Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: God Desires to Call You by Your Name

[Music] hi everybody here shalom it's good to have you here and tonight's here is dedicated as it has been for a number of weeks to the refuse leima of binyamin israel benjanita a young man that is going through hard times and we are miss powell for him and uh may it be uh the schools of all the learning of torah that we do should be uh they should have reforged israel and as always we always appreciate all of the support that people give to ibanez a very very worthy cause uh not only are there many shioriman ibana not just me other other rabbis as well rabbi poston and others but it's also a mo side of camila schasset loving kindness and charity and uh it's very very much worthy of of our generous supports uh today we are approaching of course uh pesach uh hopefully that is joy for some people it may be terror you have to clean up your house and get ready for for pesach and you know maybe that's another talk like you know how do you approach pesach cleaning maybe i'll save that for another another time but we're also beginning a new hummash right last week we finished the mouse and now we are beginning the third of the five hum shaytorah khumisvayikra and it deals largely at least in the beginning there are other things in the vicar as well it deals largely with all of the many many details of corbanos so for some people uh god forbid this almost becomes boring they're really not that interested in all of the details although for halaq scholars it is infinitely fascinating because the laws of kachin are very very intricate and in fact great yeshivas like brisk devote all of their time almost to learning the ins and outs of the sacrificial order i think i had mentioned before just as an aside that you know the khafitzhaim actually wrote many many swarm on satyr kachin we don't always realize this we know the khafiz khayyam is the author of books about against lashanhara and of course the great mishna brewer which are the laws of prayer and shabbos and yemen tobin always practical works but khabib schein wrote many many works on corbanos and one of his great works is the called the kute hellos in which he actually did the equivalent of what the riff did to seder moe nacho naziken the khabib khayim did for kachin what did the rift do revisit in the 10th century looked at all of the babylonian discussions in the gemara and extracted from them kind of the final halachic decisions without going through all of the questions and answers it's essentially a kitzer it is essentially a summary and an abridgement of the babylonian talmud but the riff only did it for the tractates that were practical things that were relevant even today so the rift did not do anything on the track dates of kochim zivachim minajos and the like the khafizem did the rift finish the rift's job on all of the massacres of kachin and not only did he do that but he also wrote the equivalent of a rashi commentary uh which is a basic basic understanding and a toast source commentary to be mafal bell and the like and somebody asked islam why are you spending all your time on kojima as if the spent all this time on ketchup he didn't but why are you spending your time on ketchum it's not relevant it's not no gail la maisa and the time gave two answers uh one answer is that precisely because we're not able to do it we need to learn about it because that's the only way our neshama gets the light of those mitzvahs so it's the opposite of what you might think you might think it's not important to learn things that are not practical or relevant it's the opposite that's the only way my system gets the light of those mitzvahs badafka but the second answer he gave i think is something that we really should be thinking about very much as we approach pesach and that is the khabib zhaim says what does it mean you think it's not practical or relevant when mashiach comes it'll certainly be practical and relevant we're going to have a base of mid-dash so you don't believe that mashiach can come you don't believe possibly coming every day except for you know shabbos and arab shabbos and the like and the time says a person who makes the argument that kachim is not relevant is essentially denying the possibility of the imminent coming of mashiach and i think this is something that is very heavily on all of our minds you know the terror makes a very big point that pesach has to be during the spring and this is responsible for a major feature of the jewish calendar the jewish calendar is fundamentally a lunar calendar like the definition of a year are 12 revolutions of the moon around the earth but a lunar calendar is i'm going to go with approximate numbers is only 354 days a solar year is again approximately we don't need to be more exact than that is 365 and a quarter days which means there's at least more than an 11-day difference between a lunar year and a solar year now seasons are of course based on the solar year so that would mean that naturally the jewish calendar would make pesach earlier and earlier in the year vis-a-vis the season so let's say in year one if pesach is april 15 in year two it'll be april four in year three it'll be in late march in year four it'll be in middle march in year five it'll be uh in early march and then it's going to get into february or january and you're going to have pesach in the middle of the winter and the torah says pesach has to be in the spring so the jewish calendar incorporates every few years and extra whenever pesach is getting a little too early we have an extra month of adar to push pesach a month later in fact uh next year will be a leap year which will also be a shemitah year and the jewish calendar is set up that 7 out of 19 years we have an extra month of utter shaney so it staggers between every second year i'm sorry every third year or every fourth year meaning sometimes it's one two and the third year is an empire a leap year and sometimes it's one two three and the fourth year is in hebrew right that's how how it works now let's think about this why is it so important for pesach to be in the spring i mean jewish events commemorates uh the dates that they occurred on we left mitzrayim on the 15th of nisan so whenever the 15th of nisan is is when we celebrate pesach who cares if it's spring winter fall summer la main afghanistan what's the difference all we care about is the date like when people say rosh hashanah is early this year oh it's early i mean it's not on the first of fishery it's sometime inevitable rashad is never early it's the first of tishrei pesach is not early it's the 15th of nisan so why is there this big deal that we got to make it during the spring and there's a very powerful reason for that because the morale writes that the seasons as they change on earth are physical manifestations of divine energies meaning the earth itself responds to the divine spiritual energy that permeates the universe now we know that spring is a time of liberation it's a time of redemption the earth is freed from its infertility from its dormancy new things can grow the shackles of imprisonment metaphorically are lifted but why is that so that is precisely because hakadosh barclay put the potentialities of gaula and redemption in the air and the earth is responding to it now if we understand pesach not just as commemoration but a theme that we've talked about a lot i don't want to elaborate on it tonight but it's not just remembering that god took us out of slavery but it's a kawak a power that hashem put into the bria that we can become liberated from whatever it is that enslaves us then if i don't make it during the spring i'm not tapping into that energy i'm commemorating an event that happened on the 15th of nisan but the kawak of kherus the kawak of gaula is not there so we have to match it up with the spiritual powers that hashem is putting in the universe uh now you may ask hitachi on me that in the southern hemisphere south africa australia new zealand pacer is not during the spring but that's not a tasha really because the spiritual energies come into the world through eric israel so when it's a liberation time here it'll the spiritual influence is going to go to south africa and australia as well even though the earth is lagging a little bit in its response to that spiritual energy so this is a time of great potential a time of growth a time of liberation a time of redemption both in terms of the earth itself and in terms of our individual predicament and in terms of amusement and in many many ways this whole year really starting last forum a year ago has been a year of dormancy kind of a year of long winter a year in which people have been isolated and there have been health issues unfortunately there are many many people who died people who were sick and even people who broke hashem were not sick and they managed to be healthy for the entire year but the devastation of businesses the loneliness the inability of families to connect and all of us in one way or the other have been in a sense of imprisonment there are good reasons for that we can grow from our imprisonment just as the jews grew from the enslavement in egypt again this touches on so many sure i've talked about already i i don't want to repeat everything but nevertheless it is an obtuse it is a servitude now when spring comes spring doesn't come in one fell swoop you don't all of a sudden walk out one day and everything is growing it starts with a little plant coming out of the crack it comes chemokima it comes gradually and i think that in many many ways this is exactly what's going on we're not out of the woods yet but things are coming gradually things are gradually coming back we're experiencing spring we're experiencing of it we're experiencing a spiritual spring in our own lives and it's kind of neat if i can say that it does match up with pesach which is that time of liberation that time of redemption we can actually feel it in our lives uh just as for much of much of the year and even even now you're wearing a mask that covers yourself up but now the masks are beginning at least to come down a little bit and not not for everybody but okay but uh that's what i think we should think about that that we are approaching now of course the ultimate springtime will be the ghoulish flame of mashiach and you know when corona started and we start we first started having our lockdown so everybody was uh well number one nobody thought it would last so long that's one thing but spiritually many people thought it was the harbinger of mashiach because fascinatingly they bring stuff from a forsham this is actually an amazing amazing reference that before mashiach comes there's supposed to be this cataclysmic war that's called the war of gogan magog and the posture says it's a war they say from the villenegon that the war of gogan mugga will be a war that will last for 12 minutes now when the villenegon said that 250 years ago nobody knew what he meant what type of war could last for 12 minutes unfortunately we know what type of war could last for 12 minutes that could be a nuclear war so was the was the villenegon prophesying that goku mugo would be a nuclear war i hope not but that is certainly a possible interpretation of his words but there's other sources that say that goku mugo might be a disease might be an epidemic might be a pandemic it doesn't have to be a human enemy the enemy can be the virus so people uh were very very excited in a sense when these references came up people always managed to find these amazing references and people thought oh mashiach was going to come but now a year in fact somebody even asked me this morning maybe we shouldn't be so happy that the pandemic is uh getting better so to speak because and mashiach hasn't come you know kind of yeah but i i think the short answer is that this does not negate the possibility of goku magog because uh the gula doesn't mean mashiach comes right after goku muggle goku mugger is a step and then there's a goola there may be a hiatus to give us a chance to do chuva and the like so uh to the degree that you were optimistic that the pandemic was the milkhames goku magog you have permission to continue uh to be optimistic and and hopeful uh and the fact that we haven't yet been zechar to the gola just means once again that uh there are going to be sometimes delays in the in the process so corbanos are important for the two reasons that the articulated number one we need the light of every part of the torah and if we're not able to do it we've got to learn it because that's the only way we get the light and number two it is telling a kurdish paratha we believe in mashiach we believe in gaola we believe there will be a base on mikke and that's why we're learning all these details so that's the the first point i i wanted to bring out the second point is is the well-known discussion in the rishanam as to why does hashem want korbanos does hashem have a fondness for barbecued meats it's a pleasant fragrance it's a nice aroma like you walk by the mangala on yo matsumut and you know you smell uh all the goods the hot dogs and the hamburgers you know uh i like the smell but you know hashem likes the smell i mean hashem surely has more important uh things to uh to do so what is this onion of carbonus a very strange thing so it's i'm sure over the years the most of you have have learned these different opinions that there is a big mach locus between rambam maimonides and ramban nakhmanides and the rambam's position is stated in the morin of the guide to the perplexed part three of the guide to the perplexed where the rambam basically says that hashem does not intrinsically desire carbanos kerbanos are of no utility to akadeshwar but the jewish people were very much connected to paganism and idolatry and part of the attraction was ritual fanfare different sacrifices pageantry the kohanim being dressed up in not the ghana but the priests of idolatry being dressed up in fancy uniforms and as we know in the pagan ritual sacrifice included not just animal sacrifice but it also included human sacrifice now when god gives the torah he wants to wean us away from idolatry towards monotheism and in pure monotheism the icker is prayer meditation charity torah not all of this sacrificial stuff but if god would have said go cold turkey we wouldn't have been able to do it because we loved the ritual so much so gave us a ritual so we could find within torah a way to do this thing and therefore we would be less attracted to our bodhisattva in other words it was a concession to the idolatrous impulse in man in the jew to wean them away from idolatry now there are many many many questions on the rambam's position among these questions are we haven't had a base of mikdash for almost 2000 years we don't bring korbanos anymore we most of us don't feel the need to bring corbanas so why on earth according to the rambam would we pray that hashem should bring back the qurbanist what is the muslim prayer the muslim prayer is we brought these carbanos please hashem let us bring them back according to the rambam it's the opposite we've graduated we've progressed we've moved from corbanos to prayer which is higher why should we take a step backwards to adopt middles of a bodhisattva and please rest assured that the rambam darwin the same music that we darwin i mean subject to nusrah you know whatever whatever whatever it would be and of course in the mishnah together the rambam lovingly in fact the rambam is the main postsecond in the laws of kurdistan gives you every single technical detail about the laws of of korbunos and to top it off the rambam says explicitly in that when mashiach comes we will bring all of the corbanos described in the torah again it's not our subject you know many of you know a famous quote from ref cook that says leo cidlovo the carbanos of the besamic this will be vegetarian offerings they will not be animal offerings uh even that is akasha so does god need roasted tomatoes i mean that doesn't answer that doesn't answer the question fully either but i just want to point out that rav cook's very statement is contradicted at least by the rambam who says that there will be animal animal corbanos when mashiach comes and you see this in the book of vikasko as well the book of yahushua describes the ultimate redemption and that's full of animal kurbanes now it happens to be that's another question that the carbanos in the book of euskil don't match up with the carbanos in the torah and that is a real real difficult question but they are animal offerings so this is a real question on the rambam's position if carbanos are simply a concession to our idolatrous impulse then why do we want it back why are we asking for it back why does hashem want it back we've graduated we were on a higher level so some have suggested again i'm just putting this out i i you know again now that everything's on youtube i'm always afraid because if there's anybody in the world that is upset you know i hear from them uh but that was the you know that was the advantage of a private shirt shiite and the like uh but but the thing is that some do have a belief that the reasons the rambam gives in the maury nevujn were not intended by the rambam to be the true reasons for mitzvahs because remember the mourinho got to the perplexed right who are they perplexed they're perplexed were people who were very conversant with greek philosophy particularly aristotelian philosophy and irish title created a certain structure of logic and reason and they saw things in judaism or in the torah that didn't fit the model of rationality and therefore they were perplexed how do i understand the torah if it does not fit the rationalism of aristotelian philosophy so the rambam does many things in mourinho but one of the things he does is he tries to give explanations for commandments that are consistent with rationality so the concession to idolatry is a rational reason yeah you don't need pro bonos they don't make sense but you know god gave a concession to human weakness but the rambam himself is modem that the has infinite levels and some of those levels are mystical and some of those levels are super irrational and corbanus would be an example so the fact that the rambam in the morin of gives what you might call a rationalistic historical reason doesn't mean that the rambam ever held that that was the complete reason and therefore it's as if there are two rambams i mean one person almost like a split personality in the mourinho he is a rationalist aristotelian philosopher and he tries to explain the torah in accordance with the tenets of aristotelian rationalism in the mishnah torah he is a moon up shooter a complete faith in god and understanding that mitzvahs are multi-level and i i think logically that that is the only uh answer you can really give because otherwise uh we're we're really stuck number one there are a lot of conscious why do we pray for mach for corbanos why will there be carbanos and you can also ask historical touches and that is the avos brought corbanos right abram music and jacob brought carbanas other mauritian breadcrubanos like why were they doing that the ovo certainly didn't have a voter zara that they were attracted to right so if you you have akasha on the rambam both in terms of the future and in terms of the past so the alternative shot which again i just suggested the rambam would admit to is that which is offered by ramban nakhmanidis or the generation right after the rambam in which the ramban brings the rambam and criticizes the rambam but the ramban uh says that corbanos are not intrinsically desirable by god but corbanos represent a symbolic transformation of the worshipper that i bring a carbon and i put my hands on the carbon as if the korban becomes me and the carbon is shected and it's burnt on the altar and every time i think to myself there but for the grace of god goes me and that's my oh rare me to shiva that is my oh rare it awakens me to gratitude and that is what is the pleasant smell so to speak to hashem it's not the physical smell of the meat but it's the transformation of the worshipper and that is why the naviem always knock corbanos if this is a thing this is a famous argument you know the reform movement likes to differentiate between what they call the priestly religion of judaism and the prophetic religion of judaism the priestly religion of judaism as they would define it is all of this ritual the carbanos and it includes shabbos and tashas and phil and you know the ritual stuff but when you look at the prophets isaiah yeshua year meow yes they're always talking about social justice they're talking about take care of the poor protect the widow and the orphan and they even knock korbanos hashem doesn't want your carbonation says i don't want your corbanos they are disgusting to me so the reform movement likes to make the claim that the only thing that's really important is the interpersonal social justice mitzvoth not the ritual god says i don't want your ritual and they make a dichotomy so reform likes to say we are the prophetic voice of judaism that's a claim that is made because we emphasize social justice ticonola all of that stuff which actually except when it turns into pure liberal politics you know that actually is a worthy objective take care of the poor i mean that is what the torah says uh we are supposed to protect those who are helpless and powerless in society that's you know by and large that is a good thing i don't want to take that away from them but they say that hashem doesn't care about the other part now that is obviously untrue because first of all it's not ms that the naveem only talk about social issues they talk about shabbos they talk about tashiris they talk about the mitzvots that are ritualistic as well but here is another point i want to point out why do they always choose carbon when they attack that hashem says i don't want the mitzvos of a person who is dishonest in business and who cheats and oppresses the widow and the orphan they don't say i don't want your shabbos i don't want your kashmiris they always say i don't want your karbanas carbanos is the thing they always attack so this is very important because according to the ramban the whole reason a corban is desirable to hashem is only because it transforms you and makes you a better person if you bring a carbon and it doesn't change the way you live your life that carbon is worthless now that's not necessarily true for other mitzvahs if i'm dishonest in business but i keep shabbos so it's a great sin to be dishonest in business but i still kept shabbos right hashem is not going to say i don't want your shabbos you're dishonest in business no dishonest in business is a sin and shabbos is a mitzvah but with a corbin you see you can't sever it that way a carbon is about transformation if it doesn't transform you it's an empty worthless act and not only is it an empty worthless act it is a sinful act for the following reason in paganism how did we view a sacrifice like why did the greeks bring sacrifices to zeus or whatever the romans brought it to jupiter it wasn't because you're supposed to be a better person obviously the whole religion of greek and greece and rome was not based on character development i'm not saying there weren't nice people there you know there probably were but it wasn't because of their religion it was their instinct or whatever it is in fact if you read greek mythology you see that the greek gods were hardly paragons of virtue i mean they were basically very degenerate entities who happen to have superpowers it's kind of like uh i don't know what they call it i remember the old superman comics they had this super heroes not superheroes super villains whatever it is whatever it was they were like super villains there were no uh so what was the purpose of a corbin the purpose of a corbin was like mafia protection money you paid off the god so they either would leave you alone or they would help you against your enemies now if i bring a carbon to hashem but it doesn't change me what do i think i'm doing i'm paying god a bride that is not just worthless that is downright offensive you're saying that god is no better than the godfather who can be bought off with whatever it is homage and with sacrifices and the light and that's why the naviem always knocked corbanos and that's why the pasiken mishla indeed says quite often the sacrifice of a russia is not only worthless it is an abomination to god that's not true for the shabbos of russia the shabbos of russia is still a shabbos even though he's a russia that's pretty bad still a shabbos but the corbett of a russia is an abomination that very much fits the ramban's idea of character transformation i become changed now if this sounds uh very abstract and maybe it's hard for 21st century man to connect to the ramban's paradigm of animal sacrifice let me mention that in the magazine psychology today i'm not sure if there's still printing it because this all goes all the way back to the 1980s there was an article about a group of people that still practice animal sacrifice these are from the caribbean they've come to america they still do animal sacrifice sometimes it's not legal whatever whatever whatever it would be and the head of the one of the local branches of the cult in chicago happened to be a mild-mannered jewish accountant so somehow during the week he was a cpa who did accounting kind of the blandest you know profession you can imagine but sunday saturday and sunday he became the high priest of this caribbean cult and he would kill animals and sacrifice them on altars now on one hand this is tremendously sad because essentially he was doing a protozoa i mean that's nothing good in that but it's interesting he was interviewed like how can you as a modern he was 20th century person how could you get into carbona's sacrifices and he described again he was he was not religious and he had no jewish education but he described the ritual of sacrifice very closely to what the ramban said i feel united to the life force of the animal i merge my identity into the animal and as the animal joins kind of the universe of infinite life which is god i feel i'm part of that and there but for the grace of god i would be as well but god has given me an individual identity any life or god or god's whatever whatever god he was talking about i'm not sure and therefore my life has to count and my life has to matter because i've been spared and being given an individual personality so apparently you know it's a ritual that we're so far from that we don't understand its power anymore and abstractly we don't really know what it is that we're missing but those who still practice it actually talk in terms of the ancients power that it once had and that the ezra sachem is once go is once again going to have remote alimoto something to to think about so that was the the second point just about a general discussion of the corbanos why we learned them and what they mean and what they what they symbolize and now i want to talk about a third point and the third point is not about corbanos per se but it's about the very first word of the third hamish and the very first word in that first passage is a little unusual the phrase hashem almost you lamer god speaks to moshe saying that appears gazelle you know thousands of times in the torah but vayikra begins with a a phrase that normally does not appear el moshe hashem calls to moshe by adaber hashem a love and then hashem speaks to him may o elmo from the mishkan then we have various laws of karbala so the regime will point out if all we're talking about is hashem speaking to moshe why don't we just say viadabar hashem and moshe layman all the laws of carbanos why do we have this new beginning of yikra el moshe what is the significance of vayikra ill motion so there is a mahloka sri shainam what is the significance of vayikra el mosha there is rashi's opinion and then there is the opinion of ramban let's go over both opinions rashi says that this is called a binyan of meaning every single time that god spoke to moshe there always was the calling of a name first meaning before hashem started talking to moshe he would call moshe's name moshe are you here and moshe would say hiney although that's not recorded and then he would do it and even though he does not say by yak rail motion so the torah doesn't have to repeat the torah says it here and we assume it happens everywhere so according to rashi vayikra al-mosha is not an anomaly it's not unusual it's not a one-time thing it is something hashem did every time of course the only question on rashi i think it's a strong question is so if the terror is telling you telling you once then why doesn't it tell you that the first time meaning why does the torah use something that's kind of in the middle of things to teach me this idea now khazal say and because i'll actually go or seem to be supporting rashid that this is a matter number one of derek eritz that you don't start talking to a person until you call their name so they know you're talking to them and the casita nice little twist they say moshe was so humble that if he would simply hear god talking but how god didn't say i'm talking to you he would think hashem must be talking to somebody else who am i for hashem to talk to so mama hashem had to say moshe i'm talking to you and you have to acknowledge it that was the kriya shem right so according to rashi nothing unusual kriyas shem ramban learns very differently and the ramban says in order to understand the beginning of ayiiikra you have to remember the end of shmos right sometimes we forget right the mishkan is finally constructed right it was constructed on the first of nisan rosh nissan is the day uh that the michigan was first completed uh it was not dedicated till the eighth of nisan you had seven days of preliminaries but as soon as the michigan is constructed the torah says the cloud of glory covered the mishkan not not hovering above the michigan it covered the mishkan and the glory of hashem as a fire was in the mishkan the cloud and the glory and the kawaii hashem was like a fire that made the cloud also shine and the torah says lo yahoo i said lo yahoo moshe lavon moshe could not enter the mishkan because the divine presence was in the mishka even moshe couldn't enter so vayikra el mosha says the ramban was god giving permission to moshe because remember hashem gave moshe mitzvos from the arana kodesh in the kodi shakhtarjun does that mean moshe actually went into the kodashikzashima it's not so clear but he went either right outside the kardashian or even inside the garage in tajim and hashem spoke to him from between the two kuruvin the two cherubs that's the voice of god came there but moshe needed permission to enter the makkah the puzzle says at the end of pakude end of shemos so by yikra el maisha is hashem giving permission to moshe rabbenu to enter the makhaim you find the parallel the ramban says the harshinai itself the cloud of hashem covered our senate and god called their losses god called to moshe that he can enter the ramban says it's a perfect parallel moshe needed rashus to enter the mocking of he needed rashas to enter harsina and he needed resistance to the michigan but the ramban's point was once he got the permission it was a standing permission so the rest of the time moshe just went in and hashem spoke to him he didn't need a vayikra el maisha so you see the maklocus here according to rashi kriya shem was something that happened every single time according to ramban this was the nithilas rashus the getting of permission to enter into the makaim of sashrina and once that permission was granted moshe has standing permission to enter bacalhas right moshe could talk to hashem anytime he could just enter that that market so this is a technical much locus and one one would assume it doesn't really have that many ramifications beyond the textual issue that it's exploring but in fact i think if you think about it a little more metaphorically i think there's some very very deep lessons here we know that the michigan is a model of how we try to bring hashem into our heart and our soul right the the the great passage that started the whole process of the mishkan is vyasuli mikdash make for me a mikdash make for me a sanctuary a temple the shahanti bisaycham so i will dwell in their heart and soul meaning it's not the building it's their heart and soul and there's a beautiful which i mean the words were actually taken from the safer haredem bilvavi mishkonevna in my heart i will build a dwelling place for akadeshwar and a very popular series of swarm by uh ravi summer schwartz they're called the govabi series a website too uh bavaria mishkan even in which he talks about how to have a relationship with hashem again these are actually very highly recommended for people that are interested in that and of course everybody should be interested in that and uh and the light so everything about the michigan somehow has to come back around to building a mission of the heart and maybe the makhlokas rashi and ramban kind of indicating two different pathways in building or having maintaining the mission of the heart and not in the sense that these are alternatives but in the sense they they represent two dimensions that you need both for let me start with ramban first ramban says nutila what is the implication of the resource you want to enter into god's home you want to enter into a relationship with god you got to have permission now another way of saying that is you have to enter on god's terms not your terms now think about what that means you know among many many people jews and non-jews there's a great desire for spirituality that in some ways with all the decadence of modern society there's actually a bit of a spiritual renaissance as well called new age spirituality the kabbalah center right madonna learns kabbalah although all these different you know now i want something that feels good that connects me to god but in all of this new age spirituality people are kind of defining spirituality and religion by what makes me feel good and the sense of having to follow god's laws and to subjugate yourself to the commands of a higher authority people don't have patience for that they don't want to do that you know it's interesting that um there was a book harvey cox i don't think he's alive but he was a professor of religion at harvard university and he wrote a number of books on religions in america so uh he wrote that americans were very religious but many of them didn't want to identify with the denomination they believed in god but they didn't want to follow any particular religion so in one of his books he interviews a nurse whose name was sheila and sheila says i believe in god but i don't believe in organized religion so i have my own religion that i call sheilaism and sheila is my religion that's my relationship with god so a rabbi was once discussing this and he said that it's lucky her name wasn't judy because then her religion would be called judea-ism now in truth uh many many jews have a judaism religion people say i'm jewish and this is what i believe so that's judaism sometimes you hear it and it's interesting i mean okay i don't want to get too political um sometimes when khareda may you know do something that may be not so great so they they sometimes get muslim from these secular politicians and the secular politicians like like you know who know nothing about shabbos or katrius or anything they say this is not the judaism that i know well what judaism do you know i mean they say this is not judaism yeah okay and again they actually might be right i'm not even saying they're wrong but they they take the prophetic voice and kind of you know give uh give musser and and and and the like and the truth of the matter is uh that the timat rashut means if you want to have a relationship with hashem you got to follow hashem's rules hashem tells you what to do hashem tells you how to do it this is what we call and if you think you can have a relationship with hashem without following his rules you're just mistaken because you are entering the without the rishus of mitzvos are what give us permission so to speak to engage with god now obviously i'm not talking about the well-intentioned person who simply doesn't know about mitzvos of course god looks at such a person in a very different way a person that is sincere a person that wants to do hashem's will but doesn't know hashem's will of course that person is well regarded by akadeshwara but i'm talking about the person who knows what halacha is and says nah that's not for me i will have my own relationship with god so what the ramban is highlighting in his interpretation of vayikra is the concept of submission to higher authority to be mavato yourself to understand that i don't just do what makes me feel good new age spirituality but a true relationship to hashem has to be predicated on what is called kabbalah accepting the yoke of heaven that is the perspective that i think the ramban is emphasizing in the notion of national schutz to the machine of the shrine but rashi i think might be emphasizing another idea kriya shem right hashem did not speak to moshe until he called him by name what is a name a name is something that expresses my individuality that separates me from a group i'm not just part of a group i'm a unique discreet individual now it's true many people may have the same name there may be many motives in the group but still there's moshe one motion two there's you know moshe yitzchak and moshar and whatever whatever it would be a name certainly separates me out from the anonymity of the group and what raji is highlighting is on one hand spiritual life is about submission it's about to be mavato yourself to negate your ego and your individuality to submit to the common obligations of what it means to be a servant of hashem but there's also a danger to that because in destroying your individuality [Music] you're denying the uniqueness of the person that hashem intended you to be so rashi is highlighting that side by side with the ramban's emphasis on nullification to the will of god rashi is emphasizing the need to preserve your uniqueness you're not just a member of the jewish people whose obligations are the same as everybody else in the jewish people you are an avraham yaakov a mayor an esther a devorah god wants you not just as an anonymous conglomerate within the community hashem wants you because of you you matter you as an individual and again this is this is themes that we've talked about a lot with the half shekel i i don't want to repeat every every every association but it's so interesting that the technical mach locus of rashi and the ramban is actually a synthesis of the two modalities we have to maintain in advaith hashem one is to nullify ourselves in obedience to god and the other is to develop the uniqueness of our talents and abilities so we stand before hashem not only as an anonymous member of the community but we stand before hashem in all the brightness and light of our personalities and when we come to pesach it's very very interesting that the holiday of pesach encapsulates both of these elements uh let me start the obvious element ashi rashi is the most obvious one because if pesach is about freedom liberation the highest freedom right in the most simple sense is the ability to express who you are and what you are so when i think of the liberation of pesach i think of the idea of being opened up of being liberated of being freed of being able to express my true essence and yet we find side by side with that the freedom of pesach is intimately connected to the submission of kabbalah satoru we know that we link the freedom of pesach with the submission of kabbalah satire through the mitzvah of counting the omer in the middle of peta from the second day of pesach we start connecting to shivohas why because freedom is not worthwhile unless it is also linked to submission to hashem's will that's why qazal tell us that the carbon that was brought on pesach was a barley offering the omer and barley is essentially animal food at least before the invention of cholins and on shavuos the carbon that was brought was wheat the stem which is human food because a pesach without a chivas is animal liberation only when we bring in torah submission do we achieve a human dignity and think about this because the person who is undisciplined who has not subjugated himself to something higher may think he's totally free but that is the freedom of the animal because i'm ruled i'm not totally free i'm ruled by my passions i'm ruled by my moods i'm ruled by whatever feeling i have today i want to punch you in the nose i'll punch you in the nose and i want to be kind but even then it's just like you know another emotion is making me act a certain way happens to be a good one so without without submission to hashem you're not free you're just a slave to whatever mood whatever fad happens to grab you i've mentioned many times again i'll repeat it because it's so relevant the the famous quote from tagori great indian poet in which the human soul is like a violin string if it's totally loose on the table you can't get any music out of it only when it's tied down does it express the music that is within we think that the ramban's paradigm of the tilatrashas that i'm kind of redefining as submission accepting the yoke we think that destroys our individuality we think that destroys our creativity in fact sometimes even religious you say that they say i know i'm giving up so much but okay i obey hashem well that's good you know that that is good that is a myra but that's an erroneous judgment the torah is not ultimately about suppression it's not ultimately about this is destroying everything that i love in life but i'll do it for god again i mean that that that is in madriga but that's not the goal there the torah is about ultimately opening up the potentialities that you have you become the violin string that's tied on the bow and then being tied down you can express the music that is within you so the two jerusalem of rashfi and the ramban are not opposites they are complementary they are they are aspects of our personality that we have to combine and that's very hard you know there are people who are naturally free spirits non-conformists they're always they're very creative and the like but they're not willing to submit to the discipline of accepting god's law and then there are people who maybe are very mechanical and rigid who follow everything to the book but they don't like anything to do with individuality or creativity a jew in the highest sense has to try to incorporate both ideas the rigidity and consistency of exact hallucic observance but also cultivating the emotion and the creative side in which they serve hashem by the development of their personality in all of its richness in all of its diversity in all of the different ways now of course i know that a person that is a hoser batuva has to give some things up in life uh you know if you were a dancer in a strip club man or woman you know okay you may have to give it up so the notion that you can do anything but far too often i see in the balco world that there is a pressure and sometimes it's internal pressure it's not necessarily from the outside sometimes it is from the outside there is somebody was a musician somebody was a poet somebody was an artist these are somehow treif they're somehow they're not really part of the yeshiva world or the kharadi world and you have to give it up because you have to spend all of your time learning etc and i think that's largely a mistake because if something is a very intimate expression of who you are it's ultimately coming from the special unique nishama that hashem gave you and for you to simply say i'm going to ignore it we'd be like amputating your arm now amputation is a very good analogy because sometimes you do have to amputate right sometimes something is gangrenous poisonous you gotta amputate but that's vada a very last resort that's not a first resort and therefore one has to see how they can integrate the different facets of their personality in avoiding hashem now you know there's a well-known ashkenazic minogue that after we eat the the seder after we eat the matzah and the morar and the korech so uh before we eat the regular meal the the chicken soup with the kafil to fish we need a hard-boiled egg it's not it's not it's not a din i mean some i know that sometimes in in less religious homes they take the egg extremely seriously i've been at sturm where like the egg was like much more important than the matzah whatever whatever it would be now get rid of the mata bring out the egg you know the egg is a minute but it is a minute it is a minute and it has a a mocker for it and one of the reasons that's given is that the first night of pesach is always the same night the first day of pesach is always the same day as tish above same day of the week and since uh we don't have the carbon pesach and we think about the bay samitas and we think about tisha so we eat an egg because the egg is the food that you give a mourner when they come back from a cemetery why because an egg is a food of comfort because it's oval and it reminds a person that even when times are bad and times are tough it turns around that's why you give a novel a hard-boiled egg when they come back from the cemetery so in a sense the egg is a nichrome available it is a comfort to all of us in mourning now in judaism there are never any accidents so why would it be that pesach and tish above have the same day day of the week so here is my little kiddish i did not see it anywhere that is the first day of pesach is the only day of pesach that is not connected to shavuots because you don't start counting the omer until the second day so the first day of pesach the first night of pesach is freedom that is not yet linked to torah and the reminder is when freedom is not linked to torah you'll get a tisha b it's going to be destructive so in a sense the hard-boiled egg is the substitute for not counting the omer we'll discuss in another share why don't i start counting the omer from day one that would have been the logical thing like well we'll discuss that for another shear they'll be shiny mastacasha but i'm just assuming the reality right now but assuming the fact that we don't count the omer so it's pure freedom pure freedom that's not going to get you anywhere that's going to lead to destruction gullus suffering and that is the idea of the hard-boiled egg that we eat the first the first seder so anyway i wish you all uh very well i guess mr shem will have one more shear before pesach next week and stay healthy and be welcomed [Music] foreign