The Power to Rebuild (Ep. 128)

hi this is double dollowski and welcome to the robertovski show and wherever you're watching wherever you're listening whatever you're doing i hope it's good you know i i actually uh got a number of emails complaining that the recent episodes have just been too darn long they've just gotten too long i i'm surprised because people used to complain they were too short and people say listen i liked it the way it was it just gets to be too long and uh you know i haven't got that much time to uh dedicate to this nothing personal [Laughter] i don't take it personally you know personally i can sit and listen to myself for hours and hours and i do you know i actually watch my podcast and i laugh all over again and enjoy myself so okay so the last episode which was our perm episode was particularly long er the purim episodes tend to be long because i bring in my children and you know give them that form and uh you know there's a lot of rolovski's you have to bear in mind i'm one of six boys my oldest brother passed away uh but when i was growing up i was i was probably the quietest in the family you know everybody would be outside playing ball having rock fights with the kids down the block you know and i was in my room and read i i was uh i was relatively quiet compared to the rest of my family so you can imagine if uh we got everybody here together you know um my brother jason who uh who passed away his yard said is coming up the beginning of nissan um he said to me once i can't believe you get paid to speak i'm so much funnier than you are and i'm so much better than you are and i'm so much more interesting than you why do you get paid to do this and i said uh well jason i work clean he goes oh all right [Music] but for pure outrageousness a few people could uh could talk to him very talented and bore hashem i have a lot of talented children and so we all have a lot to say but uh you know so i'm gonna try to keep this one a little shorter and uh but i will make up for it uh because soon we'll be starting our annual pesach program and we'll be having multiple episodes to keep you company while you prepare for pesach i want to finish up other with with an idea that i feel like i may have talked about in the past but you know when you get to be my age uh you know what they say the first thing to go is your memory the second thing is um no that's not a point but anyway um so it could be i've spoken about this before but you know you you reach a certain age and they see you're constantly meeting new people and sometimes their family members you just don't remember you know uh part of this is age and part of it is hereditary you know uh my father as long as i can remember most of the people uh that he knew was named uh uh uh uh who's that guy uh uh and uh you know we start to become our parents you know we get a little older such as uh such as life some people are much better with their memories my good friend uh joe werfel uh who i've never really uh spoken about yet i really need to dedicate uh more more of a show to him but uh his mind was sharp right up until the end i mean he uh he can remember everything was just amazing uh he was my my uh associate director and ncsy and um i never needed a rolodex before there were uh cell phones um before there were uh mobile phones it was just regular phones that were wired uh into the wall uh so you basically had a fancy address book you used to have address books where you kept track of names and addresses and phone numbers and a fancy one was a rolodex where each person got their own little card in alphabetical order and you would roll it roll the decks to be able to find the particular name we didn't need one in the office because joe remembered everybody's number and just knew them all by heart i just say joe what's the number you know today it's the exact opposite nobody knows anybody's number because they put it to their phone and then they just know the name they lose their phone they don't know anybody's numbers so uh yeah it's is a different thing but it could be i spoke about this idea in the past but as we come to the end of the month of adar which is the end of the jewish year where the world was created in nissan or in tishrei and uh we seemed to pass king liger yeshua the world was created in nissan now of course we have rosh hashanah at the beginning of of tishrei we call it the russian shandong the beginning of the year and the famous iran discusses why we call it rosh hashanah if in fact the world was created in nissan what took place on rosh hashanah but okay we'll put that aside just for a moment and and say that the world is coming to an end on other and this was one of the things that human uh noticed that when the poor came out to addre he says oh just as the jewish people began in nisan so they will end in other because everything has a beginning a middle and an end and so the jewish people came into existence in the month of nisan so a sana is a full cycle they'll meet their end in other um so the mishnis shkolin which interestingly enough is the only you show me that we do in uh in da fiomi um we're coming to the end of sokken by the way those of you who would like to consider picking up with daf yomi we will be starting soon uh shkolim you will show me and uh that's really fascinating and um uh we uh we'll be going through scotland and it talks about the khati shekel that was collected every year and it was collected during uh other so that it could be used to buy the new cabon ice the new offerings public offerings that were going to be brought on in nissan and the puzzle teaches us uh that you have to use new money every year to buy the new carbon ice even though half a shekel from all of the jewish people with such an enormous amount of money in fact during the second base of mikdash people tried to buy from the romans uh the position of coin gundle so that they could get access to the treasury such an enormous amount of money that was involved and he just had to buy two sheep for the corporate tournament every day and corbin mussoff uh relatively limited amount of those on the holidays and uh every shabbos um so uh so a lot of this money was left over so bishneish column begins by saying that on rosh chodesh they begin announcing about the [Music] and uh that is why we read parishes golem on either the shabbos before rosh chodesh or in a year like this which has been extremely unusual year sorry potatoes came out on friday that can happen but does not happen often um we we of course have um for you outside of yerushalayim purim comes out on friday we've had that a lot of times here in jerusalem you people don't have that too often because when that happens we have purim on shabbos which of course leads to a perimeter which is what we had here in usual i am three days after and that means that eric pesach will come out on on shabbos and so that brings with it its own challenges which we'll talk about and uh so pasha shkolim you can actually do on rosh pradesh adam and they read the parsha and tell everyone to get ready with their shackle so the first mishna parak aleph mishna alef says that in addition to that what would they do mataknan they would as a rehobos they would fix up the roads and the highways yes mikhail's hamayim and they would clean out the public mikvahs etc um the ocean called surge and they would take care of everything that needed to be done so what were they taking care of okay talk about different things that they would do uh what would they do uh messiah and assad virus they would ma mark the graves vyotanafal and they would also send out people to check if uh there was overgrowth that was leading to killheim now why would they do this okay so one reason is we're going to start collecting money from the public and we want to show the public your tax dollars at work i want to show everybody that they're uh we're fixing up the roads we're remarking the graves we're taking care of all of the public projects that need to be done don't worry your money is going to a good course that's one reason the other reason is that the month of adar is at the end of the rainy season we've had a really good uh rainy season the kinerick is uh almost full it's uh it was a good year but uh there's something in the world a rule a newtonian rule if you will known as entropy and that is things fall apart left to themselves systems tend to reach their greatest level of disorder and chaos all right don't try cleaning the kitchen for a while you will won't find that it becomes cleaner don't stay on top of cleaning the house it's not going to become cleaner things fall apart things reach a level of chaos toe everything falls apart you need to maintain things you need to work to stay on top of things the rainy season is a time historically in different societies where people did not stay on top of everything because the rain would just come and wash everything away so it doesn't pay to clean out the mcvos because it's just gonna rain and wash dirt and leaves and things into it that's the way that's the way the world is set up in springtime everything grows renews begins again summer it becomes lush and full in autumn things begin to deteriorate things start to wither and there's some and in the winter everything looks dead the trees look dead and the rain washes everything away so you have to re-mark the graves because they used to mark around it with plaster so you knew where the grave was so people didn't become tummy and the rain would wash that away um things would become overgrown so you'd end up with kill ion because uh you know different types of species would grow together so you have to send people out to check and say hey you're going to uproot that you got to remove that that's a problem i know you didn't plant it but that's what happens things just start to grow you take a look at the sidewalk and you see grass growing out and between the in between the concrete you'll find uh and and wherever you might have uh tiling or brick work outside you'll find things starting to grow out of it things start to wash away that's the nature of life things tend to fall apart uh trust me yeah when you're young you think you can do anything you can't even imagine that there's a limitation you can eat whatever you want as much as you want unless you have some kind of specific digestive problem you can do anything you want you're so strong you so you slowly start getting older and you start to see your body developing limitations now there are things i can't do now uh there are things i can't eat now my opportunities are becoming more limited you feel life closing in on you things start to fall apart or as someone famously noted if i wake up in the morning and nothing hurts then i know i'm dead you start to go and uh i go to get a haircut i said to the guy you obviously didn't clean off the you know cloth from the last guy because there's all this white hair where'd that come from i'm shocked i'm shocked um full disclosure because i have no filters as you probably noticed uh i had a problem uh part of it's hereditary part of it is age but my eyelids were drooping into my eyes they were drooping so far in that i couldn't see you know i would have teach a class and i'd have to like lift open my eyes yeah so i went for what today we call the vernacular and eye job where they cut away part of my lid cut away some of the underneath i just couldn't see in fact the uh the health fund covered it because they said this is medical you just can't see it's kind of dangerous when you're driving you know i remember uh when i went for the checkup afterwards he showed me the four pictures in the after pictures he says see now you don't look so tired and angry i said did it ever occur to you that i'm just tired and angry but you know gravity just starts to hang down on it okay so kumar says rabiot had to roll up his island that wasn't good but i just couldn't see it wasn't it wasn't uh um it wasn't for uh you know uh um you know just just for appearances sake i just medically i couldn't sing in fact it takes a while till things snap back now for the longest time i was like you know my wife says why do you always look upset i said it's not it's you know you always look like you're going [Laughter] in fact there was one particular actress who had her eyes done so many times that she couldn't close them and close them all the way yeah but uh gosh when you're younger who even imagines that well bit by bit that's the nature of life yes nissan it begins and slowly by the time you reach either everything's falling apart and so we have to spend a time of hishajus recreation we have to fix things up clean things up pesach cleaning so you have a lot of these around bottom who always point out you know pesach cleaning is not spring cleaning i used to say this over because it's one of the things you're expected to say in a pesachia you know until one time a woman said to me right but i also have to do spring cleaning so do you really think i'm going to take the beds apart to check the you know the the bed frames to make sure there's no hummus there and not wipe it down i was like yeah you're right do spring cleaning it's something that's built into nature at the at the end of the rainy season as we get ready for the springtime you have to clean everything up you have to clean out the mcvos and clean out the the burrows of water you have to repaint you have to set everything up because that's the nature of it things fall apart and before you can get started you have to start over again gardeners know that they have to come in at the end of the winter before the springtime you know plant the annuals those you're not familiar you know there's two types of plants there are annuals and perennials perennials just keep uh growing the same plants annuals they they die out at the end of the of autumn and they have to be replaced so uh you have to come in you have to clean up the garden rake out all the dead leaves pull everything together if you are environmentally conscious you'll pull them all together and let them mulch so you can use them later for fertilizing and pull everything together but uh but that's the nature of life things fall apart yeah it's very interesting we say feel as tal um on pesach we say that's vila fatale and if you look in i think it's the mata moshe it could be the mountain one of the one of the perusan so when you say it feels geshen so when you come to the end of two sketching we say look i am veloli mothers and it says quite literally you need water to live that the rain should fall so that we can live and not die we uh we and erzel are much more conscious of this because we really really uh depend on the rain and people don't realize this and yerushalayim when they would find any house it always had a cistern because during the rainy season you would wait for your cistern to fill up and then you would seal it and that was all the water you had for washing for drinking for whatever and as it would slowly go down you had to hope that you know it lasted until the to the next rainy season if it didn't you know you were a very serious thing they'd make tenacion i'm talking about even in the old yeshua you go to the old yeshua museum in the old city you'll see the different signs that they used to put up telling people we're making a tiniest while making especially ones feel that there's no rain i remember one time there was a drought terrible drought and they made a yom tefila at the uh at the case of the western wall and i remember i was at the time i was teaching in asia torah so i was overlooking coastal plaza and they gathered everybody together there was no prediction of rain and they said the first passage of the first capital yeah my eyes and the sky opened up and it started to pour i i was there i saw it with my own eyes that's not the amazing thing half the people had umbrellas they were so sure we're gonna dive in this guy it's gonna start to rain so you say look i'm lolola mothers if you don't have any rain you don't have any water it's it's life or death what do you do without water we take it so for granted that we turn on the forces during the 48 war the arabs cut the the pipelines and the usual iron was desperate for water something that you take for granted and uh we say phyllis tao on [Music] pesach there he says a different shot look i'm lola mothers it's resurrection that's the idea of springtime everything comes back to life you look at these trees in the wintertime and they look like they're dead and suddenly they come back to life life begins again things start to grow an amazing thing and that's pesach is the philistine is the concept of mason and that's what the khazal say is that when you know tris mason is going to be a coach baroque who's going to bring the tao of trees amazing bring everybody back to life we were dead in egypt the goula was a tree mason we had to come back to life i've mentioned this but uh the ramban says where is the mysore of a similar bottom operation myself where's mashiach he says it's when yaakov comes back to eric's trail dead that's what's going to be in the final googler the guru says it's perishing that the ghazal say that titus stuck his sword into the paroches and blood came out and says the guru because he killed us and we died and for 2 000 years we've been riding away until there's nothing left but dry bones and when she comes he's going to have to bring us back to life just like yaakov avinu comes back to israel dead and has to you have to wait for him to come back to life that's the whole jewish people we don't even appreciate it that that we're dead how much can we expect from people yeah the gemara says that they he'll hid mcgillis tightness she talks about all kinds of different happy days and sad days because there's already one door after the corbin after the destruction of jerusalem why because this is just like a needle and dead flesh doesn't feel any pain we don't feel any pain we're limited in what we can experience so other is the nader of the jewish people and that's why purim is really a story of kris amazing signed a decree that every jew is going to die by the way that decree has never been cancelled out he was the king of the whole world and he's signed that all the jews are going to die he signed another decree we can fight back but as far as us being killed there's still a sort of damocles hanging over the head of the jewish people the story of the megillah is the story of kris the the the turns around the wheel of fortune i was a magician when i was a kid so one of the things that i i did is i got a tarot deck you know it's supposed to be fortune telling cards and i learned uh it's it's a really simple all right it's all psychology you figure out what the person wants you to say and then you know you put up the cards and you tell it what it's supposed to be but one is the wheel of fortune everything turns around you know so whatever it is you say oh everything's going to turn around for you the wheel of fortune card comes out you know everything turns around but for us we were all supposed to die and we came back to life it was monstrous amazing human was right we were born in nisan as a people we should die in other because moshe of benue died in other says the murderer but he didn't know he was born in address so what everyone who's born dies part of the nature mark twain famously wrote everything is mortal but the jew yeah the jewish people don't die we disappear and reappear okay that's amazing nations of the world are compared to the sun they last forever we tell time by the moon the moon waxes and wanes it appears reaches its full moon and then shrinks until it disappears and then reappears and that's what we say in kiddush lavona the power of the new month to be able to recreate to be able to come back to life that's the that's the power of the jewish people and so counting avraham is the first generation david was the 14th generation is the 15th generation the 14th and 15th of the month is when the moon is full right after that civil war we split it apart we slowly are destroyed by a larger power we go into exile and that's the end and then we reappear and we start to grow again and we build the second base of mikdash and we defeat the greeks and we reach our golden age the shimano macabee and then again we have the war between [Music] uh herkiness and uh aristobalus and slowly rome comes in and we fall apart we get destroyed again and then we reappear in the great yeshiva bubble and eventually they're destroyed and then we reappear in spain and then the community is destroyed and we wax and wane everything is mortal but the jew because we're the power of threesome that's what didn't understand because amalek is only this world there is nothing beyond this world as it says when amulek attacked us they cut off the makkah of the brismella threw it to heaven and said take back that which you want god stay up in heaven and we're down here yad hashem because hashem's throne is not complete as long as a malik is in the world why because the throne is what allows god to be in this world and they break that connection there's nothing but this world and that's what human wanted to do you like everything else in nature you begin you reach your strength and then you die as with people we're born we have our youth and then we slowly start to deteriorate then we die but we have christmas and we come back again and that's what pesach is pesach is that power of resurrection and so when either we start getting ready it's time to start cleaning up it's the time to start repainting remarking getting ready everything that needs to be there because the new life is going to burst out you look at the tree and slowly a new branch comes out and new leaves and a new bud and a new fruit until it reaches its strength and we have to always look for that hizhachus for that renewal for that recreation everything is mortal but the jew so we read the dollar power shields scotland start getting rid of your shackle because you're going to need it to buy next year's cabanas collect it now and other because they're trying to stop that recreation that kia mason from taking place para thomas mace the tummy of death has to be removed the puru duma has that power to bring new life after death and then that newness of the jewish people and so we leave adar and go into nisan to get ready for a brand new month a brand new year a brand new creation a new life a new google and hashem one day one month i should say one roshko dish we'll do kittislavana and the moon will begin to get bigger and bigger and bigger until it's full and it'll keep growing and growing and growing until the moon is as bright as the sun and there'll be an emma sagula maybe this year i'm game in daffy me i've been teaching uh soccer i think i know enough now to bring the corbin pesach i'm a cohen i will be standing outside directing the people i don't think they can actually put me on the floor operating but you know the time has come the time is here i goolabah i mentioned this years ago that someone i know took his tummy then to see where him can he ask you this was a few years ago they said is michelle coming he says no he's outside knocking on the door that's how close we are so hashem we will begin soon uh our our new um [Music] our new uh series getting ready for pesach uh i don't know if i mentioned because my memory goes uh we have a sponsor this week and the episode is sponsored anonymously as this course for the donors so of course all the thousands of people who watch this and i am always amazed at how many people i meet who are watching this and re-watch it and send it around and it's on so many different uh places all of that is disgust for the people who are supporting this so thank you to you and the people who uh support this and that's it for this week if you'd like to find out more about the show you can go to my website raviolansky.com can leave a comment send a letter you can sponsor an episode and that's it as we end other and we go into nissan and the isman of gaula of his hutress of newness and recreation and renewal i'm devin orlowski and this is the raviolovsky show it's the rabbi orlovsky show torah and simra [Music] knowledge and wisdom will help you grow lots of fun in every episode and we don't have to rhyme no no it's the rabbi orlovsky show on rabbi orlovsky.com torah anytime youtube and more it's rabbi orlowski show torah and simba ready show till next time till we meet again throughout my orolovsky show it's the rabbi yolovsky show it's the rabbi orlowski