Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Do not Forget the L-rd your G-d with Birkat HaMazon

[Music] again i apologize for being a little late today uh today's share uh is being dedicated for a reformed leima to avia adena batmariam boom alaya bhatt sarabela and sarah freda bas raizel that they should have reformed israel and uh she was also dedicated for the uh in memory and for the aliyah of pinchas ben yehoshua esther and once again the yummy israel then shomo was the young man that we had been dominating for and now our torah should be nishmato and the elo you're going to show much of all the sponsors and really all of the new show modes of quality thrill that can benefit from torad mitzvos that are being done um i actually have two unrelated topics to talk about today i'll start with one and if there's time left over i'll get into the other one if not i'll hold it over for another another share i want to start off with talking about a mitzvah that does appear in this parsha itself and we're reading parches akev which is the third parsha in the book of devorah and actually let me start since we didn't really talk about the book of dvaram because we had the 9th of and other days that that we were talking about let me first talk about the book of devorium as a book because it is actually a very very interesting book number one it has a very special title in rabbinic literature it is called mishna torah mishna torah literally means the repetition of the law and in fact that's exactly the translation of the term deuteronomy deuteronomy is greek for the second law it is literally a translation of the rabbinic term mishna torah now why is the book of devarum called mishna torah because to a considerable degree not exclusively moshe rabano in the last month of his life the whole book of devorium is the last month after the last five weeks of his life because it begins rosh chodesh shavat moshe is going to die the seventh of adar so it's a month and a week of his life he reviews a lot of the history of the jewish people and he also reviews many mitzvots so to a large degree the book of devarim is a khazara it is a review of the torah although many details are added but it is important to understand that there are mitzvot in the book of duvarim that do not appear anywhere else there are so-called new mitzvot in the book of juvarim among them are get right the law of jewish divorce yibum if a man dies without children there's a mitzvah on his brother to marry and birkat amazon which is actually what i'm going to be talking about so the idea that everything in devarim is a reiteration of things that happened earlier is not quite true now those of you that are students of the rambam are well aware that the name of the rambam's code of jewish law is also called mishnah torah he obviously borrowed it from the book of javarim but the rambam had i think a different meaning involved it's kind of a double meaning when the book of javarim is called mishna torah it means it is simply a review or a reiteration of things that came before the rambam used the title mishna torah to highlight the dichotomy between the written torah and the oral torah in other words he basically said that all a person needs is the five books of moses which is the written torah and my book which will give you all the laws of the oral torah of course the obvious implication was who needs gamora you have my book and indeed the private uh strenuously attacked the rambam uh claiming that the rambam was calling for the abrogation the abolition of gomorrah's study the rambam defended himself and said he didn't really mean that uh or whatever it is that's an interesting topic uh for another time so the point is that when we call the book of dvaram mishna torah we are simply talking about reviewing what was previously stated when the rambam uses the word mishna torah he means it supplements the written torah by the codification of the rules that are in the oral law namely the babylonian talmud and the you you shall me talmud and the like uh be it as it may though in terms of literary structure there is something very unusual about the book of zivarim and that is throughout the four books of the torah the narrative voice is omniscient of course it happens to be god so of course it's omnishia but but there's a term in in literature called the omniscient narrator that simply means the narrator that is just telling you everything that everybody is doing john did this and helen did this and et cetera as if the narrator is above all of the action and seeing everything of course god is omniscient so god quite literally is the omniscient narrator the initiate narrator always speaks in third voice and god said to moshe and moshe answered and pyro said that's how a narrator narrates a story in the book of devarim moshe is speaking in first person so instead of hashem said to moshe the book of jehoram always says and hashem said to me that i should do this it's very very different in other words in the whole torah the narrator is god in the book of devorim the narrative voice is actually moshe and indeed the gemara in megillah says that the whole torah was said from the mouth of god the book of javarim is me p moshe now this is what the gemaran magilla says now the problem with that statement is that on one level it seems to be heretical one of the rambam's 13 principles of faith that is universally agreed upon is that every word of the torah is from god there is not a single word in the torah that moshe wrote on his own god moshe was like a secretary god dictated to moshe the words to describe korach and miraglim and the mitzvot so the question is how do you reconcile the idea that the gemaran magilla says the book of javarim are moshe's words with the fundamental idea that every word of the torah is from god indeed if one were to say that moshe wrote his own words into the torah that would be kefira that would be heresy so there's a very very helpful explanation of the abarbanel the abarbanel don yitzrica barbanel a very colorful person very very interesting person he was the finance minister of spain under the reign of ferdinand and isabella that he was the finance minister who raised money for columbus's uh journey uh to what wound up to be to the new world although it was an attempt to find a short route to to india and uh he actually lived through the spanish inquisition and the expulsion of the jews from spain and it was interesting that when jews were given the choice to either convert to christianity or catholicism or die or leave so some jews were willing to die some jews left some jews became the muranos the jews the anusim as they preferred to be called who were observing the tory in private the abarbanel was offered a private deal the arbanel's skills were so necessary to ferdinand and isabella that ferdinand actually offered the barbados the option of remaining a religious jew as long as you stay in the government now the varbanel is a man of principle refused to accept that offer and as an old man as an elderly person he went into exile with thousands and thousands of other jews there is a tradition although it's not not entirely substantiated that the day that thousands of jews left spain it was not the only day but one of the days in which a very large number of jews left spain in exile including the abar banel who was the elder of the whole group and the head of the jewish community was on the ninth of us there was such a tradition and there is also a tradition that the barbanel poskins that they should play musical instruments as they were leaving even though it was the ninth above and it's interesting there are two different reasons that are given and both reasons are very very interesting obviously normally playing musical instruments on the ninth above would be a pretty big avera it's much worse than the nine days generally uh this is the day of tisha what are you playing music but one reason was that people were so broken so depressed that it literally was a matter of of life and death a person could have a breakdown and therefore he felt a one-time emergency ruling in fact even today i mean sometimes it happens someone who is in mourning may be suffering depression anxiety so the is we we allow that we allow them to listen to music if they really really need it there are going to be allowances in halacha for what you might call psychological peculiarity it doesn't have to be suicide it doesn't have to be the person that's a suicide risk but simply they can have a severe emotional breakdown that's reason number one reason number two i think is even more interesting the abarbanel wanted to reinforce to the jews because the jews were not crying over the corbin basa mikdash they were crying over leaving spain in there now wanted to kind of communicate to them this was not our home as successful as we were as prominent as we were remember there had been the golden age of spain where jews were so successful the abravanel's own life illustrates how successful he was in the political world of spain but spain is not eric israel spain is not yerushalayim and as a result playing of the music says don't be so sad that you're leaving galut to go into another galat it's galut and it's gallate okay so he actually wanted them to realize this is not an occasion to be so heartbroken over the basamitas yeah but over leaving spain no that's what it is that's what jewish life is uh we could be in hundreds of years in a place and eventually it comes to an end i mean there are people who talk about the united states that way i don't want to get into that to too political but historically there are goliath in which jews have done very very well and they have prospered in all types of spheres i mean even even germany was an example of that and yet the gaga comes to an end in one way one way or the other okay again in okay but be this made the brabunel although historically he was the finance minister of spain but his real recognition is he was a very very great biblical commentator he wrote commentaries on the torah and on the naviem he was also very interested in messianic redemption so although he did not write a systematic commentary on dikatubim he wrote no fewer than three commentaries on the book of daniel because the book of denial has many messianic calculations the abrahamic is actually one of the great great commentaries on all aspects of mashiach if you were to give a course on moshiach barbanel would be one of the main sources that we would look at for a very systematic you know the rambam deals with mashiach in a very abbreviated way the rambam has basically a chapter and a half at the end of the mishnah torah about mashiach extremely important but you know just a chapter in half the barbarian has literally hundreds and hundreds of pages on the union of mashiach the rabinelle's uh interpretive method is actually very interesting he takes uh a parsha or a perec or a subject and he will ask many many questions he might ask 50 questions and then he'll give an explanation that kind of answers all the questions he also summarizes all the meforsham that came before him rajiv ramban ebenezer etc so it's kind of a very good encyclopedia of parshanut the old joke is that a person this is a dangerous method of communicating when you ask too many questions before you give answers they tell the story about a jew who enjoyed learning a barbanal after the challenge shabbos afternoon when you're sleepy so he sat in his easy chair and he started reading 50 questions on the humish and he fell asleep before he read the answers he became an api chorus he says how can i believe in this book so many questions so many contradictions so many inconsistencies so many things don't make sense ah the whole thing got to be false so it's a little dangerous to front load all of your questions before you give answers somebody might leave before they read the the answers okay that's a little bit of autobiography or biographical information i thought you should know a little bit about the ibrahim but in the in the introduction to the book of devoriam he does raise this question how can we say that every word of the torah is from god and at the same time say that the book of javarim are moshe rabbenu's own words and he was not told to say them by god so the ibarbanel makes a distinction that really once you hear it it's so obvious that you even wonder what the question was and he says the following what do we mean when we say every word of the torah is from god now in the torah we have you know we have cayenne saying am i my brother's keeper we have love on telling yaakov i'm going to kill you we have paro saying who is god that i should listen to his voice plenty of bad guys are saying things in the torah did god tell them what to say what do you mean that every word of the torah is from god if the torah has so many words of people quran the marawin so the rabbanel says you have to distinguish between the word as it is spoken and the word as it is recorded in the torah when we say the torah is from god we don't mean every person was told what to say before they said it but here's the point bilaam said many things cayenne said many things moshe said many things god chose from all that was said what should be written down in the torah there's a lot of things that are not written down in the torah some of it is preserved in madrid and some of it is simply not preserved right we don't know what avraham ate for breakfast you know every tuesday morning we just don't know that information so the bible says the fact that the torah is from god means that god told moshe what part of the story to write down and what part of the story not to write down but the words when they were spoken were the words of the actors who were acting on their own volition so so in the rest of the torah when moshe gave us the commandments god told moshe what to say hashem el moshel laymar spoke to moshe lay more these are the words you should use in the book of devarim hashem did not tell moshe what words to use in the last month of his life moshe was given the authority not to create a new commandment for sure not but to express the commandments and the history in his own words so god did not tell him ahead of time what to say but nothing was entered into the torah until hashem dictated what to put down so this is again a very very logical look and that is the notion that the whole torah is from god is referring to the words that were written down they were not written down unless god said to write them down but the speaker speaks on his own but moshe normally was told what to say by god moshe and the rest of them was given the script that's the meaning of hashem el moshe laymore the book of devorim is moshe rabano's own voice but god did not tell him to write down everything that he said god told him to write down only part of what he said again i i can't necessarily give you a reason for that but moshe said many more things besides what was written down because god decided what was needed to be written down what was what was not now of course this gets uh involved with another philosophical question because the torah did predate the creation of the world by thousands of years so but that's because god knows the future so essentially god was already able to inscribe ahead of time what it is that moshe would speak to his own volition and his own choice i think that's a very very important idea because when you learn the gemaran megillah that the book of duvarim are moshe's words you know it's very troublesome initially when you read it because the whole torah is supposed to be from god so the abravanel gives us the key how to analyze this so that's a thought i wanted to share about the general idea of the book of devorim the idea of mishna torah now the only thing is you have to make a certain assumption that cannot be proven it has to be taken on faith and that is when you have mitzvots that are new in the book of devarim mitzvos that were not mentioned before in the torah the example would be a get the example would be ibum and moshe is giving these mitzvoth in his own words you have to assume that god at least told him there's a mitzvah called get go and describe it to people in other words moshe could not have made up the mitzvah that would be totally illegitimate so you have to assume that any new mitzvah in the book of devarim was in fact told to moshe by hashem but hashem did not dictate the words by which moshe would communicate it hashem explained the mitzvah to him and then moshe explained it in his own in his own language that's how you have to understand it okay so now let's be more specific one of the new mitzvoth that appears for the first time in the torah is a mitzvah that we practice even today and that is the mitzvah of benching birkata mazon right there's a passage at the right before shaney the first aliyah in part josekev vesavata and you will be satisfied and when you eat and when you are satisfied uve rakta you must bless god because of the good land that he has given you we're not yet in eritrea but in anticipation of our going into heritage israel this is the mitzvah diorise of birkata mazon now it's important to note that there are two conditions that are stated for the obligation to recite the blessing one is there must be eating and two is there must be satisfaction i don't want to get into all the details of halakha but let me just explain them in a general sense the requirement of eating means you're not high of the right that we're talking about birkat amazon unless you eat at least an olive the volume of an olive of bread right because the word achilla always means a kazayat how big is it because i had many many different opinions but let's say just to keep it simple half a slice of bread would be enough bread to be high enough to bench but there's another condition even if you fulfilled the condition of achilles you're only high up to bench if you ate enough that you feel satisfied and satiated right so it's a big mac locus what do we mean to be satisfied or satiated does that mean from the bread or does it mean from the totality of the meal so if moshe feinstein has a chuva in which he says these are two different conditions in terms of the amount of bread you have to eat that's for your halta that's only a causation let's call it half a slice of bread the requirement that you be full and satisfied does not mean you have to eat so much bread that you're full and satisfied but we include all the other food okay so let's let's take that from let's take that position for a second so according to moshe feinstein if i eat let's say uh even a whole slice of bread or even a whole sandwich but i'm still hungry i'm still hungry da o raisa it has to be kiday sevilla again uh you may ask well listen just because something is rabuna and you still got to do it and that's true but there are some differences between a benching that's the orita and the benching that's strabana for example let's assume i ate a meal and i don't remember if i benched i just don't remember if my kiev was the urita then when you're in doubt whether you fulfilled a torah commandment you got to be strict and bench again if on the other hand i ate a meal and i was not full my kiev of benching is only rabbinic if i don't remember if i did it we have another rule a suffic in a rabbinic obligation we're lenient right so that would be one one difference now other posts can say a little strange that to raita it is not enough that you've been satisfied from the whole meal you had to have eaten enough bread that the bread alone would satiate you now if you think about that that's actually fairly rare i mean if i mean i mean listen if i'm eating a whole meal why would i eat enough bread that would fill me up and not have anything else so according to those post skin it would actually be a fairly uncommon scenario where you would actually be high enough to bench their horizon because you have to have cadet sevilla from the legend and even then i think you have a bit of a philosophical question if the sevilla is from the leche does that mean you're full or does that mean you're satisfied those are two different states a person can eat so much bread that they're stuffed and can't take in any other food but they may not be satisfied with that in other words that's an interesting ambiguity if sevilla refers to fullness or sevilla refers to satisfaction again these are interesting questions they're not so relevant practically because remember rabbinically you got a bench no matter what so it's only a shy love dorisa versus versus drug on it okay but be it as it may if those conditions are met we have a mitzvah the orisa of birkata mazon now a lot of us don't like to do this mitzvah and i i will include myself sometimes uh i remember going to a lavalier years ago of a very wonderful elderly lady you know righteous woman and her grandson was one of the people who gave a head spit so he mentions that one of the things that always irritated his grandmother is when people are offered food and they say i don't want to wash now the reason we all said i don't want to wash is not really i don't want to wash it i don't want to bench and that's a set and she said she didn't understand how can a religious person say i don't want to give thanks to hashem for discuss it what is the philosophy again i'm talking to myself what is the philosophy i don't want a bench why not and there are people actually who have a minute they will not eat any food in the day unless it's part of a meal where they wash and make a mozi and bench because shulchan a jewish table is like an altar to hashem it's like a carbon to hashem and they want it to be done in a very respectful dignified way with all of the mitzvoth that we do for a meal in other words they will not have the idea of a snack in the middle they may eat you know the meals may be big meals but there is a of concept of everything has to be on a shohan with a hamodsi and a berkat birkat amazon and the truth of matter is uh that seems i mean i don't do it but it seems to be the right the right way of of of doing it uh so bercat amazon is a mix with the arisa now let me backtrack for a moment and point out that even though it's a misfit the arisa the precise liturgical text is not indicated in the torah the torah does not give you a text for birkato mozon and in fact uh you could say whatever you want to say on some level someone that asked me i had talked and talked about this somewhere else too what about rub-a-dub dub thanks for the grub uh yay god uh would that be a valid berkat amazon a doris doris of course the answer is it might now the reason i say it might is because the atonement indicates that even though the torah does not give you liturgical text the torah might require that certain elements be incorporated even in your spontaneous formulation such as you might have to mention thanks for the land of israel allah the gemara hazard russia you may have to mention brits mila and you may have to mention the gift of torah which means sometimes the terror does not give you a text and it allows you to improvise and make up your own text yeah but it still requires that certain elements be in the text so if you're going to do the rub-a-dub-dub uh you're gonna you're gonna have to add a few words you know thanks for the grub and for eric israel and for with mila and for torah yay god and then indeed you're fine you're actually fine but you may have to add those elements uh to the statement so in fact the the precise liturgical text that we have for berkat amazon uh the different paragraphs were composed by different people paragraph one hasana sakhal was composed by none other than moshe rabbenu in commemoration of the man that fell from heaven paragraph 2 which is god thanking god for the land of israel although that was part of benching in terms of being up to mention it but the actual composition of the bracha is yahushua bin nun when we entered the land of israel paragraph three rakhem which asks hashem to show mercy for the malchus of bastavid and the building of the basa mikdash was written by david and augmented by muhammad now obviously you have to understand obviously the text of david and was not the text that we have because we our text is asking hashem to rebuild the base on make this that was destroyed obviously that was not the text the text there was a prayer for the upkeep of the beta make dutch but still that basic prayer now for many many years i mentioned this last week that was benching the first bracha is moshe second broker yoshua third broker david and and benching ended then that's why it says omega because that that was the original end of benching and often when we finish a series of brachas we say amen even though we're just doing it ourselves the next rakha of benching is is is rabbinic and that was the last thing that was added and i mentioned uh last week that in the aftermath of the destruction of betar in the year 135 the crushing of the barcode revolt when hadrian did not allow hundreds of thousands of corpses to be buried for three years and the miracle was that the corpses did not decompose and on the 15th of three years and a week after the corbin betar hadrian allowed because at this point he wasn't proving anything if anything it was a source of rebellion against him he finally said barry this dead and that was a simpler for claude israel even though in the midst of a tragedy and uh and that was on the 15th of our that's one if you remember last week that's one of the smarts of the 15th ave the harugae betar nitnulikvura and in honor of that occasion the added the last bracha of birkatamazan that god is good that we were able to that the bodies didn't decompose but made him and god does good shen it knew like that we were able to bury the dead now even then that goes up to al-jiha all of the harahamas our rahman's are added later in fact they're added after the gemara they were added in the time of the gonim and there are some that have the minute not even to say them not even to say the harahamas they end benching with al-yakasreno now here i do want to correct a mistake that i have made in the past and uh it came to my intention now i uh often would say because many people say that it was the minute of the villenegon to end benching with ao yakas reno and not to say the harahamas that is not quite true uh it was the minute of the vilna gown not to say the harachaman zanshabas or yamtif because he felt that those were personal prayers that were not part of the original text of benching and they should not be said on shabbos but behold as far as i know the villenegon did say it however what is true is there are some yeshivas and i believe it's high in berlin i mean i believe that so that actually don't say the harahamas even during the week in reliance on the bill nego and shita because they say since it's an extra part of benching that's not mandatory beetle torah you know we're not gonna again you know i can understand if you're a person maybe who does not waste a single minute so the harakamans is a bitter but i mean you know if you read a novel i mean i mean if you do plenty of other things i don't know if you should single out the harakaman says this is my stance against against beetle against spittle terrorists like i have time for everything else but no i don't have time for that but okay so i do want to correct that uh the vilna dong did not say the rahman's on shabbos but he did say it because many people still quote the vilnigan as if he said he didn't say the harakamans at all okay now if you think about these four brachas the brachavasana the barakah of allah that ends with the words you actually see a very fascinating pattern of increasingly deeper levels of gratitude because there's no question that the essence of birkat amazon is gratitude hakara satof a very fundamental idea in judaism in fact the very word jew yehudi comes from gratitude remember leia called her fourth son yehudah because she said now i am grateful to god for he has given me more than my portion and rashi explains that leia knew with ruacha kodesh there would be 12 tribes and she knew that the 12 tribes would come from four mothers raquel leia billa and zilpah so she figures 12 divided by three each woman gets three children when leia had four now she wound up having six but when she had four she realized she got more than her entitlements that generates gratitude that's rashi brings us this ms extrapolates takes it one step further in a beautiful thought that is why every jew is called a yehudi because we have to go through life with the attitude that god has given me more than i deserve in terms of kindness instead of feeling resentful or shortchanged our attitude should be hashem has given me more than i deserve so you know i remember a year around 20 years 25 years ago the american heritage dictionary included slang usages in the dictionary and one of the slang usages popular in the south was the use of jew as a verb to mean drive a hard business deal or even cheat so you might say don't jew around with me you could say it to a you know one guy i could say it to another guy don't jew around with me because jews were known it's not necessarily even in the accusation of dishonesty but they were known for driving a hard deal that goes all the way back to in the merchant of venice you know pound of flesh you know and and and and the like so people protested and people said you know the adl the anti-defamation league got involved anti-semitic you know the truth of the matter is uh if you have a dictionary of slang you know i'd like to know i'd like to know what is you know i mean you know these are you know what do these words mean i i just as a matter of intellectual interest it's interesting to know slang usages even when they're insulting but be it as it may if jew is going to be made into a verb what it should properly mean is be a grateful person right to jew around would mean linguistically express your gratitude to hashem and even to other people so if benching has any meaning at all it's all about gratitude all about akaretatov so let's look at the different levels of akaretatov as expressed in the progression of the four blessings of birkatamaza blessing number one was written by moshe in honor of the man now man is the most obvious thing to be grateful for it's a supernatural miracle it didn't come from human effort it didn't come from human creativity it's a gift from the heavens so that's an obvious hakareta when god gives you some extraordinary thing that you didn't have anything to do with you're going to be grateful but the second bracha is gratitude for eretz israel now this requires a certain subtle adjustment of being grateful because after all first of all eric israel we did have to fight for and jews died and moreover unlike the midbore where the mun comes from heaven and you have a traveling well of water in eritrea soil we have to plant and we have to harvest and we have to build cities and dig ditches and drain the swamps so the tyre itself testifies that when the jewish people will be successful in their land they may not attribute their success to god they will say in the famous verse kohi pyotsum yadi it was my strength and my ability that gave me all of my success you're not going to say that for the month obviously for the month you had nothing to do with that but for eric israel maybe your gratitude to god may you know if you're an arrogant person your gratitude may not be the god you may attribute your success to your abilities in fact again i don't want to be a prognosticator or a prophet even in retrospect but but some people have thought that that was the relationship between the great great great semi or quasi or actual miraculous victory of 1967 and the you know very disappointing and devastating somewhat of a defeat although british i'm not a total defeat in the yom kippur war like you know and and some say again i mean i i i'm not giving any definitive pronouncements but some say that although the six-day war was the impetus for many many chuva movements in fact a lot of the uh torah or they were founded in the aftermath of the six day war where many people saw the hand of god it was very very true many people really really thought mashiach was going to come there was even a lot of talk about abolishing tisha b again that wouldn't be proper but there were people who were talking about it how can you have a tissue but if we have the kaiser although the kaizo is not the best let me remind you of the obvious but there was another segment of society which kind of said there was a glorification of the power that israel is we got the best army in the world we could lick those 35 nations or whatever it is that are trying to destroy us nobody can beat israel we finally showed the world don't mess with me now again i i want to add that i am personally always very very grateful to the army and we owe them a tremendous tremendous debt of gratitude this is not meant to disparage any real but in certain segments of society there was a certain arrogance that the torah itself calls kokhi fyodzim yadi and therefore hakadishbarco allowed something like the yom kippur war to take place in which we realized that we are vulnerable we are precarious we can make mistakes and we can suffer for them so some want to basically say that that was the corrective so if bracha number one going back to the benching is the obvious sakaratov for the supernatural that you clearly have nothing to do with the second bracha takes gratitude further and says even the things that you seem to have gotten by your efforts by your work by your toil remember your success comes from god without god you would not have that success in other words what you're doing is you're deepening the scope of gratitude to include what comes through your efforts that your efforts also only bear fruit because hashem gave you the talent and hashem gave you the success now the third bracha is taking it even further the third raka talks about khorban galutz and there the idea is that my gratitude to god is even when there's adversity even when they're suffering even when there's deprivation i am grateful to god for giving us life for letting us continue so you're going from the man which is the supernatural to eric israel which is the product in part of your work to even facing adversity and recognizing god's kindness and that gets intensified in the last bracha which is not just corban and galot but a bracha that was enacted in the aftermath of a massacre somewhat equivalent to the holocaust itself in which again it always has struck me as kind of an unusual thing that we are making a whole brack of thanking god that he let us bury the hundreds of thousands of jews that were massacred in beta one might have thought that in lieu of thanking god for the wonderful question perhaps there would be anger perhaps it would be accusations and yet you see that in the deep level of akaretatov we see the light we see the blessing even in the darkest moments even in the darkness of the holocaust in the aftermath of the holocaust and those are tragedies that we don't really fathom i'm not going to sit here and give any explanations there are things and times that we hit a blank wall but still the gratitude that hashem let us let the remnants survive and not only the remnants survive but the remnant to build whether it's building a state of israel whether it's building yeshiva whether it's people who lost everything rebuilding with families and the jewish perspective is to have a karate toef even coming out of the most devastating darkness that one could imagine so in a sense the structure of birkata mazon is a structure that inculcates and directs us and teaches us to be grateful to hashem in all of the conditions that we live under now it's interesting uh many of you know the the great rabbi robbie avigdor miller as a chronological who died a few years ago and uh robbie miller was a wonderful wonderful teacher some things he says are controversial and i don't endorse everything that he says about everything but what i'm gonna mention from him are things that i do believe very much and that is one of the dominant themes of his life which he emphasized in a career that was around 75 years of teaching was the idea of gratitude and he even had different games and how you raise a child he said you know when you raise a child and you walk outside be careful how you talk about the weather because we always make negative statements of weather oh it's raining today oh it's too hot oh it's too cold but there's another way of saying it it's raining hashem is giving the nutrition that will allow the grass to grow and the flowers to grow it's hot this is the photosynthesis right the sunlight hits the plants that produce oxygen that we can breathe and he said that this may sound like a little game and it may sound artificial but you're kind of planting within an impressionable child the idea of being grateful and happy in a beautiful world that hashem created and that turns into attitudes that a person has as an adult right we become you know an adult right we say a child is the father of the adult i think there's such an expression the attitudes that a child absorbs kind of become what they are when we grow up and he would make a lot of points about developing kind of a positive appreciation for things instead of too hot too cold you know you talk about how beautiful the sun is how beautiful the the cool you know winter is you know you could whatever it would be depends if you have snow or that whatever okay that's the idea of so now that i want to share with you a very very interesting makshava of the mesh and the measure points out the following there is a mitzvah dioraisa to bench after you eat assuming you ate bread what about the broncos that you recite before you eat interestingly enough that is not a torah requirement do you realize that the torah does not require blessings before you eat the torah only requires the blessing after you eat rabbinically there is a takana of bracharishona but that's a rabbana now there's another mitzvah in the torah about reciting abraham which is not according to all opinions but this is according to ramban nahmanidis nahmanidi says he counts as the 613th mitzvah in the torah the very last mitzvah in the torah in practice he says there's a mitzvah to recite a blessing before you learn torah torah once again the torah doesn't give you the text we later the text was composed but birka satoru says the ramban is the arisa now you may ask me what passage is that where does the torah say you have to recite a blessing before you learn torah so the ramban locates the mitzvah in a passage that's actually a well-known passage because many of us say it before the amidah of minha and musaf ki shem hashem ekrah havul godel laylo cana what does that mean moshe is speaking to the binay israel when i call upon the name of god you my audience shall ascribe greatness to hashem so the ramban's interpretation it's a bit of a twist is that the torah is considered to be the name of god when i teach you torah you should precede my teaching by blessing hashem for giving you the torah that's how the ramban interprets kishay mashem when i moshe are about to teach you the name of god i.e the torah you shall give greatness to god by making a bracha so birkat satora according to ramban not everybody agrees with this but according to ramban birkat is one of the 613 myths it is the 613th commandment now what's interesting is so we have two blessings and in a way they're complementary we have a duty to bless god for physical sustenance which is food and we have a duty to bless god for spiritual sustenance which is torah does it make sense that these would be the two things that you make a bracha for because both of them are necessary for life you can't live without eating but it's also true you can't live without torah and therefore we make a barakah for those things that keep us alive but here's the problem how come when it comes to food we recite the blessing on a biblical level after we eat not before when it comes to torah we recite the blessing before there is no bracha that we recite after we learn the only broker we recite afterwards is after we have an aliyah to the torah and that's clearly rabbinic because the whole kiev of reading the torah in a minion is rabbinic so here's the question i understand why torah has a bracha and why food has a bracha because both of them are necessary for life so you got to be grateful to god but why is the thanksgiving for food after you eat and the thanksgiving for torah before you learn so the mesh says a very wonderful thing going back to the idea that the essence of bracha is gratitude keep in mind that in a sense there's a double message here on one hand it expresses gratitude on the other hand it also teaches me and reminds me to be grateful in other words a bracha has a pedagogic goal it has an educational goal meaning it's not simply the expression of the gratitude that i feel rather it may work the other way around it may teach me to feel gratitude by going through the ritual of bracha so here's what the mesh says when it comes to food and a person is hungry or thirsty the gratitude is instinctual when i come in out of the house i come in i come into the house i come in from outside where it's 100 degrees or whatever it is and there's a glass of water i may say on my own you know hashem thank god the feeling is instinctual so you don't need a bracha at least originally originally i'll talk about the change in the generations but the torah did not require abraham because when a person is in a state of need and they are given the thing that they need desperately sometimes you're naturally grateful and thankful and therefore there's no need it's like sometimes you know i remember once in someone's house a mother made a really really wonderful meal and the kids ate it up with a lot of enthusiasm and there was something i don't remember even the details it was it was a neighbor but but there was some thing you don't have to say thank you because i can see how much you enjoy it that's my thank you it was one of those things yes mom was defending the kids for that and not saying thank you but that's kind of the psychology here as well but what happens after you eat so interestingly enough although you might assume after you eat you can even be more grateful because now you're full we have the opposite idea once i eat once i'm satisfied this is what the torah literally says as a metaphor by ishmael yeshua israel gets fat by eva and they kick they reject god i don't need god anymore who needs you i'm doing fine so the torah says wait a minute guys before you leave the table think where this came from and be grateful in other words if you understand that a bracha is an exercise to generate within us feelings of gratitude there's less of a necessity before you eat than there is after you eat now apparently what happened was as the generations got spiritually weaker we stopped having gratitude even before we eat so we have to make the beforehand but the torah envisions that the instinctual gratitude took the place of the brah now when it comes to torah we have the opposite problem until i sit down and learn i may not appreciate torah learning that much there are a lot of other things i'd rather do i'd rather stay in bed i'd rather watch tv or listen to the radio i'd rather have another cup of coffee read the newspaper meaning it might be in some cases like forcing myself to learn when i'm doing other things is kind of a drag so you've got to make the before you learn so you'll appreciate the gift of torah the sweetness of torah the beauty of torah blood says the mesh after you learn you don't have to make a bracha after you learn your heart will be filled with joy and enthusiasm the gratitude will be natural it doesn't have to be expressed see with food it works the opposite way when i'm in a state of need i'm so grateful for that food when i'm full like yeah who needs it with torah when i'm not learning i'm not so grateful i say i'd rather you know i'd rather not do this i need a broker after i learn i'm filled with joy now the person might ask a question well that certainly may be describing mayor simcha koen that after the torah his heart is so full of joy and gratitude he doesn't have to say abraham but you know not everybody not all of us are always that way sometimes even after i learn you know i wasn't that interested god you know again it's sad but it happens it didn't interest me right so uh i'm not so grateful but you have to understand that sometimes halacha is pitching itself not to the person i am but to the type of person i should aspire to be in other words is kind of describing the ideal human state and sometimes i'll reach that state and sometimes i won't but it's a model in other words the model is saying that when i walk away after finishing learning i should be so inspired that my heart should be filled with joy sometimes i will have that and that's wonderful sometimes i won't have it but at least i know that i should i should have had it and therefore i will try in my life to become that type of person and that that's another aspect in which halacha actually educates in fact if i could digress for a moment this is part of the idea of mojito too you know this is already a little bit thin ice but i'll say it and that is you know people sometimes say about makitsa she are men you know you know women's complaining about makita but the truth is the people who complain about makita are men because all of these halakhas are based on men being sexual animals a man cannot you know see any woman because he will go crazy and and whatever whatever it would be so if anyone should complain about makita what is makita saying about men it kind of talks about men as being so overly sexual that any little no thing is gonna throw them into a a tizzy but in many many ways there's a very subtle remiss here that the torah is indicating that ideally in our intimate lives there should be a great deal of passion expressing love not lust and therefore the laws are pitched with certain presuppositions not because those presuppositions are going to be accurate but because they actually are describing kind of an ideal even in that context okay again as i say that may be a little a little racist i don't want to get into that too much but certainly with respect to torah going back to the main point of torah that's exactly the idea that torah should be joyous and inspiring and therefore after you learn you don't need to have a concretized legislated bracha your heart is singing with gratitude uh to to so i wish you all a very very good week a very good shabbos and bias hashem i will i guess um i i didn't get to my second topic okay but next week i'll talk about you about the seven-hour taurus of comfort which is uh i could use that for any one of the seven weeks so i have that as a share in reserve uh if when necessary so anyway take care and thank you for coming [Music] is