Mindflex- The Chanukah Candle Inside You- Part 2- Rabbi Shlomo Buxbaum

good evening everyone welcome to mineflex my name is urban buxbaum coming to you from silver spring maryland and very happy to be with you for part two of a series that we started last week the chanukah candle inside of you how to illuminate your soul during a spiritual blackout and the first and foremost thank you project inspire everything that you're doing with the mind flex the shabbat show the cooking shows so much torah so much inspiration during these unusual times so thank you for that and to all of you who are tuning in who tune in each week those of you joined us last week if you're joining us for the first time this week to those that we communicated over the course of the week and your feedback from last week's class we so much appreciate it and looking forward to delving into our topic a little bit deeper tonight a little bit more practical tonight uh to really show how this special amazing time of year hanukkah wow wow it's tomorrow night and uh showing how this this time is has so many messages for us in our struggles in our growth so let's get started with a little bit of learning about the hanukkah candle inside of you we spoke last week how chanukah comes at the darkest time of the year because it represents a very dark time in history but a time where there was a transition in the chanukah story around the overall general time of the chanukah story the era of prophecy had stopped and because of that the jewish people as a whole had to readjust their style of connecting to god connecting to torah and therefore there was this really explosion or this new wave or this new approach of the oral torah becoming much more dynamic but much more focused on our own intellect our own our own novel ideas our own interpretations and understandings which might seem to go against this concept of a divine word of god giving us the torah and yet the torah sheva the oral torah is a further revelation of the power of human consciousness human intellect to be able to reach deep down and discover almost this built-in hidden prophetic aspect inside of us that isn't coming from the outside what's coming from within and we use that to apply that to our at the time that we're in now but our own struggles as well as we go through our own spiritual journey to say that just because you're no longer feeling that inspiration from the outside doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you it just means that this is an opportunity for you to instead of looking outwards to look inwards and rediscover what your own inner light what your own inner connection uh is is all about to get creative to become original and to be able to discover almost that prophetic aspect that we have that lives inside of us so what else does hanukkah have to teach us about these highs and lows what other tools can hanukkah teach us and give us that we can use to help us make this journey through life make our spiritual search make our search to discover a dynamic judaism that we're all looking for especially during these dark times what messages and tools can hanukkah give us to bring that out to connect to that even more tonight we'll focus a little bit more on the menorah we'll also learn some lessons from the dreidel everyone's favorite toy and we're going to look at the moon not literally but we're going to explore and speak a little bit about the moon and actually find a common thread between those three things the menorah the dreidel and the moon and how this all ties in to chanukah so i hope that you're ready to come with me on this journey in the very little amount of time that we have together hanukkah perhaps you've noticed has a very unusual connection to the moon number one i'll show a couple of examples of this number one hanukkah is different than all of the other holidays that we have most holidays that we have come right in the middle of the month the 15th day of the month we have so many holidays come and if not then they come in the beginning of the month and the reason behind that is that in judaism obviously we're connected we go after the lunar calendar we set the cycle of our holidays based upon the moon and on the 15th day the moon is at its fullest which means that since we believe that our holidays are connected to the energy of the mazza load of the constellations of the lunar system so therefore whatever we're trying to tap into the power of that month is strongest on the 15th in the beginning of the month perhaps it's leading up to the 15th but still it's on the way up in terms of the fact that the moon is becoming brighter as the month goes on and therefore the power of that month the energy of that month the model of that month is getting stronger chanukah on the other hand is at the tail end of the month so pretty much when hanukkah begins the 25th the moon is really almost down to nothing and through the eight days really once hanukkah ends which is already in the beginning of the next month of te me it's kind of right after chanukah ends that's when we can begin blessing the new moon right or saying the blessing on the new moon of the next month but within the actual time of hanukkah the moon is almost not there it's almost not present which is unusual for a jewish holiday so that's one thing to point out about an unusual something unusual about chanukah but the connections between chanukah and the moon go somewhat deeper our sages teach us and every word of our sages is meant to teach us profound lessons nothing could ever be taken on surface level our sages teach us that of all of the different mitzvoth that the greeks tried to ban they had their eyes targeting three mitzvoth shabbat shabbas circumcision prismila and then the third one was the sanctification of the new moon we know that in temple times you wouldn't have a set calendar but the new month would be established by witnesses seeing the birth of the new moon and and going to based in the court and sanctifying the new moon and whereas basin would say miku dash we are now sanctifying this is a new month and kid shachadesh was the third on this list that our sages teach us that the greeks had a bone to pick with now if you're listening to this shabbat is obviously a hallmark of what it means to be a jew we are deeply interconnected with shabbat it very much paints a picture of our jewish connection brit mila is one of the most personal it's literally the stamp of god on us we know that greece really they they looked up to the human body and will be here to say that the human body needed perfection with something that was appalling to them so to to see that shabbat and brittany lash of shabbos circumcision these things that the greeks had a problem with that is is very much intuitive we can see that we can understand that kirisha sanctifying the new moon not as much not as much we can't it's much harder to see why of all of the different mitzvoth you know ben having the bagels and locks you know ben having so many different things you could think about kosher right and again not to say the greeks were okay with all of this stuff maybe they'd like bagels and locks i don't know but um but the the the target for for for our sages to teach us that they targeted i mean come on do they really is that really such an offense to them do they have something against the moon so why specifically that and that's something that's discussed in our sages interesting connection our sages teach us something else we know the great teacher of the jewish people rob that was moshe rabin the only the only uh torah personality who has this term of rabbenu right our our teacher brought down all of torah and and gave it to the jewish people and our sages say that there were three different mitzvot where moshe had to be shown in a vision he needed the visuals he didn't necessarily he couldn't picture it on his own according to our sages where they just said he needed god to show him in a visual exact visual demonstration of the mitzvah three of them one was this mitzvah that we just mentioned of sanctifying the new moon and exactly what the moon should look like at that time that it should be sanctified okay so we have the moon but listen to the second thing when it came to the construction of the mishkan the tabernacle moshe was able to comprehend all of the details except for the menorah where it says that when god told him that the menorah needs to be made out of one block and rashi quoting our savior says moshe said i need a visual god has to show him a visual of how that looked the third one the giving of the shackle for the counting we're not going to get into tonight because it's not our subject it also links into what we're going to say but again our time is limited so we'll focus just on this connection that we see over here once again the moon and the menorah these seem to be two things that that moshe is not comprehending so we have again we have an unusual this unusual connection where hanukkah is coming at a time in the month where the moon is is almost disappeared we have the greeks seem to be bothered by the sanctifying of the moon and we have moshe who doesn't seem to be able to visualize this mitzvah of sanctifying the new moon and also not coincidentally seems to have a problem visualizing the menorah what are our sages trying to teach us not to be too creative but i would like to make a little bit of an observation over here again i didn't see this anywhere but perhaps you agree if not disregard the next uh 60 seconds but i'm a big fan of the dreidel we have a lot of board games in our home but nothing is as much fun as a good game of dreidel now you spin the dreidel and really what's going on when you spin the dreidel is you get a good you can't see it on my table now it was not a great spin i got a nun by the way just in case you were wondering you give it a spin and what happens so the dreidel is spinning hence it's called a dreidel or a civil vote which means they drain to be spinning going in circles but then you also have unless you're a really good spinner you can keep it in place but usually you have the dreidel itself is kind of going around but also spinning now i think that you see where i'm going over here but if you ever take a look interestingly enough at the moon and again maybe i'm crazy maybe i'm crazy feel free send me a message afterwards say buck spam you're crazy but to me it seems that the dreidel is doing kind of the same orbit that we perceive when we see how the moon itself does its own little jig its own little spin while simultaneously doing its silva which is why we have different dynamics of light right because we're always seeing that same angle of the moon but we're seeing it at different ways because it's spinning and also going in a cycle around and to me i see perhaps again it's showing now how hanukkah is connected to the moon that maybe the dreidel is also somewhat connected and let's see if we can put all of these pieces together we know our sages teach us that the reason that our calendar goes by the lunar calendar is because in many ways we identify with the moon we see the moon we see ourselves reflected it sounds kind of like a pun over there because the whole idea of the moon is that it reflects the light of the sun but yet we see ourselves reflected in the cycle of the moon we see this with the jewish people as a whole as being a nation that waxes and wanes a nation that seems to be getting smaller that seems to be on the brink of elimination through our persecution through the through the fact that we're being exiled that we're being trampled upon and yet somehow we make a comeback somehow right we're where everything it seems like it's over and boom we're back again we're back again just like the moon the same cycle and based on that we understand that all of spirituality works like that as well as individuals we wax and we want sometimes we feel positive sometimes we're getting stronger and stronger as we spoke about in our last class and then sometimes we're getting weaker and the name of the game the name of being successful in this journey of trying to become spiritual is learning how to ride those waves learning how to balance when we feel like we're about to tip learning how to find that inner spark that is who we are as a people it represents our nation's history but it represents our cycle through life so we look at the moon we admire the moon we ask the moon to teach us we bless them we give up we make a bracha on the moon we're sanctifying the moon because we see ourselves we see our journey we see the moon as symbolic of who we are and that's why we said as well that the time in history when hanukkah comes was somewhat a time of a blackout where we had to look inwards and we had to discover ourselves but it certainly doesn't feel good and even though we know the torah and even though we know that that's the way it works when we're in it i'm in it when you're in it we know at that moment when things seem to be blacking out when we seem to be struggling when we feel disconnected when we feel like we're not becoming the individuals that we thought that we would be in any aspect of life we feel like failures we feel doubt and very often we feel like we want to give up and then we look at this mitzvah of kids and the exact moment when the jewish people would look up at the moon and they would say they say this is absolute holiness and when was it when when was it it was at a moment at a time of the month when the moon was barely there when you can barely see it and this statement of looking out looking into a black sky looking into it you can barely see where the moon is only a sliver and looking up and saying that moon that blackness that darkness that struggle that moon that's just struggling to stay alive that moon that she's struggling to stay connected that's the kurdish makodesh that has so much holiness it's amazing when god you know people say i discuss this all the time with people who were in a rut and uh in in my job is having the privilege of doing care of so many people have have ruled themselves out not for me i'm not a good jew blah blah blah blah blah i tell them think about which jewish people god decided to build the jewish people upon was the jewish people that were in egypt on the 49th level of impurity that was so low god said those are the jewish peop the darkness of the night that is what we consider holiness we can only appreciate that if we realize that the spirituality that we live for is not the spirituality of always trying to reach a destination always saying i'm becoming that i'm this i'm that but it's a it's a spiritual journey of saying that no matter where i am right now today my struggle today is the most important thing that i can bring to this planet because so often we're for our our measures of success within our spiritual growth i kind of frame the way we measure our our bank account you know you're doing well in business and you get you have more money or you're you're or any external accomplishments of the greeks we're all about accomplishments hey check out my body i've been to the gym yeah this is what i'm repping today rolled at their accomplishments in math and science and art but all of that is hey i'm a better artist than you and i came up with this new theory it was all the in the world of greece their accomplishments are measured only by what they can put on paper and say this is what i accomplished and you didn't what our sages with ghazal are teaching us the reason that the greeks had such a problem with kirisha is conceptually this idea that as jews we could say don't measure me don't measure me by anything else but the struggle that i put in today where i'm at what i'm struggling with right now that is the most important thing this is not to say and i know that many people perhaps might be thinking if you're not then i am so i'm going to say it that we shouldn't set goals and try to accomplish obviously the way we push ourselves forward is to try to accomplish but listen i'm from a world and i know speaking to a very wide audience and and maybe you are as well a beautiful world beautiful world of yeshiva where so many students finished large tract dates had major accomplishments wrote sparring books gave presentations and in the desire to push us and to motivate us forward often also it became about accomplishments and we forgot we forgot that every single day just the very fact we and when i say we are i i mean me i forgot in that world in that environment that just the opportunities to sit down for half an hour for an hour for two hours for whatever it is and say okay for this time god hashem this time it's just us this time we have an opportunity to connect i don't know i don't know that i'll ever be finishing massive track dates i don't know that i'll ever be giving you know major presentations that'll ever be right i don't know but i know that i have an hour now and often that got lost in the adventure of trying to become something big something great not realizing that just the fact that i had that opportunity was greatness i think both of those things are so important to keep in mind and certainly when we're on fire when things are amazing absolutely try to reach for those accomplishments reach for the stars but during a spiritual blackout that's not time to reach for the stars during spiritual blackout it's time to look at what we have at that moment and say i have this right now today and this is this is holy that was the struggle between the greeks and the jews between the greek way between the westernized way of evaluating of measuring our accomplishments in the way we do in torah i'd like to suggest because i brought up earlier this another connection between the moon and between the menorah and how moshe needed to be shown a visual presentation of both the menorah and the moon and somehow hazal or sages are weaving together these two things they're making us notice that something something about both the moon and the menorah was something that wasn't on moshe's radar and we know and we know that our sages elsewhere say that looking at moshe's face was like looking at the sun pine moshe says that his student joshua was like the moon but moshe was like the sun what does that mean we know as we get to know moshe more and more as we see moshe rise to become the greatest prophet to ever walk the planet by the time moshe is standing at the top of harsina of sinai giving us the torah we know that moshe himself has completely nullified himself through the word of god that he's purely a mouthpiece of god he's an extension of god moshe is not just the prophet he's the prophet of all prophets his prophecy is on such a high level that there's almost no motion that is purely god that's what it means when you say moshe is like the sun in the fact that god is shining this light right through him well as we said last week and we'll just mention this again we said it earlier that hanukkah marks the transition in history when prophecy stopped and when that world of prophecy that world represented by moshe that world of the written torah of moshe moshe who represents torusha the written torah that era came to an end and the jewish people had to rediscover their spirituality their torah not the spirituality of the sun not the spirituality of prophecy but the spirituality of the moon the spirituality that rises and falls that ebbs and flows that waxes and wanes that goes up and goes down and one that we have to look inward not outwards perhaps is it possible my suggestion tonight to you is maybe what our sages are trying to teach us when they say that moshe could not perceive this moon was to teach us that our vote our service to god is different since we're no longer in the era of prophecy we no longer receive spirituality like the sun like moshe did it's an era of rising and falling it's an era where we have to look at the moon when it's almost not there when when when when the sky is black when we feel what's called in many capitalistic texts constricted consciousness as opposed to mochin the expanded consciousness when we're in this place of darkness and be able to say this this too is holy moshe because he was so great because he was the profitable prophets that was something that he couldn't possibly experience it wasn't his abode it wasn't his service so god says i'm going this you won't be able to visualize but i'm going to show it to you and the menorah is the very vessel in the temple that represents that it's going to be the menorah these lights of the menorah that represent that hidden light that represents that light in the darkness that light that you have to look inwards and say oh okay if i can just like i can just do one light just one accomplishment today then maybe two tomorrow then maybe three maybe i could build myself all the way back up the menorah represents that light so the menorah is connected to the moon and both of those moshe said this is not my abode this is this is something that down the line this this kedusha this holiness this will be brought into the world by the jewish people later on later on in time perhaps that is the message of our sages and why specifically these two things and then we get to our next mitzvah the mitzvah of the dreidel i'm sure that everyone is excited might keep on picking up my dreadlocks a little excited if you're adrenal games tomorrow night the kids are getting excited i actually even have my dad over there we're getting ready i was thinking maybe in this year of cobin if someone could have invented like an online dreidel game that people could play dreidel over zoom how that would look i don't know if anyone has something out there but the jedi is so deep many of you might be familiar with the brilliant letters that are on the dreidel we know it as in noon the gimbal you've probably seen this in reverse a hay and a shin and what this stands for what we're taught that this stands for is nice kadal great miracle happened there it happened in exile but our sages teach us that these letters of the dreidel stand for something else as well the maharao the great great sage the maharal of prague the loewy of prague and many others teach that if we look at the human being we see that the human being is structured of several different domains we're built with many different realms many different parts and as much as we're all one human being but yet we know there are different parts of us there's different aspects of our consciousness of our personality and in many of the uh holy texts the ancient texts they describe as psychology speaks about as well and has discovered as well again much later on in history than our ancient texts that those can be divided in to what we would commonly say physical body heart mind and then often you'll see this idea of spirit which doesn't necessarily work as well with what we're trying to say but let's explain how the maharal teaches it and the language that the maharal uses the morale says that there's a physical body that we have which is a goof guff is the hebrew word for a physical body the next level up he describes as being the nephesh the nephesh is the life force that's inside of us it's what animates us it's what gives us life not to be confused with the nephesha who kissed the the godly soul which is called the nishama that is a bigger conversation but when he's referring to the nephesh he's talking about the overall construct of the fact that we are animated human beings with the ability to want to love to emote to have emotions to feel all the different types of emotions and have all sorts of human experiences those are all connected to our nephesh the life force that's inside of us that that that upgrades us from just purely animals which have a much lower level nephesh they're a goof with a lower nephesh we are a goof with a much more sophisticated nephesh above that is the seijo seijo is the intellect slash mind when we think of the intellect we think sort of about how that computer right here works our brain and our mind but we know especially discussed so much now today in modern psychology the idea of being mindful and how the mind itself can can really reach up and grasp beyond just the basic mechanics of day-to-day life all of that is included in the secret so we have again we have the nephesh but what weaves all of this together why are these not three separate different parts with with each one sort of acting in its own way because we know that they don't all necessarily want the same thing you know the goof wants to eat the nephesh might want to have emotions fall in love the mind wants to understand the seeks knowledge but what is it that unites us so there's a force that's something that's even greater the the perhaps you would say that this is the eye of our identity that is the orchestrator of this whole thing that says come on guys all right let's think about the camp counselor right okay mind mesh body come together let's join forces let's become one it's the force that unites them maharao's language he's he calls this force the general the whole you got it already but if you take a look at the dreidel the letters of the dreidel are nefesh for life force shin or sin for seijo domains of our of our of our human realm the four human domains for human realms those are represented on the four sides of the trail there's many other ideas behind this so for example the numerical value of all these letters together can equal snake which is our yetzer our evil inclination it also has the same numerical value of mashiach so we see so much in these letters of the dreidel the maharal and others teach that these four aspects these four domains correspond to the four different exiles we won't go into exactly why or how it's not our subject for tonight but they say that they correspond to the four exiles one of them being babylon the other being paras umadai persia where the purim story happened the other being yavan our story hanukkah and the final one being rome which is the exile which began with the destruction of the second temple that we're still in today but for us for tonight let's talk about how they relate to us in our own processing we know already from the mishnah in pirkei avos that says that the world stands on three things on torah aravoda which is service to god prayer and other types of services and that many of the commentaries say that they correspond to those two to three domains again excluding the hakko but the three separate domains so whereas torah is basically a mindful exercise using my seiko avodah trying to connect to god to serve god to pray is done with my nephesh i hope that this is relevant to everyone here if you're not i'm just rattling off just some verses that speak about the yearning of the life force to get close to god and then i said kindness is very much about the goof the physical interpersonal interactions so we see already that different parts of our spiritual service are connected to different realms that are within us but putting that aside on a very personal level i think that we find that if we look at our relationship to judaism every single human being is different and i think for some people we find that there are certain mitzvoth that deeply resonate with us they're naturally nephesh mitzvoth they touch us emotionally they awaken us up i'm connected this fires me up uh i'm sure a lot of you will be here who are watching this watch or receive some of the meaningful minutes um videos that they send out and they have a wonderful podcast as well and one of the great questions that they ask their guests have listened to several of them they're always you know so much fun one of the great questions that they ask their different guest is what's your mitzvah it's such a great question to ask all of ourselves what's your mitzvah but what is the mystery that fires you up because everyone has their own mitzvah they say oh this when i'm doing this i'm in the zone this is me this is my mitzvah some don't speak to us as much but but they make sense we get it we understand it and because of that we we here we do them logically knowing that this is important they're more in our say how we get it we get it we don't necessarily feel it as much but at least we can grasp it and some we do with our goof they we do them purely externally okay i'm a jew i'm part of the program i do it i don't feel it i can't understand that i might even have questions on it but you know what i'm part of the club i'm committed and i don't when i do it and the goal is that really we're thriving for the alcohol right we want to be able to fully engage every part of ourselves we want to say that we do it with our bodies but we feel it and we understand that right we want the alcohol we want the whole package but the reality is as human beings that we're different and we operate different the reality is that different parts are going to speak to us furthermore there are times that things are going to vary there are times like we've been saying all along that we're going to feel just totally nephesh we're going to feel totally excited everything is going well i'm so excited about my growth right now this is just working i'm in my groove sometimes it's just safer sometimes okay i'm not feeling it but but but i get it i'm making a plan i'm working it out i'm figuring it out and sometimes it's goof sometimes we're just doing the motions it's purely a show we're just going we're doing we're doing we're doing and we don't necessarily feel it but we're doing it and while that might seem not exciting while that might seem uninspiring we know celestia sharon the path of the just many other books say that as long as the person that the one thing that we can always control we can control what inspires us we can't always control ourselves but we can control our book we can control our bodies and if you're in a bad mood you can still smile you might not be able to change your mood you can smile maybe if you smile it'll change your mood maybe if you dance a little bit you'll become happier your body you can always control so even though we necessarily we don't necessarily feel that that's exciting but yet doing things purely with our body alone also has some holiness to it based on this now when we spin the trail we see a whole nother story the very same way the hanukkah is about the moon where we look at the moon when it's wet when there's a blackened and we say that's holy the same way the menorah comes at the darkest time of the year and we light it and we say that this will be small little lights they're going to light up the night the same thing is when we spin the dreidel when we spin it we know there's going to be certain parts they're going to be face up and there's going to be certain parts that are facing down sometimes this is going to be working but that's not sometimes i'm going to be learning well but prayer is going to be in the tubes sometimes i'm going to be doing great in my interpersonal connections but not to all my spirituality sometimes marriage is great but being a parent is hard sometimes being a parent is great but i just can't get on the same page sometimes i'm doing great at home but lousy outside right whatever it is sometimes things are going to be looking up and sometimes things are going to be looking down and hanukkah is the holiday of being able to celebrate where we are wherever we are in the struggle pushing out this idea that it's not always going to be a call it's not always going to be big and and dramatic but sometimes it's just going to be what can i do today to make this happen you know i this is a new platform for me to be speaking to the mindfulness audience and and i haven't yet figured out exactly who's out there and i want to share something um which i hope you'll forgive me there there's a a vague reference over here to a uh series a a uh a netflix series which streamed last year that in my that in the in the cure of world caused us and the carbon a lot of trouble a lot of explaining and again without just being vague about it and then obviously many will know what i'm talking about but it was a show about a woman who struggled a big part of her community because of religion and left her community and it portrayed the community that she came from in a very very dark light and to those who are purely on the outside who know nothing about that community were very very much disturbed and and us in the in the care of worlds in the world of outreach had the difficult task to try to on the one hand portrayed this community in in in in a in a in a positive light in the beautiful light that it really is and and to show how it wasn't necessarily the the greatest portrayal there was so much that was overplayed and just you know silly and dark but on the other hand you know to be also somewhat sensitive to the fact that this show did resonate with many people there was a woman who my wife and i were speaking with who has somewhat of a similar story not quite that extreme but somewhat of a similar story and she told us that there was a scene in this show where this young woman who had left were with her new group of friends and there was a line where she said i don't know exactly what it was but it sounded it was something to the extent of i had to leave my community because my god expected too much of me and this woman who my wife and i were speaking to who had somewhat of a similar story she said that that scene when she heard that line she burst out crying and she cried and cried and actually played that scene again and again because she said that my whole life that's always the way i felt i always felt like my god is asking too much of me my god is asking too much of me you know in the torah when when abraham and avraham is going to thinking that he's going to sacrifice isaac it says that he saw the place from afar he felt distant very often we feel that we're we're just distant we feel completely disconnected and what a tragedy to think that god is asking too much of me and and i have to run away because i i just can't rather than to be able to focus on the beauty of whatever struggle ever struggle and to realize that my struggle even though even though it seems so so embarrassing it seems so petty but yet within that struggle there's such holiness there is holiness that is exploding from that struggle sometimes when i feel disconnected and i'm just going with my goof i'm just going with the with the external a kev the the torah says in the beginning of partial this is the way that that our sages interpret this a kev i share shaman calling because you listen to my voice and the language is a which means a heal sometimes we're just putting one step in front of the other but that journey is beautiful that journey is holy that journey unlocks the great kedusha the great holiness that we're here for that's the holiness of hanukkah that's what we're supposed to extract to take away from chanukah that we become the moon we become the menorah we become the dreidel and know that whatever we're going through in life that's the tremendous holiness that we were placed in this world to bring out i want to wish everyone over here a wonderful beautiful illuminating hanukkah a light that wipes away all of the darkness and again i hope that we meet someday in person i invite everyone to reach out in whatever platforms you're on and and we can find one another um and hopefully we could uh continue this wonderful journey and greet moshiach together thank you for your time tonight i wish everyone a good night