The event: The death of the Gross family's children
Date: 3rd Shevat
My event of the year, and that of tens of thousands of other people in Beit Yisrael, both ultra-Orthodox and secular, is the poisoning of an anonymous family in Givat Mordechai, Jerusalem - dubbed in the general media "the Gross family children affair.".
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This sad event that claimed the lives of two gentle girls, who will always be remembered smiling a captivating smile and combing their curls - is actually the most enormous event that has happened to the Jewish people in the past year in particular and the past decade in general.
""Hayim Michael Shlomo Ben Michal" as well as "Raphael Yitzhak Isaac Ben Michal" were the shofar blasts of the months of January and February to name a few. Tens of thousands of people, parents and children, especially children, would eagerly cry out their names day after day – sincerely hoping that these tender children, whom they did not know and whose faces they had never seen, would be healthy. The dollar exchange rate in those days mattered much less than the heart rate graph of 'Yitzhak' or 'Michael' as they were called in the general media, which did not recognize names other than those appearing on Hebrew identity cards.
When my little three-year-old daughter asked me if the children were sick like Rabbi Ovadia, zt"l, was sick - I realized how much the awareness of prayer for children had penetrated the tender soul of the Jewish people, the souls of the infants of the Rabban household.
Shimi and Michal Gross, the parents, who were the darlings of the Israeli media in those days, are the ones who taught us a chapter in power and might. When senior doctors and nurses belonging to the atheistic stream pointed their finger upwards in front of the Israeli television cameras and spoke of miracles and providence, the Haredi world understood another meaning in the verse "In the midst of the sanctuary." The parents are the ones who brought the Divine Presence out of the hiddenness within the hiddenness and put it on display in the prime time of the Israeli people as if to say: The voice of God - also in power, not only in glory.
The names of the children for the prayer were so well-known in the Haredi public, to the point that entire articles written by well-known publicists and thinkers attempted to wonder what made the fourteen kidnapped boys different, whose names were not as common as the names of the Gross children. How would they distinguish the living from the dead?.
Just like during the war when we were all "people of the South," in those days we were all "the Gross family" with a pulse monitor and antibodies.
Unfortunately, there are many cases of poisoning. Death and illness of children are also often our sins. The Gross family affair, therefore, has penetrated our consciousness so deeply precisely because of its name, "The Gross Family." These wonderful parents, who were led in those days between two fresh graves and a small hospital bed and succeeded in their inconceivable grief and mourning to justify the judgment against them and to sanctify the name of the Creator of the worlds who struck them in such a painful place, are the ones who, with a single mental strength, turned a tragic and painful incident that had the power to be preserved in their consciousness alone and remembered on one day a year into a powerful event for all of Israel - the great event of the year 5774.
