Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Looking For a Soulmate, The Fundamentals

[Music] all right hi everybody it's shalom and uh thank you for coming and uh today we have a lot of sponsors for this year uh number one this year should be a liat shama for binyamin israel benchmomo again a a young boy that we were very involved in over the past year and biazrat hashem he should have a strong strong mueller sevilla bastavid uh siva or sevilla bas yosef halevi muskowitz i happen to know this is the mother of a uh a rabbi in chicago and she was just never terrorist a few days ago and this is the middle of shiva this is not a yorzei this is mamesh shiva then leia kohein who's the art site is this week brindle and rob mosha aron bin of ram labe we hope that the divrei torah we share tonight should be for the elevation of these neshamote in ghaneden and as always we very much appreciate the ibanez and i myself personally very much appreciate the support of torah for the people that sponsor and finally refuse leima for all those afflicted with covid whether inoculated or uninoculated i won't get into the the issues there and uh bias rats hashem we hope that we are headed towards the great great barack obama israel and really we pray for the whole world we pray for jews non-jews that the people should be healthy and strong you know the rambam who of course was a great doctor and gives a lot of advice about health makes the point that health is not an end in itself in fact the rambam has a fascinating statement he who makes health their highest priority is just another form of gluttony some people you know are gluttons for food and some people are gluttons for health he says one is not morally better than the other but the rampant says health is a necessary condition to be able to serve hashem properly and therefore there is a mitzvah to take care of our health not because health is the end-all but health is the mechanism and the prerequisites to be able to do all of the mitzvahs and therefore there is indeed a mitzvah to take care of our health and that's why of course we pray to hashem that we should be socha to health and refuge uh so today's parsha or this shabbos is parsha is the parsha of khayasara and this is always the case there is so much to talk about it's always difficult to choose what to talk about the torah is infinite and every word has so many depths of meaning sora's death according to rabbinic tradition since sarah's death is placed right after the akedah the indication is that she died adjacent to the al-qaeda which is very very interesting because if she died at the age of 127 and she gave birth at the age of 90 that is the proof as indeed rashi points out that yitzhak was 37 years old at the time of the al-qaeda you know we tend to look at yitzhak maybe as a little boy who's following his abba yitzhak was an adult i'm guessing that he was physically stronger than abraham who was quite old 137 and if yitzhak wanted to get out of the being bound as a corbin yitzchak probably could have done so and as a result therefore we have to look not only at avraham but at yitzchak's massive in fact people in before do ask akasha why do we always talk about the al-qaeda as a nisayan for abraham as a trial for abraham what about the fact that yitzhak knew what was going on and yitzhak was willing to give his life and of course that is the case but the meforshim explained that for yitzhak to give his life for god was not inconsistent with his basic nature yitzhak's nature is the nature of inner strength so yes it's a superhuman accomplishment but it is consistent with his teva with avraham it's exactly the opposite avraham's whole nature was one of kindness benevolence besides the fact that this was his son and this was his promise and uh but but it also it it challenged his whole idea of what was god because avraham believed in hashem because he saw a kindness and a benevolence that was permeating the entire world and that's how he brought people to god by teaching them about the kindness of hashem by the goodness of hashem and now comes hashem and apparently gives them a commandment that is full of cruelty murder violence so for abraham to have his whole idea of god shaken and still to say i will obey even if it makes no sense to me that is a difficult messiah now on a much more simple level frankly i think it might be easier for a person to give his life than to kill his child i mean i i think that's also the case yeah yitzchak was willing to give his life for god but avram was willing to even kill his child and that's that's even harder and the fortune point out another thing that there are actually two lessons in the hakeda and the lessons move in opposite directions but both are very important lesson one is your loyalty to hashem must mean you're willing to do absolutely anything hashem tells you to do no matter what but the second lesson is god is telling abraham this is never what i want you to do in other words the withdrawal of the commandment to kill yitzhak is as significant as the commandment itself we know in the ancient world there was child sacrifice that was done and hashem is basically saying you got to be willing to do whatever i tell you to do but i'm telling you this is never going to be what i'm going to tell you to do this was a one-time test to show you that you have to be willing to go to the ends of things and then i say this is not my uh my mode of worship and this was says that the meaning of the statement now i know you're a god fearing man now i know that you fear hashem what do you mean now wasn't avraham a great sadiq beforehand the answer is no i mean the answer is yes but in this sense until this point avraham served god out of love but with a commandment like the al-qaeda avraham could not love that commandment because it contradicted everything that he believed about hashem so your backup system that says that even when it doesn't make sense even when it shakes you up you're going to obey that's yirah so god says your yerat hashem has now become dominant until now you can operate on avatar but for the al-qaeda avatar was actually impossible so why did sora die so rashi says she died over the shock of the akedah and there's a whole mahlokis exactly how to understand that rash you understand that some say she died when she realized yitzhak was almost killed and some say the other way she was shocked because when she sees itzhak coming back she thinks they failed the test she was shocked because she thought they failed the test the other way around and finally again i'm not giving a share on the al-qaeda tonight this is again i have gotten into the maybe the bad habits of giving long introductions about what i'm not going to talk about but this is just one more point that i'm not going to talk about and that is an amazing amazing passage uh from a from the zoar that is quoted in the commentary sip say cohen written by a great mukubo that actually says yitzhak was killed at the akita avraham actually killed him and avram came back alone and that's why the torah says avram came back with the youth that accompanied them eliezer and ishmael it doesn't say he came back with yitzhak and hashem made a miracle two or three years later of triyasamesem imagine that uh yitzhak just shows up yes i just want to uh interrupt my shirt for a second uh i just got word there was another sponsor that i failed uh to announce this is an eleanor the art site is tonight the yard side is tonight for ganesha it was not on my my sheet over here okay all righty uh so there's a lot to talk about the al-qaeda sarah's death uh another interesting question is sarah dies in february and this is a very very difficult question abraham was not living in savron at the time in fact the torah says specifically that avraham returned to bear sheva the end of the akedah says avram returns to beersheva sarah dies in hebron so if the if avraham was living in favron why did he go to beersheba and if avram was living in beer sheva why did sarah die in the mephorshim have a lot of problems with this rabbi steins out maybe i shouldn't even say this rabbi stein's al-sahran of offers a very very radical interpretation which i don't think mainstream thought would accept he basically says that after the al-qaeda sora separated from avraham and refused to live with him and she moved to hebron and avram gets reunited only when she dies but as they say that again it is such a an unusual shot that i just felt i wanted to say it but maybe i shouldn't have said it because again as i say this is not uh as far as i know there is absolutely no mocker in ghazal that abraham ever separated from uh from sarah okay but the passage says though when avraham eulogizes sarah in maratha machela so it says vyovo avram lispodlasah avram came to eulogize sarah philip khosah and to cry over sarah the natsiv points out that if you look at the stages of mourning that are described in the gomorrah it starts off with crying you know the spontaneous grief of crying and then you can eulogize you put your thoughts together and you eulogize so first there is what is called bakshi and then there is what is called hespate without ram we find the opposite he did hespaid and then busy and then it civ explains that for most people is just a spontaneous grief you know we don't really yet know a person's greatness we don't know what they contributed to the world we just cry because we're shocked and then we eulogize but avraham's bachelor was not just spontaneous grief avram's bashi came from his intellectual and emotional understanding of who sora was first there was the hespet and from the hespet came the brahi the behe was not just emotionalism it was a true awareness of the loss of his life's partner the one that was involved in every single thing avraham did and every single thing avraham accomplished it's reminiscent of a very moving gamora in massachusetts brachas recounts that when the great great amore the greatest of the amaryam rav that's why he's called the rabbi his name was abba but it's called rav when he died all of his tummy then ripped their garments because he was like their father he was their father in torah and when they were walking back from the funeral after the burial they sat by the riverbank and they washed their hands to eat bread and then they had a halachic sheila since we're kind of sitting separately we're not sitting as one unit are we allowed to be men do we join together for zima and they didn't have the answer and they thought like well let's ask rob like a spontaneous thing but rob's not there anymore they ripped their garments again because they said rav has left us and we don't even know how to bench and the meaning of that is that it's going to hit you all that we could have gotten from someone all of the things we could have done all of the things we could have learned and now we can't anymore we can't this is the basi that comes after you recognize what someone is absolute chick at michigan university would often talk about his father in that particular way he would basically say that often i just wish i had five minutes to ask my father you know akasha in the rambam that he could explain to me because when he was alive he was able to explain everything and now i don't have him so that's the bashi that comes after the husband so one can only imagine really avraham's grief the all-consuming sadness of losing the partner that had been with him the partner who was strong enough to correct him to argue with him to set him straight because avraham did not want a yes wife and indeed sorrow was not a yes wife sarah took strong positions but avraham knew how much he needed that kind of perspective in fact by all marriage the terror describes the creation of chava i will make a helpmate to be opposite him so the gemara asked akasha which is which is it is the wife a help mate or is the wife an opposite so the gemara gives a pragmatic answer if you're zoha if the man is socha he has a help mate if he's not soccer it'll be connected sometimes you get one sometimes you get the other but in the supreme casitas they make the points that the true helpmate in marriage is the is the willingness and ability to bring opposite perspectives you know there's a wind-up toy that uh they sell in airports i haven't seen it recently but i remember it from years ago that you wind up the toys like a little talking doll and the doll says you're great you're smart you know your ideas are always valuable it's to give a person affirmation because we get so little affirmation in the outside world now it is true that to some degree that is the role that is a legitimate and important role of marriage both in terms of a husband giving that type of friezak to his wife and their wife giving that kisa to the husband you know the world is cruel what can i tell you sometimes things are mean we don't always get the support that we have that's why a person has to be maiman and hashem that hashem loves you and hashem believes in you even when you don't believe in yourself and even when other people are not validating you and certainly one of the great gifts of marriage is that we have someone that believes in us very very true god forbid i would never demean that it's something all of us need i need all of us need it but at the same time marriage is not just being a yes man or a yes woman rather when there's a true relationship of love there can be constructive discussion maybe criticism is a strong term but constructive criticism the notion of correcting a person when they're going on the wrong way because true love actually means the ability to tell the person when they're going in the wrong direction and that's sometimes hard to hear it's hard to say and it's hard to even harder to hear but the truth of the matter is if it's coming from love we can accept it you know when it's coming from people who just want to criticize and demean and denigrate so we get resentful we get defensive coming from love we can be open for this in fact there's an interesting little story and i'm not directly connected to this you know we have in the torah the taikaka the are the harsh curses that god gives if the jewish people violate the torah and uh it mentions that the altar rabbit of schneider zamen the balatanya used to be the baal kore in his minion he would read the torah including the one shabbos he was gone and somebody else read the toga and the altareb is son who became the rebbe after the altered called the mithla rebbe the middle rebbe because he was a reality for a short amount of time between the altar rebbe that was a rebbe for more than 30 years and the said the grandson who was ready for more than 30 years so the second review son is called the mithla rebbie the middle rabbi so the middle arabian is a great great sonic when he hears the tokuga he shakes and he quakes and he faints and he's so frightened he's like hey this is so awful i can't even i'm you know he almost died from it so somebody went over to matthew and said you know this is not the first time you've heard the tokuga you know we hear it every year we hear it twice a year because the end of ayiiikra i mean you never had this reaction before so he said when my father read it i didn't think it was a punishment i knew it was all good i knew it was coming from hashem's love because somehow even the token could be seen as god's love and care for the jewish people it's god correcting us when we're going the wrong way but that's because the balatanya had reached the madrega where he could communicate that even the harshness of life can be part of god's the other balcory was not on that madrega so what the mitchell rebbe heard was he heard these awful curses so azer connecto is if you really want to be a helpmate to your spouse sometimes you have to point out the mistakes open up the discussion and the like and really of all the imahats it fundamentally was sora that exemplified this more than any of the other matriarchs you know rifka we're going to see later in the torah has to resort to subterfuge and trickery in order that yitzchak should get the brachas over asav but when sarah sees that yeshmael is a tremendously bad influence and is destroying the home sarah talks to avraham directly right it's all right and this is what avraham is grieving over but life goes on and avraham kind of knows that after sora dies i mean abraham lived for until 175 so avraham lived for 38 more years but avram kind of realized that his main mission in life had been finished and it's time to pass things to the next generation there's kind of a sense of a transition and as a result the next item of business is to find a wife for his son yitzhak so yitzhak can continue the legacy of abraham so we know the story avraham dispatches his servant eliezer and the commentaries point out actually point out that in the story of eliezer finding a wife for yitzhak there's an extraordinary amount of repetition and redundancy because like this we start off with a whole conversation avraham has with eliezer then the torah describes the sequence of events then when eliezer finally locates the woman rifka he tells over to bessuel that is rifka's father and then love him because vasuel died because lovan tried to poison eliezer and the poison got switched eliezer tells love on the whole story again now the turret the turret does not like to waste words the torah could have just said and eliezer told love on everything that happened right i mean we're already given the story b c a to z and then when eliezer tells it over eliezer also recounts it a to z why does he do that or well he did it but why does the terror record it that way the torah could have simply said eliezer recounted everything that we have already mentioned i mean there are many many halachos that are learned out of a single word because one or a single letter even why would the torah have to have two letters if it could teach you something in one letter and yet here we have a problem of extraordinary verbosity redundancy repetition so khazal have a single comment about this in masaka massachusetts where they say you see that even the conversation of the slaves or the servants of the others is more beloved to hashem than all of the torah that is given by the given to the descendants of the of us because all of the torah is communicated sometimes in a letter or a word but the conversation of the servant of the of us is so beloved by god that god repeats it over and over and over again so according to that the gemara seems to say that the notion of repeating something in the torah is a sign of divine love a sign that god is so cherishes everything that the others and even the avadham of the of us do that he repeats it just like a miser might count his gold over and over and over again hashem counts the words okay that's a that's an important perspective but here is the thing and this is a clown goddamn in the tanakh that whenever stories are repeated you must pay very careful attention to the differences in the reiterations a story that is repeated a second time will never be exactly the same as the story repeated or the story stated the first time and consequently if one wants to understand the significance of repetition one must focus on the differences in the iterations because they will often give you some very very significant lessons in other words what eliezer tells love on that happens is not exactly the same as what happened eliezer changed various details and i want to focus on the significance of those changes the abarbanel the great commentary of ravissaka barbanel i believe lists no fewer than or more than 50 differences in the in the narrations uh we don't have time to go over them some of them are relatively small and it's hard to figure out what great significance is but i want to focus on three or four of them maybe i'm losing count but in which i think we have some important lessons first when avraham summons eliezer avrah makes eliezer swear that he will not take a wife for yitzhak from the daughters of kanan but he will go lrtc to my land umo ladati and the place of my birth in other words avraham gave him a mission that is described as geographical meaning avraham did not literally say go to my family abram said go to my land and my place of birth by contrast when eliezer is recounting his conversation with abraham he says my master made me swear that i will go el base avi um i will go to my father's home and my family so note that eliezer redefined what his mission was avraham emphasized a certain geographical locale eliezer reframed that as a specific request to go to a family that's difference number one difference number two eliezer raises the question what if the young woman does not want to come to her israel shall i bring your son there and abraham said shalom under no circumstances shall you bring my son there the shivoha will be annulled and will find a wife even from the canaanites avraham had friends on their estral mamre now interestingly enough ghazal point out that the word ulai maybe is written without a vow which means eli to me meaning eliezer is hinting he has a daughter and he was hoping that maybe yitzhak could marry his daughter and for reasons we'll discuss shortly as righteous as eliezer was avram did not want yitzhak to marry even eliezer's daughter go to my family but be it as it may eliezer raises the specter of the woman not going and avram's response was do not take her there but in the conversation with lovan eliezer mentions that he raised the question perhaps the woman wouldn't want to go and he gives a different answer that avraham said hashem everything will work out in other words he doesn't quote avraham saying don't take her there a second difference a third difference is when eliezer finally gets the kharan right kharan is the mesopotamia between the tigris and the euphrates river that's where kharan is like north of syria so eliezer devises a test to determine who is going to be a suitable wife now nobody told eliezer by the way what to look for this is his own test and this test is basically a test of loving kindness and care and compassion that i'm going to ask the women please uh give me water for me and my camels and the woman that draws water for me and my camels that's the right woman and behold rifka shows up now did rifka do exactly what eliezer said she actually did not but she did better eliezer said the one that gives me and my camels water what rifka did in connecticut was only three years old according to another opinion she was 14 years old she drew water gave it to eliezer and only after eliezer drank the water did she then say i will go back and draw water for your camels in other words she didn't follow exactly what he said but she did better because if you think about it eliezer was envisioning she would draw up water and say you and your camels drink the water she did gave him first and then went back so look at the fact that her acid was even greater than he was anticipating because number one if i give a person water and i say this is for you and your camels you're not going to necessarily drink everything you need because you have to save it for the camels number two there's a certain lack of human respect when i say this is for you and your animals like i'm equating the human with the animal she wanted eliezer to drink to feel comfortable and afterwards she went back for a second trip that's number three she's going to do two trips so the fact that eliezer set up a sign and she did not follow the sign exactly is because the sign was not a superstitious omen if it would be an omen omens have to be exact this is not an omen this is not you know it's like saying the first woman who's wearing a black dress is the one so if a woman comes out with dark purple she can't be the right one and you can't say oh dark purple is close to black or whatever it is close is not good enough when it comes to almonds which we don't believe in anyway it got to be exact but this is not an omen this is a logical test of character middlet kindness so if she didn't follow the exact sign but she showed a greater sensitivity to uh the needs of a human being that's not a kisarin that's a myla that's even better interestingly enough though when eliezer is talking to lavan he makes rifka's behavior exactly compliant i said the woman that gives me and my camels is the right woman and rifka gave me and my camels he doesn't emphasize that rifka first drew the water gave it to him and then went back in other words in eliezer's story he makes rifka's behavior consistent with his test when in fact rifka's behavior was not 100 consistent with the test and a final uh discrepancy is noted by rashi in the hamish after rifka gives him the water and gives the camels the water eliezer immediately gives her the jewelry and betrats her to yet and only afterwards does he ask her by the way whose daughter are you in other words he didn't even know until after he gave her the jewelry when he is recounting the story to love him the sewell but the sewell you know died basil is the father loving is the brother he says after she gave me the water i asked her who's your father and only when she said who's your father then i gave her the jewelry and rashi says because if he were to say i gave her the jewelry first lovin would say what type of idiot are you you gave her the jewelry you didn't even know she's the right family so eliezer wanted to make his story logical and plausible okay that's what rashi says but if it's illogical to give her the jewelry first why did eliezer give her the jewelry okay so these are a number of discrepancies in the different accounts so here one of the things we learn and i think all of us as children have learned this that it's not good to lie but one of the things that's very important is when you lie you got to be sure that the rest of your story is consistent because the way you get messed up is you change part of the story but you don't change another part of the story and therefore it doesn't make sense in fact mark twain once said uh if you tell the truth you never have to remember anything when you lie you gotta constantly remember to change this and change this and change this here's the point it might be suggested that avraham avinu actually never told eliezer to go to his family at all remember going back to the first question avraham's mission was geographical avram didn't care if it's his family or another family avram only wanted people from kharan and that is why avraham said go to my land and the place of my birth and he did not say go to my family now what was so special about the place of kharan so here we have a very important yasod very important interpretation from the run rabbenu nissam in the drusha saran one of the great greatest of the rishonim and iran points out why would avraham want to send eleazar to kharan or or even family if you if you assume it's family i mean after all they are idolaters they are pagans they're obvious ara eliezer is righteous a believer in hashem a faithful servant of avraham what would be avraham that he's sending eliezer on a very long mission to kharan to make a shidduch with auvd instead of the righteous sadiq that is mamish with him in irish israel and iran says the following idea the iran says that avraham knew that even though the people of kharan were of their vodasara they had in them kindness and compassion and the canaanites had a teva of akzariat of cruelty and even though we can assume that eliezer himself was righteous but the ron says it is easier to change an idol worshiper into a believer in god than it is to take a cruel person and make them kind because a vodazara is an ideological problem it's a theological problem it's a mental problem that can be cured with education that can be cured with exposure that can be occurred with learning but when there's cruelty it's very very hard to acquire kindness now we're not saying it's impossible there's some chuva works all the time but it's very very hard if you saw slaughter used to say it is harder to change one bad meda than it is to learn the entire atonement so even if we assume as we i think we would assume eliezer himself was righteous but if that natural cruelty is still in the system then who knows how it will be passed down to later generations and therefore avraham said better to marry idol worshipers who have kindness and a good heart than to marry superfrom people who have a teva of cruelty in akhzaryat i think this run is actually very very relevant to what you look for in they should have today now granted i'm not suggesting that one should marry an obito voterzora let's say i want to marry a a jew for g a messianic jew as long as they have a nice heart you know obviously we look for people that share our values but it could very well be that in the contemporary shidduchim the notion of kindness compassion a good heart might be undervalued you know we're looking about uh you know people ask about the man you know what type of hat does he wear at least in the haredi world you know uh what type of yeshiva does he go to again these are these are you know questions but you see a kinds person does he have a good heart does he care about people you know i think i mentioned maybe even last week a rabbi it was a porn play actually but it was a funny thing where the rabbi was making shidduchim and he was saying this guy is the greatest learner in lakewood etc and then on the at the other side of the conversation what about midos so the rabbi says midos midos nobody ever asked me about that i don't know he says you're the first person that brought it up and even with women although with women we don't necessarily ask what yeshiva they went to or whatever whatever it would be but often it would be uh do they see movies do they go to the internet whatever it is uh are they modern right uh you know how how long are their skirts or whatever the issue would be again i i don't mean i don't want to come across as saying that these questions are totally not no gay okay maybe they are maybe they're not but what is iran telling me the run is saying the single most important quality is the quality of and that's why eli yazar was rejected and that's why abraham sent him the quran and that explains actually how eli yeshua knew to devise his test as i mentioned before who told him to make a test of cousin maybe his test was to measure skirt lengths or whatever it would be the answer is because if the issue was skirt length so the other's daughter had the right at the right skirt length in other words the very fact according to the round is that they were pressured this is why avraham sent him to kharan so well he has your nose so it turns out like this that avraham did not care about family avram cared about geography and that's why avraham said art see um uh and the reason is because the ansheikharan had the media of khesit now again i don't mean to say love and was ethic loving was obviously a cheat loving was obviously a dishonest person so sometimes people paraphrase the wrong wrong they say oh they were over there by the zara but they were people of good medos i wouldn't call love on a person of good meat us i think that overstates it but the one quality they had duran says was gomle and leif toef leftover right so now here is the thing so when eliezer gives the jewelry he doesn't have to know whose daughter she is based on the mission that avraham gave him as soon as this woman shows she has the khasad he could marry her right so eliezer's behavior is absolutely consistent with avraham's mission but eliezer and indeed and and once again let me point out and the fact that rifka didn't follow the parameters of the test exactly that's not a historian she did more than the test but when eliezer has to sell this shidduch to basuel and lovan he has a very formidable job number one rifka is very young and number two loving don't they don't necessarily want to lose her so eliezer has to change it he has to butter up the makhutanim and he butters up the muhutanum in a number of ways he butters up the mukhitanim by saying the great famous avraham who everybody knows about specifically wanted to make a shidduch with you you see if eliezer were to simply say he sent me the quran to find somebody so lovan would say find somebody else but eliezer changes the mission the great avraham wants you you're special you're honorable you're great and that's why eliezer changes the mission from geography to family now you understand though that liars have to be consistent once he changes the mission from geography to family he can no longer say he first gave the jewelry and then asked basmiya because then they would say how do you know she's from the right family so the change of the mission from geography to family necessitated that he recount the sequence that i first gave that i first asked basmiyat then i gave her the jewelry now the same thing is true with the test eliezer was not looking for a specific family person eliezer was looking for heset so the fact that instead of rifka sang the water is for you and the camels she drew water for him first and then the camels that's not a problem she passed the test like instead of a hundred she got 110 but when eliezer is selling it to love on he's casting it as an omen as a superstitious omen he's saying there's a sign from heaven that she's the right wife because again love on visual objectizer they were very superstitious so the significance of the test from eliezer's perspective was one of character medos and ethics but the test from the perspective that he's trying to convey to love on is one of superstition and omen now in order for an omen to be an almond as i said before it has to be one hundred percent consistent so eliezer couldn't have said i said give me in the camels and she gave me and then went back because levin would say not a test it's not a one-to-one correspondence eliezer has to change it to a one-to-one correspondence similarly eliezer omits right when avraham and when eliezer said to avraham what if the woman doesn't want to go shall i bring her there so avraham said eliza leaves out the shalom answer once again if you're trying to flatter the makutanim you don't want to say god forbid my son should ever set foot in your house that's kind of the opposite so eliezer is being very diplomatic in leaving that part out finally i want to mention one extra point here and that is i just mentioned before the uli what if the woman doesn't want to go and without a love it's eli i have a wife interestingly i'm sorry i have a daughter interestingly the double entendre only appears in eliezer's conversation to lebanon it does not appear in the original conversation with avraham where it just says oolai perhaps the woman doesn't want to go and i think there's something amazing here and that is eliezer is so devoted to fulfilling the shlikas of avraham that he's willing to disclose to lovin something that is deeply embarrassing and shameful to him as if to say i am avraham's faithful disciple and i had a daughter and he said no to me and yes to you look how hush of you are in other words that bit of information is revealed in the conversation him one would have thought eliezer wouldn't want to discuss that it was something that was painful to him it was something that was embarrassing to him it was something that was humiliating to him and yet if he knew this would convince levan he was willing to disclose it in fact let me make a final point you know i've been saying i said probably a hundred times tonight eliezer eliezer eliezer eliezer because we know eliezer is abraham's servant but if you look at the parsha sarah eliezer's name is not mentioned it just says evad abraham we happen to know it's eliezer but the marshall says eliezer was so devoted to this mission it's as if he did not exist as an individual he was only an extension of avraham the self-effacing if you think about this eliezer has a deep conflict of interest i mean why would avraham even trust him eliezer has a daughter he wants his daughter to marry islam he knows that if the mission fails he has a chance in other words he has a chance at least so he has every incentive to sabotage the mission but not only does he not sabotage the mission he goes beyond what he was asked to do i mean he could have i mean listen so so he could number one he could have sabotaged the mission okay number two he could have done exactly what avraham said he could have gone to loving and said avraham sent me to the city of kharan to find somebody and if lovin would have said get out of here you think we're just anybody get out of here he could have gone back to abram and said i did exactly what you said and avraham couldn't have complained about that avraham would have no taina if eliezer did exactly what avraham said and yet do you understand this not only did eliezer not sabotage the mission eliezer went beyond what he was instructed to maximize the success of the mission and amazingly enough avraham trusted that he would do it you have to see that sitkas the righteousness of eliezer who had every reason to want this mission to fail and yet avraham trusted him and eliezer went beyond what he was told to do to maximize success and suffice it to say if you do raise the question oh isn't diliezer lying by changing all these details the answer is to get rifka out of a house of avoidazara you're allowed to lie meaning this type of lie would be permitted because it was to create uh a spiritual destiny and to liberate a righteous woman from a house of avodahzara of a bodhisattva okay so uh you see a lot of things about ldse and this explains all the discrepancies that i mentioned avraham's mission was geography but eliezer said it was family avraham said do not take my son there eliezer deletes that limit rifka does not do exactly what eliezer proposes but eliezer makes it an exact correspondence eliezer gives the jewelry before he knows basmiya but he tells love on i asked pasmiat before i gave the jewelry all of this is understood as eliezer maximizing the success of the mission and his self-effacement is why he is not given a name it's as if he ceased to exist he was nothing more than the abed abraham but again the practical lesson for us i think is the russia surround that's kind of the central point the importance of a good heart theological ideas can be acquired with learning but a good heart is much much harder again i'm not saying it's impossible but it's hard to change your nature and therefore i'm looking for a partner in life i'm looking for the media of kindness of goodness of caring and we can have a discussion of skirt length you know a little later on or whatever whatever it would be or internet whatever again again that i may get in trouble for this uh okay whatever it depends who listens but okay uh but this is what you look for this is what you look for initiative i look for initiative a life tough a lifetime and a willingness to care about people that's why indeed by the way one of the things that you can you should look for in a date and this is both men and women looking looking at each other is how do they treat let's say the more humble people in the world how do they treat the janitors the waiters the waitresses the cab drivers right how do they treat you know how do they they treat them as smarters that they're just there from my convenience or do they treat them with genuine respect and concern something it's something to look at actually it is something to look at i mean i i don't i don't even feel comfortable using how do you treat the little people of the world that that itself is an offensive expression they're not little people in the world they're important people but but you know that we sometimes regard as less significant and that i think is very very telling you know if you treat the people who are not so rich or not so powerful they're not so hush of as if they don't matter so much then that shows a shisarin in the lave tough right that one one looks for in a shadow but of course let me just say on the other side a person doesn't have the right to expect someone that has qualities they themselves don't have so if i want someone with a lathe hope i too should try to have a late top if i don't have a laptop i mean i mean listen sometimes hashem you know gives you a break and you get somebody that has a late toe even though you don't have it and hopefully hopefully you'll learn from that person but realistically you only have a claim to the ribanus for a certain meda if you yourself try to develop that meter so if you want to know how my how can i be zoho to a shidduch with the quality of lifetoph so part of the answer would be by trying to have a lathe toe of myself i will be zoka to them but interestingly enough there's another perspective on the shidduch that i think is relevant as well and this almost moves in the opposite direction it's been pointed out a lot that avraham and sora actually represent opposite medos in some way avraham represents the quality of loving-kindness but too much loving-kindness can can ruin things like when you raise a kid without discipline etc so sarah had the sense of gevorah inner strength that reigned in abram's kindness and gave it structure and boundaries again sarah had the question too but but she had this meat of gabora yitzhak it is said was predominantly his mother's child yitzhak had this quality of inner strength and containment so the same way that avraham's needed to be balanced with saras gabura yitzhak's kivura needed to be balanced with sares hasset which suggests an i'm sorry with the rifkisk which suggests another dynamic in marriage now i wouldn't automatically say opposites attract when people are mamash opposites that actually doesn't work that well but it does mean in seeking a shidduch i seek someone that will bring out those aspects in me that are weaker and less pronounced so sarah became a bigger balance kasi through a connection to abraham and avram became a stronger more contained person to his connection to sarah rifka became more contained because of her connection to yitzhak and yitzhak became more compassionate because of his connection to rivka each brings out now they do say this there's a famous story again forgive me it's not it's not a thousand percent cenius but uh i think i think i'm allowed to say it uh isadora duncan was a famous uh ballet dancer and a bit of a flirtatious person and she was once sitting with george bernard shaw famous british author and wits kind of a curmudgeon and she said you know mr shaw with my beauty and your brains we could produce beautiful children and he said to her that may be true but what if the kids have your brains and my beauty you know we're going to be in a lot of trouble so sometimes it may happen sometimes it may happen that you know gabor and so maybe the uh you know each one will acquire the bad qualities of the other ones and that's a bad thing or as john f kennedy once described living in washington dc he says washington do you see people say oh it's so beautiful because it's a combination of north and south you know the goodness of the north and the south so kennedy said yeah that's right it is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm which means kind of the negative of each each thing instead of northern efficiency and southern charm you know the south is said to be a more charming slower type of environment so that's something to keep in mind as well but in theory each one brings out a quality of the other so for example the introvert who marries the extrovert may learn to be more connected to people and the extrovert may learn to be a little more thoughtful and reflective right that's kind of the ideal balance so we see these two different dynamics the dynamic of gesset and the dynamic of which you might call complementarity if there is such a word i don't know if there is in which each one brings out different aspects of the other that would otherwise uh be dormant and these are kind of some important lessons that we learn from the shidduch from the story of eliezer and eliezer and and rifka so once again uh you know the torah says lo tov lovato right the very beginning of creation it is not good for man to be alone as hello azer connecto let me make a helpmate to be opposite him that's also an aspect of the complimentary idea to be opposites in a sense but the torah asks takasha why is it not good for man to be alone after all this is before the sin before the asadas adam is in ganeden he has everything he possibly wants except there's one tree he can't eat from but everything else is his he doesn't have to be worried about laundry or cooking or anything else what is so bad to be alone what is defeat why is it not good for man to be alone so the tour says a very important idea he says when we talk about something being good the ultimate good is god now why is god good because god is only a giver god is not a taker because there's nothing you can really give to god so the ultimate goodness is when you live to give and to share so he says when man is in a state of aloneness he has an infinite capacity to take from the world but he does not yet have someone to give so listen to this translation when it says it is not good for man to be alone we can re-translate a little bit man cannot be in a state of goodness when he is alone because goodness means to be like hashem and hashem gives if i'm not a giver so i'm not in a state of goodness man cannot be in a state of goodness until he's able to give and that's why he needs a companion now granted it's true that even as a single person broke hashem there are many many opportunities for giving but if adam would have been alone he wouldn't have had that capacity to give which means in other words god created marriage to give us an opportunity to become godly by becoming givers rather than takers marriage was created to give us man to women and women to men the opportunity of becoming a giver again to quote john kennedy again the famous speech ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country ask not what your marriage can do for you ask what you can do for your marriage but i just want to end with one important dynamic so the purpose of marriage both for a man and a woman besides the creation of life which is of course a biggie in and of itself but even the childless marriage and i want to i want to point this out um obviously hashem you know there's a mitzvah to have children and one of the main reasons we get married is to have children but you need to understand that even a childless marriage is holy is sacred it is the relationship of husband and wife not only father and mother that is a godly relationship because it enables us to become more godly by developing the capacity to give without egotism and selfishness this is a very important point because sometimes people who are not blessed with children may have a feeling of you know this whole relationship is is a waste god forbid that is absolutely not not the case it is a holy sanctified relationship so if the purpose is giving there's a certain subtlety in this and it's a very important subtlety sometimes giving means a willingness to take from the other person because the greatest thing you can give to a person is the sense that you need them and you take from them it's very very important point because if you enter a relationship and this is a problem that men often have you know men want to give give give give give and they refuse to take and open up that actually can be very selfish giving can in fact be selfish giving can be taken because a person who says i'm going to be the giver is a person who is giving out of egotism and selfishness because his giving or whoever is feeding the ego that i'm great and i'm self-sufficient so one of the interesting psychological dynamics of being a giver is the willingness to be open and to take so taking giving is an interesting dynamic sometimes taking is in fact the greatest form of giving so be israez hashem those of us who are married we should we should learn these lessons and i'm talking to myself too rest assured and uh those who have not yet found their at least they know what to look for in bizrat hashem uh this year of tough shin paybay should be a year that all of those who are looking should find a zivak minashimayam with which they could build a life and they could bring make it a true dwelling place for the shrine so that good [Music] is