A year or so ago I spent a couple years focusing on the Sefer Aish Kodesh by Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, The Piacezna Rebbe, rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Beyond the profundity of his Torah, and it’s some of the most profound chassidut one can find, and his insistently urging us find God’s authentic voice within our own neshama, to always tease out what is Ratzon Hashem God’s Will, what The Creator is urging each of us personally to do to raise our souls to ever deeper Unity with His Essence, I, and everyone I’ve ever learned this with, is struck with the complete absence of discussions or descriptions of the horror the rebbe‘s day-to-day life was. Surviving the brutal death of his entire family, instead he wrote inspiring and eternal insights based on each weekly parsha. Just from reading his words, you’d have no idea what and his community endured.

I’m reminded of his holy teaching as our people have just now been thrust into the worst horrors since his time. I’m neither a reporter nor a journalist….. nor a fundraiser, and I will take my cue and inspiration from his holy example.

The Meor Eynayim discusses God’s promise to Avram while charging him to leave behind everything he knows and to venture, with only his trust in The Creator to protect him, into a new land, the Land of Israel, Eretz Yisrael, to where we, just seventy-five years ago, have miraculously returned after two millennia of tortured exile.

One of God’s conditional promises to Avram, then, is that He will “enlarge”, “greatly enlarge” his name. In a literal sense, God added a heh, ה, one of the three separate letters in the transcendentally holy tetragrammaton, four letter name of God,  spoken aloud only once a year in the Holy of Holies of the Temple, at the height of the Yom Kippur service, “enlarging” Avram’s name, אברם, to Avraham, אברהם.

The Chernobyler Maggid does’t leave it at that, but teaches us that we all have two names. First, the name we’re given by our parents at birth, which is the true name of our neshama, and, as such, connected directly with the root of all life-energy. It is totally and purely good.

However, since we’re all made of matter and not just spirit, we have another name that reflects that duality, a deep, but not the deepest, essence that is mixed of good and evil. Avraham, and we by extension, are invited to participate in a life of mitzvot, not merely commandments or instructions, but opportunities to join, לצווה, Kadosh with Kadosh, Holy with Holy and, step by step over a lifetime, purify ourselves and, thus our names, so that when we finish our journey, only the purely good name, imbued with God’s Holy Essence, remains.

This is why, for the Jewish People, Am Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael, The Holy Land is special, because this is our field to refine our names through our actions,  binding ourselves to the Holiness of the Land and the Holiness of each other, lifting the essence of the entire concept of Name, Identity, not only for us but for all mankind.

Departing for a moment from the example of the Holy Piacenza, I want to share the observation and experience during these last three war-weeks in Israel, that the level of unity and communal love is so far beyond anything I had ever even imagined. Somehow, even if we didn’t choose to be, we are here now involved in this process where we refine Name, Identity far beyond where it’s ever been before.

Although, still living in the material world as physical beings and, as such, working in the arena of actual warfare, may we bring this refinement and elevation through our actions and interactions to the very highest.

Shabbat Shalom