Full article 35 pages, worth reading~
https://www.theyeshiva.net/jewish/item/6427/rosh-hashanah-5771-rosh-hashanah-insights
Rosh Hashanah Insights
14 Rosh Hashanah Insights
By: Rabbi YY Jacobson
1. Jewish Unity
This new year, 5771, in Hebrew, has a special acronym: Tehay Shnas Am Echad. This is the year of ONE NATION; a year of Jewish unity. What is the meaning of Jewish unity? How do we achieve it?
Jackie Mason loves cracking jokes about Jews. "It is easy to tell the difference between Jews and Gentiles. After the show, all the gentiles are saying ‘Have a drink? Want a drink? Let's have a drink!' While all the Jews are saying ‘How much do you thing this guy makes from a night like this?
And then they say to each other: Have you eaten yet?
Or another one: "Did you know that the Jews invented sushi?" Mason asks rhetorically. "That's right - two Jews bought a restaurant with no kitchen. They were too cheap to build a kitchen. So they decided to serve raw, uncooked, fish."
And then: gentiles come to a restaurant, they sit down, eat, and in 45 minute they are gone. When Jews come to a restaurant, they start moving around the furniture, they need this view and that view…
The waiter comes to the Jewish table and says: is anything alright?
And then they debate for half an hour if they want the steak well done, very well done, raw, almost raw, a little well done…
And again, during the meal, they are figuring out how much the Jewish owner makes a night. “A steak costs him $9; he charges us $45! And it’s a cash business.”
And then: When a non Jew buys a house he looks at it as a place to raise his children and grandchildren. When a Jew buys a house he looks at it as how much he can sell it in 10 years…
But I want to tell you about a less familiar aspect of “The king of Jewish comedy”: his “yechus,” his family lineage. He was born not Jackie Mason, but Yaacov Moshe Maza in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City. At age 25, he was ordained a rabbi, as his three brothers, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been. Three years later he resigned to become a comedian. And Yaakov Moshe Maza became… Jackie Mason.
[Next time you go to a Jackie Mason show, call him: Reb Yaakov Moshe Maza, I think he will appreciate it.]
He was names after his grandfather, Rabbi Yaakov Mazah, who was the chief Rabbi of Moscow. He became famous not through his comedy, but through a blood libel. In fact, if I was a psychoanalyst I would tell you that much of Jackie Mason’s comedy is rooted in this role and story of his grandfather, which occurred during the High Holidays.
The Beilis Trial
Menahem Mendel Beilis (1874-1934) was born into an observant Chassidic Jewish family (though he was not religious himself). On March 12, 1911, a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy Andrei Yushchinsky disappeared on his way to school. Eight days later his mutilated body was discovered in a cave near a local brick factory. Mendel Beilis, a father of five children, employed as a superintendent at the Zaitsev brick factory in Kiev, close to the cave, was arrested on July 21, 1911. Beilis spent more than two years in prison awaiting trial. Meanwhile, a vicious Anti-Semitic campaign was launched in the Russian press against the Jewish community in Russia, with accusations that the boy was murdered in order to use his blood for matzah.
The Mendel Beilis Affair shook the ground under those Jews who had naively thought that the modern world was a more rational one, a world in which outrageous accusations might be levied but would certainly not gain credence. (Today, of course, after the events of 1939-1945, we know better.) When Beilis was brought to trial for a blood libel accusation, it seemed that the progress of a century would be completely wiped away in an instant.
The lawyer that headed the defense team was the legendary Jewish advocate Oscar (Asher) Gruzenberg (1866-1940). Gruzenberg was born in Yaketreneslav (today Dnepropetrovsk) and enrolled in Kiev University to study jurisprudence, becoming one of the most celebrated lawyers in Russia. He knew that the prosecutions attack was going to be directed against the Talmud and other works of Jewish scholarship and that the expertise in devising a defense would have to be provided by the brilliant rabbis of the time. Rabbi Jacob Mazah (1859-1924), Chief Rabbi of Moscow, a prolific writer and orator, was chosen to head the rabbinic advisory team for the defense. The fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Sholom Ber Schneerson (1860-1920), designated his disciple Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson (1878-1944), Rabbi of Yaketreneslav (today Dnepropetrovsk) in the Ukraine (and father of the Lubavitcher Rebbe who was a child at the time) to serve as a rabbinic liaison to the defense.
The Talmud on Trial
On October 8, 1913, right after Yom Kippur, the trial opened. The long-awaited spectacle was now under way. As the trial began, the indictment accused Menachem Mendel the son of Tuviah Beilis, 39, of having murdered together with other people, not discovered, under duress of mysterious religious obligations and rituals, a child Andrei Yustchinsky.
The twelve jurors were carefully chosen; their identities and ideologies had been thoroughly prepared prior to the charade of the trial. The trial became an examination of the Talmud's view on various issues. The prosecutor was prepared with an avalanche of quotes from the Halachic (legal) and the Aggadic (homiletic) portions of the Talmud. Anti-Semites around the world had done their homework and had rallied to the cause of condemning the Jewish people and the Jewish religion in a court of law.
For example, The prosecution's case spent a great deal of effort to link the 13 wounds which were discovered on the body with the importance of the number thirteen in "Jewish ritual," only to have it revealed later that there were actually 14 wounds on the body.
Who Is Human?
And then the crucial question was posed. The Talmud makes the following declaration:
רבי שמעון בן יוחי אומר קבריהן של נכרים אין מטמאין, שנאמר (יחזקאל לד, לא) ואתן צאני צאן מרעיתי אדם אתם, אתם קרויין אדם, ואין אומות העולם קרויין אדם.
“You [the Jewish people] are called, Adam, human, while the nations of the world are not called human, Adam.”
This supposedly demonstrated clearly that Judaism considered gentiles sub-human. Hence to kill a non-Jewish child would be totally acceptable in the Jewish perspective.
The group of Rabbis involved in guiding the defense team knew that this Talmudic statement would be raised at the trial. The illustrious Rabbi Meir Shapiro (1887-1933) was then the Rabbi of Galina. (Later, he would establish and serve as the head of the famous Yeshivah of Lublin, and he would also institute the Daf Yomi, the curriculum for learning one page of Talmud each day.) Rabbi Shapiro sent a letter to Rabbi Jacob Mazeh dealing with this accusation. He told him to explain to the court that a very important insight into the nature of the Jewish people was captured in this Talmudic quote.
A Single Organism
“You, the Jewish people are called Adam.” This does not mean to say that non-Jews are G-d forbid less than human; after all, it was the Torah which claimed first that every single human being was created in the image of G-d. Rather, the Talmud meant to say that there was something about the title Adam which applied only to the Jewish people, and not to the non-Jewish world.
The title Adam, as we said, is never found in the plural, only in the singular. Thus, Adam can never refer to many humans, only to a single human. This, says the Talmud, is the unique condition of the Jewish nation: there may be millions of Jews around the world, but they are called Adam, they are considered a single human being.
This trial demonstrates the point. One Jew, Mendel Bailis, is accused of killing a child, but who is on trial? The entire Jewish world! Together with all of the Jewish texts from the beginning of time!
Imagine if a Russian gentile was accused of the murder. Would anyone entertain the idea of putting the entire Russian people and all of Russian literature on trial?! If an Italian was found guilty in murder, would the entire Italian people be blamed for the crime?
I once heard from Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, the chancellor of Yeshiva University, that he was on a cruise, with mostly non-Jews, in July of 1976, when the Israelis were kidnapped in Entebbe. On the cruise there was a waiter, a Jew by the name of Mendel. On July 4th, when the radio transmitters reported the news of the Israeli raid and rescue of the hostages, the non-Jewish personnel on the ship were so ecstatic and impressed with Israel that they lifted this up this Mendel on their shoulders and carried him around the ship!
But why? How did this simple waiter on a cruise ship become the representative of the IDF in the Holy Land?
One Man
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The answer is because “Atem Kerooyin Adam,” you car a single Adam. You may be 14 million bodies, but you are one soul. You are like one person, one organism. When one Mendel Beilis is put on trial, the entire Jewish world stands at his side like one man. The Jewish people tremble for his welfare and would do everything in their power to remove the prisoner's collar from him. What would have been the reaction of the gentile world if one specific gentile had been accused of a similar crime and was standing trial in a faraway country? Clearly, no more than the people of his own town would show any interest in the libel. Perhaps, at most, people in other parts of his own country would criticize the proceedings. But people in other countries? They certainly wouldn't take a personal interest in him.
They may very well be considered Anashim, the plural form of the word man, but they cannot be considered Adam, a nation that stands together as a single man.
This explanation left a deep impact on the court. After a long trial, the court threw out the charges, which were clearly fabricated. Mendel Beilis was set free.
This remains our unique fate and story: We are one!