The Gift of Discomfort - Ari Abramowitz: The Land of Israel Fellowship

shalom my friends shalom shalom can you hear me yes great great thank you jeremy good to see you good to see all of you as always i'm looking through the faces and looking at the chats and it's i'm just as excited as jeremy it puts me in the best place to see all of you and to be together and it's just good to be together again and thank you before i start off for sharing with me throughout the week um i was happy to hear that you all felt as blessed about our prayer session last week as i did and i encourage you to keep the prayers coming keep them coming send them to me either by email or whatsapp i forward them all immediately to the group i have with jeremy just me and jeremy just the two of us so he's able to pray immediately right then and so not only will i continue to pray for you right there on the spot but god willing we will pray together again in our next prayer session next week at the end of fellowship i've heard some of your ideas about how to move around with this prayer session and make it even better and i'm excited to implement that i don't know if we'll do it this coming week or the time afterwards but anyways i'm excited about that and i feel like it's a holy and blessed undertaking um so as you will hear from jeremy hashem has been shaking up our mountain out here on the judean frontier you'll hear what about one of the big great developments from jeremy i don't want to ruin it for him although i did have an evil inclination to do so but i'm not going to do it but i wanted to share with you about a yeshiva that came out to the farm this past wednesday and this was the second year that this yeshiva came out to the farm and and their rabbi told me that after their trip here that their the students were so profoundly impacted by their time at the farm that there was nothing like it he told me that three of them canceled their trips back to america and signed up to get drafted in the israeli army and make their lives here in israel um you know i've heard this before i've experienced it before more times than i can tell you and i have to say every time i hear even one i really have a voice in my head that's like i can die now that type of impact on the jewish people on the world even just one is enough for me and i know jeremy feels the same we've had the experiences together and it's so fulfilling and um so they said that they wanted to stay here these students and it was their time at the farm they told them directly that's why they decided to make that move and you know jeremy and i have been on our mission together to spread the truth of israel with the world meaning the meaning of israel the purpose the joy the vitality of life in israel we've been on this mission now for nearly 20 years however crazy that is jeremy it's been nearly 20 years i never thought i'd be a guy that could even say that and listen there's nowhere we wouldn't go there's no one we wouldn't speak to hot hotel rooms in the 15th floor of the king's hotel wherever it was we went there we would do it there's nowhere we wouldn't go and i really feel in retrospect that we were truly faithful to our mission even if it didn't often feel like we knew where it was all going and i cannot say that about many other parts of my life that i've been really faithful and true in every single way i think jeremy possibly can but not this guy but anyways i try i'm not trying to knock myself i'm just saying that that stood out it was like a a religious conviction like i've told you when i'm called and they say there's nine guys that are praying and they need a tenth literally it doesn't matter what i'm doing i'm going to go there and to do that anyways i feel like when hashem sent us out to this mountain he was like he i felt like he was saying okay you two you've proven your dedication and your loyalty and now i'm gonna switch out your slingshot for a nuclear weapon a nuclear weapon of holiness that is the the impact of our message through the vessel of this holy mountain that i'm sitting in right now and thank you hashem that the internet is strong enough you can apparently all hear me the impact through the vessel of this mountain is so powerful that it's difficult to describe in words and that's why often i feel like i shouldn't even try you just have to experience it for yourself so this yeshiva of american students were spending their gap year in israel the gap years of the year between high school ending and college beginning and and they came out to the farm this past wednesday and as with so many of the groups as the bus was pulling up i whisper the prayer adonis hashem please open my lips and allow my mouth to express your praises and then we begin our journey together and i just let the words flow and you know sometimes some of the words are the same as they are on other tours as you can imagine when you're giving a tour but it feels new each time and i express them with a new zeal each time because even if some of the words are the same they're being expressed expressed to completely different people at a different time in a different situation and makes it a whole different experience anyways back to this past wednesday i saw in the eyes of these students when they were out here that they were just they were like alive they were lit up and i saw maybe one or two of these smartphones come out which is pretty rare that's exceptional you know how it is with people not only adults but kids that are raised with these smartphones there's one moment of downtime one moment of their mind wandering of being bored and they've got it right in front of them anyways we we went to the overlook to see the caves where david hid from saul and where he composed the psalms that's we saw the vineyards upon which almost prophesized we went to the house of prayer and we prayed and we talked to hashem and we went to the oasis ecological pool where i taught them about how this unique and unparalleled manifestation of the words of isaiah were coming to life right here in our pool as opposed to anywhere else in israel it's the greatest manifestation of this prophecy if you don't know what i'm talking about you're a new member to the fellowship we'll i'm sure we'll share it again soon if not when you come here but anyways we sat down before their final experiential class in heed bodhidut um you know haiti voted to just had to talk to hashem and i opened up with them and i told them my honest thoughts about the direction america is heading in now from the deepest place that i feel strongly that there's no future for jews in america a lot of my friends even jeremy sometimes says i should really try to tone it back and get it done and i understand where you're coming from but i you know because it's not i'm not just talking about the rampant assimilation of how american jews are losing their children in droves to the toxic poison being taught on college campuses that they're paying for but how i really believe that in the years to come american jews will be increasingly at risk physically i mean their physical safety that america is clearly an empire in decline and when things go bad for a country as a whole they go twice as bad for the jews now i'm not i'm i'm always conflicted about whether to go there because on some level i feel like it's beneath the dignity of the holy land for people to run here out of fear but rather they should run here out of love and desire but rarely can i overcome the impulse to also at the very end at least in some way share about this the warning because in my mind it's just so real and so impending that i wouldn't be able to forgive myself if i didn't ultimately i concluded my plea by referencing one of the last verses in this week's torah portion in which moshe rabinu moses he's detailing the journey that led the nation of israel to this moment and he details their very first battle we've talked about this before who did they fight in their very first battle they fought against the people of khashbon which means in hebrew calculations calculations that was the name of the nation the king of and our sages say that the lesson here is that when it comes to entering the land of israel when it comes to meriting to live in the land the first thing you need to conquer is calculations because i you know i've been told that when it comes to moving to israel versus staying in the comfortable affluent flush pots of america if you start making the pros and the cons list the battle is already over you need to defeat the calculations you need to say i'm doing this because it's right and because it's true and because god is with me right like joshua said to caleb they didn't like joshua and caleb said to the nation right they didn't start by addressing all of the points that the other spies made and refuting them and debating them they simply said we can do it their bread and our heads we can do it because we can do it and that's it now the reason i say i've been told it's a losing battle is because when i make the pros and the cons list it still comes out far in favor of israel but i think maybe i'm a little bit off the deep end and when you're seeing things from the perspective of the exile your comforts on your career your family your life you know it's just not an easy move so i told these young yeshiva students that they are at a fork in the road on their journeys and now this is the time to do it this is the time to pull the trigger that their grandchildren would look back at their family tree and point to them and say this person right here my great great grandfather jonathan rosenberg or whatever your name is that is where the exile ended and they were the ones that made the courageous move and planted my family's roots in the holy land but then an interesting thing happened one of the rabbis that were on this tour that was lit up i mean he's a beloved friend of mine who i both like and respect he came over to me he said he thinks that i may have been mistaken though while he agrees with it i said in principle that in reality it may have been misleading the many people do take the plunge and make aliyah and it isn't a flaming success that they struggle seriously like seriously struggle they struggle with the language and the culture even just putting food on the table that i'm making it seem too rosy and too easy i don't know if you can hear my dog he's going nuts outside right now you have to forgive me but that's the hashtag farmlife security measures but anyways he said i was i was making things too easy so i was reflecting on those words over shabbat and i really thought about it particularly when reading the torah portion and it's interesting because rabbi sachs points out that the blessings and the curses in this week's torah portion are repeated twice once in the portion of bakuko tai in in the book of vayikra in leviticus and once in this week's torah portion of dvarim in deuteronomy and while they're similar the reason given for the curses is very different in leviticus god says the curses will transpire if the nation rejects his decree and abhors his laws meaning that they actively rebel against him in deuteronomy it says that the curses will happen because you do not serve the lord your god with joy and gladness in the midst of all of your abundance so those are two different things rebellion and the other one is you didn't serve god with joy with joy and gladness in the midst of the abundance so rabbi sachs points out that the greatest challenge we have is success is comfort is abundance and that when i realize and that's when i realized that that one of the great flaws in the faith of many people out there is the following because i'll tell you my friend wasn't the first one that said this point to me i've heard it many times and so where's the flaw i think that many of these american jews i meet religious god-fearing jews i always wonder why they don't make aliyah and it's a central directive in the torah and it's so foundational of what it is to be a jew and we've been praying for for thousands of years and now we can do it and they're not doing it and i think that at least one perspective is that they do believe in god but they don't necessarily believe that god is good they think that they will make aliyah and they'll suffer that it may be painful and that would and that would be a bad thing and it's true many people make aliyah and they suffer real suffering finances family culture there are endless potential downfalls but if you truly believe in hashem and and you believe hashem is good well then that suffering isn't a bad thing it's a good thing we may not be able to understand it right now at this moment but the suffering is a good thing as a matter of fact the sages tell us that there are three things you acquire through suffering and one of them is the land of israel that you're actually acquiring your portion of the land through suffering but our torah portion this week takes it even further it tells us that one of the greatest causes of spiritual downfall one of the greatest barriers between us and hashem is comfort from the comforts of the exile rabbi sachs pointed out that the greatest place for downfall isn't challenges or pain or difficulty or adversity it's affluence it's decadence and it's comfort all right my friends i'm going too far here i'm going too long and i don't know if you can hear me over my dog going nuts right now but when i say this message i'm speaking more to myself than i am to you when i say that we're not in this world to be comfortable we're put in this world to transcend our comfort zones to voluntarily and willingly do god's will to come close to him to try to serve him hashem please bless all of us my friends here me my family all of us in this fellowship during these valuable days leading up to rosh hashanah to find the comforts which are preventing us from truly serving you with our whole hearts we should merit the strength to voluntarily sacrifice these comforts on the altar of our own hearts and our own lives and by doing so may we merit to bring the blessings of this torah portion to rain down on ourselves on our families on israel and on the entire world i love you all so much many blessings to all of you from our mountaintop here in judea shalom shalom this highlight was taken from the land of israel fellowship every week hundreds of families from literally around the world come together on our live zoom sessions to strengthen each other to inspire each other and to learn torah from the land of israel in which we connect the dots between the bible the hebrew language and the confusing events of our times go to www.thelandofisral.com backslash fellowship or click on the link below to join thank you you