Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: The Reality of Faith During the Exile of Edom/Xtian and Yishmael/Islam

[Music] okay hi everybody good to see you all in person and uh whoever's listening on uh zoom or youtube later uh again i we all appreciate uh you're you're coming uh today's sheer is uh sponsored i've been young and israel vince lomo again a boy that we prayed for and uh mr hashem he should have an ali at neshama and then aliyah for sevilla david adam yoel ben avraham and gita abraham we hope that the learning of the devry torah should give them in ganesden the support of torah is considered to be one of the greatest that can help a person even after they die in addition i personally and the whole ibanez family uh wants to extend a bracha and reforeshalema to all those who are ill whether it's through covet or any other medical condition that all should be healthy and to refuse shalema batofshar holy israel this is whether you didn't get the vaccine or you got the vaccine whatever the situation is and biazrat hashem those who are healthy should remain healthy and those who are ill should be as rats hashem have a a refuse lima so this week we're continuing the saga of avraham avinu and embracious it's always a little hard to pick what to talk about because the themes in the parsha are so rich and so multifaceted and we do have to remember one thing about boracious essentially ghazal lay down a rule that the ramban uses with great frequency and that means what happens to the patriarchs and the matriarchs is a precursor for everything that will happen in the future and therefore we look at every little incident in the life of the avoca and the mahot and it will find its expression both in terms of what happens later in the torah and really what happens in the entire future of ami israel until the coming of mashiach so for example the ramban makes the point in last week's parsha that when avraham goes to mitzrayim for a famine and he leaves mitsuram with great wealth that actually is a reenactment or a precursor i should say uh of the jewish people going to mitzrayim because of a famine and 210 years later leaving with great wealth all of that is masa avos semen labanim we're going to read later about yitzchak digging wells and the first well gets covered up by the philistines and the second well gets covered up by the philistines and the wells are given a name i'm getting ahead of myself a little bit the first well is called a sec the second well is called sitna i'll explain this and the third well was successfully dug and was not filled up and that was called richovotz and the ramban says that the symbolism of the wells is the basa miktas because the basa mikdash is a source of pure divine torah and inspiration that's compared to life-giving water and as we know the first two temples were destroyed and it is only the third bay samikdish that we'll endure and the ramban sees a prophetic message even in the names that yitzhak gave to the wells because asak refers to uh in that context a bad business and that refers to the idolatry that destroyed the first temple sitna is the word of hatred and that refers to the sinatra nam that destroyed the second temple and the third temple is called which is expansiveness because that refers to the idea that the third temple will not only be bigger than the existing beitamik dashback you shall name itself it says it's going to expand until damascus talk about urban sprawl but it'll be in a positive a positive way and that's called recall votes right in fact that's uh whoever built recovers whatever it was in the 1920s or whatever it was uh used uh this pasuk as the basis of hashem has given us an expansiveness in the in the land so this is an important idea this is a meta idea it's not tied to this parsha in particular it's really tied to hamish gracious and it's such an important idea that i think it's kadai to to bring it in the al-qaeda the idea that a jew is willing to even give up the most precious thing in his life for hashem that set the template for the messiah in fact people even ask a question is that so interesting people ask the question what's so great in a way it's reversing cause and effect what's so great about avraham avinu's willingness to give up the life of his son or yitzchak's willingness to give up his own life jews do that all the time this is something that's unfortunately a place in israel that we don't even know why it's so special but the answer is you know you got it in reverse it's avrama vinu and yitzhak their willingness to do that which was superhuman spiritually imprinted the jewish soul with the capacity of messi red nephesh again i'm not sure if a scientist could explain this because obviously uh in in standard genetic understanding uh you know actions and moral decisions are not imprinted in someone's dna right these are just acquired things but we do speak again it's not necessarily meant to be literally of kind of a spiritual dna that we inherit from avraham yitzhak and yaakov and sarah rivka rachel and i'll include bill of isil but it's always a bit of a question why do we we actually don't have only four ima haute we have six images because bill and silpa were also the mothers of four tribes and we believe that masa of outsimulabanim is also a kind of imprinting that there are certain characteristics that are imprinted and mesirat nephesh the willingness to give up your life i think i mentioned before forgive me for repeating but i don't remember if i said it in this year or not the balatanya of schneer zalman writes very eloquently and beautifully in the tanya that uh imprinted in the soul of a jew whether they're religious not religious whether they're even believing god whether they say they believe in god don't believe in god there is this innate love and reverence for god that is in their soul and one does not have to learn it one only has to access what is already there and that is why even if the yetzer hara or the animal soul whatever vocabulary you want to use kind of fights it and rejects it and doesn't let it come out in times of great stress it'll often come out almost involuntarily and that's why he made the point that even jews who were very very far from torah were willing to give their lives at critical points for chloe israel and for yiddish king mrs nevis again i think i've mentioned daniel pearl you may remember him i hope you remember him he was a reporter of the wall street journal was killed by al-qaeda and they actually filmed they filmed his execution they took it down that i mean youtube took down after a while again but it's interesting they left it up they left it up longer than they leave up the anti-vaccination thing there they seem to be very very quick on that one but daniel pearl they left for a day for a day or so but i'm not taking an opinion of this i'm just noting an observation but whatever it would be and if you remember that daniel pearl was asked to renounce judaism and embrace islam and his very last words right before they slit his throat was i am a jew very very remarkable that a person who was not connected to the jewish religion a person who i believe even intermarried in his last moment of life he affirmed that he was a jew talk about what the gemara says person can acquire the world to come in one hour but one hour actually means one second now one decision in life can change everything and he truly died al-qidr i mean this is a topic that's not our topic tonight that's a much broader topic you know the notion of dying al-qaeda's hashem is a very fascinating idea we often say that every victim of the holocaust died al qizhashem and that's a little it's a little hard to understand this because the the normal idea of kirish hashem is martyrdom meaning to say you're given a choice embrace christianity and you will live and you reject christianity or embrace islam and you will live and a person makes a choice and a person says i am willing to die before i renounce god and the torah that's hashem you're declaring god's holiness and god's greatness so anyone who dies when they were given a cha anyone who dies when they were given the choice of rejecting torah that's kiddish hashem the problem with the holocaust is people didn't have a choice number one even if you converted to christianity or even if you as became an atheist they were still going to kill you in fact as you know there's there are some people actually one person in particular edith stein who became a carmelite nun before world war ii and she actually became a saint she was canonized by the catholic church because they claim that she died as a martyr to her catholic faith now that's logically incoherent because she was not killed because she was a catholic she was killed because she was a jew but that's that's simply an example that you didn't have a choice and of course many people in hong kong were not religious so but even those who were religious didn't have a choice so it's a complicated question uh how would that be many still say that they because they died as jews that's enough uh but certainly if somebody has a choice like daniel perler or other people and they say i am jewish that is dying al-qaeda and where did we get that capacity we got that capacity from the from the al-qaeda so when people ask the question what's so impressive about avraham jews do that all the time the answer is we got it from avraham so this is the general idea of myself of a similar bunny but the truth of the matter is that it's not just the good side of things it's not just the avra mitsuki yakov sorry riff or leia even from the negative shadowy figures we see precursors of what will be happening to amisha and here i want to speak a little bit about yeshmael now ishmael was born in last week's parsha if you remember avraham and sarah came to eric israel at well avram was 75 and sora was 65 a 10-year difference between them remember too just to get the family lineage straight that sarah is avraham's niece and sarah is laut's sister lot and sora were born from haran who died in the fiery furnace because he was the second guy to go into the furnace and he only went because abram was saved so he did not merit that that great miracle so avraham was 75 and sarah was 65 they did not have children so eventually avram took an egyptian a woman who was actually from the royal house of egypt hagar and at the age of 86 11 years after they came at tariq israel he had the ishmael and if you remember hagar actually runs away twice uh from sarah she runs away when she's pregnant and she comes back actually the second half she doesn't run away the second time when you smile is mistreating yitzhak or teaching in bad things she is sent away so the first time she runs away the second time she is sent away now we can look at your smile and just say well okay another another bad nation that oppresses us and the like but you actually see in madrashim and in kabbalah that yeshmael is a very very unique type of nemesis a very unique and different type of enemy with a lot of power you know in the book of daniel and certainly because i'll talk about this the jewish people are supposed to go through four exiles where there are four different kingdoms there is the exile of babylonia this is not counting mithrain mitzrayim is pre gallaudet because we didn't come to the land yet there is the galata babylonia that was followed by the gullet of persia followed by the galut of yavan greece and then the gallup of edom because rome is said to be descended from asap that is called the red one and the galot of adam destroyed the second temple and although the roman empire is long gone we are still in the galut of adam because number one a dome is also connected to the catholic church and the dome is connected to western civilization via rome and the simplest reason is because the havoc that adom wrecked upon us has not been rectified so it makes no difference if there's a roman empire or there's no roman empire there's still a quran beit mikdash right so khazal always seem to say based on the book of daniel that the last galoot is the galoot of edom but in purgatorabi eliezer which is a madrish the madras says there will be one final galot after adam so it's not just four goliath but it's a 4.1 it's not called the fifth galat it's really an appendage to galoot and that is the galoot of ishmael there will be right before mashiach the ascendancy of the power of ishmael that will wreck greater damage to the jewish people than any of the other goliyut and indeed we've seen this with 911 islamic terrorism which is really paralyzing not just not or hurting not just the jewish people but to some degree paralyzing the world in various ways so a gallup does not have to mean we're physically exiled there there are very few jews in arab countries hashem although there's a bad house in dubai and and the like i think kosher restaurant even and i'll come back to what that means uh but galut can refer to the power that this force has and pirkei drabi eliazer says the following ishmael is much more dangerous than any other galut because ishmael comes not only with the power of the sword but with the power of the spirit ishmael has a spiritual power the other goliath bavel pagas yavan they come as material forces so the truth of the matter is ruknius right spirituality will eventually overpower physicality hako ko yaakov the voice of torah belongs to yaakov yadayam physical brute force belongs to asaph although it may be a difficult process ultimately the lights will vanish will will banish the darkness but ishmael comes with the kawak of number was blessed by god ishmael has the kawak of prayer right they darwin to one god it's a monotheistic religion they dive into one god five times a day which we do granted their prayer service is relatively short but we dive in five times a day only on yom kippur they do a yom kippur to villa every day it may sound a little crazy but a religious muslim is very careful in modesty what that means is this is a very difficult idea to understand and i can't say i fully grasp it but just like a physicist will say there is matter and antimatter there and just like if you remember those of you who are old enough to remember uh pre-digital cameras old-fashioned cameras with film and remember kodak used to be a big big kodak polaroid these were big big companies now uh they're totally cut puts they're just non-existent so you used to have a photographic negative and when you would develop the negative in that solution you know you come up with uh you'd get your photograph so too in rukhniotz in spiritual matters there is something called dark spiritual energy that is even a russia if they sincerely invoke the name of god and they pray to god somehow there'll be a certain success in their actions and that makes yeshmael a very very dangerous enemy and you can see this even in the most simple political terms you know it used to be when when the united states uh had a cold war with the soviet union so the way they navigated the cold war for 30 or 40 or almost 50 years was with the acronym of mad mad was a mutual assured destruction what's the question of mad the idea was that each side had enough of a nuclear capacity that if the other side would strike first we would be able to totally destroy them meaning the us's protection that russia would not the soviet union would not nuke us is because they knew they would be destroyed and although the us was not going to do this but the soviet union had the same catchment that's why there was an arms race i have to have enough to wipe you out if you attack me and that kept an uneasy balance of peace now that is based though on people being rational actors meaning the idea is i don't want to get wiped out so i better not wipe you out although i would like to wipe you out but i'm not going to do it because i get wiped out but what if you have a person or a nation or a cause that says kind of a perverse messi rhett nephesh we are so committed to our cause that even if we're wiped out we're going to go to heaven we're going to go to the world to come we're going to go to the 86 virgins or whatever whatever they they say that they have up there they can't forgive the language so in such a situation there's no way to stop that enemy because that enemy is willing to die that enemy not only is willing to die but looks at it as martyrdom looks at it as a great thing so that is precisely the great danger of you know islamic fundamentalism islamic fanaticism because it is based on that you can't deter it you cannot deter by conventional ways and although hashem uh the israeli both the police and and the army and the security services and the mossad and the jinbet hashem have done fantastic jobs in fact i've seen reports that say that for every terrorist action that does damage there were 20 or 25 or 30 that were thwarted i mean we don't even realize number one uh hakura satov to hashem for all of the things that were stopped before they came and takara tatov to the the people on the ground uh the uh the army the police uh the security apparatus that have really thwarted many many many more attempts than have actually god forbid been successful occasionally uh but what are you going to do you can't really stop it if you i mean i live right north america and i live in new york america in the shimano sadiq area so we're right on the light rail stop right the shimano sadiq light rail stop so for a while there was a problem that that terrorists were just turning their cars into people waiting at the stage what are you going to do take away cars you know i mean somebody says besides i'm just going to turn my car into people waiting at a rail stop what are you going to do so in some ways ishmael renders us very impotent ishmael renders us helpless ishmael has a spiritual power that we're not able to defeat by even the best military planning and in a sense that's because they have spiritual color not just a physical might and as a result the only way you can defeat ishmael is by spiritual means that we have to have a koa that is greater in terms of our torah our mitzvot israel and the like and all of this it's so amazing all of this is contained in the madrid pirkei durabilizer that describes kalut ishmael as the most dangerous because they have these of the milan in fact even ishmael's name ishmael god will listen to their prayers the power of prayer now i admit it is a hard idea for me to grasp why would god listen to the prayers of people who want to destroy his people that goes back to the paradox of dark spiritual energy that spiritual energy is a reality even when it's employed in an evil improper improper way so that's kind of what we need to think about by ishmael now what's interesting is we know from parshas noah that there are 17 nations you know 70 nations that descended from sheim khameneifes now that is not counting asap and ishmael because ibn's mother sent it from avram right so these are the 70 nations that until you get to avraham and the like but there's a comment of the villenegon that says that the 70 nations are divided into two groups 35 nations come from yeshmael and 35 nations come from asap and vilmagone goes through the corbanos of sukis right where there are 70 bulls connected the nations of the world and some of the bulls are to counteract the ishmael nations and some of the bulls are to counteract the ace of nations but what does the bilnagon mean he certainly does not mean that 35 nations are descended from ishmael and 35 nations are descended from asia that's not true asap and ishmael are both from shame right semitic and most of the nations are from and from yemen so obviously they're not descended from asav and ishmael so i would suggest that the vilna gone might might mean might mean the following idea that the seventy nations are not descended from asap and ishmael but spiritually 35 nations get their power from ishmael and 35 nations get their power from asia so spiritually they are descended now what is the unique power of aids of an ishmael so it might be that the vilnigon is alluding to the idea that as the jewish people go through the galut there will be two types of persecutions that we're going to face one is the persecution of those who deny god and the they advocate a life of hedonism materialism secularism assimilation now that represents asuf asav represents the person or the nation that rejects god remember asap will say in a few weeks i am going to die what do i need the firstborn of serving god there's no life other than now that itself can take two forms that could take the form of persecution consider stalinist russia in which god was going to be eradicated or it could take the form of hedonistic assimilation that you often have in western countries but all of that is the aesa the ace of is the idea of rejecting god whether it'll come in the guise of persecution stalinist russia or whether it will come in the guise of assimilation ishmael is a different type of persecution that is not a rejection of god but that is a utilization of god for evil and violence and destructive purposes and the vilmagone is alluding to the fact that the jewish people will be buffeted by these two different forces one is the force that says there is no god and the other is the force of a fanaticism that will try to use god to inflict harm and create destruction in the world that's the para adam that's the wildness of ishmael yadobako what did the angel tell hagar your son will have his hand in everything the yada kobo and people will try to attack them but to no avail now i would go a little further with the garage and say that these two different forces the force of asaf that is hedonism materialism assimilation and rejection of god and the force of ishmael which is using god for immoral and destructive purposes are not only symbolic of the nations outside of us but these are forces within our own personalities meaning within us there is the asaph and there is the ishmael what does that mean the asaf is the eight sahara that says don't get up for davening don't bother to learn you know don't take torah that seriously right that's the ace of within us the ishmael within us is the religious fanaticism that can cause us to look down at others who don't have our particular type of judaism now god forbid i don't mean to say at all there's the moral equivalence uh between a khireti who demonstrates and an arab terrorist god forbid i'm not at all not at all saying there's a moral equivalence but at a deep root level there is a bit of a similarity in which my version of god is the only version that is acceptable and your version is up ecorsis right those to the right of me are fanatics those to the left of me are heretics up he courses right again i i want to be very very clear i am not at all asserting a moral equivalence baruch hashem even when we have religious jews who are demonstrating okay there may be sometimes they may cross the lines a little bit but we're not talking about god forbid murder or mayhem of that nature you know even when a jew riots you know they do so with a relative amount of dignity and consideration for others but nevertheless at the root there is something of ishmael in the fanaticism of sinatrinam okay so this is an interesting idea that uh ishmael and aesop are the precursors of what we will face now i want to mention one final thing i'll have a fascinating teaching this is also myself assuming actually this was not my intended topic so i want to get to my intended topic but i thought it was a an interesting introduction right i even have a piece of paper this was like point one like supposed to be five minutes uh but uh cause i'll actually say that ishmael did shiva before he died and that's why it mentions that when abraham died it's participated in his burial because ishmael think about that this is such a tremendous solace to avraham that god really really really gave him the whole blessing that even yeshua came back and indeed when avraham married katura after sarah died because i'll say kature is hagar so avraham like completed the circle in fact when it says god blessed avraham with everything it's much logas in the what's the everything what's the extra thing according to one opinion he even gave avraham a daughter according to another according to another opinion the baraka was he didn't have a daughter uh again again this is not this is not a misogynistic statement it just meant that in the ancient world having a daughter was you know a very very difficult proposition sometimes because you have to protect her from immoral people etc so because i was just pointing out in certain times when women were very very vulnerable you know it was very very difficult to raise a daughter but be it as it may it does say ishmael did shiva so the meshech says that is also myself mice that as difficult as the galut of ishmael is before mashiach comes the binay ishmael which are the arab nations will do shiva and come to god now simply says interestingly enough the first step in their shiva was the religion of islam because remember prior to muhammad the nomadic arabs were pagans so as crazy as muhammad is he brought them to monotheism because you know if you know the history of muhammad actually wanted to become jewish at one point they didn't accept him but muhammad was fascinated with midrashim and and rabbinic stories and he heard it from a lot of the jewish camel drivers and the like so the mesh says converting the nomadic arab bedouin tribes to islam is the first step of their triva it brought them to god good thing the second step i would add i think is things like the abrahamic accords now again with the change of u.s administration things are not proceeding as as quickly as as they were better but but but really i i think there is a spiritual significance in nations uh that were formally hostile to israel beginning to recognize israel beginning to recognize uh judaism and the right of jews to worship and although i am not a navy and i'm not a messianic predictor of things in any way but it looks like this is also part of the process of ishmael osetsuba which is masa about him so so the point is all of these are very very fascinating precursors we've had already several decades almost a century of arab or islamic terrorism in various guises and certainly since 9 11 or even before 9 11 things have gotten worse but at the same time and it should continue things are now getting a little better they're getting better right and part of that is the process of ishmael osa osetuba right so that also means we're getting closer and closer to the gala to the mashiach right so again they say in eric israel there's a great fascination this used to be a christian thing more or less where christians always try to predict the end of days and everything else it was not so much of a jewish thing although we do have some storm to do it but i see in eric israel everybody likes to give you predictions and come up with dates uh you know it's interesting i i can go back to blogs that are you know five years old and say moshiach is coming this year we have a gamatra okay you know you can go back to a lot of the blogs and and see that uh hashem decides things on his timetable which is not necessarily our timetable and because of that fazal discouraged causal did discourage what are called mahashvayakets which is messianic calculations but at least in a gross sense in a general sense we see different signs that indicate we are approaching a critical stage of gaola and again should be can you hear it okay so now i'm going to begin my my share and i really want to start off with a relatively localized question and share with you a fascinating uh answer of the year and that is the parsha begins avraham aveeno had his circumcision in fact not it had his he did it to himself he was 99 years old he did a bris mila obviously both because of his age and because actually through the matter is a bris miller for any adult is uh it can be a very painful procedure i mean even if you're 25. in fact a few years ago the one of the i think the one of the courts in germany prohibited was it was an islamic case it did not involve a jew but it was a very dangerous precedent they prohibited religious circumcision on babies because they said it was a non-medical surgery without the consent of the patient and therefore they said you have to wait so somebody should tell that court it's going to hurt a lot more when the kid grows up better better to do it now and that was very dangerous i mean obviously that same logic would be applied to a jewish circumcision which is even at a younger age you know hashem i think the german supreme court overruled it i sometimes remarked sarcastically that the german compassion for innocent children seems to have gotten a lot stronger than it was uh the 1933 and 1945 hashem i mean they're growing in rachmaninots and uh and and the leg but okay um so avraham has this brit mila and uh we are told that the third day of the brit mila uh you're especially weak so hashem made it very hot that day so there shouldn't be any travelers on the roads so everyone won't be waiting to show them hospitality so hashem intended that there would be no travelers so avram would rest but avram is still sitting out in the sun waiting for somebody so never god has to kind of accommodate him so he sends them three angels in the guise of people and they tell avraham next year at this time when you are a hundred and your wife sarah is 90 there will be a child okay now the truth of the matter is from avraham's perspective again you have to read the parasha before this is not the first time he's hearing about this at the end of parsha slacha right after his breath he is told you will have a child from sorry your wife and hashem even says what his name should be and he shall be named yitzhak which means he shall laugh okay but let's remember that but let's go back to valley what about your departure so it mentions that sarah overhears what the angels are saying she doesn't know their angels and it says she's laughing to herself and she's saying after i'm worn out in old will i get a rejuvenation of the flesh can i come back to my youth and then she says and my husband is too old elsa and the angels say to avraham even though sarah was thinking this why is sarah laughing that she says she's too old to have a kid so the kumari remarks although she did refer to her physical condition she did not say the word she's too old to have a kid she said her husband is too old the malachim changed what she said for shalom that avraham shouldn't be hurt et cetera okay that's a proof that you're allowed to lie for shalom that that's actually and and and the light but be it as it may we find that sarah is condemned for her laughter because even though it's her silent laughter because her silent laughter suggests there is a cynicism or a doubt that this could happen and the angels are saying why is she laughing hayipolemi hashem davar is anything beyond the power of god now question one is ramban raises question one is why shouldn't sarah laugh she doesn't know these are angels she thinks these are three bedouins who are walking around indeed they were idle worshippers because that's why abraham said wash off the dust on your feet because they used to worship the dirt the dust or whatever whatever it would be so sarah is not hearing it from god at least as sorry she knows she's hearing three people who come out of nowhere who say she's going to have a child so of course she has the right to scoff at it so the ramban says very interesting you say the ramban if somebody gives you a bracha even if you think there are nobody even if you think that they're not in a position to give you abraham always accept it because you never know who hashem has chosen to be the conduit of his blessings she should have said amane kane yehi ratsan they tell the story although some people tell me the story is not true so i i can't say it's an actual true story but this is a well-known story in the yeshiva world again that doesn't prove it happened but but here is the story about a man that had a daughter and the daughter was approaching 30 and she was not uh married yet and uh no that's a you know that's considered to be a very very old age in bernay brack and the person went to the stipeler of heimkinewski's father as to what do i do what bracha can you give me so the stipeler asked him did you make a kiddish when your daughter was born and he said i didn't make a kiddush that wasn't the minute so much he says ah that's the problem you didn't make a kiddish when daughter was born why is that because when you make a kid-ish everybody goes over to you and say may you be zoka to bring your daughter to the and you even get impatient 100 people 200 people are telling you the same thing and one of them may have been the conduit for the divine blessing you didn't make a kiddish you didn't have a conduit so the person said what do i do now he says make a kiddish in honor of your daughter's birth she's 30 years old he says so you know he listens he makes a kiddish and i want to celebrate the birthday of my daughter and people go over to him and say may you be socrates and the story goes like two weeks after the kiddish you know if she got engaged yeah okay i i don't know if it's true but it's illustrative of the idea of the notion of conduit and indeed ghazal say this al-tahi birkas a simple person who gives you a blessing take it seriously take it seriously hashem chooses people we don't really know the process to be conduits for blessings never reject a blessing that's why sora's laughter is condemned but here's the problem when avram is told by hashem that he's going to have a son it says he falls on his face and he laughs so the question is why is sarah criticized for her laughter and avraham is given a free pass for his laughter now it's fascinating that targum uncles actually gives us an answer which is quite unusual targa monklis is the aramaic translation of the torah and targa monklis is a very literal translation meaning uncles tries to be consistent if tupsu use the same word unclass will use the same aramaic translation he does not vary i mean whenever he does you have to try to understand why but uncles general approach to translation is the same hebrew word will have the same aramaic translation which makes sense now here's the problem one of the few exceptions is that with avraham it says vayitzhak which means he laughed the targum translates it which means he rejoiced and with sarah which is the same word except instead of by yitzhak it says it just means she left she scuffed so the targum takes the same hebrew word except for feminine masculine and in one case he translates it as joy and in the other place he translates it as skepticism now where does he get that presumably he's working backwards since avraham is not criticized and sorry is criticized it must be that their laughter was a different type of laughter you can laugh for two reasons i can laugh because i am so happy at this blessing of god or i can laugh because this is the most ridiculous thing i ever heard of so this is the targum khadi rejoice versus but the targum is very difficult because if the laughter of avraham was a different type of laughter than the laughter of sarah why does the torah use the same words oncolous gives us a different translation but the terry uses the same words in other words the message is totally lost if the torah describes their laughter in the same way so because of this the gives a very different and let's start with another question is this the first time that sarah is hearing this message what about the fact i mean i mean what happened avraham had his wrists and at the time of the bris hashem told him you will have a son this is you will have a son from sarah your wife not just hagar from sorry your wife and you will call this son yitzhak this is before the angels came the angels didn't come till day three after the circumcision so let me ask you did abram tell his wife about this prophecy because if he did and logic would say that he did she already knows in other words she's not hearing it from the angels for the first time she already knows so why is she laughing when she hears it from the angels right so the truth of the matter is ramban actually says avraham didn't tell his wife because he was sick he was not feeling well it slipped his mind it's too busy in other words she didn't know again that's it doesn't sound so plausible to me but you know you know how it is husbands sometimes don't tell their wives important information uh at least all the men here have been there i assume at least the married men have been there the unmarried will get there uh and and the like and we get in trouble for it so the ramban says abram says oh gee i forgot to tell you okay so sarah is hearing it the first time from the angels but the arakayam says that's a dulce khalsa probably avram tilter so we got these two problems really problem one is why is avraham's laughter okay and sora's laughter is not okay and number two why is she skeptical at this point if if we assume avraham already told her so she's not getting the information from these bedouins she got it from avraham who heard it from hashem so here's what the arachim says certainly avraham is laughing out of joy and he says sarah is laughing out of joy also sarah absolutely believes she's got to have a child she is not skeptical and when she says after i'm old can i have rejuvenation she's expressing wonder not skepticism and indeed cause i'll say that her body is already changing in other words she as she was started menstruating so her statement can i be rejuvenated after i've become withered is actually a statement of wonder and gratitude so now we're back to the problem so why are the angels critical of her she's expressing happiness and joy and abram is expressing happiness and joy it's the same thing here is the difference avraham laughed as soon as he heard the prophecy of god sarah left only when she saw the physical changes in her body so when the angels say why is sarah laughing they actually mean why is she laughing now why didn't she laugh before what does that mean the eurochaim says from avraham avinu's perspective a divine promise is equivalent to reality he doesn't need to see anything beyond the divine promise he laughed spontaneous laughter sarah believed in the divine promise surely but it wasn't real to her till she saw empirical evidence in the changing of her body this is a really uh you know new interpretation of the verse sora is not doubting this nivua she's reacting with joy but the angels are saying why didn't you react with that same joy when avraham told you the prophecy because in your mind the fear madriga you believe in the prophecy but it's not as real to you as what you see with your eyes for abraham god's promise is more real than what he sees with his eyes and that was the difference in their level of the moon and the era says for the one that is god's promises are as real as anything physical that i experience and maybe even more so so why are you laughing now and you didn't laugh before did that imply that god's promise wasn't real enough to you okay and that even explains why sora denies laughing is she lying she's not lying she thinks she's being accused of being a skeptic and i was never skeptical but that's her misunderstanding of what the angels meant so she's giving a truthful answer to an erroneous understanding of what their complaint was they were not complaining that she was a disbeliever they're complaining that the physical changes mean more to her than the divine promise itself but in terms of being a skeptic she was never skeptic she believed in the naval of avraham and she believes in what the angels are saying now because that's just confirming that that nivoa you know this is reminiscence of a vort of the kasam so fair and i think i said this around tisha but i'll bring it in here as well there's a statement in the last mishna of massachusetts anyone who mourns the destruction of the temple the destruction of yerushalayim zohev so we translate this as will merit and experience the joy of the rebuilding of you yerushalayim that's a well-known statement but in reality i just mistranslated that statement because zohair veroa is not artit it does not mean will experience that would have been yes is present so literally the statement means he who mourns over yerushalayim experiences merits and experiences the joy meaning what i'm saying while working while you are misabel what does that mean while i'm mourning i'm experiencing the the joy i mean i'm not experiencing the joy when i'm mourning so here's what the sofa says that some sofa says we find that when yosef was sold and the brothers went to yaakov and they showed him the the yosef's many colored garment being dipped in blood and they said a wild animal attacked yosef and this is his blood yosef is dead so the passage says yaakov could not be comforted and rashi brings yakov cannot be comforted because you can't be comforted when somebody's alive even though you don't know it god put into the world the idea that time is a healer of wounds that if god forbid there is a bereavement although the suffering may never go totally away but at some point usually you're able to move forward but that's only because the person is dead if the person's alive even though you don't know that they're alive in fact even if you think they're dead metaphysically there's a process that you don't heal so yaakov couldn't be healed because we're not makabe tantrum on someone that's alive because that's not the process that god put into the world so the some cipher says if i'm a guy and i'm still crying over the destruction of the temple and it's one thousand years and fifteen hundred years and sixteen years and seven hundred years two thousand years why don't i get over it because the idea of redemption is still alive meaning if redemption would be dead i would get over it but because redemption is still alive i'm not macabre so what that means is in the very process of my grief i have simcha because i say if i'm still mourning the bait mcduche that's because it's alive it's coming back and therefore in my morning i'm zoka varela now what that is saying is to the believing jew when i imagine in my mind the prophecies of comfort the promises of god even if they have not been manifested yet in reality the promise of god is every bit as good if not better than the reality itself back the gemara gives us a story in massachusetts was once teaching his talmudim because one of the nubuhas in yeshayo talks about the walls of yushalayam being made out of diamonds and rubies and jewels and ravjochen said that lyasid lavo the walls of yerushalayim will be high high walls which are slabs of jewels like a slab of diamonds a hundred feet high so a certain talmud was sitting in the sheer and he thought to himself ah this must be an exaggeration a true a bubba maiser so he was on a sea voyage and the ship got lost at sea for a while burkhashemi got back and he sees floating on the ocean slabs of diamonds so he says was right i mama saw this so when they were saved he runs back to his red he says you were right you were right i saw it with my own eyes thinking that raviocran would be happy at the confirmation srivjorn said until you saw it you didn't believe it you only believe it because you saw it and it mentions the ravioli and gave him a look and he burnt up like a pile of bones okay that's a another discussion this is occasionally a a sanction that the gemara talks about when tell me them misbehave and the lag again whether it's literal or not literal that's uh that's uh also a much locus so that's the reality of a muna it's not a madrega that you know most of us will have most of the time or any part of the time but the idea of looking at the world through the lenses of emunah the reality of hashem's presence is so palpable that it's more significant than what i see with my eyes like someone asked to cut skereby who is renowned for his very short incisive remarks that there's a certain khasid rabbi who says that every night of sukkos he sees the ushpisin as they come in and the uh the um the katsuka rebbe said i don't need to see them i believe that they come in and that's even better the ammuna is the reality of my life hashem i hope that in the coming year all of us will all of us including myself will try to grow in the idea of a munna that hashem runs the world that even when there are challenges even when there are difficulties they are the means they are the mechanism to that god is implying to bring out within us that which would be to make us stronger to make us better to make us deeper to make us more compassionate to make us more courageous and more resilient and when you look at the world through eyes of emunah you see a very very different world instead of looking at a world that is negative and dark you see a world that is full of challenge indeed full of challenge and struggle but you see it as purposeful you see it as directive you see it as meaningful and then you leave your life in accordance with the choices that will bring you to that right place so biases hashem may tough shin pay bays be a year in which we grow in that emunah okay [Music]