Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Reuniting with Your Soul in Elul

[Music] good to see you all and thank you for coming uh today's share is the shama of ruvain pinchas ben khayim yakov and uh binyamin israel ben the the young man that we prayed for for so long and uh all of the nisham should have an again they should have refused layman but charcoal israel again we're not totally out of the woods with coba yet it seems to come back and forth and different variants and all of those that are sick should get better and those who are not sick should remain healthy and then we have a special mention of sponsorship in honor of the ravenol that the bonnet does by mark questal we thank you for that and then i have to make a little bit of a commercial you know ibanez an organization that's devoted not only to the teaching of torah but also to loving-kindness a charity helping people in different ways and they are beginning a campaign to collect contributions to distribute to families during the hagim you know sometimes they'll there's no either saying such verses i need it's hard to be a jew another emotion didn't like that saying because we should look at judaism as a pleasure but sometimes financially from purely financial standpoint itaka is a little share to be a yidd especially around the hagim which have a lot of different expenses so one of the good things ibn does is to collect money for families that might be struggling particularly during the hagim and a link to contribute can be found in the description box uh on the youtube uh video that will be will be posted so biased hashem what do you teach us we say it in the sitter ut repentance uh prayer and charity are the three most powerful factors that help cancel or know the difficult decrees that sometimes come down minutiae mayhem so this is a chance certainly uh to do uh uh to do stata i'm sure all of you are doing your uh chewbacca today's parsha is really a hard one to pick because it actually has more mixed votes than any parsha in the entire torah there are close to 70 minutes votes in parashat's kisa i think considering that there's only 613 in the whole torah this is a very very high proportion of the mitzvoth so like what do you pick every mitzvah is unlimited so i'm going to pick a few things in the very beginning of the parsha and i'm going to go in reverse order the main thing i want to talk about is the very very problematical mitzvah of aisha chifatoa the woman who is a captive in time of war very very difficult in fact people have lost their job trying to talk about it in recent years i think there was a rava that saw the idf who just gave like a theoretical sheer of ancient chipotle he was not advocating it to be carried out but the press got hold of it i think he had to resign because people were arguing he was advocating rape in time of war so we're going to talk about that a little bit but then i want to go backwards and because because that's that'll be my main thing but i want to talk about something that comes after that just very very briefly there is a very very interesting discussion of the so-called rebellious son the ben so rare um and it seems to be quite amazing he does not listen to his father and mother the tory doesn't say what he did we'll talk about that and he has brought his parents bring him to the sanhedrin and they say our child is rebellious and not only that but he's also a glutton so it says he is stoned and all of israel should listen and see and learn not to engage in this type of behavior now this is a very very unusual mitzvah from many many perspectives according to the rabbinic tradition what did the kid do so the kid took some meats and some wine from his parents without permission so essentially at worst he's guilty of theft theft is not a capital offense now maybe in afghanistan with the taliban it will be or at least you'll lose your hands but traditionally according to halacha that was not the thing you don't get killed for stealing moreover the ben sober umora according to hazal is not even bar mitzvah he's only 12 years old he's a certain certain point between child and man so he's a katan number one number two all he did was steal and number three the oddity of his parents bringing him to a court to be killed not too many parents i think would would do that so hazal's interpretation is although this doesn't answer all of the questions is that the ben sore umora is not killed because of what he actually did but he's killed as a way of preventing the evil that would eventually emerge there was a concept that if he shows this type of greed eventually he will become a highway robber and eventually he will murder and therefore the concept is yamut zakai let him die as a person who's comparatively righteous and innocent rather than wait until he commits the actual sins this is what is called in the mishnah nidon al-sham he is judged not on the basis of what he did but on the basis of the torah's prediction of course god predicts with perfect accuracy we would not be allowed to do that we could not you know disable a person because of what he will do because we never know but god you know knows and god said he don't know shame so far so the point i want to bring out is a different point but i just want to bring bring out a famous question of the martial which is a very good question that the ben sower omora is nidon al shame sofo and yet we find if you remember and this is read on the first day of rosh hashanah when ishmael is dying of thirst because hagar has no water to give him until god re opens her eyes and she sees a well of water which was always there but he didn't see it that's also a monster thought the world is filled with god's blessings but sometimes we're too blind but be it as it may have a madrish and rashid brings this that the malachim in heaven we're saying let him die his descendants are going to persecute the jewish people and that khalisbaraku said that's in the future and i judge people the way they are now i don't look at what they're going to do in the future this is the way he is so the marshal says that asha husham which is the phrase that means we look at you the way you are now seems to be a direct contradiction to the idea of nidon al shame sofa so when does hakarisparco apply the idea of looking at your future damage and when does it say yeah whatever you're going to be later that doesn't count right now you're a sadiq at least comparatively righteous and we're not going to punish you actually marshall points out that there is a fundamental contradiction in these two ideas and one of the answers he suggests and again that's not so clear that we fully understand this is there's a difference between an atid which involves your descendants and in that tid that involves you in the case of ishmael ismail himself after that point really didn't do anything bad to yitzhak it was the future zara that he would have so hashem is not going to destroy you because of what your zera will do in the future mashiaching the ben sore umora himself is the one that's going to do the rishis okay that's one answer but the point that i want to bring out is that the gemara in sanhedrin actually has a mandiamar there never was such a case it never happened it is a theoretical halacha that was never implemented of course what's interesting is there's another opinion that says oh for sure it happened and i was there and i sat on his grave now it's very difficult to understand that maclaugus normally when you have a machlokis and we actually take the position both opinions are valid so if one says kosher one says traif there are good arguments on both sides and from hashem standpoint all of them are valid now that could only be true when you have a machlokis in when you have a maklocus about something that happens a historical fact it's impossible for both opinions to be right either it never happened or it did happen how is it shy of to apply the rule a liu vielu d'ivre elo kim kai okay i'll leave that again i'm bringing up a lot of questions just things to think about but one of the reasons why it could never happen is that the gemara has a huge list of text hyper technicalities that have to be met and you know those hyper technicalities are never going to be met two examples the gemara says that the father and mother must have the same voice their voice must sound exactly the same and if that's not the case the child cannot be condemned now another halacha which is really not unusual is that there's a gizera sarcasov that the parents cannot be deaf they have to be hearing now that that itself i mean most i mean most of the time their parents will not be deaf so that's not an unusual thing but these are two interesting halachas that number one the father and mother must have the same voice and number two they have to be hearing people although as i say that that itself is not an unusual requirement but why would that be so why would that be part and parcel of the technicalities of ben so rare memorial so i'll share with you a thought that i actually once heard on allow flying back uh from uh uh i think it was flying to america and uh you know you have the different uh stations they have and one of them is a torah station or the like and i heard a nice torah that actually tried to explain uh this and it's you know it's a very short for it but it's a it's a nice thought and that is then so um is looking at this kid and saying this kid is bad seed this kid is destined for bad there's no redeemable quality get rid of him before he does stuff that's a lot worse right that's what he's saying so what's ghazala teaching us is you can only condemn a child you can only write off a child number one if father and mother are giving him a consistent message so allegorically the statement that father and mother must speak with the same voice although it literally means they sound the same but speaking at a unified voice actually or can also mean l p drush that they impart the same value system there is not inconsistency in what the parents are teaching they're on the same page now obviously father and mother may have different parenting styles that's exactly the point you know the normal stereotype is father is the disciplinarian and mother is the one that you know is more gentle but sometimes it's reversed right sometimes dad is soft that mother is tough whatever it would be that's a matter of tactics but in terms of fundamental values i cannot characterize a child as a ben sower or mora unless father and mother speak with a unified voice otherwise the child gets understandably confused and moves in different directions the second point is they can't be deaf to their own message meaning sometimes what happens is that they expect their child to learn to darwin to do everything but they themselves don't live by the standards that they want their child to live by now i remember many many years ago i was on the board of education of a jewish school and uh it was a very modern orthodox school and the parents were discussing different ways that they could increase the learning in the school now you know this kids already had a very long day uh with english and with the jewish studies and the like and depends well let's add a mishmore let's add this let's add this let's add this and i knew many of the parents because i was also their love of their show and i kind of knew what they did with their spare time and it wasn't necessarily learning so it's like so nice to talk about all the extra learning you want your kid to do but you don't do it yourself so what is the kid supposed to absorb from that particular from that particular lesson the best is teaching by example it's not so much what you tell your kid to do it's what your kid sees you doing because children do have a really a sec a sixth sense for detecting hypocrisy insincerity it's very scary we just can't we really cannot get away with things with our children our children kind of watch us very very carefully and they know they know everything about us in a lot of ways and if we're not living up to a certain standard they pick up on it very very quickly and therefore the terrorists telling me before you condemn the kid you got to be sure you're not deaf to your own words and when you hear your own words then your child will absorb it and if he doesn't now we could call him a benso or mora in that particular sense so there are two lessons of parenting that emerge from ben soromora one is the consistency of both parents having the same message and the other is the parents trying to live by the message they're trying to impart do as i say and not as i do is a recipe for failure now i'm not saying there aren't exceptions sometimes a child might just become a much greater person than their parents i mean that happens but you can't bank on it no parent can expect that their child will be more righteous than them sometimes hashem gives you a gift to be sure but you know no guarantee and if you want a successful keynote there has to be a responsiveness to your own message right so those were two points i just wanted to share with you regarding parenting but to go back to the first part of the parsha the asia chifatowa this is indeed one of the most difficult mitzvahs in the entire torah but i want to be sure that people understand the exact process here because just because sometimes the steps are a little murky the torah says that when you go out to war against your enemy and god gives you victory and you see in captivity asia fatoa that literally means a beautiful woman and you have a lust for her you want to take her as a wife or as a woman that you will be with so the torah gives you a procedure of bringing her into her house shaving her hair to make her a little less a lot less attractive letting your fingernails grow and letting her cry for her father and mother for 30 days and afterwards you can then have relations with her and you can take her as a wife now here here's the thing there's a big big big mach lokas rishonim that really goes back to the gemara uh all of these these are called maison that's how the gum refers to it all of these preparations the shaving of the hair are called micem so the question is is there an initial intercourse that is mutar in the field of war itself kaiden colomizin meaning many reshinum understands and this will make it even more problematical that in the heat of war because of your passion you actually are allowed to have relations with her without doing anything and the my sim that need to be done are only if you want to continue the relationship then you have to do all of these mison in other words the bia reshaina is permitted in the heat of passion like that seems to be rashi's opinion because this is an example of what he calls also an extraordinary idea dibra torah kinneged yetzerhara the torah makes a concession to the evil inclination that sometimes passions in time of war might be literally irresistible and therefore the torah gave you a concession but it's only one bite at the apple of the apple if you want to continue it you have to do all of these things that are supposed to discourage the relationship right that's the hope the hope would be the relationship would be discouraged uh but if you still want to persist then you're allowed to continue the relationship afterwards so according to many reshainam the bri china is permitted even kaidem kalamaisum and the mysim are a condition to a continuation of the relationship again i want to point out so some people say well wait a second so are you telling me that rape in time of war against least against the non-jewish combatants is that going to be permitted so it's interesting that there is a sifri that says the following since the bre china is described as you bring her into your house which would mean you bring her into your tents so the safri darjeans lo yilchatsena milhama don't oppressor in the heat of battle there is a commentary of the tosos rid one of the great great italian we've shown him that that means the bia rishona must be consensual and rape is in fact forbidden so asia shifatoar is still a kiddish she's a non-jewish woman and normally it would be forbidden but according to the texas rit at least i'm not going to say every region will agree with this but it's a very important toastless read to be aware of that ashitifatoa as problematical as it is is not a dispensation for rape it is a one-time permissibility for consensual sex with this gentile woman and if you want to continue the relationship it has to be done under an open where it's likely to be discouraged by making or etc now that also means the following let's assume that the person did have his one-time act with the woman and he doesn't want to continue it does he have to bring her into his house and make her go through these things if he doesn't want to continue it so the mitral screener says as endeavor pushes that if you're not interested in continuing the relationship then you can send your home after the first time i mean i mean you think about this the purpose of the my sim is if you want to continue it the torah wants to create a mechanism where you will be discouraged but if i don't want to continue it what's the purpose of bringing her into my home making her unattractive and then sending her away just send her away so according to this opinion therefore the beer china is mutual even without any myself as long as it's not rape as long as it's not consensual if you want to end it at that point you can just end it and indeed you don't have the option of taking her as a slave because if you did this with her the only option is you either eventually marry her or she goes free she cannot be a slave once she went through this but if you want to marry her the terror creates a protocol to discourage you from doing so but if after that protocol you want to marry her you can go ahead and do it now even then you have some problems well go ahead and do it do i need her consent for that marriage does she have to convert is she jewish and me if she wants to convert why do i need to go in other words what is the purpose of a proto the protocol is to discourage me from wanting to stay with her but if even after the protocol i can stay with her only if she converts then why do i need the protocol if she converts let it be mutter and if she doesn't have to convert is the torah permitting a permanent relationship with a non-jewish woman as long as we went through the protocol to discourage it in other words this is very very simple question i'm not even addressing the ethical problems here i'm just addressing the factual problems here what happens after the 30 days of her being made repulsive the tyra says if i want to marry her i can then marry her well number one with her consent or without her consent number two with a conversion without a conversion if it's with a conversion why did i need to go through the protocol she just converted let her be jewish without a conversion you have a tremendously disturbing finish that i'm living with a guy the rest of my life so there are a lot of questions the gemara seems to imply that she does go through a conversion process but the conversion process is not consensual the marriage may be consensual but she kind of becomes a jew whether she likes it or or not again very very strange because one of the ideas of conversion is conversion is normally consensual in the case of asia shifatoa so which means if she sincerely wants to convert she doesn't have to go through all of these mycen but the my sim enable a halachically a compulsory conversion full of problems full of of unknown variables as i say there are some opinions that do understand even the first encounter to be non-consensual which would make it a war crime frankly uh you know rape and time of war i that's why i think the tosos rid is such a valuable re-shown to be aware of because he does say that at least the intercourse of yufatoar is consensual intercourse now you would figure that your fatah is a concession to the yetzer hara and therefore a righteous person would not engage in it it's not something that we would encourage you to do and yes let me point out that the gemara says that david hameles himself uh had nashay tohar that he took in war and in fact uh absalom was from the apostolar and amnon another son who rebelled against david and ghazal basically say that the kids you have for me fatoar are not going to turn out so well and that's why this mihrut that's why right after yufatoar we discussed the ben sorerumora because indeed that's going to be the product of that type of relationship so there's a lot of ethical problems here but i hope you at least get the picture the picture is not it's pretty bad but it's not as bad as one might have assumed and at least you understand the the process of what is what is going on okay now let me share with you let's move in another direction i'm going to move away now from shots and go into allegory remes sod that is the oracaya makado springs from the arizona that there's a mystical allegorical interpretation of ajit chifatoa that does not displace the shot but it's a separate level of meaning and what the arizona says is that a you fatter is a remiss to the neshama of a person the godly neshama of a person that is described as a beautiful woman and let's start with the words of the passage itself he said say la milham when you go to engage in war against your enemy what is the greatest enemy a person has that's none other than their yetzer hara their yate sahara is the enemy that wants to destroy you that wants this that's that force within you that wants to take you away from god so when you go out and wage war against that enemy so god gives you a promise hashem will deliver that enemy into your hands don't give up the war don't think the hra is so strong that you don't have a way to vanquish it you will always be able to defeat that's yet zahara vishal yo and you will capture back from the azer hara that's which he took away from you he took away your enthusiasm he took away your desire to be close to god you can get all of that back all that the eight zahara took away from you you will capture back that which he captured from you that's the overall message the overall message is don't give up the fight in that fight there will sometimes be two steps forward and one step back and sometimes there might be one step forward and two steps back but keep on fighting wonderful saying they say the battle is the victory that's really very very beautiful the battle the fact that i am engaged in that struggle even if i lose a lot there is victory in the fact that i'm in the fight that i'm in the struggle that i don't give up i don't allow myself to get discouraged so that's the first puzzle when you go out to wage war against that enemy that wants to destroy you hashem will give you victory in one way or the other now after that general qual it then fleshes it out by giving you details you see in captivity the beautiful woman the beautiful woman is your nishama your godly nishama in fact the balatanya writes about this a lot he describes the neshama as living in a galas a painful agonizing goddess because the nishana is a favorite of god it's god's breath god breathed into us his own breath as the zoar says when i breathe into you i'm giving you my life force a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and when the neshama is separated from god because of sin that becomes like a makhitsa hamadil like a wall of separation the neshama feels tremendous pain and at some point in your conscious life you become aware of your nishamah that has been captive taken captive by the kokos of of and you want to liberate it you have a desire to be reunited with that beautiful woman that is your neshama so what do you do you bring her into your house meaning that's introspection because the house is your mind and it says shave her head and let her finger nails grow so allegorically this means the following part of the chuva process to purify your soul is to shave your head so what is that the head is the brain all of the wild hair are the different ideologies that come out of your head that go against god so kind of shave your head get rid of the ideologies whether it's whatever it would be whether it's the desire for power political systems kind of disengage from all of that stuff that comes out of your head and let your fingernails grow on again the hands are by what we gra we grasp with our hands right so our attachment to materialism can be symbolized by what we grab with our hands when your fingernails are very long you're no longer capable of grasping so essentially the symbolic meaning of shaving the head is disengaged from the ideologies that take you away from god and disengage from the materialism and the taiva that also take away from god meaning there are two different things to take them away from god one is the realm of ideas and one is the realm of base passion in fact it's been well said by the way that um the 19th century problems with universities are very different than the 20th and 21st century problems universities you know if you would have asked a gutle let's say 100 years ago or even maybe maybe 60 years ago should a religious jew go to a secular university again i'm not saying not but but they say well there's a problem he might be exposed to emmanuel khan to hegel uh all of the spino espinoza of course is the biggie spinoza spinoza was the real apical you know most uh atheists don't know enough uh to be happy corsum spinoza you know is they tell us to tell the story about a fellow in minsk who was a from yeshiva boy and he decided one day he wanted to be an api chorus so they said oh you want to be an apocalypse you've got to meet yusel the tao napi covers he's the official api chorus of minsk so where do you find the napi chorus he went to the uh he went to the uh coffee club you know he went to the bars he went to the hotels he went to places where you'd find janaki chorus a nightclub says not there so he asks around about yasel the apical as oh yes the epicurus he spends the whole day in the basa madrish so he goes to the basement he sees a jew with a long white beard and he says are you yes of the epicorus says yeah yeah i'm yourself yapicoras i don't believe in anything he says i want to be i want to be like you i want to join your club so yasuo looks at him you know yes of course has a whole gamut open he says okay do you know shas have you learned shas he says well i didn't learn josh because i don't believe in it he says you know shaking he says no he says you're no happy courage you're just ignorant uh which means an apocalypse has to be you know in fact this is what happened i didn't stand outside of raga steins also used to tell this story you know stein's house's parents were actually very very secular in fact they were uh communists or socialists they were very uh but what happened when adidas was a young boy they wanted to get him the best tutor in the mood kodesh because they said we know that all of this is junk and we want our son to know what it is and then see how foolish it is we don't want him to reject judaism just because we told him it's not good we want him to see himself so they got him the they were so confident there was nothing in the united states that they got him like the best teacher unfortunately it backfired and that of course kindled rep stein's oslo's love in judaism so uh they say when the stein's house gomorrahs first came out he said there was reception in his honor and you know time magazine had a lot of hyperbole they said uh this is like the greatest scholar of judaism over the past thousand years okay that was a guzma that's what they said so they they they had an interview with the father and the father said they say my son is the greatest jewish scholar of the past thousand years and he said and it had to happen to me he said he said all right so to be an epicurus you got to know you got to know what you're rejecting so a hundred years ago they would say we don't want our kids to be exposed to spinoza ideologies that undermine torah minnesota today it's almost as if you know i wish my kid would read spinoza you know the issue is not spinoza the issue is drugs the issue is sex the issue is uh you know gay rights what gay marriage whatever it would be in other words one is ideology and one is taiva and the aries i was saying that's maroomas and shaving the head is distance yourself from the poisonous ideologies let the fingernails grow meaning take away your grasping ability to take charge of the world right and then it says and after you've done that let her cry over her father and mother for 30 days says they are or i'm saying that it says it's actually 29 days this is a remedy to the month of ello which is the time what is her father her father is hashem and what is her mother knesset israel the jewish people and therefore let the baal chuva cry over the pain that was brought to the park in heaven and to the jewish people and let it be which for a month of days is the month of ello and then you're reunited with your neshama and she becomes your wife and your companion in life because you are muhubar to the godliness of the nishama this is an allegory from the arizona in which it's discussing the milkheimetre the war against the yetzer hara and the ability to reclaim mainshama and connect to my neshama and the notion of going through the chuva of distancing myself from poisonous ideology and simplifying my life so i'm not so aduk in the taivus of islam and then the crying and the repentance during the month of ello allows you to be reunited with the purity of your neshama now then it goes on though interestingly enough as it says but if you don't want her let her go free and do not turn her into a slave now what what would that mean exactly so i i don't think the arizona says this but i would add maybe it means the following if you're truly not interested in shiva then let your neshama alone don't take your neshama and try to turn the wrong into the right meaning what often happens today is that people will define the deviance as if it was a righteous act as if the save was a holy act you see this in in again in gay marriage the movement of gay marriage uh i am not in favor of persecuting or stigmatizing people who are homosexual i'm not interested in going into their bedrooms i'm not interested in persecution i'm not interested in humiliation i think that is not the derrick of the toe rail and i also understand from a compassionate standpoint the struggles that people are going through and you cannot take it lightly it is a very very very difficult challenge for a person who wants to be a religious jew and they're struggling with this you know and again perique albus tells us you don't judge somebody until you're in their position and if you're not in their position you have no way of knowing we have no way of knowing how we would respond so the issue is not condemnation on the other hand the fact that i i have empathy sympathy and empathy for a struggle and i'm not there to judge should not translate into affirmative legitimation of what the tyrus says is wrong so when people say sometimes even within the outer fringes of left-wing orthodoxy to have the very outer fringes to have a choppa to have cheva brachus to sanctify something as a religious ceremony when it's absolutely wrong is taking something that is sinful and turning it into something good and that you cannot do it's one thing to say i don't castigate someone that is sinning because they have a difficult nissan it's another thing to say it's not a sin it's perfectly okay and i would suggest that perhaps that's what it says if you don't want to do chuva on something don't take your neshama and make it a slave to euroveros by defining your alveros as an expression of the neshama just say i'm not connected to my neshama in that aspect of my life but don't take the neshama and make it good so to speak right that might be again that might be okay so on one hand we have the ethically problematical shot of asia chapatoa and although i described it in a little more detail i certainly did not resolve the ethical problems on the other hand we have the allegorical shot of asia shifatoar which is the journey of the person to reclaim his neshama reconnect to his godliness through the chuva process okay so we have shat and we have ramez sot where however you would call this explanation so now i want to bring in a third idea that will create a a problem and a tension between these two explanations rashi brings from this sifri ki say se la mil khama when you go and you wage war against your enemy we know that there are two types of wars that the torah recognizes there is what is called milkhames mitzvah there is a mandatory war and there are three types of mandatory wars this was a war against the seven indigenous nations of canaan which are now extinct this is a war against amalek which is also extinct and then there's a war to defend the jewish people from an enemy that is trying to attack them tragically that is a war that is not yet extinct in fact this is all interesting topic i'm not going to talk about it but i'll just throw it out the torah gives certain people are exempt from going to war etc but that's only for optional wars for mitzvah wars everybody goes so the interesting question is if the wars that the state of israel fights today are wars of defense they would seem to fall under the category of muhammad mitzvah so perhaps there is justification in not allowing a draft exemption for yeshiva students again something to think about again well maybe we'll give another i mean this is a whole other share but that's a very live issue that has to be considered is the status of milk mitzvah baby these are three categories of milk mitzvah the seven nations amalek and wars of defense according to ramban there is a fourth category of muhammad mitzvah but only according to the ramban and that is even a war of aggression to conquer territory within the biblical boundaries of eric israel according to ramban even with it would actually be a mitzvah to wage war to conquer territory that is part of various israel the rambam seems not to count that and that goes back to the famous maklokas is settling eric israel a mitzvah or not a mitzvah ramban says it is and that includes military campaigns rambam seems to say seems to say it is not okay now that's called muhammad mitzvah which is mandatory any other war is muhammad rishut optional war now what would be an example of any other war this is also very strange a war of aggression let's say israel decides they want to conquer saudi arabia because they want more oil that's not a miss for war but it's an optional war huh that sounds kind of crazy are you telling me that the torah simply says that the jewish people are permitted to simply invade a country ah so here's the rub that's exactly the case but there are certain conditions for muhammad rishut that cannot be satisfied today number one you need a sanhedrin that authorizes it and most importantly you need prophetic authorization from the auriembitomium the coding of the best way in other words you can do it if god gives you permission so essentially we can't you know if it's truly not justified you know why is god going to give you permission so the point basically is therefore lacking his sanhedrin and certainly lacking the prophetic uh institution of the uranbitum is impossible today or well of course it's possible you could do it but it would be against and it would be considered to be murder and theft the only permissibility of milham is is something that falls under the rubric of milkhamet mitzvah there is no such thing bisman as muhammad rashid and now that in turn gives rise to a very fascinating question how does halacha characterize preemptive military strikes because the classic example of a defensive war is you are invaded so you can repel the enemy but what about a situation where the enemy has not invaded you yet but you see that they're preparing a nuclear reactor or they're preparing various bombs are we allowed to aggressively proactively go into their territory and disable because if i treat that as a form of defensive war it would fall under the parameters of merchants mitzvah which would be allowed if on the other hand i define it as a war of aggression even though it's preemptive that would be a muhammad rashud that requires a sanhedrin and an urim or imbitum interesting interesting questions these issues are debated many halaq scholars as you would imagine do consider preemption to be in the nature of a defensive war there are those who argue there are those who actually say you're not allowed to do it okay again this is a maybe a talk for another time but now let's go back and so so we have these two categories of war milk mitzvah rashi raises the question what type of war is the torah talking about when it gave you the hetero of ashat yfat tohar so rashi says again from the sephrate oh the torah is talking about a milkhammat rishut in a milkheimet mitzvah you fought tower could not exist because when you're waging a war against the seven nations of canaan or amalek you cannot take any captives because you must eradicate them and since the torah is talking about a war in which you could take captives it must be talking about milkhamet rashod and not muhammad mitzvah now the truth of the matter is that particular reasoning is a little bit of a non-sequitur because i mentioned mohammed has three types amalek seven nations and defense now it's true that on molech and seven nations you cannot take captives but a defensive war you surely could you know you don't you don't i mean you certainly don't have to kill everybody in a defensive war and we wouldn't so how how can rashi conclude oh since you're taking captives it must be talking about milkhamedrashet no maybe it's muhammad mitzvah and it's the third type of muhammad mitzvah see that would be very relevant i don't want to lose my job the question would be would there be a halachic heter for yuffatoar foreign if you look at rashi literally that it's only a hater from muhammad mitzvah since there is no mohammed rashad there's no euphos tower if on the other hand any no hama where captives are permitted would have a hetero of yufatoa so our milkham is miss for we do take captives right so uh interesting question again uh as i say um at least one idea of chaplain lost his job over this so i i don't want to go further with this uh but let's just go with rashi left shuttle that the whole parsha of yaffatoar is milhamet so here i got a problem there seems to be a discontinuity between the shot and the allegory because if i were to ask you is the war against the yetzer hara would we call that a mitzvah war or will we call that an optional war i certainly would have classified it as a mitzvot war it is the primary mitzvah we have in our lives to struggle against the atahara so why would the torah teach me the allegory of fighting the azerhara in a parsha that is not talking about myths for wars it's talking about uh optional wars now granted the allegory doesn't have to match up with the shot but the tyra should have taught me about fighting the atahara in the parsha of fighting amalek or fighting the seven nations right why would the milkhames be in a parsha dealing with muhammad rather than muhammad mitzvah right there they the allegory doesn't match the halaq pigeonhole in which rashi puts based on the sufri rashi puts the whole parsha of euphostola so yosef sevens really a great great great uh thomas khacham he was the author of the modern bahalaka in fact in many many swarms a beautiful writer and a tremendous tremendous uh thomas racham uh it was also again he was an interesting person he's almost the last of a breed he belonged to all mifla goats number one he was very close to rav cook he was a chabad khasit uh he was close to the brisker of in the khasanesh uh he was that's me really but but in his behavior he was really hared in in all of the ways and all of the cadilla of all mifla goats were macabalim he was the founding editor of the encyclopedia at salmuditz and to this day it was like whatever 60 or 70 years ago all of the categories are his i mean like in a week he just or a week or a day he just wrote down all of the categories all of the arachim all of the articles and that is the outline that they're using to this day in the encyclopedia talmudit interesting little story uh there is an essay in the name of rabzev that actually says yeshiva bhakram have to fight in the army because of muhammad because but some say that was a forgery and he never wrote it you know who knows also when art scroll translated his beautiful savior moads in bahala where rav zeven goes to all the yom tov him so the last chapter of mode in bahala is about the new yomtav of yom hatsmat when art scroll translated the festivals in they just left out the last chapter without indicating that they did so so you know the average english reader wouldn't even know you know you know if you didn't know the hebrew you wouldn't know but the people who knew were very very outraged an article had a little bit of a pill uh they said well if rob zeven would have been alive today you know you would have said how do you know he would have taken it out et cetera so that's one of the again i i admire ice cream a lot and i'm very grateful to art school i don't mean to bash them uh again i have much much i cares a toe for what they've done but this is one of the one of the things that got them a lot of criticism censoring an author's work uh without getting the author's permission and not even indicating that you're censoring the author's work but be it isn't my that's just a little hack dumma but here's what drove zevan says rob zeven says the following idea it is absolutely true that the war against the eight sahara is a mulch mitzvah there's no mitzvah greater than that but tactical tactically you have to fight it like in muhammad rishis you fight this mitzvah the way you fight amir misrisha's what do we mean what is the halachic difference as rashi himself nations you must destroy the enemy right is obliteration muhammad rishut you can capture and subjugate the enemy right muhammad rashud capture and subjugation mitzvah obliteration says rav seven the milham yetzer is indeed mitzvah but the key to fighting it is subjugation rather than obliteration what do we mean by this a person looks at their life let's say a person decides to become religious to become torah observance and they have 10 20 30 40 years of life in which they were not following the derek hashem and now hashem they're changing their lives and they're embracing the derek hashem what do they do with those 10 20 30 or 40 years how are they miyakas to that background how are they to their past how do they connect to their family to their experiences there are two modalities that jose batshuva use one might be called the chuva of amputation and the other might be called the chuva of transformation the chuva of amputation says i'm a new person i am simply cutting off that part of my life it's not a part of me anymore i have no connection to it and it's not me and i'm simply forgetting about it sometimes that is necessary just as sometimes you have to amputate a limb sometimes you have to amputate a past there is no question that sometimes that is a survival mechanism in fact even outside of religion if relationships are toxic and poisonous and abusive sometimes your only survival strategy is to cut away the arm but here's the thing amputation is sometimes necessary but it's always a last resort it's never a first resort number one with amputation you're literally cutting off part of yourself number two there is phantom pain the analogy is you know and people who try to delete email discover this you try to delete something but there's all sorts of things that are still hanging around there right you really can't get rid of your past and number three if all you're doing is amputating your past so your life may be virtuous from now on but your 40 years before that are just a zero so at best your chuva took you from demerits right you were you know minus a million and now you're back to zero hashem but it's still a zero what a waste so amputation is sometimes necessary but there's a more deeper and profound type of chuva where i don't reject my past i don't destroy my past i don't obliterate my past but i redefine that path to become the unique foundation of how i serve hashem with the fullness of my personality let's take a very simple example let's imagine a person was a drug addict or an alcoholic for many many years and now they finally kicked the habit well they could just repudiate that life and have nothing to do with it but that still means that for 30 years their life amounts to a zero but let's say a person becomes a drug counselor or he advises a.a meetings now that's very different he's not repudiating his past but from those experiences he is now able to do things in kedusha that he wouldn't have been able to do without those experiences so he's not escaping what he was he's taking what he was and he's elevating it and sanctifying it and consecrating it in fact this is actually the explanation of a very enigmatic passage in the gemara yuma that says that shiva out of love converts your sins into mitzvos it doesn't only erase your sins it doesn't just mean i have a million sins and now they're forgiven that's erasure it actually says the million sins turn into a million mitzvot now how do you understand that i understand god forgives me i won't hold it against you but all those sins become myths the answer is yes because if you use the negatives in your background to build your relationship with god then god looks at those sins as the foundation of the life that you have and rev seven says that is not the shiva of amputation that is the chuva of transformation and that's the model of muhammad richards where you capture the enemy rather than destroy the enemy so this is a wonderful thought that the torah is maramese to the muhammad not in the parsha of muhammad mitzvah which is obliteration but in the parsha of muhammad richard and this is a very important idea you know um people come from many many different backgrounds and you come to a place like jerusalem right and you meet people who have you know they come from you know 10 generations 20 generations 50 generations of golem sadiq tell me and you know we come from north dakota or whatever it is so we've been religious for two years and uh on a good day our hebrew is as good as the six-year-old at the table on a bad day it's worse and we kind of think you know they have so much that i don't have you know they god just they won the cosmic lottery so to speak they were put in the right place in the right frame and you know whatever i am is always going to be such an inferior model but that's not the right way to think about it because one another way of thinking about it is that it's true that the tenth generation yuru shell me and maya sharim has many many gifts that i don't have and will never have but it's also true that the person who was raised in south dakota has something that the tenth generation yushami doesn't have because god ultimately decided where our neshamas would be born there wasn't the choice that we made and if hashem put us in south dakota it is because there was something that we would absorb in south dakota that would be the key to how we serve hashem so you see when a person does chuva and his attitude is i am forgetting that life that's a self-defeating proposition because if you're forgetting that life why did god put you there in the first place there must be a reason so i got to take something from that life and take it out that's called the chuva of transformation not amputation i'll just end with end with this um i'll give you a story about a person who was actually raising it from home but it's it's a similar type of problem many of you uh know of or heard of the great uh saintly rosh yeshiva of mirror of nations finkel the colonel lavraka who died a few years ago and his story is such an interesting story he grew up in a religious family in fact his great uncle was the roshiv of mayor of leisure finkel but he grew up in a modern orthodox environment in chicago he went to a coed high school he was on the basketball team uh he was on the debating team you know very modern life in fact when he came to arizona after high school uh to learn in mir you know they learned like one morning stater nine to one and then he asked so what do you guys do in the afternoon you know learning four hours was pretty overwhelming and when they said well we keep on learning he couldn't believe it you know he just didn't understand i mean you mean you don't do anything you know the rest of the day type of thing so when he died you know again he had a he had very great difficulties now he had multiple sclerosis and he really really really struggled with really superhuman devotion to run this huge yeshiva and continue to give shiurim even though he was he had tremors constantly and he didn't even want to take medication to control the tremors because it dulled his mind and that's why people loved him a lot because they saw how much he sacrificed for them and for the yeshiva and how much he loved to still meet him so i remember when he died he died very suddenly so the eulogies were given and all of the eulogies kind of made the same point they said oh you see that no matter how bad the person's background you know he came from garbage he came from uh co-ed and he came from this that modern orthodoxy the bankrupt modern orthodoxy and he managed to escape that environment and become a great person so too we can escape the environments that we come from so i have to admit there was something about that that bothered me a little bit because i kind of came from a similar environment you know yeah you know i don't remember that as being so bad it wasn't so trace i thought there was a lot of good things so i would suggest that although he has paid and we're making a point that no matter where you come from you can become a gutter batora that's a wonderful point but part of rav finkel's greatness was not that he simply repudiated his past and point the fact he didn't rebuke ada's best you know one of his great co-hosts were that when american teenagers would come to israel from very modern environments they would meet with them and they would come and they would be very you know it was a totally foreign environment they cared yeshiva where people learn all day a rabbi with a big beard and then he would start talking about basketball and i can't i don't even know the vocabulary the different types of shots that you make and baseball and the yankees and and dating girls and these kids would be you know their mouths would be a game this great rabbi was talking about all these things in other words the point is part of his greatness was he didn't pretend to kind of never have lived in that world he drew on that world and that was the source of his success in reaching people and in interacting with people at all levels of observance and the like so to me although again the issue was not not being religious i mean he was always a shomer shabbos but the issue is don't turn your back on your unique life experiences part of your chuva is not to amputate not to cut off but to understand that that is the source of the uniqueness of your strength and the individuality of the relationship you will have with akadesh barcha and that is why the muhammad mitzvah of fighting the ether is specifically in the parsha dealing with muhammad rashid it is a muhammad mitzvah but this muhammad mitzvah you fight like a muhammad rishad so may hashem help all of us to look at the totality of our lives and see the beauty in it and be able to reclaim all of those parts and experiences that we've gone through and use it as the cornerstone of the edifice that we built in aveda sasha thank you [Music] is