Rabbi Daniel Siegel

LeChayim – To Our Lives

Perhaps the greatest playwright of all wrote:

“The whole world is a stage, and all the men and women merely actors. They have their exits and their entrances, and in his lifetime a man will play many parts”.

This week’s parashah is called Chayei Sarah (The Life of Sarah), which Jewish tradition purposefully “mis-reads” as “the Lives of Sarah”.

For Judaism, life is a journey, within and without. And, as Jews, we are commanded not to be merely actors but changemakers. Through our life, of many lives, the world we entered should be changed because we were in it and of it.

The following story* of the lives of Yisrael Kristal is extraordinary, as should be all our life stories, if we dare and will to be more than actors.

Holocaust survivor Yisrael Kristal, confirmed in March 2016 as the oldest man in the world. (Courtesy of family)

On August 11 2017, Yisrael, the world’s oldest man passed away, a month short of his 114th birthday – making him one of the ten longest-lived men since modern record-keeping began.

Yisrael Kristal, born in Poland in 1903, survived for four years in the Lodz ghetto and was then transported to Auschwitz. In the ghetto, his two children died. In Auschwitz, his wife was killed. When Auschwitz was liberated, he was a walking skeleton weighing a mere 37 kilos. He was the only member of his family to survive.

When the war was over and his entire world destroyed, he married again, to another Holocaust survivor. They had children. They made aliyah to Haifa. There he began again in the confectionery business, as he had done in Poland before the war. He made sweets and chocolate. He became an innovator. If you have ever had Israeli orange peel covered in chocolate, or liqueur chocolates shaped like little bottles and covered with silver foil, you are enjoying one of the products he originated. Those who knew him said he was a man with no bitterness in his soul. He wanted people to taste sweetness.

In 2016, at the age of 113, he finally celebrated his Bar Mitzvah. A hundred years earlier, this had proved impossible. By then, his mother was dead and his father was fighting in the First World War.

On his Bar Mitzvah he joked that he was the world’s oldest tallit-wearer. He gathered his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren under his tallit and said, “Here’s one person, and look how many people he brought to life. As we’re all standing here under my tallit, I’m thinking: six million people. Imagine the world they could have built.”

*Adapted from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The World’s Oldest Man