Vayechi And The Queen Of England

This Torah class is brought to [music] you by tora anytime.com. >> A Torah Anytime original series. One of the most precious moments of the week occurs every Friday night at the Shabbas table when many fathers get up and give to their sons and they lean forward and they place their hands on their son's head and they say they lovingly tell their sons that Hashem should make them like a and ever wonder for a second why we tell our sons to be specifically like a fry and why don't we tell them to be like Ruvian and Shim or Le'Vy and Yehuda or Yahar and Zulen? Why out of all the illustrious do we choose to bless our kids to be like Ephraim and Manasha who by the way we know absolutely nothing about the answer generally given is that there's a fundamental difference between Ephraim and Manasha and the rest of the Ephraim and Manasha were not born they became the other sons grew up in a home enveloped in holiness and they grew up with gigantic spiritual figures like Yakovitzk towering over them where they grew up in the shadow of their great-grandfather Avam and the famous Sha bever and grew up in Manhattan, in Miami, in Los Angeles. They grew up in Egypt. They grew up in exile alone. They grew up as the lonely Jews in a sea of Egyptian immorality. They grew up in an environment where you had to choose to be good because the standard was bad. And grow up, they did. They fought and they climbed and they persevered, they not only made it through alive, they climbed to be on the level of a So when we bless our children, we know that they may not have a father like Jacob or a grandfather like Yeetsk or Aram, but we tell them that we know deep inside they have the ability to be like a Fry and Manasha. They have that same fighting spirit deep within them. So that no matter what the world offers, they can choose good. They can soar the same way a Frymanasha sword. And here's the amazing part that when we start choosing Hashem more, we are literally ensuring the survival of the Jewish people. Some people make the mistake in thinking that the Jewish people were just randomly se selected by Hashem to be the chosen people. And it's only because he chose and continues to choose us are we still around long after every other civilization has disappeared. People often say the Jewish people were chosen by Hashem. And all along that's true. It's also dangerously incomplete because if you read Tanakh honestly, you discover something unsettling. Hashem doesn't choose us unconditionally. He chooses us when we choose him. That's not a slogan. That's a pattern of Jewish history. Wasn't chosen because he was born holy or genetically special. The puzz says it explicitly. Test after test, loneliness after loneliness, Abraham chose Hashem in a world that had absolutely no interest in God. Then and only then did Hashem say, "This is the man. From him I will build a nation." And that formula never changes. Init the Tyra tells us something shocking. Most Jews didn't leave. They were comfortable. They were assimilated. They chose Egypt. Only the ones who cried out, who actively chose Hashem were redeemed. Redemption didn't come because of ancestry. It came because of a decision. We live Egypt and we immediately get attacked by a Malik. So what does the Torah say? That when Mosha's hands were raised, we won. When they were dropped, we lost. So asked the obvious question, Mosha's hands are fighting the war. What's going on here? And the answer is chilling. When Jews look upward and choose Hashem, they rise. When they stop, they fall. Same story with the snakes in the desert. When we were suffering from a plague and Moshe erects a snake, the snake didn't heal. What matters was whether Clyra lifted their eyes and shows us Hashem again. This isn't coincidence. It's a system over and over again in safer shim. We read the same sentence. The Jewish people continue to do what is evil in the eyes of Hashem, which most of the time did not mean violent sin. It meant drifting and forgetting and getting comfortable. And what happens next? Hashem removes his protection from us. We get subjugated. We cry out. We return. And only then does salvation come. 10 entire disappear from history. Not because of murder, not because of immorality. The Gumar says it was because they chased pleasure and comfort and had no interest in Tyra. They didn't rebel. They just stopped choosing Hashem. So he stopped choosing them. Pim. We almost got annihilated. Why? Because we bowed to something else. And the only thing that reversed that decree was fasting and crying and recommitting ourselves to Hashem. So if you want to know Jewish history in one sentence, it's this. Whenever we choose Hashem, he chooses us. Whenever we don't, he steps back. There's no autopilot Judaism. There's no inherited protection. There's no spiritual cruise control. All there is is the constant conscious decision of Jews around the world of choosing Hashem. And here's the part that should make us uncomfortable. Agra reward is according to the tsar the difficulty. Most people completely misunderstand what that means. They think it's a pain meter like one guy learns an hour comfortably another guy learns an hour with a headache. So Hashem's up there saying ah with a headache extraar as if Judaism is some cosmic punch card system where suffering earns bonus points. That's not what the pain itself isn't the currency. The choice is when serving Hashem is easy. You have a supportive family. You live in a from neighborhood. You have social approval. That's beautiful. It's truly beautiful. But that choice doesn't carry the same historical weight because the Jew who chooses Hashem when it's hard, when it cost him comfort or his reputation, his relationships, his life of ease, is doing something much bigger than enduring pain. He is becoming the engine that keeps the Jewish people alive. Jewish survival has always depended on Jews choosing Hashem in environments that push the other way. every generation we exist in is because people chose Hashem when it was hard. So when Kazal say that reward is according to the difficulty, they don't mean Hashem rewards suffering. They mean Hashem rewards impact. And since the success and the continuity of the Jewish people rests on those difficult choices, Hashem rewards those people accordingly. Not because it hurt more, but because they carried more. That's why say not because are better people but because they had to fight harder currents to get to proper aem and winning that fight strengthened all of a doesn't mean congratulations you suffered. It means the harder it was to choose Hashem the more that choice protected the Jewish people. And that brings us right back to the core truth of our history. We don't survive because Hashem chose us randomly. We survive because we keep choosing him. Especially when it's hard. And every time we do, he chooses us right back. Now listen to this. There's a line we say every time we go out to say that should bother us if we're paying attention. We say just like I can dance in front of you and yet I can't touch you. So to all my enemies shouldn't be able to touch me. And we say that line three times. Now stop for a second. If the point we're trying to make is simply that Hashem is untouchable and therefore his people are untouchable, then just say that. Why are we talking about dancing? Why is that? Why not just say just like no one can touch Hashem so no one can touch us. Why bring in dancing? What does that have to do with anything? The answer is that dancing is everything. Dancing isn't just decoration. It's the antidote. Our enemies don't disappear when we hide or when we freeze, when we go numb. They don't disappear when Judaism becomes dry and technical and joyless and mechanical. They disappear when Jews choose Hashem with fire. Dancing means we're not just loyal. We're alive. We're not just observants. We're passionate. We're not just surviving, we're celebrating. And history proves this again and again. When Judaism turns into a burden, we weaken. When Judaism becomes something we dance for, we become untouchable. So we don't say you can't touch Hashem. So therefore, you can't our enemies can't touch us. That would make survival automatic. We say dancing because only when we can cling to Hashem with joy and motion and passion does he step in and say you're untouchable. Protection doesn't come from being connected. It comes from being connected and alive. That's the difference between surviving our enemies and outliving them. Now listen to this idea. In the history of Jewish lullabies, there is one that reigns supreme. There is one that has been sung since forever. And we can accurately label it the mother of all Jewish lullabies. It is the song of Hamalik Hagalo. It is those soft words Yakov said to Yoseph's sons Ephra and Manasha when he blessed them. Now here's what's odd. The end of the PK is peculiar. It concludes which translates to mean you should multiply like fish within the land. Now here's one question. Why is Jacob comparing us to fish? Didn't Hashem previously tell a we were going to be like stars in sand? Why now all of a sudden the blessing is to be like fish? And secondly, what does it mean that we should be like fish within the land? Last time I checked, fish don't live on land. So she gives an explanation that doesn't just teach us, it reveals. He says, "When we bless our children, we are not giving them comfort. We are giving them clarity. We are telling them that the same way a person could stand at the edge of the ocean and you look out and you see nothing. Just endless blue. It's flat. It's still. It's ordinary. You would never imagine that just beneath the surface is a whole world exploding with color. Entire civilizations of life and movement and harmony and beauty beyond words. And all of it is completely invisible to someone standing by the edge." Cesar Pur, that's us. That's what we are telling our children. We are telling them that the world will look at you and see nothing. They will see nothing special. They will see restrictions. They will see old books. They will see strange clothing and ancient laws. And they will have absolutely no idea of the breathtaking purity hidden beneath the surface. They will have no idea of the harmony and the peace and the magic hidden beneath the surface. When we say we are blessing our children with this truth that the life of Tyra is the greatest life, the purest life, the most dignified, the most harmonious and holy way a human being can live on this earth. And history tested that claim. We were forced into ghettos. We were loaded into cattle cars. We were left to rot in DP camps. But if you could open a crack in the ghetto wall, just a crack, you know what you would see? You would see purity. You would see holiness. You'd see integrity. You'd see love. You'd see honesty and kindness. You'd see virtually zero domestic abuse. You'd see virtually zero domestic violence or crime. You'd see the light of a shabas candle. You'd see the unparalleled holiness of Yum Kipper. You'd see the happiness of Purim. You'd see the joy of sukus. You'd see the sweetest children on the face of the earth. And you'd see all of that through a crack in the ghetto wall. Oh, completely unbeknownst to the outside world. We are like fish in the sea. We live, we move, we build lives of depth and meaning. And the world swims above us completely, entirely unaware of the beauty beneath its feet. They don't see us. They don't understand us. They never have. And that's okay because fish don't need applause from the shore. They just need to know that they belong to the ocean. And our job is to make sure our children never forget how deep their waters really are. We bless our children that they should not be deterred by those who live on land and can't see our world within the oceans's blue. We stand over our children's crib and we hope and we cry and we dream and we pray that they too come to the recognition that a life of Tyra is the best life and that anyone who tells them otherwise is merely living on land. Here's a story. Margaret Thatcher, commonly known as the iron lady, was the longest serving prime minister in Britain's history. She had a weekly meeting with the queen of England in which they would discuss various political happenings from around the country and around the world. One week, Margaret walks into the queen's inner chamber and she freezes. She looked at the queen, she looked at herself, she looked at the queen, she looked at herself, she looked back at the queen, she looked back at herself and she realizes that she had just committed one of the most egregious sins one could commit in the British Empire. She was wearing the same dress as the queen and she's mortified and she sat down and she sweated her way through the meeting and afterwards she quickly ran home and shook out a pen and paper and she wrote out a letter to the queen apologizing profusely for her deep disrespect of the kingship. A few days later, she gets a knock on her door and a messenger of the queen was holding a letter and she'd opened it up and it read, "Dear Miss Thatcher, no need to apologize, no need to feel sorry for the queen does not notice what the simpleans are wearing." You hear that? A queen doesn't take her cues from the noise around her. She doesn't recalibrate her identity based on trends or applause or criticism. She walks the path that is uniquely hers and could care less what goes on around her. And that's our takeaway. We don't live the way we live because it's easy. We don't live this way because it's popular. We live this way because Hashem chose this path for us and because it is the best path a human being can take. We live this way because we are we are kings and we don't care what you think about us. Yeah, the world will make a lot of noise. It will mock us. It will pressure. It will tell us we're outdated and extreme and missing out. But a king doesn't argue with the crowd. A queen doesn't apologize for wearing her crown. She knows who she is. She knows where she's going. And she knows she doesn't need to be noticed by the simpletons. Because when you're royalty, you know who you are. You stop apologizing for existing. You don't chase the noise. You rise above it. You've just experienced another Torah [music] class brought to you by to anytime.com.