The Missing Festival Revealed: How an Ancient Code Points to Yom HaAtzmaut - Tehila Gimpel

Okay, I want to show you guys one of the most famous, important, central books of Jewish law is the Shulchan Aruch. This is the like most comprehensive compilation of Jewish law written by Rabbi Joseph Caro in the 1500s, like 1558. This is actually a picture of the first copy just so you guys can get a sense. The first copy that was printed. Now, when Rabbi Joseph Caro who who compiled all of the Jewish law into this one great book, he was a mystic and wrote mystical works about his encounters with angels and and and you just like the most deep secrets of Jewish mysticism. But, this particular book was strictly law. And he barely ever goes into anything that's like woo woo, you know, like very uh you know, like secrets of the Torah mystical. He has other books for that. But, there's this really interesting passage in the laws of Passover. Now, bear in mind, guys, I'm not going to make you read all of that. I just want you to see that it's like written in the actual original Hebrew so you believe me that what I'm going to tell you is actually written in this book. Now, bear in mind, this was written 500 years ago. Okay? Now, in order to understand what it says there, you need a little bit of background. The Hebrew letters, okay? I I stick with me. I know this seems off topic, but it's not off topic. You guys are going to understand in a second. The Hebrew letters, as you know, correspond with the numbers. So, like the first letter is one and the second letter is two. Aleph is one, bet is two, and so on and so forth. But, what people don't also know is that so so so those numbers are kind of like a secret code. Like you can find a numerical value of a word and sometimes that's really really meaningful. But, what people are less aware of is that there's another code. It's called the Atbash code. It goes all the way back to the times of the prophets. The prophets and the sages would sometimes hide messages within the Hebrew letters using this code. The idea of the code is that the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet corresponds to the last letter of the alphabet. The second letter corresponds to the second to last letter. The third letter to the third to last letter and so on and so forth. So, you can switch out a letter and have its corresponding mirror letter. Um and then that actually can have hidden messages. You could literally see this going all the way back to cryptic prophecies of the prophets just for an example. This is just not an unrelated example. In Jeremiah 25, uh the prophet is talking about this uh cup of the wine of fury that that the nations are going to drink. And they're going to drink it and they're going to reel and be like madmen because of the sword that I'm sending among them. And then in verse 26, it says, "And all the kings of the north, both near and far, one after the other, all the kingdoms of the earth around the face of the earth, and the king of Sheshach shall drink them." And you're like, "Wait a minute. I understood it up until now, but who the heck is Sheshach?" That's not even a place. And in all the translations, this is a Jewish translation, but I checked in the King James, and no one actually knows what this is. So, now you can imagine, just like people would be wise to be cautious and not like mock Donald Trump on social media, if you were a spiritual leader of a small country in Mesopotamia, you might want to be subtle when talking about the king like when naming a king of a superpower. Um but, when you look at the word uh Sheshach, and you know this code, this Atbash code where we switch the first letter for the last letter, the second letter for the second to last letter, and so on, it actually makes perfect sense because the letter shin is parallel that's the second to last letter is parallel to the second letter bet. That's like the letter B. And so, you have that twice. And the chaf is parallel to the lamed. So, that's like an L. It literally says there the king of Babel. But, you can't just go out and like start messing with the king of Babel in certain political constellations. So, it's like hidden there in the words. And there are a lot of other examples in the words of the prophets and in the Talmud where words can be hidden using this code. Now, okay, so background on the code. This was a code. It's a real thing. It was known to the prophets, known to the sages. Now, we're going to go back to our 500-year-old Shulchan Aruch in laws of in the laws of Passover. So, Rabbi Joseph Caro in the Shulchan Aruch shares this really cool code about the days of Passover. He says, "Every day of Passover corresponds to a holiday starting with the letter the like the opposite letter of the number of that day." I know that sounded like it didn't make sense, but just like think about it for a second. So, like day one would be like the first letter of the alphabet. It's parallel, according to the code, would be the last letter of the alphabet. Okay? And now, the second letter the the second day would be parallel to the letter would be like the letter bet, the second letter of the alphabet, and that would be parallel to the second to last letter. These details aren't that important to you. What's important is that this code, unbelievably, actually makes it it it show he shows in this code that each day of Passover corresponds to another holiday starting with the same letter as that letter as that day's letter in the code. Okay? So, let's just read it in in the words and it'll make more sense for you. The first day of Passover, so that would be like aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, is parallel to Tisha B'Av. Okay? Because Tisha B'Av starts with tav, the last letter of the alphabet. So, the first day would correspond to the last letter. That would be Tisha B'Av. Now, what What does that mean? He says, "And I I couldn't believe this. I actually checked this up on on my Google calendar. That means that the first day of Passover, whatever day of the week it comes out, Tisha B'Av will actually always be on that same day. So, for example, if the first day of Passover comes out on a Tuesday, every year Tisha B'Av, the ninth day of Av, is going to come out on a Tuesday. Whatever like however you cut it up, it's always going to come out on the same day. Now, the second day of Passover, that's the second letter that would be the second letter of the alphabet, corresponds to the second to last letter, which is shin. Shavuot will always fall out on the same day as the second day of Passover. Same goes for Rosh Hashanah. The R sound, the resh sound, is the third to last letter. So, the third day, whatever the third day of Passover is, if it's a Wednesday, Rosh Hashanah will come out that year on Wednesday. And he keeps going on to explain that. So, he says the fourth day corresponds to Simchat Torah, the fifth day corresponds to Yom Kippur, and the sixth day corresponds to Purim. And you can check this on your calendars. It's really really cool. The sixth the fifth, you know, the fifth day of Passover, whatever day of the week it comes out, will always be the same day that Yom Kippur is going to fall out. It's really crazy. And now, he just finishes there. Now, that's odd, isn't it? How many days are in Passover? There are seven days, of course, in Passover. But, he goes the first day, the second day, the third day, the fourth day, the fifth day, the sixth day, ends his chapter, and you're just like, "What? Wait. What? What about the seventh day?" Cuz the seventh day should correspond with the seventh from last letter, which is ayin, and there should be a holiday that comes out parallel to whatever day the seventh day comes out. Like, why would he just stop there? That's so weird, and it's bothered people literally for 500 years. For 500 years, people are like, "Ew, what about the seventh day?" And like there are only six there listed. So, 500 people 500 years, people are trying to figure this out. What should the seventh day be? Now, look at this. We have a new holiday called Independence Day. And what letter does it start with? Ayin. Atzmaut, the seventh from last letter. So, here we go. You can check your calendars. This is unbelievable. The fifth day of Iyar, Israel's Independence Day, that also starts with ayin, will always come out on the same day of the week as the seventh day of Passover. It's the reflection of the seventh day of Passover. And the reason that it wasn't included in this 500-year-old book was because he just didn't know yet. He didn't know yet. It's like this day was just planted waiting to be discovered. And this is literally and it wasn't he wrote this down 500 years ago, but this is a a mystical tradition being passed down for he's just carrying these traditions. He's just conveying them. So, that means that for hundreds and hundreds of years, we have this tradition that there's going to be this day. It's going to start with the letter ayin, just like Independence, and it is going to come out on the same day every year as the seventh day of Passover. And here we are actually living out seeing this day come to pass. And what's even cooler is that it wasn't even a Jew that decided to set Independence Day on the on this, you know, fifth day of Iyar. It was like a British bureaucrat. It was a British officer that decided that the 14th day of May was going to be the end of the British mandate, and that fell out on the fifth of Iyar. If a Jew would have set that up, you could say, "Well, maybe he read the Shulchan Aruch and he's like really clever with like calendar synchronizing, and he did it on purpose." But, this British guy didn't even know that the the Aruch had like foreseen this seventh holiday. Is that cool? Okay, so you guys are like, "Okay, one hint, one swappy letter weird thing. Okay. Now I want to show you guys something else. There's famous uh Hasidic work called Sfas Emes from the year 1887 from the Hasidic master Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib uh Alter from from uh Gur. And he writes like this. He says there are three festivals explicitly written in the written Torah. Okay, we know that, right? There's Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot. Corresponding to them, there are three festivals in the oral Torah, meaning there are three festivals that are man-made. He says these are lights that are receiving their illumination from these holidays just like the moon receives its light from the sun, the man-made holidays receive their energy from the biblical festivals. So then he goes on to say he says, "Hanukkah gets its radiance gets its radiance from Sukkot because we know that on Sukkot in the temple, there would be the water libation ceremony like like cleansing and purifying the temple. And then on on Hanukkah, the Maccabees cleansed and purified the temple. So this man-made holiday of Hanukkah gets its energy, it's like the moon reflecting the light of the sun of Sukkot. And then he says, "Purim draws its light from Shavuot because Shavuot we received the Torah. And what does it say in the end of the book of Esther? That the Jewish people voluntarily accepted upon themselves all of these laws. Cuz you know, on on Shavuot there was this grand revelation. It's like it's nice to accept the Torah when God is completely revealing himself to you. Of course, you know, like it's it's sort of a no-brainer to accept upon yourself the Torah. But on Purim, Hashem hid his face and yet still the people accepted upon themselves the yoke of heaven. And so Purim draws its light from Shavuot. And then you're like, "Okay, yeah, what's the third? What's the third?" But we know there are only two man-made man, you know, mandated uh holidays, holidays that weren't commanded by God, but they were created by people in recognition of different miracles. It's Hanukkah and Purim. What else is there?" And you're sort of on the edge of your seat. And then he says, "What about Passover?" And now imagine he's writing this in the 1800s. He goes, "We still await one more festival to come." He goes, "As it is said in Micah, as in the days when you left the land of Egypt, I will show you wonders." Meaning he says there's going to be one more holiday that's going to be a man-made holiday that's going to be drawing its light, drawing its energy from from that core power of Passover. And so said I asked, "Okay, so if this is a time when we're fighting for Israel's independence and that's like the moon reflecting the light of Passover, why are all of our special days of this miraculous return of our people to the land, why are they all concentrated in Iyar? Cuz it seems to be like there's this there's this foreshadowing in all of our mystical sources and I only brought two, but there are more about this this this redemptive strength that's going to be brought into the world in the future that's going to be reflective of the spirit of Passover. Why is this all concentrated in the month of Iyar? Now, it's really strange cuz there aren't actually any big miracles or biblical festivals in Iyar. Like if every time has its imprint, its special strength that like comes into that month, like Iyar at first look doesn't even seem that special biblically. And I'm just trying to think like, "Okay, well in the Bible, like where what how how do we understand what is this special energy of the month of Iyar?" I said, "Wait, it's not true that there's nothing in the month of Iyar. Something actually did happen in this month." And it's in Numbers chapter 9. What happens in the second year in the desert is that they're celebrating Passover. And there were men who were ritually unclean because they came in contact with a dead person and they couldn't make the Passover sacrifice on that day. So they approached Moses and Aaron on that day. And they said, "We're ritually unclean. Why should we be excluded? So as not bring the offering of the Lord at its appointed time with all the children of Israel." And Moses said to them, "Okay, good question. Wait, I will hear what the Lord instructs concerning you." He didn't know what the answer was. And then the Lord spoke to Moses saying, "Speak to the children of Israel saying, 'Any person who becomes unclean from contact with the dead or is on a distant journey, whether in future generations, he shall make a Passover sacrifice for the Lord in the second month on the 14th day in the afternoon. They shall make it and they shall eat it with unleavened cakes and bitter herbs.'" What is the second month biblically? That's Iyar. That's the month that we're in right now. So what do you have here? You have in this month people who are ritually unclean. If they were ritually unclean, they're actually just they're like free. They're not they're they're they're they're not bound to do the the the commandments of Passover. They could have just skipped all of that and said, "Okay, I'll do it next year." Hashem made the rule. He said ritually impure people can't take part in the sacrifice. It's God's will. They were sort of like exiled from the Passover sacrifice. They could say to themselves, "Okay, better luck next year. We'll just have to accept our fate." But they were like, "No. We are going to fight to be part of this redemption experience. We're not just giving that up." Well, what would happen if they didn't push back? Theoretically, if they didn't push back, this God's rules himself. If they didn't push back, there just wouldn't have been this commandment of second Passover. We don't have any hint in the Torah that like Hashem was like about to say it and they kind of cut him off at the pass. This is something that was in it Hashem gave this opportunity. He gave them the opportunity as a response to their desire, to their action that they took. If not for them, there wouldn't be a second Passover. So now think about this. The fifth day of Iyar is Independence Day. That was the first day when the Independence War broke out. We declared our independence and we were attacked by seven countries. The Six-Day War ended on the 28th day of Iyar, meaning it started on the 23rd day. When is second Passover? Second Passover is on the 14th, precisely halfway between these two days, nine days after the Independence War started and nine days before the Six-Day War started. It's as if right in like the heart in between like these two incredible miraculous days, there's this strength that was planted right in the middle of the month, right on the 14th day of the month. Like I imagined it like sending its rays out onto these days to put strength out to us. Because what is Zionism if not the light of second Passover? Because like just like the Maccabees on Hanukkah, just like the Jews in Shushan, God didn't hand a miracle on a silver platter. It wasn't the splitting of the sea or the revelation at Sinai. We had to fight. And that's what Hashem demands of us as he waits for us to wake ourselves up. And so just like I realized this morning when I was trying to think of what we would talk about, that no one is going to inspire me. I have to say to Hashem, "I want to feel your closeness. I demand to feel your presence. I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to put away all of these books until I feel connection and closeness to you, Hashem." The Jews in second Passover said, "We're not willing to give up our redemptive experience. We will be redeemed. We will have a Passover sacrifice just like our brothers." They fought for that privilege. They left Egypt. These are raggedy slaves and they are like, "No. We are going to fight a spiritual battle even if we have to go up against God's word himself. We have to go up to Moses and say we are not willing to have one more moment of exile from God's presence." So too, the Zionist spirit says, "We aren't willing to be exiled from Hashem's beloved land anymore. We're just not 2,000 years. We're done. We're going to fight till the end to be redeemed." I think it's so deep that this day corresponds in our mystical tradition to the seventh day of Passover, that our Independence Day corresponds to the seventh day of Passover. Cuz seventh day of Passover was the crossing of the sea. It was the splitting of the sea. Now on the one hand, it's an amazing miracle. You are free from the Egyptians. But on the other hand, it is so far from being the end of the challenges. The redemption from Egypt is not the end of the fight. It's the beginning of the fight. Because after that, we have the challenges of the physical challenges of Amalek and the Midianites, the Amorites. And we have spiritual challenges and temptations of the calf, the spies, the Midianite women. I mean, you name it. And all this is eventually going to culminate in needing to go into the land. God could have given us any land. He could have given us Uganda after Egypt. I mean, for heaven's sake, like we were slaves. Couldn't we just get a nice empty piece of land? Like the world was hardly populated. We could have found God himself could certainly find an empty land to give his chosen people. Instead, he sends us to a place that we're going to have to fight for. Israel's Independence Day isn't just like technically date letter coding related to the day of the splitting of the sea. It's actually the spiritual echo of that day because redemption isn't a moment in time. It is a long process. It is something that you fight for. It is something that you're not just redeemed, but you have to actually enter into a partnership with Hashem and it's going to be painful and it's going to be hard. When we came out of Egypt, 40 years in the desert, we go into Israel, sometimes there are miracles. Miracles just like we had today in the air court. Sometimes there's going to be times that you go to Jericho and the walls just fall. And sometimes you lose like in the city of Ai because you're not spiritually up to the task. And just like then, so now in the final redemption, our independence, our splitting of the sea is not the end. It is not the completion. It is the opening cry, like the opening call of that war calling for us to have the same courage that our forefathers were called to have after they left Egypt. And it's a process that we don't know why it's so hard and we don't know why it has to be the way it is, but knowing that it is imprinted on the DNA of how redemption works in God's will and in God's plan is I think in and of itself something that is of comfort at least to me. And then, just to finish off, I saw the most interesting thing today. The Prime Minister just posted this. And I thought, "Wow, war of redemption." You know, since the beginning of this war, it sort of had an ongoing like identity crisis. Some people called it the war of October 7th, some people called it the war of Simchat Torah, the official army name was the war of iron swords or something generic like that. And then I read this and I was like, "Wow, yes. Did the Prime Minister just call this war the war of redemption?" Our Prime Minister is not known to be like a very religiously observant man. He doesn't often speak in religious terms. I don't know if he believes in redemption at all in the way that we think about redemption like Mashiach and the temple, but you know, the sages teach us that when God gives individuals, God gives us as individuals free will, but the hearts of kings, the hearts of leaders are in the hands of God just like Pharaoh's heart was in the hand of God. And so as a representative of the collective consciousness, the collective yearning, the collective soul of Israel, it's like our leader can't help but express this truth. That this is not a war of the 7th of October and it's not a war of golden iron swords. This is a war for nothing less than the redemption. And you know, we're not fighting for economic security so we can make more high-tech companies or that we can have a little bit less terrorism. Those are all nice. Those are all important, but our sons and our daughters, our brothers and our sisters, they didn't die for that. We can't settle for anything less than redemption. So, with that, I pray that this war indeed fulfills the name that was given to it by Prime Minister of Israel as the war of redemption and may we see it speedily in our days. Bye, guys.