Rav Yitzchak Breitowitz: Been Through the Holidays BUT Have the Holidays Been Through You?

[Music] okay everybody good good to see you all and um even though normally uh we discuss the par since it's it's really the aftermath of a very very long period of sacred time rosashana I kind of want to talk about what you might call in the as we're leaving the sacred season and we're entering oh yeah we're entering ordinary life uh so I want to talk a little bit about the transition to the ordinary uh that is coming up uh first let me just say the sheer tonight is dedicated Raa for B Ben feda and David benara and for the lasting Unity of the people of am Israel and for all those whose Health has been affected by the war Alat of K Ben elzar B Ben schlinsky whose yite was the end of el brother of arik and for yosua Ben Aon zanger dedicated by the Blumenthal family uh yua Ben Aon actually served in the Israeli Army during the war of independence and was Z to build a bias Isel um his grandson Yehuda is one of Rabbi poston's talim who learns regularly with him uh for all of these people and an anonymous contribution was made for the of all of and theages to return safe and totally healthy to their homes hashem's protection for all of CLA is for the G in these days amen um I know that we celebrated T last Thursday Friday and t uh of course must have been a very very difficult time for many of us because in one hand it's Sim Tor happy joyous celebration of the Torah on the other hand it was of course the Hebrew anniversary of the massacre uh in G that resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand people The Taking of the hostages and the beginning of a war that is still going on that has taken many many lives and as a result uh people were wondering uh and I'm sure all of all of us were wondering you know what do you do do you celebrate how can you how can you treat it as the same as as a normal T can Simas Torah ever be Simas Torah again in light of all of these tragedy but the thing and people are asking me you know cancel hakos or minimize hakos or reduce hakos or whatever it is but the thing is that you know we have historical documentation that even in the middle of the concentration camps the Jews would sneak away at 2:00 in the morning they didn't have a Torah of course but they would dance they would try to Rejoice this is what a Jew does a Jew understands that life is difficult and the ways ofes are not always accessible to us and we don't really know exactly why we're going through this we believe the amuna that this is part of the birth Pains of mashia that this will eventually culminate in a GAA that am Israel will eventually emerge Victorious but in that Victory there will be casualties the says this goes all the way back to when Yakov is struggling with the angel that wants to destroy him and they're wrestling through the long long night and at the end of the night Yakov emerges triumphant and the angel blesses him and the SE says that this is a prophetic description of gullas that is called a long dark night in which the enemy sometimes defeats us and sometimes we defeat the enemy but at the end of that long long night there will come a day and when that day comes even the enemy that tries to destroy us will actually bless us as will do ASA will do Chua but here's the rub that morning will come but it will not be without cost there'll be a lot of limping Yakov who represents the the B Isel he's not going to Simply get a freebie of GAA but that long night is going to have a cost and there are so many corbas just this week after theim already we've had soldiers who have died some of whom were even rabis here in right right near here Goldberg and others and now these are not just but and their their parents of large families and their children were rendered so of course our hearts are broken but at the same time we have to have SIM in our relationship with a we can't give into despond we cannot give into despondency we cannot give into Yos to giving up hope and therefore are dancing on Sim T and really are s in AEM generally is a source of our strength that we can't Define ourselves by those who want to destroy us because in a sense that's giving them a victory over and Beyond the casualties that they inflict I also thought in a way that's maybe uh more more mystical uh that there is a notion of spiritual telepathy that exists in the world as well now they tell the story of the great rebbi keager one of the greatest of the GM of the 19th century that once in the middle of the day he was dancing around a table and when he was asked what is he dancing for he said you know I have a talmid who's getting married know a thousand kilometers from here and I'm not able to go to the K but I want to be for him because I believe that the of the will know that I'm so one of the things to think about is theim who are still languishing after more than a year many of course have died but there are those who are still alive but look at the think about the unbelievable suffering did they have any celebration Sim Tor I don't know it's not not so likely but there is a nice idea that we can send a little bit of our Sim to them and maybe their nishas can also be uplifted by our AEM so it was an ambivalent time a confusing time but I think overall the Sim has to predominate but a Sim that does not forget those who are suffering but a Sim that says I Will Rejoice for the people who are suffering to be connected to them and to bring hashem's blessing into the world I think I've mentioned before a vort that's really connected to Paras spra so actually it's somewhat connected to the paraa uh yose do salic the famous reic of Y University so uh in the 1970s he suffered a devastating series of three tragedies in in uh quick succession uh he lost a brother he lost his mother and then he lost his wife which was the most devastating for him so he almost sat Shiva like every month for three you know for three months in a row and uh I knew him but I didn't know him well but those who knew him well said he never recovered although he was Z to teach for more than 10 years until his final illness uh but it was never quite the same one can understand that his spirit was was very very broken very very shattered but at the end of his third Shiva uh he said an interesting thought you know kazal teach there's a very interesting medish that B that this is not the first world Hashem made many worlds that he destroyed now it's interesting as an aside of salvic didn't go here but I just want to mention it you know when people hear this medish God created many worlds that he destroyed they assume this refers to other planets God made this planet and destroyed it but not necessarily so the Farish Israel said it could refer to the Earth itself undergoing cataclysmic destructions such as ice ages meteorite showers that's why braus talks about the fact that at the beginning of creation there is water across the face of the deep well what does that mean there's supposed to be nothing the answer is that that is a remnant of the prior worlds and in fact it's Fishel actually writes again he's a 19th century commentary on the mishna that this explains dinosaurs and this explains fossils and this explains you know millions of years of the age of the Earth right this famous conflict between science and religion again there's a lot of different answers you know I mean Dr Gerald Schroeder who is a physicist he teaches at Aur a retired Professor he writes very complicated books kind of uh bringing in the relativity of time based on Einstein that time can both be you know millions of years and a few minutes I can say it I can't really say how you understand it it kind of reminds me when Einstein became like a world celebrity because of Relativity so the New York Times and you know always wrote that nobody understands relativity like so somebody so Einstein was interviewed and says Professor Einstein is it true that only two people in the world understand the theory of relativity so Einstein said I'd like to know who the other one is you know so the relativity stuff is very very abstract that time can be both billions of years or millions of years and six days so I don't want to go with complicated things the ferish Israel says very very simply that the Earth as the Earth may have been millions and millions and millions of years old and that's n in the Rabin statement bore and he created prior worlds that he destroyed now why God did that is a good question so now we go back to where he raises the question why did Hashem make worlds that he was going to destroy what was the purpose so this is what he said he said everything hes does is that we should learn from him Hashem wanted us to internalize a lesson that even if our world get gets destroyed we go on and we rebuild we don't give upem had worlds and he destroyed those worlds but he didn't throw in the towel he says you rebuild this has been the great secret of the Jew you know in the aftermath of the Holocaust besides the well the state of Israel of course is a product essentially of the aftermath of the UST in in mysterious ways but individually people who lost whole families they went back they got married again they started again they relocated they built their lives up from scratch the Jew does not give up that is the positive side of being a stiff necked people right is recorded in the Torah often as a little bit of a criticism of the Jewish people we're too stubborn okay that's true we are too stubborn sometimes but it's that stubbornness that also represents the ability to come back not to be defeated you get knocked down you get up again SCH says sadic that sadic falls seven times and that even refers to spiritual failures and he gets up meaning the difference between the Russia and the sadic is not that the Russia Falls and fails and the sadic doesn't fail the sadic fails as well but the difference is when the Russia fails he just gives up and says what's the point that sadic says I'm gonna go on this is an important message in our Ras in our spiritual challenges very important very important because we're going to make mistakes we're going to have failures but we got to go on and it's true in in the political and Military challenges that we face as well as all of the personal tragedies that people go through you go on you go on and that is the greatness of B is and this is what hasem imparted to us when he taught us even when your world is destroyed you go on and you create as a little aside it reminds me a little bit although it's not not exactly the same topic you know one of the most famous famous in rabic literature that is treasured in all theas in the world is the is a commentary on the saer 613 mitzah of the Torah but it's full of Lumas full of you know abstract theoretical fascinating discussions in every is one of the greatest of the so there's an interesting little discussion about how the was printed the happened to be a of the of the re of G the first Reb of G the and the had on all of sh all of Big B and there was a fire in his house and all of his manuscripts were burnt a lifetime of work was totally destroyed one can imagine again I I understand I I I feel a little uneasy comparing loss of human life to loss of manuscripts I I I do understand that they're different but still a person put in his life in tah and everything got destroyed so he was heartbroken he went to the and he cried and he said everything I've done in my life has just disappeared so the said is there something left is is there anything that can be salvaged anything so the said I have this little commentary on the on the Mitzvah was like a sideline little thing I mean I I never even thought of publishing that it was just like some notes I put together and the g rebi said why don't you publish that and that became was so inconsequential in in he wasn't even going to publish it and that became one of the famous most beloved for him in life the G rebby said isn't there something yeah there a little a little little thing there I have it's it's hard to imagine how the M could have looked at it that way but that's that's what the story says he wanted to salvage you Salvage what you Salvage you know so you know I I I understand the ambivalence that that we felt and probably and of course still feel and I felt it as well but overall you can't be defeated you have to go on you have to go on you have to as the zor the zor has an expression there is Sim in one side of yourself and there's crying on the other side of yourself and both of them exist at the very same same time so now I just want to mention that they tell a story about um a Russian peasant who converted to Judaism in Aid community and were very big into big into parties which also involved a lot of drinking again again so he converted in a very auspicious time of year he converted shortly before uh Roes K so he had roses kli big big party and then a few weeks later you had Kana big party uh then T big party T was a fast but that was only a small small fast and then you had shat and then you had tuat and then you had Adar and then you had puim and then you had Nissan and then you had pesak wonderful wonderful every two weeks there was some major party and of course there was shabas in between so the peasant goes to his friend Ivan and he says Ivan you got to join this religion this religion is so fantastic uh we have wonderful parties with a lot of drinking every two weeks and then in between their shabas and even during the week you know for Bringin and get togethers and the like so Ivan somehow arranges a conversion I don't know what Bas is doing any of this but Ivan arranges a conversion and he arranges the conversion for after pesak now after pesak is is already the period of Sasa om so you don't have parties uh you know you don't make weddings and then uh comes s and then comes Tas the 17th of tamas then the three weeks and the nine days and and and uh the week of Tish and Tish and everything is fasting and not doing this and not doing that so Ivan goes to his friends and he says you know you promised me this is a religion of parties and joy and all I get is this mourning and this grieving so the first guy shakes his head and he says you know I don't know what happened ever since you've joined uh we've been going downhill now the truth is that this is exactly the nature of the Jewish calendar as well as Jewish life we have times of exaltation times of sim times of sadness times of community and Times of introspection now that certainly characteristic of the calendar as a whole but what's interesting is that in the single month of Tish which is now finishing we experience all of those emotions almost all at once in the month of let's consider there are times of sadness times of introspection times of private communion with God and then there are times of joy and even on itself even putting aside October 7 which was so fresh in our minds but you know it's very strange in the ju position between y after hakos we say Yar we remember our parents we remember our beloved ones so at least in you know Yar is day one and Aus are day two in erus it all comes together so what's going on with all of this multiplicity of emotion contradictory emotion and the short answer is that we have to learn to serve God with all of the emotions on our pallet you know there are some people whose primary focus is to serve god with joy there are other people who are more serious they like to serve god with introspection this may sound funny but it's 100% true there are people who enjoy Tish more than that may sound funny in point of fact I I may be approaching that scale because here's the point Tish a time of reflection a time of introspection a time of thinking about our relationship with Hashem right so there are people who gravitate to the serious and the somber and the reflective and there are people who gravitate to the joyous Community but what God is saying is you got to serve me with all of these different emotions you have to learn to mourn and to introspect and you have to learn how to dance and celebrate you can't just be unidimensional you have to incorporate all of these different midot so the Ledic dancer has to learn how to think and cry and reflect and the serious Miss misanthrop that's all that's a harsh word has to learn how to join in with the community and since Tish is the first month of the year it sets the template and the pattern for the rest of the year so every single emotional experience has to be experienced in the beginning of the year because that gives us the tools and the spiritual ammunition to be able to serve hes the way rutner put it rautner said the person who cannot dance on Sim Tor cannot really cry and Tish and the person who cannot cry and Tish cannot really dance with the saer Tah you see because if you have joy in your spiritual connection to God then you're going to grieve what not having a mikash is if you can't appreciate the grieving then you don't really have that Joy vice versa as well if the Torah is not a source of Joy if your relationship to God is not a source of Joy then what are you grieving that you don't have a Bas on Mikes you see so it's all connected so this kind of explains the multiplicity of emotion in Tish but now we come to a new month right we're entering in many many ways although the year year is already more than three weeks old but in many many ways is kind of the beginning of the ordinary year right Tish is taken up with the ordinary year is going to begin in two days now we know that the official name of kesan is Maran and although in all likelihood the word Mar there means raindrops Mar in Biblical Hebrew is used for rain and refers to as the beginning of the rainy season but there's a famous thought that Mar means the bitter month of and why is the bitter month because has no it's said to be the only month Tru let's check that out a little bit TI of course is fil filled with Yin has zero kave has Kan T also has the end of Kana shat has Tu okay that's stretching a little bit but you know at least is a certainly a special a special day then you have Adar which of course is porim then you have Nissan which is p okay then we have what y do you have in the month of so it depends without getting into politics you have of course y contemporary holiday you have LBA again stretching it a little bit but like okay has SH uhas now Tas is a little hard Thomas does not really have y Thomas has a fast day and yet and yet tell us based on the in Zar that those fast days will become y in the future so therefore you saidis also right yeah theis be the same thing uh of well both the ninth of will be the day that mashia is born and the 15th of is said to be the happiest day El does not have distinct y him but still is a precursor to T we're thinking about TSH but is B is B and therefore it is said to be Mar that's a famous again it probably is not atomically correct but it is a famous famous reason why kesin is called maresin but here is the thing one can actually make the argument that kesin is the most important month of the year because it is the litmus test as to what the Y have truly done for us have we been transformed have we been affected have we been changed or is it simply life as usual once we got rid of the chuba thing right many people have again it's very understandable you know particularly in theiva world you know El very very intense and then the joy of sukus so a person has a feeling kind of after Kipper okay I can put the Chua stuff you know back in the closet to be pulled out next year I don't have to worry about it anymore but what a mistake the whole idea is the whole process of Chua is about trying to redirect and reorient my life now is the real test the Kish gave a famous musle the Kish said if you have a pot that's on a fire and the pot bubbles over you don't really know if the pot is filled to the brim or only half filled because even a half- filled pot will boil over when it's on the fire so I can't look at the pot and assess how full the pot is but once the pot is off the fire and it's no longer bubbling I can then see how much water is in it is it filled to the top or is it only half fil so says the following when you're celebrating a and you're inspired you're bubbling over with Holiness that doesn't mean you've really been changed because even if you're half empty you know you'll bubble over the real test is how is yourin how is your ordinary life when there is no special day can you still live your life with resolve with commitment with positive change you know we say uh when people ref us to say uh people will sometimes use the Expression we've gone through a we've gone through a yff cycle so rautner says the question is not have you gone through a yump the question is has the yump gone through you as the they said it this is really a paraphrase of of a more famous VRA said up somebody approached him about a sh for a brilliant Borah and they said this person has been through Shas five times so said how many times has Shas been through him he's been through Shas five times has the sh been through him s hutner kind of paraphrased it and said the issue was not um have I been through a y but has the Y been through been through me and therefore is very very important becausein is the litmus test is the litmus test and here I want to share with you a very very interesting passage from saer yit saer Y is a cabalistic work uh some attribute the authorship of SE to AR and some even attribute the authorship of SE to odishan really making it kind of the first human work in history and what safri at does is and by the way it's a very well regarded it's it's not not part of the zoor it's a separate cabalistic work but it has commentaries by ragon commentaries by the vagon so everybody you know looked at sa as a very very important work uh you can even get it in English has an English sa that he annotated and the like and essentially the thesis of sa is that Hashem created the universe by combining the spiritual potencies of letters of the ALF base in fact that is the inner meaning of how did right marish called The Animals by names now how did he do that so Mark Twain who is actually an atheist but Mark Twain or an agnostic had a humorous story about Adam and Eve uh he talked about Adam calling the animals animals of course he was using English so Adam asks Eve why did you I'm sorry Eve asks Adam why why did you call that thing a lion So Adam is a little irritated it looks exactly like a lion so what am I supposed to call it it looks exactly like a lion now here's the thing Mark Twain was making a mockery he was trying to mock the biblical account but the truth of the matter is if we substitute AR for lion the truth of the matter is Mark Twain is exactly right that's exactly what Adam said because here's the thing the r writes why is Hebrew called KES right why is or again I don't mod that's an interesting question but let's say Biblical Hebrew is called so there's a the r and the ran the rambam gives what you might call a negative reason because he says in Biblical Hebrew in thees of the Torah there are no explicit terms for sexual functions or uh excretory functions everything is euphemistic so for example uh the term for interourse is sha he lay with her whatever it would be so therefore since the Torah avoids explicit mention of sexual or elimination functions that gives it a certain sanctity that's kind of a negative reason uh even in modern Hebrew uh obscenities that exist in in the Hebrew language are almost 100% from Arabic uh they're they're not indigenous to the Hebrew language itself ramban does not like that reason because he says that's just a negative the ramban says Hebrew is theashes because through the letters of the olive base God created the universe this these are the building blocks this is the DNA of creation and the same way H2O right what's H2O that when you combine two molecules or two atoms rather two atoms of hydrogen with one of oxygen you get water so too when God combines the spiritual power of the ALF with the spiritual power of the r and the spiritual power of the yud and the spiritual power of the ha each one of them alone is a separate Force but when they're combined there's a spiritual chemical reaction that produces a lion so if you ask the question how did ad Marisha know how to name them the answer is very simple he simply had x-ray vision reverse engineering he looks at the spiritual composition of the lion the lion emerges from Al y he Adam identified the spiritual essence of God's creation through safre through the contemplation of the energies that have to be brought together right so a cow is pay R sh so this this is only true for uh for Lashes right C is not the spiritual essence of a cow right dog is not the essence of a dog but the and the LED and the Bas is how you get dogs and the pay the range and the hay is how you get cows so Mark Twain is 100% right I mean he was making fun he says named The Animals by identifying the combination of letters through which that energy gave rise to that creation right that's exactly what it was exactly what it was call it reverse engineering or whatever whatever you want to call it now saf can be used by human beings as well the gamarra itself says that there were tan and am who would create a cow or a calf through safer that they would she and eat on chabas and the like and saer is the basis of the golum issue now uh you know the artificial person uh now we associate golum with maral whether the moral created of Golem is a huge historical controversy uh some maintain that in the the attic the locked attic of the maral sh in Prague there is still the Golem that has been decommissioned so to speak uh actually the fre rebbi claims to have seen the Golem uh there uh others point out that the Golem maral died in the 1500s and the first uncovering of the Golem story is in the 1800s and for like 300 years nobody heard about this Golem story it was like a an unknown thing so I don't want to get into that you could check online different different opinions is the Golem story true or not but you know one way of looking at it is when people would ask me um did the moral make a Golem so I would say I don't know if he did but I believe he certainly could have if he wanted to meaning to say he had the had the the at the K says his father didn't let him do it he had the power to make go okay but all of that comes from saf okay now why am I bringing this up because saf has another thing it does as well sa identifies every month of the year with a letter and a human sensory function like sight or hearing or the like so for the month of K this is how sa describes the month of kesin it says Hashem took the letter n n and combined it with r combined it with fragrance smell so is the conjunction of N and and every month it has a certain pairing in that way so one of the things R sok of Lublin does you'll see every roses in the in um pric is he takes this passage of sa for every month and he tries to explain it so here's what he says about soen is the conjunction of N and re what's the connection so we know that n is symbolic of the idea of nef falling down right we know this from the famous gar in m where of yan says that in the uh Capital 145 which is ashre which is ashre so uh it's an alphabetical acrtic but there's no Pas that begins with the letter Nun by the way just a little aside you know um we call Capital 145 ashre because it begins but is not part of capital 145 it's taken from another chapter of the uh 145 actually begins toil so right Ash does not appear in Ash what we call as but be it as it may uh the me is your kingdom is eternal and then we go to God supports all who fall so you go from me to there is no beginning with n and explains because the letter N canotes falling down defeat and did not want to begin a with the idea of defeat as it says in of the Jewish people will fall in gas and not be able to get up now the truth of the matter is the gamor itself is very very difficult because there are many many that do begin with nun and not only that not only generally but there's even alphabetical acrtic into Hill which have a n so Ran's explanation which is trying to explain why there's no n beginning in Ash because it's nafila does not explain why there is a nun in so many other PUK I mean that that's a a general question in the gamar but still ran says it's connected to NE so n is says r s of all of the months of the year in which we feel that we're falling that we've lost our momentum is the month of nefil because we reach so spiritually elevated levels R Yer suas and then all of a sudden crash back to Earth I still remember this very vividly you know when I was um a ninth grader in Nar was the first time I was you know sent you know uh out of town sent from my my home to the n in Baltimore and the rash the Rashana yam Kipper everything was amazing but you know Yesa Bim Begins the day after yum Kipper and it was very hard for me to emotionally handle that the day day after yum Kipper we stopped learning Yeshiva was over vacation it's a very strange feeling yeah you know it's less strange if you're not in a full-time Yeshiva environment just part of life but when you go from the crescendo of alyah to okay all all finished so symbolically Yesa try to address it a little bit they typically uh make shakas the day after yum Kipper 5 minutes earlier thing about you know just to make it a little but still it's an amazing sense of Neila sometimes you're falling you're falling you're falling soin is connected to NE but what's the antidote to NE because what is r Aroma is what remains even after an entity is physically gone an example if somebody brought in a delicious roast chicken right so very nice fragrance nice aroma so even when the chicken is finished the aroma still lingers for those of you in Prior Lives who read which I never have it's too too big of a project uh I don't have the time Marcel PR remembrance of things past one of the great great novels French novels been translated English it's like over this is like a chall this is like people want to make a c so they make a seeum on this book because this book is like 3,000 pages and you can even find articles I made the I finished this book after you know 20 years or whatever it would be but the book begins the whole book begins with somebody smelling something from a bakery that reminded them of their childhood and then 3,000 pages of narrative based on that smell so this smell allows a person to relive and recapture that which they experienced in many ways according to the makalum smell is the most purest the most spiritual of all senses that's why curus is so significant because smell was the only of adish that was notal in the of theas think about this because the Torah testifies that the fruit was beautiful in his eyes hearing the n's enticement right are words that went into the ear so there's a kilal of of um of of aim of there's a kilk of Shia touching and eating was the AA uh itself but R smell it doesn't say that there was any particular smell that attracted them so R is the one sense of man that did not have any Ura in ganeden and therefore symbolically SE is telling us that the month ofes has the smell of the Y toen even though it's obviously not a physical smell and therefore yes this is the month of but at the same time we can salvage it through the r to try to remember try to remember what things were like in fact it's interesting that they give a marshall about yum Kipper this way that yam Kipper begins with the refrain of or zarua life I'm sorry not a light light is planted for the sadic so yam Kipper is called a day of light so the mush they give is the following the whole year we're kind of on automatic pilot so we're blind we're not really seeing things one day a year God gives us a vision now imagine if a person were blind and Hashem gave him his eyesight for 24 hours does say 26 hours and after that he's going to be blind again but how he would try to soak up every color every Nuance every Vision so he could keep it in his mind to sustain him in his blindness so I know I'm mixing my metaphors and one described so to speak as R but it's also described as the memory of sight that you were given on yum I realize I'm mixing two things but both of them are true true ways of describing this okay so this is the passage of this is the passage of safer safer that even though this is the month of NE but we Salvage it by connecting the the with the to remember those y and have that R Elevate us as I say in many many ways I think it is true that kin is the true R of the year becausein is when life starts in its ordinary way the only thing to keep in mind is that even in Mar we still have the of the holiest day of the year and that is shabas kodes you know people often debate which is the holiest day of the year so many people will say yum Kipper is the holiest day of the year but in truth uh one could actually prove that the Holiness of chabas is even greater than the Holiness of yum Kipper now it's true yum Kipper has a singularity yum Kipper does have a uniqueness that no other day has that's for sure the idea of forgiveness of sin that that is indeed a unique feature of yum kber that does not apply to any other day but in terms of abstract Holiness chabas is even higher than yum and I'll bring you two proofs to that idea number one the number of alas to the Torah because the way works on chabas we have seven Alias plus ma yamer is six Y is five Andes is four and a regular Monday and Thursday is three So based on the hierarchy of Alias that correlate to Holiness shabas is higher than Yumer and even in terms of punishment in the time of the B mikash if one desecrated the M of shabus and they were given requisite warning they could be executed by a Baston if on the other hand one violated the umer restrictions there is KES there is death in the hands of heaven but that's considered less than the Misa of Bon so shabas is Holy so so it's interesting is that even in we actually have the holiest day of chabas maybe I'll I'll say for another time uh talking about the idea of chabas and the like which of course was in last week's para uh there is of course the famous statement of someone who probably didn't keep shabus but he made the statement was a famous famous uh Jewish Zionist philosopher and ideologue he actually disagreed with the reheal on a lot of issues his name was Asher Ginsburg uh not an orthodox person again I don't want to say he didn't keep shabus at Oba but his famous statement is maybe it applies to his own situation more than the Jews have kept the chabas the shabas has kept the juice meaning to say it's not only what we do for shabas it's what right then what do we say the famous Z of the Evan Ezra when I keep the Shabbat God will keep God will keep me God will protect me that's exactly uh the point here so we have to keep in mind that even though is we were given the gift of shabas Kesh even in the month of of so just want to end with like two just concluding stories kind of it's almost like I'm speaking at the conclusion of T but no this is the first time I've been talking to you since the so I think it's it's worthwhile to kind of have our own post and uh that is you know we have two great Honors that we give on t uh the one that is given Theus of finishing the Torah is called thean Torah he gets the Aliyah that finishes the Torah and then we have an honor for the person who Begins the new new cycle that's called kasan bit and uh which is considered to be the greater honor so to speak so in the lisher world in the nonic world kasan Tor is considered to be the greater honor so Kor you'll typically give to the Riva and K braus will be auctioned off and even when Kar is auctioned off it'll often be who will be the one that will honor the RO the Rosa now it's interesting among it's the other way around among Braes is a bigger honor so for examplei and his predecessors would usually get Braes okay that's an interesting thought but let's be lit here for a moment because I want to tell you a a nice story uh and that is let's if we assume is a bigger cover so here's the story uh there were a bunch of Yeshiva students who were not rejoicing on Sim Torah with the Torah so their rebi asked them why don't you dance why don't you rejoice so the boys gave a very honest answer the boys said you know we feel guilty we don't feel worthy because we don't learn that much during the year so what gives us the right you know we don't spend our time with the torus all of a sudden we sing and dance and go around he says we don't deserve it you know we we didn't earn the ability to dance and rejoice with the Torah so the rebi said you're making a very big mistake we have onim Torah Torah and we have now Torah we honor the most accomplished bra we give to to anybody who who pays the money why is that so so he says Torah is a celebration of what was accomplished you finish the Torah it's a celebration of accomplishments so who do you honor you honor the person who accomplished the most now the greatest Tous is not the joy of what you accomplished it's the joy of what you can accomplish it's the joy of New Hope it's the joy of a new beginning so we can give that to anybody because everybody has the access to that new beginning so the the rashash told the boys maybe you cannot dance with the Torah as a Torah but you can dance with the Torah as a Braes because it's a new beginning everything is open I have to say this year I felt a little uncomfortable telling this story usually I'm I tell every year and I'm very comfortable because normally I Riva gets T and I get so I'm very happy to say t we give to theous we give to anybody okay so that's that fits this year unfortunately because riva's Health was not very good he was not able to join us for so I got T so I felt a little uncomfortable saying was good so I I made the point uh I'm going to tell you the story because it has a good message but do not apply it to the Contemporary situation of this year but it's a beautiful point the point is that the joy of sim Torah is not only about the past accomplishments it's about the new opportunities that the new year brings and the final story I want to share with you is actually a true story that is um in the very early years of the state of Israel late 40s early 50s so there still were a number of sh Kim these are not just non-religious these are extremely anti-religious communist you know Kim uh and one of them was located in a and aod was such an anti-religious kibuts uh they did not allow uh a synagogue there they did not allow anything there it was against the rules of the kibuts to bring in a Jewish safer or the like now it turned out that after the Holocaust after World War II um the late 40s so the father of one of the kibbutzniks came to Israel to live with his son and he had been in aitz and amazingly enough he had managed to smuggle for three years in osit a miniature safer Torah that he kept that the Germans did not find and of course if he would have been caught with it not only would they have destroyed the Torah but he would have been he would have been killed but he lovingly kept the Torah in the concentration camp and when he came to the kibuts to Israel he brought the Torah with them but the kutnik were able to do what the Germans couldn't do they discovered there was a torus scroll in the kibuts and were so incensed that They confiscated they grabbed the torus from the man who had just come back from the Concentration Camp they threw it over the fence of the kibuts and it landed in the mud and this was such a desecration that even the newspapers like miv you know secular newspapers said yeah this is a little too much you know you don't do this and the like and there were G Israel who declared fasting the Torah is desecrated in such a way you you have to fast the pich who survived the Holocaust and came to ER Israel said he felt very much like rabi AKA there's a famous story at the end of mos that RAB AKA and the were once walking by the site of the destroyed B mikdash and they saw a fox leave the kesak and all of the started crying about the desecration of the holiest place in the world and rabaka was laughing and they asked rabaka why are you laughing and he said well why are you crying and they said we're crying because such a Holiness has been desecrated by animals as it says in Al the Mount of Zion is desolate foxes are crawling through it we see it and reab AA said I'm laughing and again he showed the idea that there's a linkage between the tragedies and the redemptions meaning to say God told us there would be many tragedies of Corbin and gas and God promised us many redemptions until I saw that the tragedies were literal I wasn't sure if the redemptions were literal but now that I see the tragedies actually happened I now know the redemptions are going to happen as well and they said to AKA Ru you have comforted USU beautiful beautiful Gar so I feel like Raba here I saw this a awful desecration but it also gives me a certain confidence he says why were they so adamant that they had to throw the Torah over the fence I mean after a while if they don't believe in it it's a mugas of an old man if an old man had Chinese hieroglyphics or or whatever let the guy keep what he keeps what are they worried about says the punov because they knew that if the Torah would be in their Kuts even one night something would change in a perverse way they recognized the transformative power of the Torah they rejected it they rebelled against it but they recognized it they didn't just think it was a zero so says the pun of if they recognize the power of the Torah there will come a time in which it will change them in a positive way and he said he predicted that in within 50 years there would be a Col in so if you go 50 years after the event now is not May it's not har even you know it's largely not not religious but there is a besset in there are daily Min and there's a part-time K which come in and they study they learn Torah and they give classes to the community and everything that the pup said happened this is an illustration of the G the wisdom of a wise Sage can even be greater than than prophecy and this was the power of the Torah that's why sometimes they point out myel points out that sometimes hostility is more positive than indifference if somebody is hostile about Judaism that's actually a sign that it's speaking to them in some way they're not comfortable with where it's taking them but it's telling them something indifference very very difficult indifference means I just don't care anymore you know it does makes no makes no difference to me I think this is what um Eli wiisel says generally says the opposite of love is not hate the opposite of Love is indifference love and hate in a sense are connected to each other you have an effect on me you mean something to me you make a difference in my life positive or negative love and hate kind of exist in a certain Continuum indifference means you mean nothing to me there therefore that's what they say in marriage in marriage the great great uh danger in the in the destruction of a marriage is when there is just indifference as long as there's hostility there actually is something to salvage when there's indifference you can't you can't rekindle it so again I apologize for uh uh speaking uh on a different topic tonight but again I wanted to just share with you some some thoughts as we in the ordinary phase of Life Of course uh we're still in as I said the very beginning we're still in a state of War we're still in a state of acute suffering of many many many people so perhaps it's not totally accurate to describe kesan as ordinary life but maybe that should also be our BR and our prayer Toes that may this be an ordinary month uh and all of the unique Sorrows that that Isel is facing they should become a a thing of the past so and be well [Music] see