Keep Your Eyes Focused

You cannot hate Israel. You cannot go against the State of Israel or the People of Israel.  

I know. I tried.  

About seven months ago, I applied for a job. It felt like a shoo-in. After each of the four rounds of interviews, the reply was the same: 

“Great work, David. We are excited.” 

After the final round of interviews, the person whom I would be working for pulled me aside. She sat with me for an hour talking about what I would be doing the moment I started.  

A few days later, I got the call.  

“We would like to go with someone else, sorry.” 

Never mind the hours of work I put in making the writing sample, or the people I called to give a reference. After assuring me “it was in the bag,” they pulled out.  

Then I remembered something that didn’t seem to fit. During my last interview, the CTO started sighing, as if I was boring him. I got the feeling that it wasn’t the words coming out of my mouth, but the kippa sitting on the top of my head.  

Right or wrong, that feeling dominated me for months after. I was filled with frenzied hatred for what happened to me.  

Here I am, in Israel, working as hard as I can to make it here, and I got turned down for a job because I am a religious Jew.  

You can imagine how high my levels of hatred rose.  

Hashem wasn’t happy at me. It didn’t matter what happened – it came from God. It was probably a test. What mattered was how I refused to stop hating my brothers and sisters.  

It’s Like Eating Non-Kosher Food – There are No Excuses 

I could feel His presence pulling away. God was leaving me because of my behavior towards His children. He loves His nation. We just read how He forgave us the sin of the golden calf: 

And Moses returned to the Lord and said: “Please! This people has committed a grave sin. They have made themselves a god of gold. And now, if You forgive their sin – but if not, erase me now from Your book, which You have written.” (Shemot 32: 31-32) 

Even in our worst sin, Moshe loves us. He tells Hashem to wipe out his name from the Torah if He doesn’t forgive us. The Torah is the Book of Existence. Moshe is saying to Hashem, during our worst moment as a nation, that he would rather not exist than see us not be forgiven by God.  

Hashem smites the Erev Rav who took part in the sin, but to the rest of the Jewish People, He forgives.  

Did He do it in the merit of Moshe’s act of love? For an act of such self-sacrifice for the nation, Hashem blesses him with the merit of national forgiveness.  

Compared to the sins of idolatry which, regretfully, we have committed many times throughout our history, what happened to me seems pretty trivial.  

Hashem forgave us time and again. He commands us to do the same for one another.  

The greatest blessing right now is to love our brothers and sisters unconditionally. To pray for their physical, emotional, and spiritual welfare that they should go from strength to strength.  

Only after the sin of the golden calf could the test of loving Israel be so difficult for Moshe. Only in this moment could the effort to continue to love one another be so great. Only during these upheavals can we gain so much merit to bring Mashiach and the Final Redemption for everyone.  

• We know Mashiach will come.  
• We know the Temple will be rebuilt.  
• We know Eretz Yisrael will stretch from the Euphrates to the Nile.
  
• We know that nobody in the FBI, Tel Aviv, Tehran, or the White House can stop it.  

The only question for us is: 

What did we do to merit Mashiach’s arrival? How hard did we try to erase our sin of baseless hatred by loving each and every one of our brothers right now?  

*** 

David Ben Horin lives in Afula with his family, millions of sunflowers, and Matilda, our local camel. David‘s Israeli startup, Center Stage Marketing, is a lean marketing agency for startups and small businesses that creates and promotes SEO optimized ROI-driven to the right audience on LinkedIn to make your business the star of the show.