Wisdom, Meditation & Torah Consciousness - Rabbi Yoram Eliassi

When I became religious, it was an option of just, you know, donating, you know, a check to a synagogue or actually starting to learn. And I realized I couldn't do it alone. I needed a haluta to learn. I need somebody to be with me one-on-one, face-to-face, or haluta or metuta. And I made a decision I'm going to pay my brother-in-law to teach me. And every day, 1 hour, we sat down learning Torah consistently. We sat and we learned 7 years. And he was sharpening my mind, asking questions, grinding the muscle in my head. 5 days a week, Gemara, Rashi, why this, why that. And if you look at the long-term process, after 7 years, the mind reaches a higher consciousness. It's a different understanding. It's a different different sharpness. And that takes time. That's a process. Combined with tfila, with prayer, asking Hashem to help you. Combine with meditating, pondering, combined with silence. That's when one reaches higher consciousness. The sages asked the same questions in the Gemara. In Gemara Niddah, they asked on the following, how can we get wisdom? Um and they were learning Torah all the time. And they how why is it that they're they're asking this question? They were the sages. Um and they they still tell us that Moshe Rabbenu Moshe Rabbenu had the same problem. He was learning Torah and he was forgetting it. He was getting knowledge, he was understanding things, and he was forgetting it. Until when? Until Hashem gifted to him. Hashem gifted to him. And we, as every individual, needs to reach to Hashem and pray to Hashem. Hashem, I want more knowledge. I want to understand. I want to realize why this is happening. What happens is when we meet a sage, a Torah scholar, we make a blessing that says "She halak me hokhmato le'erav." That Hashem portions, he gives from his wisdom. When he hokhmah, which is he has it all, to the scholar. We also need to reach to Hashem and ask [laughter] Hashem to give us understanding why this happened, why we went through that. And that is a process. We need to learn Torah. Of course, we need to learn Torah. But we need to ask Hashem to help us. More than that, there's there's an idea that people forget. We need to ponder and meditate. Okay, in the Pirkei Avot, they were told that Shimon Shimon says, "I lived among the sages and I found nothing more than silence." When a person is silent, the body is inactive and the mind starts to think and one can reach higher consciousness. The mind can tap into a different realm. But what? With pondering and meditation. What's the difference between pondering and meditation? When a person ponders, the muscles of the brain are working. He's thinking. He's analyzing. But when he's one is meditating, a person is observing. He's letting go. And when he lets go, what happened is the idea just falls in as a gift from the heaven. When a person just observe and he does not think too much. When he lets go, he's not trying to understand, Hashem gifts it to him. And that's what Moshe Rabbeinu was trying to learn Torah. He was learning, learning, learning. He was forgetting it until Hashem gifts it to him. And we also it's a process. One has to be patient in this process. We need to learn. We need to pray. We need to ponder. We need to meditate. We need silence. And we also do need to act through mitzvot cuz the mitzvot we have Ramach. We have 248 mitzvot. The mitzvot also makes us complete when the world stands on Torah to cheila and in chesed kindness kindness is an action. It's an action action base. So we need to act through the mitzvot and the combination of these three uh processes, the Torah, praying to Hashem, and the action and the silent, that's also part of the process, the pondering and the uh meditation will bring it about higher consciousness, higher understanding, tapping into a room that we were not before. It takes time. It's a process. But it will happen.