When it comes to responsibility for a fellow Jew all the barriers we’ve erected come down and those lines we tend to draw in the sand dissolve with the wind. That’s the strength of Klal Yisrael. Isn’t it better than standing on opposite sides of the barricade?

I would like to share two incidents that occurred recently both of which I heard from the people involved. Afterward see if your reaction is similar to mine.
The first story takes place on a passenger flight run by an American airline. A ben Torah who often traveled for teaching purposes occupied one seat while two seats away from him sat a woman easily identifiable as an Israeli Jewess by the Hebrew conversation she was conducting on her cell phone before takeoff. The seat between them was empty.
When the meal was served our ben Torah noticed that the woman hadn’t ordered a kosher meal. It troubled him very much to see a Jewish woman particularly a woman from Israel where most of the food is basically kosher if not kosher l’mehadrin eating food that was outright treif. (Only El Al serves kosher food on all flights leaving Israel. Other airlines use the industry’s nonkosher food-service kitchen.) He wondered if she was aware of what she was doing — after all many Israelis are so used to having automatic kosher food that it wouldn’t occur to them that these meals weren’t.
“You didn’t order a kosher meal?” he asked her.
“No ” she said. “Why should I order a kosher meal?”
“Aren’t you Jewish?”
“Yes of course I’m Jewish but I don’t observe kashrut.”
“What?” he asked perplexed. “How could it be that a Jew would specifically choose to eat nonkosher?”
In an irritated tone she replied “Sir everyone has to live by his own beliefs. You live by yours and that’s fine — and I live by mine.”
But the young man wouldn’t give up. Maybe she was really clueless. “Perhaps you don’t know what kashrut is?” he asked gently.
“I know perfectly well ” the woman answered firmly. “My parents keep kosher. I don’t. Everyone follows his own beliefs.”
The man took the meal he had just opened and instead of eating it he placed it on the serving tray of the seat between them. The woman looked at him in surprise.
“Why aren’t you eating?” she asked.
“I can’t. I’ve lost my appetite.”
“Why? What’s the matter?”
“You’re eating treif.”
“But what has that got to do with your appetite?”
“Answer me honestly ma’am. If your sister were sitting next to you and you saw her taking poison would you be able to sit by calmly and enjoy your meal? You couldn’t — right? Well that’s what’s happening here. You’re poisoning yourself. How can I just sit here enjoying my meal?”
She didn’t get it. “You mean it bothers you that much?!”
“Yes that’s how much it bothers me. My sister is poisoning herself!”
The lady a savvy businesswoman couldn’t help but be touched by the man’s obvious sincerity. He really did view her as a sister! When he offered to donate part of his kosher meal to her she accepted. And her nonkosher meal was left uneaten.
By the time they were about to disembark something within her softened. She told her fellow traveler that from now on she would be sure to order a kosher meal anytime she traveled.
The next story is connected to the Gross family of Jerusalem who recently experienced both tragic loss and miraculous salvation. We’re all still under the powerful influence of the gevurah emunah and bitachon displayed by this noble-spirited couple in the face of the terrible loss of their two daughters to toxic chemical poisoning followed by a vigil of several weeks at the bedsides of their two sons as their lives hung in the balance.
We haven’t forgotten how all of Am Yisrael rallied to plead at the gates of Heaven for the recovery of these two little boys. And we all still remember the supreme dedication of the medical staff that spared no effort to save them. In particular we remember the head of the pediatric department who was so moved by the parents’ heroism that she too became a hero working tirelessly day and night to manage and fine-tune their care.
Before little Chaim Michoel Shlomo went into heart surgery his mother’s words pierced the doctor’s own heart: “You’re about to do surgery not only on my son’s heart but on the heart of the Jewish People.”
These simple words spoken by a grieving mother filled the doctor with a sense of transcendent mission and baruch Hashem the procedure was successful.
That is the part of the story that we might have heard. But there is more. There is an unpublicized epilogue that adds another dimension to both the tragedy and the miracle.
A yungerman in Jerusalem looked up the physician’s number in the phone book and called her house. She was not there; her husband a lecturer at the Technion in Haifa answered the phone and asked what he could do for the caller.
The yungerman explained that he was just a simple Jew one of the many who were deeply concerned about the Gross family and that in the name of Klal Yisrael he wished to thank the doctor for her mesirus nefesh and her heroic fight for the lives of the Gross children.
Taken by surprise at first the professor didn’t realize the depth of the caller’s simple gesture but as it dawned on him he was drawn into a conversation that went on for two hours. He and the yungerman talked about the achdus that was revealed by this tragic case. The professor told the kollel student how stirred his wife was by the spiritual strength and nobility of the young parents by their emunah and their captivating personalities. It was all so different from everything he’d heard about the chareidim with whom he’d never had any personal acquaintance.
The yungerman assured him that the Grosses were a classic chareidi couple and that he could find many others of their caliber among the chareidim; it was only the tragic misfortune that had catapulted the Grosses into the public eye. At the end of a long conversation not only did the two new phone friends agree to keep up their acquaintance the professor even agreed to have a weekly shiur at the Technion in order to better understand the chareidi population and the Torah that motivates that lifestyle.
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Interpret these stories as you will but I believe we’re being shown a vital message. These two heroes were emissaries connecting to the other side of Am Yisrael — the side that is alienated from Torah life — and revealing to them the hallowed concept of Klal Yisrael’s sense of responsibility for one another. For the first time in their lives the businesswoman on the plane and the doctor and her husband saw that when a Jew talks about mutual responsibility he means it — and it changed them. They saw what it means to love a fellow Jew just because he is a Jew. They saw that a chareidi Jew cares about his fellow secular Jew even if that fellow Jew is disconnected from the life source of Torah and is not keeping mitzvos. They suddenly realized that yes the chareidi Jew is his brother his blood despite all the differences disagreements and even battles between them.
In one instance a religious man is so pained by a Jewish woman’s cavalier rejection of kosher food that he himself is unable to eat. And once she senses that his pain is real how can it fail to touch her — she who lives in a world of such alienation that every person is only for himself when a perfect stranger actually cares what she does to her own neshamah?
In another instance a distinguished professor is astounded that a young kollel man would call up a doctor he doesn’t know to thank her for taking care of a patient he doesn’t know but has been praying for intensely. That phone call gave the professor his first sweet taste of Klal Yisrael’s caring sense of oneness the sense of mutual responsibility that binds us all together our varying outlooks and lifestyles notwithstanding — the sense of unity that makes it come naturally to a yungerman to thank a doctor as if she had cured him personally. And in fact it was true. She had healed the yungerman because he was part of the entity known as Klal Yisrael.
When a Jew expresses his authentic Jewish self it triggers a similar response. And of course taking this view means taking on a mission. If each one of us were to feel this sense of responsibility toward our fellow Jew and act accordingly at every opportunity we could bring about a revolution. Our distant brothers and sisters are not really as distant as they seem.
Don’t you think so too? —