The week through a Torah lens
Behind the Headlines is a weekly column on YaakovAstor.com. Each week it takes one story from the news and looks at what may lie behind it, through the eyes of the Torah.
A new museum has opened in Baghdad, a story you may have missed given all the major events surrounding elections in Israel and America and the war with Iran. It tells the story of the Jews of Iraq, in the building that once housed the Shamash School, a Jewish high school founded in 1928. Visitors can see sefarim, a tallis, ritual objects and old photographs of Baghdad’s Jewish families and rabbanim.
What they can’t see is the Jews. Only a handful are left in Iraq, all of them elderly.
A Third of the City
It wasn’t always that way. About a hundred years ago, Jews made up roughly a third of Baghdad, and their roots there went back more than 2,500 years, to the exile of Nevuchadnetzar.
Bavel is where the Gemara itself was written. Sura and Pumbedisa, the great yeshivos of the Amoraim, stood in what is now Iraq. The yeshivah in Sura, Rabbi Berel Wein points out, lasted more than 1,600 years without a break. By contrast, Oxford, the oldest school in the Western world, is about 900 years old. When a congregant heard this he remarked, “1,600 years! What a deficit they must have had!”
Then it ended, quickly. On Shavuos of 1941, mobs in Baghdad murdered and looted their Jewish neighbors in the pogrom known as the Farhud. Within ten years, nearly the entire community was gone.
Home Away From Home
Why did Hashem send Klal Yisrael to Bavel in the first place? One answer the Gemara gives is that He sent them “l’veis iman — to their mother’s house” (Pesachim 87b). Avraham Avinu came from Ur Kasdim, traditionally placed in southern Iraq. Bavel was where our family began.
But a mother’s house is a place to stay for a while, not forever. And it’s hard to leave. When Koresh allowed the Jews to go home, Ezra and Nechemiah could not rouse most of them to return. Life in Bavel was good. The Gemara applies the pasuk “Havi’i vanai merachok — Bring My sons from afar” (Yeshayahu 43:6) to the Jews of Bavel (Menachos 110a). Bavel wasn’t far from Eretz Yisrael at all, Rabbi Wein notes. “Afar” means comfortable. “He has it good in Babylon (or America).”
“Don’t Take My Son Back There”
Parshas Chayei Sarah makes the same point. Avraham sends Eliezer back to “artzi u’moladti — my land and my birthplace” (Bereishis 24:4) to find a wife for Yitzchak. But he adds a firm warning: “Hishamer lecha pen tashiv es beni shamah — Be careful not to take my son back there” (24:6). The roots are in that land. The future is in Eretz Yisrael.
When Eliezer meets Rivkah, she runs to tell “l’veis imah — her mother’s house” (24:28). Her family asks if she will go with this stranger to a land she has never seen. She answers with one word, “Eileich — I will go” (24:58).
In 1950 and 1951, more than 120,000 of Rivkah’s children in Iraq gave her answer. Most left behind everything they owned. They left their mother’s house and went home.
From Hashem
The museum is also a reminder of how quickly galus can turn. For 2,500 years, the Jews of Bavel had every reason to feel settled. From the Farhud to the airlift took just ten years.
We know that unsteady feeling today. Israel went to the polls and came out without a new government. America votes, and the arguing only gets louder. And the war with Iran hangs over all of it. A Jew can feel as if the ground keeps shifting under his feet.
Parshas Chayei Sarah shows what keeps a person steady. Eliezer sets out for a distant land on a mission that seems impossible. Avraham sends him off with one assurance: “Hashem… will send His angel before you” (24:7). And when Eliezer tells his story, even Lavan and Besuel, far from righteous men, have only one answer: “Mei’Hashem yatza hadavar — The matter has come from Hashem” (24:50).
That is how a Jew keeps his balance in galus. We don’t know what Israel’s next government will look like, what the new Congress will do, or where the war with Iran is heading. We do know where all of it comes from. And we know where the story ends: the children of Bavel went home.
Do you see something else behind this week’s headlines? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Behind the Headlines is written in the spirit of Yaakov Astor’s Hidden Hand books, which look for Hashem’s guiding hand in history and in nature.
Related reading: Ships from Gaul and the Strait of Hormuz; Neither Day Nor Night
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