The Judean Experiment: A Prayer Quest That Ended Up In King David's Backyard - Ep.3

one year ago my husband Jeremy and I along with our six kids abandon every shred of comfort and inertia to go on the adventure of a lifetime we said goodbye to the suburban dream to start a farm deep in the heart of Judea this is the story of our journey what we've learned along the way and how our lives have been transformed this is our Judean experiment here's an entry from Jeremy's journal way back from the days right before our leap I can't sleep my heart is beating way too fast for a guy lying motionless in bed my house on the farm isn't ready yet I can't believe I really sold my home this was the only way I could pull it off what if I jump in in the waters actually split what happens if they don't I'm exhausted we've been traveling with all our kids for more than a month homeless just buying time until our house is done OSH Cologne two very at Jerusalem a fraud I'm so tired of packing and unpacking I wonder if all of our stuff is stolen for the last nine days I hired a Bedouin to guard my house in our things because we still don't have a door I had to vacate all our possessions from Nevada on Yelp god bless those sweet buyers for letting us keep our boxes and furniture in their house for so long Hashem I'm walking after you into the unknown into the desert please guide us protect my children into Gila give her strength this is the scariest thing I've ever done I'm so tired and I can't sleep Hashem gave me Cola I just need to fight through this time soon we'll be on the mountain nothing will ever be the same again a new day a new life for the rest of my life [Music] [Applause] hi Jeremy Gimpel hello Tila compell thank you for sharing that from your journal you know it's so funny the way that our minds work are so different how your journals are literally just an entry from every day and I look back to my notebooks at that time and it's just the mind of a madman it's like I sometimes I'm writing memories sometimes I'm writing prayers it's just one big polygon eventually one day someone's gonna go through these journals and actually just institutionalize me it's just the mind of a madman but it's cool to look back and to read these struggles that I was just trying to clarify that thoughts racing through my mind just to put them down on paper and just recently I found that the aja kodesh his first advice the PS that's never be the rabbi have the Warsaw Ghetto is that everyone needs to crystallize their thoughts by writing them all down on paper and so it's cool that I was intuitively doing that I feel like I can't otherwise but here I am now and it's just amazing looking back on that over a year ago now so now when you look back on that and you compare it to where you are today where we are today what does that look like to you what does that make you feel you know it's so funny because I'm like reading here how tired I was this was before we were even sued by the three left-wing organizations funded by Europe to destroy all of our farm so those are the good times exactly you're writing in the chilled-out yeah I'm already just like kind of nervous about the whole thing all of our money sort of at risk I didn't realize that that was just the beginning of the hard times like traveling around for a month with our kids okay we've like you know we've travelled on an RV across the United States we've like gone on adventures before so okay this was just the beginning of the hard times really I mean when we first moved into our house because we had that challenge of not being able to move in because we had sold our house had to vacate our house but our house wasn't finished even when we moved into our house when a builder finishes a house usually a professional cleaning team comes and cleans the house polishes it makes it sparkling cleaned for you to walk into our house was covered in dust filled with things in the dust of the desert had blown into our house because we didn't have windows and we didn't have a door there's just insane do you remember the first night when we went to sleep on our I won't call it beds because it wasn't a bed that mat on the floor do you remember do you remember what happened when we laid down in bed what happened we bounced onto our beds in exhaustion and this huge plume of dust came flying out of there and normal people will be like well we should change our sheets shouldn't we we were just like looked like we're too tired tonight we just slept in the dust pile in the dust yeah so looking back at that it's like you know Bar Hashem our house is like well and we have beds and we our house is relatively clean before Shabbat and here we are you know it's like miraculous how far we've come and we're lucky that we're on radio and not TV so that you can tell people our house looks normal before Siobhan and they don't have to actually know the truth house looks great you're doing a great job thank you dear so this week was a really big day for the Jewish people yeah it seems like the Jewish people are going through some type of bear or some kind of clarifications some sort of purification which direction is this country headed in the nation of Israel hasn't really decided we are split down the middle so our election day was a really special day for our family we tried to think what was the best day and you know in Israel the election day as a vacation day so we decided to do something special with the kids we wanted to make it into a real experience for them so the first thing we did was to go tomorrow to Mahalo to the tomb of the patriarchs and pray with the kids for a good outcome in the elections for for the Jewish people and then we went to Kiryat got there was a program called zezima Amina moving to the right where people from different settlements in Judea and Samaria were sent to different cities around Israel where voter turnout is usually low and just sent to go from house to house encouraging people to vote and helping them to go vote if they need help giving them a ride so we went with our six kids and the kids were so cute just running from door to door anyway so when we were in Morada Mahela I was asking you to the kids I said you don't want you guys dive in and you know pray your own special prayer to Hashem um you know just from your heart talk to him like he's your Abba he's your father so all the kids were praying and then no um I was kind of helping him along and no I'm Azhar is our four-year-old boy and he says because Isis I just want to say thank you - them I said wow that's really beautiful it was and I I want to ask him to send Messiah I said oh man that's so beautiful norm and then he saw a feather fly by and he says and I want to ask him for more feathers whatever floats your boat buddy and so then we finished we finished praying at Merida Micaela and we went we went to carry out got to go from door to door and we're in we went to one of the poorest neighborhoods in Kiryat got trying to find you know people that needed help to get to the elections and as we're going from one building to the next suddenly norm sees this huge pile of feathers okay I have no idea why there was a huge pile of feathers and I said didn't know him look Hashem answered your prayer there's a huge pile of feathers and he was just so thrilled and I thought to myself I really patted myself on the back and I said that was a great parenting moment a great teachable moment I really taught him about the power of prayer and I really I did a great job there and then suddenly I realized I didn't do anything I wasn't teaching him this wasn't a teachable moment that I was turning into a great moment Hashem was teaching him right Hashem communicates with each person we kind of think of it as like Hashem we have our of course we have a relationship with Hashem but our kids we're like teaching them to even children have a relationship with Hashem and on each person's level of where they're at and the things that matter to them Hashem is training them I realize like Hashem in his in his you know in in ed norms level was training him to have faith to believe in the power of his own prayers and how lucky I was to just be a witness to that amazing interaction between Hashem and know'm we've been talking a lot about prayer but as I really feel like the heart of this farm the ARU goat farm is prayer I feel like the people that come here they're not coming here only to learn Torah but they're coming here to have some sort of prayerful moment even if it's not in a seed or or it's not in words they come out here and they're having a prayerful moment I don't know how else to explain it you know sometimes when people walk around our house we have this beautiful deck that's right off the ARU go to Valley and literally every person that walks there you hear they go ha ha each person has their own little like breathtaking moment where their breath is literally taken away and you know in Hebrew breath is mishima and a soul is neshama and it's something about the place here that has just takes your breath away it touches your soul they're having like this moment where their soul is activated by coming out to these mountains so a few days after we got moved to the farm your brother actually brought um a rabbi out from from the United States one of the top rabbis of the Orthodox Union in the United States mhm and we took him out to that spot right where you see the magnificent our goat Valley and he says wow isn't there Abraha that you should say for this isn't there a blessing that you should say for this and we kind of scratched our heads and looked at each other and we couldn't actually think of a specific blessing that you're supposed to say in such a situation is there is there a brother for unbelievable majestic beauty and later I kind of reflected back on that moment and I said that that I felt like that urge to make a Braja to just call out a Shem to praise it's it's something that it's something that's beyond the ability to put into a box or a category of law it's just going back to that original soul space that inspired people to write all of the original broca's and that's and that's the power you know that was the power of this place is to is to awaken that inner yearning just to call out and praise Hashem well that's what's just so crazy is that when I first came out to this farm almost four years ago I was going through my own religious crisis at the time and I remember I'm in Nevada Al and there's a synagogue there called the box because it is shaped like a box it is like two caravans that are smushed together and people get there and that's sort of what we have right now for a show until today in this beautiful community and Nevada Danielle and I remember just looking around and it just looked like everyone was saying watermelon over and over again just watermelon watermelon watermelon watermelon watermelon water Mon and I'm like are their ears hearing what their mouth is saying are they talking to God are they like what it's just it looked like Catholic priests just mumbling Latin in words that they didn't understand and I just I just didn't I just it was driving me nuts it was driving me nuts and probably it was just I'm just projecting my own issues onto these these people are probably the holiest people in the world I just couldn't do it anymore that reminds me of something funny that you taught me once a few years ago that the word for the Yiddish word the Jewish word for prayer is Dominic and Dominic actually comes in the Y it in the original Yiddish from the word dolphining DAF DAF means a page so there's there's this kind of sense sometimes that that I know you were having we're just turning pages you were literally just felt like you were turning pages or like I'm dolphining I'm off DAF turning page page but nothing nothing internally was actually happening to you well so just what I feel is that I want to live a guided life how do I live a guided life I want a prayer is the key prayer is the beginning prayer is our relationship prayer is our words it's how shadows responds it's everything all in one and I wanted to take my prayer seriously I wanted it to be meaningful I wanted it to be impactful I wanted it to be sincere and I was like that's it I'm out of the synagogue I just found these mountains here which are just breathtaking I'm like that's it that's my new synagogue and I used to come here every day and go to the mountain literally right outside my staff house and I wanted to sing the morning prayers so I picked up a guitar that I'd fiddled around with a little bit in high school and I came out here and I wanted to sing cicadas Umrah and then from a place of song you enter into the shamanic Montessori meaning the prophets gave us the technology the the map of how to achieve some sort of spiritual moment in prayer and it says that the first part of the morning prayers is called cicadas Umrah passages of song it's not called su ke de miel Mool passages of mumbling it's called passages of song in the truth is in Sephardic communities they've actually maintained that tradition and many of the things are sung in Sheol only in the Ashkenazic world did we just maintain the structure the names of the sections of the prayer but we just mumble through it and I was like that's it I want a guitar I'm coming out to the mountains and I want my prayer to be meaningful so you have to understand at that time there was literally nothing here on the our goat farm Yossi and Rhoni had just paved the road and there was like a small little structure that had a like a skeleton of a structure with just stone on the outside and the main retreat centre also had just a like two sides of it were also just a skeleton it looked like an ancient ruin of the stones on a mountaintop with no water no electricity no trees and there was just a paved road to the middle of nowhere so it's just out in nature and so I'm kind of driving up into the mountains into this like deep settlement through these caravans onto this mountaintop and Here I am alone in the mountains kind of walking around no one's around no one's it's just me alone in the mountains with a guitar and in that moment you know I felt a little bit crazy I'm alone in the mountains with the guitar that I don't know how to play reading words that many of them I don't even understand and I'm trying to figure out how to connect to God and as I'm sitting down in these mountains here it was like it was the have the first day it happened I had like a moment it was like it's a moment that sort of it's captured in time it's it's the time almost stops and you're able to sort of see yourself from the outside looking in and all of a sudden I had like this moment of like oh my goodness if my grandfather's grandfather could see me right now I am in the mountains of Judea returning from an exile that I was born in Atlanta Georgia and I'm trying to figure out how to reconnect to the God of Israel in these mountains and I just felt so loved by my ancestors by Hashem who allowed me to even have that vision and that feeling it was just so because you know you got a Libya a little bit Abraham had to have felt a little bit crazy the prophets had to feel a little bit crazy people that are doing something that's sort of out of the just heard of what everyone else is doing they have to feel a little bit different but in that different Ness is a little bit of a preciousness and I just felt really precious by Hashem that Here I am trying my hardest to just really pray with all of my heart and and so I wanted to start so I opened up the prayer book and here we open it up to mo Danny the first verse the first sentence that a Jew says when he wakes up in the morning but I didn't know how to play the guitar and I didn't know what to do so I knew how to play one guitar from my old days in high school I only knew how to play one song I'm from Atlanta Georgia and so my background is a little bit in southern rock and roll so thanks to Hootie and the Blowfish I knew how to play one song and then this is what happened funny [Music] I need [Music] you know a friend of mine said you know Jeremy modani I just loved the music video I love the song I been singing it all day thank you so much for bringing that song down and like bringing it down I mean some songs were channeled maybe through me but that one has really brought down by Hootie and the Blowfish and so you know I was coming out here and then eventually like I wanted I just went through all of the morning prayers and I just trying to read King David's words and trying to like figure out what melodies would fit and all of a sudden these beautiful melodies came to me and that's like each part of the prayer is going forward I'm like developing more and more songs and month after month I'm just coming out to these mountains so inspired all alone everyone is going to synagogue and I'm alone in the mountains of Judea with my guitar best way to start my day ever you know for 15 years we were married and I had no clue that you knew how to play the guitar at all and subtly you picked up the guitar and started playing the guitar okay that's kind of cool I love to find out new things about my man that I didn't know before dad you're like oh now I don't only know how to play guitar I'm uh I'm a composer and suddenly he's writing songs and playing songs and after a few weeks I couldn't I couldn't even imagine Jeremy not walking around with a guitar every single place he went and after after about a month of fiddling around the guitar you're like an album album it was seriously it was about after a month and you're and you're like I think one day I'm like an album I mean in a few months [Laughter] you know months I just kept on coming back to this place and kept on trying to sing to God and then after about 6 or 7 months like wow these melodies are beautiful I have music too cicadas around the world needs to know this and then it took me about three and a half years to finally finish the album but I brought the best musicians in Judea to come and and now there's music to the prayers beautiful only later did I find out that the ARU goat farm is positioned exactly in the mountains of zeef in the Bible in the 23rd chapter of the book of Samuel it says that King David fled to the mountains of zeef to hide from King Saul before he became King Saul wanted to kill him he was jealous David had just killed Goliath he was gaining more and more popularity Saul actually loses it he becomes a little bit insane and hunts David down and David runs to the mountains of the ARU go to farm the Midrash says that most of the Book of Psalms was written in the mountains of zeef before David became King why did David run to the IRA go to farms when he was hiding from shell because 15 minutes away is Bethlehem now we have a small flock of sheep here on the farm we take the Sheep out in the morning and we bring them back in the evening but the bed wins here in the area they take their sheep out 4 7 8 9 10 days at a time so when David was a boy he used to live very similar to the way the bed ones live now and from Bethlehem he would come out into these mountains for 8 9 10 days at a time he knew how to live in these desert mountains he knew where the water was he knew how to find food he knew the caves he knew all of these back Saul had no chance of finding him this was his backyard and then only to realize that here I am singing the words of King David in the place where King David wrote those words she's like my prayer would took was taken to like a whole other level where she knows growing up in Atlanta the Bible was like fairy tales and legends and stories but you come to Israel and the Torah in the Tanakh it's like 3 dimensional it's not black letters on white paper it's a living color and you're inside the story and you're at the same places where it happened and all the sudden now I'm able to like add on to King David's words music to his words you know something I grew up in Atlanta Georgia and I had you know III was my parents sent me to a non-jewish a day school for a few years of my life my parents were programming me to be an international businessman since I was a little kid they sent me to summer camp where I was learning Russian they sent me to a day school where I was learning Spanish and so I had a bunch of friends and a lot of my friends liked rap music and I never really liked rap music I liked rock and roll and only later of three or four years like I'm now almost 43 years ago someone told me do you know what the word rap means and I said well do you know what the word rap mean Stila it's a word it's a thing rhythm and yeah it's an acronym rhythm and poetry and I never knew that and I was like oh my goodness King David was the first rapper he's the first man in human history to ever put rhythm to poetry and here I ended up putting my own rhythm to his poetry and I just felt like the moments here my first connection with these mountains was a connection of just a love affair with this land just in an attempt to try to connect to the divine and without us even knowing the heart of the ARU good farm the buildings that were building here the groups that were bringing here it's really all centered around prayer and without us really knowing the fact that this place was destined to be a center of prayer was already encoded into the stones of this mountain millennia ago long before we were born this what this place was destined to be and just by trying to figure out how to align myself with Hashem to try to figure out how to really tune myself into his will and to really pray from my heart I ended up in these mountains it's just marvelous so for me to move out to the farm has also been a really profound journey into the world of feel of prayer when you know when I used to work in a law firm oh just you know I was always trying to sneak in a little you know a little morning prayer on the way and part of my dream was that one day and we're gonna come out to the farm and we're just gonna simplify our life and I'm gonna have so much time to pray and my prayers are just gonna be so beautiful but then the reality kind of smacked me in the face we moved here and we were working so hard to unpack our stuff and not lose our kids and try to just make some sort of order out of our life I remember three days right after we moved here I suddenly realized I had literally just forgotten to pray for three days and I felt so bad I was so embarrassed all of a sudden you have to understand that we didn't have a bathroom we didn't have a kitchen we didn't have bars on our windows our stuff was everywhere everything was covered in dust you have to go a little bit easy on yourself yeah well so it was at that point I remember three days and I said it's not like just living here on the farm is going to make my life into a work of art and prayer it's something that I'm gonna have to actually really work on I have to cut out time and make time to focus on prayer and so um you know as a mom of six kids that not that much time in the day so the time that I chose was I'm just going to get up before the kids get up you know really early at sunrise and that's going to be my time to focus on prayer and the most amazing thing started happening I started going out to that balcony that you were just talking about Jeremy the way it where you can see all of the ARU goat um you know the our goat River and the beautiful views that are here on the farm and I started going out there in the morning and watching the sunrise and when I discovered by making this special time to go out to Dobbin while everyone else was sleeping and to just go out into nature I I discovered that early in the morning there is simply the most amazing cosmic drama going on you know the breath at you the blessing that you say right before the Shema is your tear or over a whole ship are you blessed Hashem is the one who makes light and creates a darkness and right here on the farm you can see the Sun rising on one side over the medicine Simo of over the mountains of mono and shining on the Dead Sea but on the other side because there's no streetlights here or any kind of artificial lighting you can still see the stars in the pitch black sky on the other side and actually watch the light go to battle against the darkness and slowly creep through the darkness and turn it into light instead of saying that brooklet 9:00 in the morning where nothing is really happening I was able to actually start feeling the prayers in the time that you're supposed to say them the time that they were written it will so look at this in Psalm 1 it says awake Oh guitar and harp it says an NFL but I'm gonna say that as guitar cuz that's how I connected to it it's some sort of string instrument awake Oh Neville and harp I shall awaken the dawn I will thank you among the nations Hashem I will sing to you among the peoples and I thought to myself that is just amazing that in fact based on that verse in the Book of Psalms the first codified law in Judaism you opened up the Chohan aruna it says that a man should wake up before the dawn Shaya hey whom are Arietta Shahar that he should awaken the dawn says instead of the dawn waking us it's us awakening the dawn us greeting the dawn instead of the dawn greeting us instead of being woken up by the Sun being reactive as your first action in the morning it's saying I am taking proactive measures to awaken the dawn so that this experience of starting to wake up early and daven outside in nature it's solved for me this mystery that's always kind of bothered me in my mind about the oral tradition you know that the first codification of all of the Torah chevelle pet all of our oral law in Judaism starts is in the Mishnah and it starts in the tractate of Bravo so I would kind of imagine I mean if I was the one writing the Mishnah and writing down all of our oral tradition I would want to start with you know something spiritual something meaningful something that touches the heart you know what's like the purpose of life right then the mysteries of Judaism what is what is the mission to start with like the very one when when rabbi yehuda nasi comes and says this is the oral tradition here everyone listen up what does he start with what time are we allowed to start saying the Creator what time do you dive in what time do you pray and I have always thought to myself wow isn't that a little bit technical and I mean not not that there's not place for the technical you know parameters of Prayer and that's okay but does that really have to be the opening line couldn't it start something it was a little bit more deep into the meaning of prayer well you know the more I've continued to explore prayer and the Jewish life in general it seems as though encoded in the biblical calendar encoded within time our moments energies opportunities where we can draw close to Hashem exactly and it is the prophetic order it's like a key given to us when is the most opportune time to pray in the morning let me tell you it's with the sunrise there is an energy opportunity at that time that you can't have at any other time of the day exactly that's what I realize it that the that the rabbi's the sages were giving us not just technical guidelines but giving us just the most amazing advice yeah you can dive in a little bit later the Mishna says you can dive in a little bit past sunrise but the ideal is to get up really early and there's some sort of energy that's in the world and you have to you can try this and take or you don't to take my word for it anything you know you can try this and feel it I've yet to meet someone who doesn't feel it when they do it there's something about that time and the energy that's around in that exact moment that just lends itself to an amazing morning prayer so you have to understand my relationship with tequila and least in my mind and I think in hers was really based on prayer you know we were really young when we got married she was 19 I was 22 and I felt like the decision was just too much for me to make and so first I did as I outsourced the decision to my parents I said tequila here is the phone number of my parents you can give them a call you can invite them out to dinner and if my parents approve then we can move forward but I'm not making this decision without my mom and dad yeah that was really cute jeromy's like you know what would be so nice if you went out to dinner with my parents and I said oh you and your parents no not with me and my parents just my parents let me go out with just your parents can do that well you know would be so cool if you called them and asked them out for dinner yes but you did very well as you passed with flying colors listen my parents were marriage therapist for 20 years in Atlanta Georgia I'm like if I before I get married I want to make sure that my parents that she's okay and they loved you anyway after you know we had to make decisions very quickly and I just felt like ultimately when big decisions come I just leave it up to God I pray with all of my heart and I just hope for the best in fact you know King David's son Solomon when he became king he had this dream where Hashem appeared him Solomon was also a prophet and Hashem said to him I give you one wish anything you want you're the new king of Israel wish away it was like the Jewish Aladdin's story I mean Aladdin was inspired by this biblical story except he didn't get three wishes he got one wish and when you ask people and I ask people all the time what did Solomon wish for almost everyone says well he wished for wisdom because over and over again the Bible refers to Solomon is the wisest of all men but if you look in the text he didn't ask for wisdom at all he asked for a live show man a listening heart and that's something totally different that's not you know wisdom is in the intellect it's in the IQ but a listening heart is an ability to tune in to an inner intuition that Hashem speaks to you through that in your heart is his eye in the king of Israel and the truth is everyone is the king of their own home and we all have to make decisions who are we going to marry what are we going to do am I going to go out to war am I going to raise taxes everyone has to make decisions how do we make decisions Solomon said if I have one wish to make a Shem I want you to give me a listening heart that when I need to make decisions I'm able to tune in to know what decision is best to make and because of that he became known as the wisest of all men because he had the most amazing decisions because he was tuning in so at 22 I was doing my very best to tune into the will of God saying like I have this girl in front of me she seems amazing is this what I'm supposed to do and I feel like ever since then every time we have some type of challenge fights issues I feel like it's almost always solved through our joint effort in prayer but more than prayer in some ways is that why you laughing because sometimes I get so mad at you that I don't even want to explain to you why I'm mad at you and I'm just like oh you better pray you better pray but do you know why are you moaning you better pray about it the problem that I think even um even in some ways more fundamental than the basis of our relationship being in prayer and I feel like I don't even understand how people can be married without that is our mission to Gila and I were married with a common mission it was like a covenant to our marriage that first and foremost we are together with a purpose to grow and to develop we have a purpose together to draw closer to a shipment to become the best people that we can be in this lifetime and the truth is sometimes I'm developmentally challenged I kind of chuckle to myself when you say when you say the covenant the covenant that our marriage is based on because Jeremy is such an intense guy you know when you invite somebody a family over for Shabbat lunch most people they talk about how is work what's the weather how are you kids doing Jeremy's a pretty intense guy however we sometimes invite people over we had over a bit of the you know our neighbors in Nevada young we sit down with him for the first time and he says so what's the Covenant upon which your marriage is based some people are kind of like we both like the Grateful Dead [Laughter] well I think that you know if you know some people in the Western world when they get married the question is really simple it's like you know what does this person do for me and what does that person do for me and that's the question and eventually maybe they're not going to do a good enough job or maybe what you want is gonna change but I feel like in the biblical marriage in a Jewish concept we are both on schleede we are both sent here on a mission and joining together on a mission outside of us is really what brings us together I had a beautiful doctor friend a non Jewish guy from Texas who told me write as talketh going through marital issues and I'm seeking this his advice and he said to me that marriage is like a triangle and you and your wife are on the bottom corners and at the top of the triangle is really a Kurdish bar who is a chef and the closer you draw to him the closer you draw to each other and I feel like if there is a mission outside of us that we are both focused on trying to achieve that mission and for us I think it's to serve Israel to serve Hashem then as we continue on that mission we draw closer to each other I think it's all rooted in a deep belief that we can really change ourselves that we can transform our lives that we can change the way we look we can change the way we feel we could change the way we act we can fix our attributes if we work on it if we pray on it and we're consistent we can really transform our lives but then sometimes I look at the fights that you and I have and I feel like they are the same fights that we had when we were in our early 20s and I'm almost 40 now because you don't actually listen to me no I'm listening but I just somehow it's just like the same and that you're the fights I hear the fights reverberating throughout the generations of the Jewish people I feel like you and I have been having the same fights for multiple lifetimes already now and now that we sort of live a more biblical life on a farm I can just hear Jeremy what Jeremy what are you outside with the chickens for with the children or away we have to get them out to school like what are you doing just the same fights over and over again son one and I really do believe that we can transform ourselves but on the other hand I see that no matter how hard I try I keep on making the same mistakes over and over again yeah consider the possibility that the the reference to past lives might just be an excuse for not listening it's like hey baby you should try to like do what I asked oh yeah we've been fighting this fight for 500 years though we've been doing this forever oh you don't even know it goes back like multiple reincarnations I don't know if that's like a great excuse it reminds me I heard this researcher talking on the radio about this document that they discovered from about five hundred years ago and one of the Jew from one of the shuttles it was either a diary or a letter that he was writing to his rabbi and he's talking about how miserable his wife makes him all she does is yell at me because I I I'm always missing the bedpan and she always gets upset that I went to the bathroom at night and I missed the bedpan and I thought to myself wow nothing's really changed like women are still getting mad at men for the same exact thing that was just about putting down the toilet seat nothing has changed but anyway I'm not I'm not quite as optimistic as you about the possibility of having dramatic change I think you can change within the deck you've been handed you know what I mean like you're not you're going to be able to move things a little cause I'll say that if a person can change one attribute one meda it's a huge huge compliment because it's hard it's hard to fundamentally change the well I don't know if you can necessarily change an ingrown innate attribute like a someone I for example suffer from anxiety and from nervousness I'm just a nervous guy but I was able in some ways to overcome all the fears and all of the tensions and all of the anxieties that this move had and there were so many and so even though you may have a certain tendency towards nervousness maybe you can't fundamentally change the nervousness but you can transform your lives to not let that inhibit you so you can grow in that way it reminds me of our friend who ate over at our house for Shabbat and she said how did you guys get married so young I mean there was so much you know more time you might have changed you know the brain continues to grow until the age of 25 how do you know that you know when you got married maybe your brain was gonna continue growing and you wouldn't have been a good match for one another and I said well you know I've been with Jeremy since he was 22 and I can tell you with absolute certainty that there was no continued brain growth so rest your heart assured that we didn't have any problems in that department well on the subject of changing growth something that I've really grown in since we moved to the farm was in my relationship with the Jewish prayer Brook with the seed or a seed or and I have always had kind of a complicated relationship because it's a lot of liturgy it's a lot to cover like in the morning when you have to cover there's a lot of pages there's a lot of ground to cover so there were two things that happen to me in my relationship with the seed or because well part of it is that you know all these all of these prayers are written down and you sometimes say to yourself am I just supposed to be reading somebody else's words all day long how do I connect to these words so two things happened to help me the first was that I came across of dove zingers book it's called Tico and Fela T it actually just came out a little while back in English called may our prayers be pleasant and it's um it's an English translation it's if you could believe such a thing it's a cookbook a recipe book for prayer-meeting rhabdo vizier the Rosh Yeshiva of mcore hyeme the macroeconomy shiva it was a real pioneer and Jewish spirituality he said I'm not writing a book of philosophy about prayer telling you what you need to thinking what you need to do I'm making a cookbook it's a book of recipes of of of exercises that you can choose from you don't need to do anything everything and he has just a huge amount of exercises there that you can do to enhance your prayers and one of the things he says is that you don't have to look at the seed or as something that you have to say every single solitary word he says when you go to a restaurant you don't order everything on the menu you order maybe an appetizer an entree a drink if you're really lucky you order a dessert right do you know what I mean sure well the truth is you see in yeshiva were trained that if you come late to Dominic well then there's actually a system barouche amar ashram first hallelujah last hallelujah each debauch you have like and so it becomes a checklist oh I gotta say this got to say this got to say this got to say this and I think Reb Dov's finish here his like inside his just his guidance is to say that the see door is so vast written over so many centuries don't look at it as a checklist look at it as a menu and say are you in the mood for some praise are you in the mood for thanks are you in the mood for yearning and calling out to God at this point and instead of trying to run through all of the checklists it's to sort of see where your spirit is guiding you and then find it within the seed or yeah so that really so his book that that insight and his book in general really help me if you if you can get your hand if anybody can get their hands on that book it's a real it's a real pearl it truly helps the inner work of prayer um the second thing that happened to me was was this kind of dream that came to me where I was sort of looking at the Jewish prayer brook at the sea door and suddenly I started to imagine all of the people that wrote those prayers and thinking to myself because you know the Jewish prayer book didn't come together all at once it was a compilation of just a huge amount of totally anonymous people who took time out of a life that was surely filled with many struggles took time to write down something that came from their hearts and what came out of their hearts touched other people's hearts enough to the point that it was worth it for them to try to somehow come across a scroll and a quill and ink and pass this along from generation to generation until it was canonized in the Jewish sitter and they didn't sign their names on it and they didn't give any hint to who they are most of them we don't even know who the authors were and if we do know it's just from historic study it's not because there's any hint to it in the seed or and the humility that these people had to share their inner their enterprise and their inner hearts with us I used to look at this Edoras like a burden as this liturgy that I'm stuck saying and now I realize that it's this that from this dream I realize it's this gift that all of these that so many different people had to come together to make and the dedication that the Jewish people had to have over the generations to keep these from you know throughout all of our suffering in the in the Exile to keep these prayers that came out of different people's hearts and compiled them together into one book that went from hand to hand and from father to son is such is such an amazing gift that we get to now be back in Eretz Israel and bring their words to life it's as if we're bringing them back to life you know that the deepest messages that they each had and with such humility left us without even signing their names we're able to now speak for them and even though they're gone we can bring their spirits back to life here in the land yeah you know Abraham Joshua Heschel says that a journey through the sea door is really communing with the eternal spirit of Israel as like the Jewish people have been praying throughout the centuries the most touching prayers were recorded saved and passed down to the next generation and then more prayers were added and as you're reading and praying through the book you're praying through the centuries communing with all the spirits that have brought us until today yeah and it's I'll give you an example right you made a song you're just talking about it about Madani right the first prayer modani is the first prayer that every jew says in the morning every small child it's the first thing they learn when they go to nursery school every little right our our four-year-old child knows how to say modani I didn't know who even wrote modani until you told me I was gonna surprise you and tell you right now but now I realize that I'm in advanced dimension I've already four that I've told you okay well I'll tell everybody else okay let's see if you remember Jeremy no wrote it no I was trying to circumvent that question by saying you've already no no no come on dude you're a rabbi and you wrote a song about Moe Danni you don't know who wrote Moe Danni an entire book on so Kate is near us okay Reb anus Oh would you like me to open your eyes once again see that's the joy of getting to talk with Jeremy all the time is that just forgets what I say get to thrill him time and time again else have a problem with names we're not very good with names very good with faces names not so much so no one knows exactly who wrote it but you well that's not a few because I'm about to tell you who probably wrote it we know who probably wrote it by Rabbi Moshe even you da mafia he was a mystic in spot in the 1500s he died in the year 1610 and how did his prayer come to exist he actually didn't write any books he had a little group of people that came together they called it ha very mucky Veeam friends that are listening and for listening friends and they came together as a group of mystics trying to dedicate their lives to the service of Hashem and they would meet and just try to discuss what they were struggling with and develop their develop their worship and so this rabbi he wrote this journal called said Ariel and it was about him trying to make his days a beautiful service of God and he wrote down his schedule like I get up in the morning and I do this and in the afternoon I do this and in the evening I do this and he's writing everything he does and he wrote in this diary of his and the first thing I say when I wake up in the morning is modani and he writes this prayer that he made of modani and somehow when his son went to Europe and somehow this journal went from hand to hand from person to person and someone read this prayer and thought that it was so touching that he wrote it down for himself and somehow that got passed from person to person until it was integrated to be one of the most fundamental Jewish prayers become and it's actually really recent you're talking about the 17th century this is not a very very old prayer but somehow he just touched people in a really profound way just the the idea of waking up in the morning and saying thank you - ahem as the first state of mind that you go into in the morning and and to think you know he was so he was so humble and he also was so poor you know he wrote in his in his journal about how much he longed to just one day have a beautiful menorah for Hanukkah and his the whole life he never actually said that the greatest sorrow in his life was that he was never able to light Hanukkah candles in a beautiful way because he couldn't even afford to buy respectable candles and that a person like that took time out of his life we could be working or making money or trying to increase his material possessions took his time to write down how he's making an effort to sanctify every moment of every day so that people could look back and just you know glean little pieces of inspiration it's such a gift and now his prayer is the prayer of all Jewish people in the world that's amazing hmm you know I just I feel like in my life I just want to grow closer to Hashem but I don't really know what that means that's also for me why I think the best option is to try to live a guided life because I don't know what else to do other than that I know that there is some sort of higher intelligence I mean god I don't know what that word means anymore like it's just clearly there's a system here there's an intelligence here there is something that's going on but it's like there was something before light before time before space it's just beyond his ways are not our ways and it's like I don't even know where to begin starting but I was taught once again by Abraham Joshua Heschel that you can find Hashem in deeds you can find him in deeds if you actually wholeheartedly do an act of cressid wholeheartedly do an act of kindness for someone else you really give them charity with a whole heart that they feel the love and you feel the love coming back in that moment you can experience the divine now we can't understand God but we can sort of Intuit his ways and we can encounter him in deeds and we can encounter him in prayers and I feel like our life here on the farm what I wanted it to be was that somehow our life is a prayer that everyone that we bring into this place the messages that we broadcast out from this place is in some ways just a full embodiment of I mean I think there are so many opportunities to see Hashem's presence in our lives it's like sometimes are these things they seem small but at the moment that they happen they feel like I said I'm kind of just picking out and waving at you if they're we called them a spice cart last time yeah space cart so I think it's important to I find it really helpful tor just write them down and remember them because I mean in moments of doubt you can look back at them and draw strength like the story that happened to us a few weeks ago we were at the beach and it was on Shabbat and we were here in ashqelon for Shabbat and jeremy's uh um brothers family was there as well and we went down to the park and the park was magnificent it was packed with just hundreds of people having fun on Shabbat it felt it felt so like like Redemption times right everyone was just happy and together and beautiful families and suddenly my sister-in-law Dina realizes that they've lost the key to their apartment now we're on the beach right imagine we're on the beach and there's hundreds of people there in this park that's right next to the beach and just like sand and grass and stuff and it's just finding a key on a beach is literally like finding a needle in a haystack and so everyone is frantically running running running running running I'm like there is no chance of finding this on our own our strengths will not allow us to find a key on a beach it's just not going to happen so I took I took out my Psalms and I just started dominating I said ah Shem please help us they only have one key they're here with six kids for Shabbat you know it's if they can't get into their apartment it's gonna be a real problem and I'm just diving and praying and in the middle of my prayer this guy comes up to me kind of interrupts me now you have to descend there's hundreds of people on the beach he picks me out of all of the people totally randomly a guy I've never seen in my life he says hi sorry to bother you my daughter lost her doll have you maybe seen her doll I said buddy you think you got problems we've lost the key to our apartment we've lost the key to our apartment I said when you when you find our key I'll start worrying about your doll he says was it a red key I said yeah it was a red key he goes oh well that's so funny he says yeah I just noticed this red key in the weirdest spot in the middle of the beach and I thought to myself that's odd so he led us to the key and then ironically enough my little niece had just seen a doll and was able to show the guy his doll and what are the odds that this guy was gonna pick me out of the crowd to ask me where his kids doll was there was absolutely no reason we hadn't had any kind of interaction before and it was like Hashem had planned the entire had orchestrated this entire thing and it's just that like a small is that one of those small miracles but they make you you know you walk away from was this feeling I was looking out for that sometimes like you know when you really are able to tap into a sincere prayer it is a antenna there are a magnet for pulling in Providence and you know probably one of the deepest prayers is for us to make our will his will I feel like that's what I wanted this farm to really be I feel like this is what he wanted how do I make my will his will and then his will will become my will if we just are in tune in in line with what he wants in the world then our will will be his woman there's clearly a will in this universe a will to survive a will to life ledges life all around us everyone is willing everyone's working everyone's doing this the will of all wills the the one that is giving this desire into the world and all the world is working so harmoniously together you look at the all of the world of nature I mean people are so inspired by it they have like The Lion King theme song of the circle of life everything is so harmonious and a perfect ecosystem of an exact balance the will is working so perfectly and in harmony except in human life all of a sudden in human life people feel separate disillusioned miserable de murdered chaos pollution it's like all of the hewn of the universe is in perfect harmony and then there is little old man that is just bumbling around on antidepressants totally confused and disoriented what's going on and I think that prayer is really the only answer to realign us with the will of all wills and to hopefully align our will with his will and I think that is the core of really the chuhwa movement it is just aligning ourselves with Hashem will how do we do that and I think the answer is prayer so you know this has been almost a four-year journey since I first stepped out into these mountaintops and it started in prayer and in the middle its prayer and the end is prayer and you know bar Hashem you know after so many years now we've put out a music album of prayer with a book about prayer and I feel like this is just the introduction of another book that eventually will be written when we're 70 but I felt like there were so many things our self a self but and so if any of you are interested you go to youtube right now just type in Jeremy Gimpel music five music videos are out there and it's like broadcasting the Psalms of King David to the world from the place that they were written and so hopefully this will be a baked Fela House of Prayer for All Nations or one step closer I mean I mean I pray that we continue to grow in our to feel an upper dentition all of our listeners one who doesn't respect and value his past he's not worth the honor of isn't present and has no right to a future what I promise you that I respect and value the past and I please God would love to see honor in the present and I know that all of us have a right to the future I'm Rob McClure and this is the Jewish story join Rob Mike foyer for the best she wished history podcast the Jewish story on the Land of Israel network at the 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