Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: To See the Blessings You Need To Open Your Eyes

[Music] anyway uh today's here again is for a reforest leima for bria batrava avraham whose your side is reshredishello sponsored by ellen applebaum and that's ramalevi ariela malka batyakov and miriam fine allah shalom the mother of a rummy fine uh august 25 this week and again we once again have an anonymous contribution same donor so thank you very much uh for your uh donation aksakas torah and finally uh ibanez has reached close to 50 percent of its goal for the fundraising campaign in order to distribute uh charity to needy families for the upcoming hagim and to please help to uh have you when i reach its goal before the hagem and those wishing to participate can contribute through the link below in the youtube description box around the banner website at tiscuela mitzvot again as i said last week and even more so this week we are approaching the montevello and uh certainly as we prepare ourselves for yom narayan we should never forget the teaching of our sages that schubert's villustaka repentance and prayer and charity my vivreness wrote they were they are a very powerful force that in all whatever difficult decrees may have been made in heaven so all of us want there to be no gazeros rose and that stucco is one of the great things that protects us as melek says in mishlai twice actually staka tatsumi marves that the merit of stalker can even save a person god forbid from from death so please respond generously particularly during this time of year and bezrus hashem it should be a great great chris for all of those who participate as i just said of course we are approaching the montevello uh it will be shabbos and sundari sunderland chavez on sunday and um it is a very interesting point you know uh ello is for many people a scary time or at least a negative time because it's a there's a certain heaviness in the air and this actually goes back certainly among the uh the ashkenazic jews of poland and and and russia and germany and amongst fardham as well in a different way ello was suffused with a certain atmosphere of fear uh because after all ima sadden we are afraid of god's judgment we want there to be a positive judgment and we're worried about it our lives are on the line in a little bit more than a month god will be deciding who will live who will die who will be healthy who will be sick who will be you know rich or at least middle class and who god forbid may be poor and lose all their fortune so as a result the same way that if you were on trial for your life you'd be kind of scared so elo did have this undercurrent of pakhan of mora of fear even the words yomim no ryam days of awe in some ways could be translated days of era days of fear and uh and the like in fact um i remember reading that uh if if kids were playing outside and they were too they were a little bit too rambunctious during this time of year all the women had to do whether it's their mother or any woman would say ello was coming and the kids somehow started behaving well oh it was coming and we saw cilantro remarked now we saw cilantro died in the late uh 1800s i think around 1890s or so and he recalls that in his youth which goes back to virtually the beginning of the 19th century uh when they would announce like last shabbos shabbos mavor and ello they would say rosh chodesh hello is that would be like shouting from the women's section and women would faint they would faint now if you're skeptical maybe they're fainting because they're thinking of the three-day yum chips and all of the cooking they're going to have to do of rosh hashanah and sukkas and chameleons like three sets of three okay i'm kipper they get off ricocheting all this after young people before i'm keeper okay uh but now if sausage was describing that there was such an ima saddin that when they heard evil is coming they fainted he already pointed out that even in his lifetime that level of a masaden was not there you read that santoros so it is a perspective that's very very true you cannot deny this if you look in the prayers of yamim narayan there is an undercurrent of fear think about one of the most well-known beloved prayers nisana tokef that is recited before kedusha both on both days of rosh hashanah and on yom kippur as well it talks about even the angels of heaven say who could stand before god scrutiny who could survive me that's aden nobody got nobody even the greatest angels so obviously this is a perspective one cannot deny the reality that our life is in balance but the problem is that as important and as valid as that perspective is it has a downside in terms of the impact it has on us spiritually and that is as a result elo can sometimes become and yamaneurum generally can sometimes become a very depressing time a time in which i feel so inadequate i feel like i'm so much of a failure and that can have two negative results in opposite directions one result is that i'm so broken i'm depressed i i i just feel i can't do anything the other is the opposite since i don't want to feel that way i just become oblivious i don't think about it i may go through the motions i'm talking about religious brains i may go through the motions i'm not going to allow my my mind to think about elo and rosh hashanah yom kippur because it's too depressing i don't need to be depressed so these are two opposite negative reactions one is the reaction that you're so overly sensitive that you become immobilized the other is you become so indifferent that you become oblivious so choose your poison should i and you know drink a lot of stops before my aliyah or after my aaliyah and and the leg right either way something's wrong with that right something is wrong with both of those approaches they're not going to lead to greater closeness to our college bargain they're not going to lead to a deeper spiritual life they're not going to lead to a connection to torah and mitzvos and if you happen to be a parent it's also not going to give your children any type of positive role model to deal with as a whole so in truth therefore while it is true that the aim of sudden is a reality we also have to look at the other side of the equation that shiva is hashem's great gift to us the gift of a second chance the gift of forgiveness the gift of reconciliation the chance to make things good again the chance to repair things and as i said last week it's very important to understand that the word shiva that we define we typically translate as repentance but the literal hebrew translation of chuba is return now who are you returning to returning is implying that you're going back to a place you already were all right returning to god returning to israel but the suffragetta say it also means you're returning to yourself that shiva is not about changing yourself behaviorally maybe it involves changes i'm going to behave a little differently but existentially you're not changing yourself you're actually becoming what it is you already are you are connecting to your true self your real self the real me in fact i believe rav salvatrix said perhaps it was derek rush alicia benavoya is the famous heretic in the gemara he was a great great rabbi a great talmud and for very complicated reasons he went off to derek he became a heretic he became an upbeat chorus and rebbe mayer his great talmud continued to learn from him and when your mayor was asked how can you learn from an appicoris he responded well he's like pomegranates i can throw away the rinds that's not edible i'll eat the seeds whatever it is mayor continues to learn from him but alicia benavoya in most of shas is never referred to as by his name he's always called the other one now the simple interpretation is because we don't want to give him honor we have to mention him sometimes we don't want to honor him we don't want to elevate him we want to emphasize that he's been excluded from the jewish community but i think raf salvatrix said with derek rush that this is actually a bit of a defense of akhir meaning that spirit of kefira that possessed him is not his real self it's like they say the evil twin brother i so to speak it's that evil twin so to speak it doesn't represent the truth of his inner personality the pentaly is which remains good and i'll tell you the truth even in akher i've always been very impressed with this you know i think morgan's a story that if it likes to always like build up maybe hyperbole it says it was yom kippur that was on shabbos that always makes it a double and he's eating on yom kippur the fazada and chavez and he's eating treyf on yom kippur the whole southern chavez and he's riding a horse which yeah it's not a derisive but that happens to be us or as well so he's riding on a horse on yom kippur that falls out on shabbos and he's eating dreif and rabby mayer is running after him asking him in halakha that's great and at some point alicia vanabulla said you have to turn back because we're approaching the 2000 amos right on shabbos and on yom kippur you're not allowed to walk more than two thousand almost from the end of the city but how you measure it is complicated and alicia that we had told ravi mayor we are approaching the boundary the tahum you can't go any further and ruby mayor said how do you know he says i measured it by the horse's hoofs and and the like and the like now to me it's quite astounding you know if alicia benavoya would have been a richard dawkins or a sam harris or christopher hitchens he would not have been concerned to be sure that drebby mayor keeps some religious law so what's going on alicia nobody doesn't believe in any of this stuff he thinks it's stupid so he's telling robbie mayer be careful i actually think i didn't see it anywhere but this is i think pretty much pretty good proof for absolute matrix points elisha benabria knew the torah was good he knew the torah was right he was tortured he was in the grip of something that he thought was beyond his control but he wasn't going to drag anybody else with him he wasn't going to take anybody down and that actually is a tremendous tremendous credit to him that no matter where he saw he was i mean after all he wasn't mayors for everyone could have assumed he might have had i mean i mean i'm sure if mayor wouldn't have succumbed but at least alicia and abuela could have tried red mayor was so attached to him he could have told him his epices and he could have taught him and said hey you know and of course by uh by the way i mean unfortunately many many people who become co-four monopolism like to badafka drag other people down with them misery loves company or whatever the dynamic is they want to bring people down alicia didn't and therefore of some patrick's point his is actually very significant it's not the real him and when rev mayor then says to alicia benavoya rebbe why don't you do shiva so elisha benavoya says i heard a voice from heaven that said shuvu bhanim shove of him wayward children return to me except for out there who knew me and rebelled so alicia benavoya said it's too late for me but jeff salvatrik used to say and i'm not sure if he had i'm a car for this he said the only voice alicia benavoya is hearing is his own voice it's not god's voice he thinks it's god it's not god it's him he thinks he's reached the point of no return in reality there is no such thing as a point of no return he could have done shiva too he thought as we sometimes think and even in our own way brothersham is usually not as dramatic dramatically bad as alicia bonavoya but in our own we often think you know what's the point i mean i can't really change i can't really be different i can't really grow i can't really be better i've been through this year after year after year so what shuva is all about really is not so much focusing on how bad i am how decrepit i am how many failures i have but it's an energizing opportunity to become closer to god and it's based not on changing yourself but on a recognition that there's already an inner goodness within you you're not changing you're becoming who you really are inside and therefore if cook writes and growth great eloquence i can't really even paraphrase it but the basic point is that shuba should be a joyous experience it should be exhilarating it should be exciting it should be looking at how i can become a better person in positive constructive ways we need so to speak psychologically to move away from an anxiety model because anxiety does not make bring a person closer to god and embrace the notion of joy in the growth joy in becoming a better person and therefore ello can be seen as a very joyous month and that's why it's no accident that there are many allusions to evil and in the coming weeks we'll talk about some more illusions but the most famous illusion that i'm sure everybody here has heard of is uh the verse in the phrase in shira shirim anila dodi vidodi li now shirashiram you'll remember is a romance it describes the passionate relationship between a woman and a shepherd in fact it's so romantic and so erratic although it's a very gentle eroticism that there were rabbis who didn't want to include shira sharam in the tanakh they said that it's a love poem it's romance it was going to be banned right it would of course that probably would have ensured that more people would read it than than in the case now that it was almost a censored book but the great rabbi yakiva is given the credit for bringing shirashiram back into the tanakh because he said if all of the songs are kadosh shira shirim is kodash kidashim the holy of holies because it is a metaphor it is an allegory the woman is the jewish people and the man is hakodesh and the passionate love that exists between the man and the woman in both directions is the relationship of love that exists between israel and akhadeshwara and even those scenes the famous scenes of ko dodi dophek my beloved knocks at the door for me to come but i'm sleeping and i don't get up he's a remiss to the idea that hashem wants to redeem us and bring the masjid but we're not ready so one of the refrains that occurs more than once is the woman describes her relationship to her beloved one dodee and she says ani ladoti i pledge myself in loyalty to my beloved one vidodi lee and my beloved one pledges his love to me so if you look at the first uh letters of those four words ani li dodi vidodi li it spells the woman the month of ella uh and so this is very interesting because on one hand you know if you go with the description that ello is scary a little where around trial for our life that doesn't fit on nilo dodi with dodie so it's so interesting that when the uh the ballets uh when this is not from per se but when the later swarm try to find what is the essence of the month of evil they do not find it in fire and brimstone they do not find it in fear and they find it in anila dodi bido dili and those of you that um go to khabad or learn from prabhat are familiar with this muscle at least a million times and that is from the altar rebbe the famous idea that ella was called hamela i know that you referred more than once the king is in the field meaning the concept is that normally the king is in the palace and you can still make an appointment but you got to make an appointment a little more difficult but every once in a while the king goes into the fields this is before secret service and other things where everybody was able to approach him and talk to him and there were no time limitations the alta rebbe said elo is hamelech the king is in the field for everybody to rush him by the way you know uh la haveda many of us i know in the united states it used to be the way i mean if you go back to theodore roosevelt or other presidents before you know presidents used to walk around they would go but whatever dc was then it wasn't a big town but they were going train but they would walk in the street and uh the white house itself was mama open totally for those people to walk through and the like so there was a time where there was a notion that the average citizen should just have a right to walk into the president's office and talk to him and complain those times are kind of long gone if you try that you're likely to be shot dead before you get before you get to the office or or whatever it is but at least ello calisparco is hamelech so i think we do live in a generation where and again i i want to be careful there i'm not denying ima sadin i'm not denying ownership i'm not denying the fact that very serious decisions are made on yom narayan but in truth the best way to navigate even those difficulties is much more by an attitude of simcha than an attitude of horror and terror because hara and terror are not i mean they're not really motivators they kind of paralyze you like you know i'm too scared to move forward or or i become oblivious and i shut it out either way you know you're not going to accomplish that which is positive about the the yum yum the rhyme so we need to uh bring simba and of course let me just remind you uh that when the jewish people returned to eric went well one son not most of them didn't but when some of the jewish people returned to erect israel after the 70 years of the babylonian exile and in the book of ezra and this is the book it describes that first rosh hashanah back in irish israel and the land is desolate there's not even the base of mikdash yet the land is desolate abandoned i mean talk about you know today we go we come to israel you know uh the only problem well not the only problem you know uh it might be harder to get ben and jerry's uh than it was uh but if you're talking about what it was like then you know it was pretty pretty rough and it was rosh hashanah and in the book of necemia it describes everybody was crying and weeping because they had such a sense of how sinful they were in the eyes of god that the temple had been destroyed etc and what does the narrative say ezra and circled the people around and said this is a day of joy this is a day of simba your joy in serving god will give you strength you see and in fact that is the halachic macaro of the idea that you're not supposed to fast on rosh hashanah because indeed on one hand it's a yomadan so one would think maybe i should fast in fact there is a sheet in the gynum that did fasten although ismaish contradicted from not only from ghazal's it's contributing from passage where nakami actually said do not fast today because this is a day a day of joy so that's i think an important perspective to think about as we enter the yom narayam season to kind of approach it in a positive uplifting way and look at things as a challenge in which i'm going to try to be a better person this year and try to identify some specific ways uh that that that we could we could do it now the truth of the matter is parches-rie the partial that we're coming to is either read shabbos mubaraken and there are many illusions to ello and in precious rays let me just go over a few quick ideas the puzzle starts off by moshe is speaking this is the last month of his life and he says speaking of shame hashem because that's hashem that's really speaking look see i am placing before you the entire jewish people and on some level the entire human race a pathway that will lead to blessing and goodness and a pathway that will lead to destruction and curse yes will be that you'll listen to god you'll follow his ways the curse will be when you reject god so one thing to notice is you'll notice and you only see this in the hebrew this is not reflected in the translation that there's a grammatical irregularity here because rea c is lashon yahid is singular ano he no saying lift i am placing before you now again in english both are you but is a plural second person so rea anoki no saying how do you explain the shift between yakid to rob him so the kliyokar addresses it i'm sure i'm sure my person talked about it and the clicker makes the point that what the torah is emphasizing is how much our individual actions affect not only us but they affect the sibor of which we're apart you know sometimes a person might have an attitude although it's a foolish attitude anyway says listen um you know if i want to go to hell that's my business you know i'm not affecting anybody else what are you bothering me i'll decide how i want to live my life well again that's very short-sighted even even in that in those terms but nevertheless the whole premise is false because what we do affects our families it affects our community it affects other in a mystical way it actually affects the world okay that's that's something you can't automatically prove but it certainly affects our inner circle in various ways and that's why we say call yesterday ravens elisa every jew is responsible for another jew because what i do impacts on you and therefore i have a responsibility for you and you have a responsibility for me that even reflects itself in a halacha if i made kiddush for myself and then you show up and you didn't hear kiddush unless you're not able to make it yourself i'm allowed to make it again and again and again and again if every time somebody else walks in now why should that be so if i was yotsei kiddish is it not a blessing in vain i don't need your kids the answer is if there's any jew in the world who hasn't heard kiddush i need to make kiddush it's not just his need or her need it is my need holy israel raven zelda is that me tommy me gives a very famous muscle that if i'm on a boat with a bunch of people and there's a hole under my seat and the water is coming in and you want to fix the hole and i say hey this is my seat it's my business i don't want you to fix the hole well that's not going to work because if the water goes in the whole ship is going to sink every one of us can sink the ship we got to know how important we are in that in that way so that's why we have the shift of yakitorabhim because the akhit the individual affects the rabbit but let me point out and i think the clyaker says this as well it also works the opposite way the same way i as an individual can raise the congregation or lower the congregation obviously i am affected by the rabim and the reminder there is choose carefully the groups that you affiliate with because you all of us will be influenced by the friends we keep by the communities we're a part of right the robin will impact on me right i can't automatically say well i'll be i'll be the sudderk in the group no matter what everyone else is doing i mean that's very laudable i mean that a person might make a tier of decision you know i'm going to put myself with people who don't keep the torah because i will bring them up well maybe maybe so maybe not if it's what can also happen is the other way you get dragged you get dragged out so you have to be very very careful as to who we connect to who we affiliate with who are our friends again we should be kind and considerate of everybody no question but who do i choose to really really really be my friends because i do get influenced by that so that's point number one the relationship of the yakid on the seaboard and the relationship of the sibor on the yaket and that's highlighted in the shifts from re a to lush and robin that's point number one now a second point is that god seems to say there's only two choices there's only two roads you can take you can take the road of blessing or the road of curse well isn't there a neutral route i mean it seems like you're either on the road of blessing or either wrote of course i mean normally we look at life as comprised of three components there are things i'm not allowed to do i'm not allowed to eat hazer there are things i must do like say shma or whatever but then there's a lot of neutrals in life i mean i don't have to eat cheerios for breakfast tomorrow i could choose to do it or not in other words there seems to be many areas in life in which god is not telling you you must do it and god is not telling you you can't do it it's up to you writing eric israel there's a mentality that people love to ask every little shiloh to a gundle they want they want a gun ultra pascan on every little child survived was especially subject to this in which people would ask him every little child including things which are not so far from should i have cheerios or cornflakes for breakfast uh i don't think that that exactly wasn't death but there were things that were pretty darn close so very often you know he answers in a very short way uh he would say kiritsonako kirito now do what you want you know i have no opinion no opinion on it so why does the torah emphasize there's only two pathways when in fact there's a lot of activity you know should i go you know to the zoo or should i go to the museum you know is that broker or club so the truth of the matter is there is a passage in the khaiba salah that says a wonderful thing and the rambam in the shmoner prakam shmandi prakham is the rambam's introduction to pierce it's the only introduction that's bigger than the book perfect only has five practicum of mishnah and one peric of breissa and the rambam's introduction to breckie was his apricot okay but be it as it may it's a very classic work and it was written in arabic as all of the rambam's commentaries on the mishnah but in the gemara it's printed in hebrew the ibr of shmuel ibn tibon's translation and and the like and in the shrine of prokim and as as well as chavez which is earlier than the rambam a point is made that there is no such thing as pure neutrality in life every single decision you make in life has to be based on whether this will help me become closer to hashem or it will not help me to be closer to hashem if it will help me be closer to hashem it is a good decision if it will not help me be closer to hashem then it's a bad decision now now it's important to understand what this means the rambam goes on and says this does not mean that the only thing you can do in life is learn or davin the rambam says there is room in a life for vacation there is room in life to go to gardens to go to zoos to relax to sleep in other words all of that is good because those are ways that you restore your energy those are ways in which your spirits can get happier elevated and when you're in a greater state of serenity you're then capable of serving god so the rambam is saying you can serve hashem in many many ways you can serve hashem by learning and dominating and you can serve hashem by going and seeing the alps going to switzerland but it all depends on your mindset if you think i'm going to the alps number one to see the greatness of hashem's creation and be inspired i'm going to the alps to recharge my batteries so when i get back home i will serve hashem with enthusiasm so the rambam says if that's your kavanagh then it's not just the learning and the davening you do when you get back that's a mitzvah but even going to the alps becomes a mitzvah as well and he quotes uh the mishnim every action that you do should be the shame shamayim and it's based on a passage in michelle mohammed what does that mean in all of your ways no god this is called if i can borrow the title of a book written by a christian minister but it happens to be a good title this is called the purpose driven life every life decision is connected to an ultimate purpose in that sense i think that explains why there are really only two pathways because every decision you can make can can be in the direction that will lead to bracha and if not there's no middle ground you can't be switzerland in that sense of being neutral it can't be neutral there there is no neutral if it's neutral then it's bad because it's not bringing me closer to what and this is also brought out by a very famous quotation from the vil nagon in the book of michele this commentary to michelle in which the vilnigan said if a person is not constantly trying to be malamala to go up by definition they will be going down there is no such thing as staying in place life is similar to give it a more modern muscle i don't know if you ever did this i used to do when i was a kid i haven't done it recently if you have an escalator going down you try to climb up a down escalator again as i have not done this in a few years but i used to try to do it it was kind of a lot of fun you could go faster than the escalator now you understand if you stand still on an escalator you don't stay in place you go down life is that way as well you can't really say i'm just standing still i'm just standing still and maybe you go down just to stay where i am i gotta kind of put in a certain amount of of of energy and that is why this is the second russia the first observation was the second observation is there's only two choices in life there is not the neutral choice of just staying in place because every decision has to be based on does it bring me closer uh to uh to academic so that's the second observation the third observation is the importance of the words hayong behold i am putting before you today revenue yona says this is a very significant idea and this really goes back to what we talked about in the beginning and that is sometimes a person feels they've been on the wrong road for so long there's no way to backtrack there's no way to get back on the right road my past has kind of condemned me to be wherever i am rebecca yonah says the very first step to doing truva is to look at today as the first day of your life you know the old t-shirt saying today is the first day of the rest of your life very true like most t-shirt things are actually true uh they come up with good things and rabbina and i don't know if they got there got this from robin riona i doubt it but rabano yona so says it he says see it's a little complicated because in the dynamic of truva you are supposed to regret and have remorse over the past but trebena yona says that's not what you start with because if you start with focusing on remorse you're going to get paralyzed and depressed rather instead of focusing on the past you say today is a new day today is a new opportunity hyun it's not that i'm on that bad road for so long that i can't get back to the fork in the road every day and it's not just every day it's every minute actually every minute i'm at that fork in the road and i can make a new decision and that's very very important because that basically says what i am is not limited by what i was and what i can become is not limited by what i am every day every moment a new choice a new ability to make a choice hayong the magic of hayom hayom right and that's why hayom is a word that's actually repeated very often in the rosh hashanah liturgy of course literally it means that particular day but it's also a reminder every day the only goal expresses it the same i mean it's not written down anywhere but to it was an oral tradition that the villain taught that you know let's say you're in the middle of davening sometimes it happens to all of us and i'm sure well maybe i shouldn't judge anybody but i i've had the experience sometimes if my mind was wandering it shouldn't be belandering so i remember slackline i remember something and then all of a sudden i'm like towards the end of schmonastery and like what exactly happened in between those two points i i guess i said it you know i don't even i don't even know exactly and you know we lose our concentration we don't have focus so sometimes a person's attitude might be let's say you're diving and as you're saying yeah there's escape it's not not working so a person sometimes says okay i'll just get this i'll get this fila over with and maybe my rev will be better developed god says no if the eight zahara got to you in attack qadosh you fight back with attack on the others and if you lose in hashi venue you fight back with swat letter meaning to say every you know line no okay you got me here you don't have to get me here i keep going don't give up hayyom a new choice and that's uh an enormous point where benigno says at a point at which you're strong enough to make changes then you look at your past and think about it but initially you kind of have to disassociate yourself from that past because it's going to drag your dragon down right so i've mentioned again rabbim t the two pathways of no neutrality and the idea of hayyom now the fourth issue is actually a little subtle uh it's it's based on um well it's based on the language of rashi but yo mizraki the great commentator and rashi gives a talmudic interpretation that's a little complicated because if you look at the sukkah very carefully and again you'll see this you see this only in the hebrew you'll notice a little bit a little bit of a grammatical inconsistency between the way it addresses bracha and khloe it says right behold all right i am putting before you see that i'm putting before you a blessing and a curse it then says the bracha is that you will listen to god the curse is if you don't listen to god now the curse formulation is a little more logical because you will be cursed if you don't listen to god so one would have expected that the bracha should have been worded the same way habraka but it doesn't say the bracha is it says the bracha is a share tishman so one interpretation is and the rambam seems to learn this way that the real bracha in life is being given the opportunity to serve god meaning a share tishma'un is not simply saying you will get a bracha if you keep the torah but it means you will get the bracha that you will keep the torah based on mitzvah goreres mitzvah right that's why we have the common expression tisku le mitsubot may you merit doing mitzvoth and indeed the rambam writes in chuba that when the torah says if you do mitzvos you'll get reward in this world that's not the really reward reward for mitzvah says but what the torah is saying is i'll give you the ability to do more mitzvos that's the reward money for stockholm where they would help to do mitzvoth so that's very medullic in the passage the baraka is not you will get a bracha if you do mitzvahs the barakah is you will do mitzvahs you see hashem will give you the wherewithal to do mitzvahs but rashitaka doesn't learn that way rashi actually learns ashar is almanas so there was on the condition so the passage actually means the bracha is on the condition that you do mitzvahs which means rashi is actually making it in sync with the curse but rebellion as rakhi points out that even though both for the bracha and for the klella we're using conditional language but halachically there's a difference between im if and almanas on the condition and let me explain this it's a little a tiny bit complicated but it's an amazing point that you misraki is putting into this ration let's take a monetary transaction i sell you property but it's on a condition meaning i only want to sell you property on the condition let's assume that i'm liquidating my assets in the u.s in anticipation of my move to eric israel and i don't want the sale to be valid if i don't if my if my aliyah does not come through i want to invalidate the sale and i'll give you back your money so how luckily there are two ways i could word the transaction i could say this is your house if i go to eric israel you know within six months or i could say this is your house almanas that i go to eric israel within six months on the condition sounds the same how luckily it's very different and that is when i say this is your house if i go to arizona within six months you don't have ownership of the house until i go to where which israel meaning for the next six months it's not your house if on the other hand i say this is your house on the condition that i go to eric israel it's true that if i don't go it's not your house but if i do go it is your house retroactively from the time of the sale almanas in other words is a retroactivity clause im is a prospective condition truth is this actually doesn't even correspond so much with um secular uh legal understandings of things but there are two different types of conditions in allah there is a condition which if it is fulfilled is a retroactivity violence a retroactive validation and then there's another condition in which nothing is valid until the condition is actually activated so if that's the case it's very very fascinating when it comes to the curse god says you will be cursed if you violate meaning no curses until you actually violate god is not going to punish you for your thoughts when it comes to mitzvos you will get the bracha almanas that you do good that means even if i didn't do the god will give me it on credit god will give it to me now as long as i eventually wind up doing it so the the revolution reads into this the idea that you actually see that hashem rewards a good thought even before it's carried out but he does not punish for a bad thought until it is carried out into an average and he reads all of that into the fact that rashi says hasher tishman is almanas shittishman the almanas is a retroactivity you will get it from now if you do the mitzvos but the curse you will not get in only if you do the very stuff that's really very very interesting horror uh the final uh connection to the truva process uh is on the idea of re re means see that i am giving you a blessing and a curse and the separatists point out that when it comes to a blessing it's not enough to have a blessing you need a blessing to see the blessing that you have do you remember by hagar when hagar was expelled and yeshmael was dying of thirst and tiger was desperate and he says god opened her eyes and she saw the well so the commentaries say the well was always there god did not miraculously create the well but she was oblivious she didn't notice what was there god opened her eyes she saw what was there what is the jewish word for gratitude the jewish phrase for gratitude a karate talk does not mean gratitude actually it means recognizing the good seeing it our problem is not that we're ungrateful we talked about this last week our problem is we just don't notice we don't notice so really says you need a bracket from god to see the bracha that hashem gives you to see the presences of life to see the opportunities to see the blessings you know uh in in some ways you know hashem i mean for most people not for everybody but for most people maybe not most people in the world but let's see most people who live in let's say first world countries uh we live with a standard of ease and comfort that really is un was unimaginable in world history and by the way this even includes poor people i mean today you know i mean uh in the olden days a poor person was a person who did not have bread and water now there are i mean there are even today there are some places like that but you know even in every cell you're not you're not going to have people who don't have who cannot get a piece of bread so the truth of the matter is even poverty has been upgraded and called the homer called the homer called the homer middle class middle-class standard of an average person today would be equivalent to kind of phenomenal phenomenally wealthy so life has become very easy the idea that whenever you want to eat something something is there for most of human history that was not the situation right but there's a little bit of a cost we become spoiled the slightest frustration and again i'm not i'm not giving muster i'm talking to myself too the slightest frustration sets us off you know the air conditioning isn't working so well you know whatever it is uh the bus is crowded uh it takes you a whole 11 hours to get to eritrea from new york like why does it take so long you know i remember when i got my first in the days when they had paper fax machines i guess most people don't even use them anymore i had to send the fax from baltimore to china i had to come and it it took around a minute and a half and i was very impatient i was drumming my fingers what is taking so long baltimore to china it has to take a minute and a half what's going on here right so we get impatience we want instant gratification that's why i mean i'm oversimplifying that's why the divorce rate goes up marriage doesn't work you know within the first week something to get rid of it abortion whatever the issue is it it comes down to the notion that we've become less able to deal with stresses with strengths we complain more we get more bitter when things are not perfect we have less hakara satou we see the good less and therefore the ray is muramas that if you really want the bracha you need to open your eyes and see the brah the bracha is already here to a large degree open your eyes see it sense it feel it become a person of gratitude i mean again i mentioned last week this overlaps that yahudah yehudi comes from the word gratitude leia called her fourth son yehuda because she said now i am grateful to hashem so the very definition of yehudi is a person of gratitude points out a very interesting thing how important gratitude is to being a jew you know there are a number of nations that god said are so evil that we're not allowed to marry them even if they convert right so it mentions that you're not allowed to marry the converts from amon and moaf luckily the female ones are permitted but not the male and the reason is because they did not give you food and water when you asked them for food and water in the desert and therefore they were cruel and therefore we don't marry them even if they have luckily convert we're not allowed to marry the males now the truth of the matter is there are nations that did a lot worse to us that don't have the same restrictions the torah says in egyptian i don't mean a modern egyptian i mean let's say an ancient egyptian converts so the torah says egyptians are not admitted into the jewish people until the third generation so if an egyptian converts he needs to marry another first generation egyptian convert they have a second generation they should marry a second generation egyptian convert generation three is permitted the granules discusses different permutations what if a first generation marries the second generation what's the status of the kid we don't have to go into the permutations but generally speaking first two generations is prohibited third generation is mutual now if we ask ourselves who hurt the jewish people more the egyptians or the moabites clearly it's the egyptians i mean they enslaved us they persecuted us they killed our babies the only thing the moabites did was they didn't give us food and water so why is the torah so much stricter on amon and moab than it is on mitzrayim and ref ki tov explains mitzrayim were bad people they did bad things but amon and moab showed ingratitude because after all ammon and moab come from lot and avraham had shown so much kindness to lot where was their sense of gratitude see the egyptians had no particular reason to have gratitude to us other than the fact i mean after the slavery perhaps so but but you know when they enslaved us there was no particular gratitude although you could argue jose for me that's an interesting question but at least as a nation we did not help the egyptians so rav kital points out the lack of satov is such a begum such a defect that you can't become part of the jewish people would that begum and it exists forever and ever and ever and ever right so that's the idea of gratitude so bikitsur just to go over this very quickly we mentioned the five points of parsha sriel connected to the chuva process the first is the relationship of yakrid and rabbit the second is the fact that there's only two choices in life the purpose-driven life there's no neutral uh the third is hayom every day is a new opportunity what you were does not limit what you can be what you are today and what you can be in the future never give up the fourth point is either like the rambam that the barakah is not the external things god gives you but the barakah is the ability to serf him i share yeshua or the way the ravi learns rashi god will give you the bracha based on your thought to do good even if you've done even if you haven't done the good yet as opposed to the punishment will depend on him only if you do the evil will there be punishment and the final point is riye that you need a bracha to see abraha and we have to kind of try to train ourselves to be people who notice the good that hashem has given us and that also means notice the good that people have given us right our courage to talk to people you know if you read about stories about the khabib time and even even modern guitar you know it's very so much amazing of how how they're so imbued with a sense of gratitude if if there's a they meet the great grandchild of somebody who did a message for them you know 70 years ago they will go crazy they'll take care of the person and talk to the person and have them over et cetera because they say i have a karesatov to your great grandfather for what he did for me many many years ago and that's really a media that is so essential to jewish identity that the very word yehudi is based on gratitude that is what a jew is a jew is a grateful person so bieters hashem i want to wish everyone a khodeshtov and may we be zoha to feel hashem's love in this process and may that be a motivator to a joyous chuva a chuva of passion a truth of excitement a chuva of exhilaration and to understand that every day we have a new capacity to make a new choice may hashem help us to make our choices with wisdom thank you [Music] is