Some time ago, after a lecture on the ethical challenges of the seventh commandment (“Thou shalt not steal”), I was approached by a fellow from Vienna who was a Holocaust survivor.
“Why do you assume stealing is always wrong?” asked the fellow, “Sometimes, it is even an obligation.”
“I always had a strong desire to take things, and I never understood why,” he continued, “And it wasn’t that I necessarily needed the things I took; I just loved the prospect of being able to steal things out from under people’s noses. I became quite good at it, though my conscience always bothered me. Often, I was able to resist the temptation to take things that weren’t mine, but it was always a struggle. I often wondered why G-d had burdened me with this particular challenge. I knew it was wrong to steal, and never rationalized theft; I just loved the ‘thrill of the take’. Why did G-d create me with this challenge? It wasn’t my fault I loved to steal, G-d made me that way. it just didn’t seem fair.
“And then the Holocaust came, and with it the beatings and humiliations, the forced labor battalions, and the Gestapo, who would show up at your door in the middle of the night and cart you off to the police station, from where most people never came out.. My skills at pilfering items kept our family alive, and somehow I was always able, despite the difficult conditions in the ghetto, to find enough for everyone to eat.
“One day, I received orders to report to the police station to have my papers reviewed. I had to make a terrifying decision. Did the Gestapo want me? Had they somehow discovered something I had done? Would I be allowed to leave the premises once I came in? My first thought was to run, and go into hiding. But of course, they knew where the rest of my family was, and the consequences of my not reporting to the police were unthinkable, so I had no choice but to go to the headquarters of the Gestapo.
“I was standing in a waiting hall with many other people, and every few minutes, a person’s name would be called, and a policeman would take him or her off to one of the offices down the hall. You could hear the yelling, and the cries of the person being ‘interviewed’ and sometimes, you would see the person, bloodied and beaten, limping back down the hallway and out of the building. Sometimes, though, you didn’t seem to see the person come out of that hallway….
“After what seemed like hours, my name was called, and a policeman came to escort me to the rear. I found myself in an office with four or five ‘policemen’, all behind small desks ‘interviewing’ different people who were brought in. The fellow ‘interviewing’ (really, it was more like screaming at) me, barked out the questions, and seemed even before I could give the answer, he would reach out with his arm and bat me on the head. He asked my name, and when I started to reply, he would hit me before I could finish answering. I wasn’t sure what to do, and then recalled hearing how all the Jews were being made to change their first names to Abraham or Sarah, so I answered ‘Abraham’, and sure enough the beating stopped.Eventually, with a little more beating, and some more questions, I was made to sign something and then told I would be ordered in the future to report for a labor battalion. Meanwhile, I could go home.
“At this point, a strange thing happened: It seemed all of the interviews were ending at around the same time, and as the Jews were each told the same thing and allowed to leave, the officers ‘interviewing’ them also walked out, perhaps for a break, or some coffee. By a strange congruence of circumstances, I found myself alone in the room. And I suddenly had a tremendous urge to steal something.
“I saw, on one of the desks, a large pile of papers, and next to it, an equally large pile of passports and identity papers. Clearly, these were Jews being made to report somewhere, and if this list was on a Gestapo Officer’s desk, it could not bode well for those people. Without thinking, I took the entire pile, and with a skill born of years of practice, walked right out of Gestapo headquarters with all of those papers under my shirt. Not only did I most certainly save seventy lives that day, but also, later in the war, we were able to doctor all those passports to save an additional hundred people..
“From that day, and since the war, I never had the desire to steal again, and I now realize that G-d gave me that desire, not as a curse, but as a blessing.”
So often in life, we struggle with desires and needs that seem to weigh us down. If only we didn’t so crave that chocolate fudge cake, wouldn’t it be easier to diet? How often do you know you have better things to do with your time, only it looks like such a great TV movie, and suddenly, two hours later, you wonder why you wasted a perfectly good evening on something so unproductive? Wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow remove those desires we know to be so wasteful? And, if we know we would be so much better off without these passions, why were we given these challenges in life to begin with? After all, if G-d hadn’t created people with an inclination for violence, there would be no violent crime..
This first of this week’s double portions,