by Mr. Hillel Rapp
With much gratitude and happiness, my wife Racheli and I were able to share the Simcha of having a baby girl, our second child and first daughter, with the students of Or Chaim and Ulpana at Thursday morning minyan when we gave her the name Yakira Malka. It was an especially meaningful experience for us. For Racheli, the Bnei Akiva Schools community represents her roots in Toronto and the foundations of her Jewish growth. For me, the opportunity to create an educational moment out of a family simcha is one of those special times where I can be pleasantly reminded of how unique the Jewish education system is.
With Rabbi Grauer’s encouragement, I would like to take advantage of the latest issue in our Journal to share what I spoke to the students about after giving Keira her name. This is also fitting in that it was Rabbi Grauer’s encouragement that was the cornerstone of our decision to move to Toronto, join the Bnei Akiva Schools community, and contribute to our collective goal of providing a premier educational experience for each student.
When I think of the name Yakira, meaning precious, I think of one of the great cinematic masterpieces of all time, the animated film “The Incredibles”. Spoiler Alert! If it took you thirteen years to see this movie, it’s too long to get a spoiler alert. So if you haven’t seen the film or need a refresher, the plot revolves around a group of unfortunate superheroes who are forced into hiding after a series of lawsuits related to the damage caused during their heroic rescues. Forced to hide their super powers, the superheros are compelled to look and act like everyone else. Years later, circumstances would have it that they need to come out of hiding and use their unique powers once again. Only this time they must face a villain called Syndrome, whose method for fighting the Superheros is to design a special suit that can give everyone super powers. In a line that captures the film’s theme, Syndrome devilishly remarks “if everyone is special, then no one is special.”
This concept of being special plays a central role in the Parshiot that open Sefer Shemot, as God selects the Jewish people to redeem from Egypt and gift the Torah. The collective memory of our people is infused with calls to remember the exodus from Egypt, as it is attached it Shabbat, chagim, and many recurring mitzvot on the Jewish calendar.
Why the Exodus? Why not reference Matan Torah and the moment of revelation? After all, the Torah is the centerpiece of Jewish life. The Exodus was just the moment that enabled revelation at Sinai. Here I think there is a valuable corollary that can be drawn to the birth of a child and all the work that goes into caring for our kin. On some deep level, we all understand that our very existence is only possible by way of our parents. As such, parent/child relationships can bend and strain at times but there is, among other forces, a conceptual pull that draws children to their parents rooted in the idea that without our parents, we do not exist. The Jewish people share the same conceptual framework with God. The Exodus provides the moment of birth for the Jewish nation. Without it, our people undoubtedly vanish into history with all the other ancients. In being carried out of Egypt by God’s hand, the Jewish nation is born, the transition from family to nation that takes places moving from Bereshit to Shemot is completed. Like the life parents provide their children, God providing the Exodus is what makes us who we are as Am Yisrael.
But this raises a particular question for the modern reader. Is God’s selection of the Jewish people as special or precious something we should embrace in an increasingly small and interconnected world? Why would one people be any more special than anyone else? Shouldn’t we love all humanity the same way?
This is a question taken up by several contemporary Jewish thinkers, notably among them Israeli professor Ze’ev Maghen who makes the case that God’s love for His people is not some sort of outdated or tribal mode of thinking but that it taps into the very core of how we all understand the idea of holding someone as special or precious. In an article in the journal Azure, he writes:
Last week I was sitting in this Yemenite restaurant in Jerusalem reading a book and munching my malawah. At seven P.M., the air was shrilly pierced-as it is every hour on the hour-by those six long beeps that some sadistic socialist functionary from the early days of pre-state broadcasting decided was an appropriate way to introduce the news. After a run-of-the-mill item-some foreign dignitary’s helicopter had been hovering on the brink of Israeli airspace for the last three hours and was about to plunge into the Mediterranean because officials of the Foreign and Defense ministries were quarreling over whose prerogative it was to issue the entry permit-the anchorperson announced that two hundred thirty people had been killed in an airplane crash in Indonesia.
“That’s terrible,” I thought, and proceeded to cut myself another large, juicy morsel of malawah, drench it in my side dish of humus….. And then I stopped. I was actually a little angry at myself for being unable to get sufficiently upset about those two hundred thirty Indonesians and their poor, grief-stricken, destroyed families to have it affect my appetite even for five seconds. So I tried an experiment. I took the headline I had just heard on the radio, and changed only one or two words. Now it read: Two Hundred Thirty Israeli Soldiers Die in Plane Crash over Negev.
“Oh, God. That really hurts. It physically hurts. As if someone punched me really hard in the stomach. Is that what it feels like? That much pain? I’m not thinking about my next bite of food anymore, that’s for sure. I’m pretty close to being nauseous. So now I know. Now I have some inkling at least of what those crushed, devastated, wrecked, innocent families are experiencing right now, as the news reaches them one by one that everything they ever lived for is gone. Dear God….”
For Maghen, this distinction in concern, what he calls “preferential love,” is not only normal, it’s critical to our ability to properly empathize. If we can feel the loss of those who are precious to us we can properly understand what another person feels when they lose someone precious to them. If we are expected to love everyone equally, not only is that unnatural, it leaves us without the ability to properly understand others. Syndrome might put it differently, if everyone is special then no one is special.”
Maghen goes on:
Preferential love is the most powerful love there is, the only truly motivating love there is. It is by means of that love-the special love we harbor for those close to us-that we learn how to begin to love others, who are farther away. Genuine and galvanizing empathy for “the other” is acquired most effectively and lastingly through a process which involves, first and foremost, immersion in love of self, then of family, then of friends, then of community…and so on. It is via emotional analogy to these types of strong-bond affections that one becomes capable of executing a sort of “love leap,” a hyper-space transference of the strength and immediacy of the feelings one retains for his favorite people, smack onto those who have no direct claim on such sentiments.
For the Jewish people to feel a preferential love from their God, to see their kin as special and precious, is precisely what allows us empathize with other peoples and feel what communal identities, familial relationships and struggles must be for them. God as the parent of Am Yisrael, giving our nation life as a community throughout history, is not a gesture of ethnic superiority but a paradigm of preferential love, an example of how any nation, community or family can fully realize what it means to see another as special.
In choosing to name our daughter Yakira Malka, we are expressing the hope that she discovers what it means to see another as precious via the depth of preferential love, developing empathy and learning to see another person’s predicament as reflection of her own. To this hope of Yakira we add Malka in honor of my paternal grandmother Molly Rapp z”l and Racheli’s aunt Marilyn David z”l. Both women saw their families as precious and were fierce protectors of those they loved. While family was special, they expressed a rich sense of empathy and care for others. Aunt Marilyn devoted her professional life to Jewish education, appreciating each student’s unique story because she understood what each child meant to his or her family.
Our prayer for Keira is that carries on the legacy of the Malkas that came before her and discovers the depth of love in her family, community, and nation.
Hillel Rapp is the Director of General Studies and Educational Growth at Bnei Akiva Schools
