Letters of the Rebbe: "Finding Your Special Mitzvah" (Class 6)

okay welcome to part two the second letter of tonight's double shear and uh now we're on a letter which is what was the previous letter was hass mark heisman the eighth of marchman this is a day later tess martijn brooklyn greetings and blessings again this is written to a man shalom of rakha means written to a man of shalom means to a woman so this is written to a man and i don't know who it is it doesn't say who the man was but here we go it is explained in our torah and especially in the teachings of siddhis as every individual jew has a special mitzvah or special thing everyone has their special thing and in that thing they have to be more careful zahir means careful it also has a double meaning which is luminescent zeros can mean being careful like be more meticulous be more uh scrupulous but it could also mean like zoya means to shine and this is a concept that i was going to mention that's elaborated upon by the balatanya by the alta rabbi in igera sakaidesh specifically in semen zion so there's this concept of zahir tv it's actually the the language the term is from the gemara from the modern stuff and over there it asks a question your father which mitzvah was he most scrupulous about zitsis in this particular instance the answer was sitsis and that ebb is going to speak about that actually in the letter at any rate the the term zahertfei is from the gemara and it's explained at length and exodus especially in the ghettos okay dish and it means every individual has their thing that they're going to be more careful about and they're going to shine more in and we're going to speak about this now in the letter at length um references the source in gemada which we mentioned in the modern shabbos and also in the section in tanya a kurdish letter seven a share mitzvah zoo the indian set this mitzvah or this thing that is most special for a person meshamish shah it serves as a gate derek [Music] it is the gate through which all of his toyota mitzvahs go up meaning all the spirituality that he's generating that he's doing when he's doing mitzvos is going up heavenward through that gate boys and in turn all of the flow that's coming downward from heaven to him is also coming through that gate in other words this special thing that he has that he's extra careful about and he expresses himself in in a more exuberant fashion and it has more of a connection to i guess you call his spiritual personality his unique spiritual personality uh that thing serves as a gate so everything else that he's involved in it sort of funnels through that thing in both directions if you can imagine that okay so everything that's coming from above everything that he needs that's a very interesting few words and for all of his family not just him as an individual but his zahir tv his special mitzvah is also the portal through which the blessings for his whole family are are coming down the indian mitsubis this mitzvah that's your specialty is not necessarily one that we normally consider the most serious or most grave in other words that's that's a different thing you know you talk about well what are the most the most important mitzvahs right they talk about the three cardinal sins well that's that's that's a different concept we're not talking about that that that's also an idea there is such a concept there but here we're talking about on an individual level there's something that could be your signature mitzvah where you really shine and it doesn't necessarily have to be something that's a grave issue it could be so to speak smaller thing in fact it's evident from the original source of this expression that the answer to the question what mitzvot was your father most zaheer about the answer was tsitsis says look there in shas you'll see the mitzvah sitsis is not a jewish you know what it means means that everybody has to do it you have to do it like putting on villain it's not a choice you have to put on film every jewish man has put on trillion every every day except for shabbos and yamcha now sits this is a different thing it's not a craves you don't have to put on citrus if you have a garment that has four corners the garment needs to have tits but technically if you don't have such a garment you don't have a mitzvah to put on citrus so you don't have to mitzvah to go out and buy one now it is jewish custom enshrined as aloha that we are mahada we go out of our way to buy such a garment that is obligated to have tsitzis but the the actual mitzvah itself the nature of that mitzvah is not something that the person needs to do it's like a mezuzah wha what if what if you don't own a home what if you don't rent a home what if you don't have a permanent place maybe you stay in a different hotel every night so you don't have a mezuzah you know you're not obligated to have a mezuzah as opposed to like let's say uh shaking lula vanessa again circus that's a javi's governor you have to do that so tits is not a reverse gabriel and yet in the original source of this expression of zartfei that was the mitzvah that the person was arthei about now the altareb explains ini get a sacredish we mentioned simon zion and this is a little hashkaja practice here because if you're watching live this is the night of porn this is the night of the purim soda and this was not planned i didn't even think about it or notice it until today when i was again preparing this letter uh but it says here and this is exactly what it says in the ghettos that what your special mitzvah is going to be doesn't necessarily make sense it's not like you look at the person and you look at his abilities and you look at his resources and then you put it through the computer and then the computer spits out oh this guy is going to be zortvey in davening this guy's going to be zortvey in giving dhaka the czar trey that each one of us has is really kind of random and crazy and you just sort of as that is going to explain you have to trust tashkaka practice you have to trust divine providence where opportunities present themselves to you and you realize hey this has to be my czar tray and it doesn't necessarily make sense what year zahrtfei is and the rabbit says here this is the altarebus uh language in in kurdish that shibuhira mitzvah the whole echoed it's not something that necessarily makes sense it's above our ability to understand that it just arose to hashem's godly thought which is beyond our thought video and the example metaphorically of how you get your zorte is a girdle you know what a guerrilla is it's a poor like the word purim it's a lottery i just think that's really cool and uh yeah and maybe this is an indication that there's some type of zarathei going on right here because that's above definitely above my tamvadas that just kind of happened okay so it's like a lottery and uh you know you can't predict what yazar tv is you got to keep your eyes open and see see where hashem is leading you um so it's self understood that to clarify what your individual zohertwei is in the in the vast majority of cases let's translate that away you just look how is divine providence presenting itself to you how is it and and and then it's sort of like establishing a specialty for you the midst of the indian plainy in a particular mitzvah or thing that must be the shah we spoke about that before the gate through which everything you're doing is going to go up to heaven and everything from heaven that the blessings coming down you're going to come through it so it's not necessarily what you predict but when you look around how is how divine providence is orchestrating the details of your life and presenting you with different opportunities and you kind of realize this is my thing by the way it's interesting um there are a couple of secrets when i was reading this letter that this idea here reminded me of and i checked it out um one of them is a sikh of harshest pinchas that's in helix base of le cote circus and it also mentions that girl thing uh the the lottery thing which is uh because in paris pinecos it talks about ah it's that when the iso and the jews entered the land how did they apportion which parts of the land should go to which tribe it was done through a girl through a lottery um so over there that abba speaks specifically about zahir tv being a lottery and that sicha is from te zaintamo's tough shinyud base so we're talking about three years before this letter however there's another circle that was eight years after this letter look with the circus helic gimmel parsporacious and over there it talks about similar ideas specifically that when you have a zaratv because it's so potent and important and because it's so central to your particular mission in this world you end up facing resistance um the example that i was giving there it's a circumstance about how admiration had one mitzvah you had one job adam you had one job and how could he have messed it up and yet when you have one job now we have more than one job we have 613 commandments and all the halaqaas that come from all those 613 commandments so we have thousands of jobs but we have a czar today that qualitatively is the job that's sort of like the most pivotal for us and therefore there's going to be resistance the other side that was set up by hashem to challenge us is going to zero in on that mitzvah and give you some extra resistance in that area um it explains says in capital cuff you know the long capital test 119 which the simple translation is hashem make me wiser than my enemies but siddhis explains from my enemies to hakmeni i become wise when i see the enemy zeroing in on a particular area i realize only because he tipped his card so to speak i realized that it must have strategic importance to him i didn't know it was strategic but then i see he's trying to attack it it must be important so we're about to explain that when you have a czar tv sometimes you experience a uh a disproportionate struggle in that area as well once you know it nothing can just be easy but that's that's the nature of life okay moving so it's understood that the other side and the rabbit says and if you want me to use a detailed expression okay to be more exact for more more precise the yates are harder never doesn't like the word yeah it's a harder but if you got to use it to you got to spell it out for you okay i'm talking about the yates of huda i'm talking about your evil inclination whose job is to mess with your head and ruin your life okay so what's he going to do so the the other side the eights of hunter knows that this is the special mitzvah for you because this this area of specialization it's not compartmentalized it's not distinct from the rest of your your yiddish kite it actually enhances all of your other mitzvahs so it's sort of like you know uh toppling a house of cards when you you hit that that card on the bottom or you play that game what's a game called uh jenga you know if you pull out the wrong uh little piece of wood so the whole tower come tumbling down so he knows that that's your zartvei the bad guy knows and and this is speaker forbearing about this for a whole night your success in material affairs as well because you see in the devas world view your spiritual success and your material success are not two aspects of your life they're one in the same thing when you are progressing spiritually that is the vessel to bring down blessings in your material life so the it's a harder knows if he can target you in this really important strategic area he's going to mess you up not only spiritually but also materially because ultimately your material blessings are dependent on your and your spiritual health she gambles yet is going to oppose this he's going to oppose this or commandment he is the accuser or the uh the prosecuting attorney the melee therefore the eight sahara's main effort on this guy who going to target him in this area mitzvah zoo with this mitzvah but in order to make sure the yate sahara will leave him alone and allow him to be mahada that means extra meticulous extra scrupulous with other mitzvahs as long as the etsoholder can be successful in averting him from that strategically important mitzvah so it's very interesting this the the yatsuhoda will allow the guy to get away with progressing in other areas of his spirituality in with the calculation that that will preoccupy him and uh he can sort of distract the itahoda can distract the guy that he shouldn't zero in on that really important mitzvah here's another point it's understood that if this person is is god-fearing the yetzohara cannot just show his face the way he is the ether is not going to come to him plainly and say sin because the guy won't listen to him he'll say hold on a second it's a harder right i understand the italian is an internal voice and he sounds like you he has he speaks to you in your own voice so when you hear your own voice saying things that are obviously contemptuous toward hashem god forbid so you can identify that very easily as not a good inclination and and and resist it so the the rabbit says when this is a heart is going to come to you should know something he's not going to come to you in a in an obvious way because then you're not going to listen to him the feeling is beginning in fact you won't even argue with him because it's what he's trying to get you to do is so patently wrong you're not even going to negotiate we don't negotiate with terrorists he won't be dissuaded the eight zahara he's got a job slew a little fun of the straight path the paved path in front of the etsuhara and by the way you're not his first customer he's been doing this a lot longer than you've been around he knows the smooth way now to approach you what's he going to do okay this is admir aviv shall caveat this is made of homie admir like the saying of the rabbit hashab who is the father of my father-in-law the previous rabbit hayet zahara that sometimes the eight zohar mislavish la palming bellavus the yetzahara will dress up like a righteous pure humble person of refined character ayan hayem hey tough shin gimmel see the entry for hayem yam of hof gimmel wrote a saver where he compiled sayings of his rabbis father-in-law and it's called hayem every single day of the year there's another entry it's a beautiful book it takes 30 seconds to 90 seconds a day and it plants a seed of light in your mind that will just expand there all day long and just change how you experience life i call it a seed of light because that's actually the subtitle of the book you know the feet of kadab the previous arabic gave the title to the rabbit and the subtitle from day to day it's a calendar for every day of the year and the subtitle is a calendar of implanted light seeds of light for chabad siddham so the entry for hof gimbal sieve and ever mentions the date specifically khaf kim al-sivan over there it says that once said that you know i knew the eight sahara would sometimes be a from zahara he would act pious he would act religious and then i found that it could even be a citation he'll act hasidic in order to mess with you by the way again do you know that the date hof gimmel sivan which happens to be my daughter table's birthday happy birthday title uh hov gimmel sivan is mentioned in the megillah tonight's poem in the miguel yeah of gimbal 7 is the date that the king gave mordechai permission to draft a royal edict that would counteract the royal edict that homan had had the king right so yeah by the way there's a sikh from from the rabbit shin mem gimmel where of parshas my bar mitzvah parsha parsha not 1983 uh my permission was 1987. but uh parshashlak 1983 where the rabbit spoke that khof gimmel 7 is a date where just like mordechai was given permission by the king to write whatever edict he wanted so every year in kafkan that power is in the world again and every jew as the embodiment of mordechai gets permission from the king meaning hashem to write whatever edict he wants you that's uh the blank czech day of gimbal seven anyways i think it's a really cool ashkojo protest that this hayem is called and tonight we just uh we had the porn soda and we heard the magilla today where it talks about you can't make this stuff up okay at any rate uh let's continue and we'll finish off so the khosaf hashems hashem has revealed his mighty arm through revealing the teachings of siddhis meaning to say that before the baal shamdev a lot of stuff was unknown before the balchamptov revealed what he revealed these were secrets i mean they're called say this for a reason they're called secrets of the server for a reason they're secrets they were secrets so hashem allowed really in rather recent history especially if you look at a jewish timeline you know jewish history is millennia you're talking about relatively recent history that through certain things became revealed siddhis came and revealed some of the tactics the warfare tactics of the yetzahara that it works in this way where if it knows you have a zahir tv and it does it has great intelligence uh it's so hot it gets the best intelligence reports and it knows what your zartsvay is and it's going to let you be mohadder in other mitzvahs as long as you don't ever get too good at your pivotal mitzvah because it knows that that's the linchpin and that's going to be the end of its job and trying to ruin your life so now we have siddhis we know this and this letter is reminding us now a person can understand where things are coming from and where they're heading that's an interesting way to say it and he could be more careful about it than revealed evil you know something that's hidden evil is much more insidious and you have to be much more on your toes and that's precisely what we're saying here so in other words whatever's saying about the siddhis sometimes the yetzahara will come to the guy and i don't know what this person wrote to the rabbit but that ebb is saying to him sometimes the it's come to you not tell you the new innovator because he knows he tells you to do an innovative he tells you to sin not only you won't listen to him you won't even respond to him like get out of here but what he'll do instead is he'll come tell you to do a mitzvah to add to be mahada to do something above and beyond beyond the letter of the law because it's an area that's not strategically important for your soul and the whole reason the etohod is doing that dressing up as a hasid and talking to you about doing a hidden mitzvah is to take your attention away from your tsar tv mitzvah which is going to be the gate through which everything is going to succeed materially and spiritually so i again i don't know what this person wrote to the but that ebb is sort of it seems apparently telling him get your priorities straight and make sure that when you are allocating energy to different areas of spiritual growth please keep in mind what hashtag protest what divine providence has revealed to you about your special role in the world you know don't don't be blind to the the the fate i mean it's not faith because it's but what we call fate don't be blind to your your destiny open your eyes and see that you've clearly been placed in a certain situation and you've been given a certain opportunity and you can't deny that so please make sure that that area gets extra special attention and don't allow yourself to be distracted by other things even good things and that's really the the point that i was making here valdere so like it's explained in the gemara about the students of rabbi yohoda this is in bracha's the first chapter beginning of the first chapter a sin offering can be procured for a relatively small amount of money but an ashram a variable sin offering costs two large coins is when you know that you sinned and you have to make atonement for it you buy a certain sacrifice ashram tully is you don't know if you did a sin you had in front of you a piece of kosher fat and a piece of prohibited fat and you're not sure which one you ate so you bring the variable sin offering so the gamoto speaks there why do you spend less on a sacrifice when you know you sinned why does the title require you to spend more on a sacrifice when you know you've sinned than on a sacrifice when you may maybe you didn't even send who says i even sinned we just don't know what happened because with the contest you know you sinned i know that i did it um therefore your regret will also be with a full heart vulchin and therefore it's enough that you have a relatively inexpensive sacrifice but if you have this sacrifice for a circumstance of doubt where you don't even know that you sinned [Music] even after you feel bad and you brought your corbin the tahoe is going to placate you but um don't worry you didn't sin yeah that's a technicality that you have to bring that sacrifice you ate kosher fat don't even worry you didn't do anything bad valeji live you didn't eat prohibited fat burmela aquila therefore everything's fine go back to business as usual no you shouldn't go back to business as usual it should shake you up that you were even in a situation where you don't know if you were eating kosher fat or prohibited fat and to impress that upon us the gemara says that kind of sacrifice that kind of sacrificial offering specifically has to cost more you know you hit them where it hurts in the pocketbook you make that corbin that sacrifice cost more money to impressive on the person the fact no no it's not a it's not a small matter that you were in a situation of doubt well javi corbin cometh that's why in this case of the ashram talay that the sacrifice is much more expensive than the case of certain guilt and that i was comparing this again to the idea of i don't think that i was saying the person did anything wrong necessarily but that the psychology here of placating yourself and saying everything's fine everything's good i'm okay and it seems in context what i was saying is the person is convincing himself look i'm being mahaden and mitzvahs i'm i'm growing spiritually yeah yeah yeah but what about your tsar tv so there are these these lines that we tell ourselves to placate ourselves but really that's coming from the yate sahara who's just trying to get us not to pay attention to the one thing that's super important for us very interesting spiritual psychological insight which i'm sure has applications in all of our lives okay that's the end of our second letter tonight and i will wish you all a very peaceful restful shabbos i want to mention also please check out 30 letters 30 days so 30 days 30 letters 30 letters 30 days i keep messing it up what is it what's the website called 30 days 30 letters why do i keep saying it wrong uh check them both and uh over there you know what's funny i was the one who made them change the name of the url because i said one of them made more sense than the other i can't even remember which one it was check out the website uh 30 letters 30 days that's what it is 30 letters 30days.com and there is a new resource that's going to be posted which is a shabbos table discussion companion where you can print out a pdf and bring it to your shabbos table and it will remind you of what all the letters were about over the past week and it has discussion questions which you can use to invite your family whether they watch the classes or they didn't watch the classes or you want to maybe open your booklet and read to them the letters of the shabbas table but there are discussion questions there you can use to get some nice dialogue going and really take these letters personally as intended okay good shabbos