Shnayim Yomi - Vayishlach - Rabbi David Tawil - DVAR TORAH

Shabbat shalom. I want to begin by thanking Allah Danino for this opportunity to share words of Torah with you throughout the week and for this amazing initiative of Hashem should give him much and to all of those who participated. I hope you enjoyed the words of Torah and I give you all a humble that Hashem give you strength to learn and to continue to grow. In the opening aliyah of the paras we read about how au prepared himself for the confrontation with Isav. He prepared himself in three ways. First he prepared himself with a gift that he was going to give. He prepared himself by splitting his camp to potentially have a battle with and of course he offers prayer to Hashem. In that he says the words I'm belittled. I'm humbled, YaKob says, over all of the kindness that Hashem has done for me, that you, Hashem, have performed during my time when I was away from my home in the house of Lavan, etc. Yakov is saying that he does not take for granted that he will be successful against Isaf. Hashem has helped him so much and Hashem has done so much for him, he does not wish for a supernatural miracle. He knows that that miracle could come at the expense of his merits. He's not sure if he even has enough merits. He's always questioning his level of righteousness in takes nothing for granted says a person should never stand in a dangerous place and say they're going to do a miracle for me. A they might not do a miracle for you. Who knows if you're worthy? Who knows if it's in Hashem's cards? And even if a miracle does happen, they will take away from your merits. And so Yakov teaches us here that it's not something that we relish to be in positions of life-threatening uh situations. And we don't rely on Hashem in those ways. We try to do everything that we can practically and pragmatically to avoid situations of danger and to put our towards supporting ourselves and our family. All the while recognizing that it is ultimately the outcomes that Hashem desires that are going to eventually happen. So we don't look for miracles and we don't desire miracles. And when they do happen, we of course give gratitude to Hashem, but we also wonder what response do I have to have? How do I build up my merits? There's that talks about an individual whose wife tragically passed away when giving birth to a child and he was poor. He didn't have anything to feed the child. And the says, Hashem made a miracle and he was able to nurse the child. One Amor says, "Wow, what an unbelievable guy. What a sadik that Hashem would make such a miracle for him." The other Amur says, "How lowly is this person that Hashem would not help him through natural means and instead needed a fleshy big miracle for him to be able to support his child." The fleshy big miraculous things, they're not always what they cracked out to be. They're not always the most thing that we want. They end up depleting our bank accounts of and it's not something that is our goal is to realize Hashem the says when we sayal every single day the person is blaspheming God. Why? Because halal is about miracles and those are important at specific times throughout the year holidays great that Hashem did for our people. But every day we want to see Hashem every day in the humble modest things that happen around us. I like to think about learning Torah somewhat in this way as well. A lot of times people like to give a lot of respect to the one who finishes shas and does and does all of these grand projects and then it's the projects like that get put aside and forgotten about. They don't have the big fanfare that everyone else has. But you know what? It's like you see Hashem and his greatness in the smallest of things. The things that people tend to cast aside, those are the places where Hashem has the where you have the greatest growth with I remember my days in I used to do as a every single day while other people were off doing and other big projects. And no disrespect to them, but they would often make fun of me. I would often get uh teased by others. Wow, you're just reading, you're just looking at this and that. Why don't you do some real learning? And at the very end of the year, I knew the I knew by heart. I knew and I had a tremendous amount of that many of them did not have. And so there's a reason why because when people do the less glamorous, less glorified things, they end up getting tremendous reward from you should have, you should have strength and encouragement to keep on this to keep on this to see Hashem in every single thing that you do and have tremendous and tremendous in all of your learning.