Rebbe Faults Secular Mentality

The voices of the “pure sheep,” the Jewish children.

The Midrash and Talmud relate that Mordecai gathered tens of thousands of Jewish children and taught them Torah – about the offerings in the Holy Temple, which, at the time, had not yet even been rebuilt…

This shattered Haman’s decree of annihilation, and in fact transformed it into blessing.

And just as the “voice of Jacob” was heard in the Houses of Torah Study, so too was it heard in the Houses of Prayer: The Midrash describes how Mordecai, surrounded by the children, fasted and prayed to God.

When the sound of their innocent voices ascended On High, the Almighty asked, “What is the sound ascending from this tender flock…?”

The angels told Him it was their prayers.

And so God annulled the decree, and in fact transformed it; not just nullifying the decree, but replacing it with the opposite, unbounded joy.

This illuminates the imperative to intensify our efforts for the Education Campaign of Jewish boys and girls.

Some try to console themselves, and to console one-another, with statistics: “So-and-so many new pupils have been enrolled in Jewish schools…”

However, we must look not only at those who have “joined the flock,” but also at the “young sheep,” the “tender lambs,” who are wandering in the wilderness of the nations.

If we were to compare the number of children wandering in the wilderness to how many study God’s Torah throughout the school day – suppose we even added to the list those who study Torah only half the day, and even those who study only one hour per day…

We prefer to avoid speaking of painful matters, but the total picture is alarming, no less!

In order to alert the mothers and fathers – who themselves are the innocent products of conventional secular schooling, through no fault of their own – a special effort is required.

We are not speaking here of exceptional cases nor of a minority. Even in these United States, where every person is permitted and able to conduct his life in his own way, and for Jews, “according to their own language and heritage,” many Jews forget that they have their own heritage, and instead they run to become “scattered and dispersed among the nations.”

This mistake was of the the previous generation.

But today’s parents who send their children to secular schools simply do not realize how essential and vital it is for a Jew to live with his own heritage, allowing the child to grow and be a normal Jewish child.

This is not a far-fetched effort: Things today are not as they were fifty years ago, when even in this country, one had to overturn the world…

In recent years, almost all people have come to the realization that the “dollar” in and of itself does not give life meaning.

It is no more than a means to attain something higher.

To utterly sacrifice a child to the “almighty dollar,” educating him only how to attain yet another dollar, so he can add another zero to the amount his father gave him…

What then is his parents’ heritage to him? Materialism.

He teaches the child to horde things which have no intrinsic worth. The thinking is that when a person puts a zero, which is worth nothing, after a one, it will become ten.

This is the mistake from which the father and mother must be released.

You don’t need to change the way they think, you simply need to go to them and educate them about things they never heard from their own parents: That a Jew has, and needs, his own heritage.

And it is guaranteed that “Words that come from the heart, enter the heart” and they will have the proper impact.