Shoftim & Preparing Our Vessels for Elul - Tehila Gimpel: The Land of Israel Fellowship

hey guys boy is it good to be home back in israel back on the farm um our trip was wonderful and an unforgettable experience we went from city to city and we were just so humbled and so inspired by the wonderful people that we got to meet along the way i'm not going to mention all your names i'm not going to embarrass anyone but you know who you are everywhere we went people just went to these tremendous lengths to show us so much hospitality almost everywhere we went and this was so totally unexpected our beloved hosts and friends some that we know and suddenly we were meeting for the first time they made bags of gifts for our kids with each kid's name and like giving thought to what would be right for each age and set up kosher food for us and snacks and fruit and fries the thought of even just the tiniest details down to the packages of wipes to clean the kids on the long drives and bomba so they would have israeli food to eat people we didn't even know just opened their homes to us and having five kids in your house is not a small deal so we could have never even imagined or envisioned the kindness and the generosity that we encountered and most meaningful to me was just getting to meet so many of you in person and hearing how the fellowship is impacting your lives positively people were just so amazing taking the time to show me deep personal work that they're doing and you know that was inspired by things we've discussed here together um it was just really meaningful for jeremy and me but not only for us it was also so great for our children to meet other children that study on the fellowship and it gave them perspective like you know what's often doing on the computer all the time with all those books and all those notebooks like oh this is what we you know what he's doing it all kind of came together so huge thank you to all of those of you who drove long distances everyone who hosted us everyone who spent time talking with us everyone who gave us thoughtful and meaningful gifts and care packages along the way and thank you to all the newcomers who signed up after uh meeting us welcome and i also apologize i wasn't able to accompany jeremy to every event i know that he did a great job without me he covered it but i would have loved to be at every event and um but sometimes the kids were just too exhausted we pretty much put them in a blender for a month just taking them from city to city almost every day a different city they were champs but sometimes they just needed a little tlc and quiet so hopefully next time we'll pace ourselves when we set up our itinerary a little more and we could be a little bit uh more relaxed and managed to make it to you know all of us to all of the events anyway we couldn't be more grateful and honored that you guys chose to give time to studying with us in person and of course every week um and here's a little announcement uh this one is for the ladies sorry gentlemen this idea started to uh come together with some of the women i met in colorado and as i floated it to some of you in different cities i got really enthusiastic feedback so this one thing that kept coming up when talking to the ladies is that there's kind of a thirst for like a space to have dialogue and raise questions that particularly relate to women in torah life so sorry to leave you out fellas but i'm thinking about doing uh some kind of interactive session like maybe a q a type format um and i talked about it with shayna she said she'd love to join me so my idea is that if you guys are interested in this i think it'll be really fun maybe email me questions or subjects that you want to talk about um i don't wanna uh you know be like on the spot because i might need to research things i'm sure you guys are gonna have really good questions and you guys probably know by now i'm a researcher and so then um i'll try to maybe choose some questions that seem to come up you know for a lot of you and if there are just a few questions we could try to cram everything into one session if there are a lot of questions maybe we can divide it up into a few sessions anyway uh once we're properly prepared we'll of course send out an email with a time and a place and make a recording for those of you guys who can't make it in person um might have to be after the high holidays because we got a lot going on here preparing for the festivals but uh i'll have to see how fast i can uh crank this out and put it together anyway so this is a great opportunity to bring up things that we can talk about and put on your thinking hacks about things that you want to raise in kind of a more personal smaller feminine setting so that's the exciting news and now just a little thought about this week's torah portion an interesting thing that came up for me when i was reading the torah portion this week was that the portion deals a lot with what will happen when we don't know what to do like imagine israel is about to go into the land and they're like what are we going to do without moshe that's kind of how we feel in our lives like we don't really have a moshe right what are we going to do when we don't know right so you know how we're going to solve disputes how are we going to know what the torah wants from us how do we know what hashem wants from us so in this week's portion hashem sets up different institutions and leaders that can help us so there are judges and priests and prophets and kings and for different situations we're commanded to go seek the guidance sometimes of the priests sometimes the judges sometimes are the prophets and an interesting side point is that to just to notice that the torah doesn't tell us to seek advice from the king and listen to him in the book of samuel later samuel will tell us that we have all these things we're going to have to do for the king but here in the torah portion there are only commandments towards the king not towards us listening to the king um so like the torah has this kind of love hate relationship with kings like on the one hand david was the greatest king solomon was our glory days but on the other hand the torah is kind of concerned and suspicious of political leaders i think in many ways as my pal isaiah from orlando pointed out to me that that suspicion may have inspired the founding fathers of the united states and other democracies in their suspicion towards government and limiting government power and checks and balances because they know you know there's this possible corruption so i think the torah was already laying the groundwork saying hashem is telling us seek guidance from the leaders that are god-fearing the priests the prophets right the the judges those who are knowledgeable in torah not political leaders who are kind of hit or miss you know they might be god fearing and they might not be god fearing uh so that's interesting to keep in mind but relating to the prophets and this is what i want to talk about in chapter 18 verse 17 the torah says a prophet from among you from your brothers like me meaning moshe says like you'll have a prophet like me the lord your god will set up for you and you shall hearken to him according to all that you asked of the lord your god in horev which is sinai on the day of the assembly saying let me not continue to hear the voice of the lord my god let me no longer see this great fire so that i will not die and the lord said to me they have done well in what they have spoken so these verses are saying that there's going to be in the future moshe's communist now i'm saying there's going to be prophets like me we know they're not really going to be like moshe but they're going to be pretty close right they'll hear hashem they'll be able to guide us and hashem is going to set up prophets for us because at mount sinai we said we don't want to hear hashem's voice we don't want to see this fire anymore moshe you come tell us the commandments and hashem says you've spoken well and i will give you prophets in future generations i'd say i never really paid attention to this verse before but this week it just kind of popped out at me and i said to myself okay well this is interesting like what is the connection what could possibly be the connection between our not wanting to hear hashem's voice at sinai and hashem promising to give us prophets in the future so the classical interpretation uh that's found in the oldest even in the oldest midrash on the book of deuteronomy and based on the verse that says that they spoke well is that it was actually a good thing and in the merit of the fact that israel was so god-fearing that they were afraid to hear hashem's voice directly and they asked for moshe to say the commandments that was a sign that they truly were in awe of hashem and so in that merit as almost like a reward they would get profits in future generations as well the mall beam another interpreter on the torah goes even further to say this was actually hashem's plan for israel to ask to hear the commandments through a conduit and not directly because in this world we're supposed to have doubt our challenge in life is to overcome doubt to overcome our evil inclination but if you woke up every day and heard god speaking to you directly it would be a lot harder to sin wouldn't it like if you didn't if you knew hashem was communicating with you all the time do you really have the possibility of doing something wrong it's like a parent if you tell your kid don't eat the cookie on the table and you're watching them watching them don't eat the cookie right it's not like so praiseworthy if they don't eat the cookie because you're staring right at them what's the question is when you walk away and they're not sure they're going to get caught maybe they'll be able to blame it on their brother then will they not eat the cookie that's the test so the mama beam says it was actually a good thing we ask not to hear hashem directly and because of that his word is always going to come through a prophet and you can always be like well maybe the prophet's not really a prophet maybe it's not really hashem's word you're constantly put to the test your faith is constantly put to the test so that's a really beautiful idea but i still felt a little twinged in my heart because i'm reading the verse and it says i'm going to send you a prophet because you asked not to hear hashem's voice like there's an element there that doesn't sound purely positive it sounds like maybe we were missing out so he did some digging and indeed the holy aurahayam rabbi hayan benatar who lived in the 1700s in morocco and israel he wrote this he said maybe just maybe israel caused themselves to not all be prophets because they didn't want to hear hashem directly at sinai therefore hashem will send his word through prophets will pass on the message this is a really surprising idea he's saying that we actually had the realistic possibility of all living as prophets if we had wanted to really hear hashem at sinai hashem would have done that but we were too afraid we weren't ready and so we missed out on something we got something amazing we have holy prophets to teach us don't get us wrong right but there's something a little more that we could have had if we had been ready but hashem said okay you're not into it i'll find a more indirect way that you guys can handle i think this is a really powerful message as we enter the month of elul not enter women we're on it well into the month available either way you interpret the verse and maybe you can really interpret it both ways combined the verse here is teaching us that we are in the driver's seat as far as how much or how little we want to hear hashem in our lives hashem doesn't muscle his way into our lives we're given the choice to build the vessel to set the tone of how intense or how distant we want the relationship to be it's really about what we ask for what are we ready to have and hashem will reveal itself to us in our lives in accordance with the level and the vessels that we set up i'll never forget that my dear friend lisa who i was lucky enough to spend time with on this trip she said to me i bet she doesn't even remember because it was years ago but she said to me that she often asks hashem hashem i want to walk on a straight path on a righteous path and if i go off the path please correct me and i remember being blown away by her courage because when you're on a path like we're humans and we like our paths we're pretty stubborn right like when i think i know what's the right thing i'm like kind of stuck on that the willingness to be corrected means willingness to have hashem in our lives not just as like oh i love hashem hashem you love me but actually showing us the right way even when it hurts even when it's not what we want and it takes tremendous courage to ask for that close and intense of a relationship with hashem and i believe that this verse is telling us that you will get what you asked for what you tell hashem you're ready for but watch out because you're really going to get it you know like they say careful what you wish for careful what you wish for because hashem will meet you there i know this is kind of like a stupid story i can't believe i'm even saying it but a couple of days ago i got this like really itchy red rash and i'm trying all my herbal potions and nothing's working so i started to dive in to pray i said hashem ah you know i just got back i'm jet lagged the kids are jet lagged just cut me some slack please please help me with my rash if you wouldn't mind healing it and i thought about what lisa and my friend lisa said and i thought is that really what i want to be praying and i said you know what hashem nix that hashem thank you for that rash i don't know why i have it but clearly i've done something wrong i'm not on the right path you're correcting me showing me i need to wake up and pay better attention so i'm going to take the responsibility to think about where i've gone wrong try to work harder get my act together and i just wanted you to know hashem i appreciate it thank you for giving me this rash and i felt like that's a whole different energy that's a whole different kind of listening a whole different relationship hashem gives us the freedom to choose what kind of relationship how much and how little we want to be in a dialogue so i think this month of elul is really about preparing our vessels for the coming year thinking towards rosh hashanah and yom kippur how am i going to set up my spiritual world how am i going to allow align myself how open do i really want to be this year and we learn from this week knowing from this week's portion that hashem will indeed adapt his level of providence and dialogue with us in our lives according to what we set up so i bless us to have a really clear and powerful month of elle in preparing ourselves for the kind of relationship that we want to have in this coming year have a great week guys