44: The Real Connection

Hi, this is Rabbi Dovid Orlofsky and welcome to the Rabbi Orlofsky Show! Whether you are listening on Torah Anytime or wherever you listen to your podcasts, it is so wonderful to have you along. And we have a sponsor this week, Anonymous. But the dedication is actually very special to me. It's in honor of Rabbi Wohlgelernter. I know he's known to many of his followers as 'Rabbi Jeff' and it's dedicated by one of his talmidim at Adas Yeshurun. He has been a rav in San Diego for many years. I remember when he was in Australia. I remember when we were in the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County together. And what an honor it is for me that this podcast is being given in honor of him. Episode 44. And I have to tell you, you know, I speak about a lot of different things, some of them more controversial, some of them less controversial. My feeling is always that if it gets a stronger reaction, that means that I've I've hit on something. Positive, negative whatever it is, but I've hit a vein. By that I don't mean a vein in the body and I'm draining out the blood. I mean like a vein of ore in a mountain, you know, when they're digging they hit a vein. So I don't want to be vain, but that's the term that they use, that you've gotten some place. Yeah, you've hit your mark. I don't know if I told this story anymore. You know, you start to lose track a little bit. But there was a group of older single girls I was speaking for, they asked me to come and give a shiur, chizzuk, okay, gave a shiur. Everyone listened politely. Everyone said thank you very much. I did it a second time. "Thank you very much..." And I realized I wasn't getting... I wasn't making any difference. So I came in the next time and I was like, "So what's wrong with everybody here? How come you're not married?" Everyone got all crazy. "What are you talking about?" And this and that. I said, "Maybe you are just being too picky." "Too picky?! Do you know who I went out with?" And everyone started talking and that to me is important because if you're able to hit something that has meaning to people.. I've told this and I say this very often when I speak. I will be in America Shabbos Nachamu and if I speak I may mention this again, any place. I'm waiting for the emails to come pouring in. But I always say that the the bane of Jewish education is relevance. People do not feel that it speaks to them, that it's part of their life, that it's real. It's something that I do... When they say, "Judaism is an important part of my life," that doesn't tell me anything. It's not just being a part. It's supposed to be my life. So it's a challenge over there, right? Why aren't we able to find meaning in it? And that becomes the biggest thing - finding meaning. So I spoke last week about tefillah, specifically, talking in shul, and how I felt it's a certain disconnect. And it got a very strong reaction from our listeners, more so than other topics I've touched upon. And so I thought I want to follow that up a little bit. I used to be the Long Island Director of NCSY, National Conference of Synagogue Youth. I don't know why people always think it's National Council. It's not 'Council', it's 'Conference', National Conference of Synagogue Youth. I would make Shabbatonim. There were two divisions. There was regular NCSY and there was junior NCSY. Junior NCSY was for younger children, and so for the younger children, we used to give them out an evaluation form on the event afterwards to see what they thought of it. And there were two questions: One was, what part of the shabbaton did you like the most, what part of the shabbbaton did you like the least? And later on there was another question, 'What did you think was the most important part of the Shabbaton?' And it was always interesting. What they thought was the most important part of the Shabbaton was tefillah, davening, prayer. All the way at the beginning when you said, 'Which part of the program did you like the least?', the most common answer was tefillah, prayer. It's the part that people felt was the most important and it was the part that people felt was the part they enjoyed the least. And this is amazingly common. You find very often, people who are having religious issues, where it hits them the most is when it comes to davening. You eat, a matzah, don't eat a matazah, you know, it's.... But there's something about davening that hits somebody really deep down. A guy who was going through very difficult times he used to say, I got up in the morning and I went to the bais medrash with my tefillin in my hand and I sat in the back room. I could not put them on and I could not daven. What is it that people find so difficult about tefillah? Where's the disconnect? So everybody knows the gemara in Brachos, Tefillas Hashachar, it's one of the first gemaras that people learn. For those of you who may not be as savvy in all the Judaica that I throw around, 'cuz like I say, I found out that I have quite a varied audience. Children start learning the Talmud which is the embodiment of the oral law, somewhere around fifth grade and the first gemaras that they start learning, depending on where they're coming from, is either Ailu Metzios, which talks about returning lost objects, or it's Tefillas Hashachar, which talks about prayer, the laws of prayer and the beginning. There's an interesting story. I've never confirmed it, but I have heard it. I heard it from Rabbi Pesach Krohn, and I know he confirms his stories. Where they asked Reb Moshe Feinstein in the yeshiva for the boys, what should they teach? He says, "Ailu Metzios." He says well, maybe we should teach Tefillas Hashachar, which is about davening, prayer. Maybe that's more relevant to the boys? He says, "Start off by teaching them morality. If you find a lost object, give it back." The dictum, 'Finders keepers, losers weepers' does not apply to Judaism. Then he told Reb Dovid Feinstein privately, there's another reason. He said, "You're gonna start off and tell people that you have to go to shul in the morning and there's a particular time you have to daven, and they see that their parents don't get up, there'll be a disconnect. So okay, I guess this is an age-old problem, when it comes to tefillah. It discusses over there why we daven three times a day, why do we pray three times a day. And there's a discussion whether it's because of the forefathers, which of course throws off a lot of people, there are only three of them. There are three forefathers. So it's like the four 'five-mothers'. Anyway, that's 'fore' like 'F-O-R-E'. So the three forefathers, the avos, Avraham, Yitzchok, and Yaakov, in which case Avraham would have instituted Shachris, the morning service, Yitzchok, Mincha which is the afternoon service, and Yaakov, Maariv, which is the evening service. Or maybe it was made because of the korbanos, the offerings that were brought in the Bais Hamikdash. The problem there is, there were only two. There was one that was brought in the morning. There was one that was brought in the afternoon, and there was one that was brought... That was it. But in the evening the leftover parts they used to burn. So it's not an exact comparison. But the end is that both of these are correct, both aspects exist. So Avraham, Yitzchok, and Yaakov, the Progenitors of Judaism, each one of them created a tefillah. We may have mentioned this, once upon a time, it goes for really another discussion. But all of what are called the 'Sheva Royai Yisrael', all of the Seven Shepherds made a tefillah. Those are the people who we mentioned in the Ushpizin, for example on Sukkos, So you have Avraham, Yitzchok, Yaakov, Moshe, Aharon, Yosef and Dovid. Each one of them created a tefillah, but the daily service, the three tefillos, Shachris, MIncha, Maariv, Or Shacharit, Minha and Arvit, if you prefer. When I'm at the Western Wall, we're trying to get a minyan going, you know, so you have to use both terms 'cuz you don't know who you're gonna get yeah, gotta be bilingual. I've never yet called out, "Evening service! Evening service! Looking for a quorum!" You either go, "Maariv! Maariv!" or you go, "Arvit! Arvit!" I don't know if it's still around anymore, but I remember, when I came to Israel, in the old days, there was an evening paper called 'Maariv'. And there was another one called, 'Yediot Achronot'. And when they used to be hawking the newspapers, you'd here people going, "Maariv! Maariv!" Others going, "Yediot! Yediot! So I was always waiting for someone at the Kotel when someone's screaming out "Maariv! Maariv!", to hear the other guy go, "Yediot! Yediot!" Never happened. But anyway, Avraham, Yitzchok, and Yaakov. Now, think for a second. Why do you need three fathers? Those of you who are Token fans, so you know that the dwarfs got by with just Durin, you know what I mean, I guess maybe the other seven elders of the dwarfs if you think about it, but you know... But basically you could start with one person. All of mankind started with one person, Adam Harishon, the first person, Adam. Yeah, so what's the purpose of having three? So the answer is that Judaism rests on a... what is described as a stool with three legs. Tripod. Why? Because in order to be able to achieve a balance, you have to be able to capture the two sides. Without the two sides secure, you can't create a balance. So Avraham was chessed, total giving. Now, that's not fair because although he was a person who believed in giving, he was also the person who brought God into the world and the reason that he brought God into the world is because he understood that if there's an all-powerful Being Who created the universe, He did it as an act of chessed, of kindness, and so by doing kindness, he was reintroducing God into the world. So Avraham was letting everyone know about God and at the same time chessed, kindness. Now the problem is that one has to be careful with kindness because you can do kindness to the point where you become what's known in psychology as enabling a bad behavior. And so if I just keep giving money to a drug addict so he can keep going out and buying drugs and I know he's gonna buy drugs with them, so I'm enabling him. If I give the car keys to someone who's legally drunk, I'm responsible. There was a story of a bartender who was charged by giving drinks to someone who was already clearly inebriated, he was already drunk and he was still giving him drinks. And yeah, this is a serious issue. So you have to reach a certain point where you say, "Ad kan'". You have to stop. And that idea of stopping is called 'gevurah'. It's the name of God, Shakai, She'amar Dai. Who said stop. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. So that's din, or gevruah, or any of the terms that you want to use. It's holding back. And so, Avraham introduced the concept of giving and Yitzchok introduced the idea of pulling back. Now, you understand that each one of these has a negative manifestation. Too much giving is bad. If you let a kid do whatever they want, no bedtime, you don't have to bathe, eat all the candy you want, you don't have to school, you don't have to do anything, just total freedom. The term we use for that is called neglect. So just unbridled giving, unbridled chessed, unbridled freedom, that's not good. Pulling back, holding back, restraint, unbridled means a person will starve to death, means that a person won't be able to function. In Pirkei Avos it says, there are four types of people when it comes to their relations to other people's property. "Sheli sheli v'shelcha shelcha zu midah beinunis." What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours, that's normal. I have respect. My property, your property. "V'yaish omrim zu midas Sedom." There were those who say that that's midas Sedom. Why? Because if I'm so exacting to the point where I don't give you any room to move in this world, this is mine and you can't walk past it, you can't look at it, I'll pour the water in the ground rather than give it to you, the world's not gonna be able to survive. And that's why there were two societies that captured this. One was called the Dor Hamabul, the Generation of the Flood and one was called Sedom and Amorah. The Generation of the Flood, everyone do whatever you want. They broke down every barrier. Total freedom, total giving. And how were they destroyed? With too much kindness. Not everybody appreciates rain. I was in New York, they were complaining, too much rain. Here in Israel, we had a very rainy winter and the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, raised almost to the red line. Now for those you are not familiar, there's the Kinneret, it's called Full. That's the major reservoir here in Israel. When it sinks all the way down to the red line, you're not supposed to take any more water out. So what happened the first time it fell to the red line? They drew another red line. And then it sank down to the second red line. So then what did they do? They drew a black line. This time we're serious. And it sunk down. So now it rose past the bottom red line. It's almost up to the top red line. We're almost in a state of emergency. As Groucho Marx once said, "I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty." Yep. So yeah, you don't appreciate it. Almost there. So we had a rainy winter, people were not complaining. They were very happy that we were getting rain. So the Dor Hamabul, rain, gishmai bracha, rain is good. Too much rain brings a flood. It's one of my standard lines when I go outside and it's raining and I was like, "Whoa!" People go, "A little rain never hurt anybody." I said, "You ever hear of the flood? That's not true across the board!" Sometimes it's true. So too much giving... What's Sedom? Sedom was, you were put to death if you gave charity. There was a poor person, you helped him, that was it. Terrible thing. No charity. No chessed. None at all. How are they destroyed? In a fire. Because they completely consumed themselves. They were reduced to ashes. So, what's the best? The best is a balance. So you have Avraham who is chessed, kindness, and you have Yitzchok who is gevurah, which is control, and each one of those have a negative side. So that's why Avraham had two children, Yitzchok and Yishmael and Yishmael was described as a 'perah adam', a wild animal. His hand was in everybody stuff and everybody was in his stuff. There was no borders, no boundaries. Yitzchok was complete control and because of that, he was able to hold back, restraint, self-control. The negative idea of personal power is when you want to extend that to control other people and that was Eisav. That's why he had a Yaakov and an Eisav. Eisav wanted to control everything. Power, ultimate power. They're seen in history as becoming the Roman Empire. Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. What's the Roman Peace? We tell everybody what to do. As long as you do what we say, everybody will be happy. Now, Yaakov had to be the perfect balance between those two and that becomes the challenge. So the Avos are there to create that balance. And once you have Yaakov, then you have the ultimate. Avraham Avinu creates Shachris. Avraham was chessed, kindness. "L'hagid baboker chasdecha." I will tell in the morning your chassadim. "Because it's daybreak, if you want to believe, it can be daybreak..." Sunshine! Let the sunshine in, yeah? You bring in the new day, it's optimistic. I once heard Reb Moshe Shapiro say, "Everything smells good in the morning. Morning brings with it this wonderful freshness." He says, "Even farshtunkener New York smells good in the morning." The way he put it! The morning, everything looks great. And Avraham's life is so good. He gets saved from, he defeats four world powers. He gets thrown into a furnace, comes out intact. You know, he he watches Yishmael do teshuva. He ends up having a child in the end. He sees Hagar, you know, come back to the correct ways. In fact, he dies a little early so he shouldn't see Eisav going to off the derech. He has a blessed life, and that's what Shachris is, when everything is great. And Yitzchok, Yitzchok dies knowing that his son, Yaakov, doesn't know that his beloved son Yosef is still alive down in Egypt. He knows that the Egyptian exile is coming. He himself had to go into exile by Avimelech, in the land of the Pelishtim. He has... He never gets to see Eisav come back. He's got difficulty. But no one's got it as bad as Yaakov. So Yitzchok is Mincha, when the sun is setting, when things are going down. "Lihagid baboker chasdecha ve'emunascha balailos." And the faith is at night. Because night is darkness. Darkness is non-existence. You can't see anything. And I heard from Reb Moshe Shapiro [unclear] He says, Why are people afraid of the dark? We'll put you in a dark room, turn off all lights, totally dark. What are you afraid of? 'Tisakael tachas hamita, ain mifletzet.' Look under the bed, there's no monsters. No monsters, there's nothing there. What are you afraid of?" He says, "In darkness you don't sense your own existence." And that's why Yaakov Avinu is the one who has to face up to a life of difficulties. Yaakov dies the earliest of all of the Avos, of all the forefathers. Yitzchok made it 180, Avraham, 175, and Yaakov makes it to 147. Why? He died early, you know why? 'Cuz he complained about his life. He wasn't complaining, it's just Paaroh noticed he looked very old. He says, "Why do you look so old? He says, "I've had a tough life." And God says, "You had a tough life? Didn't I save you from your brother who was trying to kill you? Didn't I save you from your uncle who was trying to kill you? After you worked for him day and night in the freezing cold, in the burning heat for 22 years? Didn't I get you back your son, Yosef save who was kidnapped and you thought was dead for 22 years? Didn't I get you back your son Shimon who you thought was thrown into prison forever? Didn't I get you back Binyomin who you thought you would never see again? Didn't I return Dina to you after she was kidnapped and raped?" Complain, complain, complain. You know what? Cut the man some slack. Okay, great, great. But we could look at this another way. My son was kidnapped. My son was thrown into prison. I was almost killed by this one. I was almost killed by that one. Yeah, I went into exile, I had all these years of suffering and you're upset at me for complaining? And I wasn't really complaining. I was really observing. The answer is that Yaakov was there to face challenges. Nighttime is dark. Nighttime is a time when we don't sense our existence. Nighttime is the mashal for galus, for exile. It's close to 2000 years we've been in exile. You know, when you think about it. Okay, we came out of Egypt, we were in the desert for 40 years. Every year we would bury a certain amount of people, okay, so let's not, even though we had the Mishkan, let's not really look at that is like one of the golden times, right? We come into Eretz Yisrael, we've got the Mishkan and then we build the Bais Hamikdash, that whole process was 850 years. Every now and then, an army would come and to try to kill us and wipe u s out. Okay. But for the most part, we had a Mishkan-Bais Hamikdash- 850 years, then we go into exile for 70 years. Haman tries to kill all of us, you know, we have a difficult time. Nebuchadnezzar was king. When he was king, nobody ever smiled. Then we come back, we have a Bais Hamikdash for another four hundred and twenty years. Well, the Greeks are trying to kill us, the Romans are trying to kill us, okay, but we had a Bais Hamikdash. Twelve hundred and seventy years we had in Eretz Yisrael, a Mishkan and a Bais Hamikdash. Almost 2,000 years where we're out of it. We're about to go into The Three Weeks, which is the weeks of destruction. We mourn the destruction of the Bais Hamikdash, the temple, exile of the Jews. That's become normal to us. We don't even understand what it means anymore. That's why Yaakov was the one who established Maariv, established that there's a tefillah at night, "Ve'emunascha balailos." We can have faith in the difficult times. And we don't even know anymore, we don't even know what normal is. Chagai is turning to the Jewish people, this is after the first Temple was destroyed, before the second one was built. And he says, "You have permission to rebuild the Bais Hamikdash. Why aren't you running to do this? Don't you see that you're living a shadow existence? Your meat doesn't taste right because it gets its taste from the karbanos, the offerings. Your wine doesn't have its effect because it gets its power from the nesachim. Your clothing doesn't feel right, because clothing gets their power from the bigdei kehuna, and when you make money, it's like you're putting it into a purse with a hole in it because all the bracha comes from the Bais Hamikdash. Why aren't you jumping to rebuild it?" Okay, that was a good tyna on them because they remembered the first Bais Hamikdash. What do we remember? We celebrate that we have limited access to the outside supporting wall of the Temple Mount. Don't get me wrong. I don't want to minimize that. We spoke not that long ago about the power of the Kosel, that we're gonna be able to go to the Western Wall, and the power that that brings. But you understand that we're happy that we have that access. Can you imagine when we have a Bais Hamikdash? Second Bais Hamikdash was about twice the size of that dome that's there now. And there would be these steps. You can still see the steps. It was short and then long, short and then long, so that it made waves of people going up the mountain to the Bais Hamikdash. Just have my Rabbi Orlofsky Show mug. And when you went into the Bais Hamikdash, you could feel Hakadosh Baruch Hu's presence, and you see the fire come down from heaven and burn the karbanos, I mean... Can you imagine? You can't imagine. They would remove the part of the bird that you weren't allowed to offer, drop it on the ground and it would get absorbed into the ground. That's something else. That's Wow! It's a Wow! Can you imagine you come into Yerushalayim, and you see this cloud hanging over the Temple Mount and you see the fire coming down? Yeah, it's a whole different existence. We don't have that today. All we have is a shul. We don't have any of those korbanos, and any of those nissim. All we have is Shachris, Mincha, Maariv. All we do is go in the morning and express our appreciation and the fact that I have this optimism in life. We daven Mincha because we recognize that sometimes things are not going our way. And we have Maariv at night, when we are sitting in the darkness. Maybe the tefillah that's most relevant to us today. 'Korban' is translated in English as a sacrifice. Sacrifice is a terrible word. Sacrifice sounds like I'm giving something up for you. I'm sacrificing something. 'Korban' is from the word 'likaraiv', to come close. The sefer in the Chumash that we finished not long ago, which describes the korbanos, is called Vayikra. Vayikra, which is a term of endearment that the malachim who love each other use, "V'kara zeh el zeh." And Hashem calls "Vayikra", to the point that Moshe Rabbeinu can't even believe it, he writes a small alef so it should be like 'vayikar', He happened upon him. He accidentally came to speak. Because Vayikra is a term of endearment. The korbanos are there to express that love and endearment. And what we have today is tefillah. So if a person is having issues with God, and God gets a real bad rap because we sometimes associate him with other people in our life, so if we had a parent who was perhaps not very good to us, or we had a rebbi who was not very good to us... Rabbi Orlowek told me this story about this little girl, you know, I did this for my children some of them my grandchildren, you put them on top of the refrigerator. You say, "Come, jump, jump, to Abba," "I'm afraid" "No, come on. Jump!" It takes them a while and they jump and you catch them and then it becomes addictive. They love it, go up there, they jump down, you know. So he puts his little daughter up, says "Come, jump to Dad." "I'm afraid." "No, no, come on, jump!" She jumps, he backs up. She hits the ground and he says, "You learned an important lesson. Never trust anybody." Rabbi Orlowek said, "Is it surprising that this girl has issues with God? No. Because she hears God say, 'Jump to me, I'll catch you.' And she sees her father letting her hit the ground." We'll have to talk more about God, He deserves probably a podcast or two for Himself. But just thinking from this point of view, I don't know about you, but I don't have that many infinite, all-powerful friends who would like to talk with me. I only got one and I intend on holding on to that relationship, and God doesn't always do what I want. I've been in a lot of relationships like that. Not everybody's gonna do what you want. And if you define a relationship by, "Well, I can't have a relationship with you because you don't do what I want" (which by the way, means that you're just abusive). If you say, "Well I can't have relationshp with God because God don't do what I want, so it's the same thing, my parents, I'm not gonna have a relationship my parents 'cuz they don't do what I want, I'm not gonna have a relationship with my children 'cuz they don't do what I want, I'm not gonna talk to my husband or my wife because they don't do what I want, that doesn't make you look so good. But Hakadosh Baruch Hu created the world, set it up for us, we're in galus, you know why we're in galus? 'Cuz we need to be in galus. If we didn't need to be in galus, we wouldn't be in galus. It wasn't just cute when somebody asked the Kotzker, "When is Moshiach gonna come? and he said, "Whenever we want him." We don't have to live this life, this shadow existence of The Wandering Jew upon the face of the earth. We belong in Eretz Yisrael with the Bais Hamikdash. The Am Hanivchar, the Chosen People, a light unto the nation's, a light unto the world. That's what we're supposed to be. And Hakadosh Baruch Hu reaches out his hand and says, "What? What would you like to say? Let's talk. Three times a day, I made time in my schedule. Let's talk." I'm sorry God, I'm angry at you because I didn't get...." Okay. All right, if that's your position. We don't daven to get stuff. We need stuff so that we'll remember to daven. That's a whole different podcast. There's more to say my friends, so much more to say. But our time this week is up for now. And so, if you want to find out more about this show, please go to RabbiOrlofsky.com. That's my website. It has my picture on it. Well, a rendering anyway. And on that website you could add comments, you can make comments, see my upcoming schedule, contact me directly, and if you want to sponsor the show, RabbiOrlofsky.com/podcast, click on the 'sponsor an episode' and we will be happy to share the zechus with you. And that's it for this week. I'm Dovid Orlofsky and this is the Rabbi Orlofsky Show.