Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Tenth of Tevet and Need to Repent for What?

[Music] hi everybody uh glad you could make it and the first i want to say that today's share is sponsored by the family of peril bus hayam vega rifka her 19th yard site is on uh the eighth of te base which is uh tonight and biazrat hashem all of the words of torah should be le iloi nishmata for the elevation of her soul and in addition we are still praying for that he should have a refuge lima but israel and he and his family are certainly in our thoughts and in our filos and as always we very much appreciate all people who sponsor the shiorim that they have a share in the hakshaka's torah and all the other vital work that rabbi poston and ebony is engaged in this friday we have a very unusual event uh we have the annual fast of the 10th of tabas and what is so unusual is the fast we have every year but this is a the only fast that we actually have on friday on erev shabbos normally the same way that we don't fast in shabbos unless it's yom kippur because we don't want to take away from the joy of shabbos there's actually a parallel halacha that one does not fast on friday either because you'd be entering the shabbos in a state of discomfort and hunger and yet asari battery base we will actually be fasting and even after we accept shabbos we cannot make kiddish and eat until it is mamas dark so we accept shabbos before sunset right before sunset but we don't eat until we get home and it's already and this is a very unusual feature of the jewish calendar in fact asari batave is in fact the only fast that can fall out on friday yom kippur theoretically if it would fall out on friday we would fast on friday just as we fast on shabbos but yom kippur can never fall out on friday so this is a very very unusual now it must i don't have i don't know off the top of my head how often this happens i i just have one memory in my life of this happening but i imagine it probably happens more more often than than i remember but it's a very unusual feeling to enter shabbos in a state of of fasting like about like about ten percent of the time oh really all right so that's somewhere else okay okay by the way there's another anomaly of asari that sometimes depending on the on the leap year the jewish leap year you can have a whole secular calendar year which doesn't have enough sororities of it like it might be at the beginning of january like in one year it might be the end of december and the next time will be the beginning of january the next year so you can actually have a secular calendar year without the fast of asari battery base i think that too is the only jewish fast day that can sometimes skip an entire secular year now the truth of the matter is one of the great great we shown him who writes on tv says even a bigger kiddish he actually says that if it would be possible for the tenth of te base to fall out on shabbos which based on our calendar it's not we would even fast on shabbos which is quite amazing because even the ninth of av which is such a harmour fast we do not fast on shabbos but as sorry but we would so what i want to talk about tonight is what exactly uh is asari betteves about and what particular lessons are we supposed to take from this experience but before we talk about asari but let me just mention that we're entering the eighth of te base and in fact in the shogun arc it is written that the eighth ninth and tenth of tapes are days of fasting days of sadness days of mourning days of grieving and even though it is only a sore battery base that's mandatory and the eighth and the ninth were only fast days for the righteous for very very few people in fact i don't know anyone that observes those fast days but on the books it is the eighth ninth and tenth of tabas that are days of some and days of sadness and in fact if you look at the selekos that we're going to recite friday morning we will make mentions to the three days of darkness now let me talk about those days first and then we'll get to the tenth of te base itself what happened on the eighth of teves so we are told that the eighth of teves happened to be the day that 70 elders who were commissioned by ptolemy was one of the kings of egypt and the aftermath of alexander the great remember we talked about that his empire was divided between seleucus and ptolemy and tommy had the uh empire in egypt and north africa and seleucus had the empire in syria and turkey and eric israel was a football between those two empires and the hanukkah story occurred when the syrian part of the empire dominated every israel but back in the tamiya dynasty the homeage empire so he commissioned 70 elders to translate the torah into greek and they completed that translation into greek and that's called the targum shivim or sometimes the greek term is the septuagint the scholarly abbreviation for it is lxx which is simply the roman numeral for 70. that is how it is referred to in scholarly literature and although i think i had mentioned when we talked about hanukkah that in the alexandrian community the completion of the septuagint was greeted with great great joy great great simbra because it made the torah accessible to a largely illiterate and assimilated population the viewed the completion of this targum in a very tragic light in fact the lesson of the gemara is that the day that the torah was completed in greek there were three days of darkness that descended upon the world 8 9 10. that's independent of the historical reason for asari betavis and why the targum shivin was considered to be a tragedy after all it did it indeed made the torah more accessible but looked at it as a tragedy because number one translations inevitably introduced distortions and number two it was tragic that the jewish population were so assimilated that they could not understand the torah in hebrew i remember when the art scroll came out the first arts girl came out in 1978 mcgillis esther a long time ago so on one hand people were celebrating but in the jewish observer there was a little article remember the fact that when the torah had to be translated there was a certain amount of sadness that's involved right so that's the targa mashivim that is what happens on the eighth of page and remember this is this is during the second temple right this is during the second temple in jerusalem was the translation of the torah into into greek when it comes to the ninth of teves the shokunari has a very enigmatic statement the nines of te base is also a fast but we don't know why it doesn't give any reason and the mr brewer says that according to the slikhos this was the day that ezra died ezra was the great one who rebuilt jewish society at the time of the second temple but it's very very difficult if indeed it is simply commemorating the death of ezra then why would it not be known why would it be it's almost as if they're the hachamim are trying to keep a secret here this is a fast day we're not telling you why if it's commemorating the death of ezra has so fair you know why shouldn't we know that so let me just mention that um dr schneider lehmann who is a great great historian anna thomas rockham a professor at now he's retired but he was for many years a professor at the city university in new york and again he has a website and if you are interested in jewish history he is the guy to go to he has really an encyclopedic knowledge of all aspects of of jewish history ancient and modern uh he has a whole article on the mystery of the ninth of teves and he brings up a lot of different suggestions and solutions one suggestion that was made is that the ninth of te base was actually the birthday the hebrew birthday of the founder of christianity we know that the christian world will be celebrating in a few days the birth of yashka and we also know that english dates and hebrew dates are not usually in sync and technically some wanted to suggest that the ninth of te base was a fast day because it was a sad commemoration of the birth of yashka whose life brought so much tragedy not so much his life but the religion that was founded uh in after his death brought so much tragedy on the jewish people so in the sense the hebrew date of christmas became a fast day a day of mourning but the did not want to be mafar saying that we are fasting because jesus was born then because that might cause a pogrom i mean there were enough programs on christmas anyway we don't need to add gasoline to the fire and therefore it was connected to the birth of yashka there is such a shita again rabbi dr layman goes through the kashmir nuts in other words it's not exactly clear that you could pull out the ninth of te base from the other types of dates that are given for yahushua's birth and of course upgrading in any event uh december 25th was not his birthday anyway that's a whole complicated issue of history first of all the gregorian calendar uh was much later and at that time was the julian calendar and everything would have been would have been different but rabbi lehmann comes out with a third possibility which is quite quite astounding really this will blow your mind and in fact he bases it on something that's called a madrish but it's not really a madrish of ghazal it's kind of a medieval commentary that's called madris and some of those midrashim do not have the kind of canonical authority of the real madrushram of ghazal but it is in a document that is denominated by madrish and this is the story of a man who is called shimon kipa shimon kipa now that name may not be familiar to you but keepa is aramaic for rock and evan is called a kippah so shimon kipa literally means simon the rock now that too may not be familiar to you but let me remind you that this is actually the name of the closest disciple of jesus his talmud movak who was simon and jesus called him peter peter is petra petra is a greek for rock he said you know you're my rock and on your on your rock i will establish my church that peter became the first bishop of rome the first pope uh etc so shimon kipa is none other than simon peter the disciple of yashka the closest disciple of yashka he was of course jewish obviously he was jewish in fact all of his uh apostles were jewish and paul who was not an apostle was was jewish as well now here is what the medra says again uh okay yeah yeah that's right now here is what the medras says about shimon kipa remember that the early christians christians were all nine out of 10 were all jews and they were functioning within the jewish community just as messianic jews might do today some of them were keeping mitzvos that there was a whole movement within christianity in which they basically felt that joshua is our mashiach yes our savior but we still have to keep the torah and there was a convocation of the sanhedrin where the sanhedrin was very very very concerned that the infiltration of christian doctrine into jewish communities would lead many many jews astray and they wanted to create some mechanism where christianity would become a separate religion separated from judaism so the medrash gives the wild idea that shimon kipa was a religious man he was a righteous man and he volunteered for the equivalent of a suicide mission he basically said i will leave the jewish religion at least as a public matter i will make myself the leader of a new religion we'll call it christianity whatever it would be called and in that way i will be the pied piper who leads the jewish christians out of affiliation with the jewish community so that they will be recognized as a separate religious denomination and will no longer have missionary influence so to speak on the jewish people so according to this madrish shimon kipa essentially renounced judaism officially although he continued to be a religious jew privately so the first pope was of course jewish that of course is true anyway peter was the first bishop of rome but he continued to keep the mitzvahs but he knew he could never again officially and publicly connect to the jewish community and he had one request he says i know that i am severing myself for quali israel from quali israel but my motives are for the sake of heaven my motives are to preserve judaism to preserve jews to protect jews from the pernicious influence of christians who would be infiltrating and functioning within the jewish community so he made two requests of the sages one is he composed a prayer and he asked that this prayer be recited in all synagogues and that prayer was none other than nishmat that we say every shabbos and at the passover seder and according to this madrid the author of nish mask which is a beautiful beautiful prayer and indeed it's considered to be a very powerful prayer in fact you'll often find that sadiqun will tell you that in times of danger times of sorrow times of sickness you recite the nismod's prayer it's really not a prayer it's really a praise of god but in that praise of hashem there are many yeshua and according to this madrish the author of nishmat is shimon kipa and his second request is that his yard site should be commemorated people should remember on the day of his death that he acted for the sake of heaven so according to the medrash his yard site was the ninth of teves so the fast day of the night of te base is to commemorate in a good way the anniversary of the death of shimon kipa but once again we didn't want to publicize the reason because a lot of jews wouldn't understand it number one jews wouldn't understand it why are you commemorating the art site of one of jesus apostles and number two that also may create antagonism from the catholic church uh as if we're claiming that simon peter who is the greatest of the apostles was an apostate he really didn't believe uh in yeshka and the like this is quite a wild idea but it does have this source in this madrish that the ninth of tevas was the art site of shimon kipa and that is why the khachamim did not want to reveal what it was again quite quite an amazing idea the maksar victory which is a compilation of minha gim and of tefila that were written around the time of rashi by rashi's disciples actually does bring a tradition that nishmat was authored by shimon kipa but he then disagrees with it he says it's not true you know he others he considers this madrid to be false but once again perhaps there was a stream that did accept this madrish and that is the mysterious origin of the ninth of tevas so that is uh dr layman's rabbi dr layman's a very very interesting article by the way in the 19th century in the early 20th century some academic historians assigned that role to paul they actually said paul was a religious jew who wanted to separate christianity from judaism that was a theory there but we have an earlier measure that actually put that role on peter who's called shimon shimon kipa okay uh of course in later uh in later uh what you might call parody jewish literature i told dossier which is essentially a parody or a satire on jesus shimon kipa was not viewed in positive terms and since his name was peter they called him peter hamur okay again petra ramore that's that's the term that torah uses for the first born of a donkey peter the chamorro okay but now let us go to the tenth of tavis the tenth of te base is the actual day that we still observe as a fast and what happened on the tenth of te so we're told on the tenth of te base that is when the netzer the king of babylonia began began nothing happened but began the siege against jerusalem that culminated eventually in the corbin basa miktus three years later on the ninth of of but the siege the matsar began on the asura batteries the navier haskell who was already living in babylonia because eleven years before the khorman many of the great tamil hachem were exiled to babel earlier this was the goddess of was told by hashem write down this date even though you're a thousand miles away right down the state the 10th of day base a beatz on this very day didn't begin his siege and this confirmed yakuza's nebula because he wrote down the date and then when they got the news later they realized that the date was accurate and the light now there's something very interesting here there are four fast days that are connected to commemorating the destruction of the basa mikdash we have the tenth of tevace which is the beginning of the siege we have the 17th of thomas when the city was broken into but actually the gemarantinus explains that in the first mikdash it was broken into the ninth of thomas it is the second basamika that the romans broke into with the 17th of thomas so technically we should fast on the 9th and the 17th the sages didn't want to create two fast days so close together but nevertheless on the 17th we do think about hufka hair both of the bias richon and the bias chaining then of course we have the ninth above and the ninth of ave amazingly was the day of the quarterback both for the bias region and 490 years later day to day 70 years of exile and 420 of the of the by cheney was the corbin by his shiny and then we have the fast of gedalia which is again only connected to the first base of mikhtash that after the corbin bassamichas most of the jews were exiled from babel but the governor gedalia was a righteous person who was put in charge of the small group of jews that remained and when godalia was assassinated that was the final nail in the coffin that told the jewish population that there is no hope now there's going to be an exile for at least 70 years and that destroyed the last jewish presence in eric israel for 70 years basically actually 52 years because cyrus allowed them to come back but for 52 years there was not a single jew in the land of israel this is what ghazal said everybody was gone so some gidalia is kind of the final nail in the coffin of the corbin basa migration now if you think about this you see an interesting pattern asara betavis and some gedalia have events that are only connected to the first temple there is nothing in them about the second temple shiva sarpatamas is both bias rishon although that was the ninth of tamas and by its shaney tish above is both bias richon and by ashani but asari batavias and some guidalia are only bias rishen now why is that important like why is it important i mean who cares if it's first temple second temple aren't we just we're mourning the base i'm making sure let's think about this for a moment what exactly is the role what is the function of the days of mourning over the temple why do we mourn over the temple the truth is there's that a person should mourn over the base of mikdash every single day of the year every single day of the year that is why there is something called tikkun khatsos people get up at midnight most of us don't do that but the sudurum habit to mourn over the khurban in fact there's an interesting story the great baal musser revellio lapian began getting up at midnight to say tikkur khatsos when he was in his 80s he had not done it his whole life and somebody asked him like why are you doing it now you know he didn't do it before so he said well listen i'm going to die soon and when a person comes up to shamayim he gets a test the malach goes through every law in the shogunate and says did you keep this so listen if there's a law in chapter 692 that i didn't keep i'm not so worried about that because by that time i'll have a track record i would have i would have built up a success with a lot of laws that i did keep so if i fail like in the in the 600s or whatever it would be uh that's not so bad but the law about mourning over the corbin basa mikdash is in the first chapter of the so if i mess up at the very beginning you know i didn't even have a chance to build up any credibility so i better be very very careful to keep the stuff that's the very beginning of the shogunate because i'm going to make a bad impression again i mean obviously that's not to be taken literally but this was his point but what is the idea of mourning whether it's the morning of tikker khatsos uh or whether it's tisha b'av or shivas or batamas or a sorbette base why are we mourning all the time and the short answer is that we're not simply sad over a past event but rather there's a very very important passage in the talmud you shall me and the talmud you show me says any generation in which the basa mikdash is not rebuilt is as culpable as the generation in which the basal mikdash was destroyed now this is a very very important you show me and we should we should focus on it very carefully we know that the base of mikdash was destroyed the first one by the babylonians the second one by the romans because i'll identify certain spiritual flaws in the people the khurban besamiktas the first place of mikdash was destroyed we are told because of the worst of they wrote a vodazara idolatry gila arayas sexual promiscuity and morality stomach murder the second base amid this the jews were largely righteous they largely were torah observant but there was a plethora of sinatra of hatred groundless animosities and of course gazal said you see how bad sinatrinam was the first baisa mikdash that was destroyed because of avodah zarya shri the worst of heiress in the torah the khurban only lasted 70 years the second basa maktash that was destroyed because of sinatrinam we are still going through that ghost now here is what the urushami is saying a person might think okay the generation that lost the temple were really bad they had these really really serious availables they lost the temple we're not so bad we're not righteous enough to get it back but we're not as guilty as the generation in which it was destroyed we just don't have the extra merit to get it back the talmud ushami is teaching us that type of thinking is wrong you don't need to be extra righteous to get the temple back the only thing you need to get the temple back is not to be guilty of the very factors that caused its destruction which means if ghazal teach us that the first place amicus was destroyed because of zara gila raj vika that means we're still guilty i'll talk about how that's so of abode of zara gila right and if the second base amicus was destroyed because of sinatra we are still guilty of sinatra every generation in which the temple is not rebuilt is as culpable as the generation of the corbin itself to put it another way the destruction of the basa mikdash is not a past event it is happening every single day every single day we are re-destroying the beisamiknash it's a very powerful idea we are makhri of the base of mikveh imagine you had a basamiknash and you're destroying it that's what we're doing now can move on it's understood that even that does not mean we're mourning the fact that we don't have this beautiful building that's not what the avelis is i mean there are many beautiful buildings in the world the taj mahal is a beautiful building lahavdil the belzer bay knesset which some people call the base of mikdus because architecturally it resembles the basal mikdash a little bit but when we talk about not having a base i make this what we're really talking about is not having the intimacy with god that the basic this symbolizes prophecy connection feeling a kesher with god it's hard for us to even describe this because we never had it so we don't even know what it is that we're missing in some ways just as a blind person blind from birth cannot really understand color and a person who was born deaf cannot understand music we were born in a sense deaf and blind to what the spiritual connection of the basa mikhtash represents but the point is therefore when we mourn over the khorben we are trying to resolve in our own lives to rectify those flaws that caused the basamiktas to be destroyed so that little by little we can rebuild the basal magnesium by being masaken the restroot that caused the basa mikhtash to be nakarov okay this is the basic understanding of what it means to mourn over the khurban bay samiktas so now there's a problem here bish lama when i consider let's say the 17th of thomas or the ninth above which are connected to the second temple i certainly have something to connect to because the second temple was destroyed because of sinatrina hatred polarization baseless groundless when i think about my life and i think about jewish life generally i can certainly identify that unfortunately and tragically we are very much still in a world of sinatrina in other words when i'm asking myself what have i done to cause the corbin base i mikdash i can certainly link to sinatrina there is so much polarization so much hatred so much dissension so much indifference so much coldness not only between religious jew and secular jew but between the religious jews of all stripes in which in fact in itself made the point in the civ in the introduction to his commentary on the himesh actually says that the sinatrinam of the second temple was a religiously based synesthetic in which i looked at other jews and i said they're not as religious as me or they're too fanatical and those tonight to the left are heretics not because them and those to the right are fanatics it's only where i am that's right and then it says that the sense of looking down at people because of their religious orientation was the sinatranam of the bayou cheney by the way the native was criticized for those words it was that he was being too soft on reform or not religious jews and in many ways i have to say the criticism actually proved the native's point and the civ's whole point was don't look down at other people yeah there are ideas that you have to argue with there are ideas you have to combat there you know you have to have clarity as to what is the stuff of the torah it doesn't mean i'm okay you're okay it doesn't mean every idea is legitimate that's not true there is ms and there is sheker and people who believe in torah have to stand up for the ms but then the civ is saying you don't demonize people you don't look down at people you don't denigrate people you have to have a respect and a coverage for people and when you personalize the mistakes that people make which are usually well intentioned even when there are mistakes they are well intentioned but you call them amalek and you call them raja that is the native rites an aspect of sanat so unfortunately i can very much identify with that meaning when i'm when i'm sitting on the ninth above and i'm sitting on the 17th of thomas and i'm thinking why don't we have a basa miktas i can certainly say like do you show me if it's not built in our time it's because we're guilty of those avairas sinatrina but here is the problem that i have on the tenth of tej i'm not thinking about the second temple i'm thinking about the first temple because there was nothing that happened on the tenth of te base that's connected to the second temple when i think about this first temple the averages that come to mind are not the averages of sinatrina the averages that come to mind are avodah zorra giliarayos sweetheart idolatry sexual immorality and murder well wait a second i'm not that bad yeah maybe and lush and hare which is connected to sinatra nam all right i'm guilty of that i got to work on that but availa idolatry uh giliarayas adultery or incest shrieker's that seems to be beyond my ambit that doesn't seem to be the thing that i or most jews are grappling with so the question becomes how do we link our nepesh our spiritual accounting our introspection to the aveiros of the first base of mikdash since it doesn't seem that we're really connected to those of errors we're generally not connected to those averages so i want to give you three answers to that question that even bismarck we are aduk we are connected unfortunately to the tragic flaws of avodah zarah delia answer number one is khazal actually identify certain aveiros as equivalent to our vote of zara gilia rayashvich for example khazal say call hakowes anyone that shows anger is equivalent to idol worship so maybe i don't bow down to an idol but if i show anger that is a form of idolatry now it's interesting what is the connection why would anger be tantamount to idolatry so really it's an idolatry in the form of self-idolization because what is anger psychologically anger comes from a sense of we might say frustrated entitlement if i think something is coming to me and i get less honor or less money or less covert than i think i deserve or if i think something bad shouldn't happen to me and it happens to me so either something bad happens that i think shouldn't happen or something good doesn't happen that i think should happen or something good happens but i think it should be more the common denominator of all of that frustration is you had a sense of my dealing this was coming to me i deserved it i should have gotten it i should have gotten the job i should have gotten the promotion i should have gotten the money i should have gotten the honor i should have gotten the respect of course sometimes you can be angry at yourself that's a different issue that comes from a sense of shame but the anger that we have towards other people comes from a sense of entitlement and when you make yourself entitled to things you're kind of making yourself your own god you're making yourself the god of your universe that you are the center of the universe looking after number one as the book was called and you are number one we are number one so one could see the connection between anger and idolatry because if i believe that everything is a gift from god then i accept whatever god gives me with equanimity and calmness so anger equals avodah zara murder cause i'll say if you humiliate somebody publicly it is tantamount to murdering them you can murder people in a lot of ways you can murder people by sticking a knife in their heart or taking a gun and shooting them or you can murder them by crushing their spirit taking away their enthusiasm humiliating them that's also killing them and finally when it comes to gilearay out cause i'll say that sexual fantasies and obsessions can even be worse than the natural of era because the average takes a minute ten minutes whatever it is but the obsessions linger in the mind and in our hyper over sexual society the the issue of fantasies of exposure of what you see what you take in can be very very very powerful that's why there's a whole website uh called guard your eyes that deals with this whole issue of of shmirate and i am what we should try not to be looking at that's why the old argument that pornography is a victimless crime right libertarians have argued for many many years that there ought to be nothing wrong with uh looking at uh pornography as long as you know children are not being exploited or whatever it is obviously and because you're just looking you're not doing you're just looking what's wrong with looking but from the of the torah things like pornography are very very detrimental to a person because the eyes bring in thoughts and fantasies and images and obsessions and you know the mind these ideas crowd out ideas of holiness and goodness so the answer is very positive in other words this is answer number one the question is how do i connect to the sins of avodah zara gilead the answer is this answer number one it's true i don't worship idols but have i ever gotten angry do i have an anger problem it's true that i haven't committed adultery or incest but pornography what i see thoughts in my mind and it's true i didn't shoot anybody but have i humiliated them have i crushed their spirits have i taken away their enthusiasm it might be to my spouse it might be to my child it might be to my friends it might be to somebody at work and that's a form of murder remember we read last week about yehuda and tamar when tamar two weeks ago when tomorrow refused to reveal the identity of yehuda who had gotten her pregnant she just said the man that gave me this staff and yehuda has to confess but what do you say if he would not have confessed she would have thrown herself into the fiery furnace what do gizelle say better to throw yourself in a fiery furnace and not humiliate somebody publicly now whether we actually puskin like that that's an interesting question meaning if you were faced with the situation of uh i'm going to be killed unless i embarrass somebody many postcards say because will be allowed okay but that's the question do i do i actually proskin like the extreme of that statement but you see how serious cause i'll take this idea better to be thrown in a fiery furnace now there's a storyboard of aaron cutler it's a very powerful story reverend cutler was known as a great great guddell even in europe he was a rusher shiva at the age of of 21. a big resistive at the age of 21. he came to america in the middle of world war ii and and during the war years he did not start yeshiva he was busy trying to save people bring them over get the visas get them out of europe et cetera and he had no moderate success he would even be mahalo shabbas he would sometimes travel on shabbos to washington to negotiate with uh government officials uh because he considered this to be a matter of pikachu in which you even violate the shabbos but after the war was over he finally wanted to do what his life's dream was to have a yeshiva and he started in white plains new york and shortly afterwards moved to lakewood and of course to this very day uh the lake ridge was one of the world's great institutions of torah they have a branch in israel called lakewood east but but baseball boa is the uh is the nerf center but when leviran cutler started as yeshiva there were very few yeshivas in america there was torah vidas there there was you but the idea of learning torah was not that accepted even among the orthodox they understood preparing people for rabbinical positions because that was a practical idea but javaren had a different sheet there avaron didn't say he's there to prepare rabbis like a vocational school wherever's point was learning is for learning tyra is what keeps the world around we have to have torah learning and that was something that many american jews just didn't understand i'm talking about orthodox jews so he would go around collecting money and people would give him a dollar two dollars you know even even in the 1950s that was not a lot of money i mean it's more than it is you know it's worth more than his day but he was not getting big donations and people would often insult him they would embarrass him they would say who needs this in america you know why are you bringing your old european ways to the free land this is a new world a new society etc and one of his talmudim once asked him says rebbe you're such a god oh you're such a sadiq you're such a gun and if you wouldn't have to raise all of this money and go through all this humiliation there are so many swarm you could write so many shiorim you could give so many tommy him you could teach why does god put you through this humiliation again and there was humiliation and reverend said you know the torah says when you kill somebody inadvertently the showgeek you go to the city of refuge you go to the hermit luts now how is the year macleod described in ghazal it's described as going into gallus going into exile so exile is the punishment for killing somebody non-maliciously accidentally so reverend said every teacher of torah may in fact be an inadvertent murderer it's inadvertant we didn't intend to kill anybody but you could kill a student kill a talmud by crushing him by deflating his self-confidence by embarrassing him because you thought he asked a stupid question by ignoring him by making the person feel that he's not important and riveran said that's a form of murder inadvertent to be sure and the punishment for inadvertent murder is galos and that's why russia yeshiva who are really responsible for everything that goes on in their yeshiva have to go from place to place to collect money because they are murderers or at least the facilitators of murder if there are other teachers and the like an amazing thing an amazing thing how we can kill people with our words with our actions with our neglects so it's not so rough to say that we are guilty of avoiding zara gilliard should be in that way so that's answer number one let me give you an answer number two answer number two is based on a very interesting story involving raviosafe cairo the author of the shulhana now we know of course regressive cairo is the great legalist the great master of halakha but yosef kairo was also a great mystic he was a great mukubo in fact his community at the time this is in the 1500s rivers of cairo was the rav of sfats the great commentator was the darshan was the preacher of svats and with alchemists the author of dhodi was the khazen of swat and you had ravi swallow who wrote kharibon alam and you had rav moshe cardivero the ramak who died and then the arizona came it's unbelievable the community now you go to spa today and all of these people seem to have their own shell now the truth of the matter is the review of cairo scholars authentically reverse of cairo show this is where yosef cairo actually doesn't the other shows they named some of some of them they named for the great rabbis the rage rabbis didn't necessarily dive in there in the irisho in spot there are two rvs right there's ari ashkenazi aries vardy well did the ire change his affiliation every week you know so okay so the truth of matter is all of the identifications of the shoals and spot with the great rabbis are somewhat questionable except provision of cairo is indeed his show the release of cairo was the rav of swat he was in his seventies when the arizona okay the arizona was only 37 years old when it came to spot and he died at 39 so the arizona's whole teaching career in kabbalah was only two years only two years and it is said that revisif kara wanted to learn kabbalah from the arena and he would go to the aries shiorim but he would always fall asleep and the arizaw told him it was minnesota that it's not the fear it is not uh honor for you to learn from me you're so great hashem does not want me to be your rebbe and you to be my talmud and that's why he doesn't want you to learn from me but be it is admiring your voice of cairo himself was a great makable and he was so great that indeed he had regular revelations from an angelic spirit that would teach him tara malach and the malach was called his magette his preacher and your vision kara wrote a diary describing his discussions with tamales it was a private diary but it was found after his death and it was published and you can get the savior i think it's even on hebrewbooks.org for free it's called magid sharim that means the preacher of righteousness and this is a discussion of the learning and the exchanges that your visit of cairo had with the malach by the way the shallow cardiac brings one particular event the device of cairo and his circle of mukubalam and spot they started the custom of learning all night schvules it was not a common custom before then and in the middle of the night a divine voice of god came out of joseph tara's mouth saying what an elevated and holy uh activity this is and this was copied over by the shallah kadesh and that's how it got to europe and that established the minute of learning all night i once saw an academic study fascinating study that correlates the introduction the minute spread to europe at different places meaning austria germany poland russia it got to those countries different times and this person correlated this with the introduction of coffee into those countries meaning coffee is not native european coffee is from the americas and it kind of got into europe in the 1600s and it was pointed out that if you trace when a given jewish community adopted the meaning of staying up all night it tends to correlate with when coffee became available because coffee is one of the things that keeps you awake so the minute worked with the introduction of coughing but be it as it may the minute comes from a yosef kairo who did it without coffee now but in the mahjid meishanram the following story is told and this is a very very fascinating story there was a piece of gemara that travios of cairo was working on and it was very very difficult and he had a lot of questions and he worked and he worked and he worked and he worked and finally after several weeks he finally understood the psat and he was so grateful to hashem who revealed the secrets and the depth of the torah through of yasaf kara he was very very grateful he's walking by and spot the narrow alleyways of spot that you can see to this very day and he overhears a shoemaker learning the same piece of gemara with his six-year-old son again my my ages may not be exact but a young son and strangely enough the young son asked his father the same question that the yosef cairo was bothered with for weeks and weeks same question okay and the father who was just a shoemaker said to the son with some annoyance i knew this gemara was too hard for you why are you asking such simple questions the answer is so-and-so the answer that it took rav yosef cairo the goddess door weeks and weeks to understand now rav yosef cairo was heartbroken because if this was such a simple point that even a six-year-old should have gotten it and the father is annoyed that the six-year-old didn't get it right away and it took ravi yosef cairo weeks to have that understanding his only conclusion was he was found undeserving in the eyes of god not to understand something very very simple and unlike our situation where we don't have anybody to ask what did i do wrong he asked malach what aveira did i do how did i find disfavor in the eyes of god that an obvious teaching should be withheld from me and the angel gave him the following answer the angel said you have no avera at all but this aspect of torah was very deep very mysterious the world was not deserving of it but through your work and your effort and your yagiya your toil you brought it into the world once you brought it into the world it becomes accessible to anybody even the six-year-old should be able to get it but had you not worked and strived it would have remained beyond the level that this world is capable of this is in the magic meshore now the question is what does this even mean review cairo didn't teach anybody you know if the idea would be he worked on it and he brought it into the world and then he would teach people and explain it all right so now we understand it he mastered it he can explain it to us but this was a private thing he was sitting by himself he was learning by himself he didn't write about it he didn't teach it he didn't communicate it what does it even mean to say you brought it into the world so the six-year-old kid could have gotten it and if he didn't get it the father could be annoyed what does that even mean so you see from this story a very very important idea in avodah's hashem that when we do mitzvos when we learn torah when we work hard to achieve spiritual goals we're not just uplifting ourselves we are bringing light and holiness into the world that has effects that may be imperceptible to us but are real the analogy would be a nuclear bomb right to take a negative analogy you have ground zero where the intensity of radiation is the greatest but even a thousand miles away two thousand miles away three thousand miles away five thousand miles away there is radiation that is still affecting you may get more attenuated with distance and time but that bomb creates effects you know people say sometimes what are you accomplishing you're sitting and learning you're doing mitzvahs what are you doing for the world you're doing something for yourself what are you doing for the world well first of all by the way according to the gemaran sanhedrin that is one of the definitions of an api chorus one of the definitions of an epicurus says what do the rabbis do for the world now obviously we do have responsibilities to the world that's true but one has to know that even the private goodness that you generate brings a holiness into the world the world is different people can connect to god in ways that they couldn't have done had you not then you've done your little mitzvah in your local basement or your home the ripple effects used to say it's a very famous statement used to say that the intensity of the learning in rotten rattan was a little village the kavitzhaim's little village affected the modesty of the dresses in paris yeah in rodden they were learning 12 hours a day 14 hours a day by the time they got to paris people weren't learning 14 hours a day but maybe a dress was a quarter of an inch shorter a longer longer than it would have been there's an effect so now how is this relevant to avoid zara gila rajvin well maybe let's even assume i'm not guilty of avoiding zara gila right i'm not guilty of those things but i live in a world any of it i live in a world of murder i live in a world of violence i live in a world of cruelty i live in a world of unbridled sexuality and exploitation i live in a world of idolatry perhaps not the idolatry of bowing down to idols but the idolatry of money the roman gone actually says the desire for money is the new idolatry materialism hedonism self-gratification and even if i'm not so guilty of those things but if i live in a world where those things go on it's because i did not generate enough kedusha in my divine service because if i would have generated kedusha the world would have been better now granted maybe because of our kadusha the world is not as bad as it would have been so maybe the world is better because of us but if it's in such bad shape it's because we didn't do all that we can do and we become co-conspirators in that in that evil so the anti-semites are right don't tell them when the anti-semites blame the jews for everything bad in the world that goes on there is sadly a certain amount of truth to that that if the world is immoral if the world is falling apart if the boundaries are collapsing all around us part of it is we have not generated enough kedusha in our avodah hashem because kedusha is powerful it brings light into the world it brings goodness into the world and as the story from of yosef cairo illustrates this applies not only when i directly try to help others influence them but even if i'm doing something totally in the privacy of my own individual life the world gets affected the world gets affected you know we lost i mentioned this before uh corey israel lost last month uh rabbi uh jonathan sachs the colonel of raqqa was a great you know great great person who sanctified god's name in many many ways rabbi sachs his avenue was very very public he reached tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions i don't know people jew non-jew an eloquent spokesman for judaism jewish values kind of the moral conscience of the world so he was a person who sanctified god's name in a very public way and he deserves great great admiration and great service not all of us have that particular function it's not given to all of us either the talents or the opportunities to necessarily sanctify god's name in a big public way but a person has to know that you can sanctify god's name in very private ways as well ways that within your family within your community or even within yourself do we shine them tell us you know we think hashem only applies but we normally use the word kirish hashem and in terms of the impact we make on other people right if i give other people a positive view of judaism that's called kidoshashem if i give people a negative view of judaism that's called we almost we always associate with impacts on others whether jewish or not jewish and that's true that is certainly a major component but if you look at the rambam you will actually find that there is something that you might call a private and internal idea of hashem and that is when a person truly conquers his yetzera and tries to be good even when it's hard that is a key to hashem even if nobody else knows about it and when khashoggi person decides not to care that's called schiller even if nobody knows about it and that kiddish hashem or katsu sheldon the opposite can have a positive or a negative impact on the whole world okay so these are the things that we think about in this fast day of assorted potatoes but i want to mention one other thing in spite of the fact that i just said or my whole share was about the fact that asura betavis is only connected to the bias re-shown and not the bioshady there is one connection to the biochemi that has been made now this is a very strange thing uh this is a horror from rav fisher he should be well swimmer fisher uh is probably the uh greatest guy that many people have never heard of he lives in new shalom he's in his nineties uh he is a guy in autumn in kola tarakula kabbalah he is also an expert in philosophy and science as well really a a treasure that many people do not know of he's a little off the beaten track because he also knows all the chakras and everything else but jeff fisher doesn't have a clear proof for this which is a little strange but he says he he tries to make a hushman that merchy racio safe happens the tenth of teves because he wants to connect all of the bais amikta's fast days to earlier tragedies in quality israel the 17th of thomas is connected to moshe rabeno breaking the tablets because of the sin of diego the ninth ava is connected to the spies who came back on the eighth above and the jewish people cried the night of the night of love and god said you are crying for no reason this will become the day of tragedy so he wants to posit that if the khurban bayas if shiva's arbitamas is connected to the and tish above is connected to the height of the miragulim he wants deposit asura beta vase is connected to the faith of yosef now if that is true and again i i can't say honestly that he has a strong proof for this but if that is true that actually connects us to the sins of the biatcheni because what is yosef other than the example of hatred of a brother jealousy and if the miragum laid the seed or planted the seeds for the corbin based yosef planted the destructive seed of sinatrina that also resulted in the chorban of the by cheney so it is fascinating that in a roundabout way asari battalis does become connected not only to the by its resound but it becomes connected to bayashini the navi zakaria promises us that all of these four fast days when mashiach comes not only will they no longer be fast days they will actually be days of joy and rejoicing and you may wonder why will they become days of joy i understand they won't be fast days anymore but why would the tenth of tevas be more joyous than the tenth of kiss life in other words what makes it a joyous day as opposed to simply not being a fast day but the answer is positive if the basa mikdash gets rebuilt by the mourning and the grieving and the introspection we engage in it turns out that the sadness and introspection of these fast days is the very thing that brings the redemption and therefore they will become days of joy days of rejoicing because we will realize that from that introspection came the goula the morale actually says that's the meaning of the famous statement mashiach is born on tishiba it's not referring to the birthday of the physical mushrik but it means what brings goula into the world is the depth of our mourning and our care and our concern for the base of miknish so i suppose if we truly believe in mashiach perhaps even this year there will not be the fast of us saribateves but if as seems likely we will fast this year may this fast day be the last fast of us and the golasma behavior [Music] foreign