The prohibition against returning to Egypt

so it's uh 1930s in poland and there's a simple uh a simple jew a villager on a train from uh a train going to the big city and he's sitting on the train he's reading his homish with with ibrahit you know the yiddish translated hamesh and he's getting excited and he's saying mighty dick gevaldic and there's a more assimilated jew who's sitting across the aisle from him and he's getting really really embarrassed so and this this young man he's from the big city and he's on his way back to the university and he turns to the the simple jew and he says what what's made a dick what's gevaldik what are you screaming about he says well i'm reading here in the hamish about how um god split the sea and the jewish people were able to march right through the sea on dry land that's gevaldic so the more modernized jew he says my friend can i can i share something with you do you realize that um today we have research that shows that at that time of year in that location in the world the so-called red sea would have been like a marsh it would basically be like a swamp it'd be no more than about 10 inches of standing water that's what they marched through so not exactly as impressive as you may uh have thought it to be so the simple he's a simple jew he doesn't argue he says huh okay fine and he goes back to reading his homish and a minute later made it it gaval the more modernized jew he looks over he says i thought i already explained to you what's made of dick what's govaldi he says no no no no but now i got to the part where god drowns the entire egyptian army in 10 inches of water [Laughter] okay so speaking of kris yamsuf the splitting of the sea the miracles of the splitting of the sea i'm going to read to you here what it says just uh one pasuk it says sorry it starts on the previous page moses said to the people don't be afraid he's yatzvuh stand there guru and see as yeshua the salvations of the lord that he is doing for you today you will not again see them forever so um some commentaries including the ramban drawing upon the merced explain that that verse means that maisha was actually stating a prohibition or at least the basis for a prohibition against the jewish people ever returning to egypt in other words moshe was saying take a good look at the yeah you know you're never coming back so you want to see the egyptians one last time there are no pictures back then right so you want to see them take a good look because this is the last time you're going to see egypt we're never going back okay so actually the prohibition against returning to egypt which is one of the 365 biblical prohibitions is stated three times in torah the first time is this time that we just learned when the jews are standing at the shore of the yamself the second time is when the prohibition against a king amassing too many horses is stated and the reason for that is because the horses come from egypt and if he's into collecting horses he's going to lead the nation back to egypt [Music] and then there's a third time towards the very very end of the five books the the torah details many of the curses that will befall the jews if they do not follow the commandments and the last of these curses says that god will bring you back to egypt and ships through the way which i had said to you you will never see it again 98 curses so that's one of the curses in other words that it's not a good thing it's not something they should do certainly not by their own volition okay so here's the question and i'm sure this is not entirely unfamiliar to anybody at least the basic idea that there is a prohibition against returning to egypt okay here's the question throughout the ages it's just a fact that there have been many communities in egypt many leaders of the jewish people were in egypt primary example being the rambam yeah maimonides yeah and although there is a tradition i'm not sure how substantiated it is but uh it's one of those things they say that um that album used to sign his letters when he would write correspondences he would sign his letters he who transgresses daily three commandments by living in egypt alluding to the three places in the torah that we just mentioned where the prohibition to return to egypt they're stated nevertheless it's it's hard to believe that that actually thought he was transgressing by living in in egypt if if he really believed it was a transgression an actual sin he would have left so maybe he meant it more on a homolytical level or spiritual level but the point is how do we reconcile the what seems to be fairly clearly a text and a tradition with the historical fact in other words it seems like torah is saying you're not allowed to go back there and the historical fact is that many did including many great jewish people go back there so i mean obviously the the reconciliation here is that there's some type of you know like like any jewish question it's not so simple right there are factors they're extenuating circumstances there are you know it's there's a gray area it's not black and white okay so we could all predict that the question is what is that you know what makes it not so black and what you with me okay fine all right so i'm going to give you just a little bit of background i don't want to get too technical but let's look a little bit at the nature of the prohibition before we try to look into the dispensation before we try to understand why it would be permitted let's first look at why it's prohibited because even regarding that surprise surprise there are different perspectives on why it's prohibited okay why would it be prohibited or under what conditions is it prohibited um some say that it's only the prohibition is only against the jews returning to egypt from israel thereby reversing the path of the exodus but if they would go to egypt from any other place let's say they're already in the diaspora then it wouldn't be then it wouldn't be a problem and in fact others say that even if they go from israel it's technically only transgressing the prohibition if they they go they retrace the exact steps of the 42 jaunts in the wilderness otherwise it's just it's not prohibited it's only if it's literally reversing the path of the exodus there are other views that the prohibition was based on a reason that the people of egypt the mitzrim were exceptionally immoral if that's the case if that is according to that perspective if that is the reason for low prohibition then the prohibition would no longer apply because a once the egyptians are not no longer exceptionally immoral i guess the world caught up to them right the world caught up right um that's that's a or or or b let's say let's say egyptians to be really racist here and i don't mean egyptians i actually mean mitsuri biblical mitsurim let's say biblical mitzrim are really really immoral people okay like i said a little bit of racism there but even if that is true even if let's say that's true the biblical mitzrim are not the people who live in mitzrayim in the in the geographical location which was once called mitzray because sanhedrin of the king of assyria came and purposely mixed up all of the nations so if the prohibition is based on staying away from those lewd mitrim that's not where they are anyway there are different theories about where they are but another view about the prohibition is that it only applies if the jewish people meaning most of the jewish people are established living in er cisro living in the holy land but if the jews are in golis anyway then it makes no difference where in goddess they are even in mitzvah [Music] no because most jews don't live in this room it's very close again this is these are all different opinions none of these are definitive they're all various different views another explanation i'm just going through the different explanations okay another explanation is that it's only prohibited if you go there to settle so it's not a problem to visit it's not a problem even to make an extended visit indefinitely but if you you're not allowed to settle there and then even more specifically let's say they go there to visit and then they end up staying that's not a problem either even though they're staying because they didn't actively go move to mitrayum they were already there and then they passively just didn't leave so it's not really an active transgression okay at any rate these these are all very interesting reasons why it is prohibited but there's one important explanation for the prohibition that we did not mention yet and it's the one that i want to focus on and it is the kabbalistic explanation that is given by the arizon known as the ari many people don't know by the way that although he's associated with the city of tsvas he do we know where he was originally from he was from egypt yeah he was interestingly he was an ashkenazi whose uh family move to egypt so what's the arizal's explanation for the prohibition against returning to egypt i'm going to tell you a story first you know the old jewish joke it's so old that you're not even going to laugh at this because it's so old you laugh now now before i tell it you could laugh after i tell it you'll be like yeah yeah you want to hear a joke backwards start laughing you got it okay this guy this jewish guy went missing on a boat crash oh no there was a bug crash no it was just a joke don't worry no there was no boat a guy a jewish guy went missing his boat crashed and they didn't find him for a year and then finally the search party discovered him he was on this island and yeah he was like he was surviving he was doing like gilligan's island stuff he was building everything out of coconuts and palm trees and he was really he built up a little city for himself so he was showing them around he was showing the search party about you know this little what is this little hut he says well that's my home that's where that's where i live then they walk a little bit further they say what is this hot he says well that's my show really that's sure okay and then they was very impressive the guy built a show he's a jewish guy he built a show and uh they go a little bit further they said what's this hot he says that's also a show and they say but you already have a shure why do you also have this shoe he says that sure i wouldn't step foot in i told you not to laugh i wouldn't step footing i wouldn't go that sure i won't step foot in there actually okay so this is a story about somebody who was also on an island who thought you'll see from the story he thought it was a deserted island and how he observed mitzvahs and jewish life by himself and it's about actually a fairly well-known figure in jewish history especially in pacific history the son-in-law of the who was named rabbi yahil and he was known and he was known as der deichel which means the german the little german because he was a german jew not the jews necessarily cared so much about last names at that time but officially his last name was ashkenazi and the reason was because he was living in majibous which was the town where the balchamptov held court which is in uh ukraine i believe at that time it was considered poland but uh so so eugene was sort of a cultural anomaly being a german jew or what we call a yucca you know about the ekka who uh he was going to shul and he told his wife he's going to be home a little bit late from uh he's going out to mind if he's going to be home a little bit late for dinner because tonight is the night they're switching from the saint bracha to saint talamato so it's going to be a little bit extra time is going to be a little bit later for dinner okay so anyways rabbi hill was called their daicho and he was the son-in-law of the balsham and it's a funny story about how he ended up in poland actually he was one of five brothers and their father made a deal with them that uh one day he gave them all a certain amount of money and he said you leave for five years and at the end of five years everybody comes back and shows what they've made of themselves so yahil ended up in in in measure bush and he ended up as an adherent of the baal shamdov and then as the bel-shemptov's own son-in-law so the end of these five years was drawing near and it was the summer time and rabbi hill came into his uh his rabbit his father-in-law and uh told him that he had to make this trip back to germany to see his father so it was the summer time and uh rebecca basically calculated how long the trip was going to take there and back and he figured that if he doesn't waste any time if everything goes smoothly he could be back in majin bush for rosh hashanah and that was very very important to him that idea of being with his rabbi on the first day of the new year so he asked the balshampta for abraham that he should be back in measure bush for rosh hashanah and the malshamptov didn't answer all he said was when you go on your trip remember to bring with you a shaufer so he understood from that that if he has to bring a shaipha he may need it he may not necessarily be in a place where he has one and certainly then he wouldn't be in major bush on rosh hashanah so he brought to show for it he went on the trip okay long story short is he gets back to germany and his father made a feast and there's a whole story about what happens over there kind of a weird story each night no there was the first night they had a feast and each of the sons got up at the feast that's right and each one had to say a advartora and each of the sons said some type of you know scholarly uh teaching and yakil was sitting and eating the whole time and when it was his turn to speak he said i don't need to speak now what he had in mind i don't know why he thought this but the baal shamdav had taught him about the sparks the of holiness that are in the physical world especially in the the the food that we eat and um you know we i think we spoke about this at another class that the rebbe's father said that kosher the word kasha khafshin did i tell you this beforehand yeah i did i did tell you about the russia tavis of kosher no kosher is russia this is an acronym for the phrase in capitol cuphold tests in chapter 119 of tehillim kemetzi shalom which means like one who discovers a great treasure the the the possum david says i rejoiced over your word like one who discovers a treasure what does that mean your word here means and those who learn especially chapter one of sharia women remember the idea that hashem creates through words through speech and that the life force in everything that gives it its existence is var hashem it's holy speech divine speech so therefore saying according to the way that ebb is father explains whether that father explains it i rejoiced over your word the divine speech the word in every physical thing like one who discovers a treasure in other words when i see the piece of food i'm not drawn in by its packaging i don't get distracted by the physical experience of it but rather i'm able to zero in on the divine energy that's there that i can unleash and re-channel through the performance of a mitzvah so i'm very happy to have discovered this hidden treasure i'm rejoicing over the dvar hashem the divine speech that's in the food commission like one who unearths or discovers a hidden treasure the hidden treasure the spark of godliness with divine speech that's in the food that's a basic kabbalistic concept and it's especially stressed and sid this and that's what rebecca was trying to illustrate he's sitting there and he's eating and he was being mevara in the tutsis he was refining sparks but that's not what anybody saw they just saw a fresher so afterwards his father said to him you really embarrassed me he says what what was embarrassing he said your brother said such wonderful divreitaro and you were just eating so rabbi hill said okay give me a second chance make another party tomorrow night and i'll i'll impress you so they made a party the next night again it's a strange story i'm not sure why this was impressive well i know why it's impressive i'm not sure why the father liked it each brother got up to say part two of his dvar torah and rebukil would get up and he would pass his hand in front of the brother's face and the brother would go into a trance and he would start to confess all of his sins and that he would sit down in embarrassment and one by one boom boom boom and then rebeccil got up and he explained this concept about the sparks of godliness that are in everything and how everything in the world has divine energy and we have to harness it we have to elevate it through using it the proper way all right apha myself i told you that before don't ask me why a story happened the way that it happened this is the way that it happened the father loved it he said you heal you made me proud that was so cool that was amazing what you did okay sorry then says great i'm proud i'm happy i made you proud can i go now can i leave can i go back to measure bush so he says yeah sure no problem go back to magic bush so he runs back to measure bush he realizes he's making good time he will make it back to measure bush for rosh hashanah so he's heading back to uh to measure bush for rosh hashanah he's making good time and you know what happens anytime you're on a trip and you're making good time right the minute that you look at the gps you say we're going to be 20 minutes early right what happens okay recalculating exactly so what was the recalculating he got kidnapped by slave drivers they were human traffickers he got kidnapped and they took him far far far away from the the road and i don't know how far they took him but they took him to a body of water so from germany to poland there's not major bodies of water around anywhere where they took him i'm not sure but very far off course and they took him on a boat and they were basically going to take him away to some place and sell him so he's on the boat and now forget about not making it back to measure bush for rosh hashanah now how is he going to escape from this this peril and when you know it there was a storm and the boat capsized and he was able to jump overboard and everybody else was lost at sea and he was able to safely uh find an island and he swam ashore and he finds himself on this island this deserted or like i told you before so he thought deserted island okay and he calculates and he realizes that tonight is rosh hashanah and he has his chauffeur just like the basham have told him bring your shauper so he has his schaefer okay fine here he is he's on this island what choice does he have he's got to do the you know like i called it before gilligan's island he's just he's got self-sufficient he's got a you got to make do he's got to make do with what he has okay fine so he goes to mikveh you know on the island how do you go to the midfield yeah you have the mikveh's all around you every direction you walk you eventually hit the mikvah okay and then he goes in the water he comes out of the water and he davens and then the next morning in davens again and he sounds the ram's horn and he doesn't realize it but there's a group of natives watching him and they're very very concerned because this stranger came to the island strange person he came to the island he's not looking for help he's not looking for food he's not looking for shelter he jumps in the water he jumps out of the water he screams at the sky he cries and he toots on a ram's horn he's crazy so there was a whole crowd of these natives watching and discussing what should we do with this guy you know should we put the butterfly net over him and haul him in so the uh the king of the island happened to be coming by and uh he sees the crowd of his subjects he says why why are you why are you all congregated here by the beach and they say his majesty uh should know that there's a a stranger came to the island he's very very odd we've been watching him we think he's crazy he jumps in the water he jumps out of the water he screams at this guy he cries he toots on a ram's horn he cries some more and we think he's he's we think he's crazy so the king says ah the king was the most educated person on the island so he says ah i've heard of these people he's not crazy he's jewish i read about this these are called jews and i think this is his uh new year i would love to meet a jew go tell him to come to me meet me in the palace to be my to be my guest so they go down to hill and he realizes he's not alone and they say the king wants to meet you so he says it's my holiday i can't meet the king right now. so the messenger goes back he says he says it's his holiday today so the king says so tell him to come tomorrow. so he comes down he's the king says come tomorrow he says tomorrow is also my holiday so he goes back to the king king says oh yeah two day yum i forgot about that tell him whenever it's over just come to me but i want to meet him i want to meet a jew fine they arrange it whenever your your holiday is over the king wants to see you say after the 48 hours of rosh hashanah yahil goes to the palace he meets the king the king says to him listen i never met a jew but i always wanted to meet a jew i think jews are great um and in fact i think my kingdom my this island kingdom would do well with the jewish community and i was thinking about it i think we would like to have 400 jews so could you please arrange for me and i'll pay for your your service that jews should relocate here on my island so ibrahil says to the king he says i'm not going to be able to grant his majesty's request for two reasons one reason is a simple reason which is i'm not a governor or a leader or an organizer of jews that i can just command 400 jewish people to move where i tell them to so i i can't i can't do that for you he says but the other reason is because you should understand how it works yeah the jews are all over the world but it's more complicated than it seems and he started abigail started to explain a little bit about the idea of the sparks of godliness that are lodged in the physical world and how the jewish people are tasked with engaging these sparks through mitzvahs and elevating them so he says basically the jewish people are in the diaspora they're they're dispersed all over the world for these sparks and wherever the sparks are that's where the jewish people are and uh so what i'm saying to you is it doesn't really help for you to want 400 jews to be here because that's not how it works jews don't go where they want to go they think they're going where they want to go but they go really where they're where they are needed to to engage and elevate the the sparks and uh you don't have to ask for 400 jews if god wants 400 jews to be in your island if god doesn't want 400 years to be on your island it's never going to happen no matter what you try but if god does want 400 jews to be on your island then you don't have to convince them you don't have to ask them 400 jews are going to end up on this island even if they have to be dragged here in chains as slaves so the king hears this and he says that makes a lot of sense and uh okay fine i hear you forget my request and i'm getting i'll get you a boat and get you back to the mainland and we'll arrange transportation for you to get back to wherever it is that you're going so finally gets back to measure bush and it's long after rosh hashanah at this point and he sees his uh his father-in-law his rebbe the holy baal champiv and he comes into uh his room and he sees that the baal shem is very serious so he says this rosh hashanah i had to work very hard wasn't just daviding for himself obviously not just for his family or or even his students was dominant for claudius so he says i was working this rosh hashanah on making everything good for everybody this year and there was this one decree that i saw hanging over the heads of the jewish people this year and i just couldn't no matter what i tried i just couldn't get it to go away the decree was that there was this really far-flung remote location which happened to have been embedded with an incredible amount of godly sparks since the time of creation and no jew had ever been there and since no jew had ever been there these sparks were stuck and so it was decreed as is the way of of the world that the jews had to be there they had to go there and it was calculated somehow that the only way that this would uh work is that 400 jews would have to be brought to that island as a community and they would live there for many generations and they would practice judaism torah and mitzvos until finally those sparks would be redeemed and then they would eventually after many generations they would be able to leave and i saw that was going to happen this year 400 jews were going to be dragged in chains as slaves to this remote island and i couldn't get the decree to go away but something happened over the 48 hours of rosh hashanah what happened is somehow by divine providence one jew ended up at that very place and was engaged with such fervor in the aveda the spiritual tasks of rosh hashanah the davening and the mitzvah of schaefer that his work there elevated all of the holiness in that place and now no jew ever has to go back to that place he finished it he cleaned it all up it's done nobody has to go back there and who was that jew says the balchemtev he says yehil that was you okay that's the story and we're almost ready to hear the arizona's explanation for why we shouldn't go back to egypt when the jewish people left mitzrayim or more accurately when hashem removed them finally from mitsura they took the sparks how do you know that where does it say that oh i said it before i don't know from myself they left with rehearsal very good with wealth now that wealth is literal wealth the gold the silver right all those things that they were borrowing why on the eve of their liberation after 210 years of brutality and torture children being stuffed into walls why were they running around gathering riches who needs it who needs it because hashem said well why did hashem say why did hashem make them gather up riches get me out of here because the whole point of going down into egypt was in order to leave egypt and the whole point of leaving egypt was to bring with all of the sparks and as we said those sparks are are embedded in the physical world in physical objects so they were leaving with the wealth of mitzrayim and remember before the jews even came to egypt god arranged that all of world wealth global wealth should become become concentrated in egypt if you remember the whole story of yosef was there was a global famine and only mitzrayim had the plan because they had yeseth he was the minister of agriculture the viceroy and he planned it all so during those years before the jews even ended up in egypt global wealth was concentrated in egypt they were by far disproportionately the wealthiest country in the world and when the jewish people left mitzraim they left with that wealth i think this is what we learned before ah when we were talking about the the name elekim i think that's when we talked about el akim is begumatria teva which is 86. yeah that's where we learned this it says in the beginning of creation the godly spirit was hovering over the waters so the kabbalah explains marijefi's hovering is mace rapach the first letter and the last letter memento is mace and in between you have rapach the 288 sparks of the schweitzel the shattering of the vessels they died so to speak they fell from their very lofty source down to the physical world so when the world was created 288 sparks fell to this world when the jewish people left mitzrayim it says that an erev went up with them that means the mixed multitude but also it means base 202 that they left with 202 of the 288 sparks and all that's been left since then are the 86 sparks which is the gematria our job of revealing godliness in the natural order the point is they left mitzrayim with all of the wealth of mitraim and it says that when they left mitraim was like a pond without a without a single fish it was totally sapped totally drained every spark was removed from there the artifacts are primarily from before atmosphere and they're very little culturally afterwards yeah and there's a gap and they just fell off right because they went from this incredible abundance it's unbelievable to all of a sudden third world country you see it in the in the years they tell you the years that these things were created and there's uh there's a gap and the stuff that that's from before is more advanced than the artifacts from after the artifacts from before are like they had they had um they had everything down pat they've built so much and afterwards it's primitive you have you have to see it too yeah yeah they literally lost their whole civilization yeah yeah yeah so basically now here's the the death of the 288 sparks from the shattering of the vessels so bottom line what's the idea here jewish people go where there are sparks to redeem mitsuram has no sparks that was done that was finished finish that close it up it's like when mommy finishes a room of pesach cleaning she puts up a sign don't go in here we're done don't go back there so hashem said don't go back to mitzrayim this is how we explain many different reasons for the prohibition of returning to mitsura the arizona explains it he explains it kabbalistically he says jews go where there are sparks but if there are no sparks jews shouldn't go there it's a waste of their time wait it's a waste of their precious holy time now if you understand the arizona's explanation for the nature of the prohibition now we can understand the nature of the dispensation why it would often be allowed under certain circumstances and in fact it's revealed or hinted to at least in the rambam that was not overtly a kabbalist but many of the things he wrote were in line with kabbalah and one of the things that rules in mishnah toyota laws of kings is that although it's a prohibition for the jewish people to return to egypt one is allowed to go there for business for business pragmatia business why does he allow you to go back for business so if you're really cynical you say oh for parlusa we could always find a hat there right right okay but that's that's not what it is why can you go back for business think about it because egypt may not have any wealth left but the nature of commerce is that goods travel so a merchant who buys and sells may find some merchandise that found its way to egypt egypt doesn't natively have any sparks left they were all they were all removed but some spark may have been brought to egypt and some jew may need to redeem that by owning that for a period of time and making use of it so therefore there might be sparks that landed up back so it's like mommy put up the sign we're finished don't go into this room and then you find out that your five-year-old was in there with a bag of pretzels up we got to go back again okay we thought we were done we're not done okay and that's why you're allowed to go back for whatever sparks ended up back there so if there's sparks back they say you're allowed to go okay here's the bottom line here's the idea wherever you are wherever you are found it is not by choice you think you chose to be here you think because you were born here or you married someone from here or you have a job here or you like the school here none of that is true that's what you're telling yourself if god needed you to be somewhere else you would be there no matter how he had to get you there even god forbid in chains as a slave whatever he would have to do he would get you there wherever we are found right now is because this is where the sparks are and more specifically not just in a general way but sparks that you are able to redeem and the more quickly we finish that up the more quickly we all get out of here and we go to where we really belong we go to air to throw with me [Applause] it's not literally 86 is it because then we just take 86 people isn't it obviously multiple people but it's not one spark per person they're general sparks so it's very sparkly they're aggregate okay caution foreign