By Rabbi Shmuly Begun in San Diego
In 1943, in the attic of a barrack in the Theresienstadt ghetto, a group of Jewish children began rehearsing in secret. The rehearsals happened in stolen moments, in attic spaces and hidden corners, away from the eyes of the SS guards who controlled every aspect of life in the ghetto.
The opera premiered on September 23, 1943, and went on to be performed more than 55 times to fellow prisoners, who packed into those hidden spaces to watch children sing a fairy tale about good triumphing over evil. Everyone in the audience understood exactly what the opera was really about. But even in the darkest times, they mustered the power to sing.
What those children were living in that attic, this week’s Haftarah puts into words: “This people I formed for Myself; they shall relate My praise.”
Our commentators explain that G-d is not speaking here about what the Jewish people do – not their prayers, not their deeds, not their accomplishments. He is speaking about their very existence. The Jewish people’s continued presence in the world is itself the praise of G-d. They are not merely the singers of His song. They are the song itself.
Look at history through that lens and something remarkable comes into focus. The Egyptian empire rose and fell. The Babylonian, the Persian, the Roman, the Ottoman. One by one, the great powers of history appeared, dominated the world, and vanished. The Jewish people, a small nation repeatedly conquered, exiled, and targeted for annihilation, outlasted every single one of them. Mark Twain noticed it. Historians have struggled to explain it. Even Hitler (may his name be erased), in his own writings, admitted to a creeping fear that some inscrutable destiny had decreed the final victory of this small nation. Even the enemy, without meaning to, sang our praises.
Nothing about us makes sense. And that is precisely the point.
Every chapter, every generation, every Jew is a note in this grand, ongoing composition, a song that carries the deep wounds and scars of pain yet rises above every challenge. G-d has placed within the Jewish people a dimension of eternity, and no force in history has ever succeeded in silencing it. Not Pharaoh. Not the Inquisition. Not the Cossacks. Not the Reich.
This week, the World Happiness Report was released, and the numbers demand an explanation. Despite an active war on multiple fronts, missile strikes, schools closed, bomb shelters filled, and a level of national trauma that has stretched on for years, Israel ranked 8th in the world for the second consecutive year. Israelis under 25, the generation going directly from high school into uniform, ranked 3rd happiest in the world. Their American counterparts, living in peace and prosperity, ranked 60th.
There is no rational explanation for this. A people carrying centuries of persecution, currently living under fire, ranking among the happiest on earth. Unless what we are witnessing is not something new at all. Unless it is the same force that kept children singing in an attic in Theresienstadt. The same stubborn, irreducible vitality that has confounded every empire and every enemy that ever tried to extinguish it.
Nothing illustrates this more than the journey of two young people: Gali Segal and Ben Binyamin.
They got engaged one week before October 7. When the attack began they ran, found a roadside shelter, and held on to each other as terrorists hurled grenades inside. When Gali opened her eyes in the darkness she realized her right leg had been blown off.
They were evacuated separately, each certain they would never see the other again. It was only at Soroka Medical Center, as Gali was being wheeled down the hallway, that she saw Ben lying two beds away. They called out to each other. Both alive. Both missing their right leg.
In the months that followed, Gali underwent seven surgeries. Ben underwent three. They recovered side by side, learning to walk again on prosthetic legs, navigating not only physical pain but the slow, quiet grief of a life that would never look quite the way they had imagined. Ben, who had been a professional soccer player in the Israeli second division, wept when he looked out the hospital window and saw a soccer field.
On July 25, 2024, Gali Segal and Ben Binyamin walked down to the chuppah together, each on a prosthetic leg. Gali had hers decorated. The entire medical staff that had cared for them over those long months was invited, and every single one of them came. And as Gali’s mother watched her daughter walk toward her future, she said: “They’re building a home, they’re building a family. Despite all the pain and the insane journey we’ve been through this year. We have won.”
Not because the pain was not real. Not because the loss was not devastating. But because that is what the Jewish people do. In every generation, in every darkness, something refuses to be extinguished.
They stood under that chuppah, each on a prosthetic leg, and without knowing it, they were standing in a line that stretches back to every Jew, to whoever chose to keep going when the world gave them every reason to stop. The children in the attic of Theresienstadt. The Jews who outlasted Pharaoh and Rome and the Inquisition and the Reich. And now Gali and Ben, walking toward their future on legs that the world tried to take from them.
The song has never stopped. We live with the same stubborn joy.
Shabbat Shalom.
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Rabbi Shuli Begun is spiritual leader of Chabad of Tierrasanta.
Thank you for this beautifully written, important article. It gives hope when that is in short supply.