These are not easy times to be chareidi in Eretz Yisrael. Every day of coalition negotiations brings new declarations from one of the prospective coalition partners that the time has come to solve the “chareidi problem.” The more amiable of these spokesmen sometimes add that they are “friends” of the chareidi world.
To cheer me up my friend Rabbi Eliyahu Meir Klugman author of the definitive biography of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch called my attention to Rav Hirsch’s fourth essay on Kislev (Collected Writings Vol. II) in which Rav Hirsch addresses the “despondency” that members of a religious minority can fall into. German Orthodox Jews in Rav Hirsch’s day was very much such a religious minority.
The whole history of the Jewish People writes Rav Hirsch is one of a minority whose Truth triumphed. It begins with a single man who stood on one side while the whole world stood on the other. It then evolves into the history of a single family the House of Jacob. Hashem chooses the Jewish People the smallest of the nations to be the bearer of His Truth to the world.
A minority by its very nature attaches itself to its Truth in a way that a majority never will. Only the spiritual value of its causes compensates for what it lacks in numbers and so it nurtures and champions that cause in a manner the majority never will. For if a minority no longer had its cause what else would it have? Its devotion to its cause “impels the minority to immerse itself over and over again into the spiritual content of its cause to study its content again and again in all their aspects to remain faithful to every detail and in all their totality.”
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