The Mystical Letter Bet - Part 2: Why Are the Angels Going Backwards? - Rabbi Yaakov Marcus

[Music] the rabbi's asked to follow the famous question if bait represents the letter of connection or relationship why didn't God take the letter bait and make it open towards or facing the goal of what you're here to connect to okay if we say the letter Aleph represents God's 1 is the baby's connection or relationship why couldn't God take the bait and make it facing the goal the olive I'm here to connect to God's one as good as that which connects me evils not which distances me so the bait of connection should have its opening towards the goal instead God graphically designed the bait with its back to the goal as if it's facing the wrong direction so why did God prefer the letter of connection relationship not facing what you're here to connect to and that's a representation of his oneness so the answer to that goes back to a dream a prophetic dream that was given to Jacob who were gonna call Yaakov when he stole the blessings from his twin brother [Music] haze' okay so he steals the blessings from his twin brother's twin brother he sub says I'm gonna kill him let's just put our genealogy up here we have Avraham who's the founder of the Jewish people has a son named Isaac who we're gonna call yes huh and yet Scott has a son named Yaakov and Yaakov has a twin brother named ASA and he solves a pretty evil guy Iago steals the blessings from his twin brother Jose so it was slightly older and kill him Iago please have a Land of Israel and on his way out of the Land of Israel he lays down to sleep on a hill where decades earlier his grandfather tried to sacrifice his father and a thousand years in the future the temple will be built in Jerusalem at this stage in history it's just a hill so here's the hill here's got the lake down to sleep and he has a prophetic dream God gives them a dream in prophecy and that dream is each layer of the dream each successive layers deeper than the one for its introduced by a Hebrew word named teen a familiar with the word Heaney well he name is usually translated by the English editors as behold and in English behold is the Thoreau a word in other words you don't really need it like in Shakespeare behold Hamlet approaches or something like that I could just say Hanlon approaches but there's no throwaway words in the Torah and therefore every word has to have a deeper significance so Heaney is used almost like a code word in the Torah for the idea that if you look deeper I'll show you something you didn't see before so Yaakov lays down to sleep and the first he named the dream is there's a ladder this is a famous dream of Yaakov Slatter and there's a ladder from heaven heading down to earth and Heaney there's a ladder meaning God say to Yaakov look deeper and you'll see you didn't lay down to sleep on any Hill this is a hill which has a connection between heaven and earth because ladders imply your ability to span two locations so the only Hill anywhere in the on the planet which by the Torah is described as being a ladder from heaven and earth is this hill right here in other words there's no hill with a ladder in Egypt even though we spent hundreds of years there or a Babylonia even though we spent centuries there so this is must be we're having an earth connect meaning when you pray in New York that spiritual flow of whatever it is you're talking to God about is not traveling up from New York into the spiritual realm that's what most people would think it's actually traveling to land of Israel and up from here because the connection point is here over Jerusalem and not over Manhattan or whatever they and whatever a spiritual response comes to comes down here travels on a land of his back to New York okay that's what the first team is look deeper and you'll see this is not just any of that's probably you know makes it easy to conclude that Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac there because that's where heaven earth okay then there's another he named and the next he name is look deeper and you'll see it's not a place of potential connection because that's what the letter implies no the next thing in the dream are you familiar with destroy the next he named the dream looked deeper and what's on the ladder do you remember angels angels are going up and down the ladder that's the next look deeper and you'll see it's not a place of potential connection there's actual flow back and forth angels represent spirit blow as a matter of fact the way to understand angels and Judaism is not the way other religions understand them they pretty much distorted the idea but angels are like puppets angels are spiritual forces God wills into existence to carry out his will they do not have an independent will it's almost like you know I put on a hand puppet and I call my hand puppet Frank and I say hey Frank turn a light for me says sure Robby Marcus I'll be right back and he goes flick some light says will there be anything else I say no that's fine so who flicked unlike me who did I want you to think flicked on the light Frank so Frank is something I created to carry out my will but if Frank can't go against me so angels are spiritual forces in other words if you if you pretend as God's here and every physical chemical biological process in the universe has a spiritual basis to it then if you could see what God willing that that process to exist or to function looks like that will would be called what we call an angel so therefore every every process in biology or physics or chemistry has a spiritual basis God runs the universe by willing forces to care at his will for 99.9 9% of whatever beats it I don't know if in high school they still make high school students memorize every step of the Krebs citric acid cycle of photosynthesis that you have to do this in high school oh my gosh I hope they're having mercy on the students but I had to memorize every step the Krebs is your answer cycle where a photon of light is absorbed by ADP and becomes a ATP I mean like whatever anyway so according to Judaism every step has a spiritual basis but it's just God willing and into existence so that it functions indirectly as opposed to directly now you're thinking well that's silly God's doing everything himself anyway if it's just his will why is he creating it as an intermediary stage as opposed to just doing it himself because ultimately it is him and the answer is because just like he hides himself behind physics chemistry biology so that you can go through the physical world and decide there is no God be an atheist so too he hides himself spiritually to create intermediary stages or spiritual systems to carry it as well so that he's hidden in the spiritual realm if you and I were more spiritually sensitive or perceptive or capable of prophecy let's say we'd see layering and therefore it not be able to connect back to God so easily or directly in the spiritual realm as well you follow so it's all of us seriously that's why it's so significant when God says I did this and not an ancient like in the Passover story which we read the night of the Seder we read that God says I took about a land of Egypt on the night I am NOT an angel I killed the first point I am NOT a messenger so God says it was me which is extremely rare historically where God did not use an intermediary system and said didn't directly himself and that's because you know there were reasons for that but anyway so therefore we've got this intermediary system of God using to run the world now anyone who knows anything about angels knows that if we put God up metaphorically even though God's everywhere so let's say heaven is lots of levels in it which it does each level subdivided some about a subdivide so you get thousands of levels in the spiritual realm and we'll call this the bottom level of the spirit realm right here and we'll call this our universe with its billions of galaxies each galaxy has a billion stars and here's a human being down here on the planet Earth okay so now anyone who knows anything about angels knows that they are spiritual forces that God will sin to exist is carried in Israel so in terms of graphing them we would call them the forces to carry out friction gravity whether physics or biology all those things and therefore God would send them down to do whatever it is our world needed doing and then when they were done they would go back which means the angels in the dream are going backwards angels aren't physical world creations that go to the spiritual realm there are spiritual creations that come down to our world since we take the Torah very literally at least in this particular section the if this is a prophetic dream thank God should have shown the angels going down and coming up it said he showed them going up and coming down which is backwards so the question is why would God show Yaakov Jacob the spiritual realm in a prophecy running backwards and I think that's what we'll continue with next time just remind me when we continue we'll do why that whole system of angels is going the wrong way okay we'll stop over here you