Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: 3 Observations of the Pri Tzadik - The Power of Speech (3 Weeks)

[Music] hi everybody it's uh good to see you again uh professional people are coming back in person the hopeful aftermath of corona you can never tell and uh again our share is sponsored today uh for a reform and uh once again uh sadly for the young israel uh then you remember he was the young man that we were praying for for a year and a half tragically he did pass away a few weeks ago and our heart goes out to his parents who have been so generous in their sponsorship of torah and made this sponsorship by elevate his michonne to higher and higher levels in ghanaia we are of course uh in the three weeks we are approaching with kodeshov and although i will be talking about the parsha but i also want to connect it to the three weeks where we prepare to mourn the hormone basambitas and let me start off with really three unrelated observations all of which are made by southampton lublin that is great for the carrey rob savage of lublin one of the greatest deepest most profound thinkers uh has quite a lot about the three weeks and out of all that he says i'm going to take out three short observations one i actually mentioned last week uh he points out that just as pirkey agus tells us that the world stands on three pillars torah avodah the learning of torah divine service by corvanos in prayer and acts of willing kindness those are the positive features and as you know they correspond to the unique tafki nim of the three of us avraham represents the pillar of chesed yitzhak who was a sacrifice uh represents avodah and yaakov who spent 14 years in the yeshiva of shaymineva represents the learning of torah so the same way we have three positive features that build up the world we have three negative destructive forces that undermine holiness and banish god from this earth and they are of course hina jealousy taiva is excessive lust for the sensual and the hedonistic and cuddle is seeking warning uh ego self-advertisement and the light there will be a lazar they take a person out of the world that means of course he loses the world to come and even his life in this world becomes pretty miserable because he's consumed by jealousy and covert and love so rav southik points out that since the whole idea of the three weeks is to rebuild the base on mikdush in our hearts because really the hormone vasa mitosis is just a manifestation of the fact that in our heart and our soul we were not worthy to have a dwelling place for the divine so our job is one of building of construction of making a place for god in our hearts but in order to make a place for god in our hearts we have to get rid of the junk get rid of the garbage clean out to use the uh the famous trump expression although he did not invent it we have to drain this one by the way i used that expression a few weeks ago just as a very general expression and some college students get up and said no i know you're a trumper i'm not going to get into that i'm not going to address that because any time i make the teeniest weeniest political statement i hear from the whole world apparently uh either good or bad or whatever it will be so i'm using draining of the swamp i am not connecting with trump i'm using it to explain what sugar that we have to get rid of and the three weeks against these three destructive attributes of kina in other words these are weeks where we work on middles we work on getting rid of the rough edges of our character we work on being more generous in terms of getting pleasure from the good fortune of other people that's an antidote to inna dina is when i begrudge the good fortune of others and tobayan is the tikka where i get naka petromer once made a very interesting psychological observation he says it is easier this is very interesting think about this uh see if it's true in your own case it is easier to be empathetic in someone's suffering than it is to be happy in someone's good fortune because when someone is suffering i feel sorry for them but at least i'm kind of in a better position i'm looking down at them i don't mean looking down as inferior but you know i'm here they're there so i can be a kindly person i can be a nice person but if somebody is hashem very very successful and flourishing it's a little more difficult for me to kind of be happy in their success and i still remember this is something i remember uh after many many years already uh when my son was in second grade and now he's been in the mid-30s so uh in school there's like a shabbos and he came home one day friday afternoon and he was so excited because he said his friends mayor like one year lord would be the best shabbos and he was so happy and i was thinking to myself i didn't say it says what are you so happy about he didn't you didn't get the award and then i realized it was such a beautiful thing that for his friend to get this honor was just as good as if he got it he was just so happy that his friend got the honor and that's kind of the teaching that's the opposite of the media of jealousy okay and we work on being less involved in the material and of course being less concerned for couples if i could quote then we're going to get even bigger trouble here if i can quote ronald reagan again if not i am not productive conservative president i know i know i know but he once said there is no end to the good that can be accomplished if we don't care who gets credit for it so much good you can do in the world if you know you're not fighting as to who gets the recognition it's a wonderful thing so let's wrap sudok's first observation that the three weeks are about kina taiva color then he makes another observation and the other observation is that you know if you look at the jewish calendar shiva sarbatamas is always the same day as the ninth above obviously they say they have to be three weeks and it happens to be that it's the same day of the week as the first day of pesach a few months before so the first day of pesach is sunday that will be shiva tamas which of course was sunday and that will be the 9th above which will also be something okay this is not a case by the way this is not the case where tissue bugs on shabbos and you and you do the facts on the program this is tissue is actually um a lot of these again maybe other maybe next week you can give a shirt however it's so fascinating because there are two shabbos scenarios one is where the ninth avatar is sunday and the other is where the mind divides and it gets pushed off to somebody and how luckily they're actually treated in different ways but this year it's not a nitra so to speak ishiba is multi-child defenders subject wants to say the following we know when it comes to pesach we have four terms of redemption that are used right that's why we have four cups of wine because there are four stages of redemption quote stacy i took you out it's been selfie i've saved you with alti or i will save you i will redeem you i will take you up to me for a nation connected the four terms of redemption we have four uh cups of wine right we talked about that uh back in the book now the soviet wants to say that the three weeks followed by tisheva correspond to the four terms of redemption in reverse because if before the shogunate of golowat represents progressive steps of closeness to that the three weeks and the ninth about represent movement in the opposite direction and if indeed it is the case that the last lesson is the ultimate kiribati then the last step in this reverse process which is the 9th is the ultimate distance from god so in one hand it's like a mirror image and it's an opposite but in the other hand rub sugar says it is precisely through the distance that we achieve closeness everyone knows the famous saying i think it's from shakespeare absence makes the heart grow fonder and there is a concept that yearning for closeness to god creates a closeness that is sometimes more intense and deep than the state of actual closeness the lovers who are separated and yearning to be reunited actually have a stronger passionate connection than when they're simply there now i remember reading years ago there was a great uh it was a very clutch of a rug in germany in the 19th century a friend of red hirsch mark island or mayor lehmann and romero landon was a very very dedicated love and he was a tom trump and he wrote sloan but in addition in order to speak to the youth of the time he actually wrote novels he wrote novels with a jewish religious content so kids could have fiction teenagers could have fiction to read and they can be introduced to torah ideas through that medium of pictures so to this very day the novels or the stories of marcus lemon are actually a very good source of reading for religious teenagers and the like so he has a a fictional biography of rabbi yet eva in which he incorporates many begrudging but you know it's a it's a fiction so at some point he has a vignette about rabiativa's future wife rochelle and i still remember this because it's kind of anachronistic in which the girls are deciding you know what they want to do sunday afternoon apparently there wasn't a lot to do with the house so one of them said why don't we walk over to the base of meat dutch and watch the corvona's interesting people and the other girl said nah they always do the same thing there let's go to the mall and say ah yes the romans had morals like i guess they had that they had balls on the left which means you the car the cargo let's go to the cargo and see what's going on they can make this which means you even when you have a base of you can take it for granted when you yearn when you don't have something so if suduks points out that although the three weeks antishiva is the opposite of the foreign it is also a way of getting close to god in the 1970s i don't know if you remember this historically we just celebrated uh commemorated the raid on integrity uh that was the eighth that was the area where there were a lot of hijackings and planes and the light again and one very famous hijacking uh rough whitner david dileador was actually uh one of the one of the passengers the whole plane was eventually released this was not a heavy it was something else a different different hijacking uh but when you're putting your main away somebody asked him is there anything you miss about foot floors and he said yeah the one thing i missed about khutslawareth is the yearning to come to israel it's an interesting thought because when you're in households and you really want to come direct israel you're yearning you're dreaming you're waiting for the moment you'll be able to come you can almost taste the land being connected to the conditions and you think about it day and night and you're waiting once you come here so never you know you get involved in some of the harassment of everyday life and you don't always feel we don't always feel the privilege and the success and the honor meaning sometimes the closeness of absence can be very very powerful therefore these are closeness through awareness of this that's why soda correlates the three weeks tish above to the four of the show notes of externally they are the opposite presence but spiritually it is a mechanism of redemption by giving us a sense of distance and separation okay that is the second observation about southern ranks the third observation introduction the main thing i'm going to talk about that if you look at the three-half terrorists we have three hundred terrorists before tissue that are called the have terrorists of paronys the terrorists of tragedy of catastrophe remember they'll be followed by seven of tyrants of comfort they take us all the way to rosh hashanah but before before they have terrorism comfort which is after the ninth above shall we stop alone we have the three of terrorists of courageousness joseph says let's just look at the first words of each of the three halftimers the first tough timer that we actually read last week is chapter one of say their year leo and chapter one says did rey hear me oh the words of your beyond the third this week is chapter 2 of your video you always of course the prophet of the quran and it's a shiva devotional hear the words of hashem and then they have torah right before kishiba which is hero of israel is not from yumiyo it's from yeshayo who is largely the prophet of comfort but chapter one of yeshayoko is a vision of korban and that begins with kazon the vision of isaiah that is why that shabbos before tijuana is called so look at when each thing is being identified have terror number one is about divorce speech how terror number two is about shamia hearing number three is about division c we have to be misake in all of these ways that we interact with the world first we have to work on our speech right we have tendencies to be negative we have tendencies to save our we have tendencies to embarrass to humiliate to express anger so step number one is speak no evil work on your mouth work on your tongue but this is very important is essentially a short-term strategy like that i mean the following time now hashem in recent years there's been a lot of awareness in the religious community about the ocean horror we have mainly among women men and women that don't care about men don't care about it quite as much that's that is selfish and hard so i apologize uh but there is a big awareness that we have to guard our tongue so if you ask most people what is lesnar about do people go well controlling your speech but here's the thing in the long term that's actually not true because if you're filled with negative thoughts and you're filled with anger and you're filled with resentment but your message is i'm not gonna communicate all of the hatred and negativity i feel about other people well eventually like a pressure cooker you're going to explode so the real solution to lashinhara on the long term basis is not about controlling your tongue but it's about changing your perception of reality so you start with controlling your mouth even if i feel negative and angry about people i'll bite my lip for a while and hold it in but that's short-term you then have to kind of control the input to control what you're hearing and reading about people about shamia but the real tika is change how you view people look at them in a good way understand that even if people are difficult and even if people are negative and even if people are behaving in ways that are not proper often that's a result of the pain that they themselves suffered how does the saying go hurts people hurt with moshe curtivera the great great macabre the great novelist before the aretha wrote a lovely book a book that everybody should learn at some time in their life and more than once this is tomer devorah which is about emulating the ways of god of kindness of mercy of compassion it's a kabbalistic work i would call it a light lighter kabbalah it's not heavy very difficult to vote but it is based on someone but it's a book of kabbalistic epic and it's a very very sweet book in many ways and one of the practical advice that he gives you in the book the very fascinating advice that sounds like contemporary is that when you're dealing with difficult people try to imagine them try to reset the quality to when they were children or babies because after all most babies are cute most babies are adorable maybe not everybody but you know most of the time so now i have this difficult harassable adult who's mean and cruel you know i'm not talking about the hitlers but what does any people we need in our lives that you know just are not nice and we resent them we don't like them we want to disperse them but at some point they must have been babies and when they were babies they must have been cute so what happened to take a cute adorable baby and turn them into the bomb that you're dealing with now something must have happened and then what what rivera says when you think about that instead of being angry you're actually filled with compassion for how did a beautiful person become so crystal it doesn't mean you ignore that they might be twisted but it's a different perspective people are proud of hurts of abuses of difficulties in their life and then you can look at them in a very different way and you don't want to disparage them anymore because once you have rakham in for somebody like you just lose the interest in putting them why should i take a person when he's already down right these are like mental exercises that helps and that's why we go from corrupting your speech and you're hearing about people to ultimately and that's why i've said many many times that the ultimate cure so to speak in harder is not controlling your speech it is changing your perception of reality and to understand that people go through many many things that we're not really aware of we only know the tip of an icebreaker that's that's why they the commentary says that shalom and shalem are connected shalom in hebrew of words means peace shalem means holiness completion and a simple level of course whether shalom there is called this but some add a little twist and that is when you know the whole story when you have the whole story then there's going to be peace because then you understand what people are going through okay when you don't know the whole story there will be anger there will be anchor there will be resentment but when there's challenge there will be shalom okay so these are three observations that ravsono makes about the three weeks one is it is a tikkun for tina taiva the other is the three weeks plus tish above is a reversal of the four on the shall note of gohula of pesach but through that reversal you actually achieve a redemption it's a redemption to awareness of distance and the third idea is that the three weeks are equal for divorce speech shamia hearing and perception of reality as echoed in the three titles of the haftaros for the shogu with three health terrorists of tragedy of catastrophe by the way i'll just make a little observation uh again it's not going to be our subject now we'll talk about it afterwards above you will notice that we have three half terrorists of tragedy and catastrophe and we have seven comforts that terrorism comfort are more than double the terrorists of tragedy and that really shows us what hashem ultimately wants to emphasize that with all of our tragedy all of our servants all of the things that we deserve because of our awareness and the life still it is god's ultimate deepest desire to give us comfort and he comforts us twice as much a little bit more than twice as much uh the punishments that he brings upon us uh because of our because of our abuse so what i want to talk about today are these three things that we got to fix we got to fix our speech we got to fix our hearing what we're listening to and we have to change our perception i want to talk about the power of speech because the power of speech is very very pronounced in this parsha as rory posted said this parsha deals with the laws of vows the laws of darim and the dharim whether it's wealth technically there are two different things there's a neder and there is a shabua a person could make in english would translate another as a vow and we translate as an oath and that's probably not a meaningful distinction to know so mr lara says basically that these are two ways that a person could impose a voluntary restriction on themselves uh let's assume that uh like you say uh between men or lemons method they want to keep away from chocolate but chocolate is just too powerful too powerful that ends up voluntarily keep away from chocolate but a person has to keep away from chocolate so theoretically they could create a situation where chocolate becomes the equivalent of hazard and they can do it in two linguistic ways one is i make an oath a shabuah that i will not eat chocolate and at that point there's an issue to orissa of eating the chocolate so a shibuya is i will not eat chocolate the nedaire is expressed in a different way chocolate is forbidden to me for our purposes we don't need to know why the torah has these two different formulations but the bottom line is both formulations are philosophically binding under prison again there are rules that a husband get annoyed about a father might be able to know the vow and of course anybody can go to the baked in and then all the valve that's hot rastadaram but until that procedure is undertaken the neder or the shibuya is binding now if you think about this this is a remarkable illustration of the power of speech because normally we assume only god can create the category of something being forbidden god decrees hazard is forbidden god decrees matzah must be eaten the first night of pesach god decrees most fruits are permitted in other words it's god that gives the toeic it's god that creates what is up and what is water how do i as a human being have the power to create new prohibitions in many many ways the whole idea of or shibuya where i create prohibitions is actually a god-like function in which god recognizes my power to create new programs yeah the one who emphasized this if i made a netter that apples are forbidden to me or if i made a shibuya that i will not eat an apple whatever it would be that is as forbidden as a piece of bacon it is straight i could get lashes i would be punished for it they're very severity it's like that's how he was saying it could be a controversial that for the sin of not keeping vows and oats then god forbid god even visits the punishment on children exactly children might be punished for the parental sin of not keeping valve no that is why by the way cause i'll actually very much discourage you know if chocolate is too much for you uh find another way to do it uh you know get yourself a coach or a buddy don't make a vow or not because as mellick says in the book of coelus better not to make a vow than to make a vow that you might break okay so we very much discourage the vows and notes but if the person made them they're violent so in many many ways nidharian exemplifies the idea exemplify the idea that speech is very powerful speech creates realities speech creates a situation and of course in a more general sense is a very famous verse in proverbs death and life are in the tongue the tongue creates death and life the bedrush illustrates this with a humorous story the membership illustrates that all the limbs were once debating among themselves who's the most important part of the body you know the heart the brain the hands the feet they all said without me can't do anything so finally the tongue says i'm the most important of all so people left not people these limbs i don't know how they're talking about the limbs laughed every time they said you don't even have a backbone you don't have a bone in your bodies obviously you're just uh you lie down what can you do you're ineffectual you don't do anything at all so the tongue said i'll show you that i'm the most powerful now apparently this person that had all of these limbs was a servant to the king and the king asked for some milk and the servant said i'll bring you the milk of a dog which is very disrespectful for me to say so the king was so shocked at this foots but the king said off with his head kill this man he has such effort so now all the limbs were telling the tongue what did you do you're going to get us killed the time said yeah i could get you killed and i'll get you out of it and the tongue started explaining oh you know when i said dog in my native language dog means hero dog means a great person i'm sadly i reverted to my old language but the word in your language that dog is really the highest term and the king said oh now i understand of course and you can't cancel it so the tongue says to the other limbs you see i can get you killed and i can get you saved and certainly that's very very true a person or a person says can get them killed what a person says can get them saved right you can actually try this by going to a certain neighborhood and saying certain things you get killed certainly to get safe but in a more general sense when roman number talks about death and life in the hands of the tongue you know death in life doesn't just mean physically killing somebody you know your words can kill somebody you can break somebody's spirit you humiliate them you take away their desire to live you take away their sense that they're valued human beings our words can break people and our words can build people up give them encouragement give them strength give them hope give them courage give them a sense that they matter to somebody think about this death and life are in the hands of the time our words can give people life and our words can destroy it and that creates a certain responsibility but how we use our words how we use our words try to use words to build up certainly with your parents obviously this is what you need to do with your kids that doesn't mean no discipline of course there has to be discipline of course there has to be structure a parent that does not discipline is not showing love to the child they're showing indifference so i'm not advocating you know a disciplinary matter but ultimately our words need to be words of encouragement right of validation lead people up that's the way we relate to our kids that's the way we relate to our spouses if you're a teacher that's the way you relate to your students and really that's the way we really should we should relate to our friends and everybody becoming content use our speech to build up and not to destroy because speech is like nuclear energy nuclear energy has numerous beneficial uses and nuclear energy can also create an atom that destroys and destroy the world words are very much the same thing so that's one thing to think about the power of speech as an instrument of good and the power of speech as something that can be very very destructive you know the old saying that our parents might have told us sticks and stones may break my bodies but names will never hurt me is actually not true it really is not true in in in many ways it may be the opposite sticks and stones may break their bones but the bones heal the bones usually nothing you know everything but the typical childhood accident the bones are going to heal but some of the hurt some of the pain that we get from hurtful words may never go away and it's very very scary i think i mentioned this uh a few months ago i remember hearing an interview with richard nixon and richard nixon went through quite a lot in his life well the country went along with him too on a lot of the now in many ways uh nixon was over the good president for israel again i don't know why i'm getting myself in politics gotta pull that okay uh but the one thing i want to point out is that uh but the thing i remember about richard nixon's interview was that you know here's a guy who went through a scandal he resigned the presidency i mean big big things up and he couldn't get out of talking about sixth grade insults that he got into flavor you know you never get over that which means a lot of decisions that world leaders are making are to some degree influenced by things that happened when they were 12 years old or younger that's pretty scary that creates a big responsibility of the kids of the flavor you know who knows what's going on right so those words can have a very very powerful powerful effect now let me mention uh this week we have a double question i remember michael you know i think he did delorean has always got that so i'm going to mention something from the second part which also relates to the power of speech and that is the power of prayer prayer are the words because the words have to be connected to the heart and prayer has an enormous power and we see this in some very odd corners at the end of precious masa we talk about the ear mic lights now the year of is the city of refuge what is the institution that if somebody kills in that work we would call it manslaughter i don't mean an accident if it's a pure unavoidable accident there's no punishment at all but if you unintentionally killed somebody by careless behavior you didn't stop at a stop sign or you were throwing rocks out of your apartment and you didn't look at who was there so it's unintentional so you don't get the death penalty but there was a certain culpability because you repair you think enough about what you're doing so the torah has a very interesting punishment that if you go to a city of refuge and you remain in that city it's a very indeterminate sentence until the co-a godzilla dies that could be one day but that could be the rest of your life an unknown second and then when the calling that all dies you get released but if you leave the arabic lands before your sentence is up then go el haddam a relative of the deceased has permission to kill you so you could imagine in some of these scenarios waiting outside of the year mclennan that if you decide to take a walk or whatever it would be technically you happen to come technically you have a radius of 2 000 ammos from the city in which you're still very protected though if you walk 2001 almost beyond the city boundary you can be killed now the mission of the air force says the following the mission says the very fascinating thing it says that the mothers of gohanim bidolin used to visit the murderers in the army neglect and bring them care packages bring them food packages in order that the murderers maybe i should call the murderers but the people who are guilty of an homicide should not pray to god that the covering government without meaning if you're in the him and black you're kind of hoping the coming god is going to die because when he dies you go home so in order that they shouldn't pray the mothers of the gohan of godelwood would bribe them with food so the implication of that mishna is that if they would pray the prayer would be efficacious that's why they need to be right so both the bodily and the you shall me ask the question why would the prayer be efficacious the calling guido didn't do anything wrong why would he be vulnerable to the prayer of the rosa the kaleen gundle did not do anything wrong what would make him vulnerable now this is a tiny bit complicated this question is asked both by the bible the babylonian talmud and the rochelle me but a different answer is here the question is why is the calling goddamn all vulnerable to the prayer of the rosseac the calling guttal is an innocent party that's the question the babylonian talmud's answer is the colleen guttel is not an innocent life the calling god only is culpable in the unintentional homicides that take place under his watch because he's the spiritual leader and why is he comfortable he should have prayed to god better that these tragedies should not happen under his wake his failure to pray for the generation makes him culpable for what happened in that generation and therefore he is vulnerable to the prayers of the roach now let's think about that a little bit how god all could have prayed that these calamities shouldn't take place now let's think about that for a moment because i'll say how kobe deshamaya everything is in the hands of heaven except the decision to serve god now a person can pray there shouldn't be a tsunami there shouldn't be a hurricane because those are after god but can i pray that somebody shouldn't desecrate the shabbos that somebody should keep kosher that somebody should do chewing on one level one would say you can't pray that i can't pray that my brother should do chuba or my neighbors should do chuba because cuba is not from god becomes surreal that's a kobe de shamay and puts me a restaurant everything in the hands of heaven except the decision of your god now given the fact that in order for a rhodesia to go to near midland the rosea must have decided to be careless and indifferent not to look at the red you know red light not to look around not to stop at the stop sign and therefore his heel the gullet is a is a result of his carelessness and powerlessness and indifference how could the cohen god all pray that he should not be callous and indifferent would that not be an interference with free will right and yet the bodily takes the position that the calling gunner could have stopped this by prayer so there are two possible answers the kazinich actually says from here a very amazing thing that the power of prayer is so great that it can overcome free will i can pray that a person should be true i can pray that a person should be righteous i can pray that they should be more careful in their behavior because even though as a general rule these decisions are made by free will tiffina can overcome even free will and indeed the husband brings arya from a very famous kamara that i know you know and maybe you're thinking of that is if you remember rabbi mayer had enemies and he wanted to pray that his enemies should get destroyed and his wife rory gloria said instead of praying that they should be destroyed you should pray that they should repent and become righteous because king david said let sins perish and not sin wait a second i can pray that somebody does truma that's not up to god that's up to them because you see from that gemara that indeed tephila can even override the fundamental principle of freeway now not everybody agrees with this with this teaching this is a very controversial teaching some say you cannot directly pray that somebody does do july but you can pray that god put into their life inspirational experiences which will be conducive to leading them the truth in other words that's a different thing in other words i can't according to if you're calling i cannot pray that god should make somebody do treatment that's a contradiction to free will but i can pray god please let them meet people let them have experiences that will inspire them and that's what brewery means as well now with the calling gunner we have the same issue according to the kaizen ish the cohen gunnel for that prey that god will make the guy more careful that's how the question is if you don't accept the husband you would say the following god is not going to change a person's carelessness or recklessness but god could protect the victim from being in his proximity in other words instead of changing the guy that says yeah that guy's going to go going to go through a red light god is not going to control that but that could determine if the victim is going to be right but either way what you see from the bodily is the colleen goggle has culpability because he could have prayed to avert the tragedy that's the problem probably the talmud you shot me they asked the same question and the same question is why is the coloring gun vulnerable to the prayers of the roadster he didn't do anything wrong so the bodily's answer is he did something wrong the xiaomi's answer is maybe this is even more scary that the power of tephila is so great that if it is given with true kavanaugh it can even hurt an undeserving a person who doesn't deserve a negative consequence meaning it can even work against the innocent now this is very hard for us to understand but according to this sincere prayer beloved shalom will be accepted even from an unworthy person with a nefarious scheme in mind if it's sincere in fact that's why they said but say that the care packages may not have stopped the weather they would filter but they would no longer be praying to 100 devotion that's enough to take it away this actually has some relevance with respect to arabs and terrorism it's a very difficult idea it's an idea of a dark spiritual energy and that's why indeed the vinay ishmael is the most dangerous of all of our enemies because of the physical force the navy smile comes with a certain kawak of prayer and if that prayer is beloved shall then it can have some efficacy in the world this is what the ushana says and that is why ultimately we defeat the ishmael primarily by spiritual nature we need an army we need the police very shortly but the truth of the matter is if you think about it cannot be defeated solely by physical needs because it's very simple it's one thing to say we'll fight an army and we'll stop an army but when you have people who are driving cars and if you have people in the one to one and they're driving right where i live i live in shemin at sadiq where the light rail stops you remember two or three years ago uh there were people who arabs were driving cars and the people who were waiting and stuff now how are you going to stop that you can put as many police as you want if someone some crazy guy wants to turn his car into a crowd of people you cannot stop that i mean every time you cross the street you face that every time you cross the street you face those psychos in other words the threat of binay ishmael cannot be fully addressed by military needs element because they come with a spiritual power we defeat them only by a spiritual body so what's interesting is that both from the bob lee and the you shall meet you see the kawak of prayer but from different perspectives from the vatican you see the colossal prayer can even affect the autonomous free will of people from the yucatan you see the sum of others that even the prayer of the unworthy when offered believe shalom can have a certain effect and call the quran therefore the prayer of someone who tries to be righteous that's an amazing thing that the prayer of the unworthy if it's truly heartfelt has a certain power tomorrow that says that every ghana before they rob a house they pray to god may i be successful if i offer a prayer to my friend may i be successful in my endeavors okay so once again the power of words the power of prayer the power of vows these are pronounced thieves in these mercies let me share with you an interesting demonic conduction the guard conduction gives a story that again it's difficult to understand in many many ways you can mark conduction lines a certain city that was being terrorized by a seven-headed demon a monster yes on the focus there the rambam famously says no such thing as demons and any reference and shival to demons is only a metaphor for enemies whatever it would be and the rambam said demons no such thing the ville nagon writes on the number that the rambam was led astray by these preoccupations with the accursed greek philosophy and of course there are demons just because the rambo was a rationalist doesn't make him right someone once asked the custer rebbe are there demons no they're not people the kutsuki rebbe said of course there are demons but once the rambam passage they don't exist even the demons have to listen to around them that's why we don't see them today the demons also have to follow the round dogs so again this is a discussion for another time are there or they're not but i just want to tell you the story because the story illustrates a certain time so that the story goes that the town was terrorized by venus and people were afraid to walk in the street so albania came up with an idea i tell you what the demon lived in a certain abandoned building i'll tell you what there's this great rabbi coming to town and he needs lodging for the night and everybody should decide not to give him any logic so he's going to have to sleep in that abandoned building we're not going to tell him what lives there and don't take care of the demon so the rabbi comes to town he needs a place to stay everybody says don't have room so the rabbi figures there's any place he could stay with his abandoned building not knowing there's a demon and as he goes to sleep all of a sudden this demon comes to terrorize the killer and the rabbi utter utters one tefila and one head gets severed and the other two or the other gets heaven and the seven heads gets severed and he kills the demon the next morning he goes over to obama and says how could you put me in this danger i could have been killed there so abaya says what do you mean i knew you're so righteous i knew you would kill the demon you were not in danger at all because i knew you could handle it so the marshal asks the following question let's assume that abaya is so confident in this man's righteousness that abaya felt it wasn't even a dangerous situation for him let's make that assumption rabbi said i knew he was safe because he's attacked but there's a problem there's a teaching that says that if god does miracles for you in this world it comes out of your allah meaning if god gives you earthly rewards god gives you money or health that's a gift of hashem that's kashmiris that's material that does not take away your allah but when god does something that's supernatural that's beyond the laws of nature that's otherworldly that comes out of you so marshall asked akasha even if avaya was absolutely confident that the person would survive this ordeal he's taking away part of his what gives him the right to do that because anyone who benefits from miracles that comes out of the over my blood that's an advance on your obamacare so the marshawn's answer is that the idea that if you benefit from a miracle you lose your allah are only miracles that happen not through prayer but when a miracle happens through prayer that is not called a miracle that is called nature the color of tequila is built into the natural world and therefore that's not called nana mimei and therefore he didn't lose any overwhelming so it's reminiscent of a famous story now this story i will hasten to add is probably apocrypha so don't send me an email about the story has been documented false i acknowledge it is probably an apocryphal story but it is a story that is said and that is when miguel ready was a smuggled man republic right he was kind of miraculously saved from the warsaw and he was smuggled out of poland so the story goes that he was brought to england because that part of the case some say there was no evidence me just tell you the story and winston churchill heard that a holy rabbi was in london he wanted to speak to the guerrilla ready to an interpreter obviously wherever he was by the way this reminds me of another story which might also be a microphone that is there's a famous british jewish philosopher isaiah berlin very very famous intellectual and then of course there's the famous american composer irving women jewish guy grew up like christmas but jewish guy very uh god bless america serving berlin and everybody was also involved in some of the warriors winston churchill very much wanted to talk to isaiah berlin about ideas cetera and the taurus like council of arkansas they run in birmingham and they spoke for around half an hour and churchill said you know a very nice guy but i just didn't really think of him as such a philosopher so that was one of the they believe irving uh but here the story goes that he met the guarani and he said to the guarantee you know this is during the battle of britain the bombing etc he said how do we defeat the nazis how do we defeat this power of evil in the world what do we do so the ghetto represent do you want to know the natural way of doing things or the miraculous way of doing it so churchill says tell me about i want to know all of the options so the memory says i'll tell you the miracle the miracle would be that with your army and with your air force and defeat the nazis that would be a supernatural miracle of the greatest man it says what's the natural way of winning you take a book of psalms and you pray to god and that will be the normal way you're going to achieve in something and that's really what the martial is saying that what happens through prayer is considered to be now now i do need to add of course that all of us know that prayers are not always answered in the way that we desire um if i could quote now this is not a republican this is mick jagger like hawaii assume was super liberal his song you don't always get what you want but you get what you need exactly a very profound reflection on spirituality whether intended or not and that is we want all sorts of things and we often convince ourselves that it's not just a is actually a need god has different judgments judgments that we don't always fathom and sometimes even things that we want very desperately are sometimes without from us there are tragedies there are deaths you're dedicated in the memory of the young boy and died tragically i should also add that our hearts still go the victims out florida there are still new victims being uncovered and a lot of people are missing who knows where they are and it doesn't look good but you know sometimes people that they find to uh will be alive so we understand we don't have a polyanis view of prayer we don't go with the idea that if you just pray hard enough you will get the specific thing that you're praying for you know we know that that's not always going to be the case hashem does have bracham and very often prayers are answered but sometimes not but we also have to remember that prayers are answered in different ways sometimes a prayer is answered not that i don't get the tragedy but i get the strength and the courage and the resilience to be able to rebuild and grow from my interest in the famous words of the punisher of when the person asked the puna victor love in yiddish which means why does god not answer the part of israel says you have to read the sentence a little different er edvards niche he answers no that's very different to say god doesn't answer means god ignores me and god doesn't care say he answers no says he listens he deals he decides what is best in this situation in ways that's inscrutable it's not just a semantic game there is no prayer that god ignores but god's answer may not be the answer i want although ultimately it will be the answer i need in ways that i don't always perceive so we're not naive in that way we understand the reality of the world but we also know that prayers work in many many ways the strength to get up in the morning after a tragedy is also a gift for god in the wake of that tragedy itself and so prayer always has that hope whether it gives us the immediate result that we want or not be as if needed this is certainly a time of prayer a prayer with service that the world was facing without the israelites fencing for the binyan bay for the moshiach and may we in these three weeks be sold that they will be turned into days of joy and rejoicing [Music] maybe [Music] is