Regret vs Redemption - Ari Abramowitz: The Land of Israel Fellowship

it's not really up to us whether we touch Hearts it's up to Hashem whether he allows us to dig deep enough but I know that I am with people that love us so much that they have the patience to allow us to try every single time and it is so good to see all of your faces I'm just sitting here scrolling through your faces and it's true it feels like we haven't been together in such a long time we haven't gone without seeing each other this long since the Inception of the fellowship itself which by the way is what made this uh Fellowship Retreat that Jeremy's book about so very very beautiful but I'm going to put a bookmark in that and get to that uh very soon I think next week when I'm leading the fellowship I want to share my experience there but it was just so special and Unforgettable that that uh Fellowship day the only thing that was really missing there was each and every one of you that wasn't there and uh and I've been seeing your faces right now and hoping that the next time we can all really be together I'm seeing Tara and Nancy also who are still here in the land and please God I'll be able to see them again before they leave I'm so excited about that I'm just seeing everybody's faces it's so fun and so great um so yeah like Jeremy said I'm not going to go into the whole details why I don't know why things fell out that way that the fellowship was constantly falling on the holiday itself not the intermediate days known as hola moed in which we can use electricity and you know perform creative acts but the holidays themselves and therefore you know week after week we weren't able to meet and while it maybe it remains to be seen why Hashem had Things fall out that way I think that on some level they were intended to create a buffer a buffer in time and uh and only after this buffer are we able to come together again with new eyes and and refreshed Parts Jeremy and I've been discussing new things and new approaches and you know uh he said that the fellowship Retreat isn't like the culmination of anything I remember we were sitting around the fire together he said it feels like the beginning the beginning of something new and I really think that's that's true because um this is a new time it makes sense we're starting to Torah Anew we are different people than they were were last year and our encounter with the Torah will therefore be totally different and totally new and that's why the stages of Israel tell us that the first letter of the first word of the Torah right what's the first word Berry sheet and the first letter is BET because as you see here on on this Slide the letter bet the shape of the letter itself is closed on all three sides and only open facing forwards which is a lesson to us that our eyes should always be trained forward looking ahead all right what's passed is past we've dealt with it uh We've one way or another over the holidays particularly rosh hashan Yom Kippur and even if we didn't feel like we did it right we we need to have enough faith in Hashem to really leave it behind anyways Hashem doesn't want us carrying all all of that guilt with that he doesn't want us filled with regrets and guilt and looking at the past he wants us to be looking forwards and in our very valuable time together I really hope I don't go over uh you know when I was with you guys for the summer I had so much time with you that it's been hard for me to readjust that when Jeremy's leading to just share a little piece it's just hard for me to do that but I do I want to focus on that because I know that I um like many of you have a 10 tendency perhaps to dwell in the past sometimes particularly in what I perceive to be my shortcomings and all the time that I've wasted and all the opportunities that I've squandered and there's even a part of me that looks back at these holidays and regrets all the time that I feel like I just let slip away that I didn't use correctly to connect to Hashem in the best way I could you know for example Yom Kippur the day of atonement it was uh you know I'm not going to whitewash it it was a battle for and by the way little emuna the delicious daughter of Jeremy is sitting there and she just put a heart and she's raising her hand and look how cute she is I cannot go on talking with them when I was a little face I'm not going to say that she's my favorite gimpel but I definitely cannot say that she's not either way I felt some guilt there um that I didn't use that time to connect with Hashem for example Yom Kippur right it was it was a battle there are years I can remember that my heart was open and that the tears flowed and I felt cleansed afterwards that was not this year now don't get me wrong I Had My Moments but it was a war to achieve them there was a lot of time over suit cook that I actually spent outside the sukkah and I really went in there saying to Shayna I want to live in the circuit this year and I just felt like I should have been in it reveling in the holiday and I was dealing with groups and things and people okay and now I know I'm you gotta get Noam and emuna off the screen because I can't focus you guys are too delicious anyways I don't know if you guys felt like this too but uh you know there were dances on SIM card Torah that I missed that I sat out and there were just a lot of regrets and I'm sharing this with you because my instinct is that I'm not alone but while the details may be different this is a sentiment many of us may be feeling one way or another and with the help of raviderman and others I think one of the beautiful embedded messages in Beret sheet and the portion of Genesis is that Hashem doesn't want us getting lost in in all of that stuff right well well we may Market all of the guilt and regret and beating ourselves up as virtuous there were some somehow you know punishing ourselves for our shortcomings and that's a good thing in truth Hashem doesn't want us reveling in those you know destructive emotions as a matter of fact I'm coming to believe that most of those feelings are really from the other side so to speak that those feelings send us deeper and deeper into a spiral of sin and guilt and and darkness okay so let's look for a second at the first Cent and you know it's hard for me to even talk about this subject because as you know from that from past fellowships and just by knowing my understanding of the first sin and the Torah the eating of the fruit from the tree is so critical and Central to my understanding not only of Torah but of life itself that it really informs how I experience the world from day to day not an abstract philosophy but a day-to-day experience of it I believe we've gone uh you know deeper in the past into these details and you could go and look at past fellowships you know your members you have access to all of the past fellowships but um but for now let's just focus on the first sin in the in the very plain simple way right she ate from the tree and Adam ate as well like dealer said you know he blamed her you know everything everything changed for them at that moment most fundamentally you know it was the eyes through which they saw and experienced themselves and the world around them they just like congealed from beings of life fight into these finite beings of matter at least that's how they perceived it and God called out to Adam right where are you that's a question that we're all supposed to be asking ourselves every single day but the very first time Adam heard this question what'd he do he hid he perceived his nakedness he he felt naked now there are those who say that he felt naked of of worthiness to stand before something that he felt unworthy which is understandable right he just blatantly defied the one commandment he'd been given and he stood there naked of garments and bereft of merits to stand before Hashem and he was riddled with guilt and regrets and and what ended up happening to all that regrets it turned into blade right blaming himself perhaps they were some blaming himself but really even more so much more than blaming himself he blamed his wife she made me do it right like sahila said so such a funny way she did it she made me do it he that's what he said dashem and that despair that regret that depression that blame that is really where the darkness started coming in raviderman shared a teaching from the cutskarebi that even more than the Avera than the sin itself the evil inclination right the Satan craves all of that Despair and sadness and blame and just general darkness that comes after the Avera right after the sin that's what the Satan wants even more than this in itself that's where the Satan traps you that's the real Victory and so that is where Adam really lost his weight and if if right if he stood before Hashem naked and bereft and he owned it and he took responsibility for it our sages say he would never have been thrown out of the garden it's only when he let the shaman regret overtake him and he accusatorly pointed at his finger at his wife that he said it was her fault that's when they were thrown out of the garden and we see a similar thing with kind with cane right last year we learned about the idea that the sages teach that kind didn't mean to kill his brother you remember that beautiful teaching from Carl back when I first learned that I cried yeah because it kind hit his brother yes he hit him but no one had ever died before and he didn't mean to kill him because death didn't even exist and he sat next to his brother's body the sage would say for three days shaking him and begging him and crying and begging him please wake up brother please wake up so yeah okay so he did a mean to murder him but there's no question that he did mean to strike him that he did want to hurt him and why why did he want to hurt his brother because his sacrifice was rejected and the sacrifice the sacrifice of his brother was not and he was angry and sad and filled with regret but things didn't need to go as they did have you ever heard of the sporno this Forno is a great sage and commentator and this is the way he put it he said Hashem asks kind why he is crestfall why he is so down and dejected why his face has fallen literally why is his face falling and as Forno explains when you mess up don't feel regret and remorse about the past but rather it's fitting to try to fix fix it all for the future and this approach to dealing with our own sins and shortcomings is not relegated to the ancient past or Biblical history but we live with it on personal levels and on National levels every day to this very day and that's what I want to finish here with I want to share with you something that happened just a few days ago here on the farm now as you can imagine for the past few months it's been tourist season and we've had more groups coming in the farm than ever before and I don't ask a group who they are I don't do a background check maybe I should I just don't I don't ask whether they're Christians or Jews or right or left-wing or anything because it really doesn't matter to me in my mind the hills of Judea as far as I'm concerned these Hills were created to eliminate The Souls of all of mankind and who am I to start you know filtering people out so on Wednesday afternoon I went to the House of Prayer to meet a Bus full of Germans that were coming for a visit and when they got out of the vehicle I could tell that something was different you know I'm like an energy guy and I was greeted with this wave of hostility and resentment immediately I felt it I couldn't tell what was going on but as I you know as the question started to come I was asking them questions I came to understand that this was a group of left leaning let's put it that way German human rights activists who are on a quote fact-finding Mission and it quickly became clear exactly what facts they were looking to find and and I started off as I often do overlooking the valley of our good and orienting them historically and biblically but when I saw that I wasn't connecting and I saw their faces I asked you know I said before I go into all this are you Bible people and like a one all of them said no no we certainly are not and uh and to be honest I got really excited um I felt the challenge now I I feel like I lived for this this is an opportunity to practice what we've been talking about here on this Fellowship of replacing anger and resentment with compassion and love and blessing um I really wish I recorded it the same of the last that leftist group if you remember I just regret not recording it not allowed to regret but I do and um and there are parts of our time together when I'm telling you a few of these people started crying right something was happening but there were a few women and one that I'm thinking of in specific she was a taller lady with the shaved head and she was not having it it felt like her heart just wasn't open at least it didn't feel open to me she was the most hostile and accusatory out of everyone and at times it felt like she was really like interrogating like she was the prosecuting attorney and I was the defendant and it was not a good feeling and so I had to work on myself to release that that anger that I was feeling the irony the historical irony felt like about this German woman coming to our farm and castigating me for being a Jew that has had the nerve to live in Judea right this is Arab land and I stole it and I'm a racist and that's the way she was doing it and that and that's where all of her questions were coming from and at some point towards the end I asked if it was okay if I could ask her and really all of them a couple questions and I'm telling you I wasn't I wasn't looking to win a debate or to beat her in an argument I just found myself curious I asked her I asked all of them why why they were here not only here on the mountain in Judea but in Israel asked them why they had what seemed to me to be an obsessive compulsion with Israel and Judea and the Jewish people with all the atrocities that are happening in the world this this is where they focus their Fury and their indignation why I told them how interesting it was to me that out of all the nations of the world one could make the argument that for us here at the farm the greatest blessing of all that has originated from any of the Nations was from that's right Germany of course you all know the legends of all the holy German friends some of which were children and grandchildren of Nazis who have come here to build much of the retreat center and the pergola and the pool contributed and built so many different things they've blessed us spiritually in material and emotionally blessed us in so many ways they're Blessing Me Right Now by letting me broadcast this from the guest house that they're sleeping in tonight that's right many of them are here right now like Jeremy said uh but I also told them that the greatest curses and darkness that we faced here at the farm are also from Germany as Germany you know they're a big force behind the funding of these far-left organizations that are seeking to destroy the farm and not only the farm all Jewish life in Judea what is it about Germany I asked them the causes that Nation to be the source of of both the greatest blessings and the greatest curse and then it struck me both the blessings and the curses of Germany are coming from the same place but where Esther and the holy Germans who visit us every year and bless us in the most beautiful ways are coming from a place of love and Contrition while they're courageous enough to look their past in the eye in a real way and rather than to be defeated by it rather than to get lost in the darkness they seek to rectify it and to fix it and to elevate the darkness into light right to look their sin and and repent for their sin in the most beautiful way you can imagine but these other Germans I was sitting with it was hard to blame them I really like they didn't have the the Torah or the god of Israel Illuminating their path they didn't have the the the tools at their disposal they they had yet to meet Jews that would tell them that there's another way that they could go I one of the moments of impact I felt the strongest was when I described these other Germans and I called them holy and I felt that hit them like he's calling children and grandchildren of Nazis holy they couldn't imagine that there was another path that they could take that they they weren't destined to have The Mark of Cain emblazoned upon them for all of eternity and it struck me why were they here with me trying to paint me and all the Jews in Judea as cruel apartheid human rights violators I think it's because deep down the guilt of their sins was too much for them the guilt of the Holocaust of the unimaginable Horrors that their families and their Nation inflicted upon the Jewish people is just too much to bear so rather than face the truth and repent and fix and bring light they decided to project their own guilt onto the victims of their evil because if they painted us as the same evil villains that they know that they themselves were then they don't need to contend with the crippling guilt and regret and blame and that's been plaguing them because we're just as bad that's why despite the horrible human rights violations and mass murder going on through the world they're spending their time and money coming to Israel where the Arabs arguably live better lives than anywhere else in the Middle East they come all the way out here in order to fortify that narrative that the Jews are the new Nazis and that they have nothing to feel bad about and that they are the Righteous ones standing up against these nazi-like Jews it's such a crazy Twisted distorted leap of an argument to uh to make and so um I was just looking at them and my heart broke for them for the tragedy and the torment that they're contending with and the Darkness that they must feel projecting their guilt and their sin and the sadness and their darkness and their lives and within those two groups two groups of Germans and Jeremy I appreciate you letting me go and I'm almost done here but you know looking at those two groups of Germans we can see playing out before is the difference between the two approaches right the regret sadness guilt approach the blame approach that's been plaguing Humanity since the sin in the garden and the other approach the King David approached the Teala was talking about the ownership the responsibility and the repentance that we know will usher in the Redemption and I believe that's one of the great uh reasons that out of all the stories I share with groups at the farm the story about the Germans is the most moving it touches people in the deepest way it elicits the most tears because if the nation that perhaps is manifested the most horrific evil in the world can transform that deep Darkness to beautiful light to the greatest blessing then there's hope for the rest of us There's Hope for all of humanity There's Hope for all of mankind and so that's my blessing to all of you and to all of us that as we uh start the Torah again in Bray sheets may we have the courage and the faith to believe in the power of repentance and forgiveness and to leave behind the guilt and the regrets and and to hold hardly embrace the future with hearts filled with hope and love and conviction to really embrace our past ends and harness them and stand on them and climb upon them as inspiration to improve and to grow and to fix and to bring a light and love so strong that the Redemption will just have to come anyways thank you Jeremy thank you all again I love you guys so much stay in touch stay connected and I'm really excited to connect again next week reach out to me all the time I love hearing from you