Being Like Avraham Spiritual Strategies to Win the War Chizuk for Iron Sword by Rabbi Ari Kahn

okay good morning so uh here we are again I was hoping that when they asked me to speak a couple of weeks ago then uh it would be a one-time thing and we wouldn't be needing at this point we would all be very strong and we would have already uh been past this particular episode but as we know sometimes processes move at speeds which are not necessarily to our liking and uh therefore there seems to be a little bit more and obviously our first concern right now is with our soldiers and with our civilians and with all of the people who live over here and uh I'm I'm going to add another thing which uh obviously some people will agree and some people will disagree but if not you know if I can't get you upset then what's the purpose of all of this and uh and that is that we all concerned about the people on the other side as well we don't want Bloodshed we uh we don't want people to die we want to protect ourselves elves and when it comes to protecting our lives sometimes unfortunately especially when we have an enemy which lacks morality and hides behind children we do quite the opposite we protect our children and I'm not going to say things which are almost cliches because all of us know them but instead what I want to do is to take a look and to see something in this week's para which I think should speak to all of us and also it should hopefully answer a question which sometimes we seem to lack Clarity on so let's start with the question the question is why does God choose Abraham which means there lots and lots of people who lived in Antiquity and to make the question A Little Bit Stronger when we first meet Abraham we're not told anything which is exceptional about Abraham yes we have midrashim and yes we have traditions and yes we know other things about Abraham but the Torah itself doesn't share any of those the Tor itself doesn't give us any kind of inkling as to why Abraham is chosen at least not initially which means in par we don't find it but there is a p in this week's par which is in a surprising place and if you don't know it then you could easily have missed it and it's particularly that verse that P which I want to look at as the people who came to visit leave it says so over here we have a little bit of what we can call foreshadowing the people get up leave Abraham and they take a glance at Stone so yeah it's just it's perfect the next verse isar and notice it's which is interesting and God says will I hide from that which I'm doing is going to become so important so influential how can I hide from Aram this is the verse this is the one which is important because I know that because he's going to command his children and his household on his followers after him they're going to follow the way of God to do we can translate staka as Charity we can understand it as righteous Behavior m is is a legal behavior and therefore God will speak so now we have the answer why God chose abam because abam somehow is going to combine within him two things which are almost impossible to combine one is and the other is mish and then it continues and it says that God says that the Cry of sto in front of him and they're they're full of sins and so on which shouldn't surprise us because we already heard this previously we heard back in per gimmel that that these are people that are very very sinful very bad and very sinful we heard earlier maybe this will say something to us specifically today at this point in history back in peret when when sto and Amora are introduced it's in the same verse with AA so you can take a look at peret so how exactly does aam combine these two things Sak mbat so there is a source which is found in aan Al peric L [Music] giml and what it says over there is how aam combin them and it says that when two people would come to Abraham and they had an argument they had agreement so what would happen quoted our verse so it says two people came to adjudicate a problem and one would say this guy owes me money one guy said to the this guy owes me money would take the money and give it to the litigant and say here here's some money then he would say come and listen to the case and if he found that person guilty he would say okay give him the money I just now gave you so therefore Abraham did both mishpat what's fair and staka I I I want to mention something specifically in this context there was a great Rabbi in Europe who I don't know how well known he is today and if he is well known today it's because of a particular descendant his name was RB eloi Feinstein Reb Elia from pran now I'll just tell you the following my family my mother's family came from pran and my grandfather knew him rebelia and rebelia had a number of very famous relatives first of all he had a brother-in-law who was uh named doid Feinstein who mosha Feinstein's father it was a case where a Feinstein married a Feinstein one was a Ley one wasn't a Ley and he had a daughter pesha who married somebody named rosha salvic so this pesha is Rabbi salik's mother so had Rabbi salvic not had such a famous paternal grandfather Rim I think more of us would have known about the other one because the other one rebelia was worthy to have been I mean he was one of the gor when the two fathers met and they discussed the sh asked does rebellia does your daughter knowes and he said you can test her onu which is one of the harder parim later said about pesha had she been a man she would have been one of the great roshi Yesa in Europe and rim was asked does your son mosha does he know how to learn and rim said he knows how to learn better than I know how to learn and lateria agreed that they moosha did by the way they they uh they always in the salvic family honored their children or mosha thought that his son knew how to learn better than than the father knew how to learn but we we'll we'll continue with our story a number of years ago one of I'm going say a number of years ago I'm talking way over uh around 40 years ago one of Rabbi salat's grandsons found out that my grandfather had uh had known rebellia and he said can I meet him can I come meet him so he came over he sat with my grandfather and he said know tell me about rebellion so my grandfather said I'll tell you this is this is what he did and this goes exactly to our point of staka and mishad he said that if ever a person came over to him with a chicken you know in the old days that's what rabbis did they looked at the chickens is the chicken kosher or is it not Kosher is there problem not he said that whenever he somebody would come with the chicken if Ria thought it wasn't kosher he would give him the money for the chicken he would pay him he would buy the he would buy the non-closure chicken from the fellow or from the woman whatever the case was and that's what my grandfather remembered my grandfather didn't remember any he didn't remember any speeches he didn't remember but he remembered that he said rebelia rebelia was a sadic but don't we realize that is the behavior of ainu ainu was this incredible person who can combine together staka and mbat and I I want to now use this to discuss exactly where we are right now one of the things which is emerging out of the last 3 weeks are amounts and acts ofed which are absolutely unbelievable I can spend the next couple of hours just on stories that I've heard and I've seen and that I'm aware of and my suspicion is I don't have to because I think all of you have heard these stories as well there's one particular one that I will mention that I had a woman down south inim and uh somebody young woman 17 years old said you know there's a war going on you know do you need help with your kid you know we're running a party for kids in one of the bomb shelters they brought a clown and they brought pizza and they entertained the kids to get the give the kids something to do a couple of hours and she came pick the kid up and then she brought the kid back and afterward somebody mentioned to the to the mother he goes that girl that 17-year-old old girl she just got up from Shiva she lost her father and her brother in the events of October 7th and her response to all of this is is is is not one of hatred is one of love is not one it's this ISU this ISU this is where we come from which means our actions of are what are going to protect all of our soldiers together with the and their dedication to protect am Israel and the actions that have been taking place have been absolutely Beyond people's imaginations and some people it's incredible amount of money and some people it's just themselves it's their hearts it's the hearts which are overflowing with with concern it's Hearts which are overflowing with love for our people which means if we were in a situation one month ago and I remember on suod even sitting in my sukar people were talking about the protests and people were talking about the two different sides and how and so on and so forth and and very quickly they were in two different sides and I and again I I could tell you certain things one of the PE one of the groups that was the biggest protest they raised the most amount of money to bring arms over for the soldiers I'm not going to go into any details but I know this as a fact cuz uh people on my block raised over a million dollars and distributed all kinds of things that soldiers need and and then by the way that's that's for some people that could be a very large amount of money for me it certainly is and uh these people these people work and they work day and night because how can we leave our soldiers in a sense if we can get them better equipment if we can take care of them a little bit better but it wasn't just the it wasn't just the equipment it's also the food and and the people that are that are going down and the entertainers and and and everything else but what we have to do is that we have to feel in our hearts we have to Davin we have to say to helim we have to learn Torah we have to do and we have to do more have to do more because here we heard it the the Reason God chooses ainu is our combination of doinga together with mishpat we need to fight because of mishpat we need to fight because of what is right we need to do certain things over there because something really really wrong happened and if you think about it there there's a point over here which is much sharper which I haven't said yet clearly a number of years ago the middle of Co the middle of Corona I wrote a book right everybody was sitting home with nothing to do so so every week I was writing the paraa and I was thinking as I'm writing it this is going to be the most depressing book imaginable because who in the world's going to I mean cuz I wrote it coming from a certain mental place and coming from a certain space and and again what what kind of limited impact this book is going to have and of course when we got to this year bid I told people you know what you can read bid from what I wrote there we get to Noah you can read what I wrote Noah get to get to every single word I've written in those parts are absolutely meaningful today and on Viera I wrote a chapter which I called the inadvertent trial of stone the name of the book by the way is healing and repairing the inadvertent trial of stone now just think about this God comes down to put sto on trial and aam comes and he prays for at least the innocent people in STO he doesn't pray for the guilty he prays for the innocent do you realize that with every prayer that Abraham says he condemns Stone more CU Stone wouldn't act that way which means what's highlighted here is the distinction between Abraham's and Abraham's and Abraham's kindness with the behavior the barbaric Behavior which takes place in stone so as Abraham prays god is essentially saying this is the person I want to invest in this is the kind of behavior that that we need and therefore the same thing is true today when we compare our Behavior with the behavior of the people that we're fighting With Every Act of that we do condemns them more every single act of kindness that we do condemns them more and we can be like a aido and say we don't want innocent people on the other side to die it's okay for us to feel that because they don't feel that they don't think that there any of us are innocent they don't even have such a concept that any of us are innocent you can listen to the spokesperson of uh of Kamas when he said of course we can he said we didn't kill any citizens and in his Minds said they didn't because we're all settlers settlers became something which wanted how everyone is a settler well a settler is somebody who lives in the land of Israel a settler is a Jew who lives any place of the world which means Abraham is chosen because of and as AB does and as ab doesa and as AB is kind and as abam prays every single action that he does condemns the other side even more and we're going to continue and we're going to be children of Abram we're going to be children of Sarah and we are going to do mishpat and we're going to DOA we're going to take care of our soldiers and we're going to care for All Peoples of these of this world because that's what abam does and there's no contradiction whatsoever unfortunately for them as we care more their position spiritually becomes more and more diminished May KES have a great deal of compassion for all of our people may all of our soldiers be safe may all of them come back to their family safe and may we quickly quickly end this particular war and may all of arm Israel live in complete peace