🔥 Chazaq on the Parsha: Eikev🎤 Dr. Shmuel Shields

okay my name is dr shmuel shields and i'm going to be talking a little bit about this week's pasha akev i want to start off a little story a story about the uh a wife of the vilna gaon they tell that she was out collecting sadaka with a friend of hers and she um the two of them were looking for a certain house and um they were having a little trouble locating the house they were supposed to go to and they saw a woman in the street and they went over and said uh we're looking for a certain house and the woman went like this she pointed with a hand like that so they went to the house they collected the tzedakah and then later on the two women made sort of an agreement with themselves that whichever one was nif terrace first would come and reveal in a dream to the other woman what it was like in the olympia emmaus so the friend of the wife of the village was niftaris and that night she came and revealed herself and said to the wife of the vilnigone that i want to give you a little piece of information of what it was like here and she said the following she said remember we were out collecting seducka a while back and we came we were looking for a house we couldn't find it and we saw a woman and we went over to her and said where is the house we're looking to collect zadaka we had to go to a certain house and she went like this well i want to tell you the reward that that woman got in the ulama emmist in the next world for going like this is beyond your imagination you can't believe the tremendous reward she got for that small act of kindness that she did so our pasha akev also starts off the very first puzzlic with a medrash interpretation from rashi madrashik interpretation it talks about the importance of the light and the small mitzvahs that many times we take for granted or treat very lightly kev tishma it will be it will be because of your listening to these ordinances um observing and doing them what are we talking about so rashi focuses on the word akev which means he'll and the madrish is is that there are these mitzvahs that we're talking about here these ordinances are ones that we tend to treat lightly that we may neglect that we may step on that we may not care too much about but hashem the torah promises us that if we do them hashem will safeguard for us his covenant and his kindness for doing these light mixes so we see the importance of small things of doing light mitzvahs uh we know there's a mitzvah in the torah sending away the mother bird it's a very easy mitzvah it's a very lightness mitzvah not hard to do and the torah promises us the reward of long life for such a simple mitzvah so since we know that the torah is not a history book but we're supposed to take we're supposed to take the learning from the torah and it's supposed to transform our lives so maybe going into the shabbos we could reflect on that first passage and we can maybe think about a mitzvah that we take lightly that we tend to neglect that we tend to maybe figuratively tread on with our heels and maybe we could give some physic to that mitzvah one if you're having trouble thinking of one i'm gonna mention one that i think is taken very lightly the nish martin the old enough you should guard your souls very carefully the torah tamima shows how this verse also teaches the importance of guarding our health and unfortunately in today's world it's a mitzvah that has become very light and we trample on it and we think about it it's really a very important mitzvah because without our health we can't do the bigger mitzvahs and the more important ones that we we always want to do so the rambam tells us that most illnesses are due to overeating and eating bad foods so maybe going at the shabbos we could scale back a little bit maybe we could eat a little bit less maybe we can plan a healthier chillant uh and of course when we stop by at the grab and go kiddish maybe we can grab a little less have a great travis