Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Current Events and the Exodus From Egypt

[Music] okay hi everybody shalom and uh thank you for coming it's good good to see you all and uh today's shir is again the aliyat shama of binyamin israel ben halevi and sevilla bastavid and we hope that all of our learning should elevate their the shamout into the olam ms and in addition a refusal to stephen ben khabar and as always we pray for all of the holy israel inoculated uninoculated covet related non-covet related and those who are healthy should be as rats hashem remain healthy in addition we have an anonymous donor for tonight's class so whoever he or she is or they or family we express our gratitude to them and i guess uh being humble about it there's an extra measure of success as well uh finally uh we're towards the end of the secular year 2021 a difficult year in many ways and the bonnet is closing its fundraising campaign only a few days left much thanks for those who have generously contributed and baruch hashem i am told that ibanez has reached 80 of their goal but we're still 20 shorts and as i've said a number of times you've been has a wonderful wonderful organization that sponsors not only uh shiore torah not just mine their other shirom even tonight uh robbie white wright gabriel before me and also many uh many projects of khased and kirif and it's certainly a worthy organization to support um if you look at the youtube description box uh so under it below that uh the youtube you will see a link to the uh to the fundraising effort as well as on the bonnet website itself so uh those of you who uh are filing taxes and need some type of tax deductible contribution i got to get it in before january 1st for u.s taxes for sure i guess israel works the same way the secular calendar and bizrat hashem you should get the tax deduction as as as well this week is a difficult week in many many ways i i don't want to talk about it that much but i just have to say some words about the great great the tragedies surrounding walder it's really an unbelievable situation i myself have absolutely flabbergasted kai and walter for those you may not know but if you have young children who that you raised in israel you certainly do know which one really one of the most gifted writers of children's books from a religious perspective uh in israel and his books uh had kids talking about their problems their struggles and many many children benefited a tremendous amount from those books he was in fact given awards from the state of israel for his work with children and in more recent years he began to write books for adults as well and he really accomplished a tremendous amount of good but unfortunately uh there apparently was another side and we don't really understand the complexity of the human personality it's really very scary very frightening how side by side with tremendous good and that good should not be denied the good was done there can also be a tremendous potential for evil and whether we attribute the evil to mental illness or addiction or or if the aids are hara you know god only god can decide and there were many many people who were victimized and uh to superimpose tragedy upon tragedy uh walter killed himself uh yesterday committed suicide next to the grave of his son who had died over disease a few years earlier in patartika so where does that leave us it leaves us really in a at least me i can speak for myself in a tremendous state of confusion ambivalence on one hand uh the feeling is you know if these allegations would have remained silent you know he would still be alive today on the other hand there are victims who deserve to have their pain addressed and exposed if that is their choice and of course we have to be concerned for victims of abuse we always have to be concerned for them we have to protect them we have to do what we can to try to be sure that these things will not repeat themselves unfortunately they probably will repeat themselves but at least try to minimize the number of events and this has been a major major issue as you know uh there was an earlier person the founder of xhaka who also did a tremendous amount of good but was also found guilty on some level of various things and he attempted to kill himself and i believe he's kind of in a vegetative state in a hospital so i i'm not sure what to say about this other than you see the tremendous complexity of the human personality in which side by side with good there's a tremendous potential for evil and that's very very frightening pirgiavos tells us do not trust yourself totally until the day of death meaning no matter how great you are all sorts of things can happen that drag you down i've also said before that this also highlights i think to some degree the dangers of charismatic leadership and that is when people are charismatic and they attract people by virtue of the force of their personalities that's a wonderful thing you want to be with a person you want to learn from a person they inspire you but there's a bit of a danger that as we get kind of as a person gets impressed by his own charisma there is an idea that sometimes the rules that apply to everybody else don't have to apply to you so muhammad made that mistake the torah says a per a king is not supposed to have too many horses lest he bring his people down to mitzrayim to accumulate horses says hey i'm smart enough i'm not going to fall into that trap it doesn't apply to me so he started increasing his horses and eventually he sent people down to mitsurai a king is not allowed to have too many wives no more than eighteen lest he become distracted says unable to focus says me the wisest of all people not gonna happen but it happens now the torah sets up a system if you simply follow the shulhanara sexual abuse is almost impossible it's almost impossible you have i mean it is impossible you have the laws of ego you have the laws of megia if you follow those rules just follow the rules like a punch in the head this can never happen at all so how does it be that a rabbi a great person a person of accomplishment how does it be that that this even happens the answer is well again i mean it's much more complicated but one of the answers is the person says you know these are for lowly people you know who are like animals this is not for me i'm a saint i'm a great person shalom made that mistake and then what happens is as great as you are you don't follow the boundaries it's not just a minor thing i didn't follow the boundary i had yielded with somebody but it gets you know worse and worse and worse until you're in a situation over which you have no control so one of the lessons is that halacha is a wise system and is not only a system for average people a luck is a system that that even you know people of exceptional ability and talent that maybe especially people of exceptional ability and talent have to have to keep because once you break down the boundaries even if you think all you're doing is i'm sitting alone with a with a person you never know where that's going to take you things go out of control so i you know i don't know i don't know any more than anyone else knows about about this complexity of the situation but all i know is that i i do feel very very strongly that a person's life has to be seen in a totality there is good there is bad the bad does not cancel out the good just as the good does not cancel out the bad there's a total picture here he did a lot of good a lot of good and that good shouldn't go away and that good shouldn't be destroyed that's why i tell people people ask me should we throw out the books that it's one thing not to market new books that might be an issue should we throw out the books from our shelves and my feeling is if your kids benefit from those books why throw them out and in fact uh walter left a suicide note i don't know if you saw they're not really a heart-wrenching note he said that even if you lost faith in me the books every line in the book i wrote to help people who knows who knows i happened i happen to believe that because i believe the eighth over the age of harvest says there is a good in a person and they bat in a person and this is a real real tragedy this is the greek tragedy i'll borrow the metaphor for the torah the greek tragedy is not when a building falls on you that's you know that's sad a greek tragedy is when a great person is destroyed because of a flaw that is within them they are destroyed from within that is tragic that is truly truly tragedy and therefore this whole story is tragedy tragedy for the victims tragedy for walder tragedy for his family and tragedy for the jewish people in all these ways so i just needed to see even though it's not i'm not giving a whole talk in this but i needed to say something about it because it's something that's uh very much heavily on my heart you know um in 1999 i had a sabbatical in eric israel i was living in florence but i took up a year and my son was 12 years old at the time and it was not an easy year for him to kind of move you know from america territorial was not an automatic adjustment and one of the things that got him through the ear was high and welder's books so i can't i just can't say i'm going to throw them out they were something that was very very important in the life of my son but as they say uh the victims have to be a major major priority as well and they need healing and the truth of the matter is uh the suicide is also a trauma for the victims in an indirect way because the victims might associate and again it's obviously not their fault they did what they had to do but psychologically they might associate his death with their reporting it so i imagine that in addition to the abuse they will need counseling and therapy over the fact that they might again erroneously god forbid that erroneously attribute his death to uh to what they did and have guilt over that so so if you want to be harsh you could say that this is an extra act of abuse against victims of abuse by making them feel that they were responsible so the tragedies are so interlinked and so multi-layered that is just a very very very sad situation and uh maya karishboku bring healing to all that we're afflicted and all that we're suffering uh because of this uh multi-leveled tragedy okay so now we go back to what uh our indian and our subject is of course you'd see us misrayam and the parshas foreign has the bulk of the ten plagues seven flags are in this parsha the last three plagues are in the next parsha and that's when they go out of mitzrayim and the general idea of the ten plagues is a very perplexing idea it's like god gives moshe a mission and then he tells moshe and you know you're gonna fail i'm telling you ahead of time i'm telling you ahead of time that para was going to say no and no and no and no and i'm going to keep on bringing the marcos but at the end of the day you know you're going to win but there's going to be a lot of no's in order that i can do my marcos now the question is like what's the point if god wants to take the jews out of egypt so let him take the jews out of egypt why does he have to have a system where pyro is set up to say no so obviously you see very very clearly that if we ask ourselves what is the purpose of the plagues the purpose of the plagues is not to get the jews out of egypt if god's only agenda was to get the jews out of egypt he could have done it in a million ways and he could have done it right away it didn't have to take a whole year rather it's very very clear from the hamish itself and this is not even that the purpose of the plagues in addition to getting the jews out of egypt is to establish god's mastery over the universe and that is a lesson both to the egyptians and mainly actually to the jewish people that they should see that god is the architect of the universe he is the master of heaven and earth he has absolute control over the natural forces of the universe and he even has control over the will of man and that gets us into hardening pyro's heart that as maimonides says hashem wants to show that human beings can be like puppets or marionettes in the hand of god he can make them say no he can make him say yes he can simply override their will at every single point so this is a again it's a simple point but that's an important point the purpose of the macos was not to get the jews out of egypt the purpose of the marcos was to demonstrate god's total mastery and control both over the universe and over the human will now that does raise of course the fundamental theological question of the fairness of it because uh if god says god hardened pyro's heart god hardens pyrosarc and paro said no now that implies that without that explicit divine hardening of the heart pyro would have said yes at an earlier point but god wanted power to say no so he can keep on giving marcos and marcos and marcos and marcos so the obvious question is where is the fairness in that i mean after all maimonides the rambam in shuba addresses the fundamental question of free will right free will is a very powerful idea in judaism that even though god decrees if you'll be rich or poor tall or short intelligent not intelligent but the decision to be righteous or evil is your decision god does not decide that that's called bachira and the rambam argues that the proof of the idea of bhakhira khafshit is the idea of reward and punishment because if we believe that god rewards goodness either in this world or the next world it's not important how that works but if we believe there's ultimately a reward for goodness and there's ultimately a punishment for evil again this world next world whatever it is how can there be reward if i'm pre-programmed to behave a certain way and how can there be accountability i was programmed i'm a machine right you're not going to beat your car we might do it out of anger but the generally if my car doesn't work i'm not going to beat it because there was no moral decision so the rambam says the whole idea of reward and punishment presupposes moral responsibility and moral responsibility can exist only when there's free will that's the famous rama of the rama even says in almost a hyperbolic way every person can be as righteous as moshe that's a pretty strong statement and as evil as yerevan ben devos the first king of the ten tribes god does not decree who will be righteous and who will be evil that is our decision we are masters not of our fate necessarily but we are masters of our moral condition and how we choose to live so the rambam then raises the obvious question so how can god harden pyro's heart hardening paro's heart means god is directly interfering with the volition that pyro otherwise would have had the implication is that had god left him alone pyro would have let them go after we don't know exactly when but we'll see about that in a moment he wouldn't let them go earlier but since god wants to do this and that and that and that to show his might he says i'm not going to let him give in i'm going to make him say no so i can hit him again and again and again and again where is the morality of that and where is the idea of bakira free will how does god take away free will so this was a question that actually bothered the rambam a lot and the proof that it bothers the rambam a lot is because the rambam addresses it in several places so you can see that there were certain types of questions the rambam keeps on coming back to because they bothered him because the rambam is a very big proponent of free will autonomy he considers that to be a cornerstone of theology as opposed to pre-determination we know that certain christian groups like the calvinists believe that a person's virtue or vice was predetermined but the truth is in the rambam's time there were islamic philosophers the al-muhadis who believe the same way and the rambam was actually addressing many jews who were following some of those islamic teachings and the rambam gives the following answer it's an interesting answer the rambam makes the point that we know that god has a system of punishment for people who deviate from his ways and those punishments can take many many forms there can be a punishment of death there can be a punishment of illness we're not saying that's the only reason these things happen but they can happen because of that there can be a punishment of loss of function a person could lose an arm and i and it's hard for us to know exactly why god chooses one medium of punishment over another but we understand that a certain amount of suffering or death is attributable again this is not the exclusive reason please don't don't misunderstand me or the rambam but it is understood that there is a punishment system in place so here's the rambam the same way a divine punishment may take the form of a loss of an arm or the loss of an eye it may take the form of a loss of free will because free will after all is a faculty of a human being and god may take it away as a punishment for repeated volitional violations of his will and here the ramban points out that the phrase god hardens pyro's heart only appears in the latter plagues the last five plagues in the first five plagues the language of the torah is paro hardened his own heart so in other words the rambam says that when paro hardened his heart over and over and over again and refused he and his nation and refused to listen to god his punishment was he lost the capacity of free will and therefore the punishments that came for the last five marcos were not because he said no then at that point he was beyond the point of no return the punishments of the last five were because of the defiance of the first five in which god took away his ability to do cuba because otherwise he would have done shiva he would have got not of the punishment that was coming to him so god took away the pathway of chuva as a punishment for the first five right this is the rambam's famous thesis and the rambam was proud of this idea that the rambam says if you examine all the other answers that are given to this question and compare them with mine you will see which is the better answer so the rambo actually had a little bit of pride in this particular formulation now even psychologically we can understand this idea that you start off making choices and then you become addicted again this is actually relevant to perhaps to the first part of my remarks you know you sin and you sin and you sin and you have choices but you don't care at some point you find yourself in the grip of behaviors that you're almost powerless to change you can't change i mean think about addiction you can't get out of it i mean you could but it would take us almost a superhuman effort but even though now you can't get out of it it is a product the volitional choices you made when you had a way out and therefore god can hold you accountable for what you can't get out of because you didn't have to put yourself in that situation kind of addiction to sin again as they say this is actually is very very relevant uh to issues of abuse and and the like you know you know even give you another example uh let's say somebody drinks gets drunk drives a car and kills somebody now their defense might be you can't blame me i was drunk i didn't have control over my actions i didn't intend to kill anybody i couldn't stop myself that's true so why am i going to jail because you didn't have to put yourself in that situation of taking all those drinks you're right you put yourself in a circumstance over which you had no control but you had control over whether to put yourself in that circumstance right that's kind of where the rambam is is going uh but be it as it may though as i say this should not obscure the fundamental points that the topless the purpose of the marcos were not to take the jews out of egypt the purpose of the marcus were number one to punish mithrim for their sins based on the intransigence of the of not responding to god the first five mongols and of course the slavery and to demonstrate primarily for the jewish people god's supreme control over the powers of the of the universe the uh they don't need anyone thank so was it did you take it away permanently no no not permanently it was just just for the purpose of finishing the process that god wanted god had a process of these ten plagues and he didn't want pyro to be able to do chuva and get rid of the punishment that would have truncated the plan so the punishment was he lost he meaning he and the egyptians lost their free will and kind of were forced to say no now it's hard for us to understand exactly what it means to lose free will um are you consciously aware of that or you're not kind of anything like this is it like let's say you're pyro is it like i really want to say let them go but something is not letting me say it i have a feeling it probably didn't take that for him it probably as far as pyro was concerned he probably thought he was just making his decision no no i'm not going to let you go so he had the illusion of free will when in fact it was god putting those thoughts into his head now i don't think it was the situation where like i remember the one time in my life i was drunk i actually had that type of feeling um somebody when i was in high school uh some of my friends putting put in quotation marks i thought it would be nice to see what would happen if i got drunk so i got drunk you know as i'm pulling and i remember almost having this split blade i was like saying all sorts of things and i was telling myself you idiot shut up keep quiet yeah so i actually had a sense that my body or part of my brain was not in control of the other part of my brain i remember constantly don't talk don't say this you know but i couldn't so maybe that's what happened with pyro too i'm not sure exactly what what the mechanism is when you feel you don't have you don't have free will okay so now that i want to go back a little bit in the parsha itself that is if you remember the end of shamos very bad news mosha starts off with the bang but things end in a very sad way at least at the end of last person because when he first comes to the jewish people and he's 80 years old he had a whole life that's not explained in the torah that's very fascinating there's so many missing years of moshe's life he was raised in mitzrayim then he runs away to midgen he was gone for 40 or 50 years then he comes back at the age of 80. age of 80. so what happened all those years so the medrush gives us a whole back story he was king in africa he wasn't just with the israel he was he was in prison for 10 years i mean the whole life that the torah does not even just talk about why because those years were not important right that's why you never know sometimes uh you know you think when you're 80 you think oh you know i'm finished you know i can retire you never know maybe the most important part of your life is waiting you know when you're 80 you'll emotionally remain at that point but be it as it may when he first comes to the jewish people and says god is going to redeem you even though moshe said they're not going to believe me they believe him right away they believe him right away in other words all of his concerns were not true then he goes to pyro and says send forth my people. and pyro looks at his list of uh of idol you know different gods and says who is this god i never heard of him and who do you think you are and you guys have too much time in your hands that's why you're agitating about civil liberties and pyro decrees from now on don't give them their straw apparently they use straw to make the bricks they've got to gather their own straw and their quota of bricks remains undiminished so all of a sudden moshe albania become moshe and our own both by the way our own remember our own stayed in mitsrayam all those years it's interesting moshe was gone for so many years arun was there aaron was the leader of the jewish people in mithralia moshe and iron come out and all of a sudden they're persona non grata meaning who needs you you come in and you make our life worse you make our life bitter and moshe rabbenu himself is very broken moshe of ainu goes to god and moshe remainer says why did you send me i didn't want to go i told you i didn't want to go and not only have you not saved the people you have made their life worse moshe is very defiant and hashem says that swings over to our parsha that i made many promises to the to the obvos and the most that i did not keep and they did not complain and you complain because things don't go your way right away tell the jewish people there will be redemption and four terms are used and more with me israel ani hashem i am the almighty this is yurt kevke and rashi explains in this context utk means i am reliable in keeping my promises and then giving reward and then he uses four phrases hodseisi i will take them from under the burdens of mitzrayim he salty as i will save them from their slavery go out yes i will redeem them with zero and the two with an outstretched arm and with miracles and i will take them unto me for a nation so this is a very very famous passage because according to the talmud yushami syndrome it's not in the talmud bubbling we know there's a mitzvah of lael cedar of drinking four cups of wine four cups of wine and the four cups of wine is a rabbinic enactment it's not a torah document and the bravoly does not really give the reason for the four cups of wine the famous reason that everybody knows everybody knows this reason is based on the talmud you shall me interestingly enough that connects the four cups of wine to the four expressions of redemption that god uses vote seisi i will take you out be salty i will save you vigo alti i will redeem you i will take you unto me for a nation dalid leshon of gaula now there is a fifth term right afterwards i will bring you to the land eric israel and there is one opinion in commissioner rabbi tarfan who actually says you're supposed to have five cups at the seder because of evasi and the morale suggests that as well or at least as a preference he says it's not mandatory but it's as a preference he suggests it and there are hasidic groups that actually have five cups of wine at the seder because of hey basie we do not have most of us do not have a fifth cup at the seder because we believe that the reference to being bringing us to the land is the messianic redemption and that is indeed why ashkenazim have the cup of eli yahoo now the cup of eliyahu is a cup that we pour but we do not drink from and elio navi is the one who will announce the coming of mashiach right so what's going to happen is when elio hanabi comes and announces mashiach we will then have the fifth cup but right now we are waiting for eliohu and that is why we do not drink the fifth cup you know there is a medrish that says elio comes to every bris and he comes to every pesach seder but the thing that parents always tell their kids that leo drinks from the cup that i think there's no source for him particularly right parents always say i don't know they say uh watch the y you're going to see the wine go down a little bit leo's going to take a sip and then the father might jostle the table and a little wine will spill and that i think there's no mukkar that's kind of a folk tradition but the leo coming to the seder that actually is is brought down it's actually a punishment interestingly enough because at one point he said to hashem the jewish people are unfaithful they don't keep your covenant so because of that elio was ordered to go to every bris as a punishment almost and to go to every seder where even jews who are not that religious the two rituals that are widely kept in cloud israel are a brits although god forbid unfortunately there is an anti-circumcision movement but by and large until recently even jews who were very very far from judaism believed in the idea of a bris and a pesotar again the place of the other may betray from many ways but the idea of a seder almost everybody believes we have to have some type of seder okay uh so these are but beat us in may that's the fifth last question but the four kosovos are because of the four le sho notes of gaula our bakosos kaneged the four of the shininess of gola so the question is very obvious the gaula was a single event hashem took us out of mitzrayim why do we need four terms to describe yet see us mithraim and even if you're going to say which is true that the fourth term i will take you unto me for a nation is a reference to matan torah which is very very logical actually but so what so that gives you two terms so there are two events you see as mitzrayim why do we have to describe it in the sense of for the show note of so i want to share with you a thoughts of the meshech right just for information ramirez was the rav of davinsk in latvia great great gone and sadik and his safer under rambam was started in honor and in memory of her who had no surviving children now he and his rebecca had one daughter who tragically died uh before she was married um i'm not sure before she was married i think it was before she was married but i i'm not 100 sure but they only had one daughter and she did die and they had no other children and the yeshiva was started in his memory so his book on rambam is called or samayak and his book on is called meshach right so sometimes as i'm talking i may interchangeably say i am talking about the same same person but this is a thought from his commentary on the homesch and he says the following if you think about servitude and slavery in egypt and we were enslaved for 210 years well no we were in mitzrayim 210 years the actual slavery was around 86 85 years or so but whatever it is we were enslaved there were four dangers that we faced there are four dangers that an enslaved population can experience danger number one is physical annihilation under slave conditions people's lives can be killed i mean think about concentration camps people can die of brutality they can die of deliberate murder they can die of starvation they can die of the adverse conditions physical survival is at risk when you are totally enslaved and at the mercy of other people right concentration camps were essentially enforced slavery you had the work camps you had the death camps or the death camps were specifically set up for extermination but many many many people died in the war camps so that's danger number one danger to your physical survival danger number two is the dehumanization of your spiritual essence you might acquire the values of the host culture through assimilation but even if you don't assimilate to that culture because they reject you but you become debased you become dehumanized you stop thinking about spiritual ideas you stop thinking about a relationship with god because all you have is this annoying hunger in your belly all the time and all you can think about is the bread or all you can think about is the labor and the agony and the suffering and that destroys your spiritual essence right so danger number one is danger to the body danger number two is danger to the soul now danger number three which is connected to number two these these overlap a little bit is that a slave can sometimes lose a sense of their history a sense of where they come from think about for example you may remember in the 1970s this goes back a ways an author alex haley wrote a book called roots they discovered later that some of it was made up stories but whatever it was it was about his own he was a he was black african-american or black person and he was discussing his in which his ancestors were slaves but before that their ancestors had been kings and princes in ghana and a slave loses a sense of connection to that past children were ripped away from their parents husbands were separated from wives they had no sense of where they came from they had no sense of any potential greatness in their past it's as if they were just born yesterday with no connection to anything that came before them and as the saying has been said many times if a person doesn't know where they come from it is very hard to have a sense of where they're going to what is my direction in life if i don't have a sense of where i'm coming from so danger number three is that in a slavery society that separates families there is often no sense of history and therefore no sense of self because there's no past to which you can be connected and danger number four is lack of hope that the future can never be different that as long as a person has hope that things will be better they have a goal to which they can work towards to which they can aspire when you lose hope that's it even medically that's the case um i i believe there's even some studies again i'm not sure if it's anecdotal or actually scientifically confirmed in which when people believe that they have no possibility of recovering they are firmly convinced that there's no hope the body itself shuts down the body itself responds to the hopelessness by shutting down in irreversible ways even voodoo right voodoo is is certainly uh totally untrue if i believe that if somebody sticks a pin in an effigy that i'm gonna drop dead i'm gonna drop dead it happens you might call it reverse placebo right just like you have positive placebos that have a certain rate of effectiveness if i think it's going to work then maybe it's going to work if i think it's going to kill me then it's going to kill me right reverse placebos so these are the four dangers of slavery danger to physical survival danger to your spiritual essence losing a sense of history and losing a sense of hope and god therefore had to redeem us from all four of these dangers so the metro says the reason why we have for the show note of galoola is because there were four dangers that we faced so that's the four let's show notes and the four dangers but now let's take it a little further rimer somehow points out that although god is the redeemer in fact the haggadah itself is so emphatic on this point that it refuses to even mention moshe robbiner's name it's a well-known observation that mosher of banu's name does not appear in the god it actually it does appear once in the middle of a passage by the splitting of the red sea so moshe's name does appear once in fact if you want to get your kids to follow the haggadah you can offer besides the afikoman prize you can offer a prize to any kid who can uh identify when mosher boehner's name is mentioned but it's certainly de-emphasized and one of the reasons why it's the emphasized is it's important for us to believe and to affirm that god is the redeemer don't don't give moshe the credit here it comes from hashem an evil o and no angel nevertheless there is something that is required in the language of the zohar isarusa this is aramaic isarusa de la tata isarusa la there must be an arousal from below to awaken the arousal from above in other words the jewish people needed to do something to address the four dangers in order to elicit god's redemptive response so what behaviors did the jewish people have that address the four dangers so i mentioned last week and i'll mention it again because it ties into this that the makhilta the makhilta is the medrashan shamos mentions that although the jews were on the 49th level of impurity and had they stayed in mitzrayim even a few more minutes the amount of time that it takes for dough to become muhammad they would have hit level 50 and they would have been irredeemable and four-fifths of them did hit level 50 and died in egypt and were not redeemed there were four merits the jewish people had the one fifth head the one-fifth that prevented them from sinking to level fifty and the four merits of the machilt again you might have heard different lists but i'm working off the the shelter and the metric is working off the magilta is number one they did not intermarry number two they did not speak los angel against each other number three they did not change their jewish names and number four they did not change their language they continued to speak the hebrew language which is called lashon hakodesh the holy language so what the meshman wants to do is he wants to create a one-to-one correspondence between the four meritorious behaviors of the jewish people each one of them addressed one of those dangers and that created the isarusa de la tata the awakening from below that was necessary to bring down the awakening from above which is called the cerusa diliala and here's what he says again it's not in the same order but let's take it to the order of the dangers danger number one was danger to our physical survival that is addressed by not speaking russian horror now why is that so when we say the jews did not speak lesnar we don't mean that they were following the laws of the time maybe in terms of gossiping they did gossip they gossiped not speaking lesnar primarily meant they did not turn against each other by reporting to the authorities for example if you remember even dust and villavira who are the bad guys in the desert they were taskmasters in egypt and when the egyptians demanded to know which jews did not meet their quota that day when they saw that the totals of bricks were not enough da sun and avira refused to reveal that information and they got beaten without turning in a fellow gym so you have to understand this not speaking lash and hara is not referring to the firm idea of not speaking rashnara in a fetch it essentially means group solidarity actus unity we're not going to turn against each other in order to get some temporary advantage from the big guy from the boss and that is the great guarantor of physical survival because when jews are unified the enemy will not be able to vanquish them there may be individual people certainly again in the holocaust keep in mind that superimposed on the awesome awful unimaginable horrors of the holocaust superimposed on it was the fact that occasionally occasionally there were jews who did collaborate with the nazis in terms of turning other jews in in terms of spying for the nazis in the concentration camps now most of the time it didn't really help them because whatever they they got a little bit of food for a while and then they got killed also but it's hard for us to judge you know we just don't know of us warns us don't judge people until you're in their place these were people who were desperate these were people who were starving these were people who thought this is the only way they could survive so they became collaborators actually probably not less in the concentration camps and more in the ghettos in the ghettos there were collaborators who would inform and the like in mitzrayim when the ghazal say they didn't speak leshenara that's what it means nobody collaborated with the egyptians united front and that is the great thing that protects us physically united we stand right what benjamin franklin said that we must all hang together in the revolutionary war because otherwise we will surely hang separately and that is a message that we believe is on israel the great thing that protects us physically is which was reflected in no collaboration with the enemy lo dibra lashanhara now the second danger was dehumanization and the lack of a spiritual essence in your life that comes back to not intermarrying because if you express it in a positive way that means husbands and wives were faithful and that is the idea the very important idea that the relationship of a husband and a wife in creating a jewish home is the temple of god in the world is in the loving relationship of husband and wife is the divine presence so even if the whole day all i'm thinking about is the hard work and the beatings and the humiliation and the starvation and the hunger in those moments of husband and wife connecting there was holiness there was goodness and that kept us now it didn't prevent us from hitting the 49th level but that is what kept us from hitting level 50. and that is actually the meaning of the gomorrah in the merit of righteous women the jewish people were redeemed because the women gave their husbands faith the women gave their husbands encouragement the women gave their husbands belief that there will be a redemption so that prevented the spiritual disintegration that would have heard right so lodiburu lashing hara is connected the physical danger not intermarrying which in the positive is the relationship of husband and wife was the spiritual guard now the third danger again it's overlaps was a lack of history a lack of roots a lack of being connected to something so that was combated by not changing our names because jewish names always connected to the past you name someone after a grandfather or a grandmother or after ancestors avraham yitzhak yakov sarah rifka raccolea devorah that reminds me i have a past i have a yikas i have a connection to people who were great and elevated and even if i'm a non-jew converts to judaism so i don't have that biological connection but by embracing the jewish faith i become a child of avraham and soren right so you can become a child i think i'm an adopted child but as an adopted child they are my parents too so names connect you to the past names remind you you don't come from nobody you know even the yiddish diminutives are very meaningful we often don't think about them you know we have expressions and sometimes people just use them they don't think about the meanings but the meanings are very beautiful bubbala means little grandmother zaydola less common i think little grandfather tatula little daddy little abba mamala little mommy what are you telling the child you're connected there was someone who died before you were born and you have their name and you're connected to their neshama you're my little mother my little father my little grandfather right my little grandmother a child doesn't come from nothing a child comes from that past so you see how the metro khakim is going here the danger of physical to our physical survival is combative with the unity of not speaking leshan hara the danger to our spiritual essence is combatted by the faithfulness of husband and wife the sense of not having a history or a connection we try to preserve by jewish names that connect us to the past and finally the final danger was in the course of decades and decades of slavery you lose hope that things can ever be better well preservation of language think about this you know there was a time in history where latin was the most commonly spoken language in the world the roman empire was huge and latin was the language of the roman empire today very very few people speak latin even the catholic church officially abandoned latin in the lurita now there are some herein catholics who you know they consider the vatican too to be reformed and they they actually have the old math but they're they're actually considered to be uh they're not in the pope's good graces uh because they weren't macabre uh the reforms of vatican too so why do so few people study latin although latin is a very important language i mean many languages come from latin i mean the romance languages uh and even english english is a mixture of but being it also has a strong latin component the answer is that languages are not spoken are not learned if they're not spoken if they're not relevant so if i'm living in mitzrayim and i believe we're here to stay and we're never going to get out why would i speak to my kid in hebrew what's the purpose what is the purpose of preserving the hebrew language if we're never going to go back to our land and we're never going to have our society and if our slavery is permanent do you understand that holding on to the hebrew language was a statement of hope it was a statement that says i'm telling my child when i speak them in hebrew yeah now we're slaves but there's gonna come a time i don't know when i don't know it'll be in my lifetime or your lifetime or even after your lifetime that we're going to be taken out of here we're going to go to our land and we will need our language so the slave who naturally faces a hopelessness a disbelief that things can ever change the preservation of the language was our affirmation of hope so now you see what's going on there are four the show note of redemption from hashem because there are four dangers that we face but in order to merit the four redemptions from hashem because of the four dangers that we faced we needed four behaviors on our part that's the isarutta the tata the arousal from below in order to elicit the arousal from above so the final piece in the puzzle is ramirez says this explains why the four cups of wine are positioned in the haggadah where they are positioned remember just to remind you again it's a little early in the year but since these are the parshas of theatems ryan we can talk about the seder as well the first cup is the cup of kiddush the second cup is the cup over which we recite the narrative of the haggadah the third cup we recite benching and the fourth cup we recite hal so cos one is kiddish cos2 is maggit cos3 is birkat's hamazoo cos4 is hallow so here's what the mesh says the coast of kiddish which means literally holiness or sanctification that corresponds to the merit of faithfulness to husband and wife which brings kadusha into the home the coast of magette is the case of remembering our sense of history because what is the magic the past of you it's the azimuth raymond that's connected to not changing our names history past the coast of birca tamazon is the case of gratitude and gratitude is conducive to unity because when there's gratitude for what i have i'm not jealous i don't begrudge you and therefore that's the one that fits not speaking english in hara because when there's gratitude there is togetherness when there's togetherness there's unity and love and not speaking lash and hara against each other and finally halal is hope because it's been pointed out that the halal after benching is not the halal about the past it's the halal about the future redemption and we are affirming our emunah in the coming of mashiach and that's why al-yah's cup and therefore it's a beautiful pattern in which for the show note of gaula are because of four dangers that we faced the four dangers that we faced had to be met by four behaviors in our parts and we celebrate those four behaviors by the positioning of the four cups in different parts of the haggadah okay so this is a bit of a thought a bit of an elaboration of a thought that is found in the mesher karma so thank you and i wish you well and have a good weekend a uh shabbat shalom [Music] is