112: It's Sukkos! Happy Chanuka!

hi this is double dolofski welcome to the roberto show and whether you're watching with our friends over at tour anytime whoever you watch or listen to your podcast we are certainly excited to have you along for the experience in our special second circus presentation um last time i mentioned uh about the fact that the um the hoshanah that we say on shabbos seems to be focusing on a lot of issues that are durable and that was i wanted to suggest because since the only reason we're not doing real hoshanas with aerodynamin even though on the first day of circus it's a mitsubi arisa is because the robot and we're afraid that somebody might come to carry and so for that because of that concern so we tell all of clients how they can't do the mitzvah a very strange idea so i mentioned at the time if you recall uh ramosa feinstein says we don't blow chauffeur on rosh hashanah on the first day and it's such an important thing because the kia schaefer actually moves the kurdish borough from the kizer then to the kisarakum from the throne of judgment to the throne of mercy so how could you do without it so he says assad go sadhu-gohan says one of the ten reasons we blow chauffeur is to remind us of the words of the sages and by fulfilling the words of the sages we are in fact um doing the mitzvah of how could we just suspend it what's the what's the the upside there so the fact of the matter is i i maintain and i told the story uh with the anaya melech and the mission at the end of sukkah uh about baz bilga there seems to be a certain aspect of the rabbana now i'll give you an example the simcoe's base of sho'eva which again they're abundant uh have is that we see now it's not written in the title it was very interesting at the semicolons base of show eva it says that uh [Music] only the hasidim only the greatest people would dance and the girl describes this one would juggle this one would uh you know uh stand on their door headstand whatever it was all kinds of amazing things that these people did and uh and only everybody else watched um uh josef sonnenfeld he had trouble with his feet but he used to push himself at the sunken special show ever to dance and they'd say to him listen you're old you know why are you pushing yourself and he said because in the future when michelle comes and we have a base to make this only the greatest sadiq will be allowed to dance who knows if i'll be allowed to dance so now that we can dance let's dance how's that today of course we have to do it socially distanced but yeah but uh but you see that they weren't dancing in circles this one was juggling fire and the torches this one was doing headstand so uh the the dancing has a special thing but it's only so i wanted to suggest perhaps and this is something really for a bigger discussion we're not going to have time today to go and do uh justice to this but uh there's a gemara in shabbos which talks about chanukah and uh and it says uh famous mach lakers between basil and bishop how do you like the hanukkah menorah so we know we light it like basil the first day one then two then three then fourth and five and six seven eight mali makoti's remember and says beshamai no you write the first day eight then seven and six and five and four then three and two and one the gemara says where do you get that from and basham i says from the poor from the from the uh bulls that were offered up on circus because as you know they brought 70 uh bulls uh on circus seven days okay do the math 70 divided by seven bring 10 every day but that's not what they did they brought the thirty first day thirteen the second day twelve then eleven then ten then nine then eight and then seven in descending order that's one of the reasons why we say full halal every day of sukis and we don't during pesach because on pesach every day you're saying a different actually you're saying the same carbon you put the same carbon every day except for the first day yeah every day you bring the same carbon massa end came uh circus it's always changing that's why if you have uh one of those c durham where it has the brackets you know the second day and the third day the third day and the fourth day uh you know and you have to keep doing two days that's a hustler it's not so we don't have to do that it's uh it's a fascinating laning that we do here in earth so it'll be and then you just read what they brought on the third day and you do that four times no change very very uh simple to be able to follow of what the laning is what the korean terrier is on circus but um uh the um the the the corbanos were brought in a descending order so since beijamai just like um the uh the offerings were brought in a descending order so too we light the candles in a descending order now if i was based hello what i would say at that point is what why in the world would you bring the corvonus of circus and drag it in when we're talking about lighting up and over once it didn't derive someone's it didn't drop button what are you making the connection for but that's not what baseball says it's all says you're right but milo and because rhema reading you go up in kadusa and you don't go down otherwise you're right i'd learned that from the barrier where as i would have said if i was basically what has this got to do with the with anything why are you dragging this in so um it's a uh the gemara is apparently being there those who disagree right maybe at some point we'll discuss the other views but why would you bring in this idea of circus to chanukah so it turns out that there are um similarities parallels between circus and uh and chanukah they're both eight day holidays and they're the only two eight day holidays we have i know there's sukis and then there's schminikeras but the very fact that you're calling it yomashmini means that it's the eighth day of something otherwise you would just call it serious the fact that you're calling it ateris means that you recognize on some level that this is the eighth day there's eight days and hanukkah is also eight days and all of circus we say full how well and all of hanukkah we say fall hallow interesting uh associations in my own particular instance the connection is obvious because it's hanukkah time uh because of the rain uh that i finally take down my sukkah so if the connection over there is pretty uh pretty uh obvious but there's another idea and that's the following um sugars comes out on the fifteenth of tishrei thirty days later the fifteenth of judgment 30 days later the 15th of kiss slave that's 60 days 10 days later the 25th of kisslight so the difference between circus and hanukkah are 70 days and we bring 70 par on uh circus but in descending order why because the 70 um bulls that we bring represent the 70 nations of the world we are there's a certain universal aspect to circus a lot of messianic references um the gemara says that when sheikh comes so the nine jews are going to ask for a mitzvah he's going to give him it so sounds like because when he comes it's going to be circus otherwise if it comes on pesach we'll still tell them build a sucker now right so there's a certain messianic idea to uh to sukis the kumari says if the nations of the world knew what they lost by destroying the base in mcdosh they would run to rebuild it we got forgiveness for the whole world we weren't just looking for us it's uh this is such an important point i talked about it in one of my first podcasts but it is such an important point we're not a religion like every other religion uh in christianity and islam if you do not accept christianity and by the way the right sect of christianity in the 1300s there were two popes one in france and one in italy and each one put the others followers into excommunication that's a unique catholic concept as communication not to be confused with the social distancing of in judaism they're both called excommunication but excommunication in catholicism means the pope said you can't go to heaven that's pretty that's pretty heavy stuff so each pope put the other one followers in so whoever your pope was there was another pope telling you you ain't going into heaven yeah so if you don't follow the right version of christianity then you're going to be cast into the fire of hell yeah so too with islam that's why it's so important to them that you become part of their religion and they will use whatever methods they can to urge you to take on the religion of love as the spanish inquisition showed us you have to torture people burn them you know do whatever you have to do you do that because we are so worried about yourself the exact opposite when an andrew comes to uh a rabbi and says i want to convert to judaism we say why what do you want to do that for you know how hard it is you know what i was they keep coaching to keep shabbos you know give me a pesach you know how difficult this whole thing is he said but i want to go to heaven no problem do the seven go to heaven do the seven noah hide laws and you'll gotta have it so one second you mean you don't have to be a part of your religion to go to heaven that's right what kind of religion are you the only true one in the sense that god loves everybody in the world he's not a cast anybody in the pit of hell he wants everyone to have a relationship with him will jews have more reward i sure hope so if i'm doing 613 and you're doing seven i hope i'm getting more out of it he says that's not fair no no no you could choose to become a jew you don't have to i'm gonna force it on you we don't have to be married we could just be friends i never i i i actually did hear that quite a bit when i was dating everybody liked me but nobody wanted to marry me i was too intense if you could imagine it can't imagine but i used to scare off everybody a friend of mine said you don't go to look at halls on the first date no that's an exaggeration i never did that but i don't know how to make small talk to this day i don't know how to make small talk so i would talk about real serious issues and then everyone would be like whoa why can't you just tell camp stories or like the best challenge you've ever had this is what people are supposed to talk about on dates because i want to get too intense um parenthetically i got an email from an older singer who asked if i would speak about the shidduchim and dating and those sort of things maybe i will oh no whatever catches my fancy uh since i evidently have the trump strain of coving where in within two days you're totally better i think it's the french fries but in any event um so uh so you don't have to become you want a more intense relationship with god you can but you don't have to so the nations of the world are all there eventually to recognize the closure yes the day will come when everybody will recognize god we'll have a we'll have an advantage because we got there first there's this one tailor he says i can't wait for creasa mason this is why he says everyone's going to come back they'll be naked they'll all need clothes i'll have a great business he says yeah but all the tailors will also come back to life he says but they won't know the latest styles [Laughter] so we know the latest styles we've been doing this already for a few thousand years we know our way around so people will suddenly discover god will be like wow you guys know about this stuff you know you want to want to clue us in yeah how do you buy wholesale as jackie mason said once you know i was thinking about a restaurant he goes you know you know it's a cash business he says someone explained to the gentiles what a cash business is anyway i digress but uh so therefore all the nations of the world are there to recognize them but we jews we're we're so easily moved by other people's thinkings right hollywood hollywood was captured the essence of us meant to be an american hollywood was all done by jewish immigrants the warner brothers yeah golden mayor yeah the uh the the uh all the all the uh the the the moguls the mughals they were all jews they understood but they understood what spent an american better some of the greatest german philosophers were jews who captured what it meant to be a german better than anyone else german jews were more german than the germans yeah we were we were more american than the americans we were more russian than the russians yeah we we get so absorbed so in circus we bring the 70 carbons for the 70 nations of the world but it's always decreasing because the effect is there to to for us to uh harness but not for it to rule us the effect has become less and less until schmidty arteris it's just one there's just one corporate between us and the credit bureau so uh so this is the this is ideally what uh sukis is supposed to capture and so then we go for 70 days each one of those days hopefully taking what the best is that the nations won't have to offer us and then coming back is called the festival of lights yeah we like the menorah uh it's it's uh it's something very special it's when the light we're at the darkest part of the year and the light is slowly coming back into the world and in that darkest time that's when we light the menorah give us light and what do we focus on on circus circus is all about water as i mentioned we take the water and we pour it in his bed it's not written in the torah uh very strange story in the in the torah as we all know they travel for three days they come to murrah and they can't drink the water because it's bitter and so they uh put in this bitter stick and then they become sweet and there we were given uh torah to study to learn torah and it was at that point that moshe said every three days we're going to read the torah because you can't go three days without torah because torah is water so torah is water so what's light what is light light is very esoteric uh photon energy [Music] i once heard uh dr gerald schroeder explained that it's probably the closest thing that's physical that's non-physical in in the world yeah i'm not gonna i'm not gonna uh i'm not going to uh wander off into the concepts of photon energy which is definitely uh outside of my pay scale i do know about the photon torpedoes that were on the enterprise those were pretty bad but uh the idea is that light yeah and what is the light it's olive oil how do you get olive oil you squeeze the olives to get the oil out and that's why the theme of hanukkah is very much tarshish about it's the oral lord it's the teachings of the rabbis it's the traditions that we have received all of hanukkah is there abanan and the teachings that are included inside of it is all the power of the rabbana if you look at mayam as being at the terrorist ship itself and you have to look at the oil as representing the turismo pet because it's hidden inside you have to squeeze it to get it out whereas the water is part and parcel of creation there is an integral relationship between the two like i said it's really for another discussion but uh i'll give you one one source for this uh the um at the beginning of partial's medicates where it says power was standing by the or the ramban says all water your river has is the word or in it because all um water has its source in light yeah if light is representing the certain spiritual power water is representing that gosh me power there's something incredibly physical about it because you know water has no uh sewer uh talk capitalistic for a moment there's something called hoi man that's coming comes in called surah homer is raw material sure is the form that it takes uh so water has chome but it's very little it moves however you move it it takes on the shape you put it in a long thin tube it'll be long and thin you put it in a shallow bowl it'll be shallow it takes on the shape that you give it it's home air it's raw material but it has no sewer it has no form light is all surah it's all it's all the form that it takes on the maharao interestingly enough points out that uh a very strange gemara in uh xubus where was after the destruction the ryokan zakai is writing with his students and he sees this young girl picking the undigested barley corns out from the droppings of the donkeys kamor yeah and it's it's a pitiful sight and he says young lady who are you she says rubble you don't recognize me you signed mike silva i'm the daughter of naktime mangori and one of the richest jews and this is what she's been reduced to now listen to what ribiograms says israel happy are you a jewish people because when you are who you're supposed to be no one can touch you but if you lose your way and you don't know who you are then you're lower than the lowest people in the world and not only the lowest people in the world but you're under the animals of the lowest people in the world so yes what is the praise there he says because the jewish people are surah we're all formed we're like light and if we lose our torah there's no homura to fall back on the lowest people in the world have have got me is to them they have physicality the animals akamura and they have something but where either the jewish people are with nothing so when when all you have is the cashmeres and circus is what it's all about cashmere it's all about kashmir's we uh we bring in our harvest we're bringing our wine we bring in our oil we bring in our grains our storehouses are full going into the winter and we're feeling really good but it's all stuff i remember seeing a bumper sticker back in the 80s it says whoever has the most toys when they die wins that's an approach stuff we don't have this so much in israel but in america you have garage sales we don't have that here because we don't have garages sometimes they have apartment sales but uh what's a garage sale i take all my stuff and you buy you add it to your stuff at some point you realize you have too much stuff so you make a garage sale sometimes i'll go back and buy my old stuff how much stuff do you need yeah people schlep around so much stuff what do we end up with in the end these two people were fighting over a field they went through velozena to try to decide it so each one gave their point of view and gave their position so he says okay i've heard from you too but i haven't heard from the third party so who's the third party says the ground that you're fighting over the field so they both kind of smile and say okay so he listens and he comes up and he says no what did the field say he says why are they both fighting over me when in the end they're both going to belong to me anyway what what are we fighting about what is so important to us so you look at all the stuff all of the uh the sound and fury and signifying nothing all the stuff you need 70 days to remove every negative aspect of that gas meiosis the go down because we're moving to an ultimate truth the ultimate truth is going to be not just what's in the torah but the turkish about it's deeper than that um shapiro pointed out famous um mission in perkiers it talks about the ancient nasa godola the men of the great assembly 120 sages and prophets and the last one last man standing was uh um uh schmidt sadik and when alexander the great was conquering the whole world in the greek story so he comes to israel and chaminade sadiq puts on his the goddamn of the kohindl and goes to surrender which we knew we couldn't fight alexander the great he gets off his horse and he bows down sherman is like you got it backwards sweetheart it's not the way this works he says whenever i go off to fight one of my battles somebody dressed in your clothes would appear to me and tell me what to do i sense that there's a greatness to you alexander the great controlled the entire world power everything says says remission shapiro why is it sherman at sadiq it says because we were going through a transition and that's what the greek period represented that's what chanukah represented the last of the naviem uh died out there was no more prophecy you can't be an atheist when there's a prophet when there's a prophet who can show you this is what god just told me it's haunted to deny god a vote of zara you look for spirituality in the wrong places but he can't really deny it atheism is a greek word a means not like a ace asymmetry or uh atypical yeah theo is of course god ism is believing a theist is the non-belief in god that's a greek idea because there was no more nav so it's the first of the with who confronts alexander the great why because the greeks held that they had the key to intellect logic universities culture sports everything we call western civilization everything that surrounds us and what did uh what did we have we're tired josephus writes we are not given to the writing of many books because the torah is our form of entertainment that's what we find fun in this fellow is helping reverend cutler raise money for lakewood yeshiva and he comes overnight and he opens the newspaper the very looks and says why don't you open a cabaret he says don't worry rebbe i have my own hobby because yo i'm thinking about them what could be more fun than learning a piece of gemara and enjoying it and fighting the geschmeck in it a lot of people don't know how to do that that's the that's the sad part i knew uh i had this course of knowing av rottenberg when he was out in l.a sometimes i get an invitation over for supper and he'd sit down and start playing the piano songs that i didn't recognize and i said to his wife once i said what's he playing she said his day he could just take it and turn it into music but you have to have a certain mastery of the piano to make that work if you never move past i used to grow up there was always somebody at the piano in the library [Laughter] but you just hope somebody came along who knew the second boy they passed the law in new york state that if someone plays that for more than 10 minutes and you kill them you're not held responsible but uh you know so okay if that's as far as you've mastered the piano you're not going to find the geshmach then a.b rottenberg sits down and plays the piano and just the most beautiful music comes pouring out but if you can find that in terror so the greeks came and confronted us with their intellect and their logic how do you know this how do you know that how do you know this and we were like i don't know okay let's examine the torah let's squeeze it to find the olive oil and we found this brilliance the way i heard my shapiro put it was adaraba you're from your kasha i have a deeper understanding of torah than i understood before i didn't even realize how beautiful this was you're making me squeeze the olives to get the olive oil out of it to see the brilliance of it that process starts on circus that's what's represented by the the lower number of offerings you bring every day did you go from 13 12 11 10 987 instead of going 10 10 10 10 10 10 we're moving away from the temptations of the physicality that the nations of the world have to offer us and they're good lovers once said i couldn't understand when i was in europe i couldn't understand you trade this world for ulam for what for a piece of black bread and an onion then i came to america and i found asa wasn't so stupid after all my parents who were not easy to impress yeah i still remember when the fanciest kosher restaurant certainly in new york which means probably the world yeah was lugey seagulls and uh and uh when we were engaged uh my parents took us out there and we were just like wow whoever saw him like this you know what i mean kosher restaurants with delis with four mica tables and some uh waiter with an attitude came over with like a a dirty rag and wiped off the table put down a paper napkin and stuck to it and you got some like bent silverware you know and they're like yeah what do you want what do you want um i was thinking now we're out of it i don't know if these delis are still around these remember these bellies once in one me and my wife my wife said uh do you have any herbal tea yeah herb get these people some tea they go to ludy seals it's like a fancy restaurant my parents weren't impressed they were depressed but my mother used to speak about the time that she was in paris and she stayed in the ritz hotel and just how unbelievable it was she says they used to put like a little mat down on the carpeting you know a towel whatever else so when you got out of bed you shouldn't have to touch with your bare feet the the carpet which was the fanciest thing you've ever seen you know it's like you know yeah of course more than that you know so fancy okay circus we celebrate the gosh no question about it but it's decreasing and that process of decreasing continues until we get to chanukah hanukkah is herman woke uh wrote a book called this is my god and he says in the introduction it's an introduction to judaism and at the time he was quite a popular novelist and uh he says he wrote it because people were asking me about hanukkah and so i decided to write a book explaining about what judaism is and um and uh and when he comes to kaneki he says i have to tell you this is not really one of the major things you know it's cold out might be snowing you know dark and you lighter these little candles little candles there's none of the you know pageantry he says that goes with the other holidays none of the gash me is there's no mitzvah to have a suda on hanukkah unless you're doing it as an excuse there is a minute to eat foods that are cooked in oil uh ashkenazi jews tend to have um uh potato latkes uh ashkenazic jews tend to have like fried bread um but that's mostly because of the minute to eat things in oil to show that we don't want to have great physiques like the greeks had we want to look like jews [Laughter] anyway um but uh that's not what hanukkah is about it's about the light it's about the brilliance inside of the water of torreira it's squeezing the olive oil out so if there is a message of a dirabonan in sukis and that's why going back to my original question that i asked in the last podcast you have a mitzvah the arizona fidelity that was supposed to have on on uh the first day of sukis and the rabbis come along and say that's because sukis is about starting that process of moving towards appreciating the deeper secrets of torah that finally reaches its culmination in the light of chanukah and the darkness that's left in the physical world so a few uh circus thoughts for you met hashem you should enjoy the the yandeff and uh and uh that's it for this week uh if you want to find out more about the podcast uh you can go to raviolovsky.com you can uh comment on the episode you can send me an email you can sponsor an episode milowski and this is the rivariolavsky show it's the rabbi orlowski show torah and simra ready to go the rabbi 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