Rebuilding after Tragedy (Ep. 134)

hi this is deborah olowski welcome to the raviolives tv show and whether you're watching with our friends on tour anytime or wherever you watch or listen to your podcast as always it's good to have us together we should all be together especially during difficult times uh we have a sponsor this week an anonymous sponsor as a host for claudius how appropriate so let me give the briefest introduction to obviously what we're going to talk about i've been doing this podcast for some time now and you've more or less figured out what it is that i i try to do here what we're trying to talk about and to empower people and give them a positive approach to life and to yahadus to themselves to their family to the jewish people to the world around us that's that's more or less and uh as a rule i don't deal with current events i don't deal with specifics i remember when there was an attack on a synagogue in pittsburgh an anti-semitic attack i didn't discuss it it was uh it was a tragedy and uh somebody wrote me and said i'm really surprised you didn't speak about it and i said everybody's speaking about it i don't think you need me to speak about it also that doesn't mean that i don't recognize the magnitude of the tragedy but you know um it was a sort of a tragedy that although you can never say this about the jewish people but it was localized the reason i i say can never say this about the jewish people is because claudius ravens and lizette were all responsible for each other um during the bayless trial they were attacking various quotes from the talmud one of them was the jewish people a jew is called an adam and not an ancient he says you think we're animals so the rav who was on the witness stand said no but there are many different words for people for human beings adam is a lushen that is specifically relating to flames because the jewish people are one people he says look there's a jew on trial here in russia and the entire jewish world is watching if there was a russian on trial would all of russia be watching would they all be concerned so of course it's just like i say that what can i tell you tragedy and dealing with tragedy and these sort of things are not really my strong point i i rather try to give positive building messages but what happened this past log by may is something that cannot be ignored and i have dreaded doing this podcast for exactly this reason but let's let's just deal with this for a second this is the least localized tragedy no one can imagine they were hasidim and they were yeshiva yeah the the hasidim and and brisk they were old middle-aged young i live in a high note if we lost a 13-year-old boy my grandson's rebbe was lost it wasn't an israeli tragedy like a usual terrorist attack there were people from uh different communities all across america in canada who were caught up in this so it spanned both of the uh north america and and israel there were uh kharadim and uh and that illumi people who were involved in this it was it was just such a cross-section that it was it was just it was like everybody was represented in this tragedy um the other aspect to it is that it was unlike baoma as one of my daughters who is particularly traumatized by this event said to me it changes the nature of like omer forever like bulma is this happy day where ironically we celebrate the end of death the talmudim of riverview kiva stopped dying and here by rushing by kevin so the the magnitude of those 45 individuals lost is just staggering staggering and most people are in shock so what's the first thing we do find someone to blame find someone to blame who is responsible why did they close off the exit why wasn't this repaired beforehand everybody starts uh mentioning i mentioned uh a tweet two years ago three years ago i pointed out there was going to be a problem i knew this was coming listen as long as i can remember jews have been going to uh harm around unlocked bone midnight and even though the tragedy always could happen it never did happen it was the first time that it didn't happen which means that on some level whatever special hashikaka we had as a people with akritbaruku watching over us he took that away let's make it worse it's right at the end of an entire year of mageifa i mean these are plagues of biblical proportion the gemara tells the story to explain you're not allowed to wear shoes with cleats on chavez because we're afraid you're going to dig up when you're walking no because there was one time that there were jews who were hiding from the non-jewish enemy in a cave and somebody was walking with cleats and it echoed through the cave and the people panicked and they ran for the exits and more people were killed by being trampled to death than uh and were killed in the actual that's over two thousand years ago and to this day we don't wear cleats on shabbos because jews were trampled to death so it's coming after him i gave her in a situation like this and and it just happened so quickly there was no so i'm a reason there's no enemy it's such an amazing thing i pointed this out that part of the effect of the coronavirus was that everybody has to stay alone people can't come together i used to say when i would speak before tisha b'av and say you know it's getting close to tishoba and everybody's making sure take another drink find something else to eat because i know i can't eat or drink for 24 hours and i would say you know you also can't say hello so make sure and use this timeline of this enough to say hello to all the people that you want to say hello to because you can't greet them on digital but that doesn't seem to bother us as much i'm afraid but uh but uh the the entire coronavirus period was measured by stay away from each other and finally they tell us we can come together and we came so together that the pressure ended up destroying 45 people so right away family members ask me how do you explain this and i gave them the correct answer and they said that's to pat i'm always surprised about this the answer remains the correct answer no matter how many times you ask the question you go to the doctor and he's going to tell you lose weight and exercise quit smoking if you're a smoker it doesn't matter how many times you go to him he's going to give you the same advice can't you do something else for me nope when i went to my diabetes doctor the you know first first number of times whatever that number is he used to tell me don't eat this don't eat that to his hand he would just say tony just just don't eat that's it don't eat exercise but people said to me how do you understand this let me explain this i always used to say i'm i'm always troubled by the question how do you explain the death of a young person because the implication is i'm okay with the death of an old person but being an older person i'm not ready to go yet i'd like to think that if i died it was a tragedy but evidently there's a certain age where we're okay if they die well okay it's no longer a question every death is a tragedy it doesn't matter what age the death takes place and there's only one way to look at it everyone's going to die you are burned born with a terminal condition you are going to die that's a fact everyone's going to die we don't know when we don't know how we don't get to choose it but there's going to come a time in everybody's life when it ends it's shocking i feel like i told this story recently but i flew in because they said my father was dying he didn't think he would make it i got there friday morning he died friday night and uh i was obviously quite jet-lagged and shabbos i went to lie down about three o'clock in the morning my brother woke me up and said dad was nifty and my first reaction was can't be can't be because death is a shock nobody's supposed to die because broca created the world that nobody was supposed to die the dust came in where moshe benoit says that goes baron why do i have to die i didn't do anything wrong he says because that's how it is built into the world everyone is going to die and some people will die in their 90s never without all their faculties and the family will sit shiva and they'll say that was time already you know he was old you know he was in pain and sometimes people will die as a as a young person and go console a parent had a neighbor lost a two-year-old meningitis and she said the saddest part is the lack of potential i never get to see her grow up go to school get married have a life who was carried me when i was in eighth grade he lost his father was over 100 years old and i was young then and i said uh well i guess it's easier because he was over a hundred on life and he burst into tears and i was surprised he said they reach a certain age you don't think they're ever going to die so everyone's going to die that's just how it is this is called the oil hasheker this is a world of illusion it's not real we're not meant to be here we're meant to be in olam haba we're meant to be in the real world but this world is an entrance hall we're going someplace we're here to do something i'm friends here in harnell their teenage son fell off his bicycle hit his head and passed away and we were all saying what do you say so this one row says what do you mean i went over right away so what did you say so the gemara says if a person dies under 20 it's not because they did anything wrong not a punishment it can't be anything other than the fact that because baruch who sent them back down to this world for a limited period of time so there was an ashama that lived a very long life and got up to shamayim and did bad things and was going to have to have a tikkun and uh because baruch says i'll give you a chance to come back down to the world to repair the things that you did he says okay i'll take it it's all right i'll live another 70 years i said 70 years what i didn't do anything good all right 40 years 40 years 40 years you're telling me that 40 years of my 70 years was no good you know and he handles and he handles until he gets god down to 16 years all right you only have to stay in this 16 years you'll get your compartment this is very hard for us to process because we're left behind like uh the song on journeys one of the two brothers in the womb but one of them is born and this twin thinks that he died please don't mourn me when my life has just begun [Music] and he tells his twins soon you'll be here with me in this world to come meaning you'll be born too and come into this world but this world is not the real world it's an illusion we get so attached to it we think it's so real we know this we hear this all the time we just don't believe it the wealthy man says this is how you live you don't have a couch you don't have drapes you don't have a rug it says the wealthy man you have all those things i'd love to see them i don't have them with me i'm just passing through i'm also just passing through we're in this world to accomplish something we don't choose as it says in perky of us against the will you born and against your will you die no one's consulting you on any of this you come down into this world you're given a certain amount of time and that's it come on could anyone have anticipated this i know everyone sending out tweets but for years and years people go to maroon somebody slipped and the door and the gate was closed and then people fell on top of them to anticipate this it happened because coach barrow decided that these people's time was up why did it okay you need a nubby only enough he can tell you why i'm not a navi i can't tell you why i can't answer um mystical esoteric questions and i'm not one of those i don't have kodesh why were the jews at the time of the purim story deserving to be destroyed they didn't know so we all know because he told us because they went to akhirosh's party but they didn't make that association because it was nine years apart i ca who's going to tell you anyone who tells you why this happened or that happened nobody knows why what you can do is look for patterns look for associations there are some poisson who say you have to keep a bayless during the night of blood moment and that's so we don't hold that away other people do because according to that shita the tamil kiva also died on my bank and so during like moment during the day you don't have to keep the ebay list why because mixes yama kakula you know when you have seven days of shiva on the seventh day you just sit a little bit and then you get up you don't you have to keep the whole day because that's the rule part of the day is like the whole day so the fact that people died on uh on like moment night going to that point of view it's not it's not such a mystery in any event like bomber is of course a happy day why because the talmudim of cuba stopped dying my son was four years old he came back from god and i said what did you learn he said it learns about like i said what did you learn he says live bomb is a happy day because the talmudim of rebbi akiva stopped dying four years old my yakov he's been on the podcast he looks me and he says but abba that's because they were all dead well yeah twenty four thousand tomato river akiva died the fact that that that they finished dying is only because there was nobody left to die the pre khadas asked this question so what's the simcha and he says the simcha is the last five tamid the vekiva advanced and aged went out and found another five-time medium and started over remember kevin was 40 years old he was an immigrant he couldn't read olive bass and he manages to go and sit in a little haiti with little children let me out of base 24 years to the age of 66. eventually he has 24 000 ton medium and these twenty four thousand tell me them became the leaders of chrysler and every single day hundreds of them died and after he buried his last talmud that's it he's an old man he's experienced tragedy that is difficult to comprehend today we say post traumatic stress disorder give up he looks around and he finds five more people who are ready to tell me them they were not on the level of his twenty four thousand it says akiva was able to learn even from the crowns on the letters of the torah that torah he gave to those twenty four thousand not to the others he's starting over again it must be hard having a job being in charge of the issue for 24 000 and then go to five it's gotta be hard looked at what had to be done picked himself up brushed himself off and started again that's the power of lock bonding isn't everything goes well as my son said they all died it wasn't like we dove and then we saved the day and they didn't die they all died every last one of them died the symbol is that we can pick yourself up afterwards and keep going klusenburger rapper survived the holocaust lords his wife and children came to itself got remarried again got more children built uh sons where do you get that strength that's log behind me anytime somebody finds the power to pick themselves up and keep going in spite of all the difficulties and challenges it's easy to give up as fact if you want to or you could it says at the end of tip on the roof rabbi wouldn't this be a good time for the messiah to come yes but until he does we'll just have to wait for him someplace else and so we jews have faced disappointment and tragedy over and over again and we pick ourselves up that's long bone and as we go into gullus because bronco comes with us ava mavina wants to save the metropolis known as stone five cities and he says they couldn't bargain maybe there are fifteen saudi maybe they're 40 maybe they're 30. maybe they're 20 maybe there are 10. but she says he was hoping to save all five cities 10 for each city if not say four cities not three cities two cities but there's one other number that's thrown in there forty-five forty-five is nine for each city and lethal bureaucrat styraf forty-five sadiq with a kurdish barack obama listen i'm not a navi and but after following a year of a pandemic so many people who passed away so many people who suffered financial losses so many people who still haven't completely recovered i still don't have my taste and spell back from the corona virus after all these things that happened yeah the power to keep going isn't like bowman listen is there a message in this for us yeah the fact that the coach broke who watched over us every year and this year he didn't yeah there's a message i'm not big enough to try to figure out what it is but this much is for sure everybody came together everyone crushed together young and old a citizen americans and israelis ready gentlemen if we do not hang together then we shall truly hang separately there's a message especially as we go into shabbos there are 600 000 jews and 600 000 letters in the sage of torah because every jew is important and all of us are responsible for each other the gemara says in gittin said put an oath put a sign on every tsadek so that when the destruction comes they'll be saved says the sutton why should they be saved they didn't give muslim they didn't try to help everybody else because bravo says but i know that if they did nobody would have listened he says you know that but they don't know that hashem says you're right put a sign on their head they're going to be the first to go i've been asked the question over the years i never really fully understood it but and ask the question um [Music] why did sadikim die in the holocaust sometimes i get asked by secular people why did the orthodox people die i said because we practice what you preach you talk about uh achtus where one people we actually believe as the famous yusumi always says if your right hand is cutting a piece of meat and by accident cuts your left hand your left hand doesn't pick up the knife and cut the right hand because you understand you're one body one people it's not us and them we've been government that we're trying to get digger tower to join and he says we're not going to join if you give the education ministry to merits so they said okay we'll make a separate haredi education ministry and you could be in charge of that said you think we only care about our children you think we don't care about every jewish child that's a mistake we're all in this together and we have to feel that sense of [Music] obligation [Music] and then singularly we all came together we're all going to be together if it kills us how levi we can do it why were these 45 people chosen that's god's department i don't know i can't i can't explain who he chose i will tell you what i uh said when the two bus blew up here in the usher line and they had a cross section of people they were discussing and uh each one was a big exciting than the next i said to my wife well at least i'm safe because he's only taking the tsa i don't know how these hijabs were made but special people were taken but they were taken for all of us we're all one people it's not us and them hashem we should come out of this and not know any more tragedies go into a simcha and everyone joining together that's it for this week if you want to find out more about the roloffsky show you can go to my website ruby alaska.com make comments sponsor an episode and uh [Music] you can contact me and that's it i'm deborah rolofsky and this is the ravioli