Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Leaving Egypt, Receiving The Torah and Building The Tabernacle

my baby [Music] okay everybody thank you for thank you for coming again and tonight's share is dedicated for a refurbished Lima foreign whose 20th yard site falls on tavate 22 by Fran Hitler and once again we have an anonymous donor and very grateful to Mr or Mrs or Miss Anonymous and thank you very much for your uh uh we are of course this week beginning the second of the five and it's interesting that khazal gave each its own nickname so safer gracious is called uh safer hayashur the book of the upright because it describes the of us who are upright in their relationship to God and to people as well I'll come to the book of shmos in a moment the book of ayikra is called toras colonium the laws of the priesthood which actually corresponds pretty closely to Leviticus which is the Greek name because of safer Viagra has many many details of the mishkan ritual the corvanos and the special laws of the kohanim the book of my midboard is called the Hamish of census actually numbers because it is bracketed with a census of the generation that left metriam and at the end of the safer a census of the new generation after the 40 years so it's the Book of Numbers the book of census I think Sensai would be the plural and finally the book of devoreim is called mishna Torah which means the repetition of the law which is by the way an exact correspondence to Deuteronomy which means the second law based on the idea that although there are many new Mitzvahs in safer tavarium but a lot of it is reiterating and amplifying what was already given right before Moshe rabenu's death he reviews a lot of the Torah it is called mishna Torah the review or the repetition of the Torah and of course you may also know that the rambam himself named his codification of Jewish law also mishna Torah but with slightly a different Nuance devarim is called mishnatorah because it's a repeat and a review of the Torah the rambam called his book mishna Torah in the sense of a second Torah meaning we have the written Torah and we have the oral Torah and the mishnatori was the oral okay so every hamesh has a nickname what is the nickname for the book of shmos safer shmos so the truth is the ramban does Supply a very beautiful name the ramban calls the book of shamos safe the book of redemption which also corresponds to Exodus leaving the book of leaving betrayal brings in the name of the gaonian that the they gave a different nickname to the book of shmos it was called the second now that's not very dramatic I mean you know that's not a name really in other words like every hummus gets it gets a distinct name say for hayasha or Taurus all you call shmos is the second Hamish why doesn't shemos get a name as well doesn't mean the second Hamish means part two of gracious in other words the nickname teaches us the idea that the way to understand shamos is it is the hashalama it is the completion of the book of gracious how so the book of gracious is the book of creation indeed the word Genesis creation it is the creation of the world it is the creation of the Jewish people through the avos but shmos gives us further levels in the creation of amisrael Through The Exodus from Egypt and through matantara now since the very purpose of the world Rashi the second rational makes this point the very purpose of the creation of the world was that there should be a Jew a special Nation the Jewish people that accept the Torah so Genesis tells us that the world was created Exodus tells us why the world was created so book one is the how of creation and book two is the why of creation and therefore doesn't just mean the second klimish that's a meaningless nickname but it means part two of the book of creation and if you look at safer shmos you actually see there are three fundamental themes in the book of shmouse with quite a few detours but if you simply focus on the fundamental themes you see how they pertain to the creation of Ami Israel in multiple stages act one of play in 3x act 1 is Acts 2 is Matan Torah act 3 is building a mission so the divine presence would be within us leaving metrium receiving the Torah accepting the Torah building a Michigan now in truth this idea is not simply three National events that happen to the Jewish people but they are also part of our own individual spiritual journey as well there's a beautiful beautiful thought from the balotanya the altar baby where he points out and we're going to be coming back to this idea a number of times in the next few weeks because it's all connected to the Exodus story that the word mitzrayim has a double meaning Egypt so you see as much Raya means we were taken out of the slavery in the country called Egypt and 100 percent religious as we're believing Jews We Believe that there was a historical event called yet but the balotanya says mitzrayim can have another meaning of constriction limitation boundary David amalek says and Hollow minha mates are karasika I call out to God from the narrow confining constricting place in which I feel I have no room to go no place to go I'm trapped mitzrayim says the balatanya refers to all of the inner limitations a person has prevents them from becoming the person they would be able to become to have the relationship with Hashem mainly and without everyone else that they should be able to have and every single person has their own mithralium I can have the metrium of arrogance of laziness of egotism or of self-loathing or depression or despair I have my mitzrayim anger whatever it is and when God took the Jews out of mitralium that was a cosmic process that put into the spiritual world the power of every person to become liberated from their own inner mitzrayim very very powerful I mean people often ask people who analyze the Torah often ask is the Torah history or is the Torah metaphor meaning do we have to assume there was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with a talking snake or that of our real people maybe they just stand for certain spiritual ideas even The Exodus it's kind of a symbolic idea some some would say about man's striving for freedom so some people say the Torah is history and some people say the Torah is metaphor but the true answer is that this is a false dichotomy Torah is history but the Torah is metaphor at the same time because the history itself is a metaphor for a deeper spiritual construct this is what the balotanya is telling me yes we were taken out of Egypt history but yes it represents the capacity of the human spirit to be liberated from all of the inner mitzriimes that block us and stop us because Hashem put into the world a certain power that we can access now especially during pesach but it's brought down that during these weeks when we read about positive the spirit and the light of pesach is here in at least microcosm so these weeks in particular you can link to the spiritual of each seat to be liberated from the metriums that enslave us you know in Kabbalah in particular all of these weeks it's a period of time that is called shove him now Chauvin is simply the first letter it's a word formed of the first letter of the parshius forever foreign and some for good measure add two more weeks they have they call it showed truma and tessabe which completes the building of the Michigan actually and the show of him is an interesting period of time in most places it's simply passes unremarked and Eric Israel there's a little bit more of a consciousness there's something about these weeks although it's hard to know exactly what is special about these wakes but the concept is the word shove of him is a bit of a pun on one hand it is simply the first letter of the partios on the other hand shove him means a wayward person a person who wanders off the Derek like Hashem says return my wayward children that are lost and off the proper proper path So based on the teachings of the result and the other macabella shelf of him is a time in which akalisparku enables us to return to him by transcending our limitations so the thing I'm adding is precisely because these are the weeks of yet that is why we are able to transcend our limitations and exit our own mitraim it's it's all connected the coax of him derives from the fact that these are the weeks of you'd see at mitraim and based on the alter rebbe's idea mitzrayim is not just Egypt mitzrayim refers to constrictions limitations boundaries blockages and as the old saying goes those are sometimes the hardest metriams to leave they say it's easier to take the Jew out of matrium than it is to take mithram out of the Jew but it can be done it can be done so if we apply this Paradigm to the three acts of the book of shmos mishkan the way we would describe it is this the first step in spiritual liberation is to free yourself from your mentoriums but that's not enough freedom is not the end-all of life you know people say the purpose of my life is to be free that's not a logical statement freedom may be a condition to be able to accomplish what you need to accomplish Freedom may be an enabler but Freedom alone contains within it no designation of purpose free to be what free to do what Eric from happened to be Jewish uh talmud movak of Sigmund Freud who also happened to be Jewish although Freud actually had a stronger Jewish background than than Eric Trump But Eric Fram once remarked very poignantly that we make a very big mistake when we Define freedom from something Freedom has to be towards something not freedom from but Freedom towards yep so Freedom has to be Freedom towards something and this is beautifully Illustrated by the idea that gazal themselves say a person is only free if they connect themselves to the Torah so yes mitzrayim has to be followed by a submission and a commitment to God that actually explains why in the holiday of freedom we immediately try to connect it to the holiday of Torah and we do it by the Counting of the Omer when do we start counting the Omer we start counting the Omer on pesach itself because freedom without commitment is not only worthless but it's actually destructive so free yourself from your midterians but then use your freedom to connect to something greater than yourselves now superficially one might say that's a zero-sum game uh you know because essentially I just got rid of one slavery to do another slavery so why am I ahead all right well God's slavery is more benign so to speak but still I'm going from slave to slave that's not necessarily a benefit but there's a beautiful metaphor that was stated by the poet tagorean Indian poet and he was not talking about Judaism I don't know if you knew any Jews he was quite a gifted poet he I think he won the Nobel Prize for literature in the 1920s and he said a human soul is like a violin string violin string is capable of the most exquisite beautiful music but paradoxically if you take a string and leave it on the table a loose string a loose unencumbered string what music will you be able to get out of it you'll get nothing out of it it is only when it's tied down that you'll get the music you see the paradox I'm totally free I'm aimless I'm purposeless the beauty of my soul will never come out unless and until I tie myself down and I commit myself to something greater than myself and then the music of my soul can come out in a very beautiful way so in the book of redemption it's not just freedom from mitzrayim but it is the acceptance of the Torah and that's why because I'll say a person is only free if they've accepted the Torah they've accepted the submission to our Kurdish baraku's will the truth is even from a totally secular standpoint you see this as well if you consider for example things like art and music you know let's assume that you're listening to a jazz trombonist and the guy is doing improvs and riffs and all sorts of like amazing things and you say or your child says I want to do I want to play like that so you buy him a trombone or a trumpet and you get him a teacher and the teacher says okay for the next two hours you're going to play scales over and over and over and over again says that is boring I want to do creative stuff I want to do exciting stuff I don't want to do this routine thing but the short answer is that your ability to fly your ability to create your ability to do amazing things depends on a certain Foundation of skill that may be actually boring may not be interesting but that builds your foundation that keeps you grounded just like a kite you know people want the kite to go as high as they could possibly go but if it's if someone's not holding it or it's not tied down it goes into the stratosphere it's lost forever so in order to fly you need something that also keeps you grounded at the same time rev cook used to say roof cook said nurof cook of course was a very very poetic mystical imaginative person and he was also a master of technical and people sometimes looked at that as a little bit of a contradiction like how can he be so involved in detail after detail after detail when in fact he is poetic and mystical and with cook said the details of palaka grounded him in reality and then it allowed his Spirit to soar without that groundedness he would just vanish in all sorts of metaphysical speculations he actually gave a mushroom if Cook himself gave this muscle of a manual interestingly enough he gave a muscle of a non-jewish philosopher you know Kant is one of the most difficult of philosophers the most the Deep one of the deepest philosophers and the like but so how do you relax what did Kant do to relax right sometimes the mind gets overheated so Kant was very involved in uh in geography like the bridges the roads like he he that he said he wanted to do something that did not involve any type of speculative thinking kind of a very physical type of thing look at the highways look at the roads look at the train schedules and he would focus on that and that somehow connected him to a physical world and then he was able to be ethereal rev cook said that was his relationship to halacha that halacha was his physical reality which therefore allowed him to then be mystical so the truth of the matter is you want to you want to do improvisational rips you got to be connected to technique painting right some people want to be like Picasso right the kid learns how to paint and you know and indeed there are abstract artists sometimes that look like you kicked a can of paint over and you can sell this for three million dollars well you know uh I I'm not a I'm not a big expert in abstract art but you know I wonder like you know can I get my kid to knock over the can or maybe I can do it myself and make a lot of money uh retire with the money but the truth is someone like Picasso before Picasso did his deconstruction his cubism and everything else Picasso has to master and did Master precise and exact draftsmanship we have you know early works of Picasso which were exactly that way very careful observation of exactly how to draw things and Judaism is very much the same going back to tagari's muscle you want to fly you want to express the music of your soul you have to tie yourself down to God so that's why the first two themes of shmos are you'd see us I am leaving your inner mitzrayim and then moving to submission to Hashem but even that is not the end goal accepting the Torah and doing the Torah are very important but that's not the ultimate goal the ultimate goal is to make yourself a Dwelling Place for God on Earth remember that the critical plastic about the mishkan is fiasulimic Dash Hashem says make for me a Sanctified place a sanctuary so I will dwell in them that meaning the binay Israel it does not say make for me a mishkan so I won't dwell in it make for me a mishkan so I will dwell in the heart and soul of every individual though that's the famous words been put to music as well Bill lovey mishkan everything in my heart I will construct a dwelling place for God now what does that mean exactly I understand what it means to say I gotta do Mitzvahs I gotta keep Shabbos I gotta keep kosher I got a diamond if I'm a man I got to put on filling and sisters that I understand but what does it mean to tell me oh yes and in addition to dominating and saying broccolis and keeping Shabbos you got to make yourself a dwelling place for God that doesn't have the same concrete meaning as everything else but it essentially means that within your heart and soul there should be love of Hashem and reverence of Hashem and awareness of God and feeling the presence of Hashem in your daily life Hashem are an interesting thing is fear of God Havas Hashem is love of God what is fear of God so the truth is it's very hard to how do you you know if fear of God means I'm afraid that God might hurt me how can that possibly match up with love it's very hard to love somebody that you're afraid is going to hurt you that's almost a pathological love in some ways so the reasoning already explained that there are two types of year as Hashem two types of fear of God there is fear of punishment motivator it's an inferior motivator but it's an effective motivator meaning one of the things that keeps me in line is the knowledge that if I commit sins and violations of hashem's law there are going to be consequences that's not the highest level motivation but I'm not going to disparage it because it gets the job done at least in some cases but the real meaning of yira is not fear the real meaning of yira is awe reverence a sense of the greatness of God the word fear in English doesn't really capture that particular nuance Yara is awe and reverence now we know even in human relationships we can have awe and reverence without fear I mean let's imagine although Queen Elizabeth is not alive anymore I still think of Queen Elizabeth as the queen although I understand it's Charles but I'm going to use Queen Elizabeth because I think it's a better martial for this Queen Elizabeth walks into the room so you're not afraid she's going to cut off your head like you know maybe Henry VIII you know her great great great grandfather but that might be something to be afraid of but Elizabeth was a nice woman she's not going to kill you if you didn't bow down or stand up or whatever it is but there's a certain sense of awe and reverence for the office president of the United States whether you like whoever is the president or don't there's a certain sense of something special right you'll brush off your jacket or whatever it is president of Israel I'm not sure exactly because Israel is a more informal country but this is called a certain sense of reverence and law so Hira sashem is I feel awe in the presence of God now once you define yira not so much as he's going to hurt me but the notion of awe you can actually see how that actually connects the love of God because what is love of God okay so era is awe and reverence it's love so love itself and again the Tanya talks about this love itself and as what does it mean to love God and why why would I love God so love means I want to be connected but why do I want to be connected so there's actually two ways of looking at it one is you might call an egocentric love which is not bad but it's egocentric and the other is Transcendental love the egocentric love is a love that emerges from profound gratitude I love God because I feel in my heart all that he's done for me you know he's given me a life he's given me intelligence he's given me the capacity to love and then you can generalize him he created a world of beauty of color and music in other words this is love connected to gratitude I love God because I feel so grateful for everything he's done for me and really for the universe now that's a very Noble thing gratitude is really really important I I forgot to put it down in any way but if you think about it that's ultimately kind of an egocentrical type of love because I love God because he's given so many things to me and again that's a high level and that's a good level but it's still a level that implicates the ego but there's another aspect of transcendental love which is I love God because I'm in awe of his utter perfection the person might say I love looking at the Grand Canyon I have feelings of love when I look at the Grand Canyon what is it that you love you love The Rock The Rock didn't do anything for you but there's something in the human soul that when we see something that looks perfect it inspires us in a certain way so seen in this way one can love God not because of what God has done for me but I love God as I become aware of his perfection and in that way what's interesting is Hashem are not opposite ideas in fact year as Hashem gives you Ava and indeed that's how the rambam describes it the rambam does not describe Ava sashem as an emotion that comes from gratitude which is one way of defining it but rather it is a an emotion that comes from awe as I contemplate the magnificence of the cosmos I just fall in love with the Perfection of the Creator who was able to make such a structure and that's why the rambam writes famously that scientific study can actually give you a greater appreciation of God because you see the Magnificent structures of the universe can if you take someone like Albert Einstein or Einstein was it was very very far from being an orthodox Jew uh I mean everyone he never had number two he was too skeptical really uh to do that although when he was 12 because he was very rebellious and he grew up in a very assimilated home as a rebel when he was around 12 he actually flirted with Orthodox Judaism he was a show more Shabbos for a short while till a border with his family talked him out of it and brought him back to atheism uh and paradoxically bizarrely the Border was a Jewish medical student whose name was Max talmud the last name was Tom woods and Max talmud has the very very dubious dishonorable distinction of taking Einstein away from the practice of Torah Judaism but the one thing that you need to know about I understand I'm sure many of you know this anyway Einstein absolutely believed in God he did not believe in a personal God that would give us Commandments that that's where he didn't make that jump but precisely because he saw a universe of structure and orderliness and coherence and how things fit together he said this universe could only have been generated by a power that was all-knowing and all-powerful so we actually had a very very deep belief in God but as they say where where it failed was he was not able to transition that belief into the notion that God consciously interacts with the human race in that in that way like there's actually a name for that type of philosophy that's called deism in fact many uh famous people were Dias Thomas Jefferson for example they had a deep belief in God by virtue of God's structure of the universe but they didn't believe in the notion of personal Commandments in fact the ramban points out to get ahead of myself a little bit that is precisely why the Ten Commandments What is the first of the Ten Commandments I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of mitzrayim so the ramban brings uh lucky the ebenezero brings a question uh that reviewed our lady asked and that is why does it say I am the guy who took you out of Egypt it should say I am the god who created heaven and earth that's a bigger achievement so to speak so the Ebenezer himself answers well yes but Heaven and Earth would be a claim that God could make on all Humanity and since the aceres adibros are specific claims that Hashem is making for the Jewish people had to pick something that Israel and that's it that's what the Ebenezer says the ramban gives another answer the ramban says there are many people who believe that God created the world or the universe but once he created the universe he's no longer involved that's a deism that was Einstein's belief right that was Thomas Jefferson's belief and the life so God wants to make the point I'm not just the God who is the architect of Heaven and Earth I am the god that is involved in history I am the god that cares about Vice and virtue I am the god that will exact ultimately maybe in the long term punishment against evil and reward the good in other words I am the god of Providence not just the god of creation the god of not only the god of Bria exactly the point that what the aceres adibros are trying to are trying to emphasize so these are the three stages going back the book of shmos leave your limitations turn your freedom as submission to God and ultimately turn your life into a Michigan a Dwelling Place a sanctuary for God Hashem by living your life feeling the presence of hakadishburg I place God in front of me at all times but again the concept is not to be scared the concept is to feel it in a joyous awe-inspiring way the feeling of Hashem to make your heart and soul a mishcon for Hashem now granted in the book of shmos there are some significant detours such as the sin of the golden calf where we veered off topic so to speak But ultimately the book of shmos is moving towards the building of the Michigan and then the left okay so now though I want to mention the following the centrality of The Exodus to Jewish identity is very very apparent once a year we of course have a Seder where we talk about the Exodus at Great length but even every single day of the year we are obligated to remind ourselves of The Exodus in the morning and at night in fact these misses go by two different names the Mitzvah of leil Shader which is the 15th of Nisan is called Seaport yet the narration of The Exodus of Egypt the Mitzvah that you do the whole year which is in a much more cursory abbreviated fashion remembering reminding yourself and we do it in the day and we do it at night when do we do it in day or night in krishma right the third paragraph there's a verse towards the end I am the Lord your God I share it who took you out of Egypt to be your God so even if you look in the art scroll sitter you will see that have cavana when you say that pasok that you want to be Makaya the mitzvah Del Raisa of zashiras you'd see us metraim but for the balance of our time I actually want to talk about a certain detail that does not pertain to the Daily mitzvah but it pertains to the annual myth although we're not that close to Lil Sader but since we're reading about these partios I'm going to give myself a little bit of license to talk about it and that is the mishnah in our Vape which goes through the Seder right or the whole seder of pesach is spelled out in the mishnah the mishna mentions that one of the halachos of Lil Sader is you can't just talk about Redemption you gotta begin with the bad part of the story this is called in the mishnah masreeland vignus you begin with the negativities um and you conclude in praising all the good that God did in other words if I were to go in and make a Seder and simply talk about oh God took me out and God gave me as a gold and silver and then God brought me to Eric Israel and God brought me to the base I make that I wouldn't be outside I gotta talk about the bitterness of slavery I gotta talk about oppression I gotta talk about servitude I got to talk about the deaths of the children in other words it's not enough to talk about the good part of the story you have to talk about the bad part of the story The difficulties and the sufferings this is called in the language of the mishnah because you must begin with the bad and then move on to the good now this is obviously not this is obviously not a requirement the whole year the whole year we just say God took me out of Egypt but male pesos you have to be master of beginners and the question is why would it be so important to talk about the negatives why don't I just talk about the good stuff I'm thanking God for all the good stuff why do I have to talk about how bad things were so I'm going to give you two answers one is a relatively simple Common Sense answer the other is a bit deeper the common sense answer is that we only appreciate the good in life when we realize how bad things were meaning to say a person may often take their health for granted a person might go through a lot of their life relatively healthy without major sickness without hospitalizations and they take it for granted and then God forbids there may be health problems at different parts times of life and then and only then does the person appreciate the gift of a healthy body that functions hopefully they'll regain that function and then they'll have a different depreciation for it if God forbid they know they'll certainly have an appreciation for what they had some of you might have parents or certainly grandparents who came who were either survivors of the Holocaust or came from communist countries the former Soviet Union and such people tend to be very patriotic they appreciate the Liberties and Freedoms of growing up in a free Society in ways that people were just born in a free Society don't even imagine so it's the nature of human beings that you only appreciate the good if you picture how bad it was so you got to picture it I got a picture how bad and how awful it was in order to appreciate the gift of Freedom it's kind of a before and after picture that's a relatively simple answer and psychologically it's actually true if I don't realize how bad slavery is I'm not going to appreciate the gift of freedom but although that that is a good answer right sometimes a simple answer is a good answer but it does raise a question because it was God himself who decreed that we be put in since slavery Hashem told avraham in the Covenant of the parts that your children will be enslaved in a land that is not theirs now granted Hashem decreed it would be for 400 years and it was only 210 years so we ought to be grateful that God cut off 190 years but let's think about this I throw you into a prison I locked the door and I say I'm coming back in 400 years let's assume you live that long and I come back after 210 years and I say be grateful to me I'm coming back 190 years earlier then I said I would well you might profess gratitude because you don't want to be thrown back in there but in your mind undoubtedly you're thinking why should I be grateful to you for coming back 190 years early you put me into slavery for 20 10 years so why should I be grateful that God took me out of Egypt if it was God that put me into Egypt God decreed you will be enslaved so because of this we have to give a bit of a deeper answer the reason why we praise God not only by the positives of freedom but by the negatives of slavery is not simply to create a before and after contrast but rather the slavery itself is part of what we are grateful for very very different it's not that the slavery gives me an awareness to be grateful for the freedom which is true but much more deeper than that the slavery is part of what I'm grateful for meaning if we were free and we became slaves and then we're freed if the only thing that means is the freedom after the slavery is the same as the freedom before the slavery right I was free I was slave now I'm free then that wouldn't give us gratitude to God that would give us resentment if all you've done is put me in the place I was so all you did was hurt me but if we understand and again I will illustrate this in a minute if we understand that the freedom posts slavery was spiritually and qualitatively a different and deeper type of freedom then my gratitude to God is not only for the freedom my gratitude to God is for the slavery that preceded the freedom now what does that mean concretely what does it mean I am grateful for the slavery so there's a lot of difference things you might say I'll just mention two things you know the base of Levy raises an interesting contradiction in midrussian of course midrashram don't always have to be consistent so it's not automatically a question but he points out that there are two mid-russian that seem to contradict one is a famous mattress and I even mentioned it last week that says or two weeks ago that says that although the Jewish people who are on the 49th level of impurity and they almost disappeared they had certain that kept them kept their heads above water they didn't change their names they kept their Jewish names they didn't change their language they spoke Hebrew they didn't intermarry they didn't speak Russian harah they wore distinctly distinctly Jewish clothing in other words what are these these are not from kite they were not religious they were Idol worshipers but these were what you might call ethnic indicators we're not going to assimilate we are going to affirm that we're Jewish so that seems to indicate that measure seems to indicate that even in the midst of slavery they had a sense of their own group identity as Omi Israel and that was a great that enabled the Redemption that's medish number one but there's a metrics number two that says the opposite idea message number two says that when you're safe and all of the tribes died the slavery didn't start until all of the original tribes were gone Bene Israel said the following they were honored right they were considered to be very very important people because after all they're the brothers of Yosef who was the benefactor of mithraya and the binay Israel said if we are so successful when and respected when we are living distinctly from the Egyptians how much more so will they love us and accept us if we assimilate if we intermarry if we integrate with them and therefore after Yosef dies there was a wholesale move towards assimilation and into marriage and that's why God put into Pyro's heart a hatred of the Jews because when the Jew tries to become too close to the non-jewish world the non-jewish worlds will repel them this I actually wrote a little article once with the title is a little provocative anti-Semitism the hidden gift of God because in truth that is a function of anti-Semitism in the cosmic scheme of things it keeps Jews separate when assimilation gets too strong there needs to be a push the waiter of Mayor Shapiro put it he says if Jews don't make Kiddush in fact it's a very witty remark kirish literally means sanctification if a Jew doesn't sanctify himself the Graham are going to have double separation so we have these two different midrashram one Metro says the Jews didn't assimilate they kept their language and they kept uh their their their uh names the other major says there was a wholesale downscale downside slide towards assimilation which was it so says the base of Levy there's no contradiction when the Jews were prosperous and doing well they thought they would gain more by assimilating it was the slavery that made them realize that we have to stay together we have to stick together slavery gave us group identity it gave us group Consciousness it made us realize that we cannot depend on the nations of the world it made us realize that all we have is God and each other and as the saying goes Nations don't have uh friends or Allies they only have interests sometimes the interests coincide so we can walk together for a while and sometimes the interests don't coincide and we have to be separated so one gift of slavery is it made us realize that all we have is each other and we have to connect and we have to hold on and we cannot achieve success by abandoning our uniqueness and our separate identity Israel used to point out very often we have Rama Vino was negotiating to Barry Sarah he introduced himself to ephronachite or to the beneath the people of Christ chav I am a stranger and a resident among you and Raph salivatrix said that's such a perfect description of the Jew um on one hand we are a toshev on one hand we are a resident Jews rightly so try to contribute in a positive way to every society that they're not Hashem were an Erich Israel so this is a Jewish state by the Jew in America Jew in England you in France they try to make it a better Society I don't want to draw explicitly pejorative comparisons to other groups of people but one can draw the comparisons in their own minds between people who come to a society and tried to destroy it versus people who come to a society and try to make it better so we are toshav we live in whatever Society we live in a positive constructive way but side by side with the idea of being a toshav we have to be a gear we have to have a sense that we are strangers we can never feel totally comfortable in that other world because then we assimilate then we give up you know this is uh was really such a scandal but it even upset the reform movement a few years ago at Hebrew Union College which is the reform rabbinical Seminary they have a branch here but the main branches in Cincinnati so the graduating class gets to choose the speaker so they chose a Jewish novelist who actually writes Jewish themed novels I don't remember his name and the the the subject of the speech was there was no longer a need for Jews to be in the world he says Jews gave a lot to the world over thousands of thousands of years but you know it's finished there's no need to be you had be Jewish anymore there's no need to marry Jews anymore Jews suggest quite literally I mean he's speaking at a rabbinical Seminary Jews should just disappear meaning you had your own it was a good run for 5 000 years okay now just become part of General Society well I have to say that uh this even upset the reform because among other things you're not going to need rabbis if there aren't going to be Jews okay but putting that aside this is why you have to have that sense of being a stranger you can never feel totally part of that Society so that's one thing we got from The Exodus the sense I'm saying not from The Exodus from the slavery not from the from the slavery the sense we got to be together we got to hang together we gotta stick together because if we think we're going to find our salvation by just being part of General Society it's not going to happen they're going to turn against us if we don't recognize the need for boundary and separation there's also a second that the slavery gave us that almost moves in the opposite direction it's almost a contradiction the story says in more than 30 places that you must love the converts you must show respect for the convert the word is gear now Gare literally means stranger and one and then a number of succumb it says you shall love the gear love the convert because you were gay rim in the land of Egypt now you can't translate gay room as convert love the convert because you were converts we were not converts in the land of Egypt rather gave him there means stranger exactly it meaning God is saying you know what it's like to be bottom on the totem pole you know what it's like to be oppressed you know what it's like not to have influence you know what it's like not to have any basis for achievement in a society there's gonna come a time where you're going to be free there's going to come a time where you're sitting high and mighty there's going to come a time when you're in your lands but remember that experience of slavery because that will be the source of your empathy and your compassion to the poor to the weak to the vulnerable to those who don't have connections or protection in society remember access your memory of being a Slave of being a Slave because that will be the source of your compassion for the downtrodden and The Outsider this is actually a very remarkable psychological statement because often now we live in a society where many people do claim victimhood for a variety of reasons and again we have to have only compassion for victims of any different types of abuse we have to help them in any way that we can but sometimes you're gonna get in trouble for this but sometimes there's a certain narcissistic tinge in victimhood in which the only thing that matters is I was hurt and I will not allow myself to be hurt again and a person almost develops a protective shell around themselves so they're not going to allow themselves to be hurt now I can't be critical of that that may be necessary for self-protection but the Torah is suggesting there's another way of approaching this instead of distancing yourself from your pain you actually connect to your pain as a potent and powerful memory in your life but instead of using the pain to drag you down the pain becomes the source of the empathy and the compassion that you have for the downtrend and the Torah says don't forget the experience of being a Slave when you're free when you're on top when you're sitting pretty don't forget what it was like to be a nobody when you encounter people in that circumstance of life you will be there to help them that is not the gift that we got because we were freed from slavery you see the subtlety that's the gift that we got because we were slaves so the inner idea of why the Haggadah requires that we begin with the bat and culminate in the good is not simply the idea that by remembering the bad I'm grateful for the good but to internalize a deeper idea that even the bad gave me a great deal of good that I took into my life who I was after I was a slave is not the same as who I was before I was this life now this lesson applies in every aspect of life every aspect of life person every every life there are going to be misfortunes greater or lesser setbacks departments and how does one deal with those disappointments does one become bitter does one become angry does one become crushed or does one learn how to grow how to become a greater person how to have empathy and compassion for those who are suffering is the wondrous lesson that we see Redemption not only in coming out of the tunnel but we see the Redemptive possibilities of the darkness within the tunnel itself the lessons that it contains the potentialities that it can give us and in that way we see the goodness and kindness of God even in the challenges of life and even in the dark moments the Zoar talks about Cena de cardenasa putsina de cordinusa actually means black light the black light what's a black light well just as there are certain frequencies of light that can only be seen with special goggles infrared or whatever it is so too even in the Blackness there's light but you need special goggles and those goggles are emuna eyes of faith and this is some of the lessons that we see from yet we try himself wish you all have a good week and actually about Shalom and Mr Shem we'll meet together next week [Music]