It is possible that there is a universal message for mankind to heed.
As a child I went to a cheder – a little Jewish parochial school. My teacher, called Rebbe, was an old rabbi, a survivor from infamous Nazi death camps. He taught us how to read and write Hebrew. He also was responsible for instilling “the fear of the Almighty.” He once told the students who were more interested in sports than Jewish learning, the following story:
Zisha Breitbart, also called Sigmund the world’s strongest man, was the modern day Samson. He was born in a little Polish village in the late 1800’s and died in 1925. As a child he displayed outstanding strength. His father was a blacksmith and provided little Zisha with horseshoes and metal bars to play with. When Zisha grew up he would perform great feats of strength. It was reported that he would twist or break a huge iron bar by hand as easy as breaking a match stick. His pseudonym was “Iron King” but to the Jewish people who knew him he was simply called Shimshon Hagibor, Hebrew for Samson the mighty hero.
Zisha had a library of some two thousand volumes on the sports and times of the Roman Coliseum. His main interest was that of the Golden Age in Rome. It was thought that he would live to a very advanced age but sadly his life was cut short when he developed an infection, a bug. This was caused by scratching a finger in a performance.
On October 16th, 1925 the New York Times ran an editorial “Sigmund Breitbart of Vienna, who played with drayhorses and bit iron chains apart, succumbed to blood poisoning induced by a scratched finger….. “
The message our Rebbe taught was no matter how strong you are or how invincible you feel if God chooses, He can bring you down.
Our latest victory in Iraq makes us marvel at our progress. We are the proud owners of the skies. We can fly to the moon and back. We can bomb a target from thousands of miles away. All this with precision, thought impossible years ago. In the last few years we have chartered the human body of its genes. Cloning is becoming real. We are working on super discoveries. All this brings us to a smugness that cannot be shaken – so we think.
Out of nowhere we face a virus of epidemic proportions. We hypothesize that a gene that may have came from livestock and moved from animal cells to human cells. During this transition the gene muted, and attached itself to humans, and now we have the fear of a deadly virus going global.
I am worried and believe that it is prudent to turn inwards. We should ask ourselves the following: Have we been grateful to the Higher Power that really created and cares for this world? Or have we become so smug that we think we can overcome anything dealt to us?
My Rebbe did a great job in teaching us that all is in God’s hands and it may be true that we believe in the great discoveries of medicine and science but it is “In God we trust.”