Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: 4 Redemption's and 4 Exiles

[Music] everybody and welcome and I want to talk about something from the parsha that's a source of a very very familiar ritual one of the most famous rituals the Pesach Seder is the midst of drinking four cups of wine or grape juice and that is a rabbinic commandment the Torah does not say you must drink wine as the Seder but the rabbi's based it primarily on the fact and in this parsha when God informs Moshe remember what happened Moshe was very reluctant to go to pyro he argued with God he says I'm not worthy or not worthy I'm not able to speak and he's arguing with God over and over and over again Roche is an extremely reluctant leader he finally goes and things get worse and he says to God he says I told you guys I didn't want to go I didn't want to go and you send me and not only our things God didn't get better they got worse and God says this is the end of last week's Torah reading that you will see that I appeared to the Evoque I appeared to Abram in second Yakov I made many promises to them and I did not fulfill everything in their lifetime but they never questioned me and you are questioning me Lehane and moral living a Israel tell the children of Israel ania Shem I am God and that name of God means I am the one who keeps his commitments and then there are four terms that express different parts of redemption oats AC I will take them others with Ryan he's salty I will save them go Alti I will redeem them LoCascio will take them unto me as a nation these are called for the shownotes of google app for terms of redemption and to commemorate the four expressions of redemption our sages enacted that we drink four cups of wine to commemorate these for the shownotes of guellen-- there is a fifth term that appears right after the for God will bring us to the lands but that number 1 is not part of the expectation from Mitzrayim that's a separate thing and number 2 that has not been full that will not be fully fulfilled until the advent of the Messiah in fact that is the source of the Ashkenazi custom that there is in fact a fifth cup at the Seder that we do not drink and it is said to be a Leo whose club the cup of Elijah of the prophets and the reason why is the Leos cup is because they'll y'all will announce the coming of Messiah and then we're going to drink a fifth fifth cup there are some caseta by the way that actually do drink five cups of the Seder answer it's a relatively rare custom but they base it on a particular opinion in the Gomora that the rush bom changed the text others if you look if you looked at a standard tomorrow you would not find any mention of a 50-ton but there is a gear so that some going event that actually mentioned they fit stuff and there are some proscenium that follow the fifth cup most of us do not do that but we do have the cosas belly oh so now i want to share with you 2 different magicians and then draw a correlation between them Metris number one raises the question why are there four languages of redemption if in fact you'd see estimates ryeom is a single event we were taken out of egypt why are there four terms that describe it Midrash number one says because pyro issued four decrees against the Jewish people and therefore there's one language of gula connect adds every Gazzara of para Gazzara one was servitude of this gazebo two was his initial demands that the me aldose the midwives kill the male babies as they were born remember this was directed to Shiphrah and puah actually covered in Miriam and that gazebo was aborted nope no pun intended that Gazzara was not carried out and then the third the third Gazzara which was partially carried out is when the soldiers were instructed to take the males and throw them into the water so cos they were number one in south dust is they were number two which was not carried out was the directive to the midwives to kill the Jewish boys slavery slavery Thomas yeah second one was the directive to Shiphrah and puah the third was the directive to the soldiers and the fourth was this final Gazzara that after Moshe Rabbeinu went and demanded that pyro send the Jewish people away and pyro says with great defiance and great chutzpah who is this God that I should listen to his voice and why should I send the Jewish people off I've never heard of this Hashem and pyro said you guys have too much time on your hands you're agitating for civil and political rights because you're not busy enough so the fourth Khazaria was the Jews era where they have to scatter and look for straw and on their own instead of it being given to them and they would have to make bricks their quota of bricks would not be diminished so metric number one simply says for gazebos of para for the show notes of Gola we simply correlate the leshawna's of Gokula to the for evil decrees of pyro from which we were extirpated obviously we were executed at different times the Jazeera of Shiphrah and puah was never carried out and that was way before that was 80 years before the exodus because that is when Moshe Albania was born okay now there is a Metis number two that makes a different point and it basically says that the for the show no so gula are not simply referring to the exile and persecution of Egypt but they are in the nature of divine promise that God will redeem us from all of the future exiles that the Jewish people will be subjective and we know based on rabbinic tradition interpreting the Book of Daniel and the book of Zakaria that there are four kingdoms that are said to rule over Israel now we're not counting poverty that's before we came to the land but from the time we come to the lands until the final redemption there are four mouths Julio's forego Leos that rule over the Jewish people the Gulbis number one is the goddess of Babylon the goal is above him it was an answer conquered the land of Israel and eventually destroyed the temple that's godless number one the Babylonian Empire was overthrown by Persia and we know that Cyrus krrish allowed the Jewish people to return but we still remained under Persian rule at least for a brief period of time so that's Cullis number to the godless of purchase Persia was eventually overthrown by Alexander the Great Alexander of Macedonia and that established the godless of Yavin as I said during the Persian exile was the poram story during the Yvon exile that was the Hanukkah story so we have Bevelle we have Paris we have Yvonne then we have and the brief period of the Hasmonean dynasty is treated as part of the oven because although the Osmo millions were Jews they were actually Elemis therefore it really doesn't count as a Redemption and then we have the fourth ghost that is the goddess of Edom the godless of Rome that is connected to a Sethe because ASA was treated as the ancestor of Rome and the goddess of Adam of Rome is a goalless that we are still in today it is so much longer than any they call this a bed oh why are we the ghosts of Rome there is no Roman Empire obviously so in what sense can we still say the Jews are in the exile of Rome so there are a number of reasons why this is a description that is still appropriate number one even though there's no Roman Empire but the destruction of the temple that they effected has not been undone so we are still suffering the effects of their exile number one number two Western civilization is largely a product of Rome although the Greek Greeks were the ones who originated many of the basic institutions but Rome were the ones that spread the wisdom of Greece throughout Europe and hence to America other countries and therefore in a sense the goddess of that dawn the Gullah Seveso is the Western civilization that most of the viewers live under and the final is that Rome eventually became the seat of Christianity Peter we talked about Peter a few weeks ago that some say Peter was actually a good religious Jew but whatever his agenda was whether he was openly a follower of Jesus and secretly at you or whether he was a follower of Jesus inside and outside that's a separate issue I'd refer you to are sure that we gave a few weeks ago but nevertheless Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and Rome became the seat of the Catholic Church and that dominated much of the world and even today Christianity is the religion that dominates where most Jews of the world lived so for these various reasons we are still in the goals of Rome now there are other madrasah now again the concept of the four exiles is something that you see in the Book of Daniel in several places where Daniel has various visions of for animals the statue of the blue condenser that has four different metals in it so this notion of the Arba galeota is very very fundamental and in fact the metric reads this in to the very beginning of the word when it says RS Isis so who Volvo and the world was the the universe really was jumbled and confused in a confused state and there was darkness on the face of the depth and the Spirit of God hovered over the water by this is describing what the world looked like before God started creating all of the different things so here's what the Metra says this is an allusion to world history and the land was desolate that is the Babylonian exile and it was confused and jumbled that is the Persian exile and there was darkness that is the Greek exile on the face of the depth that is the goddess of Rome which is so long and deep so many thousands of years as if it's never going to end and the Spirit of God hovering over the water is the spirit of machine that will be sent by God and the water are the waters of Torah in the merit of the Jewish people learning the Torah and studying the Torah this is a very powerful message because what the message is telling us is that that's the very beginning of creation these four exiles were identified as part of the structural wealth of how there is gold again this is a deep thought we don't fully understand the repercussions but somehow just as a seed germinates from its disintegration there is a disintegration of the seed and then it sprouts so two of the world needs a certain process of disintegration and persecution in order that ultimate goodness emerge there's another analogy as well to birth it's a different analogy there is the analogy of the seed in which something needs to be destroyed in order to come from for something new that's also the phoenix bird and then there is the analogy of birth in which great birth is preceded by excruciating labor pains and indeed we describe the coming of machine difficult times before the coming of messiah as call a machine the birth pains of machine these are the four Goliath's now I will say you have to remember the basic historical point that's the babylonian and jerusalem talmud were compiled before the creation of islam before there before muhammad so as a result the last persecution so to speak that our sages explicitly talked about was the persecution of by the romans and in particular the christians after after Constantine converted the Empire so as a result rome christianity they were identified as one and the same however in later sources we find they talk about a fifth exile or at least something that will be added to the roman exile and that is said to be the exile or the persecution of ishmael israel of course is the ancestor of the arab each one was not muslim but nevertheless ishmael was the ancestor of the arab nations and it was seen by later authorities like a crime to towel the Ariza that's the last and worst persecution that we will face before the coming of the Messiah shall come from the Quahog Ishmael and Yeshua el is the most dangerous of all our enemies because only Ismael as the spiritual merit of circumcision and only Ishmael as the name of God as part of their national identity just as he Israel L our lammott is a name of God there are only two nations that have the name of God in their name Israel and Yishmael and the climate town finds an allusion to Ishmael in one of the prophecies of Daniel because the Neal describes well the Neal interpreted a dream that Nebuchadnezzar had of a huge statue the head was gold and the torso was silver and the arms were copper and the legs were iron and the feet the toes were a half iron and half earthenware so and then a big stone came and knocked over the statue etc so daniil explains it this way the gold represents Babylon and the silver represents Persia modern-day Iran Persia and the arms represent Greece and the iron legs represent Rome but the combination of earthenware clay cleanse like the expression clay feet in English comes from that part of the book of the meal the combination of clay and iron represents that at the very end in the heels of mushiya's there will be a connection between Rome Western civilization that's iron and clay that represents Ishmael that mr. Tonko bad away from for the reasons of this gravity as well they bow down to the dust on their feet that's the clay so therefore that indicates that the Jewish people the authority mmm towards the coming of the Messiah will suffer from two sources Western civilization and Ishmael so the Holocaust would have been an exam obviously of solutes that are imposed on us by the West then we have Arab or fundamental Islamic fundamentalism which is coming from the east and just for good measure the morale brings some interesting sources that say that at the end of time Yeshua L will unite with Paris with Persia to persecute on Israel and of course Persia is Iran so that indicates a type of unholy alliance between Persia and Yeshua L that will be super super difficult to surmount so these are the four Golia so now going back to the Midrash number two I don't want to lose money about my trend here as minish number two says that's the for the shownotes of Ga'Hoole ah are divine promises that God will extricate us from the for future exiles three of which we already have been redeemed travel we will be exiled from Babylonia from Persia from Java and ultimately from Rome which is the final and longest goes if you remember Hanukkah the song that most people think would they like the Chanukah candles Mauro's sort MOS or if you recall is largely not about Hanukkah there's only one stanza outside it is about all of the Exile starting with Egypt and then Babylonia then Persia then Greece which is the Hanukkah story and then it ends with a prayer that God should redeem us from the evil empire which is described as Rome primarily Christian Europe on Rome that's correct in fact that's that last stanza is a very very heavily censored standard so sometimes if you're singing it from different sidor ium you'll actually have different text because it was very very heavily censored some of the censored versions do not allow reference to destruction advocated that that last stanza should be changed because yeah I wrote a letter opposing any changes I'd like to see you know obviously you're gonna have the same problem with the Pesach Seder at the Pesach Seder after benching when we open up the door no friendly welcome le Illin RV we also felt like God thank you for your ransom but again this is not a general statement that we want not used to be earth this is a specific reference to those who don't want to destroy your people those who don't believe in you that's a very different thing is it's very targeted against negative destructive ideologies it's like as if you were to say we pray to God to destroy Nazi you know that wouldn't be regarded as anything negative in any way okay so it turns out we have two different Smid Russian one Midrash formulates the four leshawna so gula to the four gazebos of pyro kind of localized to the persecution in Egypt and we have another metric that correlates the four exactly they Carlos the four leshawna so gola to the four exiles that will unfor them folded and will unfold by the way in terms of each exile my Rao explains each exile has a unique character the Exile of Babylon is the exile of persecution persecution because the book of nets are took away our sovereignty he destroyed us as an independent nation he destroyed the temple and he enslaved us he was not as a Samana coming from the commenter's perspective this was just a matter of another military conquest but he made us a slave people persecution the Gullah of Persia was the Gulf's of genocide or at least attempted genocide because the most outstanding events in the goal of suppression is the book of Esther when Haman literally wanted to eradicate us so Babylon is persecution and enslavement Persia is genocide or attempted genocide now Greece Yellin which is the Hanukkah story this is already post-biblical biblical class ends in the puss of persian empire right so anything about Greece is really other than the prophecies of the meal is post-biblical Alexander is post-biblical Greece was a very different challenge Greece was the challenge of cultural assimilation in a somewhat perverted way and we talked about this Antiochus was a very enlightened person although he was enlightened in the sense of putting a gun to your head meaning at the office was not anti-semitic Antiochus was perfectly willing to give Jews full political and social rights and civic equality as long as they get rid of their distinct unique rituals and service of God don't circumcise don't keep Shabbat don't keep responding be like everybody else and if you be like everybody else we will treat you like everybody else it turned into a war only because the Maccabees refused to give in most of the Jews in fact gaming so then he say young the trial the challenge of the godless of government was not persecution or genocide it was cultural assimilation now we then come to Rome now the Roman Cullis is many times longer than all of the Gullah says combined we are still in the goal of the realm but in many ways the morale points out Rome is kind of like the Japanese like the Japanese take ideas that other people have invented and improve them and make them more effective Rome is a composite of all of the three preceding Golgotha and in different times and in different places you sometimes have what you might call the babylonian aspect of rome and you sometimes have the persian aspect of rome and you sometimes have the greek aspect of Rome so when Jews are persecuted and discriminated against that is the Babylonian part of Rome the galoot of servitude and persecution when there is attempted genocide like the Holocaust that is the Persian part of Rome rearing its ugly head and when Jews face not persecution and enslavement and not genocide but the pressures of cultural assimilation that is the Greek part of the Rowand and in most of the Western world today that is exactly what we suffer of above whatever used to say it was easier to be a Jew in Siberia than suburbia than in Siberia you could not escape being a Jew even if you wanted to you would be reminded about it constantly but it's precisely in the world of opportunity and the world of freedom for which we are grateful of course we are grateful if we have freedom to pursue whatever it is we want to pursue but there's something very dangerous about freedom and when you have the freedom to be whatever you want you have the freedom to be nothing at all you have the freedom through our way or Judaism you have the freedom to discard it just as countless people on the boat to Ellis Island as they were entering New York Harbor the least legend has it I don't have an actual story how many people did it but there there are stories that they say some immigrants took their drillin and threw them over the boat into the ocean as if to say we no longer need this and indeed in many many cases if you read the Chronicles even the immigrants who were religious because they were raised religious their children as they adapted to the new world often stopped everything they simply said we don't need this this is the land of unlimited freedom and opportunity so therefore in many ways that morale says Rome is a composite over the 2,000 years and it hasn't ended yet we have persecution we have genocide and we have cultural assimilation which is the most dangerous of all because it comes in the guise of a friend in the guise of a welcome and you have to be more scared sometimes about the Gentile culture that welcomes you than the Gentile culture that repels you and again these are difficult themes because on one hand because I'll do acknowledge that there is wisdom in the world there is wisdom there is insight we should be open to it no one is suggesting we should reject all of the Karma that exists in the world but it is quite a difficult endeavor to know what to accept and what to reject what do you bring into your home and into your soul and what do you send away in life it's always easier to be an all or nothing personal I had a person might take the position I reject everything outside of the Torah and the Gomorrah and the Mitzvah or you could be a person that such a big tent person I admit everything in but a discriminating person of wisdom understands that things are not all or nothing things are not black and white there are infinite shades of grey and one has to make difficult decisions what of the wisdoms of the world do I admit and what must I reject this beautiful statement in the Talmud Usami we know that once a Shabbos when Shabbos is over we insert in the Amidah a paragraph about touch I'm separating between the holy and the profane a mob job a cottage the home now in which brother of the amita do you put in net paragraphs so it mentions in the fourth profile which asks God for knowledge and wisdom so the Talmud you saw me says why would the brother of Havdalah be in the blessing for knowledge and wisdom how mean your Shami says because if there's not wisdom you're not able to make discriminations the ability to discriminate is a sign of wisdom when you lack wisdom you look at things as see they're all good or all no good a person with wisdom understands that there are subtleties and discriminations yeah I'll just show you a very interesting little start maybe I shouldn't tell you this but I may get in trouble for telling you I one of the one of the she or am I used to giving in or semantics to give a shear in what you might call different movements within you within a logic Judaism which had different touch guffaws for example sugar ships and fathers who believed in secular studies along with Torah studies versus those who did not believe in the the importance of secular education we spoke about Zionism versus anti-zionism now there's the different divisions that existed I'm not talking about reform I'm talking about legitimate differences of opinion that existed within habakkuk Judaism casitas versus non Authority so apparently in those early days I may have said something that was not conventionally within the evil world so somebody reported on me to they rushed each other Russia Shiva through my nominal boss so they don't do that anymore I'm not sure if I became more politically correct or whatever people got used to when I teach I'm not sure which way it went but it hasn't happened since but but I remember seven years ago I was called to the wood house as the expression goes woodshed I'm sorry that's called to the woodshed right I'm sorry what else yeah and the way she was not alive anymore not the present or she with me but he says something very remarkable very remarkable he said to me you and I both know that life is very very complicated and there are valid points of view in all of these different views but he said when you present it to our students many of whom are newcomers they get confused so he actually advocated but the idea that you know you don't have to do and you shouldn't develop the complexity of different types of views because then people don't have a clear direction in life and therefore he was in favor of what you might call a certain amount of censorship now this is fascinating and you can think about this in other words this is not something to be laughed at or dismissed and that is you know there are legitimate points of view in all sorts of places but sometimes in the interest of giving people more definitive guidance in life there may be a certain merit in not exposing everybody to all ideas at all times I was kind of I was kind of thought I was I was I was actually speechless because it just just struck me as a absolutely very very interesting idea the spiritual malla the spiritual advantage of censorship is it good is it bad you can go either way I don't want to get into a big discussion but you can understand that this place out in daily life particularly in Israel all the time the in celebrity of the her ad world you can say with us you know I don't even matter John I don't even remember it was nothing near every I think it was nothing very revolutionary I think I just quoted rough cook or something I got recorded for for mentioning women and that's the rough cook is very dangerous as you know so you get troubling us by mentioning the name but you know the insularity of the herati world you know it's a phenomenon and you could say oh it's so insular they're not open to the wisdom of the world they don't see the secular studies that can prepare them for jobs and then to be productive in the economy and all of those are true criticisms the other side is once you open doors you're also opening Pandora's boxes so in all of these decisions how we raise our children what type of family environments we want to have there's always a difficult decision to be made and arguments can be made on both sides of the equation as to what is better is it better to be open take things in this is better to be insolent the short answer is that they're both correct and they both have drawbacks they both have positives and people will strike the balance in a different way only a person of great wisdom can make the discriminations that are necessary many people cannot make those discriminations so there may be a legitimate sphere of contamination so to speak any questions of course there is of course there is everything dangerous like yeah who recently commented would the mother should be changed he studied it or severe he must have taken my class I don't want to get into an a full discussion if they say although it's a very very worthy topic all I can say is there is nothing safe there is literally no decision that will be safe everything has upsides and potentials for really really good things and everything has risks and people strike the risks in different ways and the problem is for different people certain approaches are better than other approaches there from what needs to be very wise as to what is the appropriate educational strategy pedagogy parenting when do you open when do you close but all of this is the custom of Abdullah but nevertheless we do have to admit as a general phenomenon cultural assimilation is extremely dangerous and one has it's a toxic drug as it were and if you overdose on it it can very definitely kill you I mean I'm in correspondence with a young man I mean quite amazingly who was raised as an Orthodox Jew he went to yeshiva he spent several years in college several years ago although full time learning and at the age of 31 with 3 children he and his wife have decided they no longer believe in God or the Torah and this is absolutely devastatingly catastrophic to their families and yet and they're kept it a secret from their young children but they're planning about a meeting I mean it's the minute the kids are already in school kids are third grade fourth grade been religious all their lives in religious schools the parents are climbing what you might call an atheistic meeting in which they're going to explain to their children that we no longer I mean how does that work I just but it happens it happens it happens this person got very interested in analytical philosophy he pursued he pursued it to the very end he's a very thorough scholar and researcher and he came to the conclusions what's so dangerous stuff dangerous stuff things happen right things happen so as a result although I have many many issues with the insularity of the high rating world I cannot be totally critical of it because there may be reasons for the we for why certain decisions are made ok but to go back to the main thought here whenever I do my makeup so it turns out we have two different mid Russian keep them side by side med which number one correlates the for the show notes of the lot to the four decrees of pyro servitude genocide by the midwives who did not carried out genocide by the soldiers who did carry it out and then the gathering of the straw those are the four desirous of pyro second redish the four the shortness of google correspond to Babylon Persia Greece and Rome so the Gonzales sure great Russia Shima as you do with a short actually makes a fascinating correlation he wants to correlate the four decrees of pyro to the for excellence and the underlying concept is following idea we were supposed to be in with Ryan for four hundred years that's what God told opera but God took us out after two hundred and ten years because we had we had sunk so low to the 49th level of impurity that we stayed another minute the amount of time it takes for adulterers we would have hit level 50 we would have been irredeemable so god cuts the process short God curtailed the process by a hundred and ninety years now you might think Burke Hashem that's great we got out of Egypt a hundred and ninety years early unfortunately there is a devastating consequence and that is because we never completed the process we need thousands of years of rectification of all of the galleons in order to rectify our failure to finish the 400 chemotherapies are these very actions example a person god forbid has cancer a person undergoes radiation or chemotherapy now let's imagine that the toxicity of the chemotherapy is so strong and so powerful that we have to stop the process early because it will kill the patient so we stop the process because it will kill the patients but as a result the cancer continues to grow and later you might need a more radical treatment because he couldn't finish the process at the time spiritually that's exactly the way this is understood there is a correlation because Pyro's for decrees were not fully carried out over the 400 years we need thousands of years of goblets to weed out the spiritual impurities remember the Egyptian exile itself is described as an iron furnace where the heat of the servitude burn without the impurities but if we were left with impurities they continued to fester so seen in this way he actually wants to make a one-to-one correlation between the forges a rose of pyro and the Forex on his neighbor one was servitude well that corresponds to Babylon as I indicated before Babylonia was the first nation once we got to Israel that enslaved us and took away our sovereignty because every number two is the Emil V aldose the midwives were told to murder the children that corresponds to pressure because what was Persia genocide think is a real common and indeed just as Shiphrah and puah did not carry out the genocide the genocide of Hulman was not carried out either but that was the goalless of genocide now cuz a only number three is more symbolic because the Quran is a number three is also genocide that's when the soldiers were commanded to throw the babies in the water why is that compared to Greece yaaaa so here the association is more metaphorical and that is we know that Yavin represents a source of great wisdom we talked about this for Chanukah young man's ancestor was yepez yet this is the third son of Noah shame come Yepez when shame and y FS covered up their fathers nakedness remember crumb was mocking his father's nakedness and shaming the fs walks backwards to cover him up so God gave a blessing TFS and the FSS Apopka CFUs is like your fat beauty yo fee yok Tilikum the Epis God shall give Beauty to us the ancestor of the Obon Greece the yesh Cohn and he shall dwell the all a sham in the tents of Shem the tents of Noah's older son from which the Jewish people come Semites comes from shed so what does this mean through encryption of our explains that the FS was given the blessing of bringing Beauty into the world Beauty exists in many different ways there is the logical beauty of mathematics and philosophy there is the aesthetic beauty of sculpture and even the human body and athleticism there is drama there is comedy oh the literature generally EFS was given even music the FS was given the capacity to bring Beauty into the world aesthetic beauty intellectual beauty shame was given the mission of godliness and abiram comes from shame so know expressing is that the wisdom of the ethics and the beauty of the others is good and it belongs in the tent of shame but it is good only if it is joined to godliness and that's when it separate so in that sense just as taurah is compared to water because it purifies and gives life even the wisdom of greece is water as well but you know water is a double-edged sword water keeps me alive and water cleans me but if i immerse my head in it totally i drown I can no longer breathe so metaphorically if your fun represents the confrontation of the Jew with the culture of the world which threatens to overwhelm him that can be expressed as drowning the baby in the water because the water is karma the water is wisdom the water is beauty all of that is good but when you totally immerse yourself to the exclusion of Torah it becomes suffocating and destructive and therefore the third Gazzara of yvonna corresponds I'm sorry for example Oh throwing the babies in the water corresponds to the third colors of Yemen but now we come to the fourth exile oh now the four I'm sorry the fourth decree of parenthood the fourth decree of pyro at first glance doesn't seem to be so significant they have to gather their straw how does that correlate with Roma so here once again we have to think a bit more metaphorically allegorically that is when the Torah describes the need to gather straw it uses the word scattering by your fence they have to scatter instead of being in one place and the straw is brought to them they have together they have to scatter and look for it and that makes things by the way a zero-sum game in the sense that when our straw was delivered to us so each person can do his best and that wouldn't hurt the other person but when we're competing to get the straw whatever I find is not available for you meaning to say this introduces a certain element of competition in the slavery a business now if we identify the fourth guevara of para as the Gazzara of scattering which is the word the Torah itself uses piece or a facade piece or then you can understand why the Roman exile might be described as a goalless of scattering and this is in several discrete ways first of all geographically the dispersion of the Jewish people in the goal of Rome is much greater than any other gulleson the goals of Babylon we were in Babylonian basically in the goddess of Persia we were in Persia or Babylonia the Gulf of Yavin we were in our distraction but the godless of Rome there are Jews everywhere in the world there are spiritual reasons for this because it says although we don't actively convert we do not proselytize but it's important in every corner of the world there'd be the influence of Judaism on society to make righteous no hides or whatever it would be to be involved in making society better so Jews have to be everywhere there's a friend of mine who's a rabbi and there Israel was all did to me a rabbi a soccer friends some of you might have heard of him me he's a very very popular lecturer when he's in Israel to target enemy comes though usually once or once a year and so when the advertises she or him it says rabbi Franz has listeners on every continent including Antarctica so there is Torah even and in that article and the light so on that level Peter were scattered but there are other levels of Peter Peter is also sin a subpoena we are told with across I'll say the first temple was destroyed because of idolatry sexual immorality and murder the second temple was destroyed by the Romans for the sin of hatred and polarization so psychologically we are separated from each other in the family we see this as well husbands wives parents children rising divorce rates is at risk family disintegration all of this is Peter but there's another aspect of Peter that is the most subtle of all and that is the inability to focus the distraction of a modern society consider the internet consider social media consider the idea that many people cannot sit still for one minute without going online and twittering as to what they had for breakfast what they're eat what they're eating at this moment look I mean look it's what I mean Twitter does not have great you know deep conversations about things the word Twitter is a very apt description it is the twittering now this is not just a harmless little thing I don't I don't mean to single out Twitter but it basically means that modern culture has created a huge sense of distraction preventing us from focusing preventing us from concentrating preventing us from thinking about what our life is about that is the greatest type of scattering it is the scattered list within the human psyche that can no longer focus or direct its energies nor I'm told you know there are a lot of online classes on YouTube with other other internet sources and the standard college class was always 50 minutes I'm told I'm not sure if that's true that now I'm the average the classes are only 25 minutes and this is because it was discovered that people are not able to concentrate for 50 minutes and also the whole psychology of web surfing is the notion of jumping this to this to this to this to this to this to this it's a serious problem not just in the joint it's a serious problem in educational theory as well books have already been written about web surfing rewires and reprograms the circuits in the brain so this is the correlation to gathering strong we are scatterbrained they don't focus we don't know what to do with ourselves if I don't have some connectivity with someone else and this is a great great tragedy because a human being never discovers who they really are and what their life is about and you can get paralyzed by information overload everything's on the Internet valid information junk information false information true information wonders of Arts or even again you wanted to write or in the parsha alright I'll look up something online what are you gonna get no 1 million hits or something you know I'm thinking how many you know pressure things are amazing unbelievable information over them what do you do with so much information that you wind up absorbing nothing simply because you don't know how to make a decision I remember I once said when I was in DC there was a specialty delicatessen it wasn't kosher but I just remember there seeing an advertisement which really hit me he says we carry 300 brands of mustard yeah so I was thinking let's imagine my wife you know it's like an hour before Shabbos and my wife says you know we're out of mustard can you go to the store get some mustard and I go to this place and there's 300 types of mustard what do I do I would literally be paralyzed with indecision that's kind of the predicament of modern man you know the old saying who was it was it Yeats one of the way poet or TS Eliot life goes out not with a bang but with a whimper there's a famous famous line I think it's really TS Eliot that is sometimes the real enemy is not some dramatic catastrophe or some dramatic evil person that wants to kill us sometimes it's the very triviality of life that kind of destroys destroys you from within in a very very slow way and you don't even notice as that process happens and you get more and more sucked up and sucked in to that process so bigots are therefore this is a very interesting correlation of the four caseros of pyro match up to the for excellence and it reminds us that the dangers of exile are not always persecution or genocide or even cultural assimilation and cultural assimilation is at least using wisdom and knowledge all being against the Torah this is a very very different phenomena this is simply the phenomenon of not being connected to yourself as if your personality is outside of your body and there's not even a union of all of your faculties that's a very very different no it's interesting that this issue about universally education for religious Jews now BC in the United States it's not much of an issue in the united states is least within the more modern arts of actually people get university education but that you know in the hi rainy world it's a very very big debate issue and even if that's healing me among the cartel similarly there will be reservations about it now if you would ask somebody a rabbi 100 years ago why somebody shouldn't go to college they would say oh go to college they're going to read content Spinoza and they'll be exposed to all sorts of anti Torah ideas today now although I just gave you an example of someone that actually went down that path but today it's almost however a college student who'd read content Spinoza that's not the issue today the issue is lifestyle the issue is decadence the issue is sex the issue in drugs there are many many different issues which are not connected to the intellect or to wisdom or to knowledge is connected to a very degenerate environment in many many ways and this is the difference between the Greek goddess and the Roman goddess the Greek of us was a gull us of intellectual connection to ideas some of which may be antagonistic to Judaism and that was something that was very dangerous but in this cult of scatterbrained --less the real Messiah is the decadence and the emptiness of the lifestyle that often exists in the secular world that a Jew must be very very careful to try to avoid right so these are just some things to think about and so when you drink your four cups during the Seder a little while to come you can think that we're not only talking about the past we are also focused on the gullets that we are still in [Music]