Torah as a Blueprint of the World by Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb — הסתכל באורייתא וברא עלמא:

a TR from the shal kados um and uh it's it's I get two or three emails about it from different uh institutions and organizations if you can get a hold of it or if not consult the expert here and um it's a schoola to say it and schoola can't hurt these days can never hurt uh but that's about all we'll say about rashes per se but since it's soon tomorrow is tonight and tomorrow ises so in just a few days it'll be in in in just a few days I that better I don't I have to hold it I have to almost swallow it in order to get I I don't know all the details no it's a a little mystical it's above my um P grade but the details but it's a it's a skoa the from a very holy man um so we're approaching the the of shos which is z mat so I thought it would be appropriate to speak something about um about um Matan Torah about Torah in general especially about a phrase the title of of the talk is taken from a passage in the Zohar but uh it's also to be found in the medish Raba which will study together the text for that U idea and I'll develop it as I heard it from a very great man very very long ago but the phrase as is relatively popular it's from the zor Kos and it's in Aramaic and in Aramaic it reads ist in Hebrew it's to gaze at to steer at to look at to glance at to observe so it's referring toes was referring to God himself and the is saying when he created the world looked Andel usually means more than just to glance it usually means to stud to to Really observe the details so God kav observed the details of the Torah the Torah was preceded the creation of the world Hashem K says that God had the Torah before the world it was a pre-existing Torah which was written um black fire on White Fire whatever that means it's itself a mystical concept the Torah existed before there was Earth before the human beings what does that mean but there is a Torah that God had with him primordially way back before long long ago and uh and based on what he found in the Torah he created the world so there's a n relationship that's hinted at in those four words that indicate there's a relationship between Torah and and nature the world is nature nature could be beautiful scenery nature could be our own bodies that's all nature everything that God created B is nature and nature God studied the Torah kav in order to extract what the world should look like so there's a reflection there's a kind of a interaction between Torah and Anda Torah and naturea and that's Torah and Alma Alma is all the world so if you open your um booklet uh you'll see uh after the speaker bios uh there's a big big letters bous this is the um first page in the med Raba the med Raba is the classic medish on Onish we have it onos Etc and this is on bares it's a copy of a printing of mish rber which you might not see anymore there are better printings now with notes and theote Etc but I especially treasure this set because for my 11th birthday which was a long time ago uh I received a gift from my um paternal grandfather wine Reb and he gave me a set of five volumes of this uh mishas which you can see it's not in such great physical shape anymore because I used a a little bit over the years since I was 11 um but it still is my go-to safer I keep it here in my uh personal Library here uh and you have a a picture a copy of it in fact it's even clearer on the picture in front of you than it is in my the text in front of me because uh zamir or whoever handled this um enlarged the print for for our benefit so the the medish begins as a medish always begins you'll see on the page in the text itself not looking at at the commentary it's on the text Below in the blower here for the page but looking at the text of the medish and the medish is kazal the medish is is the people who speaking here are mentioned in the mission gamorra Etc so it goes back a long way and you'll see there's first an Al and then rapia Rosia Raba the great Rosia begins his particular um spin or take on the on barus the whole notion of barus has so much to say on it so he begins with a a a in Mish Mish so writes in Mish I will be to him as anone whatever that means and that will be for him a light uh something delightful something to play with shua yum yum every single day so raos understands understands this to mean that the Torah is speaking Torah is personified as if it was a person speaking and the Torah says I will be an Amon and I will be a Shu so what does that even meanon and Shu and if you see the line on the text there are several meanings possible meanings of the word Amon so one meaning is Amon pedagog pedagog is a Greek word which in English is pedagogue it means a person who teaches T will be a teacher for us the Torah is a our pedagogue our educator that means to nurse that's another was we'll see in a moment yeah very good so has many many meanings the root is Al which could be related to amuna could be related to to raising to raise a person to bring up a child Etc but the M takes looks at various aspects of the word Amon one is Amon is a pedagogue Amon is a teacher of course even by it could mean that Mori taught Esther he brought her up and he didn't just uh uh you know teacher how to walk and Etc but he taught her important things Torah too or am mean Amon could mean covered up carried related to ton like buried somewhere it's a treasure that because the Torah is not so easy to interpret sometimes it's very deep all right could mean um and on and on but this is the the the approach taken by Rosia various possible meanings of those words omon and later much later which we won't get to today um what does it mean that the Torah is aim the Torah is a delight all right remember say that to me to God is a a pet a pet child y chuim he's a little boy I love to play with a sweet little child that's how God looks at us at b frim anyway but if you look now six seven lines from the top of the text itself you'll see the little bays and this is the uh Anonymous speaker it's no longer rosi or Raba who in alive gives us various meanings of the word omon um and this is DAL means another possible meaning of omon is um um doesn't mean where of is buried uman means a skilled laborer a Craftsman it's an um a skill if person has a skill a trade it's called umut it's called his his trade or our trade so Amon could be um meaning a a skilled person because r in order to build the world had to be an um you know to create the whole world you have to be an engineer uh a designer and an architect Etc you have to be have all these skills so the used the skills of humans uh to help so to speak to help him build the worldes and the Torah says who was you know what God had a hammer and a saw what God had Maps what do you mean he had tools of the trade so the tools of the trade says the medish again putting these words into Torah as if Torah speaks for itself and he sayses the Torah says I I was the instrument I was the I was the tools through which God created the world what does that mean God had tools what were tools so the Mish explains customary in real life me means me a king of flesh and blood a human King Bon palon he builds a a palace often you'll find in more so in medish than other rinic sources you will find Greek words that I used as if they were Hebrew words sometimes they've become Hebrew words sometimes even English words and we saw before um padog and here now we have palon which means a palace palacial he's building a palace this king is building this beautiful palace with many rooms and the corridors and a ballroom and a kitchen and etc etc and usually a dungeon in the basement so um to do that satmo the king is not an architect he can't build it on his own he knows I'd love to have the this beautiful Majestic Palace it should certainly look better than the Palaces of all the other kings I want to be number one king uh so he has his ideas but he can't do it El unless he has someone who's a Craftsman an architect who can can build it for him true but the architect himself AO he doesn't just make up the the design for the house for the palace out of his own mind and his imagination he he needs to put it down in on paper so he has to have a blueprint so we come to the blueprint now um Ella again Greek words which mean d is is a blueprint no other way to to to explain it pinkos where the word pinkos which means a notebook so he has a CH charts and notes and a blueprint uh Klo so the first thing the architect does he takes out a blueprint which is a blue piece of paper at least it used to be that way and he sketches a design he checks with the King how do you like it you think we have a room here another room here we could put steer wheells here etc etc it's all on on paper those papers are basic you can't go further that's the first step and they're all D so now he has on this chart on this blueprint he can he can tell where's he going to make where's he going to make a large room where is he going to make little closets p is a small little room almost not even can't even fit into it me it's a small little room so the same thing had an architect and the architect was a Torah and the architect what what does tah look like the tah looks like a blueprint it's black and white you know it's parchment uh paper nowadays of course it's also online uh but it's it's out there soam all he had to do is look at the blueprint look at the blueprint he can get an idea of what the world's going to look like the Torah is a blueprint for the world would look at the Torah is this is the phrase in the medish which is more Hebrew than Aramaic but the Z this the these other the words he looks at the Torah studies the Torah on the basis of what he sees in the blueprint he um create he created the world and the Torah itself says God created the world with racious what's racious racious is Torah as we we see in a momentous barim which you can translate remember from Rashi the beginning of Pas baras and all the other M since Rashi and before Rashi there's all sorts of difficulties with that simple phrase barus borim because Bas usually is nus has a is a subject for an object grammatically but here there's no object unless you go further as but means in the beginning in the beginning of what so this Kam many many approaches to that those first six eight words in the Torah but this Mish looks at it as the B is means it's it means to implement with it with races to the use of races B races with races Bim so what's RIS and he says famous words RIS refers to Torah Torah is prior it's racist Torah is number one Torah it precedes everything bir and priorities both in the religious practice but also in the creation of the world it wasn't long before the Big Bang or whatever other theories there are about the uh the creation of the world of the universe before all that there was Torah hey is Aramaic it's a contraction of the phrase where does it say that Torah is called racious that's a again as well from the case and say from Mish the Torah speaks for itself Hashem the Torah is saying God acquired me K could also mean God constructed me Built Me formed me owned me risto as the beginning of his of his path God's path was to create the world before the world was created there was Rous and the rious is Torah the Torah was like a blueprint God looked at this blueprint and created the world the create relationship Torah and World let me become very personal again this is little after I was 11 years old but I was a teenager growing up in in bar Park my father Shalom yard site is a week or so two weeks now and the um uh he daved in the Aus is Park old a is Park on 14th Avenue in 46th Street or wherever uh and in that building then those years there was the aoda where people my father's age DAV and then there was a minion of is was like young marrieds and then there was P the the the little flowers little budding flowers that was me that was me and my friends um it was like a teenage youth group we had our own Minion and everything which I credit with a lot of my education because we had a youth leader who became one of the great Russia shivas in in arus Ro since passed away but then he was a younger man and he uh he um taught us a lot to say the least in fact we used to lean the ha Tor from claim so we were 14 15 16 years old but we whoever lared the ha Torah had to prepared to be able to read it from aaf and we read all the millos not just millos Esther from a so Weir PESA from a Ru from a etc and whoever volunteered to L it or part of it we had sometimes we split it up among the several of us that way you began to learn a big chunk of tanak by heart because really know it well you have to be able to read with without noote from parchment was powerful educational experience but more powerful than that was the fact that raar was the founder of Lakewood one of the most awesome G Isel of the previous generation he's gone now quite some time but all of the Lakewood Yeshiva and the whole Lakewood Society is all based upon his dream and um he lived in B Park where I grew up in a small apartment which I happen to have visited several times as a as a teenager and um but for shabas usually Wednesday night Thursday morning he would get a ride to Lakewood and that's where he built the Yeshiva and he would give the shurm Thursday night Friday Shabbat Sunday and then he would go he needed to do that because he was so involved in uh in public works in was involved in the in the time of the Holocaust he was involved in rescue work uh solo to save people he was busy he was busy with he was busy with other and went raising funds for his Yesa then was a budding Yeshiva just just starting convincing people to give money to Yeshiva like that so he needed to be in the New York area in the city area so he lived in B Park occasionally for whatever reason he couldn't return to Lakewood for shabas so he stayed for in bar park for shabas and where do you think he chose to Davin Barak then was not what it is now but there was still plenty of shoes where he could have DAV could have DAV with the adults in the in the the in the good ISRO he chose the Davin with the teenagers with the youth minion that's he tell D with us uh we just began to appreciate who he was and what he was of course he couldn't speak a word of English and he spoke to us in Yiddish which some of us knew from our families or whatever but he also was very hard to understand he spoke very quickly because he thought very quickly and um could no way to understand him and we were 15 16 years old we weren't ready forar Cutler's Torah he hadn't reached that point yet in our studies um so he would try to kind of what should I say dumb it down for to for for for for us the teenagers so I remember two of his talks I don't remember them word for word but I remember the theme of two of his talks in one of his talks he focused on this med this medish which we just studied and he made a a very fascinating point he said you know he said to us you know you boys he called Ying which is usually a term for younger than teenagers Ying are like sixy olds but you know we were yal and he said so you I'm sure you learned that um thatu kept the whole Torah say even kept the rules of which are not Torah even it's not in the Kish you're not going to find it it's buto kept that all so didn't you always wonder he asked us how did they learn the Torah remember lived andov long before long before Matan Tor long before harini so where he get where do he know it from so he said he he quoted this medish and he says think about it you know what a blueprint is I think he used the word that he understood meant blueprint print and with a blueprint and a house you can do two things if you want to know what the house looks like look at the blueprint if you know how to read a blueprint you know what the house looks like what the structure looks like but also suppose you lose a blueprint but the house is already built so you can reconstruct the blueprint by looking at the house look at this building now and I don't know where the blueprint for this building is but if you wanted a blueprint for this building so you could construct a blueprint from from the house itself walk around house walk upstairs and look around and put it on paper and you can reconstruct a duplicate for this house 5 miles from here by looking at the blueprint that you create from studying this house so therefore if you study the blueprint you study Torah he's speaking to us if you you you boys study Torah you'll be able to understand the world because from the blueprint you can see the world also if you look at the world you look at the world of nature and he emphasized that nature doesn't just mean you know the sunset and and the forest and the trees and Etc it means your body is nature you know if you study nature um you can understand Torah and that's what AB was able to do abam was able to study the world around him there's no Matan Tor on SII there's no yet but if you look at the world well and study the world well you will be able to deduce from the world what the Torah is all about in fact the gor says if you want to learn about Snus observe a cat a cat if you ever had a cat in your home we had one one way back in Baltimore days and U his name was Vanilla Al Shalom and this cat you never saw that cat do its um bodily functions cuz would do it very Snee off in the corner in a little box that we had with sand or saw dust you if observe a cat and you could learn about sne you know you open up aish where you going to learn about sne from you have to really learn very deeply to to extract that from the Torah but you could learn it from observing nature that's a petty example but that's how you could there's a relationship between the two uh that was his point that this was the point here there's a connection between the world and Torah Torah reflects the world and the world reflects Torah ideally of course um so so that's um that was his teaching R ran Cutler based upon this this medish in later years after my teenage years I met very many people who were gim of of rabut in fact Rabbi of H who was now one of the G is and is rashka he was um also a member of this group but he was already kind I think in the the he's some years older than me and he explained to me you know arler simplified it for you Ying but really he meant something much deeper much broader and he of course he did but this is the lesson that I think makes a lot of sense in many ways so what does it mean the relationship between nature and the world now it means a lot and this is a short talk here but there's another source I'd like to share with you and that's in the next page and you'll see it um with the big letters peric sheny um and this is a passage from the rambam's major work uh which is called mishna Torah and uh in a certain Edition that I also have in front of me which is uh called rambam all right rambam for the people for the masses so it doesn't have all the extra commentaries etc etc it just has the words of the rambam with some explanatory footnotes and uh and it has noote and punctuation so it it makes it makes life easier to study uh a little bit of rambam so we'll study this little passage together as you will see it speaks for itself among the other major achievements and skills of the great rambam is was his language his ability to express himself as clearly as possible in init you're not going to find Aramaic in in in the works of the rambam the other way to attain to achieve the rambam's works by the way is if you understand Arabic because ramam wrote many of his works not this one in Arabic and most of us um have access to those Works through various translations over the centuries from his Arabic into um into IIT um I'm told by people who know Arabic that his Arabic was as masterful as his Hebrew it was just among all of his other aspects of his genius was his literary skills as you can see in the following words that come up so he's speaking about God and remember mishna Torah is rambam's summary of the whole Torah the whole blueprint of the Torah one of the easiest ways to access it's not an easy way but among the ways of accessing K torula the whole blueprint is by studying ramam from beginning to end and you'll have as RAM himself says you'll have you'll have the whole Torah in front of you mishna Torah this is a a duplicate of the Torah so at the beginning in t the found Foundation of foundations of Torah uh there is a group still in in Baltimore many baltimoreans in the audience called yod hator which is a kirov educational institution and when they were starting it good was the person who started it and he was looking for a name what can I call this institution so I can take credit I said call it you you're teaching people who have no background in Torah you're teaching them the basics call it Torah so he said yeah but that's the R I said the r doesn't have a copyright on the title you can call it you so you'll do fine so his first chapter of Y Tor of course it's about God that's the first yod and he's said now he's going to elaborate on okay God is way up there so how do we relate to God how do we how do we love God we're commanded as we'll see in a moment we we are familiar with theim kma Etc and uh how do you connect to God that's his problem which is a powerful philosophical problem but he gives you his answer which is fascinating and especially in terms of the connection between the blueprint nature and Torah so he writes notice I say the rambam writes in the present tense not the rambam wrote Because rambam died 800 plus years ago but course in yish that's that's the way it's refer to any of the G Isel from centuries and centuries ago you don't say in the past tense they wrote they say they say they as if they're alive nowos who om you know he he used to say not he said but he used to say he's still alive with us so when I say ra writes Pres intense this glorious and mighty God it's a Mitzvah to love him that's a strong word it's a clear meaning ohave means to love with all the implications of Love also and also to fear him with all the implications of fear as the says in we say it in ET you have to love him but it's also written in the Torah you also have to fear him so there these two Mitzvah you have to love him you have to fear Him one of the rambam's quote Rivals was the ramban rabi Moshe Ben who lived a generation or two after rambam but he has a different framework because he points out a beautiful formulation which is useful to know how we fulfill the Mitzvah of loving God by doing his positive mitzvos so if you keep the mitah you visit the sick you go to a wedding in you give sta Etc all those positive Commandments that's how you show love for God you show fear of God by keeping his negative Commandments by not eating TR by not eating P that's how you show your fear love you th you show through demon demonstrative actions fear you show through avoidance through staying staying away from his Commandments his so the a is a way of fulfill the Dos of the Torah do to do things do mitos and is what you do to avoid AOS but R doesn't have that formulation ramban does but there certainly two two Mitzvah in the Torah are clear as they but now uh is really the focus of of our talk today how do you do that you know all right we have you're dealing with little kids you can say God is like an old man in heaven and blah blah blah but if a person's more sophisticated adult a mature person what does it mean to love God how I do that how I Fear God how can I get how can I acquire these emotions AA and Powerful emotions they're probably the two most powerful emotions for All Humans love and fear so he answer as follows and this is the connection the r of how you achieve which is a Mitzvah in the Torah you achieve it from nature from looking at the world with Wonder remember that word wonder you don't find many people saying oh that's wonderful anymore that's not that's not strong enough you have to say awesome right awesome is y right or used to be to mean y now you know oh this potato cougle is awesome anyway I was trained in a l Yesa with aiva from from the old country from Lithuania said the ram when you learn the rambam you have to learn every word every word who was from background he used to say when you learn Rashi you have to learn every word but in L Rashi of course is Rashi but Bram is up there too so you have to look at every word and and especially because of the command of language that rambam had it's really important to learn every word when the person reflects you spell name means to reflect to contemplate it's the shes is of course is bino to look deeply you don't just look at oh wow there the fireworks or oh beautiful the beautiful scenery wow that's fine but you have to be Mis Bon look at it more carefully what is what is this if you in nature look at the how the water is Flowing down the stream and it's breaking on this on the on the on the rocks and then some of the water goes this way and some goes that way and look there's a little fish jumping out and study the the scenery of nature remembering that this uh walk in the park that you're doing is the the here you're seeing more than by walking even in the streets of youram now day you don't see much so much the the handiwork of God but you do when you see nature in in its natural form they are the that those scenes of scenes of nature are the these are the deeds and creation wondrous great Wonders of Nature and when you observe nature carefully you can see the wisdom of God and again I stress this is by looking at your functions of your body if one that deserves basic biology if you go to a doctor and really understand you know how your body is functioning or at our age not functioning as well as it used to but all of that is it's it's all full of amazing wisdom loates in English his wisdom which is infinite a it has no way of measuring his the locates it's endless and and that's true if you look at nature very very carefully uh with a microscope or telescope whatever it takes to really look at nature and study it mad just by studying it seeing how awesome it is MI immediately without too much more reflection you fall in love with the creator of all this beauty noce how he writes he's he's so effervescent it's just flowing you immediately if you just reflect on nature you know a simple physical tasks that you do it used to be easy for me to walk up the steps okay I to run up the steps if you reflect on what it takes for a human body to go up steps and really reflect on how many muscles are involved and how and so immediately if you really reflect M then M immediately who ohave you fall in love with this wise being who created all this created the beauty of nature the beauty of the anatomy of a human or of any animal out there and you begin to praise this being and to glorify him there's no better translation then you lust you long you have Tava you have a a passion for I want to know about this God I want to know about this this who can create this universe and and I shouldn't even stop with just Earth you know nowadays just the other day China reached the Dark Side of the Moon uh and what kind of Wonders lie you know On the Dark Side of the Moon who knows we don't know maybe in some years we'll find out it just the beginning of God's wonders but you want to know more about this the shame kavid now David also looked through toim just ch chooses one or twoim at almost at random but when you say toim most of these days say a lot of toim and you pay attention to the words of tahim you'll see how much how much of David's amuna David's Faith was not philosophical faith it was a faith based upon the the world that he saw well he saw a world at war so he deduced from war a lot about the the Godless of the Reon from his own life from his own family relations from his own rebellious children from that's all part of Nature and he he deduced from this his concept of God and he writes my my nees my soul thirsts for the living godos if you approach M from the we stay with our children we in the states and you go off of the go the um um palisad Parkway to the road to M you will see a have house of worship of another faith and there's a big sign uh my my soul thirsts for the Living God I'm not sure what Living God they're referring to but they're referring to this when you really begin to think until this point you're just reflecting observing it's you're being moved to a passionate love for this being and and for a desire to know more but when you really think more about it it's not just love that you begin to feel you begin to say wow I fear this power this power that can create such a world yes I I love it it's just impressive it's gorgeous it's brilliant yeah but it's pretty scary right that's the next step that's the ER when you reflect more and again this is clar there's levels of thought all right notice first is there's name there's a level ofina right women have an extra dose of Bina but then the Beyond Bina there's some other higher levels and higher levels and still higher levels so there's one level of being a of of looking at nature and thinking about it and considering it and everything else and that's going to stir up your emotions of love your passion positive in a positive sense but then if you go further you suddenly recoil you bounce back oh wow and you're afraid you tremble via and then you realize oh wow a lesson that we all need to learn all except people who suffer from extreme inferiority complexes all right but we all have to have an inferiority complex because we realize by reflecting on all this she who that he the the human birat each of us is a small creature a small Speck in the universe shaa AA that's a language where a small creature a tiny creature lowly and dark you know we can you know look at a whole whole landscape and you won't even see us we'll be a speck in the landscape homemade we standa with a very limited lightweight intelligence you know what do we are so we have 120 IQ 140 IQ compared to this wise Master of the Universe it's nothing it's it's a it's a minuscule before this brilliant unbelievably Infinite Wisdom of the tomim de deos the complete wisdom of God again he Retreats so to speak to the language of DAV you can't do better in the language of writes in when I behold your Heavens the handiwork of your fingers God sometimes paints broad strokes and sometimes you know creates little minute almost microscopic things um K's grandfather the Maj rebba used to say um we say so many times so he used to say knowing living into the well into the 20th century nowadays with telescopes and microscopes and everything else like that now we can say makot look how wonderful are the little tiny little things I remember structor in biology that I had in Brooklyn College also long ago we studying biology this was in the mid late 1950s he said throw away your books on the chapter of genetics because these SCH guys what their names again Crick and Watson so and Crick and they discovered something called DNA so they're just beginning to discover it we don't know too much about it but we just throw out the old books and we're about to learn about DNA and now they solve crime through DNA and they identify un fortunately bodies some of the recent bodies of the hostages NE the only way they could identified them was through very sophisticated forensic techniques is based on fragments bone fragments and whatnot it's horrible to even think about but nevertheless God your small little microscopic things are also unbelievably brilliant so in view of God's wisdom what Moos what are human beings the fact that you think about us we're supposed to dve to you you're way way above us and we are puny little dummies now says okay based on this this powerful statement now I can build on it had further theories a lot of them are based on his medical knowledge which was for his time unbelievable he's going to base that on these two forms AA and Y and AA and Y are the method the pith to God that's how you get to God it's through nature it's the it's the by studying the blueprint by studying the the world you can come to understand the blueprint the blueprint is and then he's introduces what he's about to speak about in more detail what I gave you was a door to begin to understand what it means he says means and the footnote says in just where this is It's a and this is like the slogan of people who think this way the connection between nature and and worship of God quote you want to understand God who said a few words and there was you want to understand that you have to study and understand nature and he takes it from there so that's the the blueprint and the the blueprint and the palace the palace is the world and everything that's in it from distant planets to our own microbes and body parts all the way uh to andem and and from there you go on to Torah Rama by the way believes to study Torah you have to have inem person who's not not into God can't study Torah that's one of the theories of the r the theories he knew what he was talking about and he knew people who thought they knew Torah but didn't you know he knew Greek philosophers Etc you know they have limitations because without aasem you can't really miss Torah which is another topic for another discussion I want to just share with you briefly we have I think three or four minutes left a um a story an anecdote I read in a book I just found with some of the U anecdotes about ra amital R Yuda Amal who was the Russa one with Rin now they're both gone and the so he was a fascinating person and he tells a story about a young man came over to him and said you know rebi I um I have difficulty with keson now we come to Roes a little bit but we're still dealing with nature the Moon is part of Nature and a week or so we we'll have go out Mo shabas maybe and do Kish L look up at the moon and we recite look in the city you see a br uh so he said I can't do that I can't I can't go out with the rest of these Shiva Outdoors I'm going to sit and look at the Moon and pray I feel like I'm praying to the Moon I'm worshiping I'm a moon worshipper I can't do it just it's like a Vora to me it's idolatry we going out and going to the Moon saying prayers it's idolatry soal gave him two aners two levels of answer he says first of all whenever you have these kind of feelings you know I can't do this particular MIT it makes no sense to me whatever it is you know so first thing you got to do is study everything out there about that Mitzvah you know you have difficulty I don't know putting Onin learn everything there is about learn the G that speaks about learn the Torah the that speaks about learn Rashi learn the ran learn the learn the Mish learn it all you know becoming familiar with the with the with the Torah of in other words the the the the study of the subject object you'll you'll you'll be able to do whatever you find it difficult to do just learn about KES there's plenty of material about it and Etc that's number one number two gave him this lesson this lesson you're not worshiping the moon you're looking at the moon and through the moon you're learning about the and look what the moon is all right the Moon is the moon know one night is not there know pretty soon this this is a black star you can't even find the moon then you see a little sliver and then the sliver gets bigger over time and then by the 15th of the month of the Hebrew month you're going to see the full moon then suddenly begin to diminish and primitive man used to think oh it's not coming back you know but two weeks later it's coming back but it's coming back slowly and and and what does that mean but how does that work and if you know a basic astronomy of how it all works H you know it's not that there's a you know a light that's getting bigger and smaller it's the way that the Moon is positioned as it revolves around the earth Etc it's very complex it shows the so when you reflect on and that's what we're doing yeah we're saying all these fos very nicely so I I thought of adding to this this idea of raal and with this to conclude because it's about KES starting the new month with the new moon but it's also relevant uh uh for today's mat with Wars on many fronts of many types Wars of rockets and and drones and and fire forest fires and Etc but also Wars of vicious anti-Semitism and Wars of all all kinds of Wars so we need Shalom so a topic for another time another teacher is do women also recite L all right yes or no that's a topic for another time why yes why no but basically it's it's one of the how can I say it's a men's thing but if you ever watched or participated in Kish one of the things you do everybody you can have a 100 people out there you approach three other people in the group and you say shalom and they say to you shalom shalom shom shalom shalom what's that all about you know when you have a I don't know the say do you say shom shalom to everybody who's sitting around the S table you know do you say shalom by the moon you do it you do it so so it I feel it's a very simple answer we say it in the kades the last part of Kadesh is shalom shalom we're in a situation now all of us just a few miles away half hour drive who knows what's going on we have who knows how many hostages are still alive and we pray and we empathize with the families it's the most horrible experience that can possibly imagine if not knowing if your brother sister wife father child little baby children are alive or dead or if they're alive what kind of horrible circumstances they're under will they return When will they return how will on and on everything everything we experience at this time so we want Shalom and we pray for Shalom and then whenever you find the word Shalom Rashi says in last week's Shalom week's have a list of bros you're going to have food and plenty and blah blah blah blah blah but all right if there's no Shalom SOI adds no Shalom and cl not what you know what's worth anything without Shalom but how do you get Shalom who can make shom so maybe the the qataris are going to make Shalom okay you're going to bank on the qataris it's almost laughable unfortunately so you're going to depend upon uh this President this politician next next president that's what even depend upon the the the army they all be well and safe and everything else like that but they also have obviously limitations and make mistakes and they're humans but in Kadesh we say shalom The God Who makes peace ROV what does it means to make peace bov the sun rises in the morning and it sets in the evening sometimes it's a little hot sometimes it's not so hot but nevertheless it's it's there and the moon don't forget the Sun the moon had a big fight way back when the sun the moon Moro SDM that were both the same size and the moon was jealous and said why can't I be bigger you soam says I'll make Shalom between you all right the Shalom is the sun will remain big and hot and the Sun and everything else the moon you I'm reducing you in size and your your light will be only a reflection of the Sun's light so that's the that's a put down on the other hand you're going to have all these Stars you know that's how God make peace so when we say shalomov means in the celestial spheres we mean things like that no the very fact that there's a universe and and it's functioning and that's bov that's what we've been learning about nature so he who the capital H who is O shalomov who it's only God who is shom