Body and Soul Retreat 2018 Shlomo Farhi Can we shape Jewish destiny

choosing a name for speech is always a difficult thing Yossi will tell you we went back and forth to try and name our sessions to try and accurately communicate an entire wealth of ideas into one tagline so it was with great difficulty that we chose the name for this keynote it was called a mistrial hi and it was gonna be about shaping the destiny of the Jewish people but I find it a little bit difficult because we had no idea the irony of the title of this talk on a Sunday morning if the nearly a dozen of our brothers and sisters were murdered in a synagogue a mistrial hi what is the destiny of the Jewish people I remember many years ago I was with a group of students on a trip with H in Eretz Israel and it was exactly as you'd imagine it a group of young men and women coming together having a great time after having done some great activities and everyone's sitting around and we're all making burgers in a tent out in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden all the sudden 150 young Jews start to go Hawaii that's not a normal thing no one is talking everyone is looking down at their phones it was the moment where 150 Jews all got the pings on their phone to tell them that the three boys that we've been praying for for 18 days were actually not missing they'd been murdered and it was surreal everything went quiet nobody spoke and suddenly someone began to sing in the room oseh Shalom not in the way that it's done at a Bar Mitzvah mind you but almost whispered booyah Shalom Aleinu if God can make help can make peace in the heavens between the various factions of good and evil please God make peace down here on earth it was more of a prayer than a song and I still remember going the next day we couldn't do anything we cancelled activities and we went to the funeral that day it was at the top of a mountain it was a hundred thousand people there it was so hot that they were carrying bodies out they were body surfing people who had fainted to the ambulances and a hundred fifty English kids who didn't speak a word of Hebrew by the way sat through an hour of speeches in Hebrew in a language they didn't understand because they felt that this was their loss these are their people their brothers their sisters after an hour and the speeches were over we sent them back down the bus back down to the bus we were nervous after I think that they 95 people fainted and had to be taken away in ambulances but I played football back in Israel I used to play lying probably can't tell now I would say rabbis are also in shape round as a shape and I decided that if I'd spent all that time learning how to push people I was gonna put that to good use and I was gonna make it all the way through the crowd to put my hand on their grave and say goodbye and I did most push move this that and I was almost there one of the most surreal things I've ever seen in my life are graves surrounded only by young people it's not a place for young people but right as I almost got there there was this moment of abject horror because it was so tightly packed I was kind of trying to we use my shoulders get in and there was a moment where I lost my foot my footing and I started to fall forward and I knew that if I actually fell I'd be trampled to death by a hundred thousand feet traveling in the same direction a moment of pure panic but then something so beautiful happened it was it's a physical manifestation of what I want to talk about today I fell forward but there was no way to fall because I was surrounded so tightly in the Jewish hug of bodies that even as my feet left the ground that I couldn't stand by myself I was held up by all the other Jews around me in a giant hug of love it's not often you get to feel that way so that's what I want to talk about today the destiny of the Jewish people I mentioned last night that today I was gonna speak about a very special woman who passed away three years ago nearly this week and her name was Annie MOC LaSalle a Shalom more an angel than a woman her house was so full of people on a consistent and constant basis and it looked like it felt like you needed a shoehorn to get people in and I remember taking a group of students there and you're looking around and this the makeup was unbelievable there was religious people non-religious people yeshiva Boys seminary girls a guy with tattoos all over his face whose name was not Mike Tyson sorry Mike but the maddest thing I've ever seen was sitting directly across from Rev Marcus was a priest at the Shabbos table eating cocoa mad how could it be so much room in somebody's heart how could it be so much room in somebody's home it was as if the walls that expanded so much they just weren't there and as I sat watching this beautiful scene how two people such special people could love with all of their hearts it struck me that I had seen this scene before not with my own eyes but in our books you see this family they were super humans but they had inherited that gene because before there was any la alarma G but then I intervene my routine more Haemophilus beforehand me and Mordecai there was Abraham and Sarah we are taught by them what a Jewish home was supposed to look like their home like any and Mordecai's had no walls it was open on all four sides and the reason why they had openings on each one of their sides was that if people wanted to come to their tent they could enter directly into their home without ever deviating from their own path they did not need to change to find a home in the house of Abraham and Sarah and the great-great grandchildren of Avraham and Sarah honey and Mordechai and practice this so well that they too had abolished walls from their dictionary they accepted and loved people as they were and it was only after there was food in their hearts and love in their souls that Avraham and Yitzhak would talk to them Avram and Sarah would talk to them about a higher purpose about a divine plan the first she wore that Abraham would give them was only at the end when they would say thank you to him and Avram would say why are you thanking me I didn't make the food it came from a higher source do you wonder where food comes from but only if they felt and only everything he felt that he was paid and cared for you know there's a famous line and it goes people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care that line is variously attributed to Teddy Roosevelt to John Maxwell to many many others and we don't actually know who said that line and I think the reason is because we don't care who said those words we only care who practices them no one thinks that any and Mordecai wrote that phrase and I'm sure that they didn't they were too busy living it to sit down and figure out how to say it so sitting there in that room with my students watching the scene the sea of Jews of all different types and stripes I was looking at the living breathing legacy the destiny that Avraham and Sarah had laid out for their great great grandchildren thousands of years later you know I took a group once to the Murata Machpelah weather forefathers are buried and I walked in it I was telling the students who these people were and there's this moment where I just broke into tears I'm holding my two children and I'm telling them who's buried right behind me in the behind me on though and behind that wall and I look up behind me and up to my right is the name it's rock free it's rock Aveeno our forefather Isaac and to my left is the name rifki he may know Rebecca our mother his wife I talked to this group about how important what we have is two rats evil animal share we were all taught Torah by moshe mirage ke logic of you know torah was taught by moshe it gets taught by rabbis it gets taught by teachers but even if you were a jew who never sat in a yeshiva who never took a class more asha it is an inheritance to the children of Jacob it's in there it was inherited bequeathed to you without a single class without a single mp3 without a single seminary it's part of your body your soul your blood and I said to them how many messages have managed to permeate thousands of years thousands of miles countless exiles with a child in my right hand underneath it's rock Aveeno my son my only son it's also called yet shock like agra homs only son called hits and the daughter in my left hand right underneath the words with kmno is also called rifki and i am holding in my hands the jewish future the destiny of the jewish people how do you communicate messages of that nature in a way that they permeate for so long and campaigns managed to catch our appetite catch our attention for a week a month a year but how do you teach something that lasts forever and I think that's the answer people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care you don't teach it by teaching it you teach it by living it you know Abraham is given a remarkable blessing in this week's parsha many of you have seen it before it's one of the most famous blessings in the Torah Vil hiya Kiba sorry keeper is average ha kiai before I will bless you Barbara our beds are hard I will make your children as numerous Kiko flesh are mine like the stars in the heavens who can call a sheriff's fat I am and like the sea the sand at the seashore not so many children you will have and the question that I've always asked myself is one second we are not that many we make up less than 1% of the world's population what happened to God's blessing that we will be like the stars in the heavens and like the sand on the earth innumerable and some of the commentators give a beautiful idea and they say that what God is talking about here is not a quantitative number but a qualitative one and we're very very proud of talking about how many Jews have won Nobel Peace Prize Nobel Prizes and we're very very proud about talking about how many Jews are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies there's this weird thing so I go yeah Facebook yeah he's Jewish yeah that's what we feel oh yeah he's do it she's Jewish yeah you Jews it's like here's what I made earlier qualitative so stars of the sky we will shine but then the follow-up is a big question that's what God was blessing him with that we would be like stars it's a little bit less glamorous to say that we're gonna be like saying right so if you're talking numbers I get the analogy if you're not talking numbers it's not that great and now it is it except that the answer is the answer isn't in his home the answer is the Tree of Life Center doc you see in this verse we're not blessed to be like the stars in the sand like his mentioned in other places in the Torah Bahia Zara Hakka Ferrara's we're blessed with specific sand the sand that sits right at the water's edge because there's a fundamental difference between the sand everywhere else and the sand that sits at the water's edge the sand that the water's edge by water is held together and the blessing that Hashem gives Avraham is that your children will shine because they will be like the sand it sticks together did any of you check Saturday night if the Tree of Life synagogue was Sephardic or Ashkenaz or Yemenite or Hasidic or reformed it wouldn't have occurred to you would it we're only good at figuring ahead and build walls and times of peace but in times of tragedy of sorrow those walls melt away and we recognized Coulomb Benicia had an afro we are all the sons one man and in those moments we shine so bright like the Stars those stars are our destiny when God takes Abraham and litters him above the Stars he says tall years are apke this is what your children are going to be like this is what we are like when we came to get in a Shabbat on where none of us would ever in a normal situation have spent together we smash down walls to be here if you hadn't told you two years ago five years ago then you'd come and pay the Spencer part with a considered guy if I had told you you're in your custody school that you were going to come and pay this friendship out with people who might have their phones out here or there what would you have said but such is the nature of the Jewish heart it finds its brother it finds its sister and binds itself to them and cares for them and loves for them it's in our bub and it's in our blood we just need to stand together and shoot for these stars you know in the Torah we're taught an amazing idea and I want to share with you what this idea looks like in the form of a modern-day story a modern son of our own son of Sarah and that is what I hope that you leave this conference with a decision to be a son of Avraham a daughter of Sarah Rev slow mph rifle was a great Rosh Yeshiva great rabbi and he was giving his schmooze a talk on the very first day of the Achieva and he told the boys about how important it was to actually have knowledge we all want to be good Jews but we need to know what Judaism is in order to be good Jews we need to take the opportunity that rough line was talking about to reach out to learn on these one-on-ones to take the opportunity to go on a destiny trip to educate ourselves we've gotten the feeling we've got we've seen what it is now let me learn about it let me know that isn't that what we do we once we see we like something we engage we make that decision step across into something that's unknown to try it out Seraph says he challenges the boys on the first day I want you to finish this mess after this entire tractate of Talmud and everyone is excited and everyone runs out it's like Dan page banner page came up then add a grade the books that an Iraqi through this and this one boy is sitting in the back and the Russia Shiva can see he's depressed he walks up Tiffany says is everything okay and the boy says can I speak to you in your office please of course the boy walks in he says you know you gave a talk and you talked about how important finishing the book is and he says yes yes I did and he says and you know that every word that you said and the more you explain how important it was the worse it hurt he says what do you mean he says all my friends are gonna finish the Masada but I'm Dyslexic and I can barely read and there's no way in the world that I can do this thing that you said is so important what about me what am I supposed to do what am i worth and if was nothing if not a big heart and he says you're right come see me tomorrow I want to think about the boy leaves so upset humiliated now someone knows his secret he comes back the next day and if slow Minds his big smile in his face and he says I got you something and he says would you get me rabbi and he gives him this gift wrapped like looks like a kind of Cindy he handed them and the point here is that open and it's a beautiful leather-bound give Myra beautiful leather-bound portion of Tama the one that they was studying but listen what a son of Avraham is like he had torn out all the pages of the Talmud except for page one and he bound it beautifully like a new chimera and he handed it to him and he said here's your Masada go finish it and make us see him with us who does that maybe you and I would have said it'll be good enough whatever you do finish as much as you can who takes a page who goes to a letter binder who hasn't bound a son of Avraham who wants every single person no matter what they look like to feel like they're part of the gang you know it's great when you care about people who were like you but that's not a drama and that's not Sarah Abram looks at a bunch of people and what does he see he sees three travelers so much are they different from him so far are they from his reality that what is a Brahms saved to them he says take a bit of water not to drink he's gonna give them that in a minute he says take a bit of water rinse your feet off if anyone he is capable of reading the squiggly bits at the bottom called Rashi print you will know that Rashi tells us why was he telling him to wash their feet not because it was a spa but because the people of the time worshiped the dust of the earth so if they weren't people who worshipped idols they had pagan beliefs Avraham wanted them to rinse that off and come into his own these are people who would diametrically opposed Avraham so how does Aram to do everything let's just remember our promise just had a pretty light at the age of 99 do you understand what that means to run besides he's Jewish do you understand what that means to run I've always wondered if you could have uber with camels there's regular uber which is a donkey uber Excel which is a camel it's got two humps I'm a very strange person I don't know if you've noticed this I have I always imagined I was weird I imagine these things in the Torah but I imagine I'm kind of lucid like the way we think now I've always imagined Adam in GaN Eden on Jay swipe he swipes in its cava and he swipes and it's cava swipe just cava cava fine I don't know why my head works this way it's not like I try and think these things up there's just you know why Avraham runs to Idol worshipers because Avraham is not a person who sees sinners who sees negativity Avram is a person of these potential Avraham knows that while this is what it looks like what I might actually be looking at his angels that doneghy was right he was right they were angels look at every Jew that way no matter how different they are to you involved every single person Abraham it says via sham Abraham by Booker and Abraham woke up in the morning he woke up not just regularly woke up early in the morning how many of you were in the first minion three people Wow so you must have had like a Zemon sorry from joke those should come with a warning Zeeland is the thing that you do when you maybe cut the Mazon sorry rabbi avraham wakes up early in the morning but the funny thing about the hebrew language is that it's different from all of the languages it's divine in all the languages the letters are actually just sounds so a is our B is Bar C is car whatever the overlay all the sounds right each sound each letter is a sound in Hebrew letters are not so much sounds but my best example for this is it's like they are elements so as an example glucose is made up I wrote this down of carbon hydrogen and oxygen to hydrogen molecules to each one of carbon and oxygen in case you were planning on doing that at the lunch table water is hydrogen and oxygen but two hydrogen molecules to one oxygen molecule the letters in Hebrew a link elements and when you take a word that's spelled in Hebrew letters that same word rearranged in another way is still the same definition just seen from another facet a couple of years ago I was speaking here and I gave an example I'll give it to you now as an example the word for dream in English in Hebrew is Kalam lamb advice men it's the same letters that spell the word lo hem because if you want your dreams to come true you need to fight for them look em needs to fight like a warrior but the same letters nose to smell the word mohel which means to give up because in order to achieve those things there's always something that you give up in order to achieve your dreams so these different word combinations in Hebrew actually they're the same thing because the letters are not sounds there elements and if you mixed hydrogen two hydrogen's and one oxygen or one oxygen and two hydrogen's it's the same thing it produces the same end goal via scam Avraham Ibaka and Aram woke up in the morning the word pop okay morning can mean morning but it also means B core which means to check do you know how hard I'm walked himself up he woke himself up by checking himself out he woke up at least two times in the Parishad there's three different times a great study tip would be to understand why he doesn't each of them but I'll run checks himself Who am I what kind of person am i but I want to talk about one of those cases we're not from praise for the people of Saddam these are people who are I can't even describe they are so against her and Assad or keema Brahms favorite thing in our world that when lots daughter welcomes in people and treats a poor man to a sandwich they give her the death penalty and the way that they give lots daughter this death penalty is they dipper into honey and hang her out so she will be stung to death by the bees these are horrific people but after him knows that maybe just maybe there's a way to get through to a closed heart an Avraham praise and a beautiful sentence is when I rob wakes up in the morning and he goes out to the place where he had stood before God and he looks out and he sees that this already smoke coming up what was so beautiful to me about this verses and aram prays again he prayed yesterday and it didn't work but I'll grab checks himself and he says is this the right thing or the wrong thing it's not my job to get it done it's my job to put in the effort so Omron wakes up in the morning he checks himself and prays a second time this remote eye is what it means to be children of our aha we are looking now at a response in my head to this heinous crime we all want to do something don't we don't we what should we do should we go on Facebook and post that that's gonna be so helpful like at least 12 people are gonna like it so now the world is different what are we gonna do in my opinion there is only one answer in every single time in every single case to terror the answer is to show terror that you are not afraid if we went to show once last year gonna shoot twice this year double your output if you were learning less before learn more now we will not be cowed into not being Jews ever again I became the rabbi just recently of the Safra synagogue in Manhattan and we did the Simchat Torah celebrations there were so many people that we had to do them on the street in front of the synagogue and while we're dancing in the street with I think it was nearly a thousand people we're dancing with the torah's in the street I stood up on a chair and I said can I just direct your attention to what it is that we are living right now my father escaped from Syria when he was 17 years old because he could not be a Jew in the streets of Syria he was shot in the head with a slingshot went blank a rock to the head and he has a scar that is there my mother is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who at the age of eight had his dog kicked down in born in Germany on Kristallnacht who is standing with their very lives to this land to the land of America we are runners and I said to the people there and now we are celebrating Simchat Torah in between Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue a block away from Central Park look at where we are look at what we have and I wonder now when they shoot at a shoe was I right or was that wrong was I right or was I wrong and I think that the answer is the following it will never matter if you shoot at us it will never matter if you come at us it will never matter if you try to exterminate us if you try to gas us or kill us or hang us or burn us we will overcome that is who we are do you feel that can you feel that from Avraham himself who's thrown in a furnace of fire and survives to a group of people who were then made slaves who wandered in the desert they get home we are finally here at the time of Messiah he's knocking on our door and whether or not nation we are no longer afraid that's the answer we might die we may have died but we are not afraid and we will not be cowed and we will go to shul and we will call people to learn with us and we will get on planes to go to Israel and we will learn more and spread more try and stop us try you fail like everyone before you the malbim rights echoed in the clear car that we have called the sand of the seashore for one more reason because it is that sand that is pounded by wave after wave after wave anti-semitism of persecution of hatred and yet every wave thinks it will flood the earth but invariably they disappear back into the ocean and no one remembers their name you mash your mom so I beg you I plead with you this inspiration that you've taken today this a whole weekend it is fuel use it to power your revolution use it to give strength to the people around you use it to create your own sense of community like we have done here invite people to your home for Shabbat and if you don't know enough like rev no I used to say I miss him so much we don't think we're teachers do we Rev no I used to say if I know olive and you know bet I have news for you my friend we are both teachers take what you've learned learn more share it like this fire everywhere make sure that they know that we are not going anywhere that is the mission that we are charged with by this weekend project inspire may have started with a couple people here or there but now it is everywhere it is a movement JWR p it's a movement and it's a movement because of you it used to be that it was leaders that decided policy for the future but today we don't live in that generation anymore obama became president because of what because of grassroots Trump became president because of what grassroots the time of Messiah is a time of Rabbis but not rabbis alone of teachers but not teachers alone it's a time where each and every one of us picks up the flag and runs for the goal line it has been an honor and a privilege to be here with you I am humbled by what they have managed to achieve here and I pray in the blessings that we are told in our torah yourself I am on I am may God increase upon your numbers came like you LF a mean a thousand times over and may he bless you with all the blessings that were given to Abraham children because you indeed are fulfilling that role or playing that part the part of the children of Abraham and Sarah