Why God Chose Moses, A Man Who Couldn't Speak TO SPEAK FOR HIM.

What kind of person do you become with all that [music] money, with all that success? Do you think you're better than everybody else? Do you think that you're owed [music] something? Do you think that God owes you something? When you turn yourself into nothing, [music] you can become everything. The first words are Moshe kibel Torah miSinai. Moshe received the Torah, which is divine wisdom, the God's divine will and wisdom, as he puts it into his Torah. And he received this from the mountain of Sinai. And then there's a transmission that he gives it over to his student, his main student. Ultimately, it becomes given over to the Jewish leadership. And so we all have, for generations now, the Torah that Moshe received from Sinai. Now, there's an obvious question here. Why talk about Moshe receiving Torah from a mountain? I mean, did some strange thing occur where all of a sudden there was a just a Torah sitting on the mountain of Sinai? So we went up there and grabbed it? That's not what happened. What really happened? He received the Torah from God. Now, it just happened to be at the mountain of Sinai. It could have been at the mountain of of the What's that one, the famous one, the high big mountain? It could have been at at Mount Everest. It could have been in a valley. It could have been anywhere. It's actually God could have chosen anywhere to give Moshe a Torah. So why does the mission accredit Mount Sinai as being not only the place where the Torah was given, but the actual giver of the Torah? Bartenura, on a very simple level, just explains, "Look, it's obviously the wording is a bit conjumbled. Obviously, with divine intent. It's not really a mistake. But he says the simple meaning is that God gave the Torah to Moshe on Mount Sinai. It's just a very concise way of saying it. Of course, there are hidden messages within the way the rabbis chose to say it, which we're going to open up right now. So, let's get started. Now, first of all, it's like this. When we say Moshe received the Torah from Sinai, what is what does that mean? So, that means that we have to learn the tremendous lesson about Moshe and what he learned himself from the mountain of Sinai. So, let's appreciate what the mountain of Sinai really means. Mountain What's a mountain? A mountain is is at the end of the day, a piece of earth that sticks out very, very high sometimes. Mount Everest is so high that it's so awesome to see that God called a piece of the flat earth to protrude and stick up and be very, very high, very tall. The sages talk about different mountains that were all vying to be the mountain that God gave his Torah on. And he's this midrash, this this teaching from the sages gives human quality qualities to the mountains. Each one was thinking and saying to themselves, "I'm a very tall mountain. I'm a very big mountain. I'm a beautiful mountain. I'm a very fit mountain for God to give the Torah on me, through me." And that was what most of these mountains were saying. Well, maybe Mount Everest was in fact one of them, being so >> [clears throat] >> so grand. But then there was this one small little mountain that was thinking to itself, "Who am I? What am I? I'm just a small mountain. I don't compare to the mountains around me. I don't think God would even consider for a second giving the Torah on me." So, he wasn't thinking that he was fit to give the Torah on. And God comes to him and says to this mountain, "You know, all of the mountains that were considering why they should be the mountain chosen for me to give my Torah to the Jewish people on, they're all blemished. All of those type of thoughts were thoughts of haughtiness, self-importance, a selfish-minded, selfish-motivated, uh distorting reality, thinking they they deserve something when they were owned. You're the only mountain that had the purest of thoughts of humility and loneliness, of being humbled before the world you're in. Meaning, looking around you in a world that that's for me, you were humbled and you were humbled also before me. And you're the only perfect mountain for me to give the Torah on. It's only you, Mount Sinai, that I can choose and will choose to give the Torah on because you're the perfect mountain with everything you represented in the in your mindset and in your look on at yourself and at a reality, you're the perfect mountain. And this is why when we come to our Torah portion and we come to that missioner in Pirkei Avot, that it's all about the mountain of Sinai. That God spoke to Moshe on the mountain of Sinai. And who gave the Torah to Moshe? The mountain of Sinai. Why? Cuz the entire divine revelation from God to the Jewish people specifically and most closely to Moshe is all about having that mindset that we learned from the mountain of Sinai. Humility, lowliness, undeserving, realizing that everything from God is an absolute gift that we can never earn from an infinite God that is just all love and all goodness from you know, to us, for us. And so that's the secret why the the missioner says that Moshe got the Torah from Sinai is because he learned the attributes and character traits of the mountain of Sinai, which really are talk we're talking about people. People, great people, mountain type people, people that are exalted and greater than everyone else around them. And the mindset that all these type of great people have, we all know that. You could be great in whatever field you're great in, a doctor, a lawyer, uh working out at the gym, uh a movie star, a scientist, a creative artist. We're all We know so much different types of greatness that we all have potential to bring out. But when you achieve greatness and you achieve accomplishment, wealth, money, you know how money changes people? What kind of person do you become with all that money, with all that success in whatever field it is? Do you think you're better than everybody else? Do you think that you're owed something? Do you think that God owes you something? You think you don't need anybody and and and to be so foolish and you don't even need God? What does your success do to you? Well, Mount Sinai as a mountain as well, we can actually appreciate that that it was those characteristics that made him the greatest mountain. And Moshe, Torah scholar, a great person, a loving person, a good person, like all the other mountains that God had to choose from to give the Torah on, Moshe wasn't the only person that could have been the giver of the Torah. First of all, his brother was equally qualified. We're taught that that Aaron was also perfect and great and could have been the one that gave us the Torah, but there was something about Moshe that was unique and different. His his his self-awareness, the way he looked at himself, made him so beautiful and so perfect beyond a beauty that we can quantify. Beyond the perfection that we can quantify. He had a speech impediment. He was aware of it. He was shy. He didn't want to take a leadership role. He argued with God rather than take a role of leadership. God said, "You're my teacher. I want you to be the one to give my Torah to everybody cuz there won't be a you in it. It'll be my Torah that you're giving to everybody. You won't convince yourself and turn it into your own I don't need someone that's going to take my Torah and make it his in a selfish haughty way. I need someone that will be a pure vessel. And that's why we see Moshe, Moses, in giving the Torah, when he writes it, he does something very unique, very awkward, actually. Very insane. Unless you reach the a sanity beyond any sanity that we can comprehend and appreciate. Who would write a book about themselves in the third person? Unless the person was either insane or he tapped into a reality beyond any reality that we could ever ever ever imagine, which I'll use now as a plug for this beautiful thought. We got to sometimes escape to reality, real reality. And Moshe, in writing the book in the third person, tapped into a level of human experience and existence so exalted that I don't think we have words to to kind of like quantify it. He became the mountain of Sinai, a place where God chooses and says, "This is the only place I want to be." This is the only place I can be. And that's the third person writing of God's Torah. It's not even Moshe there. We find something even confusing in the way human beings today accept the five books of Moses. He was such a non-existence. They're so He was so like absent from the Torah he wrote that even today your average people that have issues with the rabbis, which ultimately Moshe was just the first rabbi. He was great at it, but he was the first rabbi. You have people saying this nonsensical thing like, "Oh, I only want the word of God. I don't want the word of the rabbis. I don't want to listen to human a human being. I only want to listen to God." Well, guess what? When you listen to the Torah, you're listening to Moshe, who was a human being. There is no way to listen to only God unless he comes to talk to you yourself and in that sense you don't need to listen to me, you need a straightjacket or medication or both. And so what's really going on over here is that the Torah of Mosha is just the first book of the rabbis. No no different in essence than the later prophets and ultimately even the books of the sages which are telling us and showing us the will and wisdom of God just garbed in a slightly different less intense packaging. So we still see something unique and I want to bring like a positive angle to it. Why can anyone and everyone from all religions and even the non-accepting Jews that don't want to accept the limits of following Jewish law because it comes from the rabbis? Yet everything that Moses the first rabbi said is holy holy of holies. It's because he there was so little of Mosha there. There was no Mosha there. And so they're right. The five books of the Torah, you really need the first four were God speaking in the most intense unadulterated way with not even 0.000% of a human interaction human being involved. It's pure the purest dose of God you can ever get is this this dose of God that you get from Mosha and the [clears throat] Torah written in the third person. Nothing tops it, nothing comes close to it, nothing ever will until Messiah comes. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to themselves and to you. Just disconnecting from reality which gets you nowhere but but nowhere. Now we have to appreciate the fifth book of the Torah before we come back to everything else we want to talk about. And the fifth book of the Torah says this. There's a shift. The first four books are are God speaking literally through Mosha. What's the fifth book of the Torah? It's finally Mosha coming on the scene. The shy, humble Mosha steps out from his comfortable, protected zone where it's not me and says, "Here I am." And it's finally the moment where Mosha says, "I have [snorts] something to say. I have something to tell all of you that I've grown to love so much, to know so well. We've shared so much together. I risked my life for you. I gave my life to you, for you." And he says, "And here's what I have to say." And of course it was because he was going to die and leave the world. And so at the end of Mosha's life before he left, he decided to leave his last will and testament. He He decided to leave his his last tzava, his own words of what he had to give, what he had to say, what he had to offer. The depths of his mind and soul he put into his last words that are written as that fifth book of the Torah. It's the fifth book of Mosha, which God said, "No, no, no, no, no. Your book will be part of my book. Even though you spoke it from your essence, you're so one with me. The bond we have is so special that I'm not going to let you separate your words from my words. We look at all five books as the absolute unadulterated word of God. That's how awesome Mosha was. There was only one Mosha. But there's a beautiful lesson we want to take out here. It's this. When Mosha bared his own soul and heart and wrote that fifth book, he opened up a portal. He opened up a dimension of connecting with God and connecting with the world and the life experience in a more personal way. He created an opportunity for Torah that is solely God's to belong to us as well. It's an unbelievable thing he accomplished. That the words of a human being, Mosha, could be called the divine words of God. He broke into and tapped into something radical and revolutionary then. And that's and he and he gave all that to us. We have a different [clears throat] life experience, a different Torah experience because of what he accomplished. And I'll just give you an an an an an idea what it might have been like without this great contribution of Mosha at the very end of his life. If we would have only the first four books from God, which was Mosha dictating in the third person, then the entire Torah experience for all of us would be this third-person experience of a book that is not really mine. Cuz it was never really Mosha's. It's it's it's too much God's. And so we would only be able to learn those words the way they were and they'd totally be above us ultimately. And we would have only the strict instructions that Mosha gave us. But we wouldn't have our personal connection with Torah. There wouldn't be the me inside my Torah learning. We wouldn't be able to be mechadish. We wouldn't be able to take that Torah and turn it into our own mindset and our own words like the sages did in the Talmud. And and and in the Mishnah and Talmud and every other book that a Torah sage writes, a Torah sage writes his own words, his own thoughts, his own feelings. And we call it Torah, just like with Mosha. And even every person has his own letter that he corresponds to in the Torah. And he has his own part of Torah to understand it in the way he understands it, to add something from himself to it. And if you're zocheh, if you merit, it'll be part of God's Torah, but it's yours. When we quote rabbis, we are careful to quote their names because it's their sweat and their blood and their effort as a soul and a body that worked hard to come up with their conclusions. Their creative thought within Torah and their thought, it's all an unbelievable human experience which is ours. Which is ours because Mosha made the Torah his and that last fifth book that he said and became written in the Torah was his and God said, "I'm taking it for me. It's mine now." And that's what we can accomplish. Every Jew, every certainly every scholar that our Torah learning is ours. And Hashem says, "But don't keep it for yourself. I want it. It's my Torah. Your Torah is my Torah." That's the beautiful thing of this fifth book and what Mosha gave us forever. Our next stop in our journey is the Torah portion of the par. What unique connection does the mountain of Sinai have with the mitzvahs? Specifically the one mentioned here is the mitzvah of agriculture. The idea of the seven year being a year of rest for the land. Okay, so what's the connection between the land of Israel and and the mountain of Sinai? That's essentially part of our question. Beautiful point. In our Torah learning, in our connecting with God and being a a vessel to reveal godliness in the world, God's God's will and God's wisdom. And and and the same idea of Sinai, the humility and the and the nothingness that that that God requires of us, the transformation from being a nothing and a nobody to to being godly, a vessel for God, to being God-like. It's an incredible thing. It's a combination of two opposites. And to appreciate this next idea, we're going to quote one of the greatest of sages, kind of redefine Torah in a new way, and that's why we call it the Torah of the Baal Shem Tov. There's the Torah of the Arizal, the Torah of the Baal Shem Tov, or the Torah of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and there's my Torah in there, your Torah, your Torah. We all have our Torah. You know, just like everybody could play basketball, not everybody's Michael Jordan, crude analogy, but you know, we don't all all have to become this great famous sage to say I have my Torah. You have your Torah on your level, and the greatest of sages have it on their level. You can be the rabbi of your own home. You're still a rabbi. You're the rabbi of your home. You're the teacher for your home. You could be the rabbi of hundreds, of thousands, of millions. There are many levels that this is expressed, and we all have a part in whatever level we can achieve. And so, here's the here's the beautiful idea. The mountain of Sinai are two opposites. Mountain means greatness, grandeur, exaltedness. This this piece of earth that is so high that we can't see the top. It's greatness. It's the human greatness that we can achieve in our lives. Sinai represents nothingness. The lowliness, the nothingness, the humbleness, the absolute absence of oneself. And so, they're two contradictions. There's the non-existence of you and the ultimate great existence of you, and how do they both coexist? So, that's the secret of Sinai and working the land. [clears throat] That's the secret of why only Sinai was the mountain that God could give the Torah on. Cuz it's a combination of opposites that we have to all accomplish. When you turn yourself into nothing, you can become everything. Everything that you have the potential to be as part of God's world. Tuning into God's desire for you, what God created you for. But it and it starts with becoming nothing. When you would become nothing, then you can become everything. That's a verse in in in to heal them Psalms of King David where he says that God takes the haughty and the the lofty cuz they they they self-aggrandize themselves. They make themselves into a big shot. They're important and he lowers them to the earth. But then [snorts] it also says that he takes those that are low like the earth and he rises them to the highest of highs. And that's what our goal is and our journey is. To lower ourselves to the lowest of lows, then God raises us to the highest of highs. But when you raise yourself to the highest of highs like all those mountains saying, "Me, me, me. I'm the best. I'm the best. I'm the best." Hashem lowers you to the ground and you become the lowest of all things. Because there's no room for you to to be together with God and ultimately there's no room for for God and you. But when you become a nothing, a non-existence, then God can be can fill you up with him, his power, and you become an emissary, a representative of God. And so that's the secret of Mount Sinai. It's through Sinai that you become a mountain of God. You become a place where God says, "I want to be with you, in you, and I want to talk through you. I want you to be a partner with me and I want to be a partner with you in you and in what you're going to accomplish in your life and it's going to be our accomplishment. And we're going to build together the most greatest, unbelievable, perfect world to come that we will live in forever together. But it has to come first with Sinai. And then you become that Moshiach character. Each one on their own level in the Gemara, every rabbi's called Moshiach because we all have a Moshiach in us that we have to tap into and actualize. And the the ultimate secret is in the land. Does the land bring forth produce? Is that where my produce comes from? Does the land give forth fruit? No. We put seeds in the land. We plant seeds. And it's only when those seeds decay and it reach a level of brokenness and and decay that the power instilled in the earth creates a process where from the nothingness that they become, they receive the power from the beginning of Malchus, of God's kingship. The this level of kingship, divine kingship, and God put in the earth the same power that he put in Mount Sinai and the same power he put in Mosheh. A power to create and produce fruit, goodness. So, it's the nothingness of the land and of the seeds we plant that become the fruit that we eat in the end of the day. And that's the secret of divine service, of who and what we are in this world. When we make ourselves nothing, we become everything. And when that earth represents the idea of nothingness, of decay, and absolute nothingness, but when you become nothing, then you can become the beginning of a new creation. And that's what we're all part of here, 6,000 years. We're part of a world of brokenness that we're here to fix. And when we tap into that, we do the will of God and we do the work of God as the nothings that we are, the broken vessels that we are, like the violin that creates an unbelievable music when you tie your the strings down, we will create an unbelievable new world. But it first has to come through Sinai. Has to come through being a vessel for God. And then we we become God-like and and partners. And we create this perfect world that we're hoping, waiting, dreaming, praying for. May we see it speedily in our days.