Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: The Novel Insight of the Pri Tzadik on MarCheshvan

[Music] okay hi everybody i hope uh you all had a wonderful young tovin i myself just got out of a bout with covet but hashem i'm doing okay uh but it was interesting a very interesting experience to spend yom kippur at home and sukkot at home and somehow torah at home and you know at first glance uh you would think that's a tremendous downer but the truth of the matter is sometimes uh when you're alone you can find hashem uh you know with your wife you know with your family i don't mean to be totally alone but you can find touch him away from the crowds so it was actually a very very interesting uh type of experience to have all of the yamamitov i'm not advocating god forbid anyone should ever get sick or even deliberately not go to minion that wouldn't uh hallachically be a proper guide but when you're in that situation you need to know that there's all sorts of potentialities even in something that seems to be sub-optimal and that's a that's an important uh lesson in life that i that i myself was able to learn and absorb a little bit uh by the experiences of young but to be as it may i'm now entering the public again and you know with a little little bit of trepidation but it's good to see you and what i want to talk about tonight tonight of course is rosh chodesh or at least the technically i mean you all know this technically when you have a two-day rosh chodesh technically the first day of rosh chodesh is the 30th day of the old month so if somebody were getting married tonight we would not put rosh hashfan we would actually put a lamid or shloshem tishrei and the second day of rosh is going to be the first of khashvind the only exception to that by the way is rosh hashanah tishrei also has two days but it's interesting that the first day of tishrei is aleph tishrei rosh hashanah and the second day is based israel but that's an anomaly the reason why is uh actually too too complicated for me to explain uh-huh oh i'm yeah it's a little too complicated for me to explain but lamai says it is important that you know that the pattern is very different for the month of tishrei day one is aleph day two is base every other two day rosh chodesh day one is the 30th of the old month and day two is actually the first of the month something to remember uh yes i did neglect uh to mention our our very very generous sponsors uh today uh we have three sponsors uh the aliyat nishama the elevation of the soul again of a dear child that we had darwin for for quite a long time the gantry family in memory of binyamin israel ben in addition sevilla bhatt david we're very very appreciative of your support of torah and the shirem that that we are giving and bias rat hashem in the merit of our torah learning may all of these souls be elevated in in in ghanaian so what i want to talk about tonight a little bit is i want to talk about the month of kashmir now we know colloquially the month of freshman is sometimes referred to as mar now there's a famous what you might call a folk vort it is not actually not historically accurate that the word mar in that context means bitter now in point to fact is actually not connected to bitterness uh there are really two origins either mar is a biblical term for rain and is connected to khashwan being the start of the rainy season you know which israel or alternatively we are told that all of the names of the jewish months are actually babylonian names even connected to avodah zarah thomas for example is an idol mentioned in the book of rescue and marches is a bit of a corruption of a babylonian idol why we incorporated idolatrous names into the jewish calendar is a very excellent question but the ramban suggests it is a way of remembering just as we remember the liberation from mizrahim every day by the calendar we remember that god took us out of the babylonian exile as well it's a way of remembering by focusing uh but be it as it may the folk etymology is that mar is bitter so mark hashvan means the bitter month of khashwan why would the month of khashwan be called the bitter month of rashford because it is said that fun is the only month in which there are no yamim tovin now let's test let's just run through the calendar very quickly and see if that's actually right tishrei of course is full of yummy together okay that's for sure kashvin has no yamamitov okay kiss slave has chanukah keves has the end of hanukkah because hanukkah straddles kisly vente base shabbat has two bishvat okay you're already stretching a little bit but tu b'shvat is also a festive day adar of course is purim nissan is pesach hmm er what what yum jeff do you have in eor so the truth is you have a few things which could make the list you have pesachini which we don't really celebrate that much but it is a festive day theoretically if you didn't bring your carbon pesach it's the gift of the second chance you also have lagma omer which is the day that the students of rebbi akiva stop dying and if you're a ceo knee you have yamaha smooth if you include the things that come come later and and the like all right so eor has yom tov him sivan has shavuos okay thomas what jump just do we have in thomas the only like special day of tammuz other than shabbos which is always special is the 17th of thomas but the 17th of thomas is a fast day it wouldn't be a time of rejoicing but the answer is actually plushet the navi zakariya tells us that when mashiach comes all of these fast days will not only not be fast days they will be days they will be days of sauson and simcha days of rejoicing so in effect we can even look at the 17th of tamas as a day of simbra in anticipation of the coming of mashiach and that will be an answer for ab as well what is the sim happy day of well the ninth of ab is the day mashiach is born or will be born and it will become a yamcha when we have a base of mgtosh and of course you also have the 15th of us which khazal say that together with yom kippur the 15th of ave that was the sadie hawkins day the marriage day was considered to be the happiest day of the jewish calendar okay okay then we come to ello yeah which means if they were ella also doesn't have any young table but already it's aloe there's a precursor to tishrei you're blowing chauffeur you're saying slichos so we look at it as part of the tishrei season so elvo comes along with the yummy tofu of citrus so you see it's a little little schmuck a little weak but nevertheless this is the association but we come to kashman is bereft is empty it's as if for three weeks in tishrei and and before that a lot of ello we've been running on the adrenaline of all of the and all of a sudden stop it's like running a marathon and just stopping you know your heart is still beating the blood is still pumping but nothing's going on so because of this the hasidis of it was that khashvan is mar is a bitter monk but i want to talk tonight the idea that one could make the argument if one had to choose what is the most important month of the year what is the most significant month of the year one might come up with freshman as the answer why would that why would that be so so let me share with you this i thought from the great rough southwark of lublin great great hasidah sherabi you died he died in 1900 at the very beginning of the 20th century and uh rav sadok is explaining a passage in safer yitzira what is safer you'd see where safety theory is a kabbalistic work and its authorship is attributed either to avraham avinu or some say even to other marisha we don't know exactly most scholars say it's later but whatever it is it is a famous well-known work of kabbalah and many many people wrote commentaries even people that you wouldn't automatically assume were kabulis rev saddagon roday parish and safriyat syrah but of course the kabbalists also did so the ville nagon al p caballo wrote a commentary in sephora et cetera now what does safari at syrah do essentially we actually even have an english translation are ravari kaplan of rakha i mean you can get an english translation of separates here i think some and some translations which are inferior to his are available for free online but you know the thing about kabbalistic works is even if you have a translation it's not necessarily going to make a lot of sense to you but but there is a translation savory etc develops the idea that god created the universe by combining by mixing the spiritual potentialities from different letters of the aleph base right that aleph has a certain type of spiritual channeling and base has a different type of spiritual channeling and when you combine them it's like a chemical reaction like hydrogen right h2o two atoms of hydrogen one of oxygen you get a new thing you get water so things get created by combinations and combinations are spiritual energies in fact as an aside uh this is how we understand this is actually going back to last week's parsha the idea of adam naming animals right adam named all the animals now uh there's an essay by mark twain mark twain uh was an atheist more or less and uh he suffered a number of tragedies he lost his wife he lost some children and in many many ways although he was famous for his humor but towards the very end of his life he was very despondent he was very depressed and sometimes he would be sarcastic and biting particularly against religion again i mean he had the i mean what can i say he had the old uh idea that people often face that if god is so good you know why did these things happen to me i mean that's the the famous question and then mark twain felt it in a very personal way so and i'm not going to address that question tonight but in one of his essays he has adam and eve talking after adam named the animals so adam named a lion a lion mark twain is using english of course adam didn't use english so eve asks adam why'd you name that thing a lion so adam says it looks exactly like a lion what else do you want me to call it that's exactly what it looks like so mark twain is making fun of of of the idea but the truth of the matter is alpi caballa uh what he said is exactly true if we substitute la chanakodesh let's take adam looks at a lion and adam calls it an arya why does he call it an arya admiration was capable of what we might call reverse engineering he was able to see the spiritual essence of the lion and he saw that it was a combination of the koak of the aleph and the kawak of the reish and the koak of the yods and the kawak of the hay and when those energies are combined of course we can't do it ourselves because we cannot we that we can't access the particular energies we can say the letters but we can't necessarily bring out that energy but that's exactly what adam did a kellev is called the kelev because a kelev is the chemical combination so to speak of khaflami base paga is that the ramban actually writes interesting mahlokas the hebrew language not necessarily modern hebrew but the language and of the torah is called lashon hakodesh hebrew is called the holy language why is hebrew called the holy language so the rambam gives a negative reason the rambam says because in the hebrew language at least in the torah's hebrew language there is no expression that is obscene or pornographic in fact words for sexuality or sexual intercourse are always euphemistic for example by ishkav he lay with her etc in other words anything to do with things that are normally not discussed publicly hebrew uses euphemisms and that is why it is a holy language so that's a negative reason rahman doesn't like that reason for thought because the ramban says sexuality is not something to be ashamed of sexuality itself is holy and elevated like the ramban wrote emmanuel brother ramban actually wrote a manual called the gera sakodesh the holy letter don't confuse that with the fifth part of the tanya which is also called igara sakodesh but this is an earlier igera sakodesh and igera sakotis is about the holiness of the sexual union so the ramban doesn't like the rambam's reason and the raman gives another reason ramban says lashan hakodesh is called kodesh because it was through those letters that god created heaven and earth and the universe all right that's the kawak of washington so safer yet seerah tries to explicate the unique spiritual potentialities of every letter and how various combinations give rise to different types of life forms now in point of fact safer yet seerah can be utilized by the by the righteous the gemara tells us that there were great rabbis who every friday would create a cow or a calf via safe air yitzira and they would shed it and they would eat it on shabbos whatever it would be they used safer etc the idea of a golem right golem golem is the artificial humanoid uh is essentially uh created doesn't have a divine soul to be sure golem does not have a divine soul it's kind of like a robot but but nevertheless it's through savory etc as an aside golum comes up in a lot of different contexts golems cannot talk by the way and they also do not have internal organs so if you stuck a knife in a golem you would just have mud or dirt there's no like nothing in there uh but golem comes up a lot with dr vemden discusses whether a golem could be counted for a minion and the like some people want to analogize a cloned human being if we cloned a human being uh they want to consider that a golem but i think the analogy is very uh inaccurate a cloned human being would ultimately be born from a woman like any other human being and would have internal organs so i think there's no doubt that a cloned human being is a human being a golem on the other hand is literally an artificial humanoid the most famous case of golem is of course the maharao is said to have made a golem and that golem was like a superman or like a batman that would defend the jewish people from all sorts of of enemies and uh towards the end of the marell's life the legend goes that he decommissioned the goal and he kind of made it dormant and it remained in the attic the locked attic of the morales bait knesset in prague which is still to this very day debate connects at one of the shows in in prague now the truth of the matter is there are many many stories about the baral and the golem uh but many many people have concluded that all of the stories are not true and the reason is very simple the marael died in the 1500s in the 16th century the very first mention of the maral and the golan is in the middle or actually the latter third of the 19th century where somebody claims they discovered a long lost manuscript that mentions the story of the golem and yet there was not a single mention of it in any by any contemporary and even by people who wrote afterwards and the person who claimed to have found it happened to be a notorious forger anyway he forged many documents that itself is interesting story i don't want to mention his name paradoxically this was a rabbi he was a thomas khacham he himself was a writer of chubas he was a very learned person but he had this thing about forging things particularly in the name of the morale you know a long-lost library in a library you know he said this was found in a library the royal library in mets in germany there there was no royal library in mexican germany you know all sorts of things so many have concluded uh and even orthodox people have concluded that the story of the morale and the golem is not a true story what i'd like to say is that if you believe the morale made a golem you are gullible if you believe he could not have made a golem had he wanted to you are heretical uh meaning yeah i i have no problem to believe that someone like the morale could have made a golem but whether he actually did so is a bit of a question now there is forgive me for digressing i'll come back to the main point in a minute uh there is a a story as i mentioned that the uh the golem was a lot in this attic that nobody ever went into because it was paddle act and the like and some have stories that the nazis you know went in and the golem awoke and destroyed the nazis uh and then uh the freyja chureby the one before reverend nakamendo his father-in-law of joseph was quoted in one source as saying that he actually entered the attic and saw the golem and that disturbed me a lot because i don't think there's a golem there but but i i saw that that itself was a made-up quote there the friedrich frieda grabby never made that claim so hashem somebody put those words in his mouth but that was not his actual uh that was not his actual testimony okay uh be it as it may though that's what safer yet sir is about now uh one of the other things that safer you see where it does again this is all a precursor throughout sudoku we'll get there is that it takes every month of the year and it assigns it a dominant letter of the aleph base it says it's connected to that letter of the yellow face and it combines the letter of the aleph base with a sensory function sight hearing feeling or whatever it would be and this is done for every single month of the year and what rav sadhuk does every rosh chodesh in his book when he reaches us he analyzes the passive passage of safer etc that links the letter to the spiritual to the sensory function so what is kashmir so safer yet seerah says hashem took the letter nun and he made it a king over the sense of aroma or smell and out of that combination of the nun emerged the month of cheshvan emerges from the osnun this is obviously a little bit obscure so let's analyze again this is from sadhuk let's analyze each piece of the puzzle piece number one why would khashwan be connected to the letter nun so for this we look at a gemara in brachas it's a very famous gemara but it's a problematic gemara we know that tahilam 145 kuf memhe is one of the most famous to hilum it is known as ashrae although let me point out right away that the verses allah is not part of tehillim 145. talum 145 begins with the words of and even the very end of it is not part of it either that's taken from halal i know sometimes people have the opposite feeling because they say ashrae more than they say hello. so you think oh davina malek is borrowing you know borrowing this from ashrae the answer is the other way around but borrows from halal i used to think this way by the way um has many many expressions from yeshaya navi the seven hafters of comfort kumiori so i remember when i first became aware of taurus i was like it was pre-bar mitzvah and i was thinking about it i say wow got this from it's really the opposite the opposite way look how dare he was hundreds and hundreds of years after the nabi ashaya so we have capital we have uh tahilim and that is the hello david and as you know it's in it's an alphabetical acrostic every passage begins with the letter of the olive base aleph so if you comments that there is no pasuk that begins with nun for ashrae that we go from your kingdom is a kingdom for eternity and then we go to sabach so may hashem hashem supports those who fall there's no plastic that begins with them actually in the um the dead sea scrolls version of psalms they actually put in they actually put in a nun but again they were just trying to fix up what they thought was a deficiency in our masoretic text there is no possible beginning with none of your comments why is there no nun beginning the passage in ashrae sravyachanan says because none is connected to nephilim falling being defeated slipping losing your place as the puzzle says in the navi amis nafla lai describing the kharman she will fall and she will not be able to get up with sulat israel the virgin of israel and david hamelech did not want to begin a plaque with a connotation of nephilim and although he does mention no flim but that's in the next passage so hashem hashem supports those who fall he didn't want to mention nafila till he mentioned smith this is a famous famous gamora i will say that it's actually problematical even on the level of shot because if rav yochanan is making a point that david does not want to begin with none because nun is suggestive of nafila number one there are many many sukim in tehillim that begin with none so obviously david did not have a policy can't begin with none not only that but even in alphabetical acrostics remember ashrae is not the only alphabetical acrostic there are many probably you know up to 10 alphabetical acrostics and tehillim and all the other alphabetical acrostics to have a nun so one has to be mazda one has to understand even in shot that why only in tehilo the david is dubbed so adamant not to begin with nephilim okay i'm not going to answer that either but there's something for you can think about i actually don't have a a compelling answer to this question but it is a question to think about like why is it only here that david is makbid dub it is particular not to begin with by the way i just want to show you though that the puzzle that ravioli uses uh to show that none connotes nephilia is a puzzle from the navi ammos which of course was after david anyway nafla laissezkum but it's interesting right after the gemara had of yochanan the gemaran bracos mentions the bine ma rubber the people of the west that means the people in eritrea which is west of iraq west of babel they punctuated the pusak in a different way so it had an optimistic message rather than a pessimistic message and it all depends on where you put the comma instead of saying nafla she has fallen comma locifum she will not get up again they read it this way no flow lysasef she will not continue to fall come back israel rise up so they actually read it as a prophecy of comfort and consolation now obviously this must have been later because rav yochanan himself was in eretz israel and he he viewed it the the other way but apparently you live in arizona long enough you have to become an optimist you have to look at the the bright side uh if you look at all of the potential negativities you're not going to get out of bed but you have to know that pro hashem brings many many many many brothers and i still get asked okay copenhagen is one thing but even even without covering that they say oh how can you live in israel it's so dangerous and you know doesn't matter yeah as if uh pittsburgh and uh all those all the other places are perfectly safe and we just had the 20th anniversary of of 911 you know like it's not like the rest of the world is so safe so if the world is a dangerous world first of all here is actually safer than most other places and if there is a measure of danger better to be here than to be in danger somewhere else might as well be here and that's the idea of looking at the bright side there's no saying attract good you have good thoughts but sign good things will be good there is a notion that a certain attitude becomes a self can can become a self-fulfilling prophecy okay so going back to khashwin so why would keshvan be connected to the letter none surah sudak says very simply of all of the months in which you're going to feel a sense of losing things falling down losing kedusha that's going to be kashmir we've come off a month of rosh hashanah and yom kippur and sukis and simbrastora days of elevation in very very different ways to be sure but days of elevation days of spirituality days of inspiration and all of a sudden it's been yanked it's been taken away from me what do i feel na feel nun a sense of emptiness you see this by the way uh even within yom kippur itself it's very very fascinating you know you know that when we know when we say shema in the morning and the evening and we say baruch shame kavod machuso baruch shame we're supposed to say silently because baruch shame is the praise of the angels that moshe stole when he heard the angels praising god in shamayim so in order not to antagonize the angels we say it silently but there's one day a year that we say it out loud because we are like the angels and that day is yom kippur yom kippur we actually can shout baruch shame kavod and this goes all the way to the end of naila you finish naila and then we say baruch shame three times we say it out loud and then we say hashem who elokim seven times because god is ascending he's leaving the earth and ascending the seven heavens then we blow shofar uh whatever the order would be say say kaddish uh and even in the kaddish we still say la la la ela because it's still yom kippur and then uh whatever did you blow show for leshana babushalayam and then we immediately go to weekday mairef and in that weekday myra when we say shema and the men are still wearing their kittles we've been demoted we've been demoted but [Music] is said silently and the truth is that's a video maybe people are too hungry to think and think about that phenomenon but that's a pretty rapid demotion you haven't left show yet you're no longer an angel you're a person you're a regular person of course what what could even be more demoralizing is that already in the shemona s ray of the weekday my roof we asked hashem to forgive our sins huh what sins did i commit i was young kipper yom kippur gave me forgiveness i didn't even leave sho what am i asking for forgiveness for so there are a few shut him one shot is that you're asking forgiveness and i include myself for the way we dive in my rift after the yom kippur you know we're we're kind of in a rush we want to get home we want to eat etc so you ask but the truth of the matter is the reference to forgiveness of sins is not only in the amidah what does myriad begin may god in his mercy forgive sins you haven't even i mean you just started myraf you don't even have like a dharvening that was so the balatanya says a beautiful beautiful thought the balatanya says that if a person leaves yom kippur does not feel that god has forgiven him does not feel that god has accepted his chuva that's a greater veil because the jew has to believe that hashem accepted his true and forgave him so you must ask forgiveness if you don't believe that you were forgiven and that's what the balatanya says is why we say bahuracham afterwards but be it as it may the point i'm making here in terms of sadhuk is that there is this sense of demotion after yom kippur but even more so after all the khagim are over because then we have the simcha of sukis and we have the unrestrained joy of simchas torah miniatures in fact it's so funny you know before there was the art scroll moxer but if i got old enough that i kind of know the history of moxiers i used to use different ones so at least in america the the u.s macho that was most popular in america before art school was the biernbaum maxer actually very good made sense in a way it's sometimes sad that works of very high quality simply are not used but before the birnbaum master there was the adler maxwell which is a product of england and that really was that really was something they actually translated to putin they had like professional people to to mimic the meter and rhyme of the hebrew like so it's a very very awkward sometimes sentence structure but they really made it so you actually got the poetic meter of the hebrew and in the adler maxr they always translated shmini at ceres in a very funny way it's very striking they translated as the eighth day of solemn assembly now where do you get solemn there i mean at sarat one of the translations of what sarah can mean to bring together so the eighth day of assembly is a not the only translation but that is a legitimate translation the eighth day which is the day of assembly we come together etc uh but where do you get solemn assembly in eric israel that's certainly not the description of it because shamini had serious and eric israel is the day of simcha's torah i guess in the gola because of iskar and so shmedia sarah said a certain solemnity to it but again it's a totally added word there is nothing at all in the hebrew of shemini etheret that talks about solemnity but be it as it may the point drop sudoku is making you know i apologize for all of the uh all of these digressions um you know i haven't talked to anybody other than my wife for like three weeks so i guess maybe i'm overly overly talkative but the thing is that uh there is nephila it's a downer we're kind of bereft we kind of don't know where to go with our energies with whatever inspiration we had ish madre gateau ah so now let's look at the second half seyfried seba says hushvan is a combination of two things the letter nun and the hush of reach now what is one of the characteristics of reach first of all ghazal tell us that reach is considered to be the holiest and most elevated strangely enough of all of our senses and the reason that's given is it was the only sense that was not corrupted in the sin of the eight sadas because the torah tells me that khaba was attracted to the tree because of its beautiful appearance or the fruit nakhma it's had a beautiful mare a beautiful appearance a taste of course she tasted from the from the fruit listening she listened to the nakhash and adam listen to khaba right in fact how did you get trapped because she said that god said today that we touched the tree we're going to die and the nakhash pushed her against the tree because i'll add from here call her myself when you try to add to the torah goraya you're really taking away by the way the kliyokar says that it's not that made the mistake it's adam adam didn't trust his wife so adam told her god said can't touch the tree so it's not harvest was accurately communicating what she was told but it was adam that distorted the khumra by making it into as if god said it so all of the senses were corrupted touch and taste and hearing and eyesight that's in the hamish but the hummish does not indicate that smell had any role in the avera it does not say the fruit had an aromatic smell whatever whatever it was so because of this reach is considered to be pristine and holy that is partially one of the reasons why katoris the aromas of katoris are so potent in the abode of the bassan mikdash because it represents an experience that was not tainted by the hate of other maritime so that's one characteristic of reach the other characteristic of rayach is reach is what lingers when the thing that generates the rash might be long gone so imagine for example that you have a roast chicken that has a delicious aroma the chicken might be finished the chicken might be taken out of the room but the smell lingers and connects you to its source even though the source is no longer here so rav sodak says in that metaphorical sense the antidote to the nun of nephila is we still have the aroma of the um we still have a connection to the um tovim in terms of our memories in terms of our experiences yeah the the the physical yamcha if i could talk about a physical yamcha is not here but the aroma remains i don't know if any of you ever did this i i have not done this myself uh marcel proust the the great french novelist wrote a huge novel several thousand pages and like ten you know whatever five five or six volumes remembrance of things past and you know it's a famous work although very few people read it i mean the few people who read it they discuss it like a cms i mean they say i went through it you know i went through it in five over five years and now i finished like a daphyomi of marcel proust whatever it was but uh i do know the page one that much i know and this five thousand page novel starts by a person smelling something that reminded him of his childhood and that opened up all of the associations that go on for the next five thousand pages that's the idea of reach says this is what safer yet seerah is telling us there's a refua and there's a makkah the makkah is nun can't help it nun is going to be a dominant emotion in freshwater but the antidote is rayach to connect to the yamatohim and in many ways is the real test kashvin represents what you might call ordinary life mundane life everyday life nothing special life the real test raftner used to say one should never say yamtif has passed once because yamcha freely doesn't pass one should say i've i've been through another yamcha the yamchev somehow changes me it changes me but you see while you're going through the empty that doesn't mean you've been changed the cousin issues to give a muscle that even a pot that's half empty it's only half full half empty when it's on the fire willow can overflow so when i see an overflowing pot i don't know if the pot is full or empty or you know half empty maybe it's half empty but it's on the fire so too the khasanesh says if i'm inspired during a yamcha i'm on the fire that doesn't mean there have been changes in me but only when the pot is off the fire you can then determine if it's full or half full and therefore kashman is god's way of letting us know whether we've truly grown from a yamcha because the truth of the matter is that is always the characteristic of sacred time even shabbos is that way as well shabbos hasn't really permeated us unless we're different on sunday monday tuesday and wednesday if it hasn't elevated our weak then we have not really internalized the holiness of shabbos that is actually what dodi means when it talks about shabbos as habraka it is the source of blessing meaning the whole week is blessed from shabbos so is the litmus test have we grown have we improved have we been changed or was it simply another you know emotional high comes and goes you're inspired and then you go back to normal right so that's why as i said before maybe with some hyperbole one could make the argument that is the most important month of the year because it is the test of everything else now there's another point here um it's related uh they tell the story about a guy a non-jew a russian peasant who lived in a khasirishia community and this was a facility community that had a lot of parties every shabbos they would make a party and then every rosh chodesh they would make a party so he really wanted to become jewish because there's so much drinking there's so much eating so much celebrating so he converts again how he converted i don't know but he becomes a yet and he became a yid at a very very good time of year he converted right before rosh chodeshvat so you have a nice uh nice string of things rosh chodeshva big big party tu bishwa big big party rosh hodish big big party purim super party so he goes over to his friend ivan and he says you gotta join this religion this religion is so fantastic every two weeks we have a big party and then every week we have shabbos you know eating drinking singing ah beautiful beautiful so ivan converts now ivan converts after shavuos it took a while pretty fast so ivan gets confronted with rosh chodesh thomas which they don't do a party because you know it's the month of the three weeks and then you have the fast days you have the three weeks and you have the nine days and you know no meat and no wine and he's going crazy all there is is deprivation so ivan goes over to the first guy and says you again i'm not endorsing any any halachic validity to any of these conversions but this is the story so ivan goes over to him and says you know you told me there's like a party every two weeks and i get i i join and all that happens is you know i can't do laundry and can't wash and can't can't eat and you can't eat meat can't eat drink wine what's going on so the first guy looks at him and says you know i really don't know ever since you joined things have been going downhill now the thing is any student of the jewish calendar anyone who lives the rhythms of the rhythms of the jewish calendar knows that's exactly what yiddish kind is that we have ups we have downs we have joy we have sadness we have times of connection with people in times of introspection that's what it is it's all encapsulated in hamel's meditation in kohelet we read alan sukkas the book of kohelet is an infinitely fascinating book many many contradictions in the book it almost didn't make the canon there were rabbis that said kahelas is full of happy courses right shira shirim is too sensual and koheles is too heretical those two books there have to be a fight to get him in but one of the most famous passages that has been set to both jewish music and secular music is for everything there is a time la colesman there is a time to cry in a time to laugh a time to make peace and a time to sometimes fight wars life is not monochromatic there are many many different experiences in life and one has to find ways to connect to god in all of those experiences we connect to god with simha and we connect to god with introspection and sadness such as tisha buff whatever it would be you see the thing is that most of us have a dominant modality in our personality and we tend to connect to god through the dominance of our personality so some people are outgoing extroverts right they love some customers they're dead but you know there are people this may sound very odd who enjoy if that's the right word maybe it's not the right word they enjoy tisha b of more than sebastian they enjoy the idea of being able to sit and think and contemplate there's a certain pleasure in in even in the grief there are people again please do not assume this is pathological i i actually don't believe that it is they prefer going to a funeral then to a hasanah and by the way if you're going to ask me that sounds sick let me just mention that's a puzzle in kohelis as well it is better to go to the house of a mourner than to go to the house of rejoicing because in that experience you will realize the fragility of life and when you realize the fragility of life you realize the preciousness of life to seize the moment you see so there are in fact even with rabbis there's interesting articles you can google this uh there are what you call dog rabbis and cat rabbis you know a dog you know always wants to greet you always wants to be with you right so a dog rabbi is a rabbi who loves to socialize then there are cat rabbis you know a cat you know has its restrictions has its boundaries cats want their privacy sometimes a dog a dog has no concept of privacy that's uh that's but cats you know we're private so they'll interact with you when they have to and when they don't have to they prefer you get out of the way so some rabbis are that you know they're scholarly they love to learn you know they'll do what they need to do but they will not go out of their way so dog rabbis cat rabbis right i won't talk about which one i am okay so so the point is all of us have a dominant personality but what god is saying is i don't want you to be monochromatic i don't want you to be homogeneous i want you to serve me with joyous communal interaction and i want you to serve me with solitary introspection because life gives us many different experiences and we have to be able to react to each of those experiences okay and that's why rafner used to say that if a person cannot cry on tish above they cannot truly rejoice on semprestora because why do i cry on tisha buff because i miss that closeness with god so if i value that closeness to such a degree that i cry or i grieve then on simphas torah i am so happy when i can have that closeness but if the absence of closeness to god doesn't bother me then how will it cause me to rejoice when i have it see they're correlated in some ways only something that i treasure and i love is going to grieve me when i have an absence if it doesn't grieve me i don't care that much about it if i don't care that much about it where am i going to get the simcha for something i don't care about you see actually that's what i think queen elizabeth must have gotten it from someone but she had a beautiful quote i think when when philip died she said grief is the price you pay for love again i i have a feeling it must be from somewhere else but that's a beautiful idea the more you love something the more you're capable of grieving when it's absent if you don't grieve then you don't love right and that's kind of ignorance it's impressive and tisha buff right it kind of supports rafner's point so that's why the jewish calendar is so schizophrenic happy sad but what's strange is that this schizophrenia is in one single month it's not just across the 12 months of the calendar but we have it in the month of tishrei itself we have khagim and tishrei that are introspective we cry we beg we do chuva and then we have days of joy and days of unrestrained simcha we're going from opposite moods and even in fact even on rosh hashanah itself i think i spoke about this before rosh hashanah itself is schizophrenic on one hand there's a pachad and a mora and an ema on the other hand it's a yamtif of simra so the concept is this because tishrei is the first month of the year god makes it a template a pattern to give you the spiritual tools to deal with all of the different experiences we will go through in the air to learn how in sadness you connect to god how in introspection how in solitude to learn how to rejoice with others and share with others because there'll be different occasions for that in life and tishrei is the roche the roche the head that kind of gives you direction and guidance for all of the rest of the year that's why it's as if hashem falls into the month of tishrei all of the different emotions that i will be using in the course of the year okay that's the second thought let me just end with uh again a very nice story we know that on simchas torah we finish the torah and the one that is given the honor to finish the torah it's a very big honor he's called hassan torah the groom of the terror like the husband of the torah now finishing the torah that's already in the gemara but our minigames we also read on sim castora we read the first the first part of racist the six days of creation and that is later that is of later origin and that's simply because the satan says oh the jews are so happy they're finished the torah we want to show no hashem we're so happy that we're going to start again all right that's khas and bharatiya's now here's a story i want to tell you there were haqqafas and simchastora and there were yeshua yeshiva students who were not participating they were not participating and the rosh shiva went over to them or the jurabi went over to them and said why don't you dance so the boys were very honest the boys said we didn't really learn that much during the year we neglected the torah we didn't do what we should have done we're not entitled to rejoice with the torah we didn't earn that right they were actually very sincere statement so the rebbe said you're making a mistake let's look at the two alleles that we have the one who finishes the torah is khasan torah and the one who begins the torah is called hassan bharatis at least among the non-khasir that's why i think this may be a non-hasidic story i mean a lot of shows auctioned it off certainly in america but in the absence of an auction khasantara is supposed to be given to a big thomas khacham to the most distinguished person whether it's the rav of the shoal whether it's the rosh yeshiva a big big talmud and voracious however we're not that particular we give it to anybody not a good person but it doesn't have to be by the way among hasidim is the opposite khasidim put greater importance on qasim braces but i'm going to tell this story in the non-qasidic version so the roshashiva said to the talmidim why do you think hassan tyra has to go to a big tamil and khas and brace doesn't go to anybody because khasantara is a celebration of accomplishment khasantara is a celebration of what you've done ah so memela we give the honor to a person who accomplished the person who finished us the person who learns the person who did a lot of torah learning that's hassan gracious khasan bharatis is not a celebration of what you've accomplished khas and gracious is a celebration of a new beginning and a new potential it's not a celebration of what you are it's a celebration of what you can become so he told the tamidim maybe you're not entitled to dance with the torah as a hasan torah but you're always entitled to dance with the torah now the truth of the matter is this might even explain why khasidas considers hassan barajas to be a bigger honor than santora because ultimately what is important in life is not what you've done but where you're going and therefore hassan barajas celebrates future potential and that is really what the month of kashmir is about it's a new year you know the truth of matter is tishrei we really haven't entered the new year yet because we were so busy with everything we had to do but now we face ordinary life we face regular life we face mundane life no distractions and although there is a nephilim but now we know that we have the opportunity to take all the lessons of the yamim narayan and sukis and simcha torah and translate them into a year of growth a year of holiness a year of goodness be israel i hope that all of us will merit to utilize the questions of our lives in very very good and positive ways [Music]