The son of Bela Rubinstein (1908-1967) always wondered why his father sustained a youthful appearance even into old age. Bela Rubinstein was rosy-cheeked and wrinkle free. His explanation, as recorded by his son:
“In April, 1943, he [Bela] was in a mukatabor, a forced labor camp on the outskirts of Budapest, working in a munitions factory. One day, the air-raid siren sounded, signaling an imminent attack by enemy aircraft. Before anyone could take shelter, a large bomb came crashing through the roof. It ignited the phosphorous supply and sent a searing flash of fire through the plant. My father lost consciousness and fell to the floor. He was taken to a hospital in Budapest, where he convalesced for many months. The explosion of the bomb at close quarters had punctured his eardrums, while the phosphoric blaze had burned off all his hair and turned the skin of his face totally black. This skin eventually peeled off, exposing a baby-pink new epidermis. Thus, my father explained his youthful-looking face.”
In 1948, Bela Rubinstein found himself in a squalid rental unit, a misunderstood refugee in Canada, fired repeatedly for refusing to work on Shabbos, but who, somehow, with his brothers, slowly rise to prominence as a major force in construction in Toronto. Bela and his wife.
Judit had two children and a life bifurcated: Holocaust persecution in Europe, freedom and success in Canada. Bela refracted his own bifurcation: one wife and family killed during WW II, and another wife and family after the war. His son, upon learning of his father’s first family at the age of sixteen, later recounted:
“While he [Bela] was recuperating in a hospital in Budapest, drifting deliriously in and out of consciousness, his wife and children were deported to Auschwitz, never to return. He was completely unaware of what had happened to them until he was able to go home at war’s end. He never fully recovered from the terrible tragedy of losing his family. What made the tragedy painful beyond bearing was his sense of failure as a husband and father, and his irrational feelings of guilt at not being present to protect his loved one when they desperately needed him.”
Bela had no monopoly on irrational thinking. His son, after having been told by his mother of his father’s previous family, ran to his room, “closed the door, and started crying uncontrollably. Later I would wonder: What was it that upset me so? . . . perhaps the realization by a sensitive young man that his own father was in some ways a stranger to him?”
The two halves of Bela Rubinstein were utterly and painfully symbolized by his achingly beautiful gravestone. His daughter and son, with the wholehearted approval of their mother, engraved it with these words, “Here lies a gentle, G-d-fearing man who hastened to serve his Creator. He treated everyone with respect, and loved his family body and soul.” Then, on the back of the gravestone, they engraved these additional words, “In memory of his first family, wife Ibi and sons Uri and Mordechai, who perished in the Holocaust al kiddush hashem.”
2 sets of life.
2 memories.
2 sides of a single gravestone.1
What is the Meaning of 12?
Multiple Perspectives
I wept as I read of this bifurcated gravestone and the ineffable sensitivity that went into it. Something about this radical division, this impassable gulf that yet resided in one place, eternalized by one family, reminded me of another example of two halves that could not have been more different, yet resided in one person.
Rabbi Akiva lost 24,000 disciples in a plague, but it is not recorded that he lost 24,000 disciples. Rather, it is recorded that he lost 2 sets of 12,000 disciples (Yevamot 62a). Why is it formulated this way?
The Talmud attributes the plague to the disrespect that R’ Akiva’s disciples showed on another. Now, Rabbi Akiva was both a pivotal Talmudic scholar and an activist who believed in the messianic identity of Bar Kokhba and backed his war against the ancient Roman occupiers of the Land of Israel. The disrespect amongst R’ Akiva’s disciples may have derived from their inability to grasp their master in his totality. One group of disciples — 12,000 — perceived R’ Akiva essentially as a teacher of Torah. The other group of disciples — 12,000 — perceived R’ Akiva essentially as an activist. Neither group respected the perspective of the other. Hence, the formulation: 2 sets of 12,000 disciples.2
This formulation struck a cord, for it summoned in my mind many other contexts in which different perspectives on the same phenomenon are expressed by the number 12. The more such contexts I collected, the more the number 12 loomed like a beam passingthrough a prism. In the case of R’ Akiva, the beam bifurcated. It yielded 2 sets of disciples (24÷2-12), akin to 2 sides of a very poignant gravestone. In other contexts, the number 12 yielded multiple perspective in other ways. Take the example of the 12 tribes of Israel.
One might think that 12 tribes are 12 tribes. However, listings of the 12 tribes are refracted in multiple ways. It is not laid down, for all time and in all contexts, who comprises the first Jewish family. There are 12 tribes, but who is included in the count?
In four places in the Torah, the count consists of the 12 sons of Jacob, including Levi (third-born of Leah) and Joseph (first-born of Rachel). However, for the apportionment of the Land of Israel, the count is refracted differently. The tribes of Levi and Joseph are excluded; they receive no land. Included in their place are Ephraim and Menasseh, the two sons of Joseph. There is still a third refraction. When Moses blesses the tribes of Israel at the end of his life, he includes Ephraim and Menasseh, not making room for them by omitting Levi and Joseph. Rather, this time Moses omits Simeon and Joseph, and includes Levi (Deuteronomy 33:1, 6-24).
While the tribal total is always 12, a multiple identity is engraved in the Jewish family from the beginning.
12, like the beam exiting a prism, does not necessarily bifurcate into 2 colors. A single shaft of light may yield many colors. Either way, 12 enables us to view the same thing from more than one perspective. The metaphor of the prism begins with the first Jewish family, the 12 tribes in their various configurations, but then embraces the breadth of Judaism as 12 is multiplied, divided, or reiterated.
For example, twelve 1/12’s.
What is the Meaning of 12?
Uncertainty
Here is a another biblical formulation of 12, this time divided into 12 segments or 1/12’s: the 12 short Prophetic books: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. These 12 short books count as 1 book of the Hebrew Bible. Each book is 1/12 of the whole. We have twelve 1/12’s, which collectively are titled (appropriately enough) “Twelve,” trei asar.
Another Jewish example of twelve 1/12’s is one directly relevant to our lives: the 12 months of the Hebrew year. Each of these 1/12’s represents 12 pieces of religious observance and consciousness. These twelve 1/12’s count as 1 whole cycle of religious growth because they are all based on a certain religious existential understanding of uncertainty. They are: Nisan’s 1/12: passover. Iyar’s 1/12: Passover’s second chance (pesach sheni). Sivan’s 1/12: shavuot. Tammuz’s 1/12: fast of tammuz 17. Av’s 1/12: tisha b’av. Elul’s 1/12: teshuvah. Tishrei’s 1/12: fear of G-d and love of G-d, respectively, high holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; yamim nora’im) and Sukkot. Heshvan’s 1/12: rest. Kislev’s 1/12: Hanukkah. Tevet’s 1/12: fast of Tevet. Shevat’s 1/12: Tu bi-Shevat. Adar’s 1/12: Purim.
The significance of these 12 1/12’s is theuncertainty that began with the first Jew, Abraham. He bequeathed uncertainty as a spiritual imperative to all of his descendants. Abraham was told to go forth, but not where to (Genesis 12:1). G-d did not reveal His intended destination for Abraham nor the length of his journey. Abraham bequeathed to his descendants the value of uncertainty not just in the occasional, dramatic tests that G-d imposes — such as to leave one’s homeland for a destination unknown — but in the periodic Jewish rhythm. This mode of uncertainty is expressed in the Jewish calendar. Religious growth, imbedded within each of 12 months, is realized when Jews to ask this question each year as each month rolls around: Have I penetrated this month’s 1/12 — its spiritual demand — fully? Have I exhausted its meaning, its teachings? Have I observed it, indeed lived it, existentially? Did it change me? Did it draw me closer to G-d and to people?
Take, for example, the uncertainty in Nisan’s 1/12, highlighted by the majestic hope articulated at the conclusion of the Passover seder: “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
This hope is split-screen. For some 1,800 years, the hope was a pure expression of faith, as the Land of Israel was closed to almost every Jew. Then this hope was denied absolutely; it was a black hole from 1949 to 1967, when the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, was denied to every Jew. After June 10, 1967, when Jerusalem was dramatically reunited during the Six Day War, the overwhelming reality of “Next Year in Jerusalem” became impossible to contain. Between June 5 and June 10, 1967, however, the uncertainty was excruciating. “Next Year in Jerusalem” seemed more imperiled than at any time since the destruction of the Second Temple and the mass exile of the Jews from the holy land.
The weeks leading up to June 5, 1967 seemed to threaten a second Holocaust. In ferocious, indeed demented speeches, Arab leaders howled about driving Israel into the Mediterranean Sea and gathered their many armies. The United Nations withdrew its peacekeeping troops from the Sinai Peninsula, leaving no buffer between Israel and Egypt. Israel called up all its entire reserves, essentially cancelling civil society and economic life. Would Israel survive the promised onslaught from all sides? The uncertainty was so thick it could be cut with a knife.
This is how that period of frightening uncertainty challenged me. In 1967 I was a junior at Yeshiva College; my close friend I. T. was a sophomore. With the impending war, word got out that Israel’s farms could lose their crops for lack of manpower as the farmers, along with most everyone else, were mobilized. The Arabs could kill the Israeli economy if they tied up Israel in a war, even if they ultimately lost the war. No one predicted a Six-Day Israeli victory, let alone a victory at all.
I. T. and I came up with a plan: Send student volunteers to Israel’s kibbutzim. Cover the Israel’s agricultural economy, the country’s weak spot behind the military front. Overnight, we no longer were in school. Rather than attend classes, we improvised a multi-pronged program: we convinced the phone company to wire our dorm rooms with multiple lines (absolutely unheard of at the time); convinced students to volunteer on Israel’s kibbutzim, which, with the impending war, also meant convincing their parents to send their children into a potential war zone; devised a system for the speedy processing of passport applications (also unheard of at the time); and secured reservations on the increasingly rare seats open on the planes still flying into Israel.<
We did not seek permission from the Jewish Agency or the Israeli Consulate. We just acted. Money started pouring in. Rabbis raised funds in their synagogues; people came in off the street; students pulled from their pockets or their parents. People handed us fat envelopes stashed with cash, at first once or twice a day, then many times a day. We succeeded in getting students to Israel. First a few, then a trickle, finally a flood.
A cadre of dedicated activists grew around us. By the time June 4, 1967 came, the activists coalesced into experts at passport procedures; lobbyists at the Jewish Agency (needed to approve the volunteer applications); and lobbyists at the airlines, as seats were tight. For every willing volunteer, we had the funds for the ticket and the passport. Morning, noon, night, our dorm rooms were frantic with activity. We had students on the last flight out of New York before the war broke out.
Darkness.
In a moment we were shut down.
The war came.
Suddenly, we were irrelevant.
The uncertainty that was so deeply present all along intensified dramatically. Yeshiva’s shuls — indeed, synagogues around the world — filled with Jews reciting, crying, even yelling the words of the book of Psalms as fervently as I had ever seen.
News blackout—for the first days of the war.
Uncertainty!
Millions of Jewish lives on the line.
Seemingly, in a lightning flash.
Glory!
Israel won.
No farmer-soldiers were pulled from their kibbutzim for an extended time.
The Israeli economy would not die.
Yeshiva’s student volunteers might or might not spend their summer volunteering on kibbutzim, but would surely bask in the afterglow of the miraculous, six-day victory.
In and out of Israel, Jews worldwide tasted a rare moment of uncertainty transfigured. A few days later came Shavuot. The Western Wall was opened to Jews for the first time in 19 years and for the first time under Jewish control in 1,897 years.
If ever there seemed to be a moment when Abraham’s journey reached a culmination, when Nisan’s “Next Year in Jerusalem” was not longer a mere hope, when the uncertainty within the 1/12’s of the Jewish calendar gave way to the presence and protection of G-d, it was in the miraculous rescue from destruction and and the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967.
What is the Meaning of 12?
Cohesion or Collapse
A related formulation of 12, of the Jewish prismatic number, is another case of twelve 1/12’s, which, however, may also be 12 as a unit. This case is the thematic opposite of the Six Day War. It is the gruesome fate of the concubine at Gibeah, who was gang raped and then dismembered, with her violated corpse sent throughout the borders of Israel (Judges 19:29). Her nameless Levite consort’s shocking response to his concubine’s group rape and death implicated the Jewish people as a whole, whether this nameless Levite sent 1 slice of this woman to each of the 12 tribes (12 1/12’s; Ralbag) or all 12 pieces to each tribe sequentially (12 as a unit; Abarbanel).
Upon learning of her cruel fate through the vile vividness of her corpse, 11 of the 12 tribes erupted in outrage (20:1, 2). They launched civil war that almost wiped out the 12th tribe, from which the molesters came, the tribe of Benjamin (20:8-48). The cohesion of the entire people of Israel, of all 12 tribes, needed to be reasserted. It scarcely escaped collapse.
In the end, 600 girls were sent to marry into the tribe of Benjamin, since all of its female members were killed in the civil war between the 11 tribes and the tribe of Benjamin (21:1-23; Ta’anit 30a). Deep disaster ended in a renewed unity of the people, as the 12 tribes came together stronger and morally determined, though hardly without deep shame for a despicable event that had never been seen from the time the people left Egypt (19:30).
Today there are no longer 12 identifiable tribes, nor do the entire Jewish people reside in the land of Israel. Jews are scattered around the world, making it so much easier to be threatened with collapse. Yet, in the face of prospective collapse, cohesion like that of the reunited 12 tribes can emerge.
With the onset of a new type of disaster — a COVID-19 pandemic in March, 2020 — the centers of Jewish cohesion took an unprecedented hit. Collapse loomed. Synagogues closed. No prayer, no kiddush, no conviviality. Wedding and brit attendance dropped to 10 or less. Sheva berakhot, community events, in-person Torah study — mostly canceled. Likewise, guests for Passover seders. The flow of Jewish life and connection shriveled into separation and self-reflection. Jewish life came to rest on mere spirit as its familiar forms froze. The four walls of the home needed to supply spiritual succor, to defeat loneliness, depression or poverty. Zoom entered the vocabulary as an awkward substitute for shiva and school.
Yet, quietly and surely, as Jewish life approached collapse, it paradoxically gathered into a powerful stream. Alongside aching losses of COVID victims and lesser sufferings, cohesion conquered collapse. The Jewish community divided and subdivided against its will into the smallest possible family units, including units of 1, but a unifying texture emerged. Though unarticulated, Jewish commitment to time-honored norms washed over the Jewish community organically, pervasively — worldwide, in the whole House of Israel.
“Judge a person favorably, dan et kol ha-adam le-khaf zekhut,” commands Avot. This is easier said than done, but during the pandemic it became natural. Someone did not return a phone call? Ignored an email? Did not extend a mazel tov? Whatever someone did or did not do, it was understood. Who knows what this person is going through? Who knows whether this person is ill? Or his relative died? Or he or she is gripped with fear? Who knows? Countless ways of judging a person favorably emerged naturally, beautifully, like a butterfly from a chrysalis.
“Bear the burden of a friend, nose’i be’ol im havero,” commands Avot — something hard to find time to do. However, during the pandemic, time assumed different dimensions and empathy expanded. Now there was time to make that phone call, to reach out, to deliver groceries — small acts of kindness that busy schedules typically rendered unthinkable. Such acts bespoke more than kindness. Everyone knew that friends and acquaintances could be hurting, shut in, and confused. These acts of kindness were not just favors. They expressed empathy for the burdens of others, even for strangers. A trace of our best selves flowed into action. The 12 tribes of today transformed the potential collapse from COVID into acts of cohesion never before imagined.
A widow was scheduled to sit down to the Passover seder alone. The medical authorities mandated quarantine. Her husband had died two years earlier but at least she had the comfort of her children around the seder table. Not this year. She would be utterly alone. Her neighbors noticed that her unit and theirs were close. Why not push their respective tables close to their windows? For all practical purposes the widow could join their seder next door while keeping the required distance. So it was. She could not thank them enough, nor stop marveling to her children that her neighbors even shared the same customs and sang the exact tunes that her husband had sung. Against all expectations, her seder went from isolated to memorable.
What she did not know is that after proposing their adjacent seder, her neighbors phoned her children and asked them to make recordings of all the tunes that her family had used at their seder over the years. The neighbors could memorize these tunes in time for seder night. Which they did. The widow’s seder became “a night of watching” not only by G-d but by creative and empathetic neighbors. Bonding and cohesion grew amidst the pandemic.3
What is the Meaning of 12?
Visual Nothing
In the plague Divinely imposed as punishment for the Israelites’ immorality and worship of Midian’s idols, 24,000 Israelites died (Numbers 25:1-14). When it came time to avenge the honor of G-d, Moses invoked 12: “Arm men from among yourselves for the legion against Midian, to take the vengeance of the L-rd against Midian. Send from all the tribes of Israel, 1,000 per tribe, 1,000 per tribe, to the legion” (Numbers 31:3-4). According to Baal HaTurim, based on R’ Yishmael, 2,000 soldiers per tribe were armed — 12 sets of 2,000 — for a total of 24,000 soldiers, corresponding to the 24,000 Israelites who fell in the plague (31:4; Sifrei).
The zealot Phineas killed the two most public practitioners of immorality, Zimri and Cozbi, thus halting the plague. Then, “after the plague” (Numbers 26:1) — there is a blank space in the Torah scroll. No words follow. This is a rare instance where a blank space appears in the middle of a verse. The late Fred Englard, a Holocaust survivor, approached me one day:
“After a plague — stop!”
Then he stopped, staring at me silently.
He spoke about the Holocaust repeatedly. This time, his echo was a visual signaling.
“If there is a plague, you cannot just go on.”
Then he stopped, while staring at me again, for a long time.
Silently.
Waiting.
Remaining silent for a painfully long time.
“And it was after the plague,” Englard reminded me of the Torah’s exact words. Then he called my attention to the visual oddity that follows these words. The Torah simply stops in the middle of a verse.
After the plague, which Phineas’ act of zealotry stopped, came . . . nothing.
Zero.
White space.
Englard made his point.
24,000 died to say: Stop!
Do not pass this by.
Do not move on.
Do not figure there is nothing to learn from this.
“After a plague, stop! Think,” Englard said.
“After a plague, there can be no business as usual.”
Phineas acted correctly, but his response was that of a single person. What about everyone else?
What about us?
What about the plagues the Jewish people have lived through?
After a plague — a blank. Stop.
Think.
It is impossible to do so without recalling the plague itself — its massive, cruel losses. For this reason it is impossible for a nation to respond as a single unit. It can only respond from a diversity of perspectives. Some will remember the dead so deeply that they cannot move on. It is said of that Elie Wiesel that he never mentally left the camps. Others will remember but still move on; others will move on by trying to forget. Some will speak incessantly about the loss, others will fall silent, suppressing the pain — or trying to. Some will be paralyzed into inaction, others will be spurred to action, to fight injustice everywhere. Some will create new families, others will not wish to subject a another generation to the possibility of another plague. Many survivors of a plague will combine more than one of these responses.
That is why, when the soldiers in ancient Israel were chosen to avenge the honor of G-d against the Midianite dishonor, the soldiers were chosen per tribe. 12 sets of 2,000 soldiers. “After the plague,” there is no single way to think. There are multiple perspectives.
Again, it is the number 12 that conveys them. 12 is the prism that refracts the shades of color, of diversity, inherent in a single shaft, such as a single plague. Be it in ancient times, in R’ Akiva’s time or in our own time, be it a tombstone, a search for Jerusalem or any of the Jewish calendar’s imperatives, a transformative event is articulated with many sides, cast as an iteration of 12.
Notes
1. Robert Eli Rubinstein, An Italian Renaissance: Choosing Life in Canada (Urim, 2010), pp. 24, 85.
2. I heard this from Rabbi Marc Gitler, who cited someone else.
3. Yitzchok Hisiger, “The Seder Next Door” (Yated Ne’eman, May 8, 2020). n