KLM BRAND NEW SERIES: Rabbi Asher Baruch Wegbreit on Kavanah L'Mitzvot INTRODUCTION

[Music] welcome everyone to the gibbon and bate midrash today we have a very special presentation an introduction to i won't say i will let the rabbi rabbi asher baruch wegbrite introduce himself and explain what this is all about but let me tell you who he is he's an old friend we go way back and he was and had held the position of the meshiach and yeshiva in the old city as well as the educational director there he was also a market share for over 20 years in gamora mishnayas and you know what he's an expert in teaching the rahm khan's learning method methodology he was also um he supervised moosa vadim in areas of character development to fila and truva and that's my segway introduced several of his books he's a well-known author and this happens to be just the one of the four books and if you want to tune in this is not my promotion this is a really promotion for the uh i can't say not yet uh but i also give a a khabora in character he wrote a book and i'm going to read it and i'm going to use it because i know it's full of gold gold golden opportunities for chuva and he has also written i'll mention the other three books real quick and that is the power of ashrae which we say three times a day or more and elenu which we say three times a day or more as well as the villainous domes uh mcgillis esther he translated it and added his own commentary so without any further ado i am going to introduce you to the rabbi rabbi asher morrow webb wright thank you right away poston with a little vision and your help i'm hoping that this series is not going to be just a bunch of classes i'm hoping we're going to be able to spark a flaming claudius ralph let me explain there's one mitzvah um that if you upgrade this mitzvah it has at least three amazing results okay number one and this is big you'll become a more sincere person who wouldn't want that okay number two you will become excited about the mitzvahs you do and thirdly definitely last but not least you'll get closer to hashem in a very real sense okay i think that sounds attractive correct so the question is what's this mitzvah and the answer is the answer is to have cabana from mitzvos to have intention while and before you perform a mitzvah kavanagh mitzvahs okay now beside these amazing things sincerity closeness to hashem turned on about the mitzvahs how about this that it's the halapha it's halacha okay if you look at the shokan araka and the mishna brewer in cinnamon right the mish the shofar and misha all commandments require kavanagh now it's interesting you should know it was a debate in the gemara they had a debate do mrs require kavanagh before you do them you know i'm doing the mitzvah of learning torah or whatever so they concluded the the halakhah concluded yes but you should know the other side right that says mitzvahs don't need kavanagh not exactly what it means is that if you did the myths without kavanagh it counts bitty avid so it's far from desirable and even that position says for sure you should have intention when you do mitzvos okay so that's what is uh it's important holologically and it's it can i promise you it can try to transform you okay so what the with the rabbi kindly i i would like to call around i posted a first mover in this here in about 15 minutes of some classes i've given on this and he said let's go for this okay why what i'm trying to do is create a like a grassroots awareness movement about the incredible importance of this mitzvah okay so i'm very excited that you're joining me and my wife came up with a great name for this okay klm have you heard that kavanaugh missed us okay there's no problem with airline i checked with the lawyers okay we'll make a it's very going to be very i hope you will soar into the heavens but not on a plane okay so klm welcome to klm we're starting a series and i you know you can be get in very early on this okay so i mentioned to our own uh about for acquaintance i had i have to tell you a story that was over 30 years ago well over 30 years ago i was in los angeles or it's a place called claremont i was working on my phd in psychology okay and uh in the dormitories i opened the door and there's this man from china now i was about 25 he was 35 and his name was ling he was from beijing okay now why am i telling you about him because he had an experience that changed his life and i had a similar one listen to what happened to him he was rahmanis for him he grew up in the times of mao zeitung they said okay now in the end the cultural revolution which was if you study about it was a nightmare it was absolute nightmare they would send young young children young people to coal mines and that's what he did he was he was in the coal mines at the age of 13. not exactly a bar mitzvah okay so he was in the coal mines and what happened he found a book that changed his life what it was translated into chinese uh rousseau's social contract it's a book about the philosophy of democracy the book changed his life why because at that point he says i know what i want to do with my life i want to try to bring democracy to china so found that book that's what happened now just you're probably curious what happened so when i met him what happened he got out of the coal mines by coaching the women's basketball team then he went to farm ministry school and he worked his ways up the government until he became an assistant to danger ping's daughter pretty high for mid-30s okay but he realized it's not going to happen from the inside we're not going to change we're not bringing china a democracy from the inside so he came to california and he enrolled in a phd program in political philosophy and he was busy there very inspiring roommate so that he changed my life just seeing his example but he he read a book it changed his life about five years ago i found a book i read it and it changed my life now let me let me qualify that my wife my life thank god was wonderful it was amazing i was as the rabbi said i was learning gamora i was teaching gumara and i loved gemara i was learning musser i was teaching muslim i loved musser too it was great and also if you don't think i wrote some books everything's going great but try as my try as i may i was tossing broncos out of my mouth i wasn't happy you nod your head in acknowledgement of course and i wasn't happy about that and also you know there's a mitsubishi mikra effort to learn the parsha every week i was doing it like a robot i was a dutiful robot so something was missing with my connection to mitzvos and that's when thank god and i wasn't going to call mine thank god i found this safer i am happy have i promoted my book i'm happy to promote this it's a safer called cash shared sebastian as hashem commands right and it's all about the mitzvah of kavanam it's as a rabbi daniel garfinkel i recommend the book highly he's very happy i'm giving his glasses um in fact i taught it in the yeshiva for for about a year or two and uh so many copies were sold that he came to pay his respects and give me a visit so anyhow that book changed everything by by this improving this myth of having kobani however before we go there let's start with misses themselves okay i think we need to reorient our understanding and experience of mitzvos let me uh going back to lane so i came to israel i learned for uh you know like a half a year there and it was transformative okay and i come back and ling sees me now lean was trying to move up the ranks in politics so he trained himself to look into people's eyes and just in a second figure out if they're dangerous or that you know the the the the student riots happened and he was like we're doing convert operations in our dorm room with the army that is unbelievable so yeah i'm trying to tell you ling could read people right and he knew me very well come back ling looks at me and says i mean he's he's like staring at me almost you know after a day or two he looks at me goes we have chinese saying you can change river and mountain but you cannot change person and personality but you have changed you must i don't care you've changed what happened right so i'd like to try to explain that okay what happened so let's talk about broccolis right we make broccolis right make broccoli on water make broccolis morning brothers etc let's talk about abraca the rashba and the malben explain that there's different opinions okay of the nepheshine but the rashford and the mom say means shem you are the source of something that i really like and appreciate for example fruit uh being able to see clothes you know i could go on and on right you're saying hashem you're the source and i really appreciate it okay now what else do we make a bracha on let's say you're to fill in right mitzvahs right so what are you saying and you are the source thank you for sanctifying me do you realize we don't realize we're thanking hashem for sanctifying us because something profound happens when you do a mitzvah it's transformative and also by the way the nephesh hymn says just give a little feeling see what i want to do before we talk about the mitzvah of intentionality let's talk about mitzvahs let's realize what misses are and what they do to us okay so the the never time says when you do a mitzvah there's this spiritual light of god and aiden that descends upon you sounds good and and i was i was making a joke but again we get sanctified when we do a mitzvah we just the yacht wants us to not realize what that means and what's going on and i made a joke i have there's a doctor of a good friend with dr setzer and i said imagine you know somebody comes into his uh office he says doctor you know i i don't know what's going on me i just became religious recently and i don't know what's happening but he said you're okay is actually i feel pretty good but it's just i feel strange he says well let's take let's take an x-ray take an x-ray he says you've been sanctified he sees him glowing as if here it's a big thing when you do a mitzvah something very deep and spiritual happens so i'd like to suggest that's what he saw okay however that was what was what was happening at that time i was fresh and new so i was not doing the mitzvahs mechanically i was not doing them by rote you hear i didn't have 20 years of making blessings behind me so i was on fire and therefore the fire of the kedusha of the spirituality was right on okay however what if we've been in the game for a while right what do we do then okay that's what i'm hearing that's what i want to tackle that's what klm is all about we want to fire up okay we want to fire up so number one the first thing that these classes are going to hopefully give many these classes are made to do you know what you're doing when you're doing a mitzvah we don't have awareness and that's because the azar is not interested at all i'm sure he is very upset about this class to tell you the truth he is not interested in you having awareness of the profound effects when you do mensa so so number one that's what the classes will be about okay number two how about this here's something up so we have to reorient towards mitzvos how about this we also have to reorient towards hashem okay that's another agenda here i again here's the here's something that's i mean i i'm afraid you're probably going to relate okay and that is that for many rabbi miller makes this point he says for many people where does hashem exist well he's in the sitter he's mentioned in the sitter and in the hamish that's where hashem is no maybe he's here also maybe he's in our lives we we tend to only experience hashem oh hashem somebody i mentioned when i'm praying this is something i mentioned once i'm learning that's not ideal right and we need to work on that okay you know i'm just trying to decide if i should tell you this right now one second give me one second um okay let's make the problem worse you're learning tara and let's say you know how to learn torah and you enjoy learning talk and you're learning torah and when you learn torah you get i mean unbelievably close to god but you might go through the whole time of your learning and not even think of god or be aware he's there very very scary now let me explain something very important especially when you learn gomorrah or any type of tar you need to sink your teeth into the nepheshine says that look build yourself up beforehand but if you're going to do a proper job learning gemara and learning turret you have to focus on that so i'm not coming to say that you should be where's hashem as hashem here while you're doing it but it is a kind of scary you can spend a whole day in yeshiva learning tara and not a thought about hashem very very now this is such an issue by the way that rabbi miller says a victim he wrote a book see there's another thing here here one more one more okay shabbos okay you have a beautiful shabbos right you have it it's you're connecting with the people there you're uh it's singing beautiful singing there's devritara right and if you were to count the guests right so we have right now we have six right so you come to guess would you count hashem he's also present and chavez is all about encountering the presence of hashem but we could pass through hashabas in a beautiful way and still not be aware of him and it don't feel bad don't feel bad that's not my aim my aim is to let you realize that the ate sahara wants us unaware because he knows how incredible it is if we make that connection okay so we're gonna lay it down it's very dangerous when you're reckoning with the it's heads a little bit we're going to try and work on this okay so we're going to first work on connection to mitzvahs secondly hashem being aware of his presence okay i you know right now the hottest thing maybe you'll tell me i'm not so in on everything but mindfulness is huge correct i think mindfulness is a huge movement i have a proof okay with um i had a mentor a management professor at top business school right and i couldn't believe what he told me i just reconnected with him he goes you know we're working on mindfulness in management i couldn't believe it they're training managers to be mindful you know and by the way it makes a ton of sense it really makes sense to learn to not like just get trigger and go in another place and it it's almost like they're learning muscle and developing their character traits from it's incredible right so mindfulness is a big thing right however this is what's beautiful you we're also lucky to be in tara and everything where the world finishes off we just begin okay their goal is to be present in the moment our goal is to be present in the presence of hashem you here that's what we're that's what we want to work on that's it and it's not just about the world to come okay but that brings me to another thing we need to work on okay but this is just an overview don't get overwhelmed by the overdue but we're again before we even get to the mitzvah of klm cavanaugh missus we have to appreciate what mixes are we have to connect to hashem and we also have to think about hola maba the world to come okay is it important is it important to think about it well if you ask the author the most famous muslim safer in recent times messiahs isharim he opens up he says your obligation in the world is to recognize and convince yourself of how important it is to aim for connecting to god in the world to come okay big he calls it a foundation so it is so again interestingly enough but not so surprising because of our good old enemy right it's all right not so surprising uh who thinks about religious people rabbi miller reverend miller is making this come he's observing he says religious people who thinks about it right so that's another thing that i want to focus on in these classes is i want us to connect to that it's a foundation how good is a building without a foundation so if it's important and by the way we're going to go step by step but all this can be very reviving uh okay good we're finally ready to uh start uh talking about kavanagh limitless okay we talked about mitzvas we talked about hashem and we talked about the world to come now the cabanas so let me tell you this rabbi in his introduction he said interestingly enough again i've been learning many years and halakha and all these things but there's certain things you just passed by he he asked people you know do you have cavanaugh when you do mess with when i say kavanaugh i don't mean like in prayer where you're really focused in on what you're doing in conscious that that's great but i'm talking about before you do a mitzvah do you have in mind i'm doing the myths of hessid by giving rabbi robert a glass of water right so do you um do you have in mind the message so he asked people do you have in mind uh do you have cabanas so they said sure from mcgillis esther okay and uh chris chris yeah chris mcgill and the blowing the chauffeur why because the gabby goes okay everyone be sure to have in mind that baltic is going to do go to your obligation in the balcory with the create right right so people do because they're told to so then he said yes he did further interview he said anybody else do you have kavanagh pass that so some people god bless uh miraculous muslim benching very important to do that and krishma okay so those are all very important but he and so he to himself maybe it's not that big a deal he considered it because that's mostly what people were doing but he did intense research in the halakhas and found that lo and behold you're supposed to have govana for all your misses you do everything you hear so it's a big topic i mean and it's amazing but what's so beautiful about it you know by the way does the shim love us i think so how many mitzvahs did he give the non-jews seven how many did give us six is six thirteen was he trying to overwhelm us when i'd be rafi this is your kind of question when i be more successful give me seven let me do them well why is he giving us 613 okay the moral explains hashem wants to create a link and a connection with you in every possible manner it's for our benefit it's i mean also it's great to be connecting in every possible dimension okay so that's the thing is it's all mitzvahs even mrs rabon in and we can talk about uh los angeles etc there's a world there but i just want to tell you it's for real now so let's practice what i'm preaching okay now uh the people in this room and i want the people who are watching this video let's have kimono for what we're doing right now what are we doing right now we're learning tara okay now the truth is you may say to me well i covered that with my beard tara right my blessing on the torah the rabbi garfinkel understands from the vera that's still not ideal okay that we we infer that okay you had some kibana but ideally every time you learn torah before you start the session i have in mind the mitzvot learning torah so ready i i came a little ackerman him h i am him have in mind the mitzvah of learning tara okay i assure you you may not feel anything right this moment but you just upped the game incredibly incredibly another mitzvah to have in mind okay have in mind the mitzvah to have cabana for mitzvahs okay now where is that where's the source that you should have cabana from mincemas okay rhetorical for right now in the second paragraph of the krishma okay it says if you listen carefully to my commandments and you love hashem who loved o behold the vulcan and you serve him with all your heart as who a voter should believe i know you're going to say tofila prayer and you're right the the the um the bright there's a price in kindness what's the service of your heart prayer but it says the high autumn that not just prayer kevana for your mitzvahs that's service of your heart i told you if you work on this with me you will become more sincere your heart will be in what you're doing and that's service of the heart says the high autumn okay don't scare you but he says if you don't have kavanagh you've knocked out that message so we're going to focus on the positive but it's a big thing serving hashem with your heart rabbi miller explains what is the heart he insists it means the mind serving hashem with your mind okay however he even goes to safari he he wrote a commentary on duties of the heart right he translated duties of the mind i how come we all associate the heart with feelings the answer is because you're when you're thinking proper thoughts and torah thoughts it should be with your heart you should feel them too okay but it's your mind right so serving your shin with all your mind and heart all your heart so that's that's the source because so right now okay yeah you know what i know i you may not believe me i just told you right now you just added the kavana of learning tara and the cabana tag kavanaugh missus right what happened when you did this okay so there's another book super duper duper life changer called evan miller has anyone heard of that it's by rav shmuel hominer he was a your shami in the early nineteen hundreds i wrote a book called alessa shachar in tefila anyhow this rabbi reveals all the mitzvahs in every portion and it's incredible it does incredible all the things you so you know rev hominer brought this and okay get ready for this right now we're learning tauron right and we're learning torah now in an ideal way because we had kevana and we're doing the mystic lens says the zohar when a person doesn't mitzvah down here the mitzvah appears in the highest realms now listen to this it appears in the highest realms and crowns itself and says before hashem yehudah made me aaron made me isaac made me etc you hear it says i came from asher borac asher that's happening right now do you hear this right now but in a very ideal way the crown is going to look beautiful because you had kevana okay so that's uh so we just started okay now i'm going to share with you where we're close to the end of this introduction what i want you to know is the different uh areas that this applies of having combined that we're going to break down the misses into like three groups okay so first of all there's this is misses you're doing all the time like learning torah right or if you smile at your wife right or your friend if you're warm and you say hello you could be doing hesit because you're making them happy or you've been giving them covet right so we're going to train ourselves to have him in mind have in mind when i'm learning tara hannah then weinman i'm nice to my friend or my wife etc so the first part is just to start training because it's not it's not automatic obviously right i'm just introducing this to maybe you tonight and the the levels of it so just be patient with yourself but realize if you remember just once think about what's going on there's a crown with your name on it okay so the first part is we're going to start becoming uh like gaining consciousness and intervening in our daily activities in our learning and everything and putting in the the i have in mind the midst of learning tarot okay that's part number one part number two uh hashem gave me this morning i think because of the share this idea um let's say you found a kettle and it looks here in yerushalayim right let's say you find an old cow but let's not make it like from the second temple okay but let's say you find it a a kettle and it's in decent condition it's years old right so what are you going to do to see it see its value you're going to take it to be appraised right so i i know i know somebody who is having a hard time marrying off his first child him and his wife so they got an autographed um painting from a fairly famous photographer or artist and they had it appraised and they said you'll be fine with the wedding it was like thousands and thousands of dollars right so here's what i want to tell you there are a lot of things you're doing and if you had them appraised you would find that there's many mitzvahs in within your single mitzvah let me give you an example okay if god forbid uh we hear that somebody needs prayer right you know someone's sick right so we say to him correct so what what mitzvah did we do okay we we did the mid so we're reciting to ellen for a sick person ready but let me appraise this a little further do you know there's a mitzvah says the rambam in in uh tinus hookah's right there's a mitzvah to cry out when people are suffering when jewish people are having a hard time in suffering there's a mitzvah to rise your prayer turns into a torah commandment we think of uh to feel as rabbinic right rambam says once a day it's divisive but okay so ready you say it to hillam hmm him have in mind the misfit to cry out when a jew is in trouble but so they israel you're including him all these people rahman is who need our prayers but that's not only thing if you praise that mitzvah a little further you will see that you're doing the mitzvah of the draft of walking god's ways when you share the pain of a fellow jew you're doing a mitzvah darisa of emulating akatas barcode him have in mind emulating a goddess of you hear this so we're gonna in this series we're gonna expand these myths we're going to get them assessed and appraised and see how much is going on in them okay the third one is really amazing people have heard of the concept of a concept alchemy what alchemy is now this i googled this you know it was a medieval thing this and that so you probably heard what it is you take like base metals and it was some way they would try to turn the base metals into gold and and silver and things like this right so i think it was a mishigas i mean if anyone knows otherwise tell me i don't think it was real but spiritually speaking it's real okay i'll give you an example on the way to this class class okay so i i live in harnoff it's about an hour bus ride so i time to time the bus line in this net to get there i run up to the bus right in time and i forgot my rough cut off okay what can i do it's too late so i said i brought money just in case so i i got a cab and at first i'm not happy about it and they said wait a minute you know what you can do now you can do the mitzvah paying a worker on time now i if you've taken a cab right you pay him at the end correct so mitzvah's srikaz it the half of time brings this in office has it if you have in mind i'm doing the mitzvah too uh not to delay a workers pay and the pay worker on the day right so i just there's a crown up there saying he paid the worker on his time right he's getting sanctified you got i was getting sanctified i was like this is great and not only that not only that thank god i remembered there's another mitzvah and you you've probably heard this but you um we don't think practically when it comes to these opportunities ready the mitzvah of loving hashem with all your resources with all your money so mosey well i i'm in a company of very serious sincere torah people you're spending money all the time what are you doing it on right your kids your friends to learn tara to make a livelihood so you can support a family everything you're doing could be is an expression of i'm my resources my resources are for you hashem and because i love you right sorry guys ah this expensive cab ride boom loving hashem with all my resources and it was all my resources no so anyhow you're here you can turn me you can be an alchemist you take ready ready anyone here uh um is careful to hydrate and drink water uh great healthy food anybody okay all right okay it was more of the water anyhow every effort you make for your health says the kitser shokhan rf is the smartest show safe and take good care of yourselves in fact they asked about heineken if you look both ways when you cross the street yes it's a mystery smart temple of nacho satan why cross the street carefully and not get eternity you hear this why drink why only hydrate and leave it down here as of some tan and lead let's turn it into gold you hear so that's the third category okay so what this series is going to cover is going to try to cover again we're going to try to appreciate what a mitzvah is and what it does to us we're going to try to get closer to hashem we're going to try to think about aluma and then we're going to go we're going to be set free and we're going to start putting him into the picture you're doing it anyway you're already doing it why not let's just bring it to the most beautiful and high place okay i hope you'll join us on this journey [Music] is