Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Seeing the Light Within the Darkness

[Music] hi everybody good to see you and um i had a little little fall on the bus but i'm doing okay was a little trying to regain my my balance here but i'm everything is fine and uh today's share is sponsored again aliyat shama of bin yaman yisrael then halevi a young man who died after a very heroic bout with cancer and sevilla bastavids and we hope that our learning should be eloy nishmatam and in addition a refuse leima sponsorship by craig and liz kaufman for the refoolish lame of alan sokolov and as always we also pray for all of those who are afflicted with covet or non-covet conditions whether inoculated or non-inoculated uninoculated whether you've gotten one boost or two boost or three booster or whatever booster it is everyone should have refused lema and those who are hashem still healthy should remain healthy in addition we have a generous donation by sue schmelzer in honor and gratitude for free youtube videos yes uh everything ibona does is a free share rosh chodesh kislev and her daughter and granddaughter returning safely from a trip it's good to have uh happy happy good good tidings uh today's parsha of harsha's faith is actually a jam-packed parsha tremendous a number of things happen in a relatively short parsha yaakov vavino we learned last week how he took the blessings away from his brother asav by an act of deception but now his brother asap wants to kill him so yaakov really has a double reason why he has to leave eric israel number one he has to leave to escape the wrath of his brother but number two he also has to find a wife because all the way back from abraham there was a policy there was a takana that the ovos do not take wives from the canaanite women they have to go back to avraham's family in other words yaakov was going to love him just as eliezer on behalf of yitzhak also went to basuel who was lovan's father so the muforsham say that is the meaning of the very first phrase in the parsha vaiyet say yaakov yaakov left beershava vale karana and he went to kharan which is north northeast mesopotamia so the point we have these two verbs he left and he went because when you go on a trip sometimes your main purpose is to escape where you are the ikar is the leaving and sometimes the icker is the destination with yaakov there are two equal points he must leave beersheba because of the anger of asaf and he must go to kharan because that is where he is going to find a wife now we know from the narrative as it unfolds that yaakov actually spent 20 years in lavan's house for seven years he worked he thought for raqqa he wound up getting leia and then he worked another seven years for rachel although he did get ruckle right away the way it works is he worked seven years for so he thought it was for rachel he gets leia but he then after these seven days of rejoicing he then marries rachel but then has to work seven years afterwards in other words the raqqael was given to him on credit but that was a total of 14 years and then another six years where yaakov built up his fortune uh in the sheep and that is when the tribes were born all of the tribes were born in lovan's house except for the very last son binyamin that was not born until they came back to eric israel and as we know rachel tragically died in childbirth people don't realize how young rachel was when she died rajo was 32 or 33 when she died and yaakov lived many many decades after rachel's death and there's something very very touching that on yakov's deathbed he reminisces about his dear wife rocco that had left him you know much more than half a century before so we don't realize kind of the tragic dimensions of rachel's life in her brief marriage she did not have children until towards the very end of her life and then she had yosef and then binyamin and she died in in chalbert but be it as it may yaakov was gone for 20 years and then there were another two years in which he was traveling until he was able to get reunited with his father yitzhak so yitzchak lived a lot longer than people thought yitzhak thought he was going to die with the whole incident of the blessings in fact yitzhak was still alive when yaakov came back 22 years later and rashi has a very very involved calculation which i'm not going to go into but rashi proves that although from the hamish itself you can only document that yaakov was gone for 22 years there was an additional 14 years that has to be added to the calculation and that is yaakov before he went to lovan's house took a brief 14-year detour to study torah at the yeshiva of shame and aver now shame was of course the oldest son of noah or at least the greatest son of noah and shame was actually yaakov's you know great great great great great grandfather now shane was not alive by this time avair is shame's grandson so the yeshiva of shame and aver was run by ava at that time and yaakov spent 14 years in the yeshiva of shame and aver and according to rabbinic tradition yaakov did not sleep for those 14 years again i i think we have to assume that he drowsed off not that he didn't sleep at all but he didn't like go to a bed for 14 years and what was this yeshiva of shame and aver anyway what did they learn i mean technically shame and haber are not even jewish same and abraham but they know shame is quite literally a ben noah anoakheid so what do you learn in the yeshiva of shame behavior and why did yats why did yaakov feel that he had to go to that particular yeshiva i mean after all yaakov had studied torah from yitzchak and then earlier from avraham because abram had been alive for the first 15 years of yaakov's life so what was this unique idea of shame behavior so first of all we have to understand that what did they learn in the yeshiva of shame behavior you know they didn't learn necessarily what we would call gemara or whatever it is none of that was even in existence the torah hadn't been given yet so number one they learned the seven laws of noah now if you're going to tell me well that doesn't take fourteen years seven las vegas i could say them over in in five minutes well you know you'd be surprised the seven laws of noah can have many many many deep and involved applications for example not allowed to steal okay but just like in halakhah we analyze well is downloading uh music from the internet is that considered to be stealing right well so the same problems that we would face in halachic analysis we would face under the narrow height code right so there'll be a lot of laws about what is stealing what is unethical business behavior uh what is a fair and equitable basis for society so although the seven nuage laws are only seven but in point of fact there's a lot of depth and a lot of analysis that one could go through with them just as we do in jewish law that's one thing the other thing that they studied at the yeshiva of shame behavior is what we might call in modern terms kabbalah they relate to understand the nature of god what is divine providence how do you see god in the world uh ravari kaplan suggests that they studied meditative techniques to somehow come in contact with higher spiritual consciousness to perhaps even become prophets in some way okay so it wasn't so much maybe a halachic curriculum as it would be a spiritual curriculum and i'm using later terms musser would be a big thing musser is interpersonal ethics and morality right so musser kabbalah noah law it's a big curriculum it's a big curriculum but the question still becomes what did yaakov think he was going to get there that he didn't take with him from the house of avraham and yitzhak yaakov was 63 when he left his father's house the story of the brachos they were not children they were jakob venezia were twins they were both 63 years old what did yaakov need to get from shane beiber so there's a beautiful thought that rav putner review expresses and that is yaakov knows that he's going into gullus and he's going into an environment that is bereft of kedusha he's going into an environment where his morals and his values and that and his ethics are going to be challenged every day now yaakov grew up in a home that not only was full of holiness in and of itself the home of yitzhak abraham but certainly in avraham's time avraham had brought a great number of people under the belief of god so in a sense yaakov was raised which you might say in a religious society but now he's going to a society that's totally separated from god he needs special survival skills he needs special wisdom the types of things that sustained him in a very religious and spiritual society would not necessarily be the tools that could help him in a society that is bereft but in the yeshiva of shame behavior they preserved the vestigial memories of life before the flood when the world was corrupt when the world was immoral when the world was degenerate and how noah who raised shame of course was able to remain faithful to god and faithful to morality in a world that was bereft of faith in god and a sense of morality and yaakov knew he needed to embody and absorb the spiritual lessons of how to retain a relationship with god when you're all alone and that is why he needed 14 years in the yeshiva of shame and ever in order to absorb that type of learning now rashi has a very fascinating observation from the medrash khazal tell us that yosef was separated from yaakov we're going to read in a few weeks it was 22 years of separation because yosef was sold when he was 17. and yaakov did not see yosef again until yosef was 39 17 to 39 is 22 years and he's i'll say because yaakov was separated from his father yitzhak and did not give him kiba of the aim for the 22 years 20 years in lovan's house and two years on the road yosef was separated from yaakov for 22 years and didn't give yaakov keep it avian so rashi then asked the obvious question but yaakov was separated for 36 years because of the 14 years of the yeshiva of shame behavior answer for the 14 years that yaakov was learning torah he is not held responsible because the mitzvah of learning torah is greater than the mitzvah of honoring father and mother and rashi derives this from the fact that it is only the 22 years of separation that is held against yaakov and not the 14 years of learning in the yeshiva of shame and avid now myself the whole madrish is very very difficult because why should yaakov be punished for the 22 years after all it was not only his mother who told him to go it was his father so yaakov did not violate honoring his father honoring his father by going to kharan by going to lovan's house his father had told him to go on the other hand his father didn't tell him how long to stay so maybe you have a problem of the length of the stay and and everything else okay that's again that was this is not the main thing i wanted to talk about i just wanted to bring out the very very fascinating chronology of the extra 14 years that is not really indicated in the hamish but rashi figures it out to a very intricate calculation at the very end of precious toldos at the very end of last week's pressure there's a long long rashi that figures out that there's a missing 14 years in yaakov avinu's chronology but what i want to talk about is this so if gaba malcolm yakov encounters a place and he decides to lodge in that place and the sun sets and yaakov sets up stones to rest his head on not a very comfortable pillow and yaakov has a wondrous vision of the angels of god going up the ladder and down the ladder and at the very top of the ladder aka the sporchu promises yaakov i will be with you i will protect you i will bring you back to this land in peace and yaakov wakes up and he says i didn't know this is where hashem's presence will become manifest and again have a very complicated chronology here that essentially what hashem did was hashem brought mount moralia the temple mount to where yaakov was he was not there he was somewhere else but hashem literally brought the temple mount under yaakov and yaakov experiences the revelation of god's presence now on the words he encountered the place and the sun set gazal and massachusetts brachos have a drasha that the verb encounter encountering is a term that is used for prayer and yaakov established the minhag which became that one prays to god at night meaning khazal say avraham was misakan that we pray in the morning and yitzhak was misakan that we pray in the afternoon minha that we pray in arvis and that's based on with avraham it says by the al-qaeda for yashke mabram baboker abram get up in the morning that refers to tefila with yitzhak it says went to converse in the field that's in the afternoon and by if god is yaakov was misake in harvest now you understand when we say avram did chakras and yitzhak did minha and yakov did myra if we don't mean they dive in the amidah the amida as a fixed liturgical text came much later that was the time of the second temple the people of the great assembly the ancient kinesthet agdola so they prayed in their own words there was no particular text but chakras the all those were misaki so there's a very interesting tasha that the meforshim asks and they say the following they say chakras and minha are obligatory prayers but arvis is technically an optional prayer meaning if you want a dove in it you dove in it if you don't wanna daven you don't have to now let me clarify two things this rule that filat arvid is rishut does not refer to kriyashma the krishma of myrev is certainly a here in the torah but it refers to the amida that's point one point two is that even though initially it was a rashut once the jewish people accepted it it now becomes a minor that you have to do so nobody should walk out of the room saying that i said you don't have to dive in my roof you certainly do but in its inception arvid was a rashut not a chauva so the question is very obvious if avraham was masake and chakras and yitzhak was misake in minha and yaakov was masaki narvis why should the prayer of yaakov be inferior to the prayer of avraham and yitzhak avraham's prayer is an obligation yitzchak's prayer is an obligation are you telling me that yaakov's prayer is less important and it's only your should if you want to do it do it if you don't want to do it don't do it why should that be so we know in many ways yakov is considered to be the greatest of the others number one avraham had yitzhak and ishmael kind of good son bad son yitzhak had yaakov it's only yaakov all of whose children are part of the jewish people although there are many sins to be sure but mitaso shalema all of his progeny are part of our israel we are told that on god's divine throne on the kiseha kavod there is the face of a man of a person on god's celestial throne and that face is none other than the face of yaakov avinu so yaakov avina was called bakhir shabi of us albeit because he's standing on the shoulders of abraham right i mean just as a famous muscle that a on the shoulders of a giant can see further than the giant and a giant on top of a giant can even see further so yaakov is a giant on top of a giant on top of a giant so yaakov achieves a greatness both in his own right and as the son of abraham and the grandson of yaakov but whatever the reason he is called be bakir us the choicest of the others so why should it be that somehow his prayer is considered to be inferior so let me give you two answers one is a bit of a technical answer but it's a very very good answer uh this is an answer of the pinay yoshua pine yoshua for those of you who may not have heard of the safer rebel yeshua was the rav of frankfurt in the 1600s and he was a tremendous tremendous gown and he wrote hidushim on many many parts of shas and in the hakdom he has a very interesting story he says he was caught in a fire in a courtyard and the whole courthouse was made of wood so the fire was spreading very very quickly and he made a vow to hashem that if hashem would save him he would devote his life to writing his interpretations of gomorrah and he writes in the dhamma he had been trapped you know he was trapped all of the wood all of the planks all of the beams had fallen down and blocked his way and somehow after he made his netter there was a clearing that materialized and he was able to escape and uh it is said that before he wrote the pinay yoshua he wanted to be sure that he would never miss a cross-reference to any gemara that would be relevant so he learned shas 36 times before he wrote his hidushim and his tradition were very very learned and studied and mokubo but he had one of the things he does is actually very very interesting you know we have the standard commentary on gemara is rashi and then we have tosvos that asks a lot of kashas on rashi and toastpost which means additional notes often offers alternative interpretations because there are many difficulties in russian so one of the things that pneushua tries to do is he tries to defend rashi from all of the kashas of tosus so in a sense he links up to rashi and tries to defend rajin in that way but here's the pne yoshua's answer there really is a mach locus in the gemara what is the origin of the three prayers one opinion says avraham did chakrit yitzhak did yaakov did mahrif that is one opinion but there's another opinion that says that the three filots are not based on the o votes but they are based on mimicking the sacrificial cycle in the basa miktas in the basa mikdash you had the korban tamid the daily offering of the morning and you had the daily offering of the afternoon and then if there were any leftover fats or internal organs that had not been consumed they could be consumed at night but if there was nothing left over he didn't have to do anything at night so the pneushua wants to say the opinion that maintains that our vit is rashoot is not the opinion that says that feel out there because of the vote but rather that's filoter because of the sacrificial cycle and since there was no official corbin at night it was only leftovers so that was called the rashid if you had it you had it if you didn't have it you didn't have it so the pane yeshua says if you maintain that arvid was made by yaakov our vit would be the same chauvat as chakras and min but the opinion that says arvid is optional is not looking at the avot it is looking at the sacrificial cycle and therefore the yeshua says there's no problem because if you hold these filots or because of the avote our vit would be just as important as any other tfila so the padeoshowa's answer is a wonderful answer in the gemara but it does not fit the rambam because here's the problem the rambam does say that filots are because of the avots you know avraham chakras yitzhak minha and the rambam also says our vit is optional now zaramba maintains both of these laws which according to the yeshua would be inconsistent and yet the ram bomb goes with that inconsistency so we're back to square one if yaakov enacted arvids why would it be an optional prayer right what would make it optional about it jacob is the greatest of the other so here let me share with you uh answer number two which would which would address this and this is from the great great hasidis of lublin and he says a very very beautiful thought and it's something that i think can help us all in the daily of odisha belay remember what feel is called tequila is called service of the heart avodah shabalif not the voda shabape it's not the service of the mouth service of the heart back the kusari much much earlier viewed alive he writes that phila is the food of the neshama it is the nutrition of the neshama the same way we generally eat three times a day our neshama needs those three connections to god at different parts of the day and i would add that the same way we snack between meals so you could dive into hashem between meals too and the good thing about it is there are no calories in that right so you can have all the snacks that you want and it's going to be healthy totally healthy but i would also add using the analogy to food it's a very interesting analogy that the same way let's say a person only lived on junk food only junk food right uh the only he only ate uh he only ate chocolate bars and potato chips well they'll stay alive they're not gonna they're not gonna die i mean other than the sicknesses that come but in terms of caloric intake it is enough to stay alive but certainly you're not going to be healthy so with tefila just the same way there's junk food there is what you might call junked fever a person davens but without thinking about it without passion without interest baruch hashem it's enough to stay alive your neshama is living on junk food and once again i would rather have junk food than starvation right junk food is bad right having a candy bar every day is a lot better than having nothing but still what type of health are you going to have so i think the food analogy is a very very good analogy in that uh there is junk fila that will keep you alive but barely and then there's meaningful feeling that gives you all the nutrition that you're in a shaman but rav sadok takes this whole picture and and and runs with it in a bit of a deeper way and he says that although the amida which is the fixed liturgical text may be the same morning afternoon night but the fact that it's linked to specific times of the day means each tafila has a unique emotional resonance and mood that is different than the other tv the shimona israel of chakrit or whatever prayer i'm saying in the morning is a different type of prayer than the prayer of minha and the prayer of minha is different than the prayer of myraf and it's linked to these times of the day now unfortunately we're a little lost in that because since we have artificial lighting we have electricity so i dive in chakras in tomorrow if i'm all in the same place but when you were living with nature which we're not the mood of the morning is different than the mood of the afternoon and the mood of the afternoon is different than the mood of the night how so mourning is a time of gratitude hope and optimism a person wakes up in the morning even if the day before was tough there's usually a sense that maybe things will be better today right you hear the birds singing like the birds are kind of telling you it's a new day things could be good now that may only last for like two seconds till i realize all the problems i have but at least initially there is often a sense of optimism hope gratitude right so the dominant mood of chakras is thanking god for the new opportunities that come into the world it's a time of hope it's a time of optimism it's a time of gratitude chakras very much belongs to avraham because avraham was a person who number one came to god by perceiving the benevolence and compassion in the creation right we say avraham was the man of khasi but there's an interesting question of chicken and egg did abraham become the man of kheseh because that is how he perceived god meaning it was his perception of god that made him want to emulate what he saw was god's primary characteristic or is it the other way around because he was a man of present that's what he saw in god meaning is it the divine perception that molded his character or was it his character that molded his perception of the divine and in all probability there was a combination of both things happening at the same time right we see god through the lens of our own personalities which in turn come from that personalities are also coming from hashem so avraham saw in this world divine benevolence compassion and therefore his prayer reflects the sense of benevolence and goodness that exists in the world this even has a very interesting halachic implication we know that one of the great mitzvoth that we're commanded to do as an act of loving kindness is beaker hollam to visit people who are sick now this mithra takes a lot of delicacy by the ways it's not it's not as easy because uh you have to sometimes know that a cola might prefer and might need a shorter visit rather than a longer visit right so it's not necessarily in the houla's best interest that you come and spend six or seven hours uh with them sometimes they may really like that i'm not saying that'll never be the case but very often just to have somebody show that they care and you know and maybe even pray for them part of the bigger column is to pray for the quran but even if you say may hashem give you a refusal that is a prayer for the khala and the light and then kind of leave get out of the way that that takes a certain not to overstay your welcome because the last thing you need uh you want is that the chola has to spend his energy or her energy entertaining you because you know whatever it is okay but be as it may bicker holin is certainly a very very big mitzvah so the gemara says when you visit a chamber don't go now we don't necessarily follow this but i'll tell you what the game says don't visit him the first three hours of the day because he'll look so good that you won't pray for him hey you look great don't visit him the last three hours of the day in late afternoon because he'll look so bad that you're going to figure no you stopping the guy's a goner go in the middle of the day when you know not so good not so bad at that point you see that he's ill you'll pray for him oh yeah obviously it depends on the sickness but there is this concept that in the morning you're just better you're just better some people are not morning people but even then there's a sense of optimism and hope so chakras is the prayer of optimism hope gratitude and that was abram's life number one he saw god's kindness in the bria and number two in his own life looking back at least he was the recipient of god's kindness he had a child with sarah at the age of 100 years old even the bad son ishmael according to ghazal did shiva in abraham's lifetime and hagar that he had sent away came back to him as katura yes he did lose his beloved sarah but she was 127 she was not a young woman and avraham looks back at his life and he was respected he was admired all of the promises that god had made them were fulfilled so avram belongs to chakras because chakras is about gratitude and seeing the benevolence of god okay we now come to the prayer of minha now theoretically you can dive in mindra as early as coming one half hour after the middle of the day so if the middle of the day is 12 o'clock which is it often it's not so you don't make it 12 30. but the ideal time to dive in minha is late in the afternoon before the sun sets unless you're a chassid but it will be before the sunset but you already see the lengthening shadows of the evening you see the lengthening shadows meaning it's still daytime but you get a sense it's beginning to get dark if chakras represents gratitude and joy minha is connected to panic meaning you still have blessings but you feel that they're slipping away there's a sense of desperation first of all this is even true in the most mechanical sense the most uh simple factual sense because minha has the smallest window because let's say you're a working person right so chakras you could usually dive in before you go to work and arvis you can dive in when you come back minha you're stuck in the middle of the day all right so hashem maybe an erect israel you shall i am not a big problem if i'm number one you're you're you're near a shoal no matter where you are number two if you have the government in the streets so you don't mind the streets i mean uh you know no one no one's gonna look at you funny even if you simply dive in minecraft in the street but in america other countries you know when are you going to have a minister sometimes a dilemma i remember many years ago before there were cell phones that were widely in use so if you would walk into port authority the bus station in new york or penn station the train station in manhattan and they had pay phones because people didn't have cell phones all of the pay phones around shikiyata around sunset time were occupied by orthodox men usually men who were wearing hats or whatever it is and they were looking for a place of david mitchell so the way they pretended to them to do is they were making a phone call because they were embarrassed people were embarrassed just to dive in in the middle of the train station so they are making a phone call to god of course from penn station it is a long distance call to god uh here in ushalayam baruch hashem we can make a local call to ashrae okay but long distance call uh tuakodesboroku and uh you know minsky you're stuck right mentally you are stuck if you don't have a prayer if you don't have a private office or you're in the middle of a meeting and you see the sun going down like what are you gonna do right so minha even in terms of scheduling is kind of difficult to do especially in short short days in fact they have a little joke what is the definition of a relaxed jew when is a jew relaxed like i have no problems in life the answer is i darwin's milk like no problems i have unlimited options i can eat what i want and i don't have to worry about milka right that is called a relaxed a relaxed jewel but more seriously mintra's connected to panic because let's look at the life of yitzcar on one level is living in eretz israel but yitzugovino never left eric israel so yitzhak did not experience any physical gullets so he's living in daylight but already yitzhak understands that's obi godless remember that when hashem told avraham your children will be enslaved in a land that is not theirs for 400 years so you'll remember we were only in mitranium 210 years but the 400 years starts from the birth of yitzhak until the exodus is 400 years now there's that's a very famous rashi based on the metric but the question is but what do you mean why are you counting it from the birth of vietnam was not a slave biaser was not a stranger yesterday was an error to trail the answer is he was an eric israel but he was made to feel that he didn't belong there he was harassed he was pushed around the wells that he dug or that avraham dug were filled up by the philistines yitzhak had a sense of being in exile even though he was an irish israel he was given the message repeatedly you're not welcome here unlike avraham who was honored and respected yitzhak had moments of that but he also had many many moments the other way and that is why the gallup begins from and that is why minha belongs to yitzhak because if chakras is the prayer of gratitude optimism and hope mintra is the prayer of desperation where you're still holding on to blessings but you feel that they are slipping away from you they are moving away from you this was yitzhak who had the sense of exile the sense of being an alien i sometimes think of how jews felt in germany in 1933 right hitler became chancellor of germany in 1933 and at first they didn't have concentration camps right away but they passed various laws no jews can't be lawyers or jews can't be doctors or jews cannot sell in certain neighborhoods and a lot of people thought a lot of people thought all right this is going to pass hitler is a you know kind of a right-wing fanatic but you know they'll get over this i mean nobody imagined nobody imagines although in my conf he wrote pretty explicitly what he wanted to do but nobody imagined realistically we would be talking about concentration camps and god forbid rahman millions of jews being being killed they thought that it was in fact i i came across a letter this is one of the most amazing in a sad way one of the most amazing letters i ever read this was a letter signed by many many rabbis addressed to chancellor adolf hilter in 1933 and the letter basically said listen we know that you had to campaign on some anti-jewish sentiments because that's how you get votes in this type of society but we trust that you know you'll respond in a reasonable way to a jewish community that has been here for 1 000 years and we know that you will not be carried away with the rhetoric of campaigns and the like uh adef it will never never responded uh to that particular letter but there was such a belief that you know okay it was a little crazy but you know whatever it is it's not going to happen and yet day by day by day the jews were getting the message you're not welcome here this is not your country now of course in the case of germany that happens to be true in the case of eric israel it's not true but nevertheless that was the message that yitzhak was getting from the polishing so you see it's a different emotional mood now once again we're not so sensitive to this because for us going from afternoon to night is not such a big transition we have lights anything we do in the day we can do at night but in an agricultural economy that was pre-electricity night really meant the end of things you know if you were working in the fields once it was night you had to leave in fact uh somebody wrote a book another jewish book about i think it was called history of night very very interesting that that night today is a very different implication than night years ago uh 150 years ago if you read jane austen or you're reading any novel about that night you know you kind of locked up the shop you know that was it you were home maybe you had parties sometimes but more or less night was night today no night day everything is indistinguishable but night really signified the end of things think about just to give you a visual picture think about the new york stock exchange they close i think at 4 30 or 5 o'clock or something if you ever see as the last minutes are approaching there is an absolute frenzy the traders are like chickens without a head they have to get in that last raid because once the bell you know rings that's it oh that's not really the case but uh at least at least officially that's it for trading so the difference is once again avraham experiences benevolence compassion joy avram gives us the prayer of shakras yitzhak experiences panic fright a sense of things that are slipping away he gives us which is the prayer that we dive in as the day is slipping away into night and that's why the ushalmi says indeed that although you can dive in minha anytime in the afternoon the ideal time to dive in minfra is as the sun is setting because minsk is supposed to give you that sense of terror fright the fact that i need god to hold on to my blessings because they could so easily slip away so now let's look at my roof when did yaakov vavino enact the prayer of my roof he is 63 actually not 16 well okay it depends when he went to shane beaver he's either 63 or 77 depending on whether the 14 years were before this or after this the pastor says they were before it so he's 77 years old he is without a wife at this point he is without children there is a death sentence a fatwa on him aesop wants to kill him according to khazal yaakov is penniless because elifa's ace of son took all of his wealth so he's without money without wife without children he's old he is running away for his life for his life he is leaving the holiness of the land of israel he thinks he will never see his father again although the mighty does but he thinks he's not going to see his father again he never sees his mother again rifka dies although her death is not directly recorded and where is he going to he's leaving the holiness of the house of the others and he's going to a place of tumor and immorality and yaakov is deathly afraid of that because yaakov says if the ace of the asas of the world will destroy my body the lovelands of the world may destroy my soul and the soul of whatever children i have and the entire destiny of the nation that i'm supposed to create is going to be in jeopardy and therefore yaakov cannot pray like avraham thank you god for your benevolence and your kindness and he can't even pray for yitzhak who is still in the light of day but things are slipping away yaakov has hit rock bottom yaakov is in a position of total darkness in fact the point to add to this because i'll tell us the sun set prematurely it's not it's not even time for sunset total darkness so yaakov represents the person who is in a situation of utter hopelessness despair there is no way derek now it's true that he did have this glorious vision of god but let me remind you that is after he prayed that was god's answer to his prayer when yaakov prayed there was no ladder there was no vision there was no light there was no word from god there was only the prayer of yakov so here is what rap sadok says if chakras is the prayer of optimism and gratitude and yitzhak is the prayer of asking god to let me hold on to my blessings our vit is the prayer of amuna faith and muna is what you have when everything else is gone eve who suffered tremendously said the famous words that i think bach said to music in you know in the german hein yiktaleni even if god slay me lo ayachel to him i will have hope arvis is the prayer of the jew in auschwitz the prayer of the jew in the concentration camp the prayer of the jew in which there seems to be no hope there seems to be no light there seems to be no escape but because of maya muna i turn to hashem i trust in you to give me strength now that doesn't mean i will emerge from this tragedy jews died obviously in the in the holocaust but it means that god is with me whatever the result i am not alone i'm not dying alone i'm not walking through this suffering alone hashem is with me every step of the way my rev is a munna because myrib is the prayer of total darkness so here's what sadhuk says remember we're trying to answer a question why would myra be optional chakras is obligatory mindra is obligatory my rev is optional now the question is assuming that if something is optional that makes it less important rav flips this in the opposite direction because when something is a field that means every single person can be expected to live up to that idea so chakras which is the prayer of gratitude well of course every person has to be grateful for the good things god has given them even animals are grateful the navi ishayo says even the donkey knows who feeds it so chakras which is gratitude everybody has to have chakras be grateful minha the prayer of desperation well that's the old saying there are no atheists and foxholes meaning when you're at risk of losing things you become religious all of a sudden i don't know if you ever heard the jewish song it's in the jewish english song but the atheist convention it says a.b rottenberg was a very very wonderful uh composer of many many nagunim hebrew english so it's a little skit about three people are going to an atheist convention and and it talks about how you know religion is superstitious and blah blah blah and then the the plane loses altitude and it's about seems to be about to crash and all of a sudden the jewish atheists who have been expounding about uh how god is a superstition you know shouts out my israel and then the plane is straight actually he wasn't so much of an atheist as perhaps he thought he thought he was no so a b rottenberg wonderful absolutely i mean uh you know he's written literally maybe over a hundred songs all of them are very very beautiful some are funny and some are very poignant but he's a great great composer but be it as it may so mincha belongs to everybody when i have god's blessings and i'm afraid of losing them i pray to god but myra is optional not because it's less important but because it represents such a deep level of spiritual commitments that you work towards it but it can't be concretized as an obligation see this is the other way around my rev is the greatest prayer because it represents the highest spiritual level and we can't expect every bar mitzvah boy or basmitzva girl or even a regular adult to have to do it but it's a level that we want to reach the level of emunah the level of seeing god not only in the light but seeing god in the darkness and to understand that it's not just that god will show me a light at the end of the tunnel but that in the tunnel itself there is a light again this would need fleshing out but i refer you to books like victor frankel man's search for meaning that sometimes it's our confrontation with the darkness that brings out qualities of heroism and goodness and courage that we otherwise wouldn't have had and these are what you might call the awful gifts of god now i use awful in its older sense not not awful bad but there are gifts that come with an awesome price a devastating prince but they are gifts nonetheless there are the gifts that come in the package of darkness which are the most difficult gifts in life but they might also be the most precious gifts in life and this is why you know after the krishna of the morning we say ahmet v god's truth is firm and standing upright i can see it at night we say ahmet via god's truth is what i believe in even when i don't see it so clearly myra and of course this is the famous famous hasidic interpretation of what david malek says in tehillim sadiq bays which is the song of shabbos i declare your loving kindness in the morning and your faith at night so the famous hasidic interpretation is that mourning refers to those parts of your life that are bright day full of light full of blessing when i go through the life of days bulk but in every life there are going to be moments of darkness of hopelessness of helplessness of despondency and i look at that world and i look at that darkness and i don't see the light and i don't see the present so what do i have in the darkness of my life my faith in you in the mornings of life i declare hashem and in the dark nights of life i declare maya muna in hashem and my rev is the prayer of emunah and its optionality if there is such an english word is not based on it being less significant than the other prayers but it's based on it being a higher madrega because it represents the highest level of spiritual development that we can go through you know just to tell you a little story there was a very famous pianist i i'm not sure if he's he may still be alive if but if not he died very very recently uh leon fleischer uh who was uh i i knew some of his students and leon fleischer has had had a very long career i mean he started in the 1950s and he went on for many many years a very very gifted person he won many many awards as a young man and but he was obsessive i guess as all concert pianists probably are he was obsessive about practicing and as a result i think in his 40s he had some serious repetitive stress injuries in which he didn't have the ability to manipulate his fingers at least at the professional level that he needed and they tried all sorts of surgeries and all sorts of medical treatments and nothing really worked and he was very despondent because his music was his life and if he could not all right so for a while they have these one-handed pieces of music so while he was doing left-handed i think pieces but you know there's only a very limited uh repertoire so he was so despondent he said later that he was thinking of committing suicide because without music he had no life but what he did was he changed direction and he became a very very prominent teacher of the next generation of concert pianists so he was not an active player but he was an instructor and he taught and as i said i actually know some of his students some of whom are in symphonies and israel here and the like and he did this for around 25 years 24 years he did not play at any concert but he was a teacher who helped other people develop their talent so after 25 years his wife is reading something in the newspaper about some new experimental massage treatment in japan for repetitive stress carpal tunnel and she says to her husband you know there's this new thing here why don't you try it out so he actually said i don't want to try that i you know i almost killed myself you know 25 years before i'm going to get my hopes up about this new treatment and then it's not going to work he says i don't know if i could survive it i'd rather not open that door because if it doesn't work it's going to be too devastating for me you know we can understand that attitude it says i don't want to explore that option but his wife was persistent and she convinced him to get the treatment and lo and behold miraculously it was successful and he was able to play for another five or six years eventually it caught up but he had five years of playing and because he had been a teacher all those years his performance was still at a very high level of quality and he had five years of being able to share his music that would have been denied now that's a nice story generally but why am i telling you the story i'm telling you this story because leon fleischer who happens to be jewish or happened to be jewish i have to check if he's alive not religious at all but he came up with the mushrooms and the mushrooms is fantastic he said the following he said when i couldn't play i suffered tremendously but i understand why it happened to me because when i was a concert pianist the first time my life was all about me the kavod the honor the glory the applause and god wanted me to learn to care about other people so he took away my talent he took away my ability and i didn't know what to do because my whole life was about building up my ego and i didn't know what to do if i could no longer feed my ego so i was adrift for a long time but eventually i realized that i could help others and i became a teacher and what happened was my life was no longer about me my life was about what i could do for others and it became a situation where their successes were as beloved to me as my successes and their failures and their mistakes and their setbacks were as sad to me as my setbacks and i had learned that life was about giving and life was about caring and then when i learned that lesson god said to me okay i'll give you back your talent now now this is kind of a neat arc although it took 25 years you kind of have beginning middle end and the ark gets complete for many of us things are not always that neat to be sure and sometimes the ark might be so long that we really can't see the end of it but i think fleischer's insight which fits in with victor frankl's insight is a very very real thing things happen in life that can sometimes be tragic and at a minimum can be very disappointing and sad they don't necessarily have to be big things your seventh grader didn't get in the basketball team that they wanted to get on no for him that may be a big thing a person a shidduch didn't work out a job didn't materialize we can get very very broken over this we can get very sad we can get the respondent but we have to realize that the message of yaakov the message of emunah is that in the darkness there are hidden gifts and those hidden gifts in those hidden gifts we can discover new things about ourselves that we never realized that we had and that is the greatness of the prayer of arvit okay so shabbat shalom [Music] it's