Rabbi Assor
Conversations as the Most Powerful Lessons


Years before I became a rabbi, while at flight school during recess from a plane structure class, one of the students asked me, "where are you from?" "Israel," I said. "Are all Israelis Jews?" he inquired further. "Not necessarily, but most of them are." I said. "We are farmers, and rabbis come to our farm to buy animals to slaughter” he said. “They feel the animals with their hands in a strange way...What are they looking for?" "I don’t know about such things," I said. "Well," the cowboy said proudly, "we have one thing in common. We both observe kashrus!" "Oh," I said, "I don’t." "Why not?" he asked surprised. "These are outdated laws that belong to the past and seem irrelevant today." I replied.

The cowboy was amazed. "Even I observe kashrus, though not for religious reasons. It just seems healthier," he said, "those rabbis, at first they looked to us like they didn’t know what they were doing, but soon we realized they are top professionals. After they feel a few animals, they buy only the healthy ones, always leaving us with the sick and wounded ones. I'm telling you, they are top professionals!"

"By kosher, do you mean that you wash the meat with water before you cook it?" I asked. "Not at all," he responded. "We are familiar with all the kashrus signs: the encircled letter K, and even OU, I’m telling you, these are the healthiest."

Listening to our conversation was an F-15 pilot. "During the Gulf War," he suddenly said, "I came to Israel with the Patriot batteries and I must tell you - I believe you are God's nation. He is definitely watching over you quite nicely.
I’m not Jewish, and I think it does not matter. Everyone saw what happened in the Gulf War. We did our job and you just sat quietly. Even the 39 Iraqi scuds that slipped through the aerial defense system and hit Israel, miraculously missed their targets. These are undisputed facts."

He went on. "If the Christian claim that we, Christians, replaced you and that wherever the Bible speaks of Israelites, it refers to us, why do the prophecies materialize in the Jewish nation? Why are the prophecies by Jeremiah and Isaiah realized as Jews are those who return to Jerusalem and rebuild it?" He told me that a Christian prophecy, attributed to Saint Augustine, claims that since the Christians replaced the Jewish nation, it no longer has an eternal message to convey to humanity; Jews are doomed forever, and will never return to the Land of Israel. "You see?" the aviator told me, "when the State of Israel was founded, Pope Pious XII was asked how that happened, contradicting the old prophecy. The Pope had to explain that prophesizing 1,600 years ago, Augustine meant that the Jews will never return to Jerusalem. But when they did in 1967, the Church could no longer adhere to that prophecy… You can walk around Jerusalem with an open Bible and see how its word materialized in every corner. I was very excited about this,” he concluded.

I listened to him closely, greatly impressed… I went home that day with a lot to think about. How this story unfolded will be revealed in the next issue.