Letters of the Rebbe: "Youth Should Not Think About Earning a Living" (Class 8)

okay shalom aleichem welcome back to another week of 30 letters in 30 days our letter tonight is uh about chinook about education about raising children and about the future of the children a very very universally important subject but before we jump into this letter i wanted to just mention a couple of things first of all i think i've mentioned in the past that there are groups specifically of the notions of conus of the righteous women who are all over the world making local groups for further study and discussion of these letters so there may have been other groups but i was informed of one gathering that took place this past shabbos in shul with the anash of airmont new york up in the muncie area and they got together and discussed the week's worth of letters using the discussion packet that we had sent out we want to give a shout out to airmont new york and if you have a group or you'd like to form a group let us know you can contact us at 30 letters 30days.com um a question came in we do get feedback at the website and when there are questions we will answer them lee nether so a question came in yesterday about the fact that i had mentioned that when the rabbit is writing to a man the latter will start with the salutation of greetings and blessings and when it's written to a woman it'll start the opposite it'll flip it flip the two words it'll say bracha blessings and greetings so somebody asked why that is like what's that all about so i will explain to you actually um there is a story that is recorded in the book the very fine historical book called yemebracious which is about the beginning of the rebels naceus and it says over there that a baker rabb ellie gross who was very close with the rebbe and had a lot of interactions with the rabbi and much of the material and you may be from his journal from his accounts apparently after yuchafat meaning after the histalkus of the frida keraba after the passing of the previous rabbit um about four or five months later it was in the summer time and this this bakr this yeshiva student brought in a letter to the rabbi that the previous rabbi had written to a woman who was in a situation a dire marital type of situation where she had written to the previous rabbit and the priest rabbi had told her to pursue a divorce i guess it was that type of a situation unfortunately at any rate this baker was following up on that letter and brought the letter that the previous rabbit had written to this woman and showed it to the rabbi that the previous rabbi had advised her to pursue a divorce and that ever said okay so then we're going to follow up on that and we're going to have somebody speak to her husband and get it taken care of um so while this yeshiva boy ellie gross was speaking to the rabbit he said by the way i noticed that the way that the previous rabbit addressed the letter to her was not the typical shalom but rather bracha vishalim and i'm wondering why so the rabbit then explained to ali gross that that is the way that one writes to a woman it is an extra layer of let's call it precaution uh it is not something that is halal necessary but it is beyond the letter of the law extra sensitivity regarding over familiarity between genders and this is based on the gemmarian condition da flamin almond bass which is brought as a halacha in evan which says that a man shouldn't ask a woman how is her the word that khazal use and that the shogunate uses is her shaolin hershala means her well-being in other words of course you can say hello but it's considered overly familiar for a man to ask a woman hey how are you doing are you feeling okay that type of inquiry is considered to be over the line so the word shalom itself is not over the line but as an extra measure of sensitivity rather than opening and saying shalom which is it means hello but it also is like hey how is your shaolin mashlomek what's your how's your welfare um we don't do that rather we say bracha but then we don't want to miss the rabbit told told ali uh gross he said but we don't want the woman to not also get the shaman because allah means peace we want to wish peace upon her so you say bracha give her the blessing and then you say the shalom so then the shalom isn't like hey how's your welfare how's your well-being the shalom is more like you know peace be upon you you're wishing her shalom as part of the bracha the bracha is in conjunction with the shalom so it's not invasive and disrespectful and overly familiar but it's but the woman doesn't lose out on having the well wishes of of shalom of peace so uh that's the reason for that and i think it's probably useful for us to reflect upon the fact that the rabbit was extremely meticulous about halacha beyond the latter of the law and at the same time extremely sensitive about the humanity of the people with whom he was interacting and i think this is a perfect case in point whether it ever wanted to be extra scrupulous about the concern about over familiarity between genders and at the same time that a woman should not miss out on a blessing of of shalom and you know we mentioned a few letters ago that ebba wrote a letter to uh mrs hannah scharfstein and i mentioned to you that there were times when that ebba had written just to her husband there were times where they'd ever had written to both of them as a couple and the letter that we read that ebba wrote directly to mrs scharfstein a woman and that abbott did at times write directly to a woman and this is because as i mentioned that didn't consider that the woman is god forbid an accessory to her husband and that her importance is only indirectly through her husband a a woman is is is also a hosted a woman is also worthy of uh of of direct communication when when the situation calls for it so just like sometimes you write to the husband and not the wife sometimes you write to the wife and not the husband but even at those times there's extra care given to certain things that i guess you know particularly in our day i think people are kind of waking up and realizing how much we need to be aware of these kinds of things and how a person can cross a line and not even realize it so maybe it would be good for all of us to sort of uh take this to heart in our own uh conversations okay so let's jump in to the letter here we go uh barack hashem brooklyn and we're going to say so that means 2a let's see if you remember you have a 50 50 chance of answering correctly toy man okay deb is writing to a man um who is this man i can tell you from context i don't know the name the name was redacted but uh and for obvious reasons the name is redacted because it's not the kind of thing i think someone would be proud of having publicly attached to his name uh as we're going to see but i'll tell you what i can gather from the context this is clearly a member of anash meaning this is a chabad hosset this isn't somebody who's an outsider and who's unfamiliar with uh the standards of the chabad community and the tone is slightly harsh as was a a letter that we read a few days ago so again i'm warning you of that okay in response to your letter of valve kashvin so this is what uh five days later uh yeah five days later fairly quick turn around i think um [Music] he named me at me chalet bossy it is self-understood that i'm not at all coming with a complaint now obviously if the rubber has to clarify that he's not complaining there's something contentious or negative or let's just say it delicately something that needs correcting okay if that has to clarify that he's not complaining obviously there's something that may sort of be worthy of complaining about us but that ever clarifies i'm not complaining and i'm especially not complaining to your daughter they should be well i'm not complaining to you and i'm not complaining to your daughter and i wasn't complaining before not complaining okay ella so rather what then what am i doing or what did i do apparently that ebb had spoken with this man's daughter i orally conveyed my pain sawyer the pain that i have about the fact that at such a young age her education is being affected in a way where what ma she's starting to think about tactless tactless means practicality like how are you going to make a living she's thinking about that velorak lakshev not only to think about it like in an abstract way not only she's thinking about it she's actually changing her way of being educated i don't know exactly what it's referring to but she's actually she's she's gone more she's gone a lot farther than just thinking about it she's actually changed the way she's being educated uh in in a way that deviates from the norm among the hasidic community and she's resembling we had that word in our first letter the way the world does things and we spoke about that that we we try to resist doing things the way that the world does things um i think it's important here to mention that must have said i mean i i don't know someone may be able to search this with a computer but dozens of times a situte let me say it about many issues very often about uh about israel about the security issues in the land of israel but the rabbi would say this expression i said they if it hurts schneiderman you you scream out meaning to say i'm not trying to rebuke you i'm not trying to make you feel bad god forbid i'm in pain and sometimes when you're in pain you express that pain so that i was explaining to this crossed i expressed to your daughter my my pain about what she's doing now i don't know how old this girl was uh that ebba says called kah sawyer that she's so young young i don't know if means a child or an adolescent but the the point is that the girl at a young age what that ever considers to be an inappropriately young age is already thinking about how is she and her future family going to make a living and it's just not right that ebba says that's and and i'm expressing my pain about that okay um let's continue here the alpi sacrisal according to the ruling of our sages betrayed with two or three there is a hazaka an established presumption of something being a pattern it's actually a macholicus of tanoyum in uh uh about whether hazaka is twice or three times now for most things we pass in that hazaka in order to establish a presumption of a repeated pattern something has to happen three times there are times when where mahmeer like the opinion of rebbi and we say even something that happens twice uh we already say uh that's enough to establish a pattern and we have to worry that it's going to continue as a pattern like for instance where we machmer an example if a family has a bris mila for their child and the child has hemophilia and so therefore the bris mila is dangerous for the child so if that happens twice in a family then it's presumed already like that's the pattern and let's not uh let's not push it over here other things usually it takes three times before we say oh that's it it's established as a pattern it's interesting here that ebba says ahazaka al-pitayara is two or three and then the rabbit says um the hain ate so i see this movement i see this direction being taken both by your daughter and your two sons so that's sort of a hazaka according to both opinions because if you count the boys and the girls so he has three kids like this and if you just count the boys then he's got two boys like this so two boys three kids in total he's yates according to late allah dayas so we see already that your daughter the one i was speaking about earlier and your two sons they're all headed in this direction may they be well and i'm just going to read what it says it's known the way a child speaks they pick it up at home it comes from their father this is actually a uh a phrase that's from the end of gumarasuka from uh ahmed base it's the famous story of miriam bas bilga and i should mention it's an incredible situation uh bilga and explains how really it was that her her her pinterla yid that was crying out uh in and and asking for justice on behalf of the jewish people and that's how the ebola was malamatez and made basically redeemed her and turned her into a an unlikely hero or heroin uh but the simple meaning of the story is that she was a young woman who came from a family of kehanam a priestly family and she intermarried with a greek general and she became an apostate and she said some inappropriate things about about hashem i'm saying the simple meaning obviously there's there's a much deeper story and that takes that deeper approach and there's the the famous as i mentioned from 10 years later from uh from coffee and uh it's very much i'm sorry not that from uh lamin hey tufts from uh yeah from 20 years later sorry let me correct that from 20 years after this and it's it's on it's uh there's a recording of it and it's very worthwhile to listen to uh but at any rate the simple meaning is when a kid is speaking a certain way that's inappropriate you can assume that they picked it up at home and that's what happened in the store of million miriam bus bilga that her entire family was was penalized because of the way she spoke at any rate i'm just reading what it says here that i was saying look your two boys and your daughter they're all sort of overly fixated on making a living and how are they gonna how again how are they gonna support themselves and they're they're very career-minded um maybe it's time to look inward and think about if you're giving this off somehow and and i want to say i didn't see the letter nobody saw the letter except for the rebbe that this person wrote it could very well be that that he himself doesn't like it it could very well be that he's telling the rabbit that i don't want them to be this way but for whatever reason it's appropriate and it's helpful to for this person to be advised that perhaps it's time for introspection perhaps the way that his children are heading has something to do with his influence and in that sense it's sort of empowering or it's very empowering because as you're going to see that ebb is going to say i'm not here to bemoan the past that's the next thing that i was about to say i'm not here to bemoan the past i'm trying to give you some direction for the future so you know i say it's empowering because if if i'm not the problem i can't be the solution but if i am the problem okay it stings at first to hear that i'm the problem but then that's great news because i'm the one who's causing the problem then i can stop causing the problem i can start causing the solution so it's actually good news to be told maybe i'm the source of everything maybe i'm the source of the problem because if that's the case now i can do something about it so let's let's go further all right um moving gum kane it's also understood shallow bossy bataki allah over i'm not bemoaning the past because whatever says it like a general rule in life we do not bemoan the past you don't cry over spilled milk like they say valoi my only intent is what ella lasaki mekano lahaba to fix things from here on out going forward okay this is not about crying what's been about what's been this is about how can we fix things going forward i'll call upon him at the very least to fix things going forward at the very least shalom yatsego and now that ebb is saying here's what you shouldn't do here's what you got to stop doing shiloh yatsigo stop presenting things with an emphasis stop representing things with an emphasis that a perfect person or a well-developed person is what means not just a a plan but like an immediate plan and uh yadia brura means like a very clear idea so not just in the abstract he has a notion maybe i'll um become a uh i don't know shoemaker right now this is like i've got a plan i know a guy who's ready to sell me a shoe store and i know where it is and i know how much money and i know what the rent is like he's got it all lined up stop presenting things that the schlemmer saw them that a person who's a developed person a a complete person is a person who has really um specific plans about how they're going to make a living mistake about how they're going to make a living yeah the memory stocker is actually how they're going to make a living you know you're going to see that actually is borrowing that phrase from from the modern from daf nun base where this gemara actually is famously brought in the famous uh iguera sakuras from the altareba from iguido secretaries from tanya from sumikov base where the altareba asks why are people coming to me asking me questions about parnassa about gashmi it's about material things what am i navi um although as the eva pointed out even after the altera wrote that letter he continued to accept people in yikidis who asked such questions and continued to answer take that however you will but at any rate um the rabbit says here that look let's look in parenthesis that trying to know how you're going to make a living like having a real substantial plan how you're going to make a living is the opposite the opposite of what our sages tell us that what ain't audema a person doesn't know how he's going to make a living we don't know how the the the parnosa that hashem has allotted for us is going to make its way to us we don't know the conduit and we know how the altar explains gamora and sacrum there that we mentioned says there are seven things that are muslim that are covered meaning they're not known one of them is a person doesn't know how he's going to make a living the other thing or one of the other seven things is a person doesn't know when meshiach exactly when meshich is going to come and the altar takes those two and he compares them he says just like nobody can tell you exactly what mashir is coming so too exactly so is it completely unknowable how your parnosa is going to come to you so the al trebba equates those two as far as they're as the as far as the futility of trying to have uh have knowledge about either of those two things colossians 1 and you see there the altareba says the two things are equated okay so it's opposite of that maimer hazal from sahim and especially the way the altar explains it in you get a sakura dish of base and also it goes it flies in the face of a passage of a scriptural verse for gam the wise do not have bread this is king solomon is is saying you know the world's a funny place the fast guy doesn't win the win the race and the strong guy doesn't win the war like the guy that you would expect that on paper he's supposed to have it in the bag and then that's now how reality works right there's always a fluke there's always a spoiler you never know how it works and the smart guys you think that they're going to make money and then they don't and that you know when we say we don't mean like necessarily they're different purusham but you could say oh haha means torah scholar so yeah a torah scholar he doesn't know how to make a living no even if you if you translate to mean people who are smart in how to make a living are not necessarily the ones who end up making a living you know uh maisha reichman oliver shalom passed away uh almost 10 years ago now but he was the big giver to put it lightly a multi-billionaire from toronto and he started with nothing he started as an immigrant with he didn't have uh two pennies to rub together and he built up a multi multi-billion dollar enterprise so they once uh asked him like what's what was your formula for success how did you build the multi-billion dollar empire so he says the formula it's uh five percent cycle you know intelligence and 95 mazel and they asked him and if you had to start from the beginning all over again would you do anything differently he thought he said yeah the five percent cycle i would just switch it in for another five percent of mazel meaning even even the five percent mazel that it was it was part of uh my success i mean for the five percent cycle it was part of a success forget that i'll just i'll just take more mazel because at the end of the day it's not the cycle that helps it's the muzzle so i'll take 100 mazel at any rate that's the point that toyota tells us you think you have a plan you think you have it all worked out oh you know how it's going to happen and then that's not how it happens all right now you may argue and that ebber preempts here the argument that there is such a thing called estadlas and putting forth effort and you do have to have a job you do have to do something to create a vassal for hashem to send his blessings of course the rebel knows this and if it's going to preemptively uh what we call bavorin that is going to anticipate that response and and although very clearly hashem will bless you in everything that you do and everything that you do in other words hashem will bless you but you have to do you have to actually do something within which hashem can send his blessing is clean you have to make a vessel okay fine no problem had a move it's not a contradiction and if you want to hear all of this explained at length you can go listen to all of the shadow bit talking classes that we did a year and a half two years ago already i think it's two years ago wow time flies um yeah so over there we explained this at length the idea of putting forth natural effort it's not a steroid it's not a contradiction to the fact that ultimately everything is hashem's blessings we speak about it at length there in china that hashem requires deniable plausibility hashem needs an alibi he can't be caught miraculously reigning bread from heaven upon us even though that's exactly what it is it's all bred from heaven but it has to have a cover story it has to look like we did it naturally so we hide the miracle by putting forth effort so that's why it's not a contradiction it really is all hashem's blessings but we have to provide the alibi by putting forth uh some natural effort the in the hamitz of the foreign everyone knows that rambam has a safer mitzvos the tamarted the third khabad the ainakul of the balatanya also has a safer mitsubishi we more commonly refer to that safer as derek mitzvah and derek look on page 106. uh what mimer is that that's the maymeter which in turn is based on that says which in turn is based on a mimer in the torah from the altar one is basing it mostly or at least the dibra moscow is about asia's fast tire the other one starts by speaking about the metsida they both go into the same discussion and i don't have time to go into it right now why it's a whole discussion about hair it starts us a whole discussion about hair and about symptom and now is not the time at any rate i it's a very geshmakam very enjoyable i highly recommend learning the glass of masaida from derek mitsui at any rate uh it explains over there that you know picture a person who uh has a suit and he makes his suit bigger than necessary you know like a zoot suit like you know like in the in the 40s you know the cool guys were the zoot suits and when they were rations because of the war effort they were rations on material so they wanted to show their uh extravagance by having extra material that was totally unnecessary so but it's not very practical you know imagine wearing this big suit that's way bigger than you than you need so the tamaksa doesn't say zoot suit but that's about it says imagine you have this suit that's way bigger than you need and then what happens you end up tripping on it so did it serve a purpose no it was counterproductive so too um the hishtadlis the natural means that we put forth to create a vessel for hashem's blessings the blessings are going to take hold in whatever size vessel we put out but if the vessel is too big it becomes unwieldy it becomes burdensome we trip on it it gets in the way so that's that's the the the allegory that it uses over there in the tedx mimer let's continue so what i'm hoping is that from now on ya gishu gambon of i hope that your children will also be sensitive to the fact that really everything depends on the infinite one who has no end who is the one the infinite one he is the one who guarantees that if you go in my ways if you follow my mitzvahs then i will give you rain in its time i will give you the proper arnossa the right parnosa in the right time okay but it's all depending on hashem it's not depending on having some smart plan about how you're going to make a living especially when you're such a young person and it's such a waste of of head space to be thinking about these things right now okay let's continue we'll wrap it up here's the devil lamenting about the waste of time that young people in their in their formative years are spending thinking about things that really are not going to help them out in life they're thinking about plans how they're going to have a career how they're going to make parnosa they're in their formative years they could be spending that time so much more usefully continuing to learn today and that eva says that will benefit them not only spiritually but materially let's let's look inside of those hours that your sons spend learning meaning learning and those virtues those qualities that they're going to pick up from the the people who are teaching them that's actually going to be far more appropriate for whatever it is that they need both materially and spiritually so i'm not telling you okay i'm sorry you're gonna have to have you're gonna have to suffer you're gonna have to have a lack of materiality and you're just going to have to sacrifice yourself and you're going to have to have all spirituality that i'm saying i'm not saying that to the contrary i'm trying to i want you to have the best of both worlds i'm trying to help you here so the best thing the most productive thing for a young person right now focus on the spiritual and that will be good for both the spiritual and the material because after all at the end of the day hashem is the one who provides pronosa it's not the smart people who make money rachman said i would trade it trade in even the five percent say hydrating for more mozilla hashem should bless you to see much the siddhis from all of your descendants or rather mitochondria i should say arkava could imply material prosperity but it's interesting here that ebb wishes which means mental prosperity so to speak you know what that means it means having a broad mind sometimes we call it you just claim couple the kite narrow-mindedness and you just get very fixated very myopic and you can't see the forest for the trees so that ebb is wishing him that he should have lots of knackers from his kids and he should have harvested he should have a broad mind and good health with blessing and that's our letter for tonight