Igrot Kodesh · Letter 994 — Chinuch

By the grace of Hashem,
1 Iyar 5711,
Brooklyn, New York,

To the pleasant man, who has yiras Shamayim*, eager communal worker, Rav Mordechai Cohen,

Greetings and blessings,

I duly received your report on the situation of Tunisia in the educational area, and I thank you for it. I would receive with pleasure, from time to time, your news regarding the positive realizations you are introducing in this country, to ensure the chinuch* of Jewish children.

As you asked me, I told the Merkaz L'Inyonei Chinuch* to send you a package of sefarim* to the address of Rav Bembaron[1]. These works have surely reached you in good condition, and you will kindly confirm to me having received them.

We have just celebrated the festival of Pesach*, and we are advantageously approaching the spring. Now, the verse specifies that Pesach* must be celebrated during the month of spring. Concretely, during this season, the living forces of nature, which had remained hidden during the winter to the point of seeming to disappear completely, suddenly reappear. From then on, it is established that these forces had veiled themselves for some time only the better to act subsequently. The trees blossom, the fields cover themselves with vegetables. And our Sages say: "One who goes out into the fields during the month of Nissan and sees the trees in blossom must recite a berachah*[2]."

A lesson for us all flows from this. One can tell oneself that a certain period of our existence is not creative, brings nothing new. One must know that such a conception is, generally, mistaken, that an interruption has for its purpose to add strengths or, to take up the previously stated image, to ensure the blossoming and to give birth to fruits.

The festival of Pesach* alludes to all this. Shortly after the bitter exile of Egypt, exile of body and soul both at once, to the point that the protecting angel of that country said: "In what are these different from those?"[3], the elevation that resulted from this exile became evident. In fifty days, the children of Yisroel left the forty-nine gates of impurity, in order to receive the Torah from Hashem Himself.

With my blessing that you may know success in bringing Jewish children closer to our Father Who is in Heaven,

Notes
[1] See the previous letter.
[2] "Blessed are You, Hashem... Who has made a world in which nothing is lacking, and has placed in it good creatures and good trees so that men should derive benefit from them."
[3] In what do the children of Yisroel differ from the Egyptians, since both are idolaters, and why are the latter drowned in the Red Sea while the former cross it on dry land?