Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Rav Chaim Kanievsky זצ״ל and the Red Heifer

[Music] okay hi everybody uh thank you for coming and uh i know it's a cold night and uh appreciate the messier snapped uh in coming out um for me actually this makes me sentimental it reminds me of the new england winters of my youth so uh this does actually does not bother me uh but again i know uh a lot of people get used to the uh relatively milder winters of yushalayam and uh this is kind of a yo tsai minakwa so um sarah agra perkiavo says according to the suffering is the reward so you have a lot of extra reward tonight uh today's shir again is dedicated uh lazar nishmas bin yaman yasrel ben uh and uh again someone that we prayed for and cared about for quite a long time and he should have an aliyat nashamah and refuse leima is really just a general blessing we don't have any specific people today but certainly there are many people that are sick and many people that are suffering for war and other reasons and we hope that hashem will bring them a a yeshua i was asked to remind people that ibanez having a pesach seder i'll happen to be the one conducting it and if you go to the website you can get information about how to register quite a lot of things have happened since the last time we met just last week we had in a way they go in opposite directions we had perhaps the happiest day of the year poor him the great great joy of purim whether you kept it on thursday or kept it on friday or kept it on both days as people like to do purim is the epitome of joy and purim in its sanctity according to the arizona is even greater than yom kippur everyone knows the famous sport that yom kippur in the torah is called yom kippurim which if you read it slightly different yom kippurim a is almost as great as for him for him is even greater so on one hand i hope that all of you had the tremendous simcha particularly in trying to feel hashem's presence even in concealment and uh even in very very difficult and trying times as the jews faced in purim so too we face today although hashem even with all the sorrows it's not as bad as it was then but one should have trust and be taken in hashem and that should give a person joy side by side with the great great joy it was a tremendous tremendous loss for the jewish people on shushan purim on on friday which was not purim and benebrach we lost one of the great rabbis of our generation perhaps the greatest you know he can't rank people exactly but certainly up there uh rafhaim kanyevsky zakhar sadik vakadesh lovraka and i just want to give you i don't want to give the whole shirt devoted to this although he certainly in his cupboard one could give many many shirum in his memory but i just want to put it in perspective a little bit sometimes people say well you know he was 94 years old he lived a long life like you know okay i mean people have to go no one's going to live forever until takiyat made him and this is true with all of our golem his father-in-law revel yoshif actually lived well into his hundreds and we have other cadilla who either approach a hundred or go over a hundred or very close to a hundred so like what's the big morning over someone who leaves this world at a very advanced age and the short answer is we're not really mourning for for climb kanowski we're not mourning because he died at 94. uh he accomplished everything he needed to accomplish in this world but we die well we won't we mourn because we've lost something we've lost something very precious to us we lost the teacher we lost a guide we lost a parent right a person loses their father or mother even if they're very old you've lost something very very precious and we know that godola israel the great sadiq and protect the generation from many many services they bring rakhme into the world and when a great sadiq leaves the world we're a little more vulnerable than we were beforehand so we're not crying because of him we're crying because of us now i fully appreciate that probably everybody in this room did not know rahem kaneski well and i include myself i did not know him well occasionally i would we would bring students from more samaya to benebrak to get abraca but you know if you were lucky you know you gotta although he was very nice but you got a two-minute bracha so i i cannot say i ever had a conversation with rafael but somehow his presence in the world was was reassuring and just to know that such a greatness could exist in the world i mean i don't know if you know what his normal learning cedar was every day every single year every year he finished babylonian talmud jerusalem talmud tosepta which most people don't even learn rambam zohar and even tanakh as well this was every year now he didn't spend the whole day doing that because he wrote many many learned for him he answered hundreds of questions a day and he saw hundreds of people a day so he had to crowd that in so to speak on top of everything else that he was doing in addition he had a particular approach that if he was asked to be a son dick at a bris anywhere in erich israel he went so there were times that he was a sondik in mathula up north and then he would be in a lot in the south the same day his own father-in-law said you know you're crazy but more or less he said you know how can you do this and he said this is the myth that this is one mister that he wants to do so he was also a man not only of brilliance and amazing phenomenal torah knowledge but he was a person of great great kindness unfortunately because there were so many demands on him he was not able to give people all the time that by his nature he would have wanted to give them he was again a very very kind person a very big exotic a very humble person a very modest person he lived very simply you know he had no titles he was not a rosh hashima of anything he was not the head of a colonel he was not a rav of a show he literally had no position whatsoever other than the position of his own greatness he was his father was a great great guttal uh the stipeler he was called from horn of stifle which is in the ukraine actually and his um father-in-law was rebel yoshi the post-sake of our generation and his uncle was the khazonesh the great great hazard and the stipeler married the khazanesh's sister miriam in fact there's an interesting story there i mean i can tell you story of the story um that the niche himself made the shidduch between the steipler and his sister miriam uh after miriam met the steipler so uh the khasanesh asked his sister how did it go and she said i don't know you know he came to the house and as soon as he sat down he fell asleep he slept the whole time so the niche was pretty upset he called the stiper in and gave him a little muscle he said you know you know you're meeting somebody that you're thinking about marrying you don't just fall asleep on them that's not what you do so the stipeler really apologized he said this is what happened apparently the stifler had to take a 30-hour train trip to get to vilna start blue was way out somewhere somewhere and here's what stipler said the stop they figured i thought i would since i would be able to sleep a real long time on the train so i decided to stay up for 24 hours and learn without going to sleep because i figured i'd make it up on the train when i got on the train i was bumped up because the trains in europe less so in america the trains in europe have first class just like airlines so i was bumped up from coach to first class now the first class trains had very fancy upholstery on the seats and the sniper says i was afraid they were shotness i was afraid they were well in linen so i wouldn't sit on them so after being up for 24 hours i then had to stand up on the train for 30 hours because i wouldn't sit on a seat that may have had sharpness so by the time i got to vilna i had been up for more than 50 hours so my body just gave out so that was kind of the ureshemaim of the of the stiper i myself have a stiper story i was i married it to meet the stiper this is not reclaimed this is his father around 50 years ago and the stipler was deaf or almost deaf so you have to communicate to him by writing things on a piece of paper so i came to his house in bernie brock also very simple home something like 11 30 or a quarter to 12 at night and he was sitting at a desk filled with swarm and also filled with papers and notes and names whitler that people had given him but he was like drowsing he was like asleep so i i obviously wouldn't wake him i was just standing there waiting now because he was deaf he spoke very loudly you sometimes felt he was shouting at you although he wasn't so all of a sudden he wakes up with a start and he starts yelling at me i thought why do people bring me all of these papers why don't they you know why don't they pray to hashem why do they come to me i'm a person they should go to akadeshwaraku and then he started saying i'm an old man i'm going to die soon i just want to learn in peace people come to me with all of this and that i can't help them only hashem can help them they turn to watch them so like he's like he's asking me these questions so i'm shrugging my shoulders and then i give him my paper here here's my you know so it was very scary on the other hand you know once he had the paper he was actually very nice and you know i mean he was still yelling because he talked very loud but but i'll tell you another interesting difference between rafael and his father that's very very fascinating the stipeler was such a humble person that if somebody showed him honor in any way he literally kind of was repulsed by it so you know spartan for example they love they love to kiss the hand of the rabbi the so the spartan would come and kiss the stifler's hand he would like pull away it really just hurt him so much because of his humility rafhaim had a different sheet on this rafchayam also hated covert hated on her but he had this idea that if it makes people happy to show this honor they want to show it so he said i'll take it i'll take the cove out as a hesset to the people who want to show the target that's an interesting perspective it did not come from arrogance god forbid it came from the desire to give people something that they'd like to do you know an example would be a gift sometimes you know let's assume that you have a cheetah which is which is a legitimate approach that you don't take gifts this is based on a possible michelin he who hates gifts will live right don't take matanos somebody gives you a gift you know if you were to simply say to them well i don't take gifts you know you might be exotic you know but you're hurting them because they went to the effort to try to give you a gift so part of giving to a person is being willing to take when they're offering you something that's also by the way that's a very big issue it's not our topic tonight that's a very big you sowed in marriage on one end we say marriage is about giving okay but you know part of giving is to be willing to take what the other person is offering because if you kind of enter a marriage with the idea i give i give i give i give and i never take from the other person you're depriving the greatest gift you can give to that other person the gift that they matter that they make a difference that what they do is significant so learning to give actually means learning to take taking graciously is an aspect of giving it's an aspect of kindness it's an aspect of it that you value what the other person is doing for you sir if hayem had that kashmir khaiyan would allow people to honor him in different ways because he felt that that would make them good now it's interesting as i say he was never a teacher he was never a rebbe he was never a reshashiva his career was his own learning his writings for him his answering questions for thousands of people so he told a story about himself that he was actually a teacher only one day in his life that shortly after he was married he was teaching high school students and because he's kind of a very gentle person you know he he could not impose any discipline on the kids so kids would wander out to go to the bathroom for 45 minutes actually i i remember that myself as a kid i would sometimes just leave the classroom and not come back for a while the funny thing was i met plenty of other kids from other classes who are doing the same thing you know so whatever it was so at some point uh rafhaim said he found himself with only one boy in the class they like been so then he looks at the boy and the boy looks at him and he says to the boy do you need to go to the bathroom and the boy said yeah so so by the middle of the class he didn't have a single student in the class so he so you know he learned by himself for the rest of the class he figured that classroom teaching was not going to be his forte but again that came from you know maybe he was too kind you know a teacher parent sometimes has to be a little tough and he didn't really have a toughness in his relationship with with with people so it's that you know you didn't know him very well i didn't know him very well but he was someone very very special very very saintly and we're very impoverished and there really is uh no one like him hashem we have great rabbis we have great scholars and hashem promised israel there will always be torah teachers right that's god's promise we will not have a jewish people without great teachers of torah but you know the generations go down and you know in a sense he's kind of the end of of that era in which there's no one really that can fully fully replace him on the other end too it's a little scary you know in 19 i think it was 1940 maybe 41 but i think it was 1940 shortly after the nazi invasion of poland there were three might be 1941 i have to really check but there were three great great great rabbis who died within less than a year of each other you had refrain moser grazinski who really was the god of hador you had rav barak berlibovic you have shimon shkap who were the two greatest russians in europe and they all died the same year so the godzilla and the the remaining guitar said that unfortunately they thought that was a very bad sign because you no longer had those sardican that protected the generation and that makes us vulnerable to all sorts of sorrows so the world is in a dangerous situation i mean obviously with russia and the ukraine and again i don't want to talk about this so much but uh not only are the the ukrainians of course are suffering and of course the jews in the ukraine we have special concern for um but this is a type of volatile situation at this point putin seems to have abandoned although generally he was a very calculating rational person somehow there seems to be a spirit of insanity that has grabbed him and the nature of this conflict is that the more he invests in it the less he is able to disengage he can't just say now okay we'll just end it now because then people say well what have you been what have you been doing for three weeks so this is the classic scenario of throwing good money after bad except this is good lives after people have already been killed that is the more he keeps us up the less he will be able to get out of this unless he accomplishes something that potentially could be extremely destructive this could spin out of control god forbid god forbid into any even nuclear war and when we lose the sadiq that protect the generation we are in a dangerous situation so what do we do so basically here is the idea i'm going to give you a make made-up number it really is just a made-up number when you have a righteous person in the world he brings holiness to the world so let's imagine that rafael canevsky brought this is a ridiculous number brought 10 billion tons of holiness into the world so at this point the world has a deficit of 10 billion tons of holiness that's a big deficit now none of us can approach even a small percentage of that but if all of us does a little bit more so right we learn a little bit more torah do more mitzvahs a little bit more more so we're filling the void that was created by the death of a great sonic and that's the challenge when a great sadiq leaves the world we have to step up to the plate not in the sense that any one of us can make up the loss but we add something and if enough people add something then you've you know maybe not completely made it up for sure not but at least we've contributed so that is why this is an occasion for nephesh and for suva and for asking ourselves what can we do to be better jews to be better human beings to sanctify the name of god and that would be uh that would be a big legacy if hayem's legacy would cause all of us to reflect on our lives that would be a tremendous contribution so he zikro barak may's memory uh be a blessing his robinson was also a very very special woman they i think there's an article biography of her uh she was the daughter of rabbi yoshi the oldest daughter of rebel yoshi and her grandfather was the famous sadiq of yushalayim ravariya levin who was also there's a books about revival of that one could read about his righteousness his kindness you kind of have a mizug a combination of both phenomenal greatness and torah tremendous kindness and love for israel that's a that's a very very powerful powerful combination right so these are just some reflections that we can think about this is life we often juxtapose the happy and the sad the bitter and the sweet this is the nature of life this is the nature of the torah life that's mama shanpurim happiest day of the year shushanpuri which is our purim actually we have this situation of losing a great great great sunday but as i say we're not sad for him but we're very very sad sad for us okay so what i want to talk about today uh is that this shabbos so it's not going to be directly on the parsha but it'll be on the mafia uh the made it that in the month of adar we have or sometimes starting with shabbos before adar depending we have four special torah readings and these are called the four parshiots now the parsha of the week is read as always but then the master the extra torah reading we have four for the four weeks of adar two of them are before purim which you already have and two of them are after purim and they take us all the way to the month of nisan uh the four partios you're familiar with uh there's the first one is the parsha of the makhsa sashekal the have shekel called parsha skullen and the second one is the shabbos before purim which is parashat sachar remembering the evil of amalek so shkalim and zakhar we've already read and i think we talked about them now the third one is parshas para it deals with the red heifer and the fourth one which is the shabbos before rosh chrodesh nissan or if rosh nissan is on shabbos and that shabbos is parsha sachodesh which is from bow and that deals with the laws of pesach and the laws of the corbyn pesach now why are these partios put where they're put well shkolim which is the half shekel that we give towards the core bonus of the temple the fiscal year of the temple began in nissan so the shkolin began to be collected for the corbanos adar so rashford is when we made the announcement for the skull and when there was a basal mikhtash so we have that zakhar is before purim because since haman comes from amalek we talk about the downfall and destruction of amalek okay that's fine what about parshas para so parshas para as i will explain in more detail in a few minutes uh is a preliminary in order to bring the corbin peso you cannot bring the corbin pesach unless you are in a state of purity and if you have been in contact with a dead body you are tami and you cannot bring the carbon pesach so how do you get tahor you get tar by being sprinkled with the ashes of the red heifer again i'll elaborate on this in a few moments so para belongs here because para is in effect a preliminary ritual to bring the korban pesach and chodesh are the laws of the corbyn pesach itself right so there are logical reasons for these four special parshiots interestingly enough even though we don't really celebrate these four shabbatot any different maybe zelka because it's right before purim possibly but you know you don't find somebody making a special party of because it's shabbat shkalim or a special party because of parches para you know the only thing we do is we read the extra master but in points of fact in the time of the beshon and earlier these were very very festive events they were festive special chabasos that we don't really celebrate today now there are special prayers for these four chabasos that you can actually find in a sitter even the art school center has them they're called yots rose special poetic compositions that were put into the dominant but very very few people even say them today uh some see them say them and yekis say them because yucky's the german jews say everything in the in the sitter page one to fifteen hundred you know if it's in the sitter they will say it one way one way or the other but most ashkenazic jews well svardhan don't say it at all because the outros are only in the sahasranas and most ashkenazic jews don't say them anyway now interesting enough i do remember growing up just in young israel that we in fact did say yo tros but uh in recent years it seems to have gone out of vogue although some key votes are trying to reinstitute them but what was interesting is that apparently these poetic compositions in the golden age of khazanas khazonim had special negonium for them and i read i was very surprised i was not aware of this i just read this a few days ago that there were khazanim that made a point of composing a new tune for these yotzeros every single year that's how significant it was like the imam which made a very big deal so the point is that in a way our observance of the shabbatot has become impoverished and diminished but they do still have great importance so here let me share with you a thought of rabb sadhuk of lublin prosecutor leblanc says pierce tells us there are three negative forces that take a person out of the world that destroy a person spiritually this is a statement of rabbi al-azhar kapoor kinna is jealousy taiva is hedonistic lust for sensual pleasure and cove out is the need for galore being glorified self-advertisement ego gratification diver arrogance they take a person out of the world they destroy a person kin a type of recovery one cannot have a relationship with god if they are consumed by kina taiva kawait our job i mean all of us have some measure of these things our job is to diminish them as much as we can because they are like barriers they are like walls that block our connection to our the rambam uses two metaphors but both metaphors are true one is the metaphor of mujitsa they are like a wall of separation and the other is the metaphor of illness they are like a sickness of the soul that has to be healed so you can either use the illness metaphor or you can use the majitsa metaphor but in all cases it blocks a person from being connected to god now here's what sudoku says pesach is coming pesach is the holiday of freedom of liberation but before you can be liberated you need to try to eradicate the kin or the title of the cupboard which is the junk and the poison within us so here's rav sadok's take parsha skullen helps us deal with jealousy parsha zakhar helps us deal with hedonistic lust and parashas para helps us deal with kavat and by going through the process of kinah taiva kavod we are then ready for khodesh which in a play on the words is his renewal so how do we get to renewal by working on kinah on so this is a beautiful perspective on the four partios that in some way it is a road map how to achieve the freedom and liberation that pesach is offering us because pesach is not just a commemoration of the historical event of yet smithsonian again we'll be talking about this as we approach pesach but it also is a re-experiencing of hashem giving us liberation from all that enslaves us so very quickly for skull and zakar because i really want to talk about para shkalim helps us overcome jealousy because you'll remember the idea we talked about this that the half shekel is not complete unless you join it with another shekel that reminds me that i am dependent on other people i need to be connected to other people and that also reminds me that other people need me that's just as i need others others need me and when i have a sense that i'm needed and i count and i matter i'm no longer jealous because i recognize that i have my role just as they have their own and therefore what am i jealous of somebody's richer than me somebody's smarter than me but i'm needed i am needed in hashem's plan and that allows me to overcome jealousy okay that's how shkulim is connected to overcoming jealousy by fostering a sense of interdependence now amalek we talked about i think last week the root of amalek inside of us at least one of the roots is the coldness of the heart in avodah hashem i share karaka they made you cold so even if a person keeps the mitzvot if they do it without enthusiasm if they do it without excitement if they do it without passion there is a little bit of amalek in them and the amalek inside of us empowers the amalek outside of us again i refer you to last week's share where we talked about this at greater length but here's rav sadok's twist what generates the coldness of the spirit for spiritual matters it is an over attachment to the material world when you're attached to money to whatever it would be uh to food to sex to to to power your heart is no longer going to be sensitive to spirituality and the reason is because material pleasures have an instant gratification aspect spiritual pleasures require work and effort and once you become habituated to the superficial the same way a person who surfs the internet cannot always sit down and read shakespeare or william faulkner because you have to concentrate for that and they're used to the instant gratification of getting quicky answers to everything so too when you're over shakua shakua invested in the physical your heart will not be receptive now this is a difficult balance because judaism is not aesthetic we're not telling people to renounce pleasure a certain amount of pleasure is is very good it's a way of giving thanks to hashem it gives a person simcha it gives them serenity of spirits okay so we're not telling people you know live on bread and water and sleep on a bed of nails and wear a hair shirt that may be a different religious tradition that's not the tradition of judaism but it's also true that if you let your possessions rule over you instead of you ruling over your possessions the heart will be cold in avodah sasha so therefore one of the ways we eradicate our molec is working on an over indulgence of taiva right so you see shkolim is connected to jealousy zakhar remember our molecule is connected to taiva but we now come to para duma which is maybe the most interesting of all para dumas connected to working uncovered on arrogance on gaiva on pride on ego what's the connection between the red heifer and arrogance pride ego so here's the thing let's go over the ritual a little bit uh what is the paradigm you've got to find a red heifer by the way red i always thought for when i was a kid i always thought this was like a fire engine red and i said gee that's pretty hard to find there are no cows as far as i know that are that color in truth the color of paraguma is not an uncommon color at all it is the orange brown that many cows have many cows are orange brown that's a standard color the reason why the paradigm is rare is not because the color is rare but because it has to be a hundred percent you know that you're only allowed up to one black air meaning if there are two black hairs uh in the paradigma it is no longer kosher so that actually means somebody has to sit with a magnifying glass and go over every single inch a quarter inch of this animal to determine if it's completely red that's why it's rare and that's why it costs a lot of money but it is important to know just for information that the color itself is not an uncommon color for cows right the orange brown is a common thing in addition there's all sorts of rules about a paradigma uh if it had done any work at all uh had a yoke on it or the like or pulled a trap or pulled a plow or even if something like i mean this is quite amazing a paradigma can become puzzle very inadvertently let's assume i leaned my weight on it meaning i was trying to support my balance and i just leaned on the paradigma that's puzzle because that's like a yoke all right i put my briefcase on it i put uh my lunch with my lunch bag box on it right so the para duma had to be guarded very very carefully in addition uh if it cohabited so it's female para is female uh but if it has cohabitation with uh with a bull that also makes it puzzle so there's many many laws about the paradigm okay assuming when there was a base of mikdash you had the paradium meaning you meaning the kohanim had the paradium so they would checked it they would burn it into ashes and the ashes would be mixed with spring water spring water and whenever anybody ever got tummy by contacting the dead they had to be sprinkled with a mixture of the water and the ashes twice the third day i mean let's assume that they became tame on sunday so the third day sunday monday would be tuesday and the seventh day well actually that's a bad example because seven days shabbos we don't sprinkle on shabbos but it would be sunday would be the eighth day but this is the third and the seventh day of chuma and under those circumstances they could then go to the mikvah they would have to go to the mikveh as well and then at night they would be ritually pure okay so you got it if i go into a cemetery let's make it monday i go into a cemetery on monday i am ritually tame i must be sprinkled with the ashes and water of the para aduma on wednesday and on sunday right that's the seventh day i then go to the mikvah sunday afternoon after the second sprinkling i am ritually pure sunday night and i could go to the base of mikdash and i can bring corbanos that's how para duma works if you're if you were not sprinkled with the ashes of the para duma even if you went to the mikvah you are tama mace forever this is unlike other forms of tuma you know a nida also has a form of tuma but that's just removed by going to the mikvah the only tuma that requires sprinkling with the ashes of the para duma is tumas mace the tumor that you contract by contact with the corpse other types of tumor do not require that thing now we'll leave for another time the logistics i mean there are hundreds of thousands of jews that needed to become purified and how can this stuff last according to our tradition there have only been nine para adumas that have been used from the time of moshe rabeda nine and the tenth one is uh will be saved from mashiach and the light so how can you have uh parajuma that could last so long meaning that would actually mean a typical paradigma may have lasted hundreds of years how could that even be possible i saw obviously there's a certain element of miracle uh that's that's here okay but be it as it may para douma is an indispensable element to be purified in fact this is the halachic reasons why many people perhaps most of the religious world not all do not go on the temple mount bismarck because you are not allowed to enter the temple mount if you are in a state of ritual impurity and if any of us have ever been in a cemetery we are in a state of ritual impurity and we don't have the para aduma to purify us now those who allow going to the temple mount agree except they basically claim that the outer perimeters of what is called the temple mount are not really part of the temple complex meaning there's not a much locus in principle here there's simply a mukhlokas about how confident are you in identifying boundaries meaning everybody admits that a person that is a tameth who has not been purified by paraduma cannot enter the area that is considered to be the temple courtyard that is clear and everybody admits that they are allowed to enter the part of the temple mount that's not within the temple courtyard so there's no makh lokas what the underlying halachos are but the much locus is how willing are you to demarcate precise boundaries so in the kharadi world the the overall and the government agrees with kharadim this is a rare a case where the government agrees with the kharadi world for although for different reasons don't go with the harabayats at all don't go because you're walking on a minefield and you know you wouldn't tell a person oh you can walk here as long as you uh keep one inch away from that thing you know i'd rather not take a chance uh some in that that's healing me will take the position that we're we're confident enough to identify right so it's not really there are political repercussions in the makalokas to be sure but this is not really a mach lokas in halakhic principle it's really a mach lokas regarding the confidence you have in identifying boundaries okay so again maybe another time we can give a longer talk about this and but and and again until we have paradigma we're not going to be able to go okay now para duma is described in the torah as the par excellence means a mitzvah whose reason is incomprehensible to us that doesn't mean it doesn't have a reason god may have reasons but we don't get it we don't know what the reason is we don't know uh why para duma makes sense but the meforshim explained that it's not simply it doesn't make sense like you know why a red cow etc maybe that doesn't make sense to us but what's more problematical is there is a built-in contradiction in the laws of paradigm and that is para aduma purifies those who are coming as we've described but you know there's a side effect all the people who handle the ashes themselves become impure ritually impure so the paradox of para duma is how could it be that the same vehicle that brings purity to the world is a cause for impurity now i just want to address a little question that people might have and just to show that it's why it's not a question and that is how can you ever get all the jewish people pure let's say for pesach because you're always going to have somebody holding the bag i mean here's the thing let's assume i'm a cohen right so you come to me your tame i sprinkle you with the ashes of the para juma so you're pure now assuming it's the second one and you went to the mixer but i'm now tummy i'm tummy so i got to get somebody to sprinkle me with the ashes of paranduma so then i become pure but then he becomes impure so at some points there'll be one person left over who's going to be tummy how does he become pure he can't go to the mix i mean going to the mix was not enough right so this is a problem of infinite regression or whatever you want to call it in which there seems to be no way to get everybody tar but there's a mistake here and let me explain what the mistake is the mistake is that the person who becomes tame by handling the ashes of para aduma doesn't need to be sprinkled with the ashes of para duma because the need to be sprinkled with the ashes of para duma is only if you became tame because of contact with the dead but if i become tame because of contact with the ashes of para duma all i have to do is go to the mikvah and i'll be tar so basically eric pesach after i have purified the last tommy jew all i got to do is jump into the mikvah and i'm going to be tar in other words the problem of infinite uh regression or whatever is only is presupposing the mistaken idea that every person who comes in contact with the paradigm and needs to be sprinkled with the ashes of the paratuma that is absolutely not true and again i i'm making this point because i think uh people make a mistake with it the requirement of the ashes of para duma is only for the person who was in contact with the dead not for the person who's in contact with the par regime okay so the problem of para duma is not simply that so many of the details are inexplicable although that's true but because it has a built-in contradiction interestingly enough uh and this is a famous phrase it purifies those who are impure um and it contaminates those who are pure interestingly enough i remember many many years ago my own rosh yeshiva applied rudiments to chronological actually applied this saying to ncsy ncsy is a wonderful wonderful youth organization that primarily caters to kids from non-religious homes most of whom are in public schools and over the years it's brought numerous numerous kids to uh the life of torah and mitzvot it's a wonderful organization in fact i uh in the 80s i was actually very very heavily involved locally in baltimore uh in ncsy with uh you may some of you might know where you said low and brown uh the corona library who who headed ncsy with uh the atlantic seaboard region with great great devotion for many many years an amazing amazing person he and his rebecca both of whom are no longer with us we're just a phenomenal team of tremendous hashpa but the problem with ncsy though is it's a co-ed organization not everybody is dressed cenius whatever it would be so as a result a lot of the yeshivas don't like their yeshiva students participating in ncsy activities and it's a difficult question because on one hand if you're not going to have you know religious kids be there as leaders and as teachers then how are you going to help the non-religious kids right but on the other hand it may be bad for their development so my rosh yeshiva encapsulated it very well he said he considered ncsy to be a para duma he said it purifies the impure that all those who are far from torah who come to ncsy will become elevated and sanctified but he's afraid that it might contaminate the pure in terms of taking people who are from so as a result his compromise was that married people could come and participate they would come with their wives etc and that way you know things wouldn't get out of hands but he did not like uh single boys to participate in ncsy right so ncsy is paradium okay but be this with me even though the para duma is called a choke par excellence the sephore casitas try to give a little bit of an explanation for it and they say the following let us look at the origin of death why did death come into the world well we know that death came into the world because adam and chava rebelled against god by eating the fruit that they were told not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge the ethadas who enticed them or at least who enticed their entire adam who enticed to eat from the eight sadas of course it is the narcish what was the narcissist claim sir if sadaq says very strikingly that the nakhisha's appeal to hava was the appeal of the ego the nakhosh said the day that you eat from this fruit vahism kelo kim you will be like god this is a godfruit a god pill yode tovara to truly understand the nature of good and evil whatever that means imagine somebody offered you a pill and said take this pill and you will be god you will be godlike that's a hard offer to refuse god-like in terms of infinite understanding so rav sadok says the way the nakash enticed hava was not through color taste smell it was through an appeal to covert and glory and ego and self-advertisement now in truth we are god-like we are made in the image of god god gave us intelligence autonomy creativity we can create and we can destroy we have many attributes of god but when we seek to surmount the unbridgeable chasm between the creator and the created we are setting ourselves up for destruction in many ways that's the story of the tower of babel and that is why death came into the world death came into the world as the ultimate reminder that as great as man is man can never be god so it's not so much that death is a punishment but death is a reminder that we are not god with all of the power that we have in this world so death comes into the world and death also equals expulsion from ghanaidhan death equals expulsion from ganeshan came into the world because of covet ego arrogance pride so here is the thing if death comes into the world because of covet ego arrogance pride how do we become liberated from the impurity of death by humility submission self-abnegation and that is why the purification ritual from too much met involves connection to ashes now this is not explaining why red etc but the general idea ashes are a symbol of humility when avram is pleading to hashem to save saddam and avraham is declaring i'm unworthy what is his language all for affair i am dirt i am ashes so death came into the world because of arrogance i become liberated from death with humility submission connecting to ashes and when i become liberated from death i gain readmission into the garden of eden which is of course the base amiktas because you understand the primary consequence of being tummy a tummy person can go to show a tummy person keep shabbos the primary restriction of a person who's tame is he can't enter the base of miknish but you see it's connected because the base on mikdash is the ghanaian of earth and the same way arrogance created death and resulted in the explosion from the garden of eden every time i come in contact with death i reenact the expulsion from ghanaian and how do i gain admission by rectifying the arrogance ashes so ashes again it's very reminiscent of the idea now people know this as a greek myth but it's interesting that there is a mattress uh which may which we believe may have been earlier than this you know the greek myth of the phoenix bird the phoenix bird is a bird that is burnt into ashes but it rises again from the ashes now in truth there's a mattress that talks about the netspurt in exactly the same way the metaphor of the dead of the destroyed bird rising from the ashes has two different meanings to it and both of them are valid one is that even though we suffer even though we've been burnt even though we've been decimated god will give us a revival from our ashes the ashes of the holocaust right for example we will come back from the ashes that's one idea but there's another idea it's a different idea that says by the humility of destroying my ego i actually become recreated in other words by destroying my selfishness destroying my arrogance destroying my egotism even though it seems that i'm denying my essential identity that actually affirms and creates your essential identity right the coming from the ashes you get reborn so now let's try to examine rav sodhak's basic point rav sadhuk said para aduma is a tikkun for covered right shkalim is a tikkun for kenna zakhar is a tikkun for taiva a coldness of the heart para duma reminds me that i get purified from death only when i rectify the arrogance that caused death by connecting to the ashes and then therefore this is will be a tickle for the cove out which prevents me from connecting to god because i'm too invested in my ego okay so so this makes sense how the three of the four parshiots deal with kinah taiva kavod leading us to the fourth parasha which is his khadjut but now one final point what about the paradox that says the ashes make me pure but all the people that handle the ashes become tummy how do you explain that one see here's what this farm is saying just like a physicist will tell you there is matter and anti-matter so too two opposites can exist in the spiritual world even though they're fundamentally almost inconsistent i'm going to make two statements about covet statement one covet looking for honor thinking about yourself egotism is the most destructive force there is and a person who is filled with covet will not be able to connect to god statement number one statement number two having a sense of covet is the most important thing that you need in your relationship with god just like there is good cholesterol and bad cholesterol right hdl ldl there is good coverage and there is bad coverage on one hand if my cove out is arrogant looking down at people disparaging people thinking i'm great that is a destructive negative force that god despises the gemara insight that says hashem says about the baalgiva he and i cannot live in the same world this world is too small hashem says for me and him to coexist and hashem says i'm going to leave the balgaiver pushes hashem out of the world on the other hand if i truly believe i'm nothing if i truly believe i'm worthless then why should i do mitzvahs why should i dive and why should i learn whatever i do is doesn't count i'm nothing and that's what the bombing must have called the framies that's the eight sahara that comes in the guise of righteousness oh god is so great and i'm so insignificant no you have to know that god gave you greatness god gave you potential god gave you a mission god and if hashem gave us all a mission it would be perverse for him not to give us the tools to accomplish that mission so here is what the double-edged message of the ashes of para juma on one hand humility submission purifies you and brings you closer to god but if that humility is taken in the wrong direction and it turns into a lack of self-esteem a lack of recognizing my strengths a lack of recognizing my ability to do good in the world it's going to make you impure so the same type of modality that can bring you to the highest levels of spirituality and kedusha can destroy you if taken in the wrong direction and that's the meaning of the paradox you need kavod you need to know and our children need to know that they matter their aveda's importance hashem treasures their mitzvos their might from told him they're learning their abbas israel there is nothing that we do that is so unimportant that our college baruch who doesn't treasure it so you have to have that self-esteem right the bali muster say a person who doesn't know their faults is a foolish person you think you're perfect you're an idiot but if a person doesn't know their greatness they are a tragic person because they will never become the person they could have been and after 120 years hashem will show them show us realize all of us what we could have done with our lives and what we didn't do with our lives and that is the ultimate tragedy in fact some say that's even the definition of ghana definition of hell is hashem shows us all what we could have been and then we realized it again this is one once again something we can think about with the death of a great sonic and a great gunner like refrain kanowski and indeed i have a little story about refrain from his uncle when the khasinich died there was a bakla in the panavic yeshiva who was crying and sobbing and the great rav destler who was the mashiki achar panovich the author of mr melio one of the great great bali musser and thinkers went over to the boy at the lavaya of the khasinesh and said to the boy why are you crying over the great gaon and sadik who's buried in the ground he then pointed to the boy why don't you cry over the great gold and the sudden that's buried in you because in you there's also a gun on its side the gun and the sudden that's buried in the ground became the goan and the static that he could have become what about you what about us that's the challenge and that's why we need covered and that's why para duma embraces the paradox and this of course is supported by the very famous statement of rabbunima prashithra another great hasidic rabbi i know you've all heard this you have to have two ideas in your pockets at all times it's not a madrid one is anokia forever i am a nobody and the other is because of me god made the whole universe god made many dogs and cats and cows and goats but only made one man and one woman and the mishna says so that every person can say the world was made for me now that's not going to lead to arrogance because the same way the world would have been made for me the world was made for you so that's not a basis for me to look down at anybody but it does remind a person how significant they are right so this is kind of the three parshiots and how it connects to kinotaiva and coven i just end with one very quicky uh quick thought uh there was another great hasidic rebbe the opterov who was known as the ohaev israel both because he was a lover of israel and because he named his savior for that reason owed israel and he said the ultimate understanding of the para duma is abbas israel what's the connection between paradium and abbas israel because here is the thing given the fact that the cohen who is purifying his fellow jew becomes tame and for a calling to become tame is an inconvenience yeah he can become tar but you know he has to leave the temple et cetera so the after rev said instead of looking at it as a contradiction how can it purify and make him tummy it works in a complementary way if i'm willing to inconvenience myself for a fellow jew that brings purity to the world the purity is because it makes me tummy i'm willing to sacrifice to help you hashem says that brings purity into the world so it's fascinating so instead of saying it's a contradiction he says no precisely because it makes you tame that's why it makes the other person taller because this is how purity comes into the world so hashem may we take these lessons to heart and think about this when we read about the enigma of the paradigm thank you [Music] here