Consoling The Father - Ari Abramowitz: The Land of Israel Fellowship

but uh but yeah so zooming out uh during these nine days we should keep our minds and our hearts focused on the destruction of the temple and what that means for us personally and what that means for the world because again you know the temple that we're seeking to build you know i've said this a thousand times and i'm always getting nervous when i say it i wish i didn't get nervous you know but it's not just a jewish temple i we've been attacked for saying this but it's just too central and obvious an idea for us to leave out the prophet isaiah yeshua says my house is a house of prayer for all nations that all the nations of the world will converge upon the holy land and offer sacrifices in the third temple may it be built soon and that's what we're really praying for because like the judaism whatever that word means the isms that we're trying to get rid of it's not meant to be this insular religion where we're checking our broccoli incessantly for bugs and no that's it's not bad to check your broccoli for bugs but not to get lost stop looking at each other like that anyways not to get lost in that that there's a greater universal mission that we have in the world so um so anyways you know the midrash actually expresses this idea really beautifully it says in midrash bamidbaraba it says if only the nations of the world would have understood that the holy temple protects them they would have surrounded it with fortresses so that it would never be destroyed and i really think about that idea all the time i'm really grateful i found a source for it because intuitively in my heart i've always felt that way that it's one of the greatest sources of sadness i have around the whole issue because you know i hate tragedies i mean that truth is just highlighted about when jeremy and i were actually arrested on the temple mount i don't know if you remember that but when i went up i was saying kaddish for a family that was murdered and so what am i saying god's name be great and may peace be spreading throughout the world and as i'm saying this i'm surrounded by arabs that are screaming death to jews that the jews and i am arrested and they put their hand over my mouth to quiet me from god forbid praying for peace to the whole world on the temple mount but that's what we're doing we're not praying for them to die or for our enemies to be wiped out we're praying for they're not to be enemies anymore but they don't realize that their hatred against us is so great and i hate tragedies you know like romeo drinking the poison just as juliet wakes up like that whole thing i don't like tragedies and this feels like a tragedy because with all the hatred and violence and fear and death that culminates in the in the most contentious 150 000 square is it 150 000 square meters i know it's like 40 acres in american measurements so that's the temple mount and it's the most sensitive spot in the world you know you throw a pebble on the temple mount and you have a tsunami throughout the nations and with all that darkness all the darkness that's coming from the temple mount right now that that great mountain will be the greatest source of life and light and peace and love imaginable and so these days are days in which we're really supposed to look inside you know and ask from uh from a real place what the temple means to us and if we are truly truly grieved at its loss and i can't honestly say that i walk around all the time grieved at its loss and this is a time when i try to nurture and and and engender that feeling within myself and let me tell you it's not it's not easy at all right to be grieved over the destruction of a building from over 2 000 years ago that we have no first-hand knowledge of what that was like or what it means it's not an easy ask it's not easy and so uh rav richman actually he explains in the name of the sages of israel throughout history that when the temple was destroyed the shrine you guys know what the shrina is i'm sure tahila maybe she's more kabbalistic than i am she can understand it better but it's like the awareness and revelation of god's presence it's like the the female element of it's a very difficult thing to explain and i see jeremy saying something to tequila right now but for for lack of a better explanation at the moment the god's presence in the world when the temple was destroyed that shino was exiled and that is the root cause of every tragedy throughout history because we know we've talked about it before we talk about it a lot in this fellowship and you know what it's okay i feel like with family you hear each other repeat themselves all the time you see what really matters to them jeremy wrote a song about this at my request gam zula tova right everything's for the good but when the temple was destroyed the funnels of god's light and presence and revealed uh and revelation it just they became exiled they became twisted and distorted and good is now all too often manifested in seeming tragedy and grief and sorrow and so uh yesterday there was this horrible accident in israel there was this mother with her with her five children that were in the car and uh you know a a driver um from our cousins i'm not going the reason i say from our cousins the reason i say that it was an arab driver is because this woman said that this other driver heading the opposite direction swerved into her lane and stayed in her lane going straight at her for a long period she tried to go right or left to dodge it but she couldn't and she got in a head-on collision killing her seven-year-old son and she said this is not a normal accident this was an intentional intentional thing which by the way makes me think of this week's torah portion which talks about when we enter the land if we do not if we let them remain there there will be thorns in our sides and uh thorns in our eyes that that's what they and and just the murder and the horror that we are facing day in and day out and this really like people are saying it was just a car accident it clearly was not but this type of things happened during the nine days this is a time of tragedy and sorrow that is the result of that temple of the temple being destroyed and so when we announce rosh chodesh forgive me i'm going to take a drink charcoal and so when we announce on rosh chodesh right the birth of the new month in synagogue on the shabbat before it falls out we call the month that we're in that's it that's its official name and title and the word menachem means consoling and the word of means father so the month literally means consoling of the father and while there's a lot of discussion about what this means and by the way jeremy and taylor i think i remember last year you sharing an idea with me if you have it feel free to interject but um you know many say that it means that in the backdrop of the great tragedies throughout all of jewish history that happened during this month that our father in heaven is consoling us reminding us that he's with us that he's sort of scolding us with one hand and consoling us with the other but for some reason i always read that those words as like a directive right it's like it's like an order an instruction right meaning console the father can console your abba that this is the month that we can say keviacho such a thing where possible that this is the month that we can console hashem that we can console our father in heaven that is is suffering from the temple's absence just as much as we are if not obviously significantly more than us because while we are so lost and disoriented and confused that most of us don't even know what we're missing hashem on the other hand knows exactly what's missing and the greatest tragedy is that we don't even really comprehend the tragedy of our existence we can't imagine how beautiful the world would be if all of mankind looked at each other and rather than seeing threats and enemies we saw brothers and sisters right each of us being made in the in the glorious image of hashem imagine that when we saw each other we saw a glowing soul made in the image of god and we recognize that we have that soul too our minds would just be consumed with how we can bless each other and give to each other and do right by each other but it's just so painfully opposite of what we see in the world today that it's hard to imagine such a reality um maybe really not you know i feel it in this fellowship that there is that sense of love and good will and togetherness but imagine that's spreading to all of mankind it's like it's hard to imagine and then so while this month of is filled with pain and sadness i've always felt that it's a really it's an opportunity for us to console hashem to to call out to hashem from the depths of our hearts and let him know that we share his pain that we grieve over the fact that we are distanced from each other and that we're alienated from each other and that's he isn't in that pain alone but we're in that pain with him this highlight was taken from the land of israel fellowship every week hundreds of families from literally around the world come together on our live zoom sessions to strengthen each other to inspire each other and to learn torah from the land of israel in which we connect the dots between the bible the hebrew language and the confusing events of our times go to www.thelandvisual.com backslash fellowship or click on the link below to join thank you