Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Jerusalem and the Pursuit of Peace and Truth! Which Wins?

[Music] okay good evening everyone good to see you and again some people who haven't been here for a while are coming back so hashem that's a very good sign and we have a number of people that are sponsoring this year for a reforeshalema uh first hayes shifra bhatt galila yohabad then galileo about devorah both of them should have very foolish lama and then the young man that we have been dominating for for quite a while unfortunately has a bit of a setback and a name was added and his name was binyamin israel now is the additional name ben khanita and again we hope and we pray that the setback should be temporary and in the merit of our learning he and all of the holy israel should have refused this has been a difficult somewhat of a difficult time for quali israel in the aftermath of the mayron tragedy that is still fairly fresh in our minds uh on yom yushalayim itself uh we had burkhashem it was not a missile attack on you shalom itself but you know nearby and things are going on in the gaza that god forbid could have difficult repercussions we hope and we pray that will not be the case uh but it's interesting how there are different perceptions i i'm on a rabbinical list surf from rabbis in the states and they were talking about the fact that the whole population of israel and your jewish lime in particular are towering under bomb shelters uh and you know i think i don't think that's an accurate description and hashem it's not an accurate description and amazingly life goes on very very normally which is the way the way that it should be but it is a time that that we need from academic and we hope and we pray that uh really nobody should get hurt and i i even include the palestinians i don't want anybody to get hurt that hashem should make shalom and only good things should happen to it for everybody and but particularly of course for ami israel and eric israel and yerushalayim before i begin the main topic of the show which will be about shivuas obviously i do want to go a little backwards yesterday was the 28th of er and uh that was yom yushalyam the day that at least for the older folk remember in the aftermath of the at the end towards the end of the six day war when we regained our control over the old city and the temple mount and the coastal mairavi and that was such a great great simcha coming at the end of really a miraculous military victory in fact uh those of you who remember the whole genesis of the baltimore movement in eric israel particularly a chatora or samaya all of the institutions that were catering to bringing young jews back to judaism had their genesis in the aftermath of the six day war in which there was a tremendous spiritual revival where people understood that only god could give a victory of that type of magnitude unfortunately some of that was short-lived because the arrogance of the human condition of kohi vyotsumyadi in which we attribute our success to our military prowess unfortunately permeated our society as well and then we had the yom kippur war which in a way kurdish berkeley kind of shows us that uh we're not as powerful as we think as we think we are so we have this pendulum going back and forth but still the very fact that one regains yerushalayim in its wholeness is a tremendous tremendous symbra but i really want to make two points and that is number one it's a time of simcha a time of gratitude a time in which one rejoices but at the same time one also feels how much it is that we still don't have you know we talk about the kaiser so the keisel is wonderful thing but what is the kaiso the kite cell is not even a wall of the temple uh the kaisel is uh the last remaining wall surrounding the temple mount and on the mikdash and in the place of the kawasaki we have mosques and all sorts of other things and jews either don't go there or can't go there for some for halal reasons some for political reasons and the like so really side by side with the tremendous joy of what we have is also the sadness that we're not quite there yet we have not yet achieved a ghoulish leima you know in the aftermath of the six day war mainly from a very modern orthodox segments of society there was even some discussion is there a reason to keep tisha above anymore or if you're going to keep tisha above what about the nakheem prayer the nachaem prayer in the amida talks about the city that is khareva that is destroyed sho mayma that is desolate bizuya that is shameful and degraded is that jerusalem today you shall i am today everything is being built up so some people were actually calling again in the more modern segment of orthodoxy they were actually calling for the abolition of the nakhen prayer or at least the revision of the nachen prayer because it did not correspond to this situation of a modern society in which jerusalem was barak hashem flourishing but raf soloveichik of yeshiva university was really kind of the goddale and the post sake he was a great person generally but particularly among modern orthodox in america he was the final authority he basically said when we talk about something being destroyed and desolate it is not only in a physical sense it also refers to a spiritual situation in which there's divisiveness there's sinashinam in which jews are fighting with each other that's a form of destruction that is a form of desolation and unfortunately even though you shalom has been built up tremendously and it's continuing to be built up but kind of the aftermath of all of those spiritual desolations are still very much with us and therefore side by side with the simra of yom your shalayam is also the tsar of what it is we haven't yet achieved and once again if we needed a little bit of a reminder we actually got it yesterday as well as a little earlier on lag on lag by omer the other point i i want to share with you is the interesting etymology of the word yerushalayim this is the name of our city yerushalayim our beloved city and that is a yerushalayim the madrid tells us is lahav dale like minneapolis saint paul it is actually two cities it is the twin cities uh it is the city of shalem which is its original name and it is the city of yira now where those two names come from so already in the humish we read after avraham avinu defeated the four kings and released lot and and the prison liberated prisoners of war so the torah tells us the king of shalem brought out legend beyond brought out bread and wine for who kohen the kelo young and this sadik the king of shalem was a priest was a spiritual leader that worshiped takha deshporcha according to rashi malchistic is none other than avraham avinu's own great great great grandfather shame the son of noah and his name was not mahritzadek but malchet said that just like every king of egypt was called pyro every king of jerusalem was called a name connected to righteousness the righteous king because even among the um there was a sense that there was some holiness here so malchithik is not his birth name akhitik is the name of his royal title and the name of the city was shalem which means city of perfection or city of peace so where do you get the uru that is the temple mount when avraham avinu was willing to sacrifice his beloved son yitzhak and yitzhak was willing to die to be a karban and hashem then said i don't want that i just wanted to see what you know how faithful you would be in doing something that's so difficult so avraham gave that area a name got marvram called the temple mount hashem now that means god will see meaning he will look down at this mountain and he will remember our devotion and our faith in our mesiras nephesh in our willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice and that will continue to be a merit for abraham's descendants claus israel till the very end of time so the medras tells us yerushalayim is a combination of yerah which is the name of the temple mount and shalem that is the rest of the city now close but we're not quite there yet so why don't we call it shalem how do you get your roux shallayim so hear them forsham say how do you spell so therefore the aleph and the hay were added together to make above and that gives you your roo now even that's not quite there because it ought to be called uru shah lem which is actually like the english jerusalem why do you have that second year the im you shall yim now in truth if you look in tanakh where ushalayim is mentioned more than 600 times under different names by the way by way of contrast how many times is the great muslim holy city of jerusalem mentioned in the quran it's mentioned zero so it's a 600 600 times to zero but in either way in tanakh yushalayim is normally written without the final year it's pronounced it's read yerushalayim it's read that way but it is actually spelled in tanakh without the end so why do we have that yield so hear the meforshim say that it's a plural just like yadayyam our two hands raglaim our two feet us nyam are two ears yerushalayim are two yerushalems now there is the city is really yerushalem and yerushalayim is two of them what do we mean by two jerusalems we certainly don't mean old city and a new city and we absolutely don't mean east jerusalem and west jerusalem we don't recognize that as two cities but it means the heavenly yerushalayim and the earthly yerushalayim that kinage had the you shall i am on earth there is yerushalayim in heaven and when those two yerushalayims are in perfect alignment through our torah and our mitzvos and our abut israel that's when the basa mikdash comes down from the heavens and the goula comes when there are little missile lines because we haven't done what we need to do then unfortunately we're still in the galas even in yerushalayim so yerushalayim is described by david malach it is the city that is connected together because our goal is to create the alignments of the heavenly jerusalem and the earthly jerusalem and that brings the gaola into the into the world so that's kind of the etymology it's year shalem becoming uru shalem and the two jerusalems are yerusha layim now let's take this a little further that avraham called the temple mount hashem ye god will see god will look down and see so to speak remember the akedah but the medrash points out on a play of words really that the same letters that spelled the word ye god will see also spell the word year o year fear reverence of god so the medrash wants to say although this is not the partial shot of the puzzle that the temple mount is called yira not only because god will look down and see the merit of the al-qaeda but because it's the place where we fear and revere god again that that is a dress that's not pseudo shall mikra so it turns out based on that madrish that the two names of jerusalem are city of divine fear and reverence and city of peace those are the two parts of the city so if you accept if you accept that midrashic interpretation of era that it's then this kind of explains the schizophrenic character of the great city that that all of us love so much that really is kind of in our in the consciousness of every jew and that is the following uh there's an old tradition among the mukubalim that although all of eric israel is holy there are four cities that are considered to be the holiest of heritage israel there's yerushalayim there is chevron there's tavaria there's svat these are called the four holy cities of eric israel and the cuban connect those four cities to the four elements yushalayim is the city of fire tsvat is the city of ruach the city of air or wind tivaria anyam kineret is the city of water and that is associated as the burial grounds of abraham of the obos and the imahos is connected to all four now we're not going to be able to go through the association of each city although it's it's a worthwhile thing to talk about and think about but i guess i just want to focus on you shalom as the city of fire now fire has kind of a double meaning fire is a source of heat and a source of light fire represents passion enthusiasm commitment hashem is often described in shira shirum in fact it says it's described as a shall have it a a fire that reaches up to god a fiery love in fact that's the famous puzzle in shirashiram mayam rabbim lo yehlul khabos the love of the jew for god and the love of god for the jew is so strong the fire is so great that the most torrential waters of persecution cannot extinguish that fire so fire on one hand represents the passion of you shall i am the commitment the the absolute total involvement in doing the will of god but fire by the way fire can also apply other ways that's why there's political arguments that's why they're debates you know uh i once had to take a cab for some aircraft i had to take a shaytar a cab from svat to ushalayam so the cab driver had there was an older man he had he had been a cab driver and spot for 50 years and he came down to ushem and we left like uh it like seven in the morning and we got to ushel i am 10 or 10 30. and immediately it's kind of rush hour or whatever it is he's confronted with people beeping their horns as you're entering uh you're the city they're beeping their horns from all directions and he told me 50 years of driving a cabin spot he had never once heard a car horn beep so that's a little difference between the the city of air and the city of fire right so that is mystical ethereal you shall i am you know everybody's on edge now that's one part of the city but the other part of the city is it's the city of peace the city of shalom now as we spoke before in other contexts these two characteristics are often at contradiction because when you tend to be a fiery committed passionate person and you're totally committed to the truth if you think about it uh you really cannot compromise on truth if something is truth and somebody's living not in accordance with that truth how are you going to split the difference how are you gonna say i'm okay you're okay so we often find that the tremendous passion of a man of truth will be at the expense of shalom they're not able to tolerate they're not able to understand they're not able to empathize with people who aren't on that madriga so generally speaking when there's truth there will often not be shalom and the other way around if there are people who are on shay shalom big tense people inclusive people tolerance people nice people they'll tend to be a little muchy on what their ultimate values are sure abortion a woman's right to choose gay marriage who am i to tell uh two loving men that they they can't be together right so this kind of a moral relativism where you kind of compromise on ms in the interests of shalom so there are ms jews who are not shalom jews and there are shalom jews who are not ms jews but the very nature of yerushalayim says you got to try to be both you got to figure out how to be both now hashem in our beloved city there is so much passion there is so much fire there was so much torah there was so much commitment and side by side with that there was so much hazard so much charity so much care but we have a little difficulty in how to balance and how to integrate them it's a very very great challenge it's not an easy challenge and yet the possibility says you have to love truth and you have to love peace your pursuit of truth which is yirah that's the year apart the fear of god your pursuit of truth cannot be at the expense of love and shalom for your fellow jew but your pursuit of shalom cannot be at the expense of standing up for ms when you have to stand up for it so it is a challenge it is not an easy challenge to navigate but the very conflicted name of the city requires that we integrate i will just share two additional thoughts to this ramosa feinstein by the way was certainly an exemplar in the highest level of ms and shalom had a very beloved talmud who was a great great thomas in his own right rabbi nissan alberts effect this albert was so close to emotion that remember it wasn't albert himself who was much much younger than ramosa died only a few weeks after emotion it's almost as if miss and albert could not live in this world without without his rebbe so if nissan albert once remarked that the gemara says the seal of god is truth the chaism god signet is ms but god's name is shalom like there's even a shy look and you say shalom in the bathroom or whatever can you erase the word sheldon so revolver pointed out both the signet ring and the name are connected to the person but the name is a deeper connection than the signet ring so god's signet ring is emis but shalom is even deeper than emmaus and there is a med-rish in tana de veo leo and this is a very interesting madrish taneville yo are actually the teachings of elio hanavi eliohan we actually say every day in davening at the end of chakras we actually quote tana develo it was taught in the school of elio kolasinacha's behold anyone that learns every day muftakh it's guaranteed that he will have all the mobile rights that's from this madrid dubai elio so in the tunnel velio there's a mattress and again if i would say this on my own i would be labeled to not be chorus so i want to emphasize i am quoting a medrish i am not adding a word to this madrid and that is elio navi quotes the ribani shalom is saying there are two things that i love without boundary that i love infinitely and of course when god says infinite that's true infinity and i love them be able i love the torah because the torah is my will the torah is my essence and i love the jewish people i love both of them without gavul without boundary so elian navi then said to god okay god which do you love more and that's an unfair question you know you don't ask a parent you know which of your children do you like more but eliana repressed hashem which do you like laura and nakaris barco didn't want to answer it at first elijah hanabi keeps on pressing and dakaresh baraku says claud that i love the torah and i love claudia israel infinitely of course mathematically it's hard to know how you how infinity could be more or less but okay that's that's akasha on the mathematics of it but he says quality throws love and if you think about this this is almost implicit in the whole idea that god gave the torah to us because of his love for us right so you see that the love that hashem has from israel kind of is above the love of the torah he gave us the torah out of his love for for us so this is something you think about so so one of the ways that you know how do you break this contradiction i'm passionate about torah about mitzvos about yiddish gay i'm uncompromising in my pursuit of truth and i deal with so many people who are not interested not committed how do i look at them with love and with shalom but part of how you break that contradiction is to make avast israel part of your zealousness you know we have a mental mistake when we think about what it means to be a religious jew so we think automatically kosher shabbast filling we don't think about being a nice person or being an oav israel as part of being a religion we say oh that's just a human thing that's uh you know for those of you who remember old american tv that's kind of a leave it to be reward cleaver type of thing that's not being jewish jewish is that which is distinct but that's a mistake because we have to recognize that israel midos tovo's kindness generosity that's part of torah that's not just being a nice guy and therefore if you fold into your zealousness and avast israel as a select of your zealousness then you can be zealous and uncompromising in that just like you're zealous and uncompromising and other things the problem is we don't regard that as kind of a religious thing no that's a human thing now i understand why that's so because on one on one end you could say well that's not uniquely jewish you can have nice i i understand but one has to recognize that this is part and parcel of the torah itself we make a very big mistake when we segment the torah in that way so that's a little bit of a little going backwards in retrospect uh thought about yom yusuf and things that we can think about as we still have a few more days in the counting of the omer until we come to the holiday of of of shibuya's the great day of matan matantora now here i want to uh share with you uh a tasha of the mugging of rum muggin abram is one of the great commentators on the show and the mughan of ram says well we celebrate shivohas because it's the day of the torah now of course when we say the day of the torah that itself needs a lot of explanation we didn't get the 613 mitzvos on shibuyas moshe went up for 40 days in harsinai and then there were luchos were broken then there were other luchas so essentially what happened on shivers is the ten commandments that occurred through kolo to brakim thunder and lightning a miraculous divine revelation hakadosh parker revealed himself to claude israel and we heard the first two commandments ourselves i am the lord your god who took you out of egypt you shall not have any other gods then we got scared and moshe rabeno communicated the rest to us so really is matantara in the sense that it's mahmod the great assembly on where god revealed himself to 3 million people with 600 000 men from age 20 and with the women and the children you generally get a number of three million and then of course if you include the a refresh you get even much much more than that a massive massive gathering of uh in a supernatural divine revelation of the shaheen and our tradition is that that occurred on the 50th day of the counting of the armor now let me point out a very important simple feature of the jewish calendar it happens to be that the holiday of shivuas is the sixth of seven but that is actually a happenstance because let me explain why in the time of the basal mikdash rosh chodesh was not determined by a calendar rosh was determined when witnesses would come to the sanhedrin in jerusalem and say they saw the new moon so in our calendar the months alternate between 30 29 30 29 30 29 except for catchment and kiss slave that can sometimes be 3729 but generally speaking the way it works is nissan is always 30 days and year is always 29 days so if you start counting 49 days from the second day of pesach it'll happen to be that the 50th day of the omer is always going to be on the 6th of seven but that doesn't have to be the case in the time of the basin mikdash witnesses could have seen the moon different times so if nisan and er were both 30 day months which they could be bisman hamikdash then it turns out shavuos would be on the fifth of stephen because you have an extra day uh no one second uh no if uh yeah that's right that's right uh yeah you're right uh meaning to say if nissan and eeyore are both 30 day months no that's not correct it'll be the fifth because if they're both 30 day months shibuyas will be earlier in the month of siban if they're both 30 or you're counting 49 days shivers will be on the fifth of season if nisan and nio are both 29 days it'll be on the seventh of seven the only reason shavuous is on the sixth of seven is because based on our calendar which replaced the system of witnesses nissan is always 30 and er is always 29. the point i'm making is that the definition of the date of shavuos is not a calendar date the torah does not say observe shavuos on a calendar date unlike pesach 15th of nisan unlike yom kippur tenth of tishrei no shavuos is the 50th day following the completion of the counting of the omer whatever date that is based on our present configuration it will always be the sixth of seven but sometimes it could have been the fifth of seven and sometimes it could have been the seventh so that's very important to know that shavuot is not a that depends on a calendar date it depends on an omer date the 50th day of the counting of the elmer so on that we say oh that was the day of my mid-harshness so freck the mugging of ram the mugging of rama sakasha the torah was not given on the 50th day of the omer the torah was given on the 51st day of the over a day later how do we prove this because the gemara in shabbos brings a braiser from seder olam which is a rabbinic chronology it is the chronology of the events of tanach from the time of the tenorium of the mishnah and in the breissa in saidara olam it says the jewish people left mitzrayim on a thursday and they received the torah on a shabbos now let's figure this out if they left mitzrayim on a thursday that means thursday was the 15th of nisan so what was the first day of the omer which is the second day of pesach so the first day of the omer was friday friday was the first day of the omer if the first day of the omar is friday the 49th day of the omer is going to be thursday that's the completion of seven weeks so friday would be the 50th day of the omer and yet the terror was not given on friday the torah was given on shabbos so the mughal rum says if you go from thursday in other words if you see us misrain was thursday and the torah was given approximately seven weeks later on shabbos the torah was not given on day 50 of the omer the torah was given on day 51 in other words we are celebrating matantora a day earlier than it actually occurred so at least in khutslawarets they get it right because they have the second day of shavuos and it's the second day of shabbos the seventh of semen where the ten commandments were given yeah don't tell your kids this and made this illusion then like you know you can almost drive your kid crazy you know you ask your first grader so what happened on this on shabbos so your son will say or your dad will say oh god gave the ten commandments no wrong what happened on trivia nothing happened on shabbos a little bit of a downer nothing happened at all nothing happened the ten commandments were given a day later so the mugging of ram asks why does the turret it's not it's not a kasha nasa it's gotcha on the tower itself why does the torah tell us to celebrate matantora a day before the torah was actually given based on this that's one of our prayers who says and we say no it's not it's not the mata so the mugging of rum gives an answer and it's a very short answer the mugging of rahm's answer is that the gemara says that mosher abenu added a day to god's preparations god originally told them on the uh fourth of seven that they should separate from their wives today and tomorrow and i will give the torah on the third day of of separation my sharabanu thoughts the jewish people were not ready and he added an extra day on his own initiative i'll explain that the kumara actually says in shabbos that there were three things that moshe did on his own initiative without god's permission and god agreed to it after the fact the first was he extended matantora by one day hashem wanted to give it one day earlier and moshe said no they need preparation for one extra day the second is when moshe decided to smash the luchos hashem didn't tell him to smash the luchos but moshe did it on his own and hashem said you're right and the third was moshe's decision to be celibate and separate from his wife because he felt he had to be ready for prophecy 24 7 and although this is not a model to be emulated and hashem didn't tell moshe to do this but after the fact hashem said for you for you at least this was correct so says the muggin of ram if we understand that maisha rabbanu added a day on his own volition it turns out the only reason the torah was given on shabbos is because moshe deferred it but under hashem's original plan the torah would have been given a day early and that would have been friday and friday would be day 50. so the mugging of ram says we celebrate matantorah not on the day that hashem actually gave the torah we celebrate matantora on the day that he would have given the torah had meisha abano not added an extra day of preparation this is the mugging of rums terrorists the mug of iran so it's still the case what happened on shivers nothing happened why is shaboo as celebrated as matantora because it was the day that god intended to give the torah even though it was pushed off the day because moshe added a yomekhod midato this is the mugging of room now the question is of course why should the hypothetical day be celebrated more than the actual day yeah hashem wanted to give the torah on friday which would have been day 50. but he didn't he gave the torah on shabbos which is day 51. so it's still akasha why would i look at hashem's desire to give the torah on that day as opposed to the actual day where he gave the torah itself so here let me share with you a a a very very well known gemara and i'm sure many of you have heard uh this story perhaps even for me as well and that is this is the famous famous gemaran bhavamithiya about the oven the oven is an earthenware oven and it's broken into uh into hoops like hula hoops and would be transported from place to place through these horizontal cuts was cut into pieces and then when they would reassemble it they would put mud between the pieces and the like so there was some shila is such an oven susceptible to ritual impurity because normally utensils can become tummy by contact with dead animals or dead people but if something is a broken vessel it cannot be macabre the tumor and the question is whether this is considered a broken vessel or no this is the way the vessel is simply transported big mach locus rebbi eliezer the great stage took the position that it was pure it could not be received the majority of the sages says and rabbi elizabeth all sorts of proofs and dismissed it and rabbi eliezer refused to concede to the majority and he started calling upon hashem to do all sorts of supernatural miracles first he said if the like me let the carob tree uproot itself and fly away and the carrot tree uprooted itself and said we don't listen to carob trees we don't listen to trees then he said if the luck was like me let this river reverse its course and go in the opposite direction and the river reversed its course a miracle and the challenge said we don't listen to rivers and then he said if me that the walls of this space madrid collapse inward and the walls were collapsing inward and rabbi yoshua ordered the walls don't you dare move and the walls didn't know who to listen to rabbi eliezer ordered them to move inward rabbi yoshua ordered them not to move so the gemara says that's why the walls of this particular base of madrid remain slanting kind of an excuse for the architecture design because they were subject to two different conflicting demands and once again as you would expect said we do not listen to walls we don't listen to trees we don't listen to water we don't listen to walls so rabbi elijah gets out the big guns and he says okay if the luck is like me let there be a boss call a bosco means let there be a voice from heaven hashem let hashem declare that i'm right and a voice from heaven declared the halacha is like rabbi eliezer god god himself and said to that we don't listen to you either god because you said in your torah you said in your torah lo basha miami the torah is not in heaven you set down the rules that you don't decide anymore we have a process and we go through the process we pass kid a bus co cannot change the look change level now now let me point out that you might have interpreted this as saying well who says boss calls are reliable maybe they're hallucinations you know maybe their imaginations but that's not what the gemara is saying the gemara is not saying it was fake the gemara is saying even if it was genuine i know a hundred percent is hashem talking mobash nah this sounds pretty husbandic right pretty hospital um in fact it reminds me of a uh they tell a story about a rabbi who is a very beleaguered rabbi and the show wanted to become a conservative show or something and the rabbi would not let it happen and even though all of the directors were against him and he finally and you know the rabbi was a voting member so the secretary sarri rabbi is eight to one against you so the rabbi said akalish baraka you can't let this happen how can you let your house and your home be desecrated tell them and a voice from heaven came down and said the rabbi is right the torah must be obeyed so the secretary said okay that's still eight to two but now that's that sounds sacrilegious but i said that's exactly at least in the halachic process that's exactly sorry god you don't count now that sounds like kutzman and in fact someone asked elio hanavi who was in shamayim what was hashem's response when they said lord i mean keep out of it god says hashem was laughing hashem was laughing caviar and hashem said my children have been victorious over me i'm going to stay out of this one the rad one of the great trees china tries to analyze what is this idea of lo basham ayami because let's think about this when we're trying to decide we're trying to decide ultimately we're trying to figure out what is god's will what does hashem want me to do in a given circumstance i mean that's what halakh is now granted most of us we don't have access to hashem directly telling me so of course i have to use human reasoning i look at precedence i look at texts and when i say aye i mean even the gemara itself we draw analogies we make distinctions but all of that is necessitated because we're trying to figure out the will of hashem so how can you say that if hashem tells you what his will is that's irrelevant i mean everything we were trying to do was an indirect way of assessing hashem's will i mean imagine to give you a trivial example imagine kids are trying to decide what to get their father for a birthday gift so one says abba likes a thai abalake's shirt abba likes to say for abba likes an ipad not in here neighborhood of course uh whatever it would be and apple walks by and say you know kids what i really like is whatever and the kids say to abba you know dad please keep out of this you know we're trying we're trying to decide what you want and don't don't distract us that doesn't make any sense the whole discussion is about what abba wants so what about tells you he wants is not relevant hashem tells you what he wants your will is irrelevant in our discussion of what is your will so the run says a tremendously interesting in the nature of the role of the in the interpretation of the oral law and he says torah is truth of course but the truth of torah is not like a mathematical truth mathematical truth at least in simple mathematics there's advanced mathematics with this isn't true but in simple mathematics mathematical truth can only have one answer one plus one equals two e phrases huh that's racist that's good that's good that that's correct i actually i saw somebody sent me that video exactly it was two plus two some kids said it was 22 and not four and whatever the teacher wound up getting fired because she insisted was four okay uh but bederra clout in a world of sanity one plus one is two and if you say it's three it's not like your opinion in my opinion you know you're wrong right as the saying goes everybody might be entitled to their own opinion but they're not entitled to their own facts we don't have alternative facts as kellyanne conway actually used that that phrase at one point now in le in torah it's not that way because akrishboroku gave moshe rabbenu principles of interpretation it was then left to the sages of every generation to take those principles and apply them to the new situations that arise the torah is unchanging but life is ever-changing and that's why there's makhloks i'm all over the place people often ask akasha if god gave the whole torah to moshe how can there be arguments doesn't that mean that somebody got it wrong no because god gave us a process and god gave us principles and he then said i'm leaving it to you to the to apply those principles and even when they get it wrong so in other words hashem has an answer to every question and sometimes we will get that answer and sometimes we won't get that answer but here's what the iran says even when we don't get that answer we get the wrong answer hashem wants our answer to be controlling as to what happens in this world he wants us to be his partners in the creation of torah so even when we're wrong when i say we i don't mean any one of us but even when the great great are objectively wrong their answer is blessed with the divine imprimatur of being operationally true as long as they followed the process of halachic decision making and therefore god says rabbi eliezer got the right answer but since the halachic process says you follow the majority of sages it is god's will that you use the wrong answer or to put it another way the wrong answer now becomes the right answer double truth there is an objective reality but then there is the reality that god wants to be operative in this world and that is the reality that comes from human effort human endeavor human collaboration now you might say well why would god want that if god has an answer to every question why wouldn't god want his answer to control so let me give you again a very simple example to illustrate this idea of partnership let's imagine that you have a four-year-old daughter and you want to uh you want to get her a cake for her birthday now there are two ways you can do it let's say you want to bake the cake one way is when your daughter is in dawn or your daughter's asleep you make the cake be nice and quick 20 minutes or even better buy the cake go to a bakery buy the cake wonderful but a deeper way of showing your love with your daughter is you make the cake with her now making a cake with a four year old whether it's a boy or a girl maybe a boy would even be worse is going to be a pretty messy proposition there could be sugar on the floor there could be chocolate all over the counter the cake could be lumpy it could be over baked and dry and one part of it and under baked in the other part of it you could have done a much better job all by yourself and unless you're a real good baker the bakery would have been a better job than that but the point is not how good of a cake you're giving your daughter the point is the love that comes from the collaboration and the sharing and doing it together you know the torah could have been a much neater thing had god simply given us an answer to every question no for example all sorts of things new technologies come up all the time you know what's the halacha of electricity on shabbos what's the luck of surrogate motherhood what's the lack of atomic energy new questions that we have to grapple with all the time based on old sources why couldn't god just give us the answer now you might as well that wouldn't have been possible because they wouldn't have understood electricity in moshe's times so hashem could have given moshe envelopes to say don't open up before 1870 don't don't open up before 1970. oh we have a cloning question uh 1983 open up or whatever the hebrew date is tough shin mem gimmel open up the envelope hashem could have given us answers but that's not the way halacha works requires that we when i say we i mean no the great talmud the post game i don't mean and just us they have to take these sources god gives them so to speak incomplete information and they have to work it out and that's why they'll be mach lokes and uncertainty in ambiguity but what god is saying is i want to make the cake with you i could have made a better cake i could have made a neater cake i could have made something that wouldn't be as messy but i want you to be my partner i want you to be my shotif i'll give you the information and you have to figure out how to apply it that's why and again i am not saying this irreverently i'm saying it with great reverence gomorrah is very messy it is messy it's this argument that argument this problem this one it brings up this possibility that possibility in fact when people first learn tomorrow they're often very very confused what are we doing why doesn't the talmud just give me an answer to things no well maybe it's this way and i can't be this way because of that can't be this way what's going on what is all this mess the mess my friends is we're the three-year-old making the cake with abba and yeah a three-year-old making a cake there'll be a lot of mess but the love of a parent to a child is when we work it out together and hashem says that's what i want so even when you get it wrong even when you get it wrong objectively you didn't get the right answer your your decision becomes my will now again this is a difficult issue because obviously it doesn't mean every individual can do that and what what is considered to be legitimate halachic analysis and what's illegitimate that is a huge huge question which i'm avoiding but assuming the person is qualified and assuming a person is working within the parameters locus from and rabbal yashev who's right the answer is they're both right from god's standpoint they are both right even when they're contradictory because they both followed the process they both made the cake the cake came out differently for each of them hashem says that's fine with me right this and this is why the giving of the torah is called matan torah which can actually be interpreted god gave away the torah he gave amithral control over the tower in other words matantora is not just god commanding us to do things it's it's giving us a shalita giving us a control over the process of halachic decision making it becomes a gift exactly right and you see this in the morning breakfast because the warren bronco says hashem is not like a basarbadam when a baasavadam gives away something very precious or sells an heirloom so hamocha ratsev the one who sold it is unhappy is sad and the buyer is happy but when hashem gives us the torah he is happy now what's the comparison when i sell an heirloom i'm giving it up what are you comparing it the answer is because hashem also gave up a certain aspect of the torah so now let's go back to the magnet of ram and schwarz you see tremendous tremendous thing if you understand that matan torah is not simply god commanding us to do things but god deferring to the in the interpretation of the torah that even when they get that wrong it becomes the divine will when is the first time that that occurred the friday which was the sixth of seven the fiftieth day of sphere hashem wanted to give the torah that day that was the day that hashem designated for giving the torah moshe rabeno interpreted hashem's will differently the gemara says he had a an interpretation and moshe's interpretation was not correct but hashem deferred to moshe rabbanu's interpretation and delayed the giving of the torah by one day that itself is matan torah in other words matan torah was not an act of commission it was omission the fact that hashem did not give the torah on friday meant he gave us the control over the process and that's what the mugging of means that we don't celebrate shivulas on the actual day that hashem gave the torah we celebrate the shivas on the day that he deferred to moshe rabbenu's interpretation now obviously this idea of human autonomy human creativity people make a big mistake sometimes they think now we do we do teach and we do believe that when hashem gave the written torah to moshe he also gave them the oral law but people sometimes think that means oh that means every word in the mishnah was given to moshe at sinai every word in the gemara now that's pretty absurd i mean you read a piece of gemara it's a conversation between rabbis who lived in the first or the second of the third century abaya is talking to rava rava's talking to abaya are they reading from a transcript uh oh abaya you're supposed to say these words today because hashem handed it down to moshe and this was handed down from generation so obviously when we say the oral law was given by hashem to moshe we don't mean every word in the gemara we mean the basic principles of interpretation and then have to flesh it out and that's why it could be a maklocus because again people ask the big question if god gave moshe everything how could there be disagreement the answer is when we say god gave moshe everything everything means god gave moshe all the information that would be needed to decide any lucky question that comes up but he did not give moshe a specific ruling for example when electricity was invented or not invented discovered whatever however you want to call it so there's an immediate shiva are you allowed to use it on shabbos or turn around on shabbos this was debated now if you ask is it fire is it not fire or other things now if you ask well what did god tell moshe about electricity so i would submit that god didn't tell moshe anything about electricity god gave moshe principles from which the cham are supposed to figure out how electricity works it's not a direct hand hashem did not give moshe direct answers hashem gave moshe the data out of which answers can be formulated and that's why there's a maclaurin this is very important this is why the existence of mach lokes in does not contradict the revelation of the aura because if you were to posit that the revelation of the aura means hashem gave specific answers then somebody got it wrong but if you understand hashem gave principles and process and then left it to the then different opinions can both be legitimate in god's eyes and that's exactly what ghazal said now this mastery over the process is not for most of us this is really for the great great gedolim of the generation but in a smaller way each of us are also part of making the cake that when we learn hashem's torah hashem wants us to engage with the totality of our personalities we should bring in our insights sometimes you hear some sometimes someone comes up with an idea and i've heard someone say where's the source for that okay it's a legitimate question but sometimes the source is the source is me and that's okay i don't mean me in particular but you know any one of us that is okay hashem gave you a mind hashem gave you a personality hashem gave you insights bring yourself to the torah as well now obviously when it comes to halacha you have to follow right you can't like interpret things that are against but as long as it's not contradicting there is room for the human being to bring their individuality to the understanding of torah their creativity because after all our very souls are the breadth of hashem we are part of the infinity of hashem so our minds our thoughts coming from our soul are also godly in that way and therefore you know we have our chance to be part of the cake cake as well so these are some things to think about schwartz but again the bottom line is still very very surprising what happened on the sixth of seven nothing and matan torah occurred by the nothingness of what should have happened and did not happen so again i i wish you all a wonderful wonderful shoe there should be a kabbalah satora and just as claus and harsinai were ishacha we became one person one heart may we once again be able to come to that level you know uh it's an unfortunate truism of life that often it is tragedies and adversities that can bring people together in a way that happy occasions unfortunately do not so i don't want to say silver lining but but if there's any any brightness at all in the tragedies that we faced perhaps perhaps it can be a catalyst to bring us together in that that in turn will be a tremendous tremendous merit for the kadasham who who died that if somehow their death could somehow create greater abbas israel and greater actress that will be a great aliyah for them in ghanaian so again and thank you [Music] is