A great miracle happened when this missile fell.
the rav of the local eruv went out to fix what he assumed would be a destroyed eruv, sensing that the eruv poles and wires in that immediate area would have been damaged by the explosion. When he got there with his tools he discovered the eruv was fully intact having incurred no damage at all.
A miracle!
5 people got injured, but the eruv wire didnt tear and that's what is important.
This was such an amazing miracle that the rabbonim of Bnei Braq went out to see the miracle for their own eyes and expressed that in the merit of shabbos observance of the people of Bnei Braq it protected the city and I guess it protected the eruv that helps them observe shabbos.
This is a tremendously busy area. There are skyscrapers there alongside large malls and businesses, with almost permanent traffic jams. A large missile hit the area, did not hit any of the large buildings , caused some damage to a couple stores and a bus but it didn't knock down any of the skyscrapers it narrowly missed, didnt destroy tens of people in their cars on those busy roads, injured only 5 people in an area that could have seen tens of injured or killed...
But the eruv is the big miracle.
אִם ה' לֹא יִשְׁמָר עִיר - שָׁוְא שָׁקַד שׁוֹמֵר
------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------
The alternative is worse. Imagine it harmed people in Ramat Gan. The response would've been "It didn't harm people in Bene Beraq because of our learning!"
ReplyDeleteI think a more accurate way to understand the sentiment is that it is a miracle that more people weren’t hurt. The eiruv string remaining intact is understood (rightly or wrongly) to be a sign from HaShem that this was in the zechus of shabbos.
ReplyDeleteIn fairness, people do this all the time, and Jews perhaps most notably so: They'll talk about the "miracle" of someone, say, surviving the Holocaust, glossing over the fact that six million people didn't merit such a miracle for some reason. (Or to be more accurate, often merited one miracle after another until they didn't.)
ReplyDeleteWhich is fine if you're going to make a seudat hodaya for your family or something. Writing books about "miracles of the Holocaust," or giving "inspirational" speeches about the guy who missed 9/11 because he was saying Selichot, or claiming that religious kibbutzim were spared on October 7th, is really out of line.
(I recently heard a representative of one of those religious kibbutzim talk about their experiences, and he claimed no such thing. He was in fact deeply mourning the foreign workers who were killed on his kibbutz, and the people shot outside their gates, and the soldiers killed defending them.)
But getting carried away over a string really, really, takes it to a bizarre level.
My father, a"h, used to hate all the "miraculous survivor stories". For every one of those were 1000 people who were just ashes.
ReplyDeleteWhen Alex Bornstein (Marvelous Maisel) gave her famous awards speech about how her mother stepped out of line when the Nazis were about to shoot her and survived, I just shook my head. Yes, her mother survived but 1000 other women trying it would've been shot. She just didn't get it.
It's very hard to think outside of our own personal experiences.
DeleteThere's also a certain ability to think of a bigger picture instead of "it's all about me"
DeleteMy father, a"h, survived and had a few stories about times he should've been killed and wasn't. He never, ever walked around saying "It's because of..." or "Because I'm..." He just wonders why him and not the millions of others that didn't escape death.
So Bornstein's lesson should be "Boy my mom got lucky", not "See? She did the right thing!"