Chasidic Stories Learning Torah Lishmah (Rabbi Dovid Gottleib)

there's a subject that the early hasidic movement stressed a lot and they stressed it because they felt it was being ignored i think to a certain extent it is still ignored i have a test for this which you can adopt if you use it on a person who's not going to be offended uh there's a mission in berkeley's which i quote to people as saying torah zakharov person who learns torah merits great many benefits and then she goes on to list a whole long slew of benefits that the person gets when studying torah so i introduced the subject that way and usually the people that are saying yeah yeah we know that we're familiar with that and then i say to them actually i quoted it wrong what mistake did i make in quoting it and usually they don't pick out a mistake on the basis of their memories doesn't say what i said i left out a word it says hello made torah the dwarf o ho right they don't even notice that it's missing and i paused for the recording those of you who are watching this record did you get it did it occur to you i left out the word the shema learning target is very important now you'll say well isn't this more important for all mitzvoth yeah it is that's no question about it but it's also very important for learning and the government several places discusses what it means to live in smallest whether that's just inferior learning or whether it is a crime which one should avoid texas reconciles different passages on that mat on that on that score what i want to know is what i've asked people who are in a certain branch of judaism do you know what the shema means did you ever hear a discussion of the shema you spent years in the yeshiva and yeshiva has supposed to give lectures on what it means to serve god how to serve god what you should be doing and as far as learning torah is concerned you definitely have heard lectures on don't waste time and learn torah even in the times where the vacation times and so on and so on and how important torah is tomatori can you get coulomb i'm sure you heard the lectures on that what about the shema most people tell me they never thought of it they never heard a single discussion of it not a single lecture on it so well the woman thought it was very important and they thought so for a number of different reasons i think first of all in certain circles the learning of torah is a hyper intellectual activity the way it's learned is a tremendous challenge to the intellect and this tremendous credit given to people who use their intellect to come up with intellectually brilliant explanations and analyses and if you are intellectual it's very very easy to be doing this as an intellectual exercise which is self-satisfying because you take pride intellectual achievements and it earns you a lot of credit when you're surrounded by people who are competing intellectually it's very easy to lose sight of it being a mitzvah altogether so uh you know you are not going to lose sight of the fact that full intermittent the only reason you put on leather boxes with leather straps and wear them for half hours because of the mitzvah otherwise you wouldn't be caught dead doing it but when i made my first trip to south africa 41 years ago i was told about a certain group of people who were not current at that time but there had been in johannesburg we got together once a week to study talmud and they came from all over the city to do this once a week to study talmud together on saturday afternoon from all over the city they didn't walk they were not practicing mitzvos at all but their background in europe gave them a tremendous taste for the intricacies of talmud so they came together once a week to learn talmud together i they drove so what that had nothing to do with it they just came to learn talmud because it was interesting because it was challenging because it was clever because it was fun now this shows you how a person who does keep mentos and does believe could be sucked into a kind of comedic learning where the mitzvah plays no role very literally you tell such a person we spoke about this before tells this person do you know that your ultimate intellectual grasp doesn't add to the mitzvah at all hashem which is not written by someone who's in the movement for these people if you're part of the movement you know we don't take you seriously anyway but you can't say it about the ram call and he says the the the sky that you get for the midst of the torah is only in the establish in the effort it's not an achievement at all i told you the reason because you don't produce the achievement did you use a gift from god why did you get scar for that for these people that would be devastating by great smurf that i thought up you spent an hour working hard to think it up and he spent an hour working hard to understand arashi on a very low level you won't get any more scar than he will you didn't do any more than he did you spent an hour working hard so at least there are working hard they'll be very crushing to his ego and then why do you think of your brilliant analysis as something valuable valuable for what for your ego for your standing in the crowd okay that's valuable right it's not jewish value it's not total value that this is why one of the part of the reason why the hasidic movement stressed the idea of learning the shema let's put it in sociological terms anybody can learn the schmo anybody on any level there were schools in the big towns in europe where they were divided by by profession is the shoemaker's shoe what did they do they heard they learned enyakov and jacob was the stories of the talmud and sometimes they couldn't read them they had to have someone read them and and translate to them and trends and teach them what the content was what the morals were i spent an hour learning republique of anger and their land again yaakov they could sit right next to you and all of my boy if they came there because they said my creator wants me to do this and i have to spend an hour here in shul thinking about these things learning these things rather than lounging or drinking tea or schmoozing and so on and so on they'll get the same reward you'll get for learning rebecca vega so this is this is the the kind of overall idea of ishmael means as a mitzvah i'm doing it because it's a mitzvah and they could have not a completely equal share in doing that now i've asked people practically how do you how do you express the small what should you do in your learning to make it lashima my youngest son gave me two two illustrations one is you're learning with you you're you're kamusa you're working on a texas you don't get it you don't get it you go home with it yeah that's what could toaster said maybe you think about it you think about it look at something sorry and about 11 30 it hits you got it got it i now know what the place just means to my next morning you go in listen dad texas i've got it listen here's the shot right how about instead of saying that saying i was thinking about the texas and i remembered that three years ago somebody told me we've shot necessities somebody told a shot here it is right what's the difference the difference is how much ego satisfaction and credit you get for providing the answer if you thought it up boy then you're great and somebody told me three years ago it's nice that you had it remembered it that's nice but it's not the same as thinking it up are you allowed to lie about something like this yes you are allowed to lie yes you are allowed to lie to not take credit for your learning you're allowed to make up a story so that you don't get credit for the lord so that would make that would be much more of a small if you if you provided the terrorists in a way that didn't give you credit here's another thing that would be an illustration with small you're learning with the tuition and a beginner comes over and he says could you help me understand this rashi now i don't know what the moura's are today what i learned in shiva a few years that i did it was like an unwritten rule if anybody comes and needs help you could ask anybody else you might be a beginner you might walk over to the advanced students but didn't matter if you asked you get an answer right now the question is how do you feel when you're learning that juicy tyson's and he comes over and asks how do i explain the words in the rashi i'll take you 20 minutes how do you feel about those 20 minutes do you feel i i have to do this i know i have to do this but what a loss my gosh i'm losing 20 minutes of working on the texas what do you say to be bonus low i've been going on i'm trying to do your missiles i'm trying to learn to to fulfill your torah when i'm sitting here learning i'm feeling your torah and now you gave me an opportunity to fulfill the mitzvah in another way thank you thank you for giving me the thai sisters and my good and thank you for giving me this opportunity to explain it to a beginner then it would be much more like i'm doing what the abrister wants because he wants me to do it rather than my own intellectual satisfaction and and credit and standing in the group those are two ways to to make it intelligent that my son told me then if you look at the phyllis that we have and and and analyze them in this respect i think you can get a lot of guidance we spoke about this once the relationship between torah and study of torah and and performance i told you that in all the weekday prayers it's torah and mitzvos always torah first of it's the second and that's the way it is in the mouth of the arm but people always talk about torah missus i don't think you ever hear someone talk about business in torah it will be very unnatural but once during three times during the week you actually do put midsoles first and torah second i'm telling you this um in the few seconds it takes me to get to the answer think to yourself especially you who are looking this recording you know yeah where did i put mitzvah's first entire second it doesn't occur to you it doesn't jump to your to your tongue then maybe maybe it's because the idea is so out of sync with what you are naturally thinking that you don't you sanctify us with your commandments and then give us our portion in torah in your torah mitzvahs come first and torah comes second knowledge of the learning torah now is the turkish our share our share in your turn that's not something else that's how you look at what you're getting because when you're studying torah it's not an accident you're studying this with this person and that's someplace else studying something else because morocco is steering you he's gerrymandering your life to get what he wants you to have so is that the way you learn it on wednesday afternoon this is a gift from this birth that he's giving me what's good from that's why i'm learning this and if the attitude is about the learning was my was my learning today successful did i have a good day learning does it ever occur to you think am i holier now than i was in the morning holier does that ever come up on the screen what comes up on the screen is did i think of good ideas did i pay attention did i not get distracted was i kind to my caruso am i holier now do you say well you did a misfit right of course you're holding here it's obvious you know you can just take it for granted no you cannot no you cannot first of all you could ask how much the schmo was in it and that could be a critique of the whole performance especially when you argue with yourself how you argue with him and how you feel about winning the argument losing the argument i know people every time you correct them they say thank you and they mean it it's like you gave them money thank you thank you for helping me thank you for straightening me out because they did a good fa a great favor but you think later because brock was giving an opportunity to raise your your your rook knees raise you in shama and you should feel grateful for that that could help also with the la shmoop it was helpful with the idea of the of the now i want to push this much deeper um suffering that god brings to a person out of love it's a lot of discussion what that means rashi says that you have pain in order to justify giving you more pleasure in the world to come that's what he says maybe in order to understand what he means you have to add some content to it but that those are the words he says the rambam rejects such an idea you know rashi but jack such an idea with both hands says absolutely unjust why should you have to pay for pleasure in the world to come by suffering here what's one thing you have to do with the other as i think as iran says why should they eat at both tables um also agrees that that's untenable unthinkable so if that's true then what are the yeast shall have so the the rambam and the ramban have different explanations of it that that's not what i want to go into what i'm going to is this how can you tell whether the suffering that you're undergoing is some of these insurance versus you certainly have another purpose you serve them with lots of different purposes how can you tell there could be two criteria if the suffering interferes with your ability to study torah then it's not israel shall have whatever the function of these sufferings that god brings in a person out of love whatever the function is it's not so important that it should disturb your ability to learn torah and the other one says it shouldn't disturb your ability to pray to daven okay when i first learned that i thought to myself boy oh boy that's going from one screen to another learning torah tabletop can get cool and it's the key to to doing mitzvos and it's absolutely essential in this and prayer according to everyone except the of them the whole institution of a prayer is only rabbinic except when there's there's danger you're praying for salvation but otherwise three times a day is the whole thing is rabbinic says that once a day is there i said but he's in a tiny minority to say that how can you tell compare the two of them yes if you sort of stopped my ability to learn torah i hear very well that's a drastic drastic effect stop feeling would vote for him that forced me or to eat trade food which is mentally slave it distorts a person's spirituality but why is prayer so important i think the answer is this prayer and taglitura are two heads of a dialogue in talmud toro we're talking to kurdish borojo and sorry in prayer in prayer we are talking about he's talking to us and what the mother is telling us is israel won't interfere with the communication between god and the person that it won't do if the suffering interferes with the communication that's not the suffering that's brought out of love whatever purpose it has it's not going to do it's not going to disturb that i think with this analysis you can explain something else in the gemara nora says that some people the ish who spent all of his time learning didn't david he did the other misfolds but he didn't die why is darvani different because when he's talking don't interrupt what he has to say to you is more important than what you have to say to him if you're in a a a a a roots a uh a station where he's talking continuously just listen otherwise talmud torah can't compete with any other mitzvah this is extremely important there's a little bit of a footnote but it's important to know with all the praise and all the greatness of torah gives way to any and every other mitzvah why because if you don't learn torah in order to perform the missiles your learning is worthless it's not only to be or to perform learning them in torah isn't it is a myth of its own but if you're learning without the definite commitment to do the mitzvos then the learning becomes worthless even rabbinic mitzva makes absolutely no difference so um this problem now get lost in the lost in the trail um so the time of torah right has to be done has to be done in order in order to perform otherwise otherwise it's worthless so oh so then the why is prayer the exception has to do all the mitzvoth even though he spends every experiment learning torah he has to do all the missiles but not but not prayer so if it's two hands of a dialogue you couldn't you could understand that so then that means that you have to experience the study of torah as a communication from a good world you're not just learning laws or learning values or learning facts this is an interaction with the giver of the torah if you have that in mind and i'm not now taking sides on whether you should have it consciously in mind and should fill half of your experience and thereby detract from the attention that you can give on understanding the complicated words you're trying to understand talks about that i see about their points about i'll tell you about that you could do it at the beginning of the end maybe once in the middle and which says about this time you've also used to but it has to be experienced that way otherwise the the shmond is is very is very weak it's this it's just this um interaction and dialogue that's going on now we spoke about something else which could take this even a step further we talked about the idea that we talked about where the will to do a mitzvah comes from and we talked about the fact that there's a big difference between i've decided on my own that i am going to do this mitzvah versus i really wasn't planning on it and somebody says to me you know this is an important mitzvah and it'd be wonderful if you would do it wonderful for you also so he convinces me that i should do it which means that the will to do the mitzvah came from him and i picked it up from him it wasn't mine that gives him a much bigger share in what i'm doing even if in the first case he provided me with the means to do the mitzvah but in the second case he provides me with the will to do the mitzvah we spoke about this vis-a-vis um if eight tells speech to worship an idol in front of an idol and the word worship is prejudicial right in front of an idol and b says i'm not doing it he says if you don't do it i'm going to kill you and be says okay okay not going to die just do that you know you ought to die the harlot is that you should die rather than bow down to the idol but i'm doing that i'm not doing that he bows down to the idol because the will for the idol of worship came from the other person this one who bows down doesn't pay any penalty he's threatened with death and the will came to somebody else we spoke about this in the room so where the will comes from is very important in determining what the identity of the action is if i do something because of somebody else's will he shares the essence of this action in a certain sense if he influences me to do it he has a bigger share in the in the in the action than i do which is god lamas now that means that my performance is acting out his will so we spoke about the idea of that vis-a-vis that when you act when you act to do a mitzvah your performance is acting out god's will that means that you god's will certain sense inhabits you the technical term in a certain swarm is you become a lavush you become like a garment that's being worn by god's will and really it's god's will that's moving the garbage like when you have your hands in a glove someone sees the glove moving he understands is the hand that's making the glove move here's because there's a boy whose will that's making you yes you submitted to it you you absorbed it but once you absorbed it that's what's making you move and that's a very maybe the most exquisite connection between god and man that's possible as a real you become in certain sense um two parts of an integrated whole by the way there's a phrase phrase that appears in this form very very often and i've encountered people who misunderstand it they say you x and y will become one sometimes in english that could mean x will become equal to y identical with y it doesn't have to mean that it could mean that x and y will attach and interact in such a way they become parts of a single whole not that they become identical uh if you have um a battery powered machine which has no batteries in so machines did not do anything the other hand the batteries on the shelf are certainly not going to do anything you put the batteries into the machine they become one batteries plus machine become one what'd it become what what one functioning machine that battery doesn't become machine she doesn't become battery so becoming one doesn't mean becoming identical this is the key for understanding marriage so becoming one the man is a man the woman is a woman they remain male and female but they integrate into a single thing of which they are parts in a certain sense you have that integration with the creator of the universe when you incorporate his will into you and act on it okay now what are you doing when you're studying torah well you are two things are happening but the one that i'm talking about the moment is you're learning how to incorporate his will into you and become one with god that's what you're learning well that's pretty valuable that's pretty important and it's very important for you to know that that's what you're doing it's also true that in the act of learning itself if it's done as a mitzvah in that very act you're incorporating god's will into you because you now among other things you know what to do are you doing you're doing it it's right now but knowing knowing what to do like we said yesterday the name of yonah right committing yourself to do gets you credit for doing you've already incorporated i'm talking now is about the spirituality of learning this is what the hasidic movement stressed to see things in spiritual terms because those are the real terms those are the terms of the reality that we're dealing with and if you don't appreciate you know in ancient times certain places i think this was in egypt maybe even greece uh what was the function of the brain brain was a radiator all those convolutions mean that the brain has a lot of surface energy a surface area sorry a lot of surface area and that means that it can radiate heat and rid the body of excess heat thought thought was in the heart nothing with your head that was in the brain right you say man they really got it wrong they really got it wrong right okay did they have inter-personal relationships sure they did i their picture of how a person works was a drastically wrong picture yeah who's drastically wrong picture but didn't stop them from interpersonal relationships so you're incorporating into you this picture of how god wants you to behave the incorporation can work even though what's ultimately behind it what's ultimately driving it the nature of the creator himself or what the ultimate consequences are and uh impact that that doings will have you don't need that you don't need to know that all you need to know is this is what a good broker wants me to study and by studying it he wants me to incorporate it into my identity and when the occasion arises he wants me to act on it and then you become a bush you become just like the glove on the hand for the reality that chris brock was presenting you with that's where that's where the the spirituality really lies and that's the idea of spirituality in general again even if you don't know the details of how the spirituality works it's really there um so one other idea about studying torah in a second you know what what what should you study now there are a few guidelines one which uh hit me very early and became sort of a daunting challenge when you get to the world to come there is study absorber there whatever that means and the the principle was any safer that you ever learned anything from in your lifetime you have a relationship to that savior and the world to come will be one of this foreign'll be open to you but something that you never opened you won't have any connection to so i thought wow okay so let's you know diversify a little bit so there's the roshami uh for a period of time islanded afghanistan for more than 40 years there was a period of time i would learn the roshami meseta side by side with the above the um sector did that for a number of different sectors i said okay i didn't go through the insurance many times but i learned something of it you're young you should think however over a lifetime of at least diversifying to the extent that you put your your toes in each pool of total water at least for some yes a few months just to get a sense of what's there especially eventually this star you know kabbalistic studies it is possible it is possible you can you can get a wonderful swarm as a safer i don't think it's translated into english it's called um but the neil frisch composed a translation and commentary on zohar and other kabbalistic works which has become phenomenally successful it's called massachusetts sweeter than honey there were others before him but none had the effect that that his translation has had my one of my sons-in-law introduced me to it and he knew that and daniel first person it was a hero xiaomi he died maybe 15 years ago he did it on computer you know and he he is tremendous he wrote safety called this is a savior about spherus omer where your 49 days that you count for each day he gives some ideas about what you should think about which is working on that day he's taking this program from a much larger safe which i think is out of print called michael's homer um and he says so but the first 15 pages that's safer are introduction to basic community concepts basic capitalistic concept he writes an extremely clear hebrew he was a master absolute master so if you wanted a very short well-organized clear introduction the basic concepts of nista that would be a wonderful place to start if your hebrew isn't up to it you could easily find someone whose hebrew is just is up to it because again it's not it's not very difficult hebrew just to give you an idea of who the author was he had some illness and he went to medical doctors and they gave up on him they couldn't help him and he heard that in the far east there's some kind of guru who was able to handle various things among which was the problem that he had so he decided to go so he went and when it was his turn uh the guru started doing whatever he was doing and he said um no no no no no clear your mind your mind has to be clear to try it again and it didn't work so i told you to clear your mind well daniel first was thinking god is one so he said you mean that thought and the girl says yeah clear your mind to that thought and first said no no if what you have to do requires me to clear my mind of that thought i'd rather have it i'd rather be sick so we're talking about a person who you know put his whole life where these ideas are coming from which does by the way make it sound like this guru did have some power you know he and he understood the fellow himself understood that frisch is thinking about something and because he's thinking about that thing it's not going to work um so this is a good place to get an introduction to those ideas there are other places as well i would not trust um many of the english translations many translations are full of mistakes and even if they aren't out how about mistakes but they use english words to explain these these concepts and they cause false false associations in a person's mind i'll give you one example um and you can use this as a test someone's going to talk to you about kabbalah you can ask him the first the very first move my second move in the whole development of everything that exists it was called simpson simpson means contraction something becomes smaller and the way it's described is that before that whatever is fills everything and therefore there's no room for anything to exist other than god so to speak so the first move has to be make room and the way he does that is he makes room by contracting himself so to speak and then there's room for something else to exist so the words that are used in the in the real swarm are leaving behind a halal and they transl as an empty space it's got to be empty because otherwise no room for the other thing to exist right okay that's dead wrong that's dead wrong nothing is ever empty nothing no empty spaces that's what simpson it means that whatever was there before contracts so that the space is empty of what was there before that's what it's empty of but not empty it's just empty of that and it's filled with something called the reshimu which means a remainder every time light abandons a place it leaves behind a residue that's a rule about light so this is the orange soap the infinite light whatever that means if it contracts it leaves behind a space that's empty of or itself is that empty it's filled and they have to ask yourself well if it's filled how did you accomplish anything the point the point was to have empty space where there's room for something to exist and if it's full you don't have room for something to exist and the answer is we're not talking about space am i talking about room six feet by six feet absolutely not the physical terms that are being used are terms which have only spiritual connotation and requires a whole long investigation liberation but you can test whether what you read or whether the person you're talking to thinks that it's contraction to leave behind an empty space where tables and chairs could be if that's what he thinks he hasn't gotten to first base he hasn't gotten the first base and sh that you should definitely not uh follow up on that yeah why is that such an essential barometer why is that the litmus test as well so uh what kind of sift why does that particular piece sift people so well oh because it's in my experience it's a very very common mistake for these people who have read it in english and you know to uh to and because it's it's really the very beginning so that's you know everything after that things become complicated and and subtle and they themselves find hard to find follow the details and it's intuitive god fills everything and if you room for something else you know the words ring out an idea or very quickly and very simply it's just the idea is dead wrong one other one which we have talked about the words literally mean there's no place empty of him ah okay no place empty of him that means he's fills everything he is everywhere is a child's song god is here god is there god is everywhere and so on yeah well that sounds good for 60 year olds but when you're 16 you ought to outgrow it only physical objects can be in physical places something that isn't a physical object can't be in a physical place physical location is a quality that physical objects have if you are convinced as you ought to be that the creator of the universe is not a physical object memphis the creative universe cannot be in your table or in your living room or in the stars or in anything you say yeah but then so it says no place is empty of him as i have told you that's no different from talking about god's eyes and god's ears and god's shoulders god's legs god's mouth and god's nose here too you're using words which are physical words but they mean to convey a spiritual reality in this case i told you the spiritual reality is that god's will gives existence to everything so to put it in still um somewhat poetic terms but much more accurately you could say nothing no nothing can be totally disconnected from god nothing could have no relationship to god because if it did it wouldn't exist it exists only because god's will is giving it existence that's true but not not that guy's in the table yeah so obviously i haven't read like the deeper kabbalistic literature uh does it make frequent use of metaphor and paradox or is it mostly systematic and philosophical it makes use of metaphor a lot um a paradox not so much uh you know paradise is really relative to your amount of knowledge um sometimes paradoxical impression is only because you have no clue of what's really going on if i tell you that the table is almost all empty space and your hand is almost all empty space why did your hand go through the table i tell you well the hand and the table are really made out of very very powerful magnets and banging your hand a table is something like trying to put two north poles of a magnet together as you know they get closer and closer let's get away because they don't want to be sitting together all of a sudden you say okay and if the magnet is distant still when you take the two powerful magnets and there's this much distance between the two north poles it's still hard to push them together because magnetic force doesn't require actual contact here you have atoms and particles all of which had magnetic most have magnetic properties and the magnetic lattice that is it resists penetration even though there's empty space there i guess one thing so other religions often in their sacred literature they will when they try to talk about different sacred topics they'll construct sentences that are intentionally designed to maybe have syntactic like peculiarities or logical paradoxes which are designed to unlink your dependence on the linguistic concept and point you to the to the reality itself um i i'm sort of but i you know i'm i'm very skeptical about these things what external evidence do you have that you're being pointed to a reality rather than just a fantasy what external evidence do you have that you and six other people who are reading the same sentences are being pointed in the same direction if it's beyond words to express and there's nothing external to test it with then what makes you think that's a reality at all um it's true we do have some cases where the words are paradoxical we do have words like that but i think they play a very special function what the words do is they tell you it's describing something which in your present condition you can't understand so you don't pretend to understand them you say here i'm being told like for example they saw the voices they saw the sounds at sinai and there's no such thing as seeing sounds for us our words don't work that way they'll talk about synesthesia synesthesia you see red when you hear a trumpet but you see a color and you hear a trumpet you don't see the trump the trumpet sound so that's very valuable to know something happened there which in my present state of understanding and experience is totally divorced from my from my from my life well it's important to know totally divorced him something which is you know beyond uh beyond understanding the way if you taught modern sciences someone 200 years ago he would also say wow come on what are you talking about doesn't mean it doesn't make sense it means it's something which i don't have the ability to understand that's worth knowing but that i don't say it points me the direction of another reality which i come in contact with by the words what i what i say is the words are designed to show me that i'm out of touch there's something that i'm not in touch with i'm not getting to it that way so uh i think that's more that's more we do have according to some certain contradictions and then we just we say okay we don't understand but when not about this idea that you're being pointed in the direction of another reality i think i would be i would be quite suspicious about that a great deal we spoke about this also a great deal of human understanding is something which you can't put into words but then there's a there's a verification that it's understanding like understanding someone else's psychological condition is how do you know what's your evidence give me the the pieces of evidence that you use to draw a conclusion answer i look at him and i know proof if he really has this condition that he needs this in this kind of therapy and when i look and say as a condition and i practice the therapy almost always is cured then i know i'm right i'm right because i have external evidence that my intuition is based on reality um so that's fine you don't have to explain in words what you know but you have to have some reason to think that it's real other than just a fantasy and also to think that you and somebody else has something in common when you undergo the experience okay