Rabbi Shais Taub: Unpacking Your Spiritual Toolkit

so this month is the month of kissliff and the month of kiss live is significant in that um it is the month of the revelation of the inner dimension of torah the month of the revelation of the inner dimension of torah what do i mean by the inner dimension you know the the zoa says that there is a body in the soul of torah there's the the body is the the the the legalistic discussions the practical technical and then the soul is the the spiritual concepts the the mystical ideas of souls and and worlds and all these abstract concepts um and the both dimensions the inner and the the external are are both essential just like a person needs a body and a soul um but they uh well let me put it like this to sell somebody on the necessity of the body of the torah and the technical the legalistic um it's it's much easier to talk about it because it's practical it's it's concrete so you talk about you know behaviors like lighting shabbos candles putting on filler and giving stalker those things are easier to talk about when it comes to the inner dimension of the torah the spiritual dimension it's obviously more difficult to explain you're talking about abstractions you're talking about ideas you talk about things not only that can't be seen but sometimes things that can't even be imagined um and yet we know that you you need to have both you have to have the body and the soul you have to have the the practical along with the the uh inspirational so the giving of the torah historically speaking was in the month of sivan but the torah doesn't call it because the torah doesn't give names to months it gives them numbers and it refers to months by ordinal numbers from having left egypt the first month is the the month of the exodus in fact the first mitzvah prior to the exodus was the lunar calendar so the first month is the month of leaving leaving egypt which which we call nissan and the second month was the month of er in the third month we call sivan but in the torah calls it the third month and it says the torah was given in the third month okay and why was the torah given in the third month because basically torah is the idea of three and the taliban talks about this at length that moses who was the one who received the torah for the jewish people he was a third born child and and the jewish people separated to prepare for the giving of the torah for three days and um that it was in the third month as we mentioned in the threefold nation of cohen levy israel and it was a three-part torah that the the the tanakh torah navy and many other threes that are connected with the torah and the idea of three is that you know to put in philosophical terms you have thesis antithesis and synthesis so you have an idea you have the opposite the contradiction and then torah is the big picture that has room for the contradiction um hence you know the the joke that the rabbis can never agree right that for everything there's another opinion or you the the they tell the story about a a receptionist that a shawl answers the phone there's a guy on the other end says i'm looking for a one-armed rabbi and the receptionist says you're looking for a what he says a one-armed rabbi you heard me she says what's a one-armed rabbi he says well i'll tell you what i want to one-up rabbi for the one that i have right now the rabbi i have i ask him a question he gives me an answer but then a second later he says but on the other hand so looking for a one-armed rabbi all right but but it's a joke but every joke has a little truth okay they say every truth has a little joke but uh a true joke has a little truth which has a little joke what's the truth here is the idea that torah is truth and truth is bigger than one perspective it cannot be limited to one perspective if it were limited to one perspective it wouldn't be the truth okay and that's what we say luvelu these and these are the words of the living god not only that both perspectives are legitimate but more than that in order to have a true perspective you need both perspectives because torah is infin is infinity it's infinite so two finite perspectives each one alone cannot convey the truth but then when you have a diversity of finite perspectives and you put them together ah now you have the truth so that's why mach like is the idea of a diversity of opinions it's not a bug in torah it's a feature and that's why torah's connected with the idea of three because if it's not a paradox it's not jewish okay it's not a paradox it's not jewish and that's why for everything we have okay there's another answer there's another opinion but that's all part of the idea that torah is infinite truth and that's why it combines within it a diversity of finite perspectives until you have the entire truth so torah is three power is three and that's when the torah was given it was given in month number three this is something that i could elaborate upon at length but for the purposes of this lecture suffice you know that two-minute summary should suffice okay so torah is three now here's the thing when is the third month and if you heard anything that i was saying you would know stephen is correct but on the other hand kistler very good because i told you if anything jewish it has to be about on the other hand so 7 is the third month it's not that it's not the third month but also you know what also is the third month see it depends how you count months one way of counting is we count from the month of the exodus so we have nissan erc event fine but there's another way of counting in fact it's in some ways more of an intuitive way of counting months which is you count from the new calendar year so when does the new calendar in what month does the new jewish calendar year begin when is rosh hashanah the head of the year is tishrei so if tishrei is one then hejman is two and then kislev is three so kisliv is also the third month so kisliv is also the month of torah the difference is seven is the third month of the summer kislev is the third month of the winter what's summer and winter summer is when the sun is shining when it's warm out winter when it's cold winter when the days are shorter that's concealment so there's revelation and there's concealment there's the revealed torah what we call nigler the torah the revealed and that's the stuff that's easy to understand it's easy to relate to because it's concrete because it's it's uh i don't want to call it god from pedestrian because it's holy but it relates to pedestrian things like what happens if this person's ox gore's this person's cow and so on and so forth then so that's the torah of the summer then there's the tour of the winter the dark hidden concealed torah we call nister the concealed dimension of torah that's talking about spiritual ideas like souls and angels and different worlds different systems of reality and both of them are torah the physical and the spiritual the the concrete and the abstract the legalistic and the mystical they're both torah happens to be kisl is the month the third month of the winter so this is the month of the giving of or the revelation of the inner dimension or the concealed dimension of torah which is also why you'd test kiss live the 19th day of the month of kislev is rosh hashanah it's by the way it's not don't don't reverse the cause and effect it's not that kislev is the month of the revolution revelation of peninsula because you would test kislya because the 19th day this is the opposite it's not is pesach the holiday of freedom because the jews went out of egypt or did the jews go out of egypt then because pesach was the holiday of freedom and all you have to do is know that abraham was making matzos centuries before the exodus and you can answer that question there are certain times to have certain energies which are conducive to certain things and then later on at certain points historical events ensue which are in keeping with the spiritual energy of that time so you'd test kisl which i mentioned a few times i didn't say what it was other than the fact it's the new year of siddhis that was the day when the balatanya the first khabad rabbit was freed from prison and when he was freed from prison he was able to disseminate the teachings of kasadism in a whole new way so it is celebrated not just in khabad but way beyond as the rosh hashanah looks at this but what i'm telling you is that this is in the month of kislev not because of something that happened 200 years ago rather something happened 200 years ago because that is the essence of kislev kislev is the third month of the winter months which means the giving of the torah in its concealed inner mystical form so far so good everyone following this okay fine so i wanted to give a talk about the inner dimension of the torah because it's kisluf and i started thinking well what do i really want to what point do i really want to get across what do i want people to come away with so i'll tell you like this somebody once um asked me uh what this guy wanted to learn kabbalah like really he never had learned kabbalah but he heard about kabbalah he really wanted to learn kabbalah so he said let's learn kabbalah so i told him you know if you want to learn kabbalah you know zaya or whatever it's you want to learn kabbalah we can learn about it but i would recommend this i think you'll enjoy it more i think it'll be more relevant to you uh so he says well just tell me what's the difference between kabbalah and this so i came up with this on the spot but since then i've been saying it a lot because i like it it made sense to me at the moment the guy happened to be uh an engineer he was an engineer so uh in fact a mechanical engineer which you know it's like an engineer's engineer and i uh so i said to him i said d do you know calculus he said sure you had to learn calculus to be an engineer i said so kabbalah this is like calculus and engineering there are mathematicians who know calculus a lot better than the engineers but they can't build a bridge the engineer may not know math as well as a mathematician but he knows enough of it to build the bridge siddis is the practical application of spiritual principles and that's why i wanted to call this talk unpacking your spiritual toolkit because what i wanted to try to do this is the challenge i set for myself tonight is to convey to you some deep mystical spiritual ideas that come from kabbalah and from siddhis and then show you their practical implementation as tools so it's spiritual but it's tools it's not spiritual like just to be inspired or just to you know sometimes people like to learn anemia toyota because it's like you know like it's almost like a high you have like an out-of-body experience and you know it's it's like otherworldly and yeah but the real purpose for which the uh the inner dimensions of the torah revealed in our generation in unprecedented ways the real purpose why that's happened is is not for inspiration it's not to get a spiritual high it's because these are practical tools that we need for living okay so anyways that's the premise you get the premise more or less okay fine all right so um yeah let's let's go through some uh some examples here by the way before i tell you an example i'll tell you a story is not a well-known story i don't think it's written anywhere i heard this story from joseph toloskin who heard it from herbert weiner who was uh i don't even know who he was he wrote nine and a half mystics and has a beautiful chapter there about and he was a reformed rabbi and then he secretly became orthodox and then he like at his retirement party he outed himself and this whole congregation said we knew rabbit we knew so anyways um when he was in college he went to hebrew university so herbert weiner went to hebrew university when he was in hebrew university he took the kabbalistic studies class of gershon shalom now anyone who ever studied kabbalah especially the academic study of kabbalah you've heard of the name gersh inshallah so he was he was not the most let's say it was he wasn't the most traditional that's i'm saying it euphemistically okay he studied kabbalah he studied zaya as an academic pursuit um he was the world expert in it but he did not believe in its sanctity okay um but he was the world's expert no question okay so gershon shalom is teaching kabbalistic studies at hebrew university herbert weiner is one of the students there and in roles this uh i i i can't describe him any as anything better more aptly than some laboratory gadfly who i i mean if anyone who knows lebovchemischbachology i could tell you who was the radatz's son okay there was a redat was a hostage the end of his life he lived i think for a few a few years but he had a son named that's his name so this don't worry about all these references just imagine you're in hebrew university in jerusalem in the in the in the fifties gershon shalom is teaching and this guy i do not know why avraham yehuda kane wandered into the class but i don't know he maybe was auditing but he came into the class and he did of course what you would expect i told you it was some lubavitcher gadfly so he started busting chops so he comes in and he says to yeshua and shalom he says hair professor pray tell what is the difference between a kabbalistic studies professor and the hosted because gersh inshallah was the kabbalistic studies professor and from durkheim was there was the hosted he says what's the difference between the kabbalistic studies professor and the and the uh costed so he says i'll tell you the difference i'll give you a marshall give you a an allegory so it's the same difference between an accountant and a business owner okay what does that mean an accountant spends his whole day in numbers and every number represents a dollar even a penny and he knows exactly how much of these numbers dollars cents came into the company how much went out he knows exactly and he knows every single day at any moment you're going to ask him he knows to the penny okay but at the end of the day he closes his book or his books you know and he goes home and he doesn't have access to that to any of that money he knows exactly how much money is there but it's not his money so he he can't spend it now the business owner he doesn't know exactly to the penny how much money came in today or went out today maybe he doesn't even know every week or you know maybe he only knows every month and it's not exactly to the penny or to the dollar he knows generally if the business is doing well or not but you know the difference it's his money it's his money he can spend it so romeo durham didn't finish and explain the the analogy but what what was his point he was saying geshen shalom knows every single word and every single letter in the zohar but he knows it academically he's like the accountant who knows to the penny but he can't spend the money by choice by his own choice but he's a jew i mean torah is his his birthright just as much in any jew if he wanted to lay claim to it he could but he didn't lay claim to it he saw it as an academic study whereas the kha said what's the cost of no maybe he knows possibility you know every custod that's possible because it's in the city right out of chavez very good maybe you know kegavna yeah kagavna so also it's also friday night in the city maybe you know a couple lines here and there beresho manusa de malka that's it i can't go any further i don't know anywhere okay it was a few lines of you know a few a few lines of czar okay but it's his money to spend meaning he's made a choice to live according to these kabbalistic principles so maybe he can't quote you zohar line by line but he's living according to zohar in his day-to-day life okay all right so i want to talk about some deep concepts couplistic concepts and then application okay so here's a concept one concept is i thought there's a pretty uh basic kabbalistic concept that the nature of created existence is tentative that god's existence is absolute was is and will be and that all creation is so conditional that it actually has to be regenerated every single second so hashem is recreating created reality at every moment and if he would cease creating it not only it would leave an empty space there would be not even an empty space in fact not only would it cease to exist from now on it would actually never have existed because it would lose everything including its past that's how conditional and tentative created existence is it has no existence unto its own even though it exists okay i'm giving you the deep version first so you're like your eyes are like uh glassing over okay but that's that's the kabbalistic concept all right i'll give you a practical application of this so there was actually this story is a story within a story the story took place the story that the story is in took place in 770 77 eastern parkway where the lobster was fabric it was a fabric it was a shabbos fabregan it was tough and there were 1970. so there were a bunch of guests at the shabbos fabregan who were from arizoro and they had flights back that night so the fabregan was sort of like continuing and they were getting nervous and they were looking at the clock like yeah we got to get out of here right okay you know those early winter shabasim right so they're looking at the clock and and and that ever noticed they're looking at the clock and in the middle of the fabrega that ever addressed this issue and and told the following story he says that was it was back in the 1920s and it was the height of communist oppression against organized judaism and he said i was in leningrad and uh i went into my father-in-law's apartment they have his father-in-law the previous rabbit the rabbit yachts so he said my father-in-law had been taking this all night yokidas are one-on-one visitors so these are people who come in and they pour out their hearts and they you know it's heavy stuff it's heavy stuff so he'd been taking visitors for you this all night and it was it was the wee hours of of the night and he was in a half an hour he had to get a morning train to moscow he had a fundraising meeting in moscow with an industrialist with some type of capital some guy who had money um and he was an international capitalist at that not a russian so somebody who was going to meet in moscow and um so they were they were spying on him all the time i mean he was public enemy number one eventually he was arrested he was arrested by them so he knew he was always being watched and you're talking about the stress of always being watched the stress of he just was talking one-on-one all night to people who had been pouring out their hearts in the yukidis meetings the stress of you have a train to catch in a half an hour i mean if i have a plane to catch that day could you know knock me out he has a and look how close we're at to jfk right he can hear i stopped you know i realized i became you know a real five towns local when i didn't hear the planes anymore um and and he's meeting with a foreign capitalist which that itself is is a crime people were shot for far less so all of these let's call it stressful things and that ever says i walked into my father-in-law's room and he was sitting calmly at his desk arranging some papers like it was the middle of a regular work day and he said i was like taken aback by how like you would if you saw this person you didn't know what he was going through in life in general and how he had just spent this evening and where he was going in a half an hour you would think this is just a regular work day a regular person you know the the level of calm the rap and the level of just being settled no you think it wasn't acting like somebody who's in it in in an intense situation so that ever said i was so taken aback i i asked him to this extent you know like meaning i know that we're supposed to control ourselves we're supposed to have our our emotions under control but to this extent i mean to act so calm and regular so uh you said my father-in-law told me says you know there are exactly as many days and hours and minutes and seconds in a person's life as there are and you can't add any to that number but what you can do is be completely present in each second so that ever told that and the rabbit said there are people right now who are not a hundred percent present with us right now at the gathering at the fabregan understandably they are thinking about how they have a plane to catch in an hour and a quarter by the way this is i said 1970 so this is back when you could you could catch a plane in an hour and a quarter and now there's with security and everything okay but you remember how it was in the good old days right okay fine it was a little different it was a lot different but still even in even in the 70s an hour and a quarter to get from crown heights brooklyn to jfk okay it's starting to get close to to the time so the never says the fact that in an hour and a quarter they have a plane to catch and they're thinking themselves they still have to dive in might have they have to pray the the evening prayer and they have to go to their hosts where they've been staying and they have to go collect their belongings and they have to get a car to the to the airport and so they're imagining all of these things in their mind they're imagining catching this plane at jfk so that ever says but if they would only think about the truth that hashem is creating the entire creation something from nothing at every single second they would realize that the plane that they need to catch hasn't been created yet it doesn't exist and that the only thing that exists right now is right here right now okay so there's a very deep concept hashem is creating the world something from nothing every single second but the practical application is so relevant to all of us and you could tell people calm down take it easy don't get so worked up don't sweat the small stuff that's fine you could tell that to people but can you give me an intelligent reason can you give me an intelligent explanation why i should allow myself to be completely in the moment why i shouldn't be fretting and worrying about what's happening an hour from now or a week from now or a month from now and here comes this concept which seems so ethereal and otherworldly and so spiritual and who needs concepts like this it's just so lofty and when you realize the application of the concept you realize hold on this isn't a luxury this is a necessity that knowing this idea if you understand how to apply it is something that will directly increase your quality of life so that you can be a better spouse and a parent and a worker and a member of the community and everything that you're doing in life will be enhanced if you can grasp this spiritual concept so is it such a lofty idea maybe but the application is really really practical okay i'll give you another example we have a concept that the essence of god is not found in the heavens in the spiritual realms because in the spiritual realms there is only godly revelation but not godly essence in the spiritual realms the spiritual beings such as the angels are able to perceive god but being finite that means it's a subjective experience their experience their perception of god meaning it's not god's essence it's a revelation it's a glimmer it's a glow like you see the sunlight in the room but you're not staring into the ball of the sun whereas in the physical world which is the lowest of all planes of creation you find the essence of god that god finds himself at home and desires to be present in the physical world okay now that's a very deep concept and you hear something like that and it's like okay like what does it have to do with my life so again i'll attempt to give you a practical application hanukkah is coming up right okay so hanukkah we have a lot of different customs one of the customs we and of course we have the the the the halacha of lighting the the manara it's not just a custom it's actually in the code of jewish law but there's very various different customs um one of the customs we have is we give children gifts of money we call it gelt and gelt is yiddish for money i know there's chocolate gelatin a lot of people think of galatis the chocolate girl but you get gelt is the real the gel the money okay why is there such a concept of giving children money on hanukkah and the idea is like this remember when the greeks came into the temple and they defiled the oil why did they defile the oil why was that important to do and and why defile it if they had a grudge against oil just smash the jars or steal them and go use it for themselves and then they could have benefit from it but they just defiled it they left it there but they you know they shook it they understood how jewish law worked and they defiled the oil and like what was the strategic value of that why did they do that so one of the problems the greeks had with the jews was that jewish people insisted in attributing spiritual characteristics to physical objects like you have something called oil okay extra virgin olive oil send it to the lab you can see is it is it or is it not and if it's not you sue the company for false advertising right that's something you could test in a lab they say it's extra virgin olive oil if it is you'll see you could test it right but think about something like calling it shem in taher or shementome that it's ritually pure ritually impure you send that to a lab send it any lab you want in the world they will never be able to distinguish anything different physically under a microscope or any other way of of examining this oil they will never be able to say well this is this is tommy this is todd this is virtually impure this is ritually pure it's a totally spiritual status so greeks hated that they absolutely despised that because in their mind the spiritual is the spiritual the physical is the fear of the physical and that's it so when it comes to physical things so just what's wrong with physicality for physicality sake you know go work out and have your olympics and be in good shape and you know why for what purpose because because it's a it itself is a desirable thing right whereas a jew would say no of course i want to be physically healthy but it has to be for a purpose has to be i have to take my physicality and use it for spirituality so if i you know if i have good physical health then i'm going to use it to do more mitzvahs i'm going to use it to dive and i'm going to use it to to to learn torah but no the greeks are like the physicals the physical the spiritual you look you want spirituality go be a philosopher go study abstraction but don't try to put the two together and that's why they defiled the oil because they wanted to make that point and say there's nothing wrong with that oil it's perfectly good use it in your thing you know just go burn it it's fine it's perfectly fine and the fact that jews said uh no it's not perfectly fine and not only it's not perfectly fine but we're willing to fight to the death to make this point that's like a quintessentially jewish concept so that ever brings out something very interesting it's a hidden rambam the 14 volume compendium of of the entire uh code of the oral law so the the maimonides talks about he gives a little history lesson of what the greeks did and he says paused which literally means the greeks set forth their hand upon the jewish possessions the rabbi says what's why why is there poetry here is this is a halacha safer like say what you mean like they set forth their hands they stretched forth their hands upon jewish possessions if they stole it say they stole it if they if they vandalized it say they vandalized what means they set forth their hand on jewish uh possessions or jewish wealth so that ever says like this it's similar to when they defiled the oil they didn't take the oil they didn't vandalize the oil at least not physically they they defiled the oil they gave it a touch they touched it they defiled it right so posterior momentum that ever says like this the greeks didn't say we're going to take your wealth they said we're going to leave you with your wealth we're going to touch it first we're going to defile it we're going to give it a greek touch we want you to assimilate remember the hell in this one the hellenize so they wanted jews to assimilate you know what that meant they want they wanted jews to treat physical things as physical real epicureanism i mean that's what we we use the term epicurus which means a heretic in talmudic lexicon but it really comes from epicurus who was or epicurus and the curious is the cooking uh website the recipe but epicurus was the philosopher epicureanism and that was his that was his uh worldview the physicals the physical that's it so the jewish worldview is no no we will not just treat physical things as physical we will sanctify physical things we will turn physical things into mitzvahs and that's why to celebrate the fact that we're here and the ancient greeks are not we give our children money money because we take something which is if you just take it at face value if you don't see more deeply if you don't see the potential of it oh it's just material just mean those who worship money itself that's materialism but the jewish view is no no you know what you can do with that money you know how much spiritual potential is there you know you could spend that money on you know you you know how many mitzvahs you can do with that money so the idea that hashem cannot ultimately be found in the spiritual worlds only a glimmer only a ray only a reflection of godliness can be found in the spiritual spiritual realms but the essence of god is only present in the physical world that is expressed in the idea that we cherish physicality as the most potent way to connect to god you know they they they tell a story the villenegon was on his deathbed and he was crying his tummy then were asking why he's crying you know he was he afraid of the yay madin you didn't stop learning to or was he afraid of judgment and they say he he grabbed his talus cotton his uh the the four cornered garment with the tits is on it and he was holding it he was crying he says i'm about to leave a world where for a few call packs you buy one of these garments and you do a mitzvah every second you're wearing it and i'm going to a world where for all the treasures of that world you can't do one mitzvah by the way mentioning the negan the village said that that one who studies the side the secrets of the toyota will understand remembers and the other levels of torah the the the concrete and the the the referential and the homiletical he says but one who does not study site even shot he will not understand yeah so i think it's very important people who follow and revere the vilnigan should know that if you refuse to study the secrets the mystical inner dimension of torah the negan himself testifies that you will not even be able to understand the most literal meaning of torah and it was just uh something to consider so that's that's another deep concept the the the preciousness of physicality of of of mitzvahs that we do with our bodies and that's holier than anything they do in heaven holier than anything in heaven the angels they they envy the souls who get to come down and be embodied even with all the tests and even with all the difficulty and the distraction but spirituality is not where it's at that's the ultimate the ultimate goal in judaism it's not heaven we believe in heaven the ultimate goal is not heaven the ultimate goal is the perfection of the physical universe and when the physical universe becomes so perfected you know what'll happen all the souls who are in heaven they come back down here right right that's uh the the thirteenth uh principle of faith the resurrection why would the souls come back down here not just mashiach the resurrection why will the souls come back into the physical world because a perfected physical world is is far more godly than the highest heaven that's it anyways that that's that's the abstract way of saying it but the practical way of saying is give you give your kids hanukkah guilt give them money no joke give them money and uh make a party and then make latkes and you eat the latkes and you make on the latkes and then you use the calories from the latkes to uh go on the menorah parade or go to the menorah lighting of the park or i'm just putting in suggestions family things bonding that you could do you want it you ate extra souffg you need to burn the calories something you go to manure lighting in the park or you go on the side you know take get get a menorah and yeah you can go and find people who are jewish people who don't have a menorah and go out and find them and give them a menorah okay um tell you another deep concept we just learned it today in that we have a tanya class a women's tanya class on on mondays at 11 a.m at khabar the five towns upstairs in the library so actually we just learned this concept today it's kabbalistic concept from the eights hayam which is a safer of chain vital vital was the chief disciple and the scribe of the ari zao of yitzchak gloria so rafhaim vital writes that every single jewish person whether he's at sadhaka or russia whether he's righteous or he's wicked he has two souls he has two souls okay so one soul and today we just learned this we learned chapter one we didn't learn chapter two so for those who are in the class sorry for the spoiler but i'm gonna mention what it says in chapter two one soul is what we call the animalistic soul and its desires for self-preservation so comfort and pleasure and uh you know you call it the ego you can call it uh lower instinct lower self you can call it um you can call it the the the carnal desire you can call it selfishness but it's it's a drive for self-preservation self-fulfillment self-enhancement okay and then there's this other soul and it's the exact opposite it's an altruistic drive it's selfless it actually is seeking um expiration it wants to not not because it's self-destructive god forbid because a penchant for self-destruction is another type of selfishness no it's not trying to achieve self-destruction it's trying to become one with god so it wants to lose its it wants to erase its separate selfhood in order to become dissolved in in the oneness okay so you have these two um drives one drive is self-preservation um and the other drive is the desire to become one with the all now that's a very lofty way of saying it so let's translate it practical uh spiritual toolkit i had a one of my first actual one of my first tanya classes i'm talking about maybe 15 years ago i gave a class a tanya class to a group of women who had never studied tanya before in fact they probably i don't think had studied much torah before at all in any form and they were not observant not at all observant they were very strongly jewishly identified in a cultural way but not not observant in any in any traditional sense or even in any liberal interpretation of the word they they were culturally jewish i should say and they would tell you that you know i don't like to use the term because it sounds dismissive but you know what we call bagels and locks judaism that's what they practice bagels and lox judaism so um and we were studying tanya together and i remember one day it was this time of year you know after you set the clocks no no it was right before that's right it was right before we set the clocks back because this was part of the conversation this lady comes in to the class and she says you know i got all excited about shabbat candles i'm gonna light shabbat candles on time and i remember the class telling her well you know you know what's going to happen they're going to set the clocks back and then you're going to have to light it like 4 30. it's going to be crazy and she said don't worry it's going to be fine so this was like a real breakthrough for her and this this is not a shabbos observant person she wanted to start and this is actually factors into the story she was not shabbos observant she took on to light shabbos because after she lit candles she did malacca she did work well she wasn't keeping shabbos yet but she started to like candles and she wanted to light them on time which was a big deal for her coming from you know having nothing like that in her background so she comes in the next week and she's all like expelling like proud and she says i want to share with everyone this wonderful thing that happened to me this week she says i looked at the clock so this was the next week after they set the clock back she says i looked at the clock and its candlelighting time was at 4 50 something i forgot the exact 450 something and i see i have to light shabbos candles now she says at that moment i'm about to light the shabbos candles i realize i wrote a check today remember checks i used to we used to have papers write on them sign checks okay you have to show id to prove that okay anyway so she said i wrote a check today and it's not covered and i have money i have another check and if i go to the bank and i deposit that check it'll cover the check that i wrote so it won't bounce and i'm looking at the clock and i'm realizing hold on a second the bank is closing and if i go there right now i could go she says i could go to the bank bank's like five minutes there five minutes back but if i go to the bank and i deposit the check i don't like chavez candles on time i told you she wasn't from her she would have known about the 18 minutes [Laughter] and anyways he was too pure and innocent anyways so she says i i'm looking at the clock and i'm thinking to myself can i do this and she said no i can't i can do one or the other either i'm going to go to the bank and i'm going to make the deposit and not bounce the check or i'm going to light chava's candles i can't do both can't do both so she said i started thinking to myself what do i really want and she said well you know what i i don't know what i really want i want both i i don't want to bounce the check and i don't want to pay the the penalties and i don't want my husband to be disappointed and on the other hand i want only childhood candles i i i want to i want to be part of this of this of this thing that's happening all over the world jewish women and girls all over the world are are lighting and i don't want to be excluded from this this wonderful thing that's going on all over the world so she says i'm i'm like going back and forth and i'm trying to figure out it's like time is ticking i'm trying to figure out what do i want what do i want to do and she says all of a sudden i realized hold on a second hold on a second every jew has two souls so there's one part of me animal soul self preservation it says go deposit your check why should you have to pay the bank money because you were being religious because you were lighting a candle go cover the check she says there's another part of me godly soul godly soul doesn't care about that the godly soul wants to do whatever is going to allow it to become closer to the infinite and at this moment what can make me closer to the infant than anything else at this moment is to light that candle at that time so she says once i understood that's what we were dealing with i said hands down easy decision godly soul so i'm telling you this is a woman who she wasn't from an observant background she started studying tanya and this is what it brought her to which brings me to a very important point though i'd like to highlight here a lot of people ask the question remember talking about before about the body and the soul of torah there's the legalistic right and there's the the spiritual a lot of people question what is the value of teaching spiritual deep spiritual concepts to people who aren't even observant people ask that's a real question people say let somebody become observant they'll study jewish law they'll start to observe jewish law and maybe then they'll start to study a little bit become literate in the basics and then after a while we'll introduce them to more sophisticated concepts like spiritual stuff and first of all i'll tell you what the villenegon said without the sight even the shot you won't understand okay but if that's not compelling enough for you i can tell you by first-hand experience how many people were brought to the observance of through an appreciation for the spiritual principles behind halacha i'll take any jew how they come if somebody comes up to me and says i want to study halacha and that's my entry point to judaism and how i want to start to become observant i'm not going to send them away okay i'll slip in a little as well but no i'll take no you want to learn how we learn but somebody who's ready to hear deep spiritual ideas do not discount that and do not think that that's just icing on the cake before you've even you know eaten your vegetables it's not true it's one torah with two dimensions the inner and the outer spiritual and the and the more practical and they all lead to the same thing and in fact many times you see somebody who learns the soul of torah that's how they end up with the body of it okay i don't know i have i i made a whole list of i have like 20 of these i'm not going to tell you i'm not going to tell you all i i didn't know how long it was i never gave this talk before so i i'm just unpacking my spiritual toolkit i didn't know how long is going to take to unpack the whole thing so i only told you i think three ideas i'll tell you a fourth one very shortly i'll tell you one more and i'll do it shortly i'll do it as briefly as possible this is an important concept and and i'll tell it to you the abstract way and then we'll tell it the practical way the abstract idea is there's a notion that um there's a notion that the the jewish people are actually one single entity which through embodiment takes on the appearance of separation from itself like yeah the embodiment you know the fact that you know two things can't be in the same place and one thing can't be in two places embodiment is what causes the appearance of separation so here's me there's you but if you look at us spiritually we're one soul we're one spiritual energy the entire jewish people um there was once a teacher teaching his class about uh singular and plural and so he taught them one different nouns singular and plural so he says like shoes shoes is plural and he says shirt shirt is singular and he asked him what's pants and the kid said plural on the bottom singular on the top okay but actually the jewish people are plural on the bottom singular on the top down here in the physical world we each inhabit different bodies so we're separate from each other spiritually we're one we're one entity we're one being um and that is the the mystical concept of of the the oneness of the jewish people so that that's that's the spiritual concept what's what's the practical application so actually this this practical application i got from uh from the jerusalem talmud from the ashami it says over there that if a person makes a vow there's a concept a person makes a vow they have to keep the vow but it's a mitzvah to actually be released from your vow and the way that it's done you have to go to a hakam to a sage and he finds what's called a passage means an opening but what it really means is that he has to find something had you had had you known this piece of information at the time of your vow you would never have made the vow so like let's say somebody says i'm making a vow never to eat dairy again and then he goes to the chocham and he says well did you know ice cream is dairy no i thought it was just cottage cheese i didn't realize it was he says well yeah well if i would have known that i would never make such a vow and then he could the sage can know the vow okay so the xiaomi tells a hypothetical scenario where a guy was neither behind that means where he got so mad at some other jew where he said if he makes a party i'm not going right if he's the honoree at the dinner i'm not going right i don't like this guy i don't want any benefit from him okay so he has to keep that vow because he made a vow you have to keep it but like any value should be released from especially a vowel like that which is not a nice vowel but he he can't stop on his own he has to go to the halcum the sage and the sage will release him so you know chamomile says like this the sage says to the guy who just made a vow i'm mad at so and so he he hurt me and you know i'm getting back at him so the sage says to him you know there was once uh a worker in his workshop and he was working with a sharp tool and when he's when he was working with this with his tool he slipped and with his dominant hand his right hand was holding the tool he slipped he stabbed his left hand should his left hand then grab the tool and stab the right hand in retaliation so when the hakhem says this scenario the person hears that he says well no of course not that would be absurd because he stabbed himself and he should stab himself again it's like this is even more than two wrongs don't make a right because two wrongs don't make my right just means there's there's no nobody gains nobody gains but this is more that's this is deeper than that that says one guy gets hurt twice one guy got hurt twice so one guy stabbed his right hand and now to even the score the same guy is going to stab his own left hand so now he's hurt twice so the hakam then says to the guy once he has that clarity he says well you know what when this guy hurt you that's one person the jewish people are one person that's one person having been hurt now you hurt him back now the same person has been hurt twice because the jewish people are not a people we're a person or one entity which inhabits different bodies so this sounds like such a lofty concept one soul and emanating into different bodies but the practical application of it can help you get over a grudge it can help you seek forgiveness can help you heal from emotional wounds it's very very practical very practical and i hope you'll based on these examples that i've given you you'll believe me well don't believe me go test it out but you will become curious enough now to go test out that every deep spiritual concept in the mystical dimension of the torah has practical everyday relevant applications okay