A Thought on Parshios Nitzavim-Vayelech

"...va'yashlichem el eretz acheres..." "...and He will cast them away to some other land..." (29:27) In parshas Nitzavim, we receive the foreboding warning that if we abandon the ways of Torah while living off the bounty of HaShem's Promised Land, we must anticipate exile and endless struggles to survive both as a people and as individuals. The Torah is quite blunt in describing the perils of dispersion among the nations of the world. This particular verse, however, is less clear, speaking about dispersion "to some other place." Moreover, the verse has two other atypical qualities: the word va'yashlichem - "and He cast them away" - is written in the Torah with an enlarged "lamed". Transposing that into transliterated Hebrew, this would look like this: va'yashLichem. In addition, based on how the word is pronounced, there seems to be a yud missing between that lamed and the kof which follows it. We rely on the masora - the implicit nekuda sound which we use to guide us in proper word pronunciation, and read it with a chirik sound as if that yud is actually present. What are the hidden messages associated with these cryptic allusions to being scattered to an unknown place, of an elongated letter, and of a "missing" letter? The Panae'ach Raza addresses this through the interpretative media of remez and sod. He offers that the message of the large lamed, which is both elongated and broadened, hints at the permanence, the magnitude, and the distance of the casting away of a multitude of Jews into a far off enduring exile. He suggests that this refers to the exile of the Ten (Lost) Tribes of Israel. Our rabbinic tradition is that they were sent wandering as captives far beyond the fabled "Mountains of Darkness" and across the Sambation River. Try as we might over the centuries, we have not succeeded in identifying either of those locations nor have we located our long lost brethren. India, the Himalayas, the Americas, other remote places, have all been scoured in fact and in fantasy. As our verse alludes, those tribes are off in "some other land", that land unidentified and untraceable. As for the missing yud, the Panae'ach Raza says simply that yud equals, in gematria, ten. It is to those ten tribes that the verse refers. They are not mentioned, they are not reckoned anymore among the ranks of the Jewish people...........because we do not know where or who they might be. The verse which follows our verse says "ha'nistar'os la'HaShem" - the hidden things are known only to HaShem. The Panae'ach Raza says that this further develops the mystery of our lost brethren. The secrets of redemption, of revelation of the identities of those hidden Jews, of the end of exile, remain concealed from us. They are known only by HaShem. We wait and wait for His Presence to be sensed once again by Jews in all places, and throughout the entire world. Good Shabbos, this final Shabbos of our year 5774. May the new year 5775 be ripe with blessings, and of panae'ach razim - revealed secrets. D Fox