Tefila, Yishmael, & Mesiras Nefesh (Meaningful Tefila #1 - Ep. 147)

hi this is debbie dolowski and welcome to the robert lowsky show and whether you're watching with our friends over tour anytime or wherever you watch or listen to your podcast as always thanks for including us in your day i really appreciate it very much i was told my sponsor this week anonymous and i have to say he has sponsored a lot of podcasts recently and thank you so much anonymous now of course sometimes it's anonymous and like last time they they actually gave their name uh this is a dear friend of mine um who uh who i'll call uh uh joe schwartz but whose real name is uh i'm linda i'm just kidding no i'm not gonna say his name but he's a dear friend of mine one of the funniest people i know and extremely talented and uh you know i love you and uh thank you so much uh for continuing to be a part of our lives and uh for some of the funniest quotes that we still share in our family so um uh i'll just give one mayday mayday [Laughter] for those who don't get the reference in uh in aladdin when he's saying something stupid to uh to the princess so the genie starts going mayday may they so evidently uh i was saying something that was getting me into trouble with my wife and he starts going mayday mayday that's one that's one we we still use that one but there are a lot of them so uh thank you so much as always we're we're thrilled to uh to just have you as part of our lives okay so uh i'm i'm at that point now which happens every now and then we finished uh whatever it is that we were working on and i say to myself what should i talk about and i did this to my wife which always gets my wife uh very nervous [Laughter] because she doesn't know what i should talk about either right you know you think there's a lot of preparation that goes into this yeah you can you met last uh last time i produced some and he'll you'll testify that very often i just sit down and say so what should i talk about so as i was driving over i had a number of ideas that came to me and one of them was i was thinking you know we haven't really talked about the punisher in a long time and then i realized no the problem with that is that depending on when it comes out uh where is it where is it going to be relevant to uh if you happen to watch it that week if you're watching a different week how often do people in the middle of the summer just want to hear a sheer on pashas about yay shave yeah so i thought instead you know i'll pick up something thematic and the thematic thing that i want to talk about hashem i've worked on my lisp over the years yeah the thematic thing that i want to talk about is some something that's going on obviously very relevant today and that is boracious is the foundation voracious is where we talk about the ovo's the fathers of claustro and uh each one of them of course makes a major contribution each one of them makes a unique contribution to the development of the jewish people they built into us a certain spiritual genetics that last to this day to the point where the gemara and baba bastard says how do you tell if someone is descended from avrahamitsuganyakov or from the arab rav from the mixed multitude from mitzrayim so it says jews are rachmanim by shanim and gom jews are generous jews have a sense of shame what they call jewish guilt but we call it shame shame is the uh nervous system of the soul if you don't feel ashamed of something then you have to be a little suspicious and uh they're merciful they're immersive i knew a guy who was working with kids who you know guys who went off to derrick and he says you know it's it's to a certain extent it's easier to bring back a jewish boy because it's hard for him to make it on the street he can't just take a razor and slice up someone's face he said to me a black kid could a hispanic kid could an italian kid could but for a jewish kid it's hard it's hard it goes against his nature the late jackie mason used to say he said a jew couldn't be a mugger can't pull out a gun and say give me all your money how much you got let's work something out there's a certain there's a certain level of cruelty that you have to really deaden that that part of you to do whereas other people it comes right naturally to them so uh so there's there's certain aspects of the others put into us at the same time there is a counter force in the world that also comes from the others and that's yeshma and asaf and the two of them become the leaders of the opposition eleven susim ayla is aleph and 35 and that's twice there's ayla and there's ayla because the 70 nations of the world divide up 35 and 35. yeshmael is the one who takes half of the world and asap takes the other half of the world and the shame hashem right we're we're left alone we are the one sheep surrounded by 70 wolves and so we see the development of our arch enemies and they're completely different they're completely different that's why the scariest part of voracious is at the end of toldos when yaakov goes off to get married and start the jewish people asap marries the daughter of ishmael and the two forces joined together but they have a completely different approach uh asap is violent he lives by his sword he's a murderer he kills that's why when god offered him the torah he says what does it say lo sirta he says don't murder but the torah says i am a murderer that's part of my nature. what bothered yeshua was lo signoff para adam i'm a thief i steal is not by nature of a murderer the fact that you can find arabs who are suicide bombers is only because of the ace of influence where the two of them joined together but that yishmael doesn't go that way yeshua is interested in pleasure pleasure someone asked for marisha shapiro once the ghazal say of the ten levels of zima of immorality that was a particular type of immorality um ishmael got nine parts of it so someone asked for but mr shapiro goes then why are they so mock bit on sneeze to an extreme extent they wear borkers you know i mean completely covered up he says they have to because they live in a society of men who have no controls so you have to cover up the women completely because they're totally out of control that's the way that he put it they describe their entire olam haba in terms of zima that's what the next world is just as much women as a person could possibly imagine in the words of groucho marx another jew who went off why there'll be more girls there than you can shake a stick at if that's your idea of a good time yeah they have a different idea of what's a good time and that's that's their old their whole habit is zima so they're not blowing themselves up that doesn't that doesn't fit in with who they are their national character now there are two types of villains i i i've made this clear many times during the past three years when i was a kid i read superhero comic books i did not show them read archie or richie rich or those kind of things i wasn't i wasn't a girl i understand i read superhero comics right why because there was a nebby kid who was picked on by everybody and uh you know and it was escapist uh you know literature for uh for a boy who gets picked on the little boys you can imagine you can fly you're invulnerable you have super strength you know uh someone starts up with you you can burn them with your heat vision i was like yeah these are these are things you know you you escape into a make-believe world right but you can you can find musa everywhere every everything uh literature is a muscle that's the power of literature i'm not i'm not saying therefore a person should stop learning you know uh remember myself tourism these parents wanted their son not to continue in yeshiva and to go to university they said we believe you can find god in everything you can find torah in everything you can find torah in science you can find torah in literature you can find torah in in history and my son said that's true and you could also find torah and torah and i might argue that it's probably the most efficient way to get it so i'm not suggesting that a person should stop learning you know and read literature but you know um you know if you if you want something to distract you when you're in in your house in the room without a mezuzah yeah so uh you know so classic novels are great because you can only read two or three pages at the time anyway so it's like i've gotten through some of the most difficult classic novels uh that way in fact i was speaking once in high school and i quoted something from charles dickens bleak house and uh the director of the english studies department said to me you read bleak house i said yeah yeah because i couldn't get through bleak house how did you get through bleak house i said two pages at a time so there are things dickens was uh such a powerful satirist he had such an unbelievable ability of of of finding uh foibles in life and making fun of it and some of it was absolutely brilliant you know and barnaby rudge the fellow there who who manages to um manipulate the crowd it's brilliant you know and little dory has this character who just keeps talking she talks for pages at a time and as she uh as the book goes on her speeches become longer and longer and he takes out punctuation until it's just like one long two pages it's it's it's wonderful satire so you learn things from uh from everything everything can be used as a martial if you know how to look for it so uh superheroes have two types of villains they have villains who are complete opposite of who they are they have a particular set of skills uh superman superman is a strange visitor from another planet who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men right he's invulnerable he flies he has x-ray vision heat vision microscopic vision you know it's super strength you know all kinds of stuff and here's two arch villains one is lex luthor who is a guy and really superman could just like burn him up and end it but he's brilliant there's no evidence that superman is brilliant isn't it and he uses his intelligence to get superman and superman has a certain code he doesn't just kill people but that's one of his arch enemies the other one is general zod which makes sense he's exactly like him he's a kryptonian the two of them have to fight like kryptonians so the two of them fight yeah so there's two types of villains there are those that are completely not like you and every superhero has a villain who's exactly like them iron man fights another guy in a big orange suit captain america has to fight uh red skull who also is a super soldier and got the super soldier serum yeah uh so he has to sometimes you have people who have the same exact skill set as you and sometimes you have an enemy who's the exact opposite yeah so we have one enemy who's the exact opposite of us and that's asap all right he is physical he fights with the sword and the difference of us and the way that it's summed up is hako ko yakov you daimy de jeff they fight and we dove and that's our power if we go one on one with him on his terms we wouldn't be able to defeat him he's the polar opposite of us and then there's our other arch enemy ishma el god will hear him he has the power of tefila and so the battle between us and yeshmael is in some ways more insidious because we're using the same weapon you've got two guys in an iron suit you have two kryptonians you're slugging it out and batman and the joker two psychopaths who dress up who both happen to be brilliant and have a lot of strength they're basically just the opposite sides of each other but they're both using the same tools sherlock holmes is dr moriarty both of them are brilliant that's how they go at each other and they have very much the same skills and the maharal says that the final gullis and the final battle will between us and ishmael who will daven better who is going to use the power of coal better and so as i was thinking of this on the way to the rabiolonsky studios to to film this episode i thought to myself how is that in three years i've never really talked about tefila now i talked about the yom narayan to feel this a little bit and things like that and listen there's only so much you can do unless you uh do a uh a daily show where your mom was giving a shirt in a particular topic or subject matter i mean i i got through a summer just picking out one line from one mishna from one pair of piercing of us imagine if we sat down to learn all of perks how long that would take yeah um because of corona my uh my public shire that i give emoji shabbos was canceled until just recently um parshas noah i i started again but we we didn't have any in-person sure and the reason that is particularly significant is that i've been doing a series for years now where i base myself on a uh a concept you find in the schla you find in other places uh we say the al-qaeda according to the aleph bays because since the world was created with the olive bays and we destroyed it with our vedas we need to rebuild it with the same aleph base that was created so that that's that part of it is real what i said is if that's the case there must be some connection between the letter and the kayak the letter that we're using and and the particular aveiras that we mention so for example on ma'am we do michael mister we could have put that on aleph so i've been giving a shirt i started with aleph and explained why the virus of imuts lev and onus viruzon and or shamnu tie into os aleph and i said i'm going to do one letter every year and at the beginning everybody was laughing because there's no way you're going to do this 22 years well uh i got through none before coronavirus hit so i'm more than halfway through and um and uh we had to suspend it for the next two years so there's always that idea that when you start uh um when you start a program that takes time you have to wonder oh i know if anybody's familiar there was this uh woman in scotland uh j.k rowling who wrote this series of children's books and she managed to keep a mystery going for six books they were waiting for the seventh book to come out and and you really didn't know what was going to happen and people used to say what would happen if she died before the book came out now in fact that happened to charles dickens charles dickens was in the middle of writing the mystery of edwin drude when he died the irony is they actually made a broadway play out of it and uh and they performed the entire book until they got to the part where he died and the narrator would come out and he'd say and at this point mr dickens looked at what he had written he with a certain sense of satisfaction put down his quill and died so we don't know how it ends so the audience got to vote on who was the murderer you know who's the love interest well there you go and they had a whole bunch of different endings to play out based on what the audience would vote for and the actors would come out into the crowd and get you know try to get people to vote for them but you know if you don't know the ending so that's why you start something like this it's going to take 22 years to finish and i mean you hope you hope you have a ricochet yeah i was doing michelle with the guru going to shirum with mr shapiro he did not get very far in the savior unfortunately um don't get me wrong we spent years on it but at the end of the day michelle is a big saver and he could spend many shiorim on one line in the guru and a lot to say on the subject so in any event so i realized in all the things we've talked about we never really talked about tefila and there's a lot to say in the subject so i'm going to be talking in the weeks ahead about tefila which i think is something that is so essential i want to start by telling you a story i was the long island director of ncsy for nine years and we had two divisions we had the senior division and the junior division and the junior division were younger children and for the younger children who weren't as good as expressing themselves all the children are very good at expressing themselves they go i don't have to take this you see younger children aren't sure exactly how to put that into words there you go just go so uh we'd give them a question here different questions uh what part of the program did you think was the best what part of the program didn't you like what did you think of the food what'd you think of the night program uh were there any particular advisors that you uh you know thought did a really good job things like this so one of the questions was what did you think was the most important part of the program and for shabbaton after champion the number one answer was tefila later on in the questionnaire when they asked the question what part of the program did you like the least the number one answer consistently was tefila and i thought that really just sums it up because everybody wants to feel it to be meaningful but it's not working it's not connecting all right mark twain famously said everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it you know everyone wants to have meaningful tweeler and so when they come out with any of these meaningful feeler books which i don't understand how you can use them because if you try to daven with them alcavra um [Music] i don't know silent reading for four pages okay you talk it it's not dominating anymore you're just you're just reading there is a certain value to that when i was uh in ncsy we used to sometimes have an explanatory minion for people who didn't know how to darven so rather than have them sit and shul for hours not knowing what's going on we would sit down and talk about the fearless and what we're saying and we'd say the shmine we'd work on some of the things but to make to feel meaningful to a person where where you can feel something means you have to give up your life what's serving hashem with all your heart says that's tefila fila is the avodah of the heart and i want to say it's not just the service of the heart it's it's a it's the work of the heart it's an effort to make feeler meaningful is a struggle so many people who feel disconnected i i'm i'm pretty sure i told this story once upon a time but i it it relates to so many different levels but i i found this one particularly significant i have a friend of mine who was a rev and he was discussing this issue that so many sures have that everyone talks people come to show and talk my rebbie zaikad sadiq the jack of wales you know he said once in class he says these two guys are sitting there talking and sure i said you have to come to schuler talk he said sure i could dive in at home but i got no one to talk to do you understand like that some people come to show and they sit there and they talk right miami boys choir actually wrote a whole song you know don't talk just down and people struggled with this and so this friend of mine asked me what would you do i said me if i was a rabbi rasho and everybody was talking i said i would make a hush come a minion 7 15 and i'd say there's no talking at this minion and anyone who wants to davin come here and the upstairs minion will start at nine o'clock and when i finish diving i'll come upstairs and i'll sit by my you know my lectern and i'll learn and i'll make the announcements and i'll uh i'll make the sermon i'll shake hands with everybody and i'll say anybody who wants to dumb and come downstairs and up here i'm not shushing you talk as much as you want and frankly if i had my druthers i would take out the bema and just put in a big table with coffee and cake and let everybody have a sit and talk what's the point of having a diamond because nobody wants to participate that that's what i told him anyway i told this story over at someone's house and this one guy is slowly sinking into the ground and uh i see everybody looking at him i was like what and he says i'm one of the big talkers i said so it's a great idea no get rid of the bema why should we interrupt your conversation with like the dobbing and the laning you know you could just sit in schmooze he says you understand i come to show late the the first dominion is already having their kiddush i could just go and have the kiddush with them i said i don't understand he says i want to come to shul i want it to be davening and i want there to be kriya satyra i said but you don't listen right and you don't darvin right but i want to go to school an amazing concept this person is desperate to darven but is completely disconnected from it doesn't know how so we're starting a new series ding ding ding our tv series and we're going to talk about different ways of how to make artifila more meaningful how to incorporate it yeah so that we can reach hashem [Laughter] yeah so uh so we're going to work on different things that's what we're going to talk about because since the final battle is going to be between us and ishmael and rabbi shapiro would speak about this many times it's going to be between us and yeshua and it's going to be about davening and not just darvening but mysterious nephesh remember that's what ishmael said to yitzhak ah big shot you had your bruce miller when you were eight days old i had mine at 13. i have more masiras nephesh than you i've suffered more a fellow i know who owns a uh garage an arab worker and somehow they start talking about politics never a good idea and he says listen eventually we're going to win and we're going to get the whole country because we're still willing to die for what we believe in and you're not anymore you're tired you've had enough and i thought wow amazing idea he's saying exactly what rashi says the battle between yitzhak and ishmael is masira's nephew and that's why ishmael says if a coach who he says i had my brisbane when i was 13 and yitzhak says if i could barkley ask for my whole body i would have it that's why they we had they came to yitzhak to show we have more mysterious nephews than they do we care more and the messiest nephesh necessary to darwin to reach inside of ourselves he becomes a rover kesha's becomes an archer and uh at the in parties vaishi he says uh yaakov says that i captured why is a bow and arrow because as far as you want the arrow to go that's how far you have to pull back the bow and so the more you reach inside of yourself and the more covenant you have the further it's going to go so this is our battle the battle between the archers who is going to be able to send that arrow flying and you know anytime it says hates in the the terror it means uh your tongue your tongue is an arrow because what the words that you say go so far you can kill somebody 100 miles away thousand miles away with your words okay well that's our introduction to this topic and i was about to say that's it for this week but we started a new segment a new segment it's called our question and answer segment and uh we asked you to submit questions we've got a few questions and i'm going to deal with one of them this week anonymous asks by the way that is not the same anonymous as the one who sponsored the episode don't confuse the two yeah because uh you know you have to you have to make sure that you you get it right and different anonymous i know nimitz why did the kohanam need a special doctor because they got colds from doing a voda barefoot if i've always wondered about this so for those of you who don't understand the question i'll explain the question kohanim have to wear the big day kahuna and that's it they had these sort of pants that they wore underneath that came down to their knees and they tied it with a like a little tie a little belt and then they put on this long shirt robe that went down to their feet and came all the way down to their hands and that was tied with a belt 32 hours long that's a very long belt and then they hit a turbine they wrapped it in the house the going gutter got four more begotten but this was the average cohen outfit you could not wear anything else you couldn't uh wear your own personal undergarments you couldn't wear any jewelry you couldn't wear any socks and shoes you worked barefoot okay now in the winter time in jerusalem i am it can sometimes get cold and most of the evoda was done at the mizbeh and the respect was outside without a roof or a roof if you're from chicago and they're running around on the cold floor and they're eating a lot of meat not all of it uh cooked well done which is the way that jews have historically eaten meat until about 30 years ago that's nice no diverse and all the ghost influence came in and you can find actual jews eating uh meat that's rare i'm rare i mean dripping blood it's it's almost mooing every jew eats their medium well or well is the only way to eat a steak my father was in uh was in the flower business he used to work with caterers you know and i cater and told him once he says you know how hard it is when i'm making a wedding and i need 400 n pieces because everybody wants a well done piece nobody wants it's red maybe red today of course you know if you if you if you go in and you order a steak that's anything that's more than medium there we don't even serve that we don't have that kind of meat you know if you want i can give you a brisket sandwich and that's what steak is immediate so um so they didn't have time to cook all the meat you know you have to make sure you only have until a certain time to eat these cabanas so they had to eat them and so they would get digestive problems and it says there was a doctor on call to help them when they were suffering from eating not very well cooked meat running around barefoot in the cold on the stone floors so anonymous asks why did they have to do this we have a rule that a person who's doing a mitzvah is not going to get hurt it ties in with the general principle that i always like to point out you can never be wrong by doing the right thing i had a young lady may have told this story in the shuttle series uh she wanted to marry a nice guy who was sitting and learning and she was working for partners in torah and uh the shotgun she spoke to said listen a real yeshiva boy doesn't want a girl who's working in cuba and she got a job in a regular office you know and you know here if you know they hear that they get scared so she asked me should i quit my job i said are you doing a good job she said yeah i said are you helping the organization she said yeah i said i don't know my god doesn't punish people who's doing his work and helping jews find their way back to torah it just doesn't work that way not my book you're telling me that god won't let you find your because you're helping claude israel i don't think so so hashem six months later found a nice guy she got married i don't usually have any endings to my stories and i certainly try to avoid happy ones but what can i do every now and then it happens it's a this is more like a story it has an ending and it's a good ending you know but um so uh so schluke mitzvahed on the zurich and so why should they get sick when they're doing the invoda so the gemara in sukkah when it talks about this gives one caveat and that is if the hezek is matsoi this doesn't apply meaning you don't have to expect something unusual but neither can you not take something to account therefore if you know that you need three hours at the airport in order to make your flight and you show up 15 minutes beforehand and you miss the flight then you can't say how did that happen mitzvah no you knew when you were supposed to come you knew what you were supposed to do and you didn't the gemara says everything is in the hands of heaven except for hot and cold what does that mean it means if it's a hot day and you went out and you didn't take water and you didn't take a hat so then you don't blame a cottage burger when you get a heat stroke and it was a cold day and you went out without a jacket not a sweater without a scarf i uh i did a um i spoke in muncie um and uh it was uh january or february wasn't like that there was some sort of uh arctic vortex it turns out that it was colder in new york or certainly in muncie than it was at the north pole so okay so i put on thermals and i put on a sweater and i put on a coat and i put on earmuffs i put on a face mask it was freezing cold you just walk outside with nothing and then you're surprised that you got sick you don't have a right to say that therefore they weren't doing anything that was unusual if you walk around barefoot on the freezing cold now having said that they didn't have a doctor in the first place in my dish the level of kadusha was such that even though this was called bedera teva they had special protection above and beyond it was much more of a supernatural nature but the second base of mcdonald's which don't get me wrong also had nissim when they used to take the tumor sedation those first ashes and put it by the side of his back it absorbed into the floor there was definitely a nissan that took place but it wasn't outside of the realm of i'm talking about life in the basement english wasn't outside of the realm of what was called normal and so you find certain things that took place in the first place in big dish that didn't take place in the second base to make dish therefore if the kohanim are acting in a way that's normal and that's why the gemara itself says if you're a mitzvah but you're doing something that you know is going to cause problems then you don't have that special protection you have the special protection that you know you have to uh take into account that i okay i don't have to not be afraid having said that of course you're only smart if you take precautions uh orbach's father had uh yeshiva and uh in irishland and he went to collect money and on the boat back so this non-jewish thug attacked him and he said something and his hand froze and he says stop it stop it stop it and the whole crowd is forming i can't move my arm i can't mow my arm he goes are you going to bother me again he says no he said something else and his arm went down and from that point onwards even though they suspected that he was carrying money nobody bothered him and his son zalman came over to him afterwards and said tata how much did you pay the guy [Laughter] it was a clever ruse in order to frighten the rubes on the boat to make sure that they did not uh come and attack him so you take precautions you're it's smart you can't go wrong by being smart yeah you have to take normal precautions into account therefore the kohanum working the base of macdush they uh would be protected from raise an earthquake lightning bolt you know i mean uh what we call acts of god but within the normal functioning of nature you have to figure that they have to take precautions and that's it for this week thank you for sending in questions we'll deal with more of the questions uh in the future uh and uh that's it for this week if you want to find out more about the show you can go to rubyalovsky.com you can leave a comment um you can join our live shirum online we have daffy omichi salsa sharmshare go to abrialovsky.com live if you'd like to sponsor an episode and i'm speaking to you anonymous you go to reality.com sponsor and of course if you'd like to submit a question for our new question and answer segment go to eribiolowsky.com qa that's it for this week thank you again for joining us i'm devin orlowski and this is the rapper alofsky show it's the rabbi orlowski show knowledge and wisdom will help you grow lots of fun in every episode and we don't have to rhyme it's the rabbi orlovsky show on rabbi orlotsky.com torah anytime youtube and more it's rabbi orlowski show [Music] till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the raviolovsky show it's the rabbi orlowski [Music]