The Mystical Letter Vav & Its Relevance to Our Daily Lives - Rabbi Yitzchak Botton

Park Heights era begins with the passing of Solomon when Avram goes to find her place for burial so he has this encounter with Ephraim essentially f1 offers to give Avram the necessary land to bury Sara and there's a whole conversation back and forth between Avraham and everyone everyone wants to pay and everyone keeps on insisting that you know what's money between them and he wants to give it to him for free now at the end of the conversation finally when it comes down to it so after all not only takes the money but it then insists on the highest currency of shekel that exists when you do the math it comes out that Avram paid an exorbitant amount of money much much more than the actual land should be worth to buy to sell to a stranger forget about someone that wants to offer it for free now on this point Rashi mentions let Efron the whole time was speaking in a way of being generous giving kind person and at the end he took way more than he was entitled to and the Torah indicates this to us by taking away the letter from his name f1 is spelled iron parish love noon and the entire sequence of events every time the Torah mentions f1 it's written full what the letter r of which is a vowel in this context but at the very end after f1 takes the money from Avraham it writes the name f1 and the verb is missing the Torah uses this method of it's called active hacer to teach us that as one himself was also cassell something but everyone was lacking that meda to follow through with what he was saying and thinking we see the Torah communicates to us on a very high level and by just removing one letter it teaches us an entire idea now on the most simple level why the letter of so the answer will be because that's the letter of his name that was a vowel which could be removed or left in meaning that's the only letter that could have been taken out of his name that's one way to look at it but we want to go deeper and explain why specifically the letter love is chosen in this case let's talk with how to write a letter bub when you want to write the letter of love in a safe for Torah so you actually first write the letter U which is the top of the phone and then what you do is you continue writing the you you draw it down further to the bottom and that becomes above based on this that some of the different commentaries specifically I saw the KU Tama on one of the Hasidic curse farm mentions that within the letter valve there's really a letter you'd you'd represents the idea of hokhmah of wisdom the function of one's head thoughts that he has now speech is an expression of those thoughts so if we want to look at the letter unit can represent that dia foreign speech the letter v' of represents the idea of just like when you write it you take lead and you draw it down to the bottom so - love represents the idea of drawing down thought and speech all the way down to the lowest level of action that is also one of the level of itself has the shape of a person's body because the person's body is made up of two parts the head part in the body part so to Vava has a head which is the lead and the goof the body that teaches us that together a head and body in man represents the idea of thoughts speech and most of all action now according to this it comes out very nice everyone who said a lot and thought a lot but did nothing lost the letter valve which represents the whole idea of connecting one's thoughts and speech with action taking this lesson a little bit further further analyzing Efron's name the root of Efron's name is from the word alpha and alpha is earth dirt the ballet mu sir based on Kabbalah explained to us that man is physical body is made up of four elements the part of man's body is made up of afar the negative aspect of that is lazy it's being dormant just like the earth stays in one place so the meter the attribute that that expresses itself within man is that live being lazy now we see interestingly here the idea of alpha comes in man and holds him back from fulfilling his desires his wants his aspirations now there's another way that we can understand the word iPhone and that is by using the same letters I earn pay raise she's changing the order as or f lee or f is the back of the neck when hashem talks about a person being very stubborn and unwilling to change it's called stiff necked cashier Olaf being stuck in the negative behavior that a person is that usually sometimes trapped in this behavior pattern that we fall into where we might want to be better we want me might want to do better but the nature that we become used to our habit takes over and it becomes very hard to break through that and make real change so the lesson of Ephron that really related to all of us is the idea of working to break the nature of the physical body that after the earth part of us which is lazy by nature and also the stubborn part that wants to just stay with routine and do what's comfortable and not push ourselves to grow and advance so beautifully enough if we want to fulfill the opposite of the lesson that frontages which is to represent the letter of which in fact we're twelve from desire that the letter of represents the Torah itself we have to work to connect our good thoughts and our good speech with the follow-up in the conclusion but acting aloud and that is what our Torah and what our life in his will is about it's about making this world different place a better place through acting out beautiful ideas the way to learn