The following is a brief summary of some of thoughts said over by R' Frand on the parshios this evening. I have attempted to reproduce these vorts to the best of my ability. Any perceived inconsistency is the result of my efforts to transcribe the shiur and should not be attributed to R' Frand.
R' Frand first referred to the end of the tochacha and noted that it ends on a positive note. R' Frand noted that after the tochacha, the Torah then discusses the concept of Erchin - that people have specific appointed value based on their age and that a donation can be made based on this valuation. But the obvious question is why does the category of Erchin follow the tochacha?
R' Frand gave two answers to the question. The first was said in the name of the Kotsker Rebbi who explained that even when a person is beaten to the ground and feels destroyed, he has a value. Regardless of what happens to a Jew or the Jewish people, it does not change the fact that he has a value and he needs to remember he has a value.
R' Frand quoted R' Mordechai Kaminetsky who told a story about the Kloizenberger Rebbi which symbolizes this thought. When the Nazis came to a town they would find the Rebbi and single him out, because the Nazis wanted to show that this was a war on the Jews.
Rabbi Frand said that as an aside, he heard from a Holocaust historian that when the Nazis were faced with the choice of killing a Jew or burning a Sefer Torah, they would burn the Sefer Torah. He also mentioned that when the Nazis came to Lublin, they took all the seforim from the Yeshiva which had the largest collection in Europe and burned them in the courtyard first as a symbol and the seforim burned for 24 hours.
R' Frand said that when they took the Kloizenberger Rebbi out to humiliate him a Nazi hit him and pulled his beard and then asked -are you from the chosen people? The Rebbi replied yes. The Nazi then knocked him to the ground and kicked him and said - are you sure you are from the chosen people? Again he responded yes. The Nazi then said - you are lying on the ground - how can you be sure you are the chosen people. The Rebbi responded - because as long as I am not the one who is doing the hitting and the kicking, I know I am one of the chosen people and you are not. I still am a Jew and I act like a Jew and that gives me value.
The second answer was said in the name of R' Moshe Sherrer who said that if you want to know the true value of a person, you need to see how a person is during a problem and after the problem - how he behaves when things are not so great and how he is after the problem has ceased.
R' Frand said that this led him to the following thought. R' Frand is among the baby boomer generation and he did not live through a World War. His parents lived through Kristallnacht and his mother had to walk through the streets afterwards. His parents came here penniless right before the Holocaust and he wondered if he had gone through that if he would have come out the same way.
R' Frand said that this does not minimize the personal troubles that individual people have dealt with, but on the mass level, the current pandemic seems like the same type of situation where masses of people are suffering and this is similar to a World War. This has impacted on everyone's lives as they are with their families 24-7 and other than a ride with his wife on Yeshiva Lane - they are there. And he has not lost his job and still has a paycheck. But it is still very hard.
After this is over, each person will have to ask - how was I with my wife or children? Was I short tempered? How was I about davening when I did not have a minyan? How was I about learning if I now had a lot of extra time on my hands? How did our cushy generation (compared to our parents and grandparents) live through our own difficult time? BH we are not being slaughtered, but it is a period of great difficulty and it touches everyone. So when it is over bimhera biyamenu we will need to ask ourselves - was I a good parent? Was I a good spouse? Was I a good son/daughter? Was I a good Jew?
The time of the mageifah is unfortunately not over yet and R' Frand noted that if we are not happy with how we have behaved until now, there is still time to change. We can still answer the question that we came through it well and we can have our own Erchin and see how we behaved during and after our generation's troubles.
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