How to Approach the Wrongs of the World - Jeremy Gimpel: The Land of Israel Fellowship

I got an email last week from a member of the fellowship and of course I answered her privately but I asked her and I told her uh that I wanted to address this question to everyone because it was very much connected to our last Fellowship about what I said about recovery and I think it's also very much connected to this Fellowship about blessing it's like how do we extract the blessings of this world and so the question is as follows and I'll keep her Anonymous just to you know pretend privacy here every week on the fellowship Jeremy says life is happening for you not to you and Ari says a there's nothing other than him everything is from God these sayings have hugely been helpful in my life to shift my mindset to put me in a grateful Head space while opening up the possibilities of how God will use this situation however what about really horrific things done by other people what about October 7th what about someone taking advantage of someone weaker than them how do you reconcile these things I feel that at the hands of the wrong person a line like everything happens for you can be used to justify any kind of abuse and I can understand how it helps your mindset when you fall off a horse or you don't get the job or your best friend moves away but what about truly horrific things that happen at the hands of other people there must be a line where you can say this is evil and should not have happened that was the question I it was actually a much longer email but that's kind of the Crux of the question and first of all it's a great question and I would say that first the answer is yes when evil is done it is right to say this is evil and should not have happened but we need to understand that probably the biggest distinction between Western biblical faith and Jewish faith the difference there is much less about uh eschatology or about the end of days it's actually about this issue it would be a lot easier to make boxes God you are in the good box devil you are in the bad box everything good is from God everything bad is from the devil that's just a lot cleaner it's a lot cleaner way to see God it's a lot easier way to understand like good is from God bad is from the devil but that's really not the Jewish way and I want you to see this in scripture itself in book of Isaiah in chapter 45 verse 7 it says I form light and create Darkness I make peace and create evil I Hashem do all these things first I think it's interesting to note that light and dark those are opposites peace and evil are also in this context at least kind of opposite it's like anything that's disrupting the peace a peace within marriage a peace within people a peace within yourself just peace in the world that's already borderlining on evil but what does it say there says I God created evil he created evil so before creation there was only God he is one everything is from him the in the world of Truth not necessarily from our perspective everything is from God and everything ultimately is for the good now obviously if evil happened well it's against the Tor it's against the will of God it's against the desire of what Hashem would want to be in the world people can use their free choice to do good and they can use their free choice to do evil and when evil is done it needs to be called out as absolute evil but nothing happens outside of Hashem there is nothing other than him and it's a conundrum even for God when he first created man he had to bring a flood in the time of Noah because all of humanity their hearts were wrong their actions were wrong evil everywhere and he really reconsidered making man all he's like oh yeah I really kind of regret this whole free will man human thing and even there it's like there's a conundrum there it's a real challenge because evil can really be done but everything is within the Oneness and so it's important to know that there is only one there is no person there is no entity no devil no other gods who can act against Hashem or outside of his domain that's why the idea that the devil is doing something and there's like two gods that are at war with each other it's like borderlines on idolatry it's against Hashem it's against the Oneness of God now looking at my life now okay so I've experienced my own pain and my own suffering and I'm trying to like learn from my surroundings and the truth is we have hundreds of olive trees on the arugot farm every year volunteers come and they pruned the olive trees last year uh two years ago excuse me um we had a group of Germans from the fellowship that came to our farm they were pruning the olive trees and I'm looking at our olive trees and we you know we planted them at lav bar mitz seven years ago and they were little and they' grown to these big beautiful olive trees with thousands of Olives now and I look at that and I was like sometimes we have to like prune the olive trees we have to cut off their branches that Sprout out from the bottom of the trunk at the beginning of the year or during the winter time and we have to trim back the Olive Tree now the Olive Tree experiences that as a trauma her branches are being cut off but as a result of cutting off those Rye branches the energy that would have gone to those branches now goes to the roots to grow deeper strengthening the other branches and ultimately makes the olive tree grow back better and produce more fruit and I said that is exactly how we need to approach setbacks failures pain injuries accidents what seems like Misfortune in our life and I think that that analogy really explains the heart of the verse at the end of the curses of the book of Deuteronomy in chapter 28 at the end of the curses God gives a reason why all of these curses Came Upon Israel and it says because you did not serve the Lord your God with happiness and with a joyful heart the abundance of everything and that's a really interesting kind of reason to put at the end of all of these disastrous curses that it was what because you didn't serve god with happiness and I think it's not actually about happiness or laughing or giggling it's not that Sim is the same letters as the word mashia it's a deep happiness it's a god happiness it's like um it's it's almost like we had a misunderstanding of how we're supposed to exist in the world how the relationship we're supposed to have and if we engage with reality in the wrong way reality will respond if you lie then believe me the reality itself will snap back on you just like Jordan Peterson says there's a way that you have to respond and if you don't come from a place of sim that means we have to have some kind of Lifeline to happiness despair that's just out of the question because on our deepest level we know that everything that happens is ultimately for the good every cloud has a silver liing you can be sad you can mourn but on the deepest level you have to know that it's all from Hashem and good will ultimately come from it now if you don't live life with that Sim with that happiness me you've cut off the lifeline it means that you're just experiencing the world either happen St or other gods have hurt you or it's like oh no those are the curses are going to come but in every difficult situation even if something evil happens to at the hands of someone else maybe a part of the healing process is to realize oh all of this ultimately will somehow for me this is somehow part of the journey that I needed to go on and when I think about that um I've been thinking a lot about our fellowship it's our four year anniversary I've been thinking a lot about the land of Israel Network and although this accident has just knocked me out it's woken me up and I know that I'm being built back better right now even as we speak I know that it's coming I know that out of this Darkness a new light is about to come and it's going to affect everything it's going to affect the arugot farm it's going to affect the fellowship it's going to affect the network it's going to affect the impact and the light that comes out of our work I our olive tree has been trimmed but our roots are growing deeper right now and our good branches are growing stronger and so I've decided um coming up I'm going to work on our Roots together the roots of our faith The Roots spiritually of what it is to be Israel in the world the roots of what it is to live with Hashem in our lives and so starting next week I'm going to start a new series a series that I've been thinking about for years and it's just now time to launch it into the World As We Begin our fourth year together and so the next Fellowship we will begin a new series called to live a guided life and I'll absolutely explain more but for now I am excited to say that I will see you all next week as we go on a new adventure together and I believe that we can actually have different understandings different theologies different backgrounds different cultures but if all of us are aligned in how we live a guided life we will be guided together all the way to a New Jerusalem