Transcript
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[Music]
Egypt is outside your front
door. Every time you leave your home,
every time you cross the threshold,
you're walking out into Egypt. Egypt was
a society of unbridled pleasure
seeeking. Sounds sort of familiar,
doesn't
it?
[Applause]
Of the four elements, the element that
is associated with pleasure is water.
The river Nile was the water god of
Egypt. Water has no shape. It's
infinitely fluid. Excuse the pun. Water
always takes the shape of what you put
it in. That's why the Hebrew word for
water, mim, is a plural noun. There's
nothing singular about water.
Egypt was the ultimate expression of
going with the flow. Egyptian society
was all about infinite variety and
therefore marital
infidelity. Egypt was the asis zenunim,
the faithless wife who seeks a new
partner every day, infinitely fluid.
That was Egypt then. And that's the
secular culture we're surrounded by
today.
[Music]
The only place we can escape from Egypt
is on our
homes. Every time I leave my house, I
kiss the muza and I ask Hashem to guard
my eyes from the infinite infidelity of
the street. Why the
muza? On the outside of every muza are
inscribed the letters Shin, Dalot, and
Yud. These letters spell one of God's
names, Sha Dai. Enroll Muza. And in that
self-same place where sha da is written
on the outside on the inside are the
letters of the ineffable fourletter name
of names yud
vke. The name sha dai conotes
limitation. D means enough in Hebrew.
The name yud vke is the name of
infinity. According to Jewish law, the
rashuta raim, the public domain, ascends
vertically only to approximately 3 f
feet above the ground. Horizontally,
however, it can extend everywhere. It
could flow all over the world
theoretically, but it never ascends. The
rashuta, the private domain, the home
that has no upper limit. It ascends to
the
sky. The muza marks the border between
the street and the home. The street says
go here, go there, do what you want, go
with the flow. Everything is possible.
Nothing is
forbidden. And Muza stands like a
sentinel at our thresholds, silently
telling us that if we say die, if we say
enough to the street, if we make a
strong demarcation between all that the
street stands for and the sanctity of
our homes, then inside God's ineffable
name, the name of Yudke Vke will lift
our homes and our lives higher than the
sky.
[Music]
