103: Peace vs. Truth (Aliya pt. 5)

hi this is devon olowski and welcome to the rabbi yolovsky show whether you're watching with our friends over at any time or whoever you watch or listen to your podcast we are so happy to have you along for this adventure i just got such a beautiful email from somebody else who discovered the show and talked about how much physic they get from it and uh what can i tell you that's uh that's such a meaningful thing to me you know yeah to know that uh you can uh share ideas that add to people's lives i don't know if i ever told this story i feel like i told the story you know i'm in an age where i'm entitled to tell the same story again yeah um i uh give a share of the mostly chavez and harno at least i did before corona and um and uh it i just there was there was a time when i was just too busy i just had too many things i had a cooper in my life when i used to leave my house at 6 40 in the morning come back 10 15 at night then i first had phone calls and emails and things like that and it was just too busy so i was gonna cut it out because it takes time to prepare i i would say every other week a partial share for an hour on a new topic that i had not spoken about before and just get up and talk for an hour i know i i make it look so easy but you know it's not so easy and especially if uh i'm going to cover all of the obligations that i want to have in the course of uh shir which i i want to say i used to have people who were real often uh it's got to be practical because it's going to be practical it's got to be inspiring people coming to mostly shop it's here in itself that's our entire saturday night we don't have a sunday here sunday's a regular day so someone who's sharing their entire saturday night it's going to be something that's inspiring and it's going to be entertaining yeah toys should be entertaining it should be something that's enjoyable so uh put all those elements together and uh talk for an hour it takes a lot it takes a lot of time to prepare i didn't spend a lot of time but but it takes a lot of time so anyway so i was looking for things to cut out and i was going to cut out this year and uh a friend of mine took me through a business shapiro and uh he says listen if there's anything today that gives physique to people it's the most important thing it's more important than anything else so i said but i have so many other obligations he says i know i feel bad you have to get rid of some of them so i gave up a few of my children i hope they're happy but anyway just kidding but uh you know uh uh he do something that gives kuznick and uh i have to say that the thousands of people who watch this um podcast they're very few venues that i've had when i speak to that many people in fact if my numbers are correct i've never spoken to that many people uh who in one place as i can reach with the podcast especially when people listen to it over you know different times and things it's remarkable anyway this episode is sponsored anonymously as this course for shidduchim of the donor's family amir shem as i have mentioned in the past i am a cohen i'm part of the union and uh we um [Music] i i give you my own personal broker that everyone should be able to find their zebug the karov find the right one it should be able to go well and uh i guess maybe we'll talk about dating i don't know some point you know you get stuck in a series and then yeah you know have other things you might want to talk about in your in your series which is where i am right now i've been speaking about aliyah and just to review the reason i'm speaking about this is because with the deteriorating situation particularly in america as well as for jews in europe south america other places there are so they say tens of thousands of jews who are considering moving territory um and as i said at the very beginning you know river left said that uh he went to ramosha feinstein and the biak of kaminetsky and they both told them the future of claire's show is an earth show having said that it's uh it's a it's a difficult decision difficult decision and i know that there have been people have been upset at me as i have raised some of the problems but listen the way we jews make decisions is by creating conflict i've ever told this story um i uh i had a uh i was teaching and or at the time i come to the class and you can feel the tension there's a lot of tension and i walk in and i hadn't even started usually you know i have to say something before there's a lot of tension there's a lot of tension in him and people say ask him ask him yeah so guy says rabbi can i ask you a question sure it says i heard that if a jew is if a if a jewish rounding and a non-jew is drowning you save the jew yeah i said okay obviously when you have to make decisions the idea has to do with mitzvos there's a value to mistress in the world and jewel has more mitzvos than an anju and that's that's the reason so he says so if some jew that i don't know is drowning and my father is drowning i have to let my father drop die i said okay let's take a deep breath i said let me tell you another command it says if your father is drowning who's a jew yeah your father's drowning in your rebbe is drowning who do you save you save your rebbe why because your father brings you into this world but your rebbe brings you into the next world now i know some fathers have been upset about this and i said to them how often do you think this happens i said if you're about to get on a boat check the roster see if your son's wrapping's there if it is take the next boat how often this has come up i said but we create conflict that's what the gemara does because the only way you can make decisions is by creating conflict i always say when i was running ncsy on long island i had to make a lot of decisions i don't like making decisions no it's not really fair there are some decisions i like to make so there's a caterer whose food is excellent he's inexpensive and reliable and there's another caterer his food is crummy he's unreliable and he's more expensive i like those decisions yeah so i know which one to choose but sometimes you have to choose between one person's food was not so good but he wasn't expensive and he was reliable there's not a guy with much better food but he was unreliable and uh he was more expensive so you have to make a decision where seinfeld says you go to the drugstore this one's fast acting but this one's long-lasting when do i want to feel better now or later [Laughter] you gotta make decisions so the gemara creates conflict even though it may never happen right why just in order for you to understand values what's more important this world or the next world so they want to show you that the next world is more important and therefore if you uh um have a choice between your rebbe and your father you save your happy even though i don't know if this has ever happened in human history but the way you make decisions is by creating conflict you have to create conflict yeah so um so in absolute terms what's more important living in israel or learning torah that's an easy one that's an easy one because it says you're allowed to leave israel in order to learn to and that people would go for merits right above them mostly learn tiger so learning torah is definitely uh a greater value um is full-time learning for everybody it's not for everybody um the i learned would sometimes call on somebody and say you're a nice guy so go out get a job in ambassador teach good job but this you you're not gonna make it entire so for you to sit here and and uh learn full-time is not for you so if you say everybody has to just sit and learn full-time you're being unrealistic they can't be one-size-fits-all for everybody mrs sharon says this at the beginning capricious where he says it's impossible to make one standard for everybody there are different types of people with different types of challenges you have to be real so if a person wants to sit and learn it was a time when i was teaching seminary i i seriously messed up these girls it was terrible they would go out on a date with the boy and he says i want to learn full time i want to learn long time long term and be a long-term learner and they say why because uh you know supposed to learn you know well i are you hoping to become a shiva do you you know this is where you want to go is this you know i don't know i want to learn because that's what you do because as i have said too many times everybody does what everybody does because that's what everybody does but to stop and think why so too excel absolute value no question about it you got to be real got gotta be real i said over all right bowman and from all the work where they would say that if you have older children you shouldn't come i say it depends not that i'm a i've done a bar but you know it depends on the situation but i understand what they're saying because i've seen kids nice settled kids who were in their schools in america and then they suddenly transfer over here they don't have any friends they don't speak the language the the culture is not uh the same and suddenly they're they're they're at the bottom where as they were towards the top it's a wrenching thing yeah so uh so so what's my point my point is the consideration uh if it works out it's compelling and i've gotten different responses from this series certain people said thank you for so much for dealing with this topic so honestly and candidly it helps me to make my decision better and some people said you know i realized that i really wanted to do this but i realized based on the considerations that you're raising at this point our family is just not going to be able to handle it okay so so have your eyes open when you're making a decision like i say you know you have to whatever it is do it by thinking the end of every thing that is an action first you have to think about it i'm sure i told this story that's one of my favorites i was at a chapel town some place and the person said to me this is a very successful shabbaton it was just before i said really why he says well we brought last students together and they're all having a great time i said was the purpose of the shabbaton to bring a lot of students together and give them a great time he thinks that he says what should be the purpose of a shabbaton i said shabbos milk is the wrong time to make that decision how did you decide before you make the shabbaton why am i making the shabbaton what's my goal what am i trying to accomplish go to the end still sean perry gimble says this world is like a maze you know you cheated amazed you go to the end work your way backwards you can cheat figure out where you're going so uh so like i say so i want to finish up this series not because there's not more to say but you know some of the criticism i've received is you you're not an expert you've been here for 32 years but situations have changed the person's making aliyah today there's other considerations there are organizations dedicated to this and they're right i've heard of having some people on and having them speak and then i realized what for go to them directly you can you can look up which organizations there are you know maybe we'll include a few links but uh you know go speak to the people who are involved today and get all the information or as we say here in hebrew inframatia yeah if you're worried about speaking hebrew don't worry it's getting easier yeah so i want to end with uh the series with something that might seem a little technical but i think is important even if you don't make aliyah it's important just to have an understanding and i would like to explain the political system over here in israel um i'm addressing myself to americans i have a regular person who watches in switzerland and says i feel like your podcast is not being aimed mostly to the swiss and uh that is for sure true because my friend uh y rubenstein um he told me he was invited to speak in switzerland when he got there they said but you know in switzerland rabbis do not tell jokes now i have to tell you why is one of the funniest people out there he's he's hysterically funny and i've always felt like you know sometimes they do they advertise me to speak and they say the world's funniest rabbi and i say no really he should he should get that title the difference is i can't stop it i don't know how to speak completely straight i can't and the truth is i've gotten better at it but you know little little jokes just tend to ooze out of me what can i do it's uh says something about i guess my approach to life but uh he could be totally straight you know so uh i i don't know how it's a little hard for me but i do refer you to my two tish above videos they may they may be helpful but uh but otherwise yeah i'm going to be addressing myself mostly to the united states let me explain to you the way things work in the united states um in the continental uh congress they hammered out an amazing uh concept that had never been done before hard to find where it's ever been done uh since and that is the following there's a constitution the constitution yeah la have dealt with itself and it says okay this is what we all agree to these are the basic principles upon which the united states is based and you can amend it you can add amendments the bill of rights or amendments that were added on yeah amendments the right to free speech the right to bear arms the freedom of religion you know all these different kind of things and uh and uh you can add more amendments you can change the amendments in the majority of the states to agree but that was the idea and then they said okay we're going to have a legislative body so the large states said good we'll go by population the small state said that we won't be represented well i'm not going to join your union so they came up with two houses they're the senate where every state whether you're california new york and texas and florida with a lot of people or whether you're wyoming without so many people everybody gets two senators yeah and then a house of representatives based on population and things have to go through the two houses um they may pass laws and the laws may not be clear do they fit in with the constitution or not are they do they go against one of the constitutional uh principles so they set up a court system the supreme court who is only there to decide whether or not what you're doing is in keeping with the constitution or not keeping with the constitution at least theoretically that's how it's supposed to work and then they made an executive right corresponding to the king so in england they had a king and they had a parliament you know and there was a house of lords and there was a you know the house of parliament you know the common house and uh there was a certain thing but the king had certain powers so here they have it as a president and the president has certain executive powers and the idea was to set up a balance of powers but over everything was the constitution and if you didn't like the constitution then you had to make you know uh uh constitutional another constitutional uh congress change them you know the majority of the states you know etc so that's how everything works you know things work because it goes it goes to the house it goes to the senate you know they each have a bill and you have to try to put the two bills together you know the the president could veto it and then the congress can uh override his veto and then they could say this wasn't legal and then you go to the supreme court it has a little balance israel doesn't have a constitution all they have is what's called the parliamentary system a hundred and twenty seats in the knesset they based it on the ancestor the men of the great assembly which was made up of 120 scholars and uh prophets this uh knesset which is the israeli parliament is made up of neither scholars nor prophets yeah there's a lot of politics that go on over there it can sometimes be very acrimonious it's a famous story they tell it a lot and i i notice when when tourists come here they always tell the story over the story of the two brothers the two brothers shared a field and one brother was single and the other one had a lot of children and the deal was they worked the field and then they would split everything up at the end of the day and uh [Music] so the brother who had a lot of children said you know my brother has nothing it's just him who's going to take care of him in his old age so he would take some of his you know grain and bring it over to his brother's side at night and the brother who was single said you know i don't have any expenses my brother has a lot of children and so he would bring some of his grain over to the other side and every day they ended up with the same amount i couldn't understand what's happening and one night the two brothers met in the middle of the field and they realized what was happening and they embraced and on that place was built the basement that's the story josh hartman who is best known for his works on the maharao said that that story is of christian origin there is no such a majorish the whole thing is a christian story it's not true so i told this over once someone said to me but there is a story that is true i said really he says yeah there were two brothers and they shared a field and one brother had a lot of children and the other one had nobody so the brotherhood nobody said my brother he gets half the same as me i have nobody to take care of me in the old age so every night he would go over and steal some of the wheat from his brother and the brother had all the children said that selfish dog he has no expenses and we're supposed to put 50 and every night he would go over and steal some of his brother's wheat and surprisingly in the morning they had the same amount and one night they met in the middle and they realized what were happening and they beat each other up and on that spot they built the knesset now i don't know if that story's any truer than the first story it is but what it means is that the knesset has a lot of acrimony in it now here's the thing there is no executive branch there's no president there there is a president of the state of israel he can do pardons he could do certain other things you know but it's mostly a ceremonial position um theoretically if i have 61 seats i can do anything i want anything i want um i've pointed this out many times that the kurdish baroque has a sense of humor and there was an election between uh perez and uh and uh netanyahu after rabbin was killed and it was so tight the exit polls the exit polls declared perez the winner by four tenths of one percent now come on you know there's a margin of error and the labor party started celebrating and they were here and i heard that night they interviewed yao dayan from the labor party and they said listen you have to recognize at least half the country is against you she said the way it works in israel is if i have one more vote i can do anything i want and i don't have to take you into account at all scary but true anyway after they counted all the votes it ended up that netanyahu won by half a percent and later in that day i heard them interviewing yao dayan again and she said netanyahu has to remember that almost half the country voted against him because it goes wrong has a sense of humor right and that's why if everybody hadn't attacked um you know justice kavanaugh and believe all women believe all women and then when accusations came out against joe biden they said well you can't just believe anybody you need proof it's the juxtaposition that creates humor it's always that way yeah so uh it's a contrast so um so it's a parliamentary system and you do not vote for a person you vote for a party now in the united states there are two parties there are smaller parties but of course uh they don't really have much of a chance of getting into congress you might have an independent here and there but for the most part you're going to be a democrat or republican in england there's three or four parties that's it this is labor party and there's the tories and uh there's i think the liberal party and i think the social democrats i may be wrong but uh but that's it so you know three four parties two major parties two smaller parties and israel works like this they had to pass a law that you have to meet a certain minimum threshold you can't get in why because every two people made their own party they have been in the past um the taxi driver party which they were running on a platform of protecting the rights of taxi drivers there was the pensioneers party which was uh set up just for um [Music] to make sure that uh you know the retirees uh had uh had all their rights they've been different parties with very specialized things but for the most part for most of history there was the labor party there was the leak could which later became the lead could it was a number of uh you know different uh there was the root party and different they all more or less came together and uh and there were the religious parties that was for the most part there was also the arab parties and the communist parties but they were they were a smaller percentage for much of israel's history and that was basically it and then things began to fracture so there was the mizrahi party which joined together with i think paulie mizrahi if if i'm correct and they formed what's called maf dao and english they called the national religious party there was uh the aguda and pole aguda that formed one party in 1992 it split into two parties uh the aguda and digo torah eventually they joined back together uh and they noticed united torah judaism and uh and then ay dairy uh together with uh yosef and uh some other you know major individuals in the safari community started a smarty religious party known as shas now what happened eventually you know went through a number of iterations there is no party called mafda in the knesset anymore they came by you d and then became it became very complicated but for the most part there were always three religious parties there was the aguda or whatever its manifestation was there was the maf dao which was the national religious and there was shas which was the smartie religious party those are the religious parties you'd think one religious body would be enough but of course not and then there are the left-wing parties of which there are many labor at one point was the largest and that split off into merits which was actually a three separate parties that formed a block and it kept breaking up and reforming different ones there have been several attempts over the years to form what they call a centrist party but a centrist party is very difficult to to maintain they've had different ones throughout the years um eventually that's what blue and white was supposed to be the blue white party which joined together with yahya lapid who had what was essentially an anti-religious secular party that was his main goal when he was in power his goal was to defund all of the yeshivas and and take away money from the religious and uh that was his father's program uh when uh when he had his party as well and uh you know he says he's gonna lock up all the midvos that's where they won't have any more children that'll be the end of them i would say really negative stuff really really negative stuff but um but uh those are the centrist parties so you vote for a party and then the party uh is more or less aligned with the left or the right yeah and so blue and white was more or less aligned with the left and they knew they were going to make a coalition with labor and with merits and with those parties and lily could was going to make a coalition together with the religious parties like a right-wing government and that was netanyahu who is the head of liquid and he's been in power for a very long time well recently we went through three elections we could not get a majority on one side it was a deadlock i kept going back and forth now uh very complicated party is of course avigdor lieberman who's supposed to be a right-wing party but who hates netanyahu with such a passion that uh that he will not join with netanyahu so he would rather go and join with the left wing even though his criticism of the tanyo is that he's not right wing enough and uh that's a mess then right now he's not in the government it's sort of a coalition government every week there's another crisis and and things like that so uh so elections are very emotional here very emotional um in america was never that emotional until um until uh the um until uh trump came in and then everybody just went crazy [Laughter] but otherwise it wasn't so you know they used to put posters over here in hebrew to get the americans to vote so i remember when bush was running against uh john kerry so there was a big sign bouche bay's bluff shin bush and one kerry kufray now if you know any hebrew it basically means that there is an election between embarrassment and tuma and i and which one anyway but um uh you know it's uh but here elections become very very emotional and uh tremendous tremendous participation etc and very often things get deadlocked but because of that if there's a party in power and you don't have somebody to go to or somebody who's gunning for you it becomes a problem it becomes uh becomes a big problem how you uh work around these things so there is no constitution but every now and then they pass what's called the basic law and aaron barack when he was the head of the supreme court decided that the basic laws form a constitution he decided this on his own and he was very much a um what they call a judicial activist and they decide to use the courts to uh to uh force through an agenda and say this is legal this is not legal and they get very into everybody because his his position was everything is judicial everything can be judged any event that's the uh that's more or less the system here so uh what's the what's the message the message i want to bring across and to finish this series there are so many parties why can't we just get together one right wing one left wing we're one center either one one religious party you know what so that says the following it says jews want peace non-jews want to fight so i'm safer but you see that non-jews always get along and jews are always fighting so he says because there's always two forces that a person has to deal with he has to deal with peace and he has to deal with truth and jews given the choice will always go for truth and we just can't let let go of what we believe to be true remember the elizabeth horconus of whom it was said if you put all the sages on one side and put him on the other side he would mahria he would decide all of them yeah i don't want to say outweigh but he would decide all of them that was his he was so great and he had an argument with the other rabbis about a oven an earthenware oven that became tame impure and he had a method to try to allow it and the sages went against him and he refused to give up his position and he was eventually put into uh he was excluded from the community and i'm thinking to myself today you know so okay so you open your own yeshiva and you you go in and country distinction of everybody and say yeah i'm smarter than everybody else he didn't he walked off the stage of jewish history one of the one of the most courageous things that a person ever did and uh it's an amazing thing he could have just given up he could have just said hey whatever okay i was voted in but he says i know i'm right and so i'm going to go with the truth over peace you ever try to tell a joke to a jew very you tell the whole joke and then you know remember i told this joke once and someone says uh you know there's a jew living on a desert island and he gets rescued and he shows him all the things he's built and then he shows him his synagogue and he shows him another synagogue he says why do you have two synagogues he says i would never dive in in that one i wouldn't pray in that one i told this joke over and over and says that's not how it goes and he tells the same exact joke only there's three synagogues he says this is the one i pray in this is the one i pray in when i have fights with the people in that one and that one i would never pray when someone says no no it goes like this and i was like you can't even agree on a joke does it really make a difference yeah but uh okay listen we jews uh we jews have uh really tried to maintain truth when you come to it's shell things are real serious here in america it's much easier to be a contradiction makes you a metaphors you know take a little from this a little from that a little from this here in israel you know one person wrote me and they said you're describing your experiences because you made aliyah and became part of the kharadi community could be could be in america i i was what they used to call gray i don't know if they still have this it's great i wasn't black it wasn't white i was great come to israel there's no such a thing so i go and i look at the two different schools and i decided to send my daughters to basia outcome and once i did most of my decisions were made for me now i knew which newspaper i read now i know which goalkeepers are about to eat now i know you know everything like that and what's interesting is the people who went to the mizrahi school in my building stopped talking to me because there's no tolerance isn't it it's black and white it's either this way or it's that way because truth is so important in america people are much more easy going yeah i i i met somebody you know lived in brooklyn and i said listen in brooklyn people don't have this much intensity everybody just goes out to eat you know i mean that's that's what they do a lot of times she says what are you talking about my robbie came in from australia i went to the airport to pick him up i said what'd you do we went out to eat i'm generalizing generalizing obviously because there are two types of people those who generalize those who don't but uh i'm a generalizer yeah but uh here life is very intense you don't see it so much now but i remember when yeah you'd be on a bus and an ambulance would go by and everybody stopped and looked out the window because that's that's one of my family members yeah i used to remember when the news would come on at the head of the hour the bus driver would turn up the news and everybody quite hear what's going on until this over once and someone told me i was here in 1953 and they used to show newsreels before the movies and in the newsreel they told the story you know they showed a film you know about uh kibbutz up north whose bond burned down he says and the people in the theater were crying that's the level of intensity this is a real intense place it's a real intense place if you're uh it's an unbelievable thing i spent america pesach to be with my mother when i came back i had to give my vote to child this and i said you know in the haggadah they darshan all the sukum over there um [Music] number as it says against his will because god said he had to he doesn't ring a and some of them apart from saying because there is no other way to leave aaron's jaw except on the selfie of the boy because i have to but to have this close to living in his child is an unbelievable thing and anyone who can as we used to say in motel 6 we'll leave the lights on for you and that's it for this week and this will conclude my aliyah series i gotta talk about some other stuff uh if you want to find out more about the show you go to my rep's website wallowski.com you can make comments uh you can uh sponsor an episode uh i don't have any upcoming events though you can sign up for the daf yummy we just started getting aravind you can sign up for the massachusetts new person just joined so excited to have them along we have two of them uh one on sunday one on monday and uh you know just if you just can't get enough of me anyway that's it for this week i'm devin rolofsky and this is the rob rolovsky show it's the rabbi orlovsky show torah and simra ready to go the rabbi orlovsky show knowledge and wisdom will help you grow lots of fun in every episode and we don't have to rhyme though it's the rabbi orlovsky show on rabbi orlovsky.com [Music] till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the rabbi yolowski show it's the rabbi orlovsky