Rabbi Moshe Taragin - The Irrationality of Jewish History

Thank you Rabbi Shore and big to Rabbi Shore and to all the OU um staff for putting together such a beautiful evening of Torah. Um this of course should serve as a protection form and for and for all the people who need refor the safer in which he describes the dreiness the dreiness and the sadness of as it's destroyed and lay in ruins. He begins it with a very strange word a word that hardly appears throughout Tanakh. It's an iconic word. It becomes of course not just the title of the migillah but one of the catchwords of tishabad the word of course absorbs multiple meanings that's why he chooses the word at its root it stems from the word and it's an inquisitive word and it introduces a description how do you get somewhere here are the directions how do you bake a cake here are the instructions how do you put together something you bought in the Or here is the manual. So and the next four proim four and a half proim detail how the city which was once bustling once was the center of humanity the metropolis of the ancient era became so desolate and quiet. So at its root it's an inquisitive. How did it happen? Here's the description. Kazal had two additional meanings. It's not inquisitive. It's more declarative. He isn't inquiring and then beginning the description. He's rather declaring. What is he declaring? So the matter says source number one it's acknowledging guilt acknowledging culpability accepting responsibility which is interesting because it seems as if at least in the first person to accept responsibility was Danielle at least publicly. Danielle finally says after doubting and wondering and questioning says so Danielle seems to be the first to accept responsibility but is already hinting at it acknowledging accepting bearing guilt according to the second day in it's not it begins the suffering the sadness the indulgence and sadness says in that so whenasi passed away they issued a decree that anyone that says that Rebi died should be stabbed. If we make believe Rebi is still alive will resuscitate him. If we just don't mention that he died, he'll leap to life. But everything described becomes more vivid. Everything thought is much more vague and distant. When we describe something, we clothe it with words. It creates more compelling, more emotional response. So we all knew the basic was destroyed but Yermir walks through the streets of Yalai and witnesses the scenes of ruins and destruction and punishment and persecution and begins to describe it and as he processes what he's about to describe he fills the kina and he mourns and he sobs. So the second layer of is not inquisitive how did it happen and here's the list but the second layer of is either or and it is important I find that sometimes because mourning not maybe for Israelis because we've suffered so much and we're all in mourning but at least before the war and maybe for people who are not as engrossed in the war it's very easy to transform tishab into yum kiper and tishab is not yum kiper tishab is not a day for chuva tishab is not a day for vidoy tishab is not a day the end of the day maybe but the beginning of the day is a day And could you imagine standing at a grave and the second the person or you sham suffers the tragedy you immediately transform it well how should I improve my life and what are the messages I should take away and I have to perform chuva that'd be grossly inhuman there are people suffering there's a death as a human being you mourn you cry as says love you sit quietly in the corner because your crown has been taken put dust into your mouth So the is once the a subsides so then we turn our attention a little more to cha but even then even then it's not a day for it's not a day of says the day the b mikdash was destroyed there's an iron curtain that separates and as if nothing happened with the mik destroying ignores that reality business is normal so it's important to carve out a space for morning that doesn't immediately bleed into how can I improve and what's the chuva that will come a month later on two months later but there's an interesting medish which implies a third meaning to that's the meaning I want to speak about tonight medish says that three employer the beginning of pares Now in those other instances, Moshe doesn't really describe. He's not inquiring to begin an answer. He doesn't describe. He's explaining something. He's not certainly not suffering. Mosha, there's no there's no when Yesh describes the city that has become a den of prostitution and of corruption and of moral immoral immoral behavior. He doesn't describe it. It's a one-off sentence. Kazal say source number two. Moshe those is not describing anything. It's just he's exclaiming something. Evidently the word is iconic. It's foundational to tishabove. It's a gateway to understanding something beyond tishabove because tishab part of the challenge of tishab is not myopic or myopia. Sometimes we develop myopia about the bas mikdash. I encourage people for example to split tishab into and gullis kurban is to experience what happened during the bas mikdash the first bas mikdash the second bas mikdash gullis is the aftermath of the ba mikdash and we suffer that on tish above and of course we relive some of those moments during the kinos but you can't just take snapshots of the holocaust and of 1666 and of the the the crusaders has to be a thorough panoramic view what did we suffer over the last 2 years what was taken from us how was Jewish history reoriented. So there's something deeper. Dishab is a day of Jewish history. It's a day to walk into some tunnel of the last 2,000 years that shouldn't have ever occurred. And now they were slowly walking out of that tunnel to look back at that tunnel and to appreciate what we suffered just as a little bit of a smile. And hopefully tonight we'll end with a smile. We keep his famous smile just like it's all right to smile in Tishab to recognize the triumph of Jewish history. But to recognize the triumph you have to suffer the misery of what we've experienced. What is that term? from a and why is it so iconic and how can we decode the meaning of a by the fact that three different prophets employed the same term well the medish actually distinguishes between the three prophets they didn't just all converge on the same term they used it at different stages of Jewish history so now we have a little more work a little more meaning the term when the Jewish people were successful they were growing exponentially in the desert they were asking questions it's not clear whether This refers to Moshe in Pares Israel. We spending all day and all night answering their questions. Maybe Mosha in paral. But either way, this is Moshe facing this indomitable cha task to deal with the needs of a growing bustling nation that had newly been liberated and was starting to grow physically, nationally, spiritually, and looking for answers. And Mosha just can't solve all the answers. They're looking for spiritual spiritual input and Moshe is wearing himself thin and Yeshua guides him at least in par to delegate. Yeshes term binulam during our moral degradation. Yesh witness the walks through and sees the thieves and sees the zonos and sees the hypocrisy. Remember the first Bikdash essentially there are three or four that it could be broken down to but one of them is hypocrisy hiding behind ritual we have we have ritual we have mitzvah and underneath it moral rot moral decay exploiting the weak taking advantage of the vulnerable ignoring the widows ignoring the orphans it's just hypocrisy it's over ritualization where we check the boxes and we know what we're doing but it doesn't reflect any inner moral spirit And yes witnesses this and he says this is mostly the city of presence is truth and and moral compassion and it's become a den of lies in a den of exploitation and then yer sees the Jewish people as they've already unraveled and he uses a so it's not just incidentally the three different nim chose the same word they chose it at strategically different points Moshe at the apex of Jewish success at the moral degeneration and yuria with the calamitous consequences of our moral collapse. What are striking at or of course are really decoding? Why are all these returning to the word? Because the word doesn't just mean an inquisitive how. It also means a rhetorical how. Sometimes when an event happens that you just can't fathom, you're overwhelmed, you're bewildered, it boggles the imagination, your first response is just exasperation. Very How could this happen? And the answer is, oh, the person was killed in a car accident or this is how the sh They're not asking for information. It's a rhetorical how in the absence of any capacity to lend ration or explanation or reason. How how does this make sense? Why is this happening to us? And aha it becomes the password for Jewish history because it captures the irrationality of Jewish history. The Jewish history does not conform to typical patterns that govern every other nation in their arc and trajectory. We are compared in safer braces to three different metaphors because Jewish identity is multi-layered. So one metaphor can fully encompass Jewish identity. The three metaphors in braces are stars, sand, and dust. And sand and dust are different, but that's not for now. But one of the implications of being compared to the stars is we hover above. Stars aren't subjected to the natural forces that affect this earth. I mean, they're held together by gravity proof, but they don't suffer the same gravitational pull. That's why they're fixed in this in the sky. We're grounded on Earth. So, they're not subjected. Stars metaphorically represent something superernal that hovers above that transcends not just biology, chemistry, but referring to nations, transcends national laws, the laws that govern races, religions, ethnicities, peoples. Our history is like the stars. It's meteoric. It's exponential. It's irrational. It's asymmetrical. And that asymmetry and disproportionality expresses itself at every stage of Jewish experience when we rise, when we fall, and when we're punished. And all of these Naveim were addressing the same phenomena, but from different moments. We're at different moments, from different vantage points. Moshe saw the meteoric rise of a nation that had weeks earlier, assuming this is Israel, been enslaved for two centuries. Think about, for example, the African-American community who suffered far less than what we suffered in Egypt. I mean, it wasn't complete. It wasn't total. It wasn't death. It wasn't murder. It was terrible, terrible slavery and dehumanization. And how long it has taken in some ways that community to recover from some of the disadvantages that they suffered and to liberate not just their bodies, but their minds and their cultures and their family life. And and here we are five weeks later, six weeks later. of and we're standing underneath Harina about to accept the most complicated religion known to manism and this is strategically prior. This is even prior of all sorts of questions. Who would have thought that slaves could ask these questions? Slaves barely surviving. Where am I getting my daily bread from? One foot in front of the other. How can I make it to the end of the day? How can I keep my family intact? And all of a sudden they're thinking about God and theodysy and spirituality and creation and afterlife and whatever they're thinking about whenever they're asking Mosha Rabenu and not just that but they're also growing they're populating and the families have remained intact. So Moses is bewildered. This doesn't make sense. Zoom out from October 7th and look at the last 90 years or 80 years of Jewish history. It's a great anthropological miracle. I'm not referring to the 2,000-y year anthropological miracle, but the last 80 years that a nation can pull itself out of such depths, out of such suffering. We lost a third of our population and close to a half of our collective wealth and we have refugees wandering the earth and not just reconstitute ourselves and build robust communities which most of us come from and achieve affluence and influence and build and construct but also conuct this historical project of building a homeland in the face of international opposition and hostility. in the wake of the Holocaust collecting dialects from 52 different countries. If you just take a walk back a step back and you view the arc of Jewish history and our successes, it leaves you confused. It's different. We're not we just we march to a different beat. We are imp we are not influenced by the typical trajectories and sign graphs that affect other nations. And unfortunately as we know when we sin we sin phenomenally incredulously weeks after it almost it defies the imagination but part of the challenge of living in front of a kesh with pen the pendulum effect when it swings so far to one end it sometimes it swings wildly sometimes both collectively and individually it's hard to keep that pendulum from swinging and we're people of great spirituality and we're stubborn people that's why we were chosen because the less stubborn people would not have been able to withstand the trials of history and the persecution of Jewish exile. So we're stubborn and sometimes that stubbornness works against us as reminds us and sometimes that stubbornness works for us. So yes looks at these people says you have the bas mikdash you have just try to walk back walk yourself back into the days of the bas mikdas we all walked into this room without moral failures and our hypocrisies and our false narratives about ourselves but if there's a mdas landed tomorrow would you sin there make us landed tomorrow I think we'd all experience spiritual revival spiritual inspiration none of us would sin and exploit and curse and and how did it happen and don't sugarcoat don't sugarcoat the past we have a very very dangerous tendency to look back at the past as if they were all righteous And we're all fallen. There were certain the generations that were righteous and there are certain generations that were fallen. And our generation is a righteous generation with the faith that we've demonstrated. And the people of that era fell headlong into Gilario and fell headlong into a vodara. There are crypts that have been discovered up north. And the crypts have little idols in them. So it wasn't a a righteous generation. And it's hard to imagine how they fell so precipitously. And that's what Yesha sees and says aha this this nation just defies logic defies and then Yeria sees the suffering and when we suffer we suffer miserably. The Romans Yia of course did not see the Romans. The Romans conquered many many cultures and their secret was that to establish and expand their empire they would not annihilate their enemies but they would subjugate their enemies. So march into the village, kill a few dozen men, rape a few dozen women, but then maintain the village because they required two elements to fuel their empire. Coin and soldiers. So they would collect taxes and collect soldiers. And without those two resources, the empire couldn't expand. So Ram had no interest whatsoever in completely rooting out their enemies except for one. There was one nation that they pursued maliciously and tenaciously. Their leaders, their executions were gory and grizzly. Not one Jew could be left alive. Unfortunately, so much of Jewish history is cyclical and repeats itself. The bodies of Betar were left unburied for years and years. And that was such a collective trauma as we are experiencing now. would imagine an entire city that when they finally allowed those bodies of betar the last stronghold to fall to be buried added to could you imagine the fourth to and what a braha we're so thankful to Hashem because thousands of dead bodies were finally buried life is that way life is a mixture of joy and sadness and just because you're cloaked by sadness doesn't mean you must ignore the joy and the thank and and the gratitude spar for whatever you're able to achieve whatever you're able the scrape together. So the fact that Moshe, Yesha, and Yeria all arrived at the same conclusion is not incidental. They were standing at different vantage points at history. Moshe at the apogee of Jewish history. Yeshiah as Jewish history was tumbling down the mountain. And Yuria as we lay in the valley exposed and lame, vulnerable and defeated. But this roller coaster of history is uncommon because we are the people of Hashem. because we're chosen by a Keshbaru and the normal anthropological cycles that other countries endure and experience don't apply to our people. Jewish history is irrational. Jewish history is indescribable and that's why they all use the term a would have been inquisitive. A is how could this happen? So Yermia strategically chooses that term first of all he wants to ask and by the way it don't take that first layer for granted. Yuria teaches us going back to that first layer something crucial. I think it's very compelling for 2025. Part of faith is asking hard questions. As long as those questions are posed with reverence and as long as you know you probably won't get answers. Think of the last two years. If you believe that Hashem is Malikim and he's Malikishb and he's bris, he's merciful, he's just, and he remembers the bris. How could you not ask the following three-word, threeletter question when you dive in? Why? Why did October 7th happen? And don't reverse engineer. Oh, because we have so many military victories over our enemies and over Syria and over that's offensive because Hashim has many algorithms to achieve those m those miracles. And don't ever reverse engineer suffering the so many people have suffered just because the endgame provides benefit just like you should look at the Holocaust. Well, we needed the we needed the Holocaust. Really? We need October 7th. Really? It's morally offensive and it's theologically bankrupt. So you ask why empowers what empowers us to ask those questions with his why. The next level of is the speak about the final level of is it just doesn't make sense and I throw my hands up. How how is how to make sense of this? And the word aka actually has a cousin. There's another word in Jewish history that captures the mystery and the irrationality and the unfathomability of Jewish history. It's not a and it's not a four-letter word, but it's a three-letter word. And to appreciate the three-letter word, let's visit Yeshai, excuse me, let's visit Yuria moments before he writes. I don't mean moments before a few minutes, but literally before he writes, the city has yet to be destroyed, but it's about to be destroyed. And he's walking through the city and it's in flames. Close your eyes and imagine the movie. Flames shooting up from the huts, walls falling down, boulders being shot into the city, Castine soldiers rampaging through the city, women running and screaming, people being speared in their hearts. You can imagine the scene. And that day charges Yeria not with speaking with his tongue but delivering a message for Jewish future with his behavior. What is Yeria's assigned task of that day? Go buy some land from your uncle. Go buy some land in Yurus from your uncle. And he's flabbergasted. And he anticipates Hashem responding. He says, "I know I'm a ny. I know that I can't understand you, but still this is preposterous. This is completely off the reservation. So Yermia says in source number five after I purchased line two and then he begins his ramble you created the earth and the heaven. You're the master of wisdom and the possessor of secrets. These are obesum lifted from Io. Basically, Yermia is saying, "I've already read Safer Eov. I know that we can't understand you." That's the take away from Zion. Yo tries, he fails and Hashem appears to him in a storm and says, "How dare you arrogate the prospect to understand my ways? So I know that I can't understand you." Yia says line number three, you're the master of wisdom. Your eyes are open. Source number five, line five. The ramparts have been built. And the have already controlled the city. You tell me purchase land. It's ridiculous. I can't even get a lawyer. No one wants to sell it. They're giving it away. A dollar for the land. And you want me to go through the motions. And Hashem delivers this threeletter word to you. It's like a password to your Google account. The password to the Google account, [email protected]. I don't know this is cook that one is lucky I would kill to have that [email protected] but the password to Jewish historygmail.com is a threeletter word hashem tells yeria last line h ani hashem el k basar source to you it seems baffling because you parse history in swaths of 100 years 200 years 500 years. I span eternity. Hashem says, "Your thousand years is my hiccup and you will return one day and Jews will live in Jerusalem one day and the real estate market will be obscene in Jerusalem one day, forcing you all to live in a fraud or at least come to the share in a fraud because you can't afford to maintain his office." Hope you didn't hear that. One day people will live in you. And you are foreshadowing that future because history is a pella pay lammed olive. Jewish history is a pella pay lammed olive. It's a mystery. It baffles you in imagination. One of my lesser desirable parts of my job is to conduct interviews for the yeshiva. If anyone wants the job, you're happy. I'm happy to give it to you. It isn't elegant. It isn't pleasant. Everyone, I I want to see not just how the boy reads Gimarra and Davins. I want to see who he is as a Jew. Is he a good Jew? Jewish identity. Such a foundation of religion. Something we overlook in today's world. We work at ritual. We work at mist. But are we a good a good ye? Are we a good Jew? So one of the questions I ask is if you had a Delorean, yeah, you get the reference, right? 80s. If you had a time machine, okay, and you had one setting and you could set it to go back to one point in Jewish history, where would you go? So, there are a million different answers to that question. They're all right. If he says, "I'm going to the Yankee game," he's probably not accepted to Yeshiva. But any other question, he said, "Any other answer." So, about 25 years ago, a boy looked at me and said, "Rabbi, what would you choose?" So firstly, when he wasn't looking, I put a big check next to him because I like kids that are a little bit irreverent because a reverence, a little bit of a reverence gets you far in life. You know, he's he has the moxy to ask that question. He's not terrified of his own shadow. He's standing up to the rabbi. If he stands up to the rabbi on the interview, he'll probably stand up to other pressures in life. And he's going places. I put a little check next to him today. He's a big rabbi, so I won't say his name. So he asked me, "Where'd I go?" I said, I would like to go back to 1945 and walk out of Avitz. Why? What was the first thing that survivors did? They found someone from the cousin, their sister's friend, their aunt's daughter, something or other. Let's remarry. Let's rebuild. Let's bring new people into this earth. And so 2020 hindsight lets us know that those children born in 46 and 48 and 49 would march in the fields of dreams and bring goula to our people. They'd be the pioneers of Jewish history, the finest generation of Jewish history, pioneering history. But they didn't know that. And I asked myself, what type of moral courage must it have taken them to just walk through the darkness and hold the line and act courageously and morally just to do the right thing even when the world doesn't make sense? I'm addicted to moral courage. I love finding people who have moral courage. should do the right thing because it's right when no one's watching regardless of any consequence because you act in accordance with your principles and you stick to your guns regardless of whatever calculus may or may not even fault. I met someone like that. His name was Ramita and I learned a lot from him. Stick to your principles, stick to your convictions, hold fast to your ideals. The world doesn't always accommodate them, but it doesn't take away the nobility of the of the of the of the position and the decision. I just want to feel their moral strength. I think a lot about the Holocaust when I think about Yeria standing in Ushal and wondering I should just trust me. Trust me. Build by Jewish history cycles in on itself. If I you know if I had a second okay thank you. >> Okay. If I veteran. So if I had a second DeLorean, I want to go back to 1960 to Las Vegas. I want to go back to 1960 Las Vegas. I'd land somewhere on the strip, find the quickest bookie that I can. I want to place a bet. 1960 Las Vegas. Which country is going to last longer? the Soviet Union or some fledgling little Jewish state in the middle of the Middle East maniacal murders. Where's going to last longer? What type of odds you think I get? 1,000 to one, 10,000 to one. Soviet Union 69 years. We're going with 78. So I would have won that bet. Make a lot of money. Sakuresh Bar delivers that second message. Moshe, yes understood it. Yermia understood it probably before he said when Hashem told him how many which illustrated to him the irrationality unknowability of Jewish history and that's why he began his say for but Yermia grasped this in the first basikdash his spiritual descendant grasped it when he walked amongst the ruins of the second basa mikdash and well this will end and this is riva but pay attention because is we're going to read that gimmar that we know too well because we don't know the details. You know the story. They're all walking amongst the ruins. They see rats and vermin. They all start crying. Aka starts laughing. Why is he laughing? And aka is a consmate outsider because he comes to it later in life. And that's why he's a fresh set of eyes. Always important to see things with a fresh set of eyes. Not just the common way that you've been trained to see things, but the reverse angle. Why is Riyaka see redemption when they all see suffering? because he sees a pak in Yesh source three. Yesh summons two prophets literally symbolically source number three speaks about um it's quoted speaks about the destruction of the mikdash I'm reading it from source number for so Ura speaks of the destruction. Of course, Zakaria, as we'll soon see, speaks of the redemption. And since Yesha having nothing to do with Ura and Zakaria but Yesha some third party bystander loops the destruction prophecy of Ura and the redemption prophecy of Zakaria into the same Puk. So when you witness the fulfillment of Ura's destruction prophecy, you can anticipate the fulfillment of Zakaya's redemption prophecy. Is that all? simply because Ura's destruction prophecy and Zakaria's redemption prophecy appear in the same pekk. No, Ura and Zakaria saw the same thing from different angles. Ura saw the basikdash raised, demolished, and sold. As I said before, Rome had no interest in renaming any other empire or annihilating any other empire except for one. He saw not only the defeat of the Jewish people but the plowing, the raising, the salting, the annihilation which which I'm sorry which which leads it to sorry my phone just went which let make sure I'm still recording which leads to it becoming a graveyard where rats are scampering around. Why did this happen? No other nation was subjected to such devastation, to such destruction. Ura is looking through Jewish history through those same lenses. This is irrational. This is incomprehensible. No other nation is suffering this miserably. He sees what Yuria basically sees in Yaleim. And Ryaka sees it hundreds of years later. What does Zakaria see? What's Zakaria's redemptive vision? And what words does he uses? Let's we'll end with this source number seven. We all know this. Men and women of elderly advanced age will stroll. The streets will be filled by children frolicking. What is so apocalyptic about these visions? Is an apocalyptic. People in Norway stroll through the city streets of Oslo. People in Italy stroll through the city streets of Rome. Children frolic in Moscow. Children frolic in Tokyo. What is so apocalyptic about men and women walking on canes and soft summer evenings and children frolicking on monkey bars? The answer is what's normal in Tokyo, Moscow. What's normal in Oslo and London is apocalyptic in Usain. And it's apocalyptic for Jews. And we still haven't achieved it because Jews are still not free to stroll through the streets of the streets of Kyon or the streets of Sterim and kids are not frolicking bars are hiding in bomb shelters. Amal Rebi told me that when he escaped the holocaust and he lived in Gat Morai and he attended the yeshiva of Kevron, he would walk every day to the yeshiva and stand by the playground transfix watching little children play and crying for hours because those same eyes that now witnessed the prophecies of Zakaria had witnessed little Jewish children being lined up on stony walls in Europe being shot dead at point blank range. And now he was privileged to see and to see these nas. And how does Zakaria conclude his nevu of redemption? This is one of the biggest hyperboles in all source number seven. That's their word again. Those that are privileged to live out the end of history will be shocked. I'll also be shocked. Here's your hyperbole. Hashem is not shocked. It's just a matter of speech to show how shocking it is. So it's not just that the destruction nva and the redemption nva happened to be joined in one p and yes and that tipped off rava. Well since they appear incidentally in the same p of about and about goula then if the is coming true because I see the rats then the goula should come true. We give us to the life of things. No these two prophecies are speaking the same message. Jewish history is unfathomable. It's unknowable. It's mysterious. It's a pella. It's a pella that we sink so low that our mak mikdash isn't just captured but is devastated and raised and salted. It's a pella. And if Jewish history is a pella at its nadir, it will be a pella as it rises mccurally from its ashes. And it can happen overnight. Serbia twinned the two nvos not only because they're juxtaposed in some puss and Yesha. Yeshos them because they're two sides of the same coin. And that coin is the irrationality of Jewish history. And that's what a means. And when we begin our experience, it's almost as if tishab is a threelegged table. It's suffering the mikdash. It's suffering the tragedy of gullis, but it's also pondering the mysteries of Jewish history because gullis is not incidental to Jewish history. It could have been avoided, but once it occurred, it transformed Jewish history. And to a degree I want to say it's a triumph of history where the way in which we navigated gullis and we're slowly pulling ourselves out of that tunnel into the next room of history is a triumph. So allow yourself a little bit of a smile on tishabove because if you keep smiled on tishab and living in Israel and witnessing the miracles if you don't smile in tishab I wonder if you've absorbed that third leg. We suffered the we suffered gullis. But we are redeeming Jewish history and walk in the footsteps of the we should know no more tragedy for our people.