Uri Zohar: When Fame Meets Faith - Struggle & Triumph (Yahrzeit)

And the 3rd of Sivan will be the yard site of Rabbi Uri Zohar. For those who are not familiar with Uri Zohar, he was what Rav Rosenblum refers to as Rav Chaim was the Sar HaTorah, the head of all Torah. He was the Sar of Baalei Teshuva. He was the head of all Baalei Teshuva. We have to realize that the the turn that he did was something that was unspeakable. And it wasn't just someone who became frum by, you know, and it was difficult for the surroundings around him, but he made the whole secular Israeli society tremble. I'd get a kick because he was the number one success that represented Israeli success. He was an entertainer in every facet of the world. He was the top comedian, a talk show host. He was an actor. He was also film producer. He was on television and radio. He was literally the number one. I know from my own relatives that I have that were around at the time that they said he was literally considered the top of the line, and he himself actually had a contract that was meant to be signed with Hollywood for a million dollars in the late '70s. Do you know how much a million dollars was in the late '70s? Do you know how many houses you could buy with that amount of money? And he turned it down in order to take a step into the Beis Medrash instead. He turned turned his back on it. A man at 40 years old sitting in a double penthouse in Netanya on the beaches of Netanya to make such a decision is something that's, if I could say, almost incredible. Something that just stands over and beyond, you know, there are such There are many Baalei Teshuva in the world, and we respect all of them, and it's fantastic. But literally a Rabbi Akiva in our time. And I have to say, he was not just someone who is a Baalei Teshuva that stayed and remained a Baalei Teshuva like you see happening sometimes. He turned into a proper Talmudic scholar. You read his farm. I heard a number of his shiurim. Imamesh was holding in the depths of understanding the Torah, of have an of being involved in every single every single bit of the details of Torah and he went full force and full head. Not without any as they say with bumps in the road. There were many things that he himself writes about he had difficulties whether it was within family life, financial life and everything that occurred on the road that put a threat even to his to his capability of remaining where he was but he held on strong. He kept committed and he came out on top. He was one of the ball top like we said people who was involved in Kiruv and his children are involved in learning and he came out incredibly on top of the world as they say and very popular known figure as we know it sacrificing and leaving everything behind. And why am I mentioning this before Shavuos? Because there's something that he used to say very often I heard this from a talmudist that he would say very often around Shavuos time and that is the famous question about why we have milk eggs. Why do we always have milky things on Shavuos? We know there are a number of answers. The famous one is of course the Mishnah Berurah that says that we weren't able to eat meat because now there's so many details of meat that we just learned about by Matan Torah. So we had to have milky things. There's a midrash that brings down that the malachim the angels said why are you giving over the Torah to basar v'cholov to these people and therefore Moshe Rabbeinu said, "Well, guess what? Obviously it can't be given to you cuz you guys ate basar v'cholov by Avraham Avinu when you ate and bakar together. You ate basar v'cholov when you were eating it together." So therefore we go out of our way to eat meat and milk and separate between the two in order to show that we know how to keep the Torah. But Rav Ovadia came up with a beautiful like many of his very things and he said very straightforward he says we all know everything that stays along with time eventually becomes spoiled. It becomes ruined. Such as any type of apple juices, orange juices, if you're talking about wines or everything, they become spoiled. And basically, they have a one-way ticket to the rubbish, to the garbage. That's where they're going to go. There's nothing to do with it. Absolutely useless. You have to make sure to keep it fresh or to drink it in time. All types of sauces, etc. One exception, and that of course is milk. Now, we know that when milk becomes curdled or has some type of it gets to stay where it actually smells, has somewhat of a putrid smell, you don't go ahead and have to run away run out and throw it immediately to the garbage, to the zevul. You When it becomes curdled, what we can do is you can transform it into incredible amount of cheeses, of butter, of different types of puddings or or yogurts and of the like that you're able to create with with this with this milk. In other words, in his words, "Beskhusakh matzah, in the skhut of the the of it getting spoiled, humekabel et the skhut leshadreg. It has the capabilities of actually moving on and improving. Who doesn't want to eat cheeses? Who doesn't pay a lot of money for special creams that we're able to that we're able to eat? Beskhusakh matzah, sometimes when a person's situation had a difficult and you have a fall and you have a place where you weren't able to see an end in the tunnel, beskhut that sometimes it's leshadreg. Drag, on the contrary, those nisyonot, those difficulties are a place where puts you on a pedestal. Cuz if you know how to pick yourself up and put yourself in the right place to search for the truth and find what needs to be done, then you will be able to not only get back to where you were before, but you'll be a step above. Who better is the one that could tell us that except for Rebbe Yisrael, the man who went through all those nisyonot, the one who picked up his whole past, which is a gory past a little bit the one so surprised and so surrounded completely in the entertainment business and to take all those to take it 180 degrees and to turn it into a level of that is the meaning of no perfect no better time than having these milky things is especially because we're not supposed to restrain from using our talents and capabilities we're supposed to channel them and put them in the place that they're supposed to go that is called on one foot.