Thanksgiving Special on the Attitude of Gratitude by Rabbi Aaron Dovid Poston

[Music] welcome home to torah very warm welcome we're here in baka in you shalom yes it's very cold outside brook hashem it's raining on and off all day and we're just so thankful which reminds me that's going to be tonight's theme right how grateful we can be now i want you to know why am i choosing this because leia named her fourth child yehuda because she was so grateful i'll just read the verse right in this week's partial v8 say in genesis chapter 29 verse 35 she conceived again and bore a son and she said this time how does she say in hebrew hashem i'm going to give thanks to the lord al kane keep these words in mind okay therefore koroshimo she called his name yehuda now she's so thankful we have a list of questions one is why did she only right now after her fourth why didn't she thank hashem after the first second okay i can't say after the third because after the third even she didn't only after she had the fourth child and she names him thankfulness that's the name that's what yoona means the root hodde mode in fact just to keep in mind what we do as jews the first thing we do we wake up in the morning how grateful i am so it's really saying animal i am grateful meaning who am i i'm yehuda i am a jew and a jew all he's doing is it's that's what the religion is called the religion of gratitude right it's unbelievable so why am i bringing this up tonight specifically happens to fall out on the non-jewish calendar a holiday called thanksgiving now i don't want to be a downer or anything and i want to read a halacha one of the commandments you can find in leviticus chapter 20 verse 23 and it says you shall not follow gentile customs oh my gosh what does this mean is is thanksgiving a gentile custom so i want to like tell you on a certain level it is on another level maybe it's not and i don't want to jump the gun but i will tell you that i actually believe that thanksgiving is a jewish holiday so jewish that we're supposed to do it and celebrate it every day all day long and that's what the show is about tonight so i chose thanksgiving to discuss these ideas not because not only because i am personally grateful and i want to feel the gratitude and i want to live to name yehuda i want to live up to the name of a jew but also because it falls out on the uh the gentile calendar so i just want to reiterate what the different post teams say it's actually a big question whether a jew can attend a thanksgiving dinner or a mother's day observance without violating this prohibition so i'll tell you what the ram bomb writes jews should be distinguished from the gentiles and distinct in his dress and his actions just as he is distinguished from them in his knowledge and his understanding so tonight we will have and show it's a different understanding of what it is to have thanksgiving the maharishi he believed that the gentile customs that are prohibited are those that have no inherent justification because they're suspected of being related to gentile religions so thank god perhaps maybe um thanksgiving as a secular holiday or a national holiday does not have maybe for them and for all the jews maybe around the world celebrating or at least in america or north america celebrating thanksgiving maybe they're not violating this uh the second category the second category of prohibited customs are those that depart a jew from humble ways the jews should conduct himself so i don't think in terms of what they do for thanksgiving is a big departure for jews because what are we we are a religion of gratitude so how can we shy away from such an idea the safer writes about this topic one who separates himself from all gentile behavior and mannerisms and applies all his thought and all his heart to god to understand his wondrous ways is rewarded in that his soul will abide with all that is good and his seed will inherit the earth okay now that's like on the negative side which is not so negative right we also have and i i have to organize myself still i came across so much that i want to share with you like i mentioned already the first thing we do now this mode that ani prayer it doesn't have god's name in it we're thanking the creator of the universe nevertheless for returning our souls with such a muna such faith in us that he's given us another chance at life and that's the first words on our mouth unbelievable before we even get out of bed right sometimes even before our eyes are open where the crust is removed the first thing we do is utter these words now it's not an ancient it's not that ancient it goes back to about 500 years here he was one of the cover of spot he's known to have authored this now i have a feeling a very strong educated feeling that the jews always said this but it was so obvious they didn't have to write it down it was only become it only became written down 500 years ago but don't worry about what i think right it's it's been a custom for at least let's just say 500 years another thing what do we do in the morning the very first words of bazooka zimmer are ho do right for ashkenazim after barak shammar the first word is hashem right praise the lord thanks and thanks to the lord right and we do also in the purkish imran there is psalm 100 which is misumura which is the song that was sung during the thanksgiving offering which we're going to talk about tonight there's actually in the temple a thanksgiving offering okay so we're going to talk about that as well now there's other idea benching go mill today since we don't have the temple and therefore we don't have the kerbano the offerings when a person experiences one of four or any one of four i'll call them we'll call them miraculous or at least something to feel grateful about has a strong sense of gratitude so one should bench gomel in public in front of 10 people and i'll go through them if someone recovered from an illness okay now it could be like not a common cold but it could be corona if they were very sick they had to go to the hospital okay hospitalization that's how we realize how far or visiting a doctor perhaps and if you were freed from jail if you crossed a sea or if you crossed a desert then you would bring a corbin to the bait to mcdosh you would bring an offering to the bay to mikdash this corbin i want to talk about the corbin a little bit it was a lot you had a cow or an eggo but listen it's at least a year old right it's eight days you had to bring i think 30 days actually okay so you had to bring this cow and you had to bring 40 loaves of bread i can even tell you it's unbelievable how much bread it's 86 well actually there's a mock locus anywhere between 50 to 86 liters of flour and you had it eaten in the same day i should say the same day and the following night meaning before the morning so you basically had a certain 12 hours whatever it was you brought it in the midday and you had to finish it before the dawn no this is do we're talking about a toda offering yeah but you didn't have to eat that much for a hat we're talking about a cow here and 40 loaves of bread 40 loaves so what was the goal the goal was to bring so many friends share this meal with so many people because you had to eat it in a certain amount of time and you would sit around everyone would be so grateful to come and participate and you would tell over your stories you know it sounds a little bit like uh sharing the gospel you know sharing the happiness you know you're so happy that this miracle where one of these things happened to you that you want to share your joy you want to share your joy physically with people and that physical joy hopefully would extend into a real spiritual uplift for everybody participating okay so you had meat and you had wine and you had a lot of bread okay so that's like an unbelievable thing it's really something and the song the song of right miz mor la soda if you look at it psalm 100 it's not on any of your sources yet we didn't get to it yet a song for a thanksgiving offering miss moore le soda shout to the lord all the earth hariul hashem kalaharis serve the lord with joy eve du s hashem come before him with praise know that the lord is god the hashem who elo king who osanu amo he made us and we are his people the flock of his pasture of its own marito come into his gates with thanksgiving and his courtyards with praise give thanks to him and bless his name for the lord is good he told hashem his kindness is forever until generation after generation is his faith the odor of adore so that is what is said at the at the time of the corbin is offered okay so i basically discussed these ideas of what does it mean now why am i bringing this all up can you understand we said over and over again what the word for praise is for giving thanks and gratitude it's odette we saw odette in the passage in the verse in 2935 and she called him yehuda the word is hodu it's unbelievable now i don't know if i put it here and it's number 13. there's a website called balashong you heard of it yeah so uh it's b-a-l-o-s-h-o-n and you put in the word hodu and this is what you come out with that the hebrew word hodu which we already know is the praise means well india yes it does mean india that's already in the bible in the scripture right here it's not like a new name right right in the story of esther in the miguel tester we know hodu is india when the earlier you know i know there's a big discrepancy how we should look at columbus day so don't get uh don't get so awoke right now okay we're just talking history here when they wanted to discover the new world they didn't think they were discovering the new world they thought they were going to discover a shortcut to india and that's why many of the right we have the east indies the west indies you have the right the um the caribbean islands many of them are from you know columbus's discoveries and um i don't care what you think about him right now we're not we're talking about the fact that he thought he was finding a shortcut to india and what did they discover there besides peanuts and tomatoes they discovered a bird a bird that didn't have in europe called the turkey you know what the turkey is called hodu so not only did these discover or try to discover hodo through a shortcut to india and they even called it even the american indians are called indians they're not indians well my wife's an indian so you have to say which indian is it the indian with the dot or the one with the feather right so the one they're called indigenous people i don't know why i don't know the etymology of indigenous but it's worth looking into perhaps so here just to know that um the hebrew word for turkey is hodu as well as the biblical word for india um an interesting coincidence they write in the word in this uh balashon is that we eat turkey on thanksgiving a common biblical hebrew term for giving thanks it means giving thanks so they interesting the story is that these pioneers these colonists or whoever they were sat down with the indians eating turkey till this very day it's not a coincidence in fact it should it should send shivers up everyone's spine correct okay so that's another reason that motivated me to speak about this again we um the the phrase hodo appears so often through tehillah right king david was so grateful and how we start our day already mentioned okay i want to start with the first rashi on that verse 29 35 what did she say she said this time i thank the lord therefore she made him yehuda rashi says this time i will thank since i have taken more than my share consequently i must offer up thanks this is giving us insight into why one should feel grateful you understand what i'm trying to say if you work 40 hours a week and your uh your employee her gives you a check i happen to feel very grateful i would say thank you i still have a job you know not not everyone has a job and if i had a job that i really liked then i'm even more grateful right and if it gives me my money at the end of the week not everyone you know sometimes businesses go under but in general when people get what's coming to them they're not as grateful as when they get a bonus right if you opened up your check your weekly check and you looked inside there was a bunch of greenbacks there was a lot of other um what you call dollar bills right then of course you would have an extra sense of gratitude so i'm going to go through a midrash just to get an idea a flavor it's actually number two on the sour sheet and it's in genesis 71 um it's in the medrash rabbah on genesis i in aleph a paragraph four so we have rebbe barachi in the name rebbe levy and there was a cohen that went down to the granary okay a cohen goes down to the granary and who's there somebody a nice guy i guess he's rich anyway a rich farmer gives this colane do you have any a core a quart is like 4 300 egg volumes worth of seed or grain can you imagine unbelievable gift and the cohen doesn't say thank you he just gave him a gift he doesn't say thank you and then somebody else gives to the coin i should say when that person gave it was maser now this is a little bit crazy because we're talking about this difference between a cohen and levy and what they get but this during the second temple period and this is something i didn't know during the second temple period ezra made a decree what was his decree because many of the levine did not come up so he made the transfer of the types of maser you know there's truman there's mice and there's my sureshin and there's different tithing that he said it all goes to the khaneen okay so that's why this madrish is speaking about this type of masair that went to the cohen the cohen we'll talk about in a second why he didn't say thank you but in the meantime someone gave hulen meaning it was already mass air where it didn't have the obligation to be masair that's what i think it is it was before it was brought into the house you only have to tithe once you bring it into the house and there's the granary so either way it was hulen and it was not necessary part of the gifts that were going to the cohen and it was how much a handful a comets a comet's like a few ounces and the cohen was so grateful and he stacked him so the guy the first guy says i don't understand i don't understand i gave you buckets buckets maybe truckload and you didn't say thank you but over here this guy gave you a little handful and he said thank you so the cohen responds because you gave me what's mine you gave to me what's coming to me and this guy gave what was his belong to him didn't belong to me and that's why i said thank you and so the measure says this is comparable to what the matriarchs did what happened so we're talking about leia okay leia and rachel they both had ruach hakodesh and i want to speak about this a little bit they had prophecy what was the prophecy at least for them at this point in this moment that there would be four wives altogether they had two handmaids that they didn't hand over yet to their husbands they only gave them when they couldn't bear any more children but they knew there was going to be four mothers and they made a calculation they also knew that what there was going to be 12 tribes so they made a calculation it must be that each one of the four mothers gonna have three children now that was a mistake because that wasn't true right not all of them had we see here already like at four right not three but thinking i mean that was okay in other words even though she had ruach the only spirit came upon her and she knew there was gonna be 12 tribes and there were four mothers it was nice of her to think of others and perhaps that's how it would come out that each one each mother would have three children and that's what she thought so when she gave birth to her fourth son this is what she declared this time let me be great let me gratefully praise hashem that is the amazing thing so i just want to mention what it says in the note number 50 when lay gave birth her first son she extended her gratitude to god for the extra measure she received over the share that was coming to her just like the cohen in the above analogy and that's according to rashid also just to keep in mind the name actually is the name of god you'd in a hey and above and hey with a dalid what does dollar always represent it always seems to represent all of hazel this world the four corn we so we say the four corners of the earth there are no corners because it's a round ball yeah it's somewhat round there's no corners but that's how we say north east southwest there's four directions right there's four dimensions okay this world you have the four elements you have the four kingdoms that we are subjugated in allah in this world so you have what basically what is yehudah and we're going to explain yehuda is the paradigm example of a jew when leia named him this is what our religion is see i don't think of judaism as a religion but now i'm starting to think differently okay judaism is much more it's a people yes we're called israel but what religion does israel follow yehuda's religion the one that leia enacted because you know what we're going to find out i suppose i began to speak about prophecy leia's prophecy was an extension of yaakov's prophecy it was an extension of hu yaakov and who's yaakov israel that's who we are she had ruacha kodesh not on her own merit only because of her husband and we're going to talk about what prophecy is in regards to women or certain women shortly but in terms of the name right yudk we are god's ambassadors we bring god down into this world that's what we do okay so keep that in mind and let's get into the prophecy a little bit okay where do i find it and number five go to number five this is in gamora mcgillin in the bavli mcgill of 14a it lists 48 male profits and seven female prophets okay you can find that toward the bottom of page two sarah miriam devorah hannah avigal judah and esther the question is where is why is sarah on the list but we don't find rachel rifka leia aren't we know they were prophets we spoke last week about rebecca about rifka being a prophet right and now we see in this parsha even leia prophetically speaking was able to give over the truth is even today let me just explain prophecy has two meanings it means the overall reaching concept called prophecy which has many levels and then within the levels prophecy is the highest of those levels believe it or not the holy spirit is the lowest of those levels of prophecy okay the ones that made the list the more actually tells us that they had something to do with the need for future generations that's why this bible that's why the 48 male prophets and the seven female prophets right are in the bible they prophesized about the future for the the nation of israel and for the world but we were taught now this is a mark locust different opinions about this how many prophets did the jewish people have i heard through mesorah we had six million prophets but the gemura says that we had twice as many profits as the amount of people left egypt so it depends how you count the people who left egypt maybe that's what it depends on so you would make the minimum one million two hundred okay i've heard that but then i just saw this morning some say that's one million two hundred men and one million two hundred women so that's already two million four hundred but we already know that if you counted all the women and the children over 60 under 16 of the elder over 60 the younger under 60 under 20 because the only people that were counted were the men between 20 and 60. so we had approximately 3 million people that left egypt and maybe that's where i heard the concept of six million because that would be twice the amount of people that left egypt so let's just say anywhere between one million two and six million prophets throughout you know the history of prophecy which a little over a thousand years from the time we left egypt until the beginning of the second temple that's when prophecy ended now prophecy never really ended prophets the highest level prophecy of people having that ended but we still have and we still have the original words of the prophet still coming true so to say prophecy ended is a it's a misunderstanding meaning it's you have to understand that we're talking about the ability of the prophets to determine the future that ended but which is a lower level which has to do with insights for personal gain not personal uh reasons but not necessarily for the whole nation uh for uh all eternity um what did i want to show you about this gemara um so i want to talk about this the stars everest he explains in number seven that the remaining women the other women meaning who not not sarah we're talking about uh rebecca rachel and leia they gain their level of prophecy due to the merit of their husbands so let's talk about sarah sarah is an exception believe it or not sarah has another name her name is yiska go to genesis 29 31 it says his son who else did he take with him so he took lot he so not only did he take abram he took lot lot was the son of quran and and that makes lot tarak's grandson and who else he took sarah her name was sarai at the time his daughter-in-law the wife of avraham his son the truth be told her she had another name her name was yiska look at genesis 11 29 in others we're going back in time we were just reading 2931 now we're going back to 1129 that avraham and nacho took themselves wise so they needed to get married the name of avraham's wife was sarai and that of knocker's wife was milka the daughter of kharan then it says the father of milka and iska where did this come from iska is sarah now what does yiska mean basically means a seer s-e-e-r it's higher than than kodesh it may be lower than the highest level of prophecy it's somewhere in between but that was the name she was given at birth so her own father gave her this name look at rashi this is sarah when it talks about iska because she would see through divine inspiration she had prophecy before she got married to avraham also she was very beautiful people looked at her so it has to do with gazing and looking uh alternatively yiska also means a princess it's an express expression of princeton and also sarah just like sarah sarai sar is like a um a minister and that's what israel is by the way we are ministers we are ambassadors of god israel so sarah her name is an expression of dominion we heard dominion a lot of times in the news lately it could be that whoever runs dominion runs the world right they choose who they want to be the the next leader anyway so means authority there's no question about it so we see that sarah had prophecy so what was the swast-emis trying to say that the other women they had they had ruka kodesh but their level to great to even have a higher level than that only was because of the merit of their husbands and that's why they're not listed you have avraham yitzhak and yaakov listed amongst the 48 they're in the list of 48 but you don't need to list rifk or leia because they're included with their husbands sarah is different because she had prophecy before she even got married and later on we know that god tells avraham to listen to your wife she has she's a greater prophet than you we don't see that by any other of the mothers now talking about yaakov i mentioned yaakov that's who we are and what does he say in genesis 32 11 he had what called the right attitude the correct attitude right hannah the right attitude he says like this i have become small from all the kindnesses this is in uh number 11 on the sword sheet genesis 32 11. i am so small compared to all that you have graced me with that's how one should feel does that mean what is coming to me i deserve no whatever you're giving to me is beyond that's also why in prayer we should never pray for what we deserve because if we got what we deserved boy why why i don't even have any words to describe it you don't want what you deserve okay the moshe prayed for a free gift and he taught us that's what we should pray that's how we should pray okay for grace we should for a gift but then let's go back to yaakov's own words i have become small from all the kindnesses and from all the truth you have rendered your servant all i did i when i crossed the jordan river all i had was my staff okay so now he has this big family that he divided into two camps this is on his way back to meet up with asa rashi says there i become small katonti katan my merits have diminished because of the kindness when but you realize how much god has given you from when from the moment of conception right he is taking care of that fetus and then when you're born from the moment you're born right someone's taking care of you changing your diaper giving you milk right giving you love someone's from the moment we were born how much kindness as i said really from the mode of conception but how much kindness what do we owe him can we ever pay him back does he owe us anything he certainly doesn't owe us anything and could we ever pay him back no way no how it's impossible when you really meditate and this is what yaakov this is what a jew does he meditates on the unbelievable kindness and love that hashem has given even in the times of trouble i just want to mention in the gamora sota rabiocona actually teaches this idea that anyone who marries a woman for the sake of heaven it's actually an earlier discussion about a certain woman perhaps it's miriam i don't want to go into it right now who was not so uh attractive nevertheless her husband is given such um uh credit as if he gave birth to her the truth is that if you marry a woman not for her looks i'm not saying go out marry somebody that doesn't uh make you happy but i think love is in the eyes of the beholder but don't be so concerned or overly concerned with appearances because it's a misfit to get married look for the character traits look for the chemistry and the torah scribes he described him at least in the time in this in the case with uh with miriam her husband as credit as if he gave birth to her which now we understand a little bit more that when the woman gets married this is an interesting in the maharaja which we'll read shortly before she got married she had a mission in life single women have a mission and when they get married they have an additional mission so let's look at the maharao i have to find it i think it's a number eight on the surgery i'm not going to go through the hebrew i'll just sum it up over here it says so the morales basically adding that a woman has two missions in life the first is from birth as an individual and the second is when she marries and enters a joint mission because the truth is about marriage people tell me oh my my boy my friends who were men i'm just a half a man i said no you're not you're nothing you're not even a man no no not until you get married then you're a real human being okay so too you're not a happy person sorry to say you're not so the woman though is but the man is not the woman has a mission before she gets married i'm giving it to the guys the women have power more power to the women right this is like the real feminist thing here going on but once she marries then she has two missions now she has so iska indicating her personal greatness reflects on her own mission while sarah remember how sorrow was named her name was sarai which was with the yud and what did god do he took the yud away from her split it in half and he gave a hate to the tesara and haita abraham and there you have avraham with the hay as opposed to avram and instead of sarai you had sarah so the woman is the control of the mission of marriage believe it or not for those guys who are hesitating to get married it's a real surrender okay this is what life's about surrendering to god and it's god's will you get married so in a certain sense you are surrendering to the will of your wife to a great deal so hopefully you all find righteous women that's right that will guide you on your way through life okay and i want to go now to the concept of yehuda the kingship right so i mentioned that a jew has to be grateful and that was the theme of tonight but it's more than that okay it has doctor with faith and a connection to the jewish people when yaakov laid his head down to go to sleep that night in our partial yeah by the dream of the latter it says he put stones under his head but we when he woke up the next day it was only one stone it's literally in the bible right but the message explains that each one of the stones fought with each other saying i want the righteous person to have his head on my on me on my stone on me somehow through they melded together they became one stone king david mentioned king david earlier it's amazing because he was the he a paradigm politician right he was the best right he wanted to make unity you have 12 tribes you know what each tribe actually is like a nation as a mini nation or state within right within the nation of israel they can each have a king even though we have one king overall king like the rule is on the temple mount only king david only from the seat of david only from yehuda right dave's from yuna he's allowed to sit the you know what maybe i shouldn't call him king with the word governor so you have a governor but he has the status of the king in each one of the other sections of israel geographical areas through the tribes when they come up to the temple mount they're not allowed to sit on the temple mount they have to bow down to the king of yehuda now if they have to bow down think about each person from asher from naftali from yusaka whatever tribe you're from your own king has to bow down to yudah to the tri to the king of yehudah so we're called you deem because yes it's true that we're israel in in the sense that we are the nation of israel but we are acknowledging that hopefully that we acknowledge the monarchy comes through yehuda in those i believe in the bible and i'm going to read genesis 49 verse 10 right now the scepter shall not depart from yehuda lo yasu yehudah nor the student of law from between his feet um until when until mashiach comes until shiloh comes and to him will be a gathering of peoples imagine that now i mentioned so those who are not familiar with my teachings is that there's nothing new in the next part the navi the prophets and the writings everything there is already known right the prophets come to rebuke to tell you what you already should have known okay they tell the people that are they need guidance that's what they're there to do to guide you but they're not allowed to make up any new laws it's forbidden right we already know in the torah it says if the navi comes to you and tells you something that your fathers did not know he's a false prophet okay so what does isaiah 9 6 say to him who increases the authority and for peace without end on david's throne and on his kingdom to establish it and to support it with justice and with righteousness from now and to eternity the zeal of the lord is host shall accomplish this we have other verses in jeremiah chapter check it out verses 15 through 18. i'm just going to skip down to the end i'll start in those days and in that time i will cause to grow for david a plant of righteousness and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land in those days yahuwah will be saved and your shalom will shall dwell securely and this is the name that he shall call it the lord is our righteousness so said the lord there shall not be cut off from david a man sitting on the throne of the house of israel and of the levitic priest now we're going to talk about the levites a little bit as well there shall not be cut off from me before me okay a man offering up a burnt offering a burning or burning a meal offering or performing a sacrifice for all time you can go to samuel 2 samuel chapter 7 verses 12-17 when your days are finished and shall lie with your forefathers then i will raise up your seed speaking to king david and that shall proceed from your body after you this is meshiach he has children and i will establish his kingdom and build a house and he shall build a house for my name and i will establish the throne of his kingdom forever go down a few verses and your house and your kingdom shall be confirmed forever before you your throne shall be established forever go to psalms 89 with king david himself chad chapter 89 verses 35-38 one thing i have sworn by my holiness and i will not tell david his seed will be forever and his throne is like the sun before me s-u-n before me like the moon which is established forever and it is a witness in the sky eternally true before i go deeper into some of these ideas i just want to mention to kind of seal the deal here that leia her prophecy was an extension extension of yaakov right i got that point clear right he's grateful katonti he that's his essence israel and yaakov are the same person and leia is part of this mission i discovered and i know i mentioned a few weeks ago that the 15 shir hamma alot were written right all the psalms is written by king david i shouldn't have said that what i meant to say is that he compiled all 150 chapters he was not the author of all of them like we know that we sing mismo shiliyashabas that's attributed to adam the first man and there are many others that attributed to other people through history 121 very famous i discovered this week was originally let's say authored by or said by or spoken by yaakov avinu our forefather israel and when we say like this sheer lamalos when i raise my eyes to the mountains so the understanding in the gomorrah is what is harim harim or what harimer mountains but it could mean it does mean our forefathers meaning he's talking about his own parents if you need guidance when you need help where is it going to come from the tradition and how do you read the word harim as if it says means parents the word itself but throughout the mountain is abraham isaac and jacob they're the mountains there are strongholds right our tradition comes from them was developed by them but the word hareem literally means parents remember he set out on this journey to go to lavon's house right his brother asav is furious wants to kill him ezrim hashem where does my help come from it comes from hashem the maker of heaven and earth right um he will not allow your foot to falter your guardian will not slumber god is always looking over you but here's the important point number four verse four he know you knew yeshua israel who is israel yaakov he's talking about god he is my guardian the the guardian of israel neither slumber nor sleep now we're talking about on his way when he himself has to go to sleep how did he sleep that night he did not drink five cups of coffee before he went to sleep in fact he was awake for 14 years studying in this in the in the study hall shaman aber at least average was the end right and he studied shame when he was young but certainly he studied the the study hall of ava for 14 straight years and he didn't sleep so he got a good night's sleep but how can you get a good night's sleep when you have your brother your evil brother asap chasing after you you have to have a lot of faith unbelievable and let's just read the rest by day the sun will not smite you near the moon at night the lord will guard you from all evil you will guard your soul the lord regard your going out and you're coming in from now and to eternity so these words were spoken by yaakov avenue okay i want to go into a little bit more um to why leia called yaakov i'm sorry why called yehuda why she gave praise after and only after yehuda's birth so you'll find this on page seven this is from the midrash so there is a verse in numbers chapter 17 verse 17 that says speak to the children of israel and take from them one staff for each father's house well in hebrew it's it's the mata the base of what's a mata a mata is yes the same word for staff is the same word for shay the tribe it actually means tribe take from them but we say mate what does that mean take a staff the same word for tribe it's a double expression of matamata which could so the word if you read it as matumatou it means deviate that the chosen of israel in two big sins what were they the sin of the golden calf and the sin of the spies that's true but there's another interpretation the gor the the medrush goes on to say that from all the tribes two will arise in prominence that being the the tribe of the priesthood which is lady and the tribe of kingship which is yehuda this is why she praised after yehuda is born because then she has two can you imagine even if she thought for a second that there were going to be 12 tribes and each mother was going to give off birth to three she couldn't imagine the two most prominent ones coming from her so now after ladies born okay so one maybe rachel will give birth to the other most prominent one i don't know but here after she gave birth to two out of 12 out of they're going to be the most prominent ones that was a reason for feeling she got more than her due more than her share now wherever you find a prominence regarding um for example whether it's priesthood or kingship so there's like the this measures goes through all these different examples i'll just read the examples at both in other words both kingship and priesthood are anointed with oil you don't find that anywhere else uh regarding a staff you only fight like our own right here the staff and uh david had a staff and the priest the the king has a staff uh there's a salt like covenant by kingship so too with the with uh the khanim levine there's a salt-like covenant and also the word hapam the word paam is only used by levy and by yehudah that extraordinary extraordinary word okay also the idea of bringing clothes you only have that by the priesthood that's by the cravanos who are bringing clothes in terms of the jewish people uh but also regarding the messiah there's also the idea of bringing clothes okay i'm not going through all the details uh just to turn the page there's more examples of what is the relationship when it comes to lineage we see there's a special idea of lineage when it comes to yehuda so too by the priesthood and then by the sits that sits is a um by the koenig the high priest has this um i don't know what he called a a forehead plate a plate that goes on the forehead that says kodesh right only to god so too there is it sits a similar idea when it comes to the kingship as well okay i want to skip a little bit [Music] um when it came to lazy right i mentioned early on as we read through i believe it was the verse in it was it was in jeremiah 33 right in jeremiah 33 if i'm not mistaken it's either 17 or 18 yeah 18. and the levitic besides talking about david not being cut off we mentioned the levitical priests will not be cut off as well why is this so important because the words al cain in our verse alkane is used both by levy and by yehuda but the truth is it was used another time by one of the other tribes and that was the tribe of dan so there's a lot of potential because alkane is like the word ao regarding but al is like eloy to be raised up in prominence so you have we have no separation really of church and state that's how they call it america right we are a theocracy we're supposed to be a theocracy so they work hand in hand like in america you have three uh there's like legislature and there's executive and then you have the judicial judicial well we also have judicial that would be the same heteron but we basically have two main facts two main parties let's say the executive that would be the king and then you have the uh the church they're sorry the religion the synagogue right you have the temple okay it should be anything like the church okay the slip of the time so you have arcane so what is what what is alkane exactly so there's a whole bunch of different uh understandings but let me just read what it says here that this is on page nine by the way and she again conceived and bore a son therefore she called him lady this is before you who was born that the lady's name cygnus signifies that that the descendant right in the future that the lithium are going to escort the children of israel to the father in heaven meaning to be the teachers how else are you going to get to heaven how else are you gonna understand the world you need teachers right hannah you need a teacher you need people who know that know what's going on the midges continues and speaks about lady's birth it says al king karashimo the words al-qaeda and the the it says in the medrash whenever alkane is used it's talking about an increase in population now we have a big problem because anybody knows we should all know the population of all the tribes right like the tip of our tongue i happen to just know two of them but and that's you that levy right you who'da had like 76 or 74 000 depends on the count right and lady had always around 22 000 and all the other tribes were in between so you have the most and you have the least so how does the world tell me it's the most populated so there's a few different answers first of all dan also reaches pretty high it's not as much but the alkane is also used by dead so what is about these two the most in the least so perhaps i'll go cut to the chase yes yehudah has the most and therefore the prominent but not only because of the fact that they are prominent in terms of population but because of kingship and also levy because of the quality of who they were that's what it means don't think in terms of straight numbers because it can't mean that we are if it says it always means that how can it be you have yehudah which is the most populous if you have levy which is the least populous so there's a few other ways to explain it but at least in terms of quality one idea is that levy should have been more populous in fact later they were but what happened is when you when you have a lot of responsibility in terms of the religious rights in the temple if you mess up you are like zapped right the bigger you are the more under a microscope you are and many colony many living failed and therefore they were they they died early so they never really got to repopulate however during king david's reign they increase greatly in fact i forget the exact number of watches and watches like a uh a torah newt in the temple i forget it was six or eight but imagine you're talking about leaving the egypt and there was a very small family aaron and his children and of course as time went on they increased to have by the time we get into israel right into the land of israel and the tabernacle and everything so you're having watches meaning um when i say torah nude i mean um switching the guards right every week it was a new guard otherwise you get exhausted or you get fat because you ate so much right by king david's time they increased it to 24 watches because there was an increase so you see there that there is this idea but i just want to read down below the comment here is regarding lady's name alternatively the reason it says alkane in regard to the levites is that although the levites were few in number they were significant qualitatively for moses at the sense of lady was actually considered equal to the entire nation remember he said don't kill them god wanted to wipe out the jewish people after the sin of the golden calf he said no wipe me out of your book we see that he's equal to everyone else so in terms of quality the same can be said about his brother aron we already know that he was considered moses as equal so in terms of lazy with inequality so going back and trying to sum up this idea that i kind of drifted off in terms of the jew is the religion of gratitude no question but we're also jews because we need to unify under the monarchy of yehuda and therefore we're jews just like the quakers or quakers the christians the christians the whoever whatever religion they all have a certain thing that they surround you know that they believe in we are believers right the 13th of the um this is the 12th with the one of the last two of the 13 principles of our faith is to believe in the coming of the messiah through the seed of david right of course then you have resurrection of the dead so you have this is the fundamental belief as a jew in the coming of the messiah we are the real messianics we are the real that's who we are and we shouldn't be afraid of it if you call yourself a jew it means you believe yehudah the the truth the monarchy will come through not just david but then through solomon and none of the other sons of david but specifically through some solomon and with that mizrat hashem i wish you a refusal to all those of amisha that are sick and all over the world we have some of our own students who are not feeling so well and that would be um as our dear friend in australia our our dear sister in wenatchee and we wish everyone our future layman also we are all looking forward to coming to mashiach been here mano to solve a lot of the political problems that are going in the world but that's not why we're interested in him we want him to build the base of mikdash right we want to see our own brothers gathered from the four corners of the earth and we'd love to see the name of hashem be brought into the world as the word and name yehudah truly represents and without your bachelor and happy thanksgiving every day every day is thanksgiving enjoy your turkey [Music] is