Made in Chevron (Ep. 161)

hi this is david olomski and welcome to the rebel golovski show and whether you're watching with our friends over at tour anytime or wherever you watch or listen to a podcast someone wrote me uh recently and said that um it's too distracting to watch it's easier for me when i just listen and i meet a lot of people just listen yeah someone tell me they listen as they work out in the gym i should warn you people have been injured listening to my podcast so you have to be careful when you're exercising or driving and listening so please use all caution all right um this episode i i can't tell you how special this dedication is i can't i can't i'll read what's written here but you know and i know and uh it's something that that touched me in a very special way this episode is sponsored anonymously in gratitude to hashem and request that he always put shalom between my children and keep each one growing bedera hashem amen can you hear us on you should have only naches from your kindle and only shalom and wonderful things we all have our challenges that we need to uh to face and hashem should give you strength so uh we've been speaking about the mishkan and in the last podcast i talked a little bit about the materials that go into making the the mishkan i want to focus on one of them right now i'll focus on one of them and i should maybe give by way of introduction the following idea and that is um when i toured north america i toured parasha and i toured parsha um five days a week for an hour sunday through thursday so uh that's five hours of parsha okay so when you have partisan voracious not so bad yeah um but when you have a year like this where viyako pakude are separate and you have to come up with five hours on vayakel five hours of pakude so some of the other people who were teaching parsha would switch to mcgillis esther because uh it's a little too taxing i of course gave five hours on every one of these things it wasn't a problem there's so much in every parsha so in pashas for yakio there was a there was a little dossier kingdom and i uh and i mentioned uh that i at one point sat down with the dust cane and we did that two times ago there's a little duster kingdom that says the following why did they use the atse time that's all he says to get forgiveness for the sin in shethem so what's the sin in sheetam all right it's at the end of parsha's bullock parties bullock is a fascinating paraship because it's the only parasha in the torah from the time that the jewish people come onto the scene that is from someone else's perspective bilum and bulk are up on top of mountaintops they're making mizbeh rice they're making kerban nice they're trying to curse the jewish people and everything's going on over there we have no idea we're sitting in the mahna merrily munching our mun we have no idea what's going on and uh all these events are swirling around us and that's of course what it means in halal those of you who have not signed up yet for the fila series that hopefully will be starting after pesach well you can't sign up yet but to express the interest that you'd like to join so that we can try to take you into account when we find the perfect time so um uh i'll i'll throw in a a a a freebie for you you know you don't have to you have to sign up for the whole course for this i'll just throw this one out for you yeah praise hashem all the nations because hashem does good for us they should praise hashem because he does good for us the answer is we don't even know all the times people try to destroy us people up on mountaintops trying to curse us out of existence and kushbaraku is always watching out for us we're like that character you know in the cartoon who walks just before the safe falls on top of him you know we're being saved all the time so billam and bullock up in the mountains trying to get us we don't even know about it but the parsha ends that bilum comes up with a suggestion he says okay the god of israel hates zima immorality uh send your daughters to seduce the jewish men and it happens and there's a plague and the jewish people were almost destroyed from that plague and pinchas went and stopped the plague and uh 24 000 people were killed in the direct magefa there were others who were killed from other things it was a terrible terrible terrible situation so that was my sushitim [Music] i've heard with moshe shapiro on more than one occasion refer to it as an open wound on the body of claudioso we've never gotten complete kapara for it it's uh the effects continue to this day in any event the um my sushi tim we use the sheetam wood and that's on my sushi themselves how does that work exactly how is how is using so if we did if we did something bad someplace uh you know uh pittsburgh you know and so we get steel from pittsburgh and we use the pittsburgh steelers you know so then that gets a uh how does that work exactly so when you're going through the list of materials kesev gold silver and kappa where'd they get that from they took it out of them from egypt why because it's precious metals trellis argument why did they take those because those were precious they were weighed like gold that's how valuable these things were linen the linen in egypt was uh extremely uh expensive and very fine so that's why they took the linen with them um goat's hair and dyed ramskins they had flocks that they took out they took the animals with them yeah on each thing you can look at it and say well this is why they had it in the desert why would they have wood you're leaving egypt donkeys filled with gold silver and expensive cloth and you're going to take along wood what would you take wood with you for that's not valuable that's the question and rashi asks why would you have wood out in the in the desert why would they take the wood where'd they get it from so rashi gives one answer a famous answer we know that yaakov avinu planted the atheism in egypt and told his children that when the redemption comes and you leave cut down these trees and take them with you so why'd they have trees because nyacovino told them take the trees you're going to need it to build the mishkan okay that's where they took them the das kanem brings two answers he brings that one and he brings another answer he says where did they get the atta him from he says from sheitem sheetum was a place in the desert where sheetum trees grow and they sent people there to cut down the aceh and bring them back when they heard that they needed it to build the mishkan okay two possible explanations where did the wood come from where did the attachment come from either they cut them from a place called shittim where later the jews sinned or they cut them down in egypt and brought them out because jacob had planted them there fine two possible explanations it says again das kadum quoting gemar says the jews sinned and him and the das kinna brings two answers of what this means sheetam was the name of the place so when it says the jews sinned and him okay the other explanation was it wasn't called shitem it was called something else pittsburgh it was called cheetham because the jews did a maester they did something crazy okay so we've got the little dust kingdom and vyakio that says the ate was there to make on my and then we have a dust kingdom that says either the place was called sheet him or it wasn't but they did a mice does and then we have the das kingdom that says they took the wood from shitem or yacovino planted in egypt they took it out so let's make seder if you say that the place was really called sheetim because cheetam trees grew there then the explanation could be that they went to sheet him to cut the atse sheet him and it was called sheetim because sheetum trees grew there so in queens is a place called elmhurst i assume it was because there were elm trees that were growing there in detroit there's a place called oakhurst i assume because there were oak trees growing there i don't know which flat bush they named that area in brooklyn after but there must have been a flat bush that they named it after so it was called shittim kushitum trees grew there how does making the mishkan solve that problem this is a basic concept that you'll find iron metal comes there it's real and he dovens or builds him as bayak every place that he senses klaus was gonna have a problem wherever he sees there's going to be a problem he does first why if you were a good kid and i was not considered a good kid in school so you'll appreciate this there's a big difference if a good kid does something wrong or a bad kid does something wrong when a kid who's perceived to be a bad kid does something wrong then the full weight and power of the entire federal government comes down on top of him when a good person does something wrong so all right you did something stupid you know i might have to suspend you for a day i might have to call your parents whatever but basically we move on the same thing is true about a place if it's a bad place then bad things happen there it's much more serious as rashi says about shechem it was a makham shemukhan la ponios bad stuff is going to happen in shrem it was a bad place there was a place in israel where they built a community and there were a lot of tragedies there but like abnormal and they uh and they brought in him a couple there's a story i heard i didn't check it out on that peso crown here so uh they brought in him a couple and he walks around and he says this is a makama vodazo you built it on on top of avodahzar that's why this was a place where the canada did all kinds of terrible things and you're getting that bad influence masha and kane we know that as we mentioned last time the closer you get to the higher bias the closer you get you shall i am the closer you get to the kosher ocean the power of the place increases so therefore we want to try to mitigate the potential evil of the place so when the jews do a hait in a place called him and we took the i'd say him from there it's not as bad a place as if we just went there to do a sin okay that that's one explanation but if the place was not called him and it was that they did and the i'd say shetim had in fact been planted by yaakov avinu down in egypt how does these trees called sheetim make up for the meisserstus that they did in a place that wasn't even called sheet them and that of course brings us to the important question of bear sheva um i don't know if you've ever been to berasheva it's not one of the more exciting cities in there it's sure i asked someone have you ever been to bereshover you sent it he said i spent a week there one day so uh there is a bedouin market that you can go to uh my wife had cousins who lived there the victims and uh for years they lived in the most famous building uh in uh beersheva it was 14 stories tall it was the biggest building in beresharma so there were bigger ones now but at the time that was uh that was amazing so uh it's it's uh today's not so exciting but you find that beer sheva seems to have a disproportionate attention in the jewish people i'll give you an example at the time of the ikeda avraham and sarah were living in chevron that's clear rashid says it clearly and they'd been living there for a long time they weren't living in beer sheva and then ah avraham takes your talk to the ikeda in yerushalayim now if you know your geography here's yerushalayim to the south is kavron and further south is bear shabba abraham from the ikeda and the passage says clearly they went to bereshava and then he hears that sarah died and he went back to hebrew means he walked right past his house didn't stop in went straight to bereshova why yitzhak uh has to leave very strong because there's a famine he goes to eretz pushed him he digs a well they take his will he digs another well they leave him alone all's well that ends well where does he go after that to bear sheva why bear shabbat he had been living in the shepherd before now he goes to beer and he has to go down to egypt the fastest way to get to egypt is the same way that you would go today if it wasn't for the gaza strip you would go across the coastal road and hug the coastal road all the way down to egypt that's the fastest way we know that because in parishes bashar it says hashem didn't take them up the coastal road kikuravu it was too close and it would be easy if they lost heart to go running back so that would have been the fastest way to go but ah yaakov didn't go that way to egypt he went straight down all the way down the spine of the country to beersheva now why do you go to bear chavez for so the emma's liakov jakob kaminsky says an absolutely amazing thing yaakov avino did not plant the atheism in egypt he replanted them they had been planted originally by avraham avinu when hashem told abraham you're going to be strangers in the land and god's going to take them out abram avino figured when they come out they're going to build a mishkan he figured that out on his own the others their homes were a mishkan as uh it says the miracles of the mishkan took place in their home when rifka comes in they came back the cloud hovered over the tent the bread stayed warm an entire week the candles stayed lit the entire week all the miracles of the mishkan were in their homes so he knew that claudius was going to have to build this bayes what we call a mishkan so abram ravino planted those trees in beersheba and says with yaakov when those trees were planted they became a place of strength and solace for the others so after the ikeda which was one of the most grueling experiences in human history avraham avino has to ask hashem for help because he's not going to pass this test because the doubts that are being put into him by the atahra is drowning him and he has to he has to fight to get through after that he goes first to his trees because there's going to be a gaoula this is going to come to an end and there's going to be a mishkan made out of these trees yagamovino goes to the plishtim which the ramban explains is the mice of a similar bottom fagos uh bubble that was a uh a condensed version of those 70 years and when it's over he goes right to his trees to get the chama and the strength for the test that he had to go through and yaakov ravino knows he's going to go down into egypt and he's going to die in gullis and that's the end he's leaving extra and the first place he goes before he leaves airtrail is to his grandfather's trees and he says me and my father and my grandfather needed these trees for strength what's going to happen to my children and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren in egypt how are they going to manage so he uprooted those trees and he took it down to egypt and he planted them and he said you see these trees my grandfather planted these trees for you and one day you're going to leave here and you're going to build a mishkan out of these trees and says yakov what gave the jews the strength to survive golus mitzrayim were these trees and when it got so overwhelming and the pain was so terrible they would walk among the trees and they said one day we're getting out of here and i'm gonna take the trees that my grandfather's grandfather planted and i'm going to make a mishkan out of it i don't know how many of you have anything from your grandfather's grandfather yeah i have a megillah that my father told me was his grandfather's that he gave to me my great-grandfather's magilla but my grandfather's grandfather an amazing concept it's it's something that you know you see families sometimes fighting over these heirloom items i never went to eastern europe um i can't see paying people money to show me where they killed my family uh that's me there's different opinions on this some people find it very inspiring i i've never found that inspiring um when i used to do tours with neceva's tours we used to go to you know um we'd go to spain portugal and italy you know venice uh you know greece and i for that very inspiring uh stay in a nice hotel uh the freeze would bring in a special caterer uh chef who would prepare the all the food fresh they gave us lots of time for uh you know shopping and things that's my idea of a spiritually motivating trip uh watching where they killed a bunch of jews it doesn't do it for me to each their own and i'm not i know this is a controversial position and you know how i eschew controversy at every opportunity last thing i want to do is say anything that will get anyone upset but uh but that's for me but people have gone they told me in krakow there's a big shook where they're selling kiddush cups of dollar sets seder plates shabbos uh lamps all of the accoutrements of jewish life that have been passed down for generations and families and now it's being sold by the people who killed them in krakow but to have something that goes to your grandfather's grandfather an amazing thing my father when he started wearing film regularly which i remember was during the yom kippur war um you know he stopped when he stopped keeping shabbos because he had to work on travis a lot of things fell by the way said and uh but he said when the young kipper war took place he said i want to do something what can i do to help people are putting their lives on the line he says i'm going to start putting on filling so he had his grandfather's in very very old villain he put them on every morning and he would darvin and during ello he would blow the chauffeur and wake up my mother she always thought that was very special but anyway but uh as he was getting towards the end of his life he wanted to give his filling but we had all been wearing arts film for decades and these were very big old villain and uh and he was like do you want to wear you want my grandfather's telling you oh my god so my nephew uh aryalowski very special fellow and uh listen lakewood and ari was there he had just gotten bar mitzvah and he said grandpa could i have those filling he says ari i just brought you a new parrot fell in the you know mahuda with all the hedorah you know he says but you know what it means for me this is a 13 year old boy every morning to say i put on my grandfather's grandfather's villain a powerful thought yeah that makes you stop and think because as i point out when i have to give a class on into marriage i said if you're jewish today probably you had two jewish parents four gr jewish four grandparents eight great-grandparents and you keep going back until you're dealing with hundreds of people who had to decide to be jewish or you wouldn't be here today as a jew a lot of choices were made and was passed down to you that's something to think about give your grandfather's grandfather's filling it's 20 22. okay um somebody comes to you and they say are you so and so she says yeah says my gosh i've had this letter um in the uh post office in uh italy for the past 400 years uh it's dated 1622. and it's a letter for you from your great great great great grandparent who says to you stay strong be a yid it makes a difference live your life as a jewish person live build a home that's a torah home build a home that i would be proud to walk into ah come on it has to be mind boggling 400 year old daughter they looked at these trees that were planted 400 years ago by their grandparents grandparents and they cut them down and they took them with them into the desert and from that they built the mishkan the house where we live together with the paruhu as isha nisha as i mentioned last time that's a cure for us nobody sins unless they're suffering from temporary insanity because if you were thinking you wouldn't do it but you're not thinking that's you know what the cure for that is think where did i come from think the decisions that my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents or my great-grandparents and great-great-great-great-great-grandparents had to make in a world where there were no rules where discrimination and hardship and poverty and exile and physical harm and death were waiting for them because they remained true as jews and they thought it's worth it to me so i can pass it down to you and you're going to give that up for some momentary fling the cure for look ahead stop and think we build the mishkan the mishkan is the home for us and hashem every home is a michigan you know what would we use to build it the wood from our grandparents grandparents we build a torah home that they would walk into and say i don't recognize the appliances i don't recognize all the materials but that wood i planted that wood 400 years ago that's what goes into our mishkan and that's what goes into our home i don't know if we're going to do this with every item in the michigan but i just want to show you that when you take something as innocuous as the wood to make the beams what goes into that mishkan is a creation of something that gives our entire existence meaning and we need to appreciate that okay and now the question and answer portion of the program [Music] shmuel rosenberg asks may we ask hashem to save us from being caught doing or having done an aveda yes we do it every morning right after after the virgin we ask hashem to save us from doing and aveira and after we've done in the vera that's between us and hashem we don't have public confession in judaism so if we say i'm going to do chuva between me and akuraj baruch and i don't want anyone to know about it that's also legitimate anonymous asks is it important to follow current events what's your opinion about the news in general i heard a story years ago i never checked it out i'm not basically but the um that i heard in tells mozi shabbos the rush yeshiva would sit down and learn up shot in the news they would they would try to understand what was going on and what the events meant for us in the rebel khan vossemann biography they tell a story about where he had a newspaper and one of the boys grabbed it away from him and ran and gave it to the shiva and the shiva calls him over and says what's this he says first of all tell him to give me back my newspaper hey she was like azayla shergozel the guy is a gusling second of all i have to know what's going on we have to we have to learn events so if you're the kutska kutzka never left his little room and he knew everything that was going on how did he know because uh he says if you're in a high enough tower you can see all around so he was able to see all around and see what was going on but if you're not the kotzka then you have to know i heard from moshe of moshe mayor weiss a story that he said he heard from one of the people who who knew this firsthand that requirement who was the goddale of all of klauso um was uh in charge of of the whole jewish community so srihan would come from all around the world to give him reports so he would hear what was going on the the point of the story he was telling was that 10 of them showed up at the same time and he brought them in and he says no zag says who everybody no all 10 of them gave their points at the same time could do that because they say he would write a chuva with his left hand a different chuva with his right hand and have a conversation so okay he was an unusually gifted person yeah but the point is he had to know what was going on so how much current events do you need to know it's very hard today because to get the news to get news you have to sift through so much garbage and opinion and slantedness and as a president united states once said fake news till you get down to what the amis is but is it worthwhile to find out yeah do i have to know who performed in the halftime show at the super bowl no do i have to know who's in the super bowl no although i have to tell you i was once doing a chavez in philadelphia and they said to me you came on a good shabbos because you know uh philadelphia won the super bowl if they lost you'd be talking to a much uh less enthusiastic crowd so that's good to know sounds good to know you've noticed from me but that's only because of the the nature of my work that i i keep up with pop culture i have to be able to throw in these various references at times i'm always surprised when something's going on i don't even know about it you know because you know i have to have to look like i know what's going on in the world and to some people that's the most important thing the latest marvel movie is the most important thing that's ever happened yeah although in absolute terms it's worth nothing but uh but if you can throw around these terms you know what i mean so uh you know i can't tell you how many times i've spoken in places and i i made like a harry potter reference and everyone's like i get everyone's attention yeah so uh but so is that important for the average person no but to know what's going on yeah i think it is important um arie bennett asks did you ever come across a good understanding in iron miklot why does ago haddam have a right to kill the murderer but once the murderer reaches base he's safe he can't be touched what's the underlying understanding of what happened okay uh i'll give you my read of the story for those of you who are not familiar with this here's the thing you kill somebody accidentally now that's not really true it's called accidentally it's really negligence right a murderer is someone who pulls out a gun and says i hate you i want to kill you and shoots you bang an accident is someone pushes me over and i fall on top of somebody and kill them that's an accident showgig is i wasn't being careful i was polishing my gun and it went off i didn't think it was loaded yeah if you follow current events you you know this happened recently yeah a person didn't know that the gun was loaded or i'm i'm not being careful i'm driving i i i'm driving and i'm not paying attention and and i'm negligent in secular law they have two terms one is called murder and one is called manslaughter i killed somebody but i didn't have intention to kill anybody it was it was negligence so the the law is if you kill somebody in a negligent manner the relative of that person can come and kill you seems like a really strange concept right because um we don't have vigilante justice i mean my gosh it says that if the basement killed somebody once in 70 years they would call the bloody court you know so here you send the vigilante out to go and get the guy looks like a good day for a hanging yeah so instead we set up cities inner miklot to take the manslaughterer to go there and stay and we send him guards and if the girl dumb shows up we took him out of it now this is so counterintuitive the torah tells this guy you go out and kill the guy and when he gets there we tell him don't kill the guy he goes there in the glad and he stays there until the current gundam dies and then he can then he can go back home what's going on here i may have told this story yeah it's a scary scary scary story guys man was the dean of the hebrew academy of nassau county and uh my family went there and uh we were very close to very fidel should live and be well and every guys men and they would come to us some because they were part of our family anyway he came to ask me my advice i was running ncsy at the time there was a kid who was in the school his father bought him a new car and within the first week he crashed into a tree and totaled the car so the father bought him another car and he was with another kid and they're on their way to a hockey game and they're speeding and they hit a woman in a crosswalk and the other kid in the car said you hit that woman so i know but we're going to be late for the game and they left her there it turned out that if they had gotten help the woman would have lived as it is she died they went to the hockey game and this other kid is just sick and on the way back he says we'll go to a movie and the whole time this other kid is like he's wrenching we kill somebody hit somebody but he gets home his parents see him so what happened he tells his parents they call the police they find the woman she's dead they arrest this kid mary gusman said i know a judge i could uh maybe get him off should i get him off or not or should i let him face the consequences so one other part of the story kid comes back to school and one of the rabbis says to him look sometimes you have to fall down in order to get up and miss hashem you'll grow from this etc the father came in demanded that that rebbe be fired how dare he suggest that my son did anything wrong it was an accident that's why it's called an accident he didn't mean to kill her it was an accident my son didn't do anything wrong so i said to robbie guzman how many people does he have to kill there's a kid who can look you in the face after he ran over a woman and say i didn't do anything wrong here's a parent whose son killed somebody and can say i didn't do anything wrong that's the problem by killing the showgig i didn't mean it it was an accident okay it wasn't completely accident it was negligence but i didn't mean to kill the guy i should have checked the axe head to make sure it was attached before it flew off and killed somebody i didn't i should have been more careful climbing down the ladder before i lost my footing and fell on somebody but okay it was an accident a person has to go to an aramic lot which is one of the cities of the levium where you're surrounded by people who just learn torah and work on spirituality because life's not important enough to you so spend your time in reflection thinking about what you did that's the problem with jail you send somebody to jail and he sits around with a bunch of other criminals and becomes a better criminal you sent him with the holiest people in clay israel to think about what you did and realize it but you know what the guy doesn't want to go because i didn't do anything wrong so you have to appoint one person who's going to point at this man and say you are a murderer and if you don't face up to that and go to the end of the mclaren i'll kill you myself so now the guy says oh my gosh i have no choice i have to go to the ira miklot i'm being forced into a recovery program because i don't realize the severity of what i did if life was more important to you you'd figure this out on your own but unfortunately people who kill people in the negligent fashion don't always appreciate the consequences of what they've done that's how i've always understood it okay that's it for this week uh if you'd like to find out more about this program go to my website rubyalofty.com where you can sign up for one of my online shiram missilsaram um the uh on uh upcoming fila series which is going to be started you could find out more information and throw in your your opinion of what time would be a good time to make it uh you could download the theme song um you could uh listen to some of the other songs that are there some of the other musical extravaganza you can sponsor an episode and uh you can leave a comment whatever you want to do there's lots of options there are articles you can read there are other shoe room that i give besides the podcast that are up there whatever it is we're always happy to have you along and we'll see you next time i'm devin orlowski and this has been the rabbi olavsky show it's the rabbi orlowski show torah [Music] knowledge and wisdom will help you grow lots of fun in every episode and we don't have to rhyme no it's the rabbi orlovsky show on rabbi orlovsky.com torah anytime youtube and more it's rabbi orlowski show torah [Music] till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the rabbi orlowski show it's the rabbi show