Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Counting Jews and Making the Jews Count

[Music] we have a much larger group tonight and uh we hope that everyone had a wonderful forum and uh are now getting inspired for the month of nisan which is uh this month that's misugab uh for the lima tonight's share is uh dedicated in memory of of two yard sites yaakov bin reptivi and ruffalaya about ravitzug and we hope that the learning should be an aliyah for their neshama and in addition a refuge for benjamin israel benjamita the young man that we have been governing for for quite a while and uh he should be healthy and continue to flourish uh tescal yonitanya iris and shimshon uh ben golda sahabas and again we hope that uh they should have refused lame of the talkshow israel and all of our learning should aid uh in uh giving them the restoration of their health and again as always we very very much appreciate uh the generosity of people that sponsor uh the shirim and the good work of ibanez and although i am not making a commercial per se but on the website you're able to donate your contact job i posted uh for sponsorships of this year and many other fewer uh as as well uh tonight i i want to start really with uh the very very first press up in parshas ki sisa because even the feep shot there are some difficulties or at least things that people don't always notice so remember situationally moshe is at harcina he's in the cloud these are the 40 days at the end of which he will come down and see the golden calf and smash the lujus but in the meantime he is getting communications from akris barco while he's in the mountain to be communicated to vinay israel when he comes down and the president says kisi says rashmi israel whenever you count the jewish people uh they shall give what is called a ko fair enough show an atonement for their soul which is a half a shekel now you may recall that right before rashford or amber showed up this year we actually read this as a month here to the parsha of the week and that was called the parsha of shkalim and now just a few weeks later we're actually reading it in the torah itself but it's important to understand a few different things there's actually three different commandments that are being referred to and they are actually not connected to each other at all commandment number one has nothing to do with the half shekel it's a general rule that whenever the jewish people are counted they should not be counted by heads by bodies one two three four five six they should be counted by an indirect mechanism which in this case happened to be a half shekel but halal it doesn't have to be a half shekel for example we find in tanaka in not rather that the sholhamela counted people by sheep everybody gave a sheep or sometimes counted them by pebbles in other words this is not a half shekel halacha per se this is a halacha that prohibits the direct counting of israel because the torah is telling me that if army israel is counted directly there is what is called a negev there is what is called the possibility of a plague and in order that there should not be a plague the jewish people should be counted in an indirect fashion it happens to be as i say that that is because of afghan in this particular instance but the doghouse it's not connected to the half shadow there's an issue of indirect i'm sorry there's an issue of direct counting the warren bronco says gives an example that david hamelech for whatever reason forgot this and towards the end of this reign he tried to he he commissioned yoav to do a census to count people and what happened was there was a magefa there were people that died because of that direct counting now how logically this raises interesting questions about responding to a census uh we know both the united states and israel conduct census and the question becomes are you allowed to respond to a census or is that a violation of being counted and most posts you're putting aside the political issue of how you relate to the state of israel that's more of a political issue i don't want to address right now but in terms of the issue of counting remember that census forms are tabulated are really indirect counting and as i put down on a piece of paper i have five people so somebody is not counting me they're counting the papers they're counting the numbers on the papers so while p din a census is clearly an indirect counting the only time you might have a problem is for carrot if you don't respond to a census so somebody might show up and say all right everybody stand here one two three four five six and then you have a a problem now again as i say that is not intrinsically connected to have the mitzvah marcus hichard at all that is a separate law no in no direct counting what is the assault of no direct counting what exactly is this you know at first glance it sounds uh a little superstitious or whatever it is and the concept basically is that as important as individual individuality is in judaism that each person must serve god as an individual it's also important that we remain connected as its seabourn as a unit and when you count somebody even if it's only momentarily you're singling in them out from the community you're saying oh there's a you that you're separating from the club and we have to know when we separate ourselves from the cloud we're putting ourselves in danger we need the zakhus of the zebra we need to be connected to am israel and therefore in that sense as it were we become part of a collectivity now of course as i've said many times already the notion of community in judaism is not the same as conformity it doesn't mean everybody's the same because as the medra says the beauty of a garden is when the flowers are different colors not when they're all the same and community does mean diversity it does mean individuality that's the concept of tribes that's why tribes are so important because it's not just a jewish people it's a tribal division in which each tribe and each individual by extension has a unique mahalish a unique approach and every decision we don't want everybody to be the same or maybe sociologically there may be pressures within the religious world to be the same but that's not the ultimate goal the ultimate goal is that each person serves hashem as an individual but within the context of a and that is why we don't want to be separated out we don't want to be directly counted and that is the assertive indirect counting now i remember hearing israel even as a child although this actually does not make complete sense to me that you know when we're counting people if there's a minion in a show so instead of saying one two three four five six seven eight nine ten people will use a plus which has ten words in it by the way there are those words which we say in governing anyway but they've acquired a recent resurgence of fame because uh the great uh ramachorsky who was nifty recently uh wrote many many years ago a famous niger to hoshiya which was actually sung in islamaya so so and i think now the negan is coming back it was an old that had not really been that popular for many many years uh when i was a child it was a very very popular we sang in akapas and now i think it's coming back uh because uh for raptorski's but that that was the puzzle that you used to account for a minion la nia styki that doesn't make sense to me because if you're using a puzzle you're still counting the heads and if you're counting the heads you have the problem of and you have the problem of negev plague unless you're going to say that since you're using it through divrei torah so the shamira that's kind of a counter protection okay so the point is the first commandment in kisa is not directly a master shekel commandment it is a prohibition against an indirect counting and that's why the villenegon says that the first pusuk does not say shekel it says like this when you count beneath israel the nasa new ish co fair enough show people should give a ransom in lieu of their nephesh that ransom doesn't have to be marxist hasheco is not mentioned until the next verse the first puzzle could be a stone it could be a sheep it could be a piece of paper it could be anything fair enough show is not directly connected to shekel now the next puzzle za yitnew now here though it's important to understand that there was actually two different mitzvoths of one was a one-time donation and the other is an annual as long as there's a base on mikdash the actual context in kisisa is not even referring to the annual mitzvah it's a strange thing we read it parashat shkalim to connect it to the annual mitzvah of master susheka but the passage is not talking about the annual mitzvah of massachusetts the pasek is talking about a one-time contribution of massachusetts that was given to the construction of the michigan that every jew had to give a certain amount of silver it's a silver a coin or at least a a silver you know metal equal to the weight of a half shekel and that was melted down and that was used to construct the adanim the sockets of the mishkan what are the adonim remember the michigan comprised very heavy boards and each board was carved so it had two teeth like the prongs of a plug and uh each prawn was set in a silver block that kind of gave it stability that's called an adan the plural of that is ada nim the english translates it as sockets with it very much does resemble a plug in a socket and each carriage because each board had two of these teeth there were two adam per karesh and when the michigan was disassembled the boards were pulled out of the adanam and then they were carried on the wagons and and and the like so the half shekels that were contributed went they were melted down and they went to the adam that's not an annual mitzvah that's a one-time mitzvah in the building of the michigan now there happens to be another mitzvah of half shekel and that is every single year uh the jews were expected to contribute a half checkout which went for what you might call the operating budget of the temple it went for kerbanos it went for the oil for the menorah it went for the musaf offerings it went for the kitauras because the halacha is that all of those carbanos had to be publicly funded they had to come from cloud israel you couldn't have a parney sahyam you couldn't have a guy that says oh i'm paying for the temple service today it has to come from the communal marxist echo and that and because of the fiscal year you'll remember of the base and make this begins in the month of nisan so when nissan started they had to have some new money you couldn't use old year's money they had to have some new money to buy corbanos so you'll recall they began collecting these new skelem in adar so that by nissan they would have some new money that they could buy kurbanas and that's why parsha skull is rashford but the anomaly is that really it doesn't match up because we're reading parsha skuldin to commemorate the mitzvah of the annual maksa sachetta that is part of the financing of carbanos but we're reading him in the torah that are actually not talking about the half shekel of the carbanos it's talking about the half shekel of the adani still hazal said since it does mention half shekel that's close enough to give you that association and give you that connection but i think that's the point that people sometimes don't realize that the marxist sasha that is talking about that's being talked about in parshas ki sisa is not the annual master shekel of the karbanos it was a one-time donation that goes for the true mass the contribution for the for the sockets so as a result therefore we really have three different concepts that we're dealing with concept number one is the prohibition against direct counting concept number two is the half shekel that went to the adanim and concept number three is the half shekel that went for the carbanos that was an annual obligation and that we do commemorate we did commemorate a thursday before mcgill reading that we give something that's called the half shekel again that's uh that's a min hug to commemorate the annual half chateau uh that was collected of course let me point out that the half shekel of the torah is a lot more uh money than the value of a half shekel of israeli currency don't confuse the two you are you'd say it is true that you are you'd say the drabanone of matsusashiko by a half shekel israeli habshecko that happens to be true but if you would come to the bassam mikdosh with an israeli half shekel they would kick you out and uh send you a bill for a lot more a lot more money it would turn out to be something like the equivalent in dollars of thirty dollars or something like uh you know 110 115 shekel would be the half sheka of the uh of the torah uh you'll recall as well uh if you recall this the famous story in the christian bible of yashka coming to the temple and throwing over the tables of the money changers and you know the money changers are portrayed as like evil predatory business people uh the truth is nothing wrong with the money changers i mean the mishna says that in the uh courtyard of the base of mikdash or in the harabayas rather there were money changers because people would come jews would come from all over the world or the diaspora they would come from egypt they would come from babylonia they would come from persia and they would bring foreign currencies and they would have to change their currencies in order to be able to give the half checkup so these money changers had you know stacks and stacks of half shekels like anyone else and they would do currency exchanges and they charge the commission i mean it's making a living do uh and uh the the the notes were a very legitimate part of the temple operation so yeshua was just being disruptive at that particular point there was nothing wrong with what the money changers were doing okay now you'll recall if i could review a little bit that when uh we talked about parashat the half shekel of the corbanos we talked about uh the meaning of that because what is uh most essential is that the rich person cannot give more and the poor person could not give less it had to be uniform and you'll recall that i shared with you the thought of the slash emis that the remis here is a person could be rich in many many ways you can be rich not only in money you could be rich in wisdom in leadership and charisma and unfortunately a person might be poor in many many ways may lack intellect may lack abilities in many ways but says when it comes to available being connected with the replenishing islam the rich is no better than the poor everybody has equal access because barclay does not judge you based on what you accomplish objectively who judges you based on how much of your potential you've given to so if i am poor or bereft of money or talent but i do the best that i can with what hashem has given me i am as equally beloved by aka as a person who can do much more and if the person who can do much more does not live up to his potential even if he's doing five times more than me in point of fact the omni is more hush of in hashem's eyes than the usher because the uni is giving hashem a hundred percent of what he can i mean no one's 100 but closer to 100 percent and the usher is giving you know less right so so that if you remember without i don't want to go over that oh that whole shirt if you remember that was the greatest sight of the master that rich and poor stands before hashem with equality of dignity and that's the fact that you have many more talents does not automatically put you in better standing with three bani shalom but tonight i want to talk about the other half shekel the half shekel that went to the adanim because here you have a problem because this is part of the construction of the mishkan now the problem is that normally people gave whatever they wanted to give meaning to say mosher vayner gave a whole list you know gold and silver and copper and defaeles you know blue woe in our gunman scarlet wall and you were not told what to give and you were not told how much to give meaning when it comes to the construction of the mission as opposed to the carbonus everybody gave whatever they wanted except for the adanim which was a mandatory minimum contribute minimum and maximum contribution so here i think we have an anomaly bishomo when it comes to carbonates all right everybody has to be equal but when it comes to building a mishkan by definition everybody gave different things so why would all of a sudden when it comes to the adanim all of a sudden we are requiring that it be uniform you understand this in other words the problem of uniformity is an anomaly in construction of the mishka even though it's understandable in connection with the carbons of the michigan so last time we talked about the skull we were talking about the corbanos but how do you understand the idea of the donut so i'll give you a short answer a short answer they say in the name of mayor shapiro ramirez shapiro secretary was the great rav of lublin who died uh in in you know before world war ii he died pre-holocaust uh he's best known today as the uh one who uh started the daffodil program the program of learning one blood and finishing shots in seven uh seven and a half years uh but he was one of the great great rabbanim in poland he had a great yeshiva yeshiva lublin just to get into that yeshiva you had to know 200 blood of gemara by heart to get into the yeshiva that's how elitist it was great great talmud uh and he already was one of the godzilla poland but he died tragically young in his late 40s and it was a great great loss uh for uh for abby israel he was also a he was a hasita she is he kind of infused his yeshiva it was a publishing issue the blend was not like a literacy issue but it was in hasidis opponent so there was a great khasirishi's spirit in his uh his yeshiva and he was a very witty person at one point he was in america on a fundraising mission and somebody proposed this is back in the 1920s somebody proposed that there be a rabbinic exchange program that why don't we send some american rabbis to poland and you'll send some polish yiddish-speaking rabbis to america so mayor shapiro said uh we're happy to send you some of our rabbis please don't send us uh some of yours now if you think about this uh an american rabbi in poland almost wouldn't make any sense i mean uh ramosha feinstein used to say you know when people would call him the guttal hadar through a motion his great modesty said the following he says in europe to know shas and shulkin that was the basic definition of a rabbi of a village that's what you know that's what a a simple rabbi knew if you were greater you had skidushim but you know to know shasman iraq that's basic education so if you come to america you become the guadalajara the robin schulce which was a basic requirement so imaginability was right that poland did not need american american rabbis but ramirez shapiro actually said this board in a thunder in the fundraising trip and he said the following he said you know the nature of of things is that people like to give money to fancy buildings that have their name on it but they don't like to give to the undramatic operating budgets like rebbe's salaries or things like basements now the addendum are actually the basement of the michigan they're the foundation of the michigan so when it comes to the fancy stuff that people can see the gold and the silver and the texas through our government we can leave it to people they're going to give as much as they can give but when it comes to the operating budget the carbonus and the foundation we need to have a compulsory donation because those are the things that are less visible less dramatic and therefore people don't want to give to it and therefore that's why we have to kind of demand a minimum contribution but uh i want to share with you a different answer that that some of fortune give and it's based on the statement of rabbeno uh points out and you'll have to accept this on faith because i myself did not count it that there are actually 613 commandments about building the mishkan meaning to say if you look at every single detail i mean there's only one mitzvah of the 613 called making a mishkan but if you subdivide it you actually get 613 components for building the mishkan and we know that the number 613 corresponds to the human body in many ways because there are 248 positives and they correspond to the bones and there are 365 negatives and they correspond to the sinews or ligaments so too the michigan so to speak corresponds to every part of the human organism because after all the whole idea of the mishkan is to bring god's presence into our heart and soul the us who we make that hashem says make for me a mikdash so i will dwell within you so the mishkan is a kind of expression of the human personality which invites god's presence and by connecting to the michigan i invite god's presence into me bilvavi mishkanevna in my heart i build mishka a dwelling place for hashem and they the commentaries go over different parts of the michigan and the like so here is the thing the reason why the torah says every person gives whatever they want gold silver copper is because everybody's mishand is different my michigan is not your michigan right every person is an individual every person serves god in their own way every person has different talents and mamela the idea is some people are connected to the what gold represents whatever spiritual co-op some are silver copper tacheilas it's not shaykh for the terry to say everybody gives the same and everyone gives the amount because every person gives according to their talents so when it comes to construction of the mishkan everybody constructs it in their own unique and individual way but even though everybody builds their mishkan in their own unique way the foundation of the mishkan the foundation of your life has to be a common foundation in other words structurally what's going on is the mish gun is built based on diversity and individuality but it must rest on a common foundation which is why the adanim are equal everyone gives a half shadow for the adam what is the common foundation of the mission of our lives so here let's go to a gemara at the end of massachusetts marcus the murad marcus tells us that myself gave us 613 commandments from hashem and then the gemara goes on and shows that later generations were unable to wrap their minds around 613 that was too many things to remember so they kept on reducing it to smaller and smaller numbers now the gemara doesn't mean they were knocking out mitzvahs the gemara means that they tried to subsume the 613 into categories like wml looked at it down to 15 it goes through so i'm not going to go over the whole list of of how it was winnowed down but i'm going to go towards the end of it it mentions that michael one of the navy got the whole torah down to three basic principles actually very famous what does god ask of you except to do justice to love kindness and to walk with humility and modesty in front of hashem so michael got everything done got into three principles justice kindness and modesty it's very important the word here is cenias in modern society modern religious society cenius is often portrayed is kind of an externalization of you know how long a woman's sleeves have to be uh what do you have to cover but although that is true that is a halachic aspect of sneeze but sanius is much more than a dress code for man or for women samias has a certain attitude of being modest of feeling that you're in the presence of hashem of not seeking recognition of not kind of having to publicize everything that you do that one's relationship to god is fundamentally a private relationship and an intimate relationship and dress is an aspect of science but it's not the definition of sneeze so mikhail got it down to three even three was too much so the navi yeshayahu got it down to one i'm sorry two two rather shim room via suits now although this is not the main topic because i want to focus on the last thing the one uh let's compare for a moment mikha's three with isha yoho's too michael's first one was asos mishka to do justice yeshua changed a sais mishpat so first what's the difference between asos mishbat and shimru mishmat shibru because i'll say always refers to a negative meaning if assais mishpat means do justice shimru mishpad actually means be careful injustice meaning avoid injustice meaning the divers are getting spiritually worse so at some point we could no longer tell a person go out and do justice because you know how am i going to know what's the just result but at least i should avoid hurting people so one aspect of the urethra sadoros is that if you're not going to be able to actively do justice at least avoid hurting people by injustice now the next one michael's second one was to love you change that to give sadaka now let's think about this the gemara in sukkah says what is the difference between so there are a few differences stucco is only with your money kamila's feathers because it is with your time stock is only for the poor it can be discussed it is even for someone that's not poor in other words is acts of love and benevolence sadaka is writing a check so here once again is an illustration of you rita sadoros ideally a jew should love crescent it should give me joy and pleasure to do good things for other people but what happens if i don't particularly like it what happens if i consider it a bother uh it's a territory i don't like i said people are bothering me so you say how it says at least write to check meaning if you can't love kazan give charity even if you don't like it in other words it's going with your rita satorus so instead of doing justice it's avoiding injustice instead of loving sesame there's a fallback position give charity means going down generations but was michael after isaiah so there were contemporaries actually and so mikha represents an earlier stage now the final point is that yeshayahu leaves out michael's all-important third step mira's third step was hatsney alexis yeshayo leaves that out now certainly he doesn't mean because it's not important of course it's important so he leaves it out so i would say there may be two reasons why he leaves it out number one he recognizes with urethra sandias people you know need recognition they need to be honored they need to be uh you know they need to get banged for their buck so at some point he's telling a person listen you know it's better to beat sanua but if you're not going to beat sanua do good things anyway even without the smears because it's better than not doing it meaning it's kind of a concession to the public culture that we have in which a person's accomplishments have to be paraded and applauded all the time but i would suggest there's even a deeper meaning and that is there are going to be times in which you're not supposed to beat sanoa and you're abiding hashem because you have to be a role model for other people sometimes you have to be a little public in what you do so that people will learn from you you say rebbe solcelander as a young man was very very attracted to a life of asceticism and almost being a hermit because in lita at the time there were jews who would go off into the forests and for the whole week they would only come home to their families on shabbos and they would learn and they would dive in and they served to god in total isolation people didn't know about them et cetera they were not involved in the seaboard and ruby saw cilantro was initially very attracted to that avaya because you free yourself of distractions you're focused on hashem and you serve hashem right the life of a hermit but then he realized he said that's good for me but what about my responsibility to call israel and therefore i need to be public i need to teach i need to go out i need to demonstrate mitzvah so maybe ishayah is being miramize that when there's a urethra sadoros you cannot always afford total samias in your abilities session you need to be a little public i don't mean ostentatious i don't mean arrogant of course but you need to let people know that you're learning i mean i heard a story years ago which was very very hard to believe but i heard such a story about i knew i knew a fellow who uh was a person who was not we would not i mean he was ashamed of shabbos but we would not call him a bentaira he didn't learn anything he was not involved that much in alberta and he once told me that his father was a great great great talmud hachem but his father was so humble he never let his children see him learning so he would be up until two o'clock in the morning if anybody got up he would cover the gemara with the newspaper and said i'm just reading paper you know i can't you know i can't sleep he didn't even want his family to know that he was learning now you could call that humility you can call that samias on the other hand you have kids who grow up you know not seeing the hashibas of torah you see so there are times where you got to balance it there are times where you have to be a little bit more open about your awaited hashem that might be intrinsically desirable intrinsically cedius but with yarita sandoros you gotta be a little bit uh in fact and i was a rabbi for 22 years so we always had this problem you know in america i don't know if they do it in israel so much uh you know synagogues and yeshivas have banquets annual banquets and you always have to have a guest of honor guess what you have to honor somebody usually because they gave money or sometimes for other reasons and some guests of honor you know love it that's open you know they would they would they would do this every year every day uh but there are a lot of very very worthy guests of honor who genuinely do not want to be honored they're humble they're modest they don't want it so for 22 years or whatever a certain demand i always have to be you know convince them and the way we convince them is the standard idea right this is like a standard uh this kind of rabbinic so 101 is you have to say well it's not because of you it's because you know you're a role model for other people that people should look at you and look at what you've accomplished and that way you can inspire other people right that's exactly how we convince people uh to be honored and that i would suggest is why yeshua omits the all-important hatsune okay so this was a digression going from mikhail but now i want to go to the final point the gemara says in macos even two was too much for people so the navi khabakook got it down to one one thing that will be the key to everything and that is the possum that says if you can only take one idea with you into life and muna in hashem and munna that there is a shalom and muna that he is the one that takes care of you that he guides you that he loves you that he's involved in your life because when you internalize ammonia you will do the mitzvos because you will have both reference for hashem and love fresh for all that he does and the munna will give you courage when times are difficult and ammuna will give you hope and will give you optimism and will give you enthusiasm and it's true that you're not going to know the whole torah from ammuna but from in muna you can be connected to everything you learn because you'll understand that it's giving so now going back to the michigan every part of the mishkan corresponds to different parts of the torah and everybody's an individual and everybody has different talents so therefore some people give gold some people give silver some people give copper and everybody gives different amounts because every person is different but the foundation of the michigan must be a common foundation and the commonality of that foundation is emunah therefore the adanim are created through a common contribution because they represent the essode of the mishkan we have with hajjam and the assad of the mishkan that we have with hashem is emunah and muna is our yasod sadiq by the way as a little aside you know at least in its inception uh was a fundamentally different type of hasidas that existed in poland paella like rebelliousness and the like was called it was a facility which was an emotional casinos it was supposed to be an intellectual became later that's a separate egypt but was very sharply differentiated from khagat and the altarebe deliberately wanted to create a facilis that was based on intellectual understanding because the altar review is very suspicious of emotions emotions come and go and he wanted something to be permanent of course that's why khabad was the only facilities that took root in lithuania because litvax could uh only only accept something that was analytical and intellectual uh little could never accept you know emotionality and the like and indeed uh the balatanyas was called by the tomato of the magi of meza rich his he was called the lichbach that that that's what he was called the litchfuck uh took everything okay uh but be as it may uh the casino of poland they used to read this they would read it they would misread it but they would read it that sadiq in his faith gives you life meaning everything depends on what the rebbe does the rebbe gives you spiritual life and rafiri's almond said no no no the rebbe cannot be your surrogate you yourself have to do the avaya again if khabad changed or didn't change i'll leave that for another another another discussion but one of the teachings of the altar mevi was to de-emphasize the centrality of the rebel in avada's hashem that everyone should develop their own kesha with the rebina with the rebar the shell island as opposed to saddiq but the puzzle doesn't say it says okay so with this understanding it turns out that the adonim of the mishkan represents [Music] seen in this way we can take the analogy further and further and further because it represents a muna that's why it is uniform because everybody builds the michigan in their own way but the foundation of the muna needs to be the common constant of life but now let's take it a little further every sock every board has two sockets why are there two sockets per carriage so this gives us a very important you say because ammuna has two aspects there's a famous and beautiful quote from rav sadhuk of lublin in the sitka sans and this is actually a quote that you know well people should actually memorize it's a famous famous beautiful quote uh put it on your refrigerator door kishem shahi of adam lahammian bakode as a person must believe in of course you must believe in yourself you must believe in yourself because if hashem created you then hashem gave you a mission because every person has a mission then he must have given you the tools to accomplish that mission because it would be perverse and unjust for ish bargain to give us a job and not give us the abilities to accomplish this the person has to be humble and the person has to know that whatever he can do only comes from hashem but at the same time humility doesn't mean i look at myself as garbage humility does not mean i don't recognize my strengths humility does not mean i don't realize that i can accomplish good and significant and meaningful things and if i can accomplish it then i must accomplish it because it becomes my responsibility it becomes my contribution to kiddish hashem and hashem's world so part of ammunition is a muna in yourself and that is why the adana are double because they're dunamar muna they are the foundation and there's the stubble in muna you believe in god and part of your moon and hashem means you believe in yourself this is an important idea you know in the morning when we open up our eyes and uh you check the obituaries and you're still alive right so we say the first thing we say even before nutilation you have returned my nishama with love with the grace and then we say it's not come the rabbi period your faith is great now is actually a fragment of a passage in eicher in icha tish above it says khadashim god renews the mornings every day your faith is great so that based on that uh they we put into our tefila the statement your faith is great the question is we normally think of emunah is what i have in hashem so why does it say rabbah and i'm speaking to hashem your faith is great it should be rabbah and i see my faith in you is great what is god's faith now the truth of the matter is the feep shot this is actually not a tasha because it's interesting that in biblical hebrew emunah does not mean faith at all emunah means faithfulness and reliability and dependability so when we say hashem is a kale emunah that does not mean a god of faith but it means a god who is faithful reliable dependable who won't let you down so rabbi is not ascribing faith to god it's saying that god is dependable the sun rises every morning the derek lal life is restored right so in other words your faithfulness is great so that's simple and they want to say well emunah means faith so what is the faith of god and the answer is it is god's faith in you that every morning that god gives you life god is whispering in your ear i have faith in you i believe in you i trust you and i understand god knows the future that raises intellectual puzzles but at least on the realm of free will hashem basically says i'm giving you life because there's still good that you can accomplish in this world and i believe in you even when you don't believe in yourself and that's an important message that's an empowering message because we sometimes live in a world where there's a lot of negativity we don't always get the the the approval or the kizok that we need from family or from or from rebellion or from our job whatever it would be and you know we sometimes uh feel very low but think about the fact that if you're alive the beauregola said i have confidence that there's good things you could accomplish because if there wouldn't be then you wouldn't be here so if i said no easier said than done i understand ultimately if i could especially says you're an okay person then why should i allow anyone to take away my self-worth and my value everybody who says i'm okay because i'm here like the t-shirt's saying god doesn't make joke right if you're here hashem doesn't no it doesn't make you so that's why the adanim are two emunah and the moon in you let's go a little further why are the adani made out of a half shekel now again let me recall let me just remind you when we were discussing a few weeks ago the half shekel of the corbanos so the point that was made then see that's why i want to separate because these are two different mitzvahs the point that was made then is that each person is incomplete just like a half is incomplete unless it's connected to another half each yakid must regard himself as incomplete unless he's mahabhara himself to the clown and the important lesson there is that i am incomplete unless unless i'm connected to you so that's an antidote to my guyva but it's also a giza because it reminds me you're incomplete unless you're connected to me so it gives me a giza for the person who thinks he doesn't matter and it's an antidote to the bulgaria who thinks that he can do everything himself now that's again not to intermingle this that's the message of the master successful of the karbanos which was an emphasis on achtus and unity but if the master shackle of the adonim is a different message it's the message of ammuna so maybe half has a different significance and that is and muna means that i have to understand i only get half of the story because like this because what is the big challenge to a minor right the biggest biggest question that a mayman has is if i believe that god is omnipotent all-powerful and i also believe he's merciful and he's just and he's fair and he's compassionate then why is there so much suffering in the world why do righteous people suffer this is the issue called theodicy in english and uh hazal tournament as a general rule for the problem of sadiq varallo why do sadikin have it so difficult in this world and not just him but children innocent people the holocaust then we have russia vitovo and then for carrots there are richoyam and this was a difficult question in fact fazal tell us again in this parsha when maisha abano asks hashem show me your ways to tell me the secret of why righteous people suffer and evildoers prosper and if you remember hashem answered in a very mysterious way i'm going to place you in the cleft of the rock and i'm going to go by you and you will see my glory from the back and you will not see me from the front and you know how some sofa interprets that mystical passage that you can understand the ways of hashem only in hindsight after it's all happened you'll see it from the back but you can't understand it as it's coming towards you that's how the consum cypher interprets was not given a clear answer the whole book of eels where a righteous person has so much suffering they debate back and forth and ultimately i will share the book of you if you can see it on on youtube uh but ultimately the answer is we don't really understand i mean there are a lot of different sub explanations you know that sadik suffers in this world as they kaphara for the generation and even though christianity borrowed it but judaism has such an idea that satikim can be a kaphora for the generation or that sadiq has a few of era so he gets punished for them in this world so his not diminished or there's even a concept of the assuring shallavah that that saddek suffers so that when he serves hashem in his suffering his reward is so much greater meaning you have a lot of what you might call individualistic explanations but ultimately we don't have the the whole the year so this can trouble the person on an emotional level even if you sit in a sheer and you hear of this explanation and that explanation emotionally how could this be done to children you think they can go over things in the holocaust or even bismarck unfortunately with terrorist uh bombings or diseases whatever it would be so in order to be amineman you have to understand i only know half of the story so that's why the adani that is in muna are two adam because in muna and hashem and muna in me that is why they're made from half shekels because half represents that to be a moment i have to understand the incompleteness of my knowledge my failure to grasp the totality of circumstances this is a very important decide um a muscle that's that's been given is that we are like actors in a play that only know our particular lines imagine if you had a imagine if you had a play and the play is the entire history of the world so it's millions and millions and millions of pages with all of these characters and you have a walk-on part and the walk-on part says enter stage left slip on a banana peel break leg and that's that's your whole that's your whole role in the play so you go to the director and you say this is not fair i just have one second of uh of being on the stage and i slip on a banana peel like what's going on why is that happening and the director says you're an idiot you don't know how important that is if you read the five million pages that came before and the five million pages that come after this is the turning point this changes everything but we don't have that perspective we look at things as if you know we're the only person you know gee visa being me as an individual this is not fair i understand but there's a before and there's an after and there's a history and there's an interrelationship of things in fact that's part of the message in the book of evil again without being married in it this would need a all sure of its own at the end of the book of eve hashem appears to you and tries to offer or does offer eve an explanation of what's going on but hashem really doesn't answer the question hashem shows eve the wonders of nature he shows them snow and mountains and stars and planets and unusual animals and he's not really answering eve's question why is this happening to me and one of the understandings is hashem is trying to show eve a complex interlocking world in which everything that happens has ripple effects on everything else in fact it's been well said that one of the reasons why even supercomputers are not that good at predicting long-range weather patterns is because weather can be influenced by a falling leaf or a sneeze meaning an extra leaf falls off the tree it generates a little tiny air current and that gets magnified and interacts with other things so by the time it reaches china maybe there'll be a tsunami or whatever it is and there's no computer that can track every falling leaf every sneeze every little thing impacts on everything else in ways we don't understand so that is why emunah by definition means you only know half of the story half does not even mean 50 it means a fraction of the story so this is what i wanted to share with you the two different messages of the adanim there is the matsusa of corbanos which is primarily an exercise in community and actus and then there's the master shekel of the adani that is a message of munna and that's why there are two and the ammuna that you only know half of the story which is why it is so it's therefore this very first puzzle again to reiterate has three different components the prohibition against direct counting the mitzvah of marxist shekel of the adani which is a one-time contribution and uh derek remis is not which is for the carbanos seaborn and it is that third thing that we were reading uh that we were referring to uh in uh but this week we'll be focusing on the shooto show negro which is the trumas so again i wish you well thank you for coming and understanding [Music] is