In a personal column published for Gimmel Tammuz, Rabbi Natanel Darmon recounts a moving conversation with an Israeli man who works in his neighborhood in a European city. For years, the two exchanged only brief greetings. The man, polite but distant, repeatedly declined invitations to visit. Then, a little more than a year ago, he stopped Darmon and spoke through tears about his newborn son, who did not speak Hebrew and could not communicate with his grandparents in Israel.
The breaking point came before Passover, when the child returned from kindergarten with a story about the man’s birth, and the father realized how disconnected he had become. “What am I giving my son?” he asked. “What is his identity? I live here, comfortably, disconnected from everything. I always thought that was peace. And suddenly I understood that this detachment did not give me peace. It disconnected me from myself, from my family, from my roots. I walk the world without ground under my feet.”
Darmon uses that encounter to discuss Parashat Chukat and the red heifer, which he describes as a ritual that purifies the impure while rendering impure the one who prepares it. He connects the idea to death, to the existential questions raised by trauma and upheaval, and to the Jewish search for identity. He says that when life is shaken, people begin asking, “What am I really? What do I belong to? What will remain after me?”
The column marks 32 years since the passing of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, whose outreach model, Darmon writes, was built on sending emissaries to Jews far from Jewish life rather than waiting for them to return on their own. He quotes the Rebbe as saying, “When you count your diamonds, you do not get tired.” Darmon says the Rebbe saw “diamonds” where others saw loss, and that today thousands of Chabad emissaries continue that work around the world.
He concludes that the modern equivalents of biblical Assyria and Egypt are cities like London, Berlin, and New York, as well as the comfort that can erase Jewish roots. The article asks who will go to the “lost” rather than waiting for them to come back alone.
