What Are the 42 Stops of My Life and Am I Supposed to Know Them? - Ari Abramowitz: The Fellowship

Now, on a personal and individual level, we don't always have clarity on what the 42 stops in our lives exactly are. We don't always know where one begins and where one ends. We don't always know exactly what the stops what the stops even are and how we're supposed to even learn from them. Now, if you're like me and you've reflected on your life journey and you've prayed on it, you may have an idea, some sort of intuition about some of the stops and the lessons you learned on them. But even if that is the case, I'm not sure we're even supposed to really know all of them with clarity, at least not in this world. I think the journeys in our lives are supposed to happen to us. And while they are happening to us, Hashem is is shaping us and molding us as he sees fit. And I'm not sure that process would be as effective or even possible if we knew um if we knew what the stops were and what was happening to us. It's only that we don't know that allows it to happen. You know what I mean? We can we we can gain inspiration and insight uh I believe by looking back at the stops that the Israelites took on their on their journey, the spiritual growth they experienced on their stops and and then we could reflect on our journey and see how ours parallels theirs. There's something to that and I think it's really worth it. I'll give a few examples that our sages share and I hope I'm not taking too deep a dive here and stealing your fellowship, Jeremy. It's just so good. The first stop on the Israel's journey was Ramsy's as we see inside. And they departed from Ramsy's in the first month on the 15th day of the first month. On the next day after the Passover, the children of Israel went out with a high hand in the sight of all the Egyptians. Now Ramsy's literally means ra and mas which means melts. Evil melts. This stop represents breaking free of Egypt, right, of mitim, which symbolizes spiritual constriction and inner slavery. And it's the very first step in redemption because in order to truly be redeemed, we need to let the old self dissolve. We need to experience the melting of those deeply ingrained fears and those false identities that we may have even really started believing truly define us. All of that needs to melt away and it can be scary and it can be painful and it can be even a very disorienting uh process. I've I've experienced a lot of this personally in my life and I can tell you it's not easy when that identity just melts away. Um but you know the Ramban says that leaving Ramsy's was done bey boldness born of faith. It's only through cleaving to our faith in Hashem that we can really let all that stuff go and melt away. [Music]