Tomer Devorah with Rabbi Avigdor Miller 29 Ch 13 Mimei Kedem From the Days of Old Hashem Rememb

Shalom. We are in the last chapter of Tom Devor chapter 13. We are discussing the character trait of Hashem called Mimed from the days of old. And last time we um explained that even after our own merits are non-existent and after the merits of our forefathers have been um used up. We still have Hashem's mercy and that is called mimed from the days of old. This is a character trait that Hashem conducts himself with us when the merit of the forefathers has worn off. What should Hashem do if we have used up all the merit of our fathers and we are no longer worthy on our own merit? It is written, I remember for you, the loving kindness of your youth, the love of your bridal days. And we explained how the Jewish people came out of Egypt into the desert. They showed love, commitment, and loyalty to Hashem. And Hashem remembers the days of old. He says that because you trusted me, I became a king. I now possess a nation. I was able to give the Torah. If the Jewish people would say, "No, Hashem, we want to stay in Egypt." There would be no Jewish nation. There would be no giving of the Torah. No one would proclaim Hashem. Hashem God was king. God is king and God will always be king. There would be no one on the national level who would serve God, recognize God, promote God's message in the world. And therefore, Hashem loves the Jewish people even if not for what they're doing now and even if not for what their forefathers did, but just for the fact that they agreed to become God's nation. And it says God, Hashem loves them with the love that was there at the beginning. And because of that he has compassion on Israel even if they are not worthy. And um [clears throat] Rabbi Miller gave a a mashal of a husband and a wife when they got married they both were handsome and beautiful but over the decades he is not as strong and handsome and she's not as beautiful. But nevertheless, they are loyal and loving to each other. They still help each other and take care of each other. Why don't they abandon each other? God forbid. And the answer is because of their memory of the earlier days. The kindness that you did with me. Just like a spouse gets sick and their wife or their husband decides to loyally take care of them and the h the spouse might be crippled forever but their husband or wife does not abandon them. They say at the beginning of our marriage when we were both in a good state, we committed to each other and now one of us unfortunately fell. I will not abandon them. I will be loyal. I will not look for a better match. I will stay with this one because we committed each other. Why? Because they were loyal to me. They took it without knowing the future. We both committed to stay loyal with each other. And that's what we both did. God did it to us and we did it to him. Sometimes being human, we fall and fail, but we come back and we reconnect to Hashem. Now, Rabbi Miller said that when we try to behave like this towards other people, if it's our own wife or our own husband, okay, our conscious might um nag at us and say, you know what, you committed to them when you got married. How's it going to look? But what if it's another person? Someone who we are not connected financially and through our children and someone who we can dump easily. It's much harder to exercise this character trait of mercy that this person has nothing going for them. They provide zero benefit to me. They have no merits on their own. I will still take care of them because of the earlier time. Like it's recommended to imagine that same person that right now you don't like how they were a baby in their mother's arms. They were cute and cuddly and smiley. And just for the sake of that long ago time when they were a baby cute in their mother's arms, I will arouse mercy in me. Now, Rabbi Cordova continues, "Therefore, Hashem will remind himself of all the mitzvot they fulfilled since they were born." On an individual level, Hashem does not only look at the person where he is now, but for the person's benefit, he also looks where they once were. If a person is coming out of a deep pit and he's climbing out of sin, then Hashem looks at him now. Right now, he just emerged from the surface of the the the pit. So, Hashem says, "Welcome. I'm going to forget about the past and I'm going to welcome you where you are now." But the opposite is also true. If unfortunately now the person is inside the deep pit and right now the person is in trouble and he's sinning terribly. Hashem says, "I will not forget that one once upon a time you were standing on the ground. You didn't fall yet. I will remember that you a long time ago were pure and you were cute little baby that you were innocent and I will have mercy on you despite you being in mud rolling in dirt. I will still look at you as if you are a little baby in my arms. He remembers all the good things they did over the course of their lives and all the good attributes with which God conducts his world. He will take the little bit this whatever he could scrape from your past and he will combine it with all his arsenal with all his tools. How to expand the good, how to only focus on the good and he will put both together. He reminds himself that these traits he once had toward them should now be activated and once more be effective toward them. And from all of them together, the little dust of good deeds that a person did and the great army of God's merciful tools, he makes a treasure from which to have pity on them. Like a copy machine, you find one little uh piece of art that your child made and you say, "You know what? I love it so much. I'm going to Xerox it. I'm going to copy it tens and hundreds of pages and I'm going to put it all over his room. He in his whole life, he only did one little drawing. The rest of the time he was breaking things. But that one little drawing, I'm going to magnify, amplify. Not only I'm going to copy it, but the copies are going to be big and not only black and white. I'm going to add with AI, I'm going to add color into those pictures. I'm going to make them beautiful and I'm going to put it all over the child's room. So the next time I come into the his room and I want to punish him, I'm going to look at all these beautiful paintings which originated with a small idea of his and a small initiative and I will calm down and I will say look he did so much and I used all my tools to tilt my own judgment to the side of mercy. God takes together any merit that they once possessed, all the mitzvot they once did. And he also takes his love that he had at an earlier time and makes a crown, a sigula, which he puts on their heads and views them now through the beauty of that crown and the memory of what they had once done. Hashem beautifies us with an artificially inflated crown made up of our small mitzvot. This last mida includes all the foregoing mitzvot as explained in Idra. Idra refers to the zohor on paratas. This last tra trait of mercy is all inclusive. It includes everything and is therefore the most important of all the midot. There isn't anyone who is not affected by thinking of this mida. Everybody comes from the great forefathers. That's true. And has the merit of those ancestors who loved Hashem with a fiery love. Even this person himself at one time was innocent and performed some good deeds. Hashem puts it all together and he considered considers it a reason to deal with them with kindliness. And hashem throughout our history we have had a lot of good to show to Hashem. We are ignoring all the mistakes. We're now focusing only on the good. We had forefathers and they were great. We as a nation chose God and we followed him into the harsh desert. And we individually did do some good things in our life. And Hashem does not forget anything on Roshana. We call we call Hashem that he remembers. He remembers everything that has ever happened. Now that should make us scared because he also remembers all the bad. But not to be scared, Hashem, we learn, subdues the bad. He hides the bad. He doesn't want to see the bad. He focuses on the good. He remembers the good and he mentions only the good. Hashem scans the entire history of human existence and he gathers, garers, scrapes all the good that can ever be found and brings it all together for us today and every day and especially on Rosha Shana and that is how he judges us. How do we imitate this mid? So now if we want Hashem to treat us with this great character trait, we need to do the same. So how do we do it? How do we become godly, godlike? How do we start treating others with same great traits like God himself? If there is someone who is unworthy of your kindness, remember that he was once a little child. He was once the darling of his mother and father. Whether for the first couple years, maybe for the first few months, maybe for the first few hours after his birth, his parents were overjoyed. They loved him dearly. Since he was once beloved by someone in the world, we should imitate the mida of Hashem that if something was once beloved, we should try to love it again. Therefore, the merit that he was once precious to his parents should make him important enough for us to be kind to him. This is the most extreme of all the 13 midot. And let's practice it. Whenever we see a person that we're not so happy with, let's remember him being a small child. Imagine how he's a baby, how he's cute, how he's innocent, how he's smiling, how he's goodnatured. And let's love that part of him because by the way it says that whatever experience we go through stays with us forever and us once upon a time being a child stays with us. That little child is part of us. Maybe that explains our behaviors and our mistakes. But it should also give us a reason to love every person because every person deep inside of them is a cute innocent little child. Now, Rabbi Cordova continues, "This is how a man should improve his behavior toward other people even when they are not worthy. Because even if he will not find any one of the precious previous reasons to treat him kindly which themselves are extreme, all the previous 12 traits of Hashem are already beyond what normal people do and he tried all of them and this person is not worthy of any of them. He should say there was a time when he did not yet sin. When he was a child, he had not done anything wrong yet. There was a time before he made a wrong turn at the fork in the road. There was a time before someone introduced something bad in his life. Before he was traumatized by the behavior of his parents or his um friends. Before that time, he himself was still hoping to be a good person. There was a time when he was a kosher child. Remember whatever good they did when they were little. And even if you didn't know them, imagine that they probably smiled at their parents. Little children obey their parents at the beginning of their life if their parents don't spoil them. And little children do what they are told. At the beginning they have no choice and they obey and he was once good and we should credit him with what he once did even though it wasn't a result of his free will or thought. But he was a nice cute baby, not hurting anyone. Also, he should remember the love of children that just came from their mother's breast. When the mother finishes nursing her baby, she kisses and hugs the baby. She loves it so much. We should try to recall that love now for this person. how he just finished nursing and his mother is so happy with him. For example, if a big husky burly truck driver who is rough bumped into you with his truck and now he's blaming you. He's angry at you. Remember once upon a time he was a nice little boy and his father and mother loved him and were caressing him. Try to awaken in yourself some of those emotions toward him and he will feel it and he will wake up and he will become better. And Rabbi uh Cordova finishes, "And therefore you will not find any man to whom it is unfit to do some good to pray for his welfare and to have mercy on him." a person uh who is obnoxious to you and in whom you don't see any good even such a person try to remember that there was a time when he was beloved by his parents a time when he was innocent even though that doesn't apply to him now nevertheless we see that Hashem applies to us what doesn't exist today. When your spouse hurts you tremendously and you feel there's nothing for me to live for after what she or he said or did. I want to hurt them back. I want to punish them. And then we remember. But remember how once we got married and we were happy with each other and we loved each other. And if that doesn't help, remember how my spouse was a little baby and his or her mom was hugging them and kissing them and loving them. This can actually save our own marriage. The Ben Israel went out to the wilderness just to follow Hashem into a land that was not sown, no plants where they were there was no chance of existing or surviving. Only because of their loyalty to Hashem, they came out of Egypt. And Hashem remembers that that merit for us even now. Likewise, we should attempt to remember even things that would be impossible to attribute to another person in the present. Did my wife ever do anything good for me? Yes, many times. Let me remember once and let me focus on that one shirt that she washed for me. Let me concentrate on her actions. going to the bin, taking out my dirty shirt, spraying it with uh stain remover, and then gently throwing it into the washing machine and turning the machine on and putting the detergent in and taking it out and putting it in the dryer. and taking it out of the dryer and hanging it. She did such kindness for me. I will always remember it. I will always have something good to say about her. Now, this is an exaggeration. We can think of million and one things to remember about our spouse and how much greater our responsibility to love our spouse for all the good things they did for us. It should be a piece of cake to fix our marriage, to reestablish our good relationship with our parents, our siblings, our co-workers, our employees or employers after remembering all the good things they did for us. We learned such a great recipe for uh for success. Likewise, we should remember even things that would be impossible to attribute to this person in the present. The merit that he was once precious to his parents is sufficient to make him important enough for us to be kind to him. Now we finished chapter 13 and now we only have the last section of this book the conclusion. Tomorrow by Zatashem we will do the conclusion as well as we will review the 13 attributes of mercy and we will compare it to the other list of 13 attributes of mercy that we say every day. um and so on that we say after vidi and when we say one we should keep the other because they work hand in hand. So we will continue and finish tomorrow. In the meantime have a great day.