Descent and Ascent: The Wicked and The Righteous: Shaarei Teshuva 2:18-19 with Rabbi Aaron Poston

[Music] everybody welcome to the shari truva kabora this is the safer we're using if you have one great if you don't follow along i'm so glad to be back here with you guys here we have people on zoom and i know that hundreds of people watch afterwards at tonight's subject today's subject it's a little depressing right because there's two chat there's two paragraphs the 18th and 19th paragraph of charbette charbette okay so we're going to be talking about the death of the wicked which because we're not wicked it shouldn't be so depressing and the probably what i'm going to title this year is because most of what most of the material is in paragraph 19 the descent and the ascent in other words of the wicked and the righteous so there's going to be a great separation and we'll see where that leads to uh it's just a fantastic um class an amazing material and i just want to mention before we begin that the class is dedicated to the roof for shaleema of ropinto his hebrew name is review yoshiyahu yosef benzafri okay so here we go that's yes in russian that's all i know now there's one more word i know in russian and that's soup what does that mean soup you know maroc soup in russian is the same as in english okay so now you know at least two words in russian oh yeah i know a third one yet placebo i can't even pronounce it but i yeah okay so here we have the you should know kinefish the soul of an evil person all that person does is chase after the desires of this world this is going to be a main theme here how do we know who's who's righteous and who's not well we're not so concerned about others let's just concern ourselves with ourselves okay we have the choice free will where do we belong on the ascension are we going up or are we going down it's just interesting that i heard from a dear friend of mine rabbi gaddafine who has spoken for given quite a number of times we have to get him again mentioned through the hasidic masters that the word rasha which is spelled shin ayan but nevertheless rasha is related to the word rash what's rash rash is noise right when you think about someone who's in charlotte someone who's at peace someone who meditates someone who prays someone who has and we you know look not every righteous person is zelja to a real peaceful life i understand but to try for um clarity where you don't have all this background noise so the russia is interested in this world in the tithes in the desires in the physical pleasures of this world that's what a russia is that's we're going to see tonight today this afternoon this morning wherever you are in the world whenever you're listening to this so you should know that a wicked person's soul which during the actual lifetime desires nothing other than physical pleasures the nif reddit basically the desire itself is separating the person from the service of god and therefore they're disconnecting themselves from the heavenly source the reason i mentioned about rash because this is how it used to work on television not that i'm a bucky but there used to be a thing that if you turn the channel people used to have antennas on their roof and basically if you're in between channels you get white noise and what this person explained to me michael roos actually dr moshe core he said basically your receiver is receiving everything and when you turn to a specific channel it's like you're it's like a filter you're blocking everything else out except for that particular channel and that's why you get a clear picture clear noise and whatnot now this is he said this early on when the internet just came out and he assumed it was the same thing it may or may not be but try to imagine is that your computer is like really receiving everything all at once therefore it receives nothing but once you put a url some kind of an address it's like a filter that's blocking everything else out except for that now you have a clear screen exactly the address that you wanted and the same thing can work i mean if you choose your imagination again i don't know if it's true but you want to write an email to somebody if you don't have the right address it's not it's going to go everywhere which really means it goes nowhere it goes absolutely nowhere and so rash this all this noise creates chaos in the in an evils person's life where he has no clarity of the value of life right i mean this try just use your imagination i i listen it fits my mold the question is it true or not i have no idea but it sound good at least when it came to white noise as i.e noise rash and this is from the hasidic masters from way long long ago so um there has to be some aspect of deep truth in it so we go on tayred bermudezoi when the person dies when the wicked person dies he'll go down la mata la'arets to the earth the place where his desires are for meaning the physical right physical desires so his soul attached remember there's five levels of your soul we're going to be discussing what we call the shama which is basically the higher level of the bottom three which everyone has okay so the higher souls called in the shaman but then we have a nephesh which is in the blood which is in the that's the animal soul that we all have and that's in the blood and that is really attached to the body and the earthly desires and needs so we have we have a constant struggle between our higher sown or lower soul okay one second so basically the russia has attached themselves so much to this lower part that they will they will descend to the earth which was the focus of its desire the now the nature of this soul this wicked soul is just like it will be like the dust of the earth in which it came from but it will go down because it's heavy right it's that's what it looks for gosh miss gosh means it's physicality and therefore it will go down and it will not ascend well one second we will go up for a judgment and then go back down we'll talk about that it actually will ascend at some point um temporarily for judgement the lee wrote and it's going to be tried and judged why it made the decisions in its lifetime to exchange what could have been a supernal spiritual existence and instead decided where its priorities were which was of the physical world and therefore the question will the question the great question of the time of judgment is like this to be tried and judged and to see how it foolishly exchanged heaven for basically a word for hell gehenna the word he uses is called evan aya de katakela now this is interesting because probably many of her have heard of this concept of kathakala it's called a slingshot it's it's similar to gehenna but i think it's worse okay because at least in general there's a time for purification and it's limited kathy keller i don't thank god i don't know that much about this but it's discussed in the sparring hakadoshim as like a slingshot is it the soul is being shot like through a slingshot from one end of the universe to the other and the soul will experience such i don't know the word to say except hell right such anxiety and fear through this exchange okay so where do we know this from so this is an amazing thing we're going to see shortly in first samuel chapter verse 29 but before we get there there is a comment about this slingshot that i want to read for you it's number three on if you're using our book it's 184. ribena yona refers here to the punishment known as kaf it's called a slingshot which is mentioned in many of the svarim according to ribena yona a primary component of the suffering of this punishment is the tremendous pain that soul experiences after it has been made aware of the sublime experience it has forfeited in other words the shock of having made the wrong decisions is i guess re-experiencing such an experience of being shot forward now what happens when you shoot a slingshot i don't know i've never shot one um but basically we're talking about goes against gravity there's a force called gravity which wants to bring the ball down the rock down nevertheless you're shooting it up you're shooting it up i i guess you're swinging around this piece of leather on a string and it's going up against gravity so there's a force trying to push it down and yet you're shooting it in the other direction so he mentions like this right so too that's what happens to the soul after the soul is going up to the heavens for the purpose of this visit this visit of this judgment it's no longer kept there but it will fall naturally down to the earth as i mentioned the similarity of the slingshot cashiers so too just as the stone falls back to earth after it's been thrown upward by the slingshot now where do we get this whole idea from so those who know tanakh right we're going to go to first samuel 25 verse 29 avigar which was a prophetess he was one of the great numbered amongst the the female prophets and she said when she saw david she fought she fell at his feet and said nephesh has she said may my lord meaning david may his soul be bound up in the bond of life with hashem your god the atnetist was she cursing his enemies no she was saying what's going to happen to them these enemies of david were evil so she said and your god may he hurl the soul of your enemies as one shoots a stone from a slingshot so the comment here says avigal said this when she pleaded for david to spare the life of her husband naval among other things she stated that dovid's enemy should after they die suffered the the fate of the wicked avigil was a prophetess and her words here were divinely inspired they are thus taken as an accurate description of the fate of the wicked so this is how we know okay we know from the tanakh that tanaka is telling us that avigile is expressing what will happen the fate of the wiccan and ghazal in the proverbs in the midrash of proverbs that after death both the souls of the righteous and the souls of the evil they go up to heaven to be judged ella but what happens shin is the souls of the wicked which are not extremely wicked subsequently descend crashing down to the earth and that's what it means when she said right that the souls of your enemies may he hurl the soul of your enemies as one shoots a stone from a slingshot now we're on page 185. i mean this is really deep insight number one when you read psalms the richness the wealth of information about this is king david i mean you know one of the greatest souls that ever lived and the insight so now it says vinhemar on page 185 the mice adam russia it says in michele that's king david's son king solomon says in 11 chapter 11 verse when the wicked man dies hope is lost unbelievable what do you mean why would hope you lost kilo to etiquette and nephesha russia there's no hope there's no there wouldn't be any hope for a evil soul let's say to me for the wicked person soul to escape the darkness of what we call gehenom to end up in the light of the garden of eden in ghana as it says in psalms king david himself in 49 verse 20 it shall go to the generation of his fathers until eternity they shall see no light the commentaries explain this verse is speaking about the soul of the wicked person whose ancestors were also wicked so we're talking about a very wicked person who had obviously free choice but chose to follow in their father's footsteps and not do trueva this would be considered an extremely wicked person all right now now we're in 19 so that was quite short most of the material here is going to be dealing with 19 and as i mentioned earlier we're talking about the ascent of the righteous soul how do we know has anybody gone there and come back we were standing at mount sinai we spoke face to face with hashem and the prophets later revealed much of what had been revealed earlier okay so this is divine information rabbi yonah now continues discussing the fate of the wicked what happens is a wicked person so you already discussed that the wicked soul will go down to what we call ghana we're going to mention two specific verses in which the rabbis derive this information the first one is in mishlai that's proverbs 15 24. it says how do we have it here the path of life leads upward for the one who uses his intellect or the way of life lamala lamaskill it's going to ascend higher and higher for who's a mosquito i just want to i want you the word the word seiko okay we would translate moscow is enlightened that's true i would translate as enlightened but what does that mean in terms of every translation is an interpretation so in rambam maimonides terminology is intellect pure unadulterated really pure intellect seemingly a rational a rationalist in in terms of the maharao he would explain it as spirit soul i as you probably know i'm familiar very familiar with the cleo car he uses the word seiko in the same way that his rebbe the maharao would use it but i would like to put them together both of these i guess interpretations together to say it's the spiritual intellect and this way we make no mistakes okay that it's a spiritual intellect that we're dealing with okay so now if we understand that we're going back to the um the verse again the path of life leads upwards for the one who uses his spiritual intellect so that his soul will turn away from sha'a below and there's an interesting comment by using one's intellect to control one's physical desires now that's why i think spiritual intellect really fits in well because we're talking about using your intellect in a spiritual way steering it away from your physical desires if however i'm sorry let me read on by using one's intellect to control one's physical desires the path of life leads him heavenward you will ascend you will go towards heaven if however one thousand fails to allow his intellect to lead him meaning his soul his spiritual intellect he will inevitably end up in gehenna so let's continue now we just said basically this verse this two demonstrates that the wicked person soul is destined for hell show so robin young explains another verse that mentions the fate of the soul after death and now we're going to go to koheleth again king solomon this is ecclesiastes chapter 3 verse 21. he says like this who knows now this sounds like a question and the and the romanion is going to go at great length to explain how one could me be misled you don't know the oral torah you don't know what's being said you have no tradition you would think king solomon is in doubt himself about what happens to the soul after you die but no king solomon knows exactly what's going to happen and he doesn't pose it as a question although we will read it as a question who knows the spirit of man that ascends on high and the spirit of the beast that descends down into the earth now what does he mean by asking this question perush the explanation is as follows he's asking the question who are you to make any judgment only god knows that's what he means the meaning of the verse is king solomon is asking rhetorically who can recognize miyakir recognize who's righteous and who's wicked in this world as we will see through what he the continuous discussion here there are many people who seem evil but they do so many righteous acts in private so they don't excel in righteousness in public but they are extremely righteous and private and there are other people who may act and dress the part of being righteous and in secrecy they do all kinds of evil things only one person only one entity only one thing knows the truth and that's hashem himself so the question was who can recognize right so we asked like this ki there are wicked people whose deeds are performed in secrecy meaning um positive things and therefore not recognize people as wicked i'm sorry there are wicked people that do their wicked acts in privacy and you wouldn't know that they're wicked the age you're a shamayim beser and there are some that really have oh a really healthy sense of awe of god in secret as we see in michael right one of the prophets in chapter six verse eight where it says this is a directive that one should walk with modesty with hashem one should walk with hashem maybe it means secretly but it's modest right not trying to get all the fanfare i was discussing this this morning we have many people whose names are on the walls of great institutions and you may think hopefully mistakenly and you don't think this way but maybe you think oh these people they just want to have their names on the wall that's why they gave them money firstly you don't know that many times a fundraiser will try to convince the donor who came and said i want to give this anonymously or i'm not interested in my name on the wall but they convinced this person that if you give we can get from five other people who are in your same tax bracket your same economic sphere because when they see you put it up they want to also donate a similar amount of money well guess what this person says well i don't want to be used for that so hopefully the fundraiser will say i want you to speak to your rabbi see what he has to say and the rabbi may convince him that the fundraiser is absolutely correct maybe that's the way to go however it is or put at least in memory of somebody and then you realize well that was that guy's father grandfather and you can put two and two together maybe his name wasn't so primally displayed but everyone knows it's him right there's different ways so just because somebody did something publicly doesn't mean that they themselves had um nefarious motives right and not so high motives you don't know so we don't know so that's one of the ideas just brought down the whole verse in mirha 6 8 what does hashem ask of you but to do justice to love kindness and to walk modestly with your god now i just want to mention the number number five the comment this doesn't mean um yeah okay this does not mean that when they are in the company people they commit sins or refrain from doing mitzvahs that must be performed at that time rather to the greatest possible extent they hide their good deeds and attempt to perform them while no one is watching okay so basically it's impossible for us to identify who is righteous and who is not righteous and that's what king solomon is talking but he's mentioning more than that because he talks about the ascension of the soul who is like man and we'll discuss what is man and versus the spirit of the beast what is the spirit of the beast i guess you can take a guess that's the evil people who are going to go down into the earth so here we go the ikra nephesha russia right away we understand that what that the this verse is referring to the soul of the wicked person as a soul of an animal nim because the soul itself is chasing after the physical desires like an animal would okay now before we get to jonah that he wants to show us maybe we'll we'll use this and i'll discuss it so go to yonah chapter 4 verse 11 where where yona is talking to god shall i not take pity upon ninja the great city in which there are more than 120 000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left hand and many animals as well what is this last part you don't really hear you don't really pick it up in english but it says and many animals what does that mean so before we um he's going to differentiate in the hebrew right we just said over there was binay adam the word adam here we have the idea of bahamas so clearly the souls of the righteous are called ruach bene adam the spirit the soul of man that's the righteous and when it comes to and i think he gives another proof for that in ezekiel ezekiel 34 31 where ezekiel says you know in god's name now you are my sheep the sheep of my pastor you are man meaning you're going to listen to me you're going to listen you're going to do trueva you are man okay so there was a comment i wanted to mention this verse in yonah was said by hashem to yonah in explanation of why he had taken pity on the inhabitants of ninja and spared them from destruction however the sages teach that the word many animals is referring specifically about the wicked okay now take this into account the meaning of the wording of the verses as follows right who knows how to identify the spirit of man that is the righteous man is going to be called righteous who ascends on high who knows obviously hashem knows kisha the answer is no one in this world can know who is and who isn't righteous for their many righteous people about whom no one can stay conclusively in this world shame sadiq and bernat that they really truly are righteous and of course because they're truly righteous their souls will ascend to heaven as it says in first samuel chapter 16 verse 7 man sees what his eyes behold but hashem sees into the heart okay in hebrew right and i read that man can only see what he sees in front of him hashem is little evolve sorry live off he can see into the heart i think it's a very good comment here true righteousness is marked not only by fulfilling the active mitzvas and refraining from sins but by the extent to which a person's inner thoughts and desires are devoted to hashem the richness of a person's inner spiritual life remains hidden from others only hashem can access a person's success with what we call the duties of the heart and know what thoughts values attitudes and desires lie in a person's mind it is thus possible that a person appears to be a simple jew has reached the highest levels of love and fear of hashem okay so we just saw that verse now the gum ki rabbi min sadiq ye re shamai and bisesa they're going to be so many righteous people who in private they have an awe they have such a high level of fear of god they insist and nobody really knows the truth the the extent to their their actions and their values however i do want you to know there are people who have been known oh yeah they're they're known as the town miser right people would say don't go don't even waste your time knocking on his door he's not going to give you any money because everyone knows the guy gives a little bit to everybody but guess what what happens all of a sudden this person dies and there's like hundreds of people in town who all surfaced at the same time and said all of a sudden the envelopes that were put under my door are not coming anymore right so you think or you judge the person thinking oh he's the miser of the town because he gives everybody just a little bit and secretly he's he's giving them a tremendous amount of sadaka and charity behind the scenes right only after the person dies you find this out so be careful how you judge people while they're alive only god knows as we already mentioned in mira chapter six verse eight where hats right this is something that should be done i'll just read the i'll just translate again also many righteous people conceal the extent to which they fear hashem and the true level of their righteousness is therefore unknown to others as we said in mikha that you should walk modesty with your god now we said earlier about the spirit of the beast what was that all about so here king solomon asked so who can identify the wicked whose souls descend to the earth there are also many i shouldn't say many there are that's what he says there are also many many evil people and people do not recognize they don't know the extent of their their deeds as it says in isaiah chapter 29 15 it says their deeds are done in secrecy they say who sees us and who knows of us right how many evil people think like this i can only imagine that's what they say exactly what isaiah says the campus is the quantum level schoeles and this verse was explained like this in the midrash on ecclesiastes where it says like this kirak banayam we already said the spirit of man that's referring to the tsadikim the righteous and the behemoth the spirit of or the soul of the animal that's talking about rashoi now having established the true meaning king's king solomon rebellion is now going to reject all alternative ways of reading this there are people that don't know tanakh don't have rabbis to learn with don't have fathers who taught them the truth about how to learn tanakh and they think mistakenly other other ideas so he says like this remember how we first read it king solomon says who knows maybe they don't go up and maybe they don't go down who knows who knows no don't think it's it is impossible for anyone to say that this is not the proper explanation of the verse that king solomon was actually wondering whether person soul ascends to heaven after death of course it does it's actually written in kohel's king solomon himself writes in chapter 12 verse 7 that the soul actually returns to the one who gave it to hashem himself the soul returns the spirit shall return to god who gave it there's no question about it not only that furthermore the odd eiki's topic how would you have any doubt that the soul of the wicked is going to go down just like the soul of the righteous is going to go up where else would it go why the spirit of the animal originates from the ground how can it possibly go up to heaven so now we're going to look in genesis right the very beginning of creation where god created the animal from what the ground that's where its life force came from whereas the life force of man came from the breath of god himself so let's see what he says it's a very supernal thing it comes from the upper worlds the it's clear from the torah that a person's soul originates from god whereas when it comes to the animal soul look in genesis chapter 1 verse 24 it says the thoughts are it's nefesh right it's coming out of the ground the nephesh the the living well how do you translate it let the earth bring forth living creatures but it's nephesh high it's the it's the soul itself is coming out of the earth whereas by nishmas adam by the soul of man even though it says man also came the physical part came from the ground what about his soul regarding the soul of man the yipak baapov the god breathed into his nostrils he blew into his nostrils the soul of life alkane therefore when the body dies the soul will go back to its creator there's no question in king solomon's mind shaving because everything ultimate return everything ultimately returns to its source and we have a verse in cohes i hope i'm good here we're on page 190 now in 12 7. did we see that we didn't step before it did we it says like this the yoshov uh yeah we solved the latter part of this verse right so um so we said the dust of the human body returns to the ground as it was but the spirit returns to the god who gave it rebecca yonah wants to cite further scriptural proof about what happens to the souls of the righteous after death i remember that we recalled in the very beginning the the title of this class will be right the descent and the ascent of the wicked and the righteous so it's also stated regarding the souls of the righteous in zechariah zechariah chapter 3 verse 7. now this is interesting because we're talking about the angels right there's talk about this if you do what i tell you to do you will be standing amongst the angels okay i'm giving to you i grant you strides among these omdim who are the omdim perush this is the meaning of the promise i'm going to grant you strides that's the mahakim among the angels who are omdim and are everlasting so they don't walk they fly they do fly angels fly they jump they jump and they fly [Music] um this sense of the word omdim right they only have one leg so they can't walk anyway this sense of the word omdim is along the lines where it's stated elsewhere look in psalms 148 verse 6. right he established them forever and ever so wherever you have the word the ami dame is related to her own dem it's the same root and that connotes the idea of forever and it says regarding that kiravat al-khad min uh so this is in daniel right he approached one of the standing ones he approached one of the angels look in number 17 this is part of daniel's description of his vision regarding the four kingdoms from the context it's clear that one of the standing ones was referring to an angel so in hebrew right i read that fine i approached one of the standing ones this is just proof that we're talking about the omdim are the angels so the righteous will go and where reside live amongst these angels that are forever so it says in gamora shabbos the um that hashem will take the souls of the righteous and tuck them away hide them away secure them store them away under the throne of glory we see this in we we we spoke about this earlier in chapter in first samuel chapter 25 with when avigile was pleading for a husband's life and blessing david that his enemies should end up like the catholic kafka she uses these words that we also use when we uh meant when we use it for alias may the lord's soul be bound up in the bond of life this bond of life with hashem your god you can't get clearer than that i think i do want to read this comment number 19. in summary at this point rubena yonah has demonstrated in his lengthy segment that the souls of the righteous and the souls of the wicked are subject to vastly different fates after death while the soul of the righteous person ascends heavenward and delights in the pleasure of being close to hashem's presence the soul of a thoroughly wicked person is subjected to great punishment including the punishments of what we call kaffa keller as well as genome so the catholic hell is really for the extremely evil people now i was going to stop here and continue the rest of this the next time we meet but it's actually not that long i think we should continue so let's do it let's push forward okay after speaking about people who live their entire lives without giving serious thought to the day of their death rabano yonah discusses at length the fate of the souls of the righteous and the wicked after they die romanian now discusses the proper attitudes a person should adopt in light of his mortality we have to know we do not live forever i was when i was in yeshiva in miami beach one of the ways i helped pay for my tuition i volunteered if you want to call it volunteering for the cover cadesha and i just remember after my first client met patera i um i i spoke to roshiva and i said to him he asked me we knew how was it i said i i feel foolish i really feel foolish saying this but i feel heavy and i feel extremely hungry he said you are you got in touch with your mortality your physical you you real you know you're talking about seeing death being involved in death so what exactly is the cover khadijah they deal with the tahara the dunking of the dead body into the mikvah cleaning the body beforehand there's a whole process i'm not going to go into it now but it was like a little bit spooky you know what i mean your first time i never saw that person in my life honestly i mean except on tv right not not in real life and there was something that you you feel like i don't know i was extremely hungry i was never that hungry in my life it was like really weird so he explained you got in touch with your mortality so we're going to talk about this now cole ancestor every wise-hearted person all wise people should think should consider this world as a temporary dwelling the only reason to use this world all of our use of this world is just to be serving hashem with your new boat say the lenovo and to use it to prepare all of our provisions for the world to come right you you go on a trip you pack your bags you make sure you have clean underwear right you have your toothbrush your toothpaste whatever else you need you to fill in right your underwear anyway so you just make sure everything is packed everything is ready to go because you're going to get up early in the morning you don't have time in the morning whatever anytime you leave you want to make sure you pack you have to prepare well this world is just temporary right so this is the time to prepare because the real trip if i can use that word is the world to come okay so here it is this is what life's about um you have all these years to live even if personally many years even if you live a thousand years twice over across even after all those years you know it's going to be it's like he never even lived that's what's going to be since there would be in the final analysis some finite numbers to his years in this world that number would eventually be reached but in the end it would be as though he never existed whereas whereas the world of reward meaning the world to come has no end you're finished this world is gone right i know some people i don't know that they tell me they want to be cremated because they don't want the bugs eating them i i mean listen the sooner your body disintegrates the better off you are the truly righteous the bugs don't even are not interested but the sooner you get the body disintegrates into the ground the better off you are honestly and it says in job job chapter 16 verse 22. for my allotted years will come and then i will embark on a path from which i will never return you have to know this world is temporary meaning any amount of time in this finite world must be viewed as temporary when compared to the eternality eternity of the world to come afk i mean this is a kind of an easy scenario but basically you're thinking of like a passing shadow and it's surely proper to adopt this perspective when in reality a person's days in this world are not that long but are like a passing shadow so if you go to chapter in psalms chapter 90 verse 10 so this is the last actually i think we have two verses here these are the last two verses we're going to deal with the image of behavior as the verse says the average person lives 70 years after strong 80. right but it ends off it is cut off swiftly and we fly away um your mouth but there it actually says in psalms 144 verse 4 man is like a breath his days are like a passing shadow and it's interesting because the name of our sub we're called selemelo kim selem elokim means in the image of god it's elim like you want in modern hebrew to take a picture a camera a camera is called a mats lima it's taking an image you want to use a xerox machine we don't use that term anywhere you know it's a photocopy machine so i forget what i forget what it's called but it's the same root right it's the same root so it's to take an image so it's interesting because the shadow shade is also the same how we are because we are not god we are like an image of god it's like a shadow right and that shadow is there's really nothing there it's going to pass on and uh okay so now this is kind of like to a summary to hit the now on the head right roberto cites the teaching of the sages regarding this last verse it says in ghazal in indus koheles log bitsilo shall ilan the lobe basilo shell kotel now by using this metaphor of a passing shadow the verse means to teach the person's life is not even like the shadow of a tree or the shadow of a wall because they remain in a certain place for some time but rather it's like it's there but our shadow is like a bird flying you ever see the shadow of a bird it's zipping by i mean it's not you know you can watch the shadow of a tree over hours move we're talking about split seconds here rotonomar what do the sages mean by this that one should look at their life really as a passing shadow like the birds was flying by which is just split seconds he says brief moment a brief moment in time that a person in his mind must compare the notion of life in this world to the shadow of flying bird which disappears almost immediately after it appears and thus view life in this world for a brief moment in time um you don't even know if tomorrow you're going to be in the ground you don't know right therefore comparing to a passing shadow is a perfect example because the person doesn't know if he's here today we're in the grave tomorrow nimsa right this idea as it turns out the case will emerge that in extending yourself and expending your energy for your tomorrow has caused yourself pain over a world that's not even yours by viewing life as a passing shadow a person will be reminded that he could die at any moment and will be less likely to focus all his energies on the uncertainty on his uncertain future in this hola mazette in this physical world and that's what the sages mean as they mentioned the mercy sanhedrin it's amazing this is most important lesson everyone should learn don't trouble yourselves with tomorrow's problems because you do not know what a day will bring all you have is the present this is all that exists you don't know and therefore do truva write one mo one day before you die we spoke about this i think this was i'm so glad we finished this um paragraph because it would have been to leave that uh but i hadn't i hadn't really gone over it that last small bit but it's uh it's a summary and it's very apropos and we should look at life like this and now i'm going to take the zoom callers questions or comments and we'll see you all not next week the week after because next sunday night sunday saturday night sunday we're either going to be feasting or fasting we do look forward we are optimistic there's what to be optimistic about um every day that passes by mashiach is getting closer and closer how much more troubles can we go through but the jewish people not in a bad sense but we are uh koishe arif we're very stubborn people in a good way and i like it is keep the faith and we'll see you in two weeks from now have a great life during the month above the 15th above hashem will all be together before or by then okay cold [Music] oh