It cannot happen. What the nations would say!

 Here's a delightful recollection by one of our more senior members, Professor George S. Moschytz, of a devar Torah by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik on this week's parashah.

Some years ago, I was in the USA for a technical meeting and spent Shabbat in Boston. It was Shabbat Ki Tisa and I decided to walk to the Shul that I knew Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (“the Rav”) would attend.

Ki Tisa is the sedra in which, after the Golden Calf incident, Moshe ‘reasons’ with Hashem why he should not destroy the Jewish people and instead make the descendants of Moshe into a great nation (Shemot 32:11-13). His argument was: why should the Mitzri’im say,

“He brought them out with evil intent, to kill them in the mountains and to annihilate them from the surface of the earth?”

The Rav asks (in his beautiful Lithuanian accent): “What kind of an argument is that to Hashem? Why should Hashem care about the gossip of the Egyptians, or of anyone else for that matter?” The Rav’s answer: ‘Since mankind is supposed to follow, as far as possible, in the ways of Hashem (‘Imitatio Dei’), and a principle of our ethics is that man is not free to do what he likes with his reputation, or, in the words of the Rav, “man’s reputation is not his own to do with it what he likes”, it follows that Hashem must also, so to speak, guard his reputation vis-à-vis mankind!

Fast forward to our time. Hashem has permitted the establishment of the Jewish State. He has permitted the return of millions of Jews from all over the world—from a few hundred thousand in 1948 to many millions today. Yet any kind of nuclear attack on Israel, presumably on heavily populated areas, would destroy the country forever.

Nuclear pollution has a so-called half-time survival rate of thousands of years.

A small country like ours would be utterly destroyed. According to the Rav’s comments, it cannot happen! What would the nations surrounding us say….?