Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Prophet Isaiah - Internalizing the 7 Weeks of Comfort

[Music] okay hi everybody good to see you i guess we're getting more and more uh live people although uh every day the government is changing the rules i hope as that's shown we will be able to uh uh to continue and uh first uh today's share is dedicated uh for a reformer ben hoda may all of these have a reforged leima israel and in addition aliyah shama in memory of the following people ruvain pinchas ben khayemyakov david ben arya lab i believe these are the relatives of alan fine who is a very very good friend who gives the shir a torah of his own and this should be uh nishma and as well as binyamin israel then who was the heroic young man that we were praying for for over a year and unfortunately he was nifter and his parents the ganchors are still generously supporting many shiorim and miriam bat shimon again all of these nisham out should have an aliyah in the merit of the torah learning that we are doing it's very very interesting that we are approaching uh the month of ello and those of you that have experienced life in yeshivats especially i know that the montevello has a special resonance rabbi shaw solanter who lived 150 years ago described ello when he was a child and he already said that it had changed that when the khazan benched rosh chodesh this coming shabbat they're going to announce rosh chodesh elder there was like a cry from the women's gallery and women literally were fainting and that was not because of the difficulties of cooking for a three day yamcha but rather there was such a palpable a matadin kind of a fear of god's judgment on rosh hashanah god decides who will live and who will die and eloh is already the preparation for the mahadin the days of den and yamim narayam and there was a tremendous parkade in lita in lithuania the saying goes that in the month of ello even the fish in the ocean tremble and quake and again the the litvisher the kind of the in lithuanian culture and in yeshivats and all of the non-hasidic yeshivo today are primarily based on what we call litchfire right now in every cell for example when you identify yourself as a litoi that does not mean you're from lithuania but it's a certain culture a certain mindset and elo was very very known as for the the ema and the pakhad the the trembling uh if you look in the prayer in the santa together which is one of the highlights of the rosh hashanah yom kippur service it talks that even the very angels in heaven quake and they tremble and who can withstand hashems did in truth we can't deny we cannot deny the fact that on rosh hashanah in a little bit more than a month no god is deciding who will live who will die uh if a preliminary decision is made on rosh hashanah we call that kitiva and then the final decision is made on yom kippur who will live and who will die who will be healthy who will be sick if we think about all the tragedies of this past year especially with corona we have to recognize they were nizar they were decreed last rosh hashanah yom kippur so serious things are happening but we also have to understand that although this is an undeniable aspect of yemen it is not a complete story because as i say sometimes people focus on this aspect and they either become anxious they become depressed or they tune out because since they don't want to be anxious or depressed they just don't want to think about it there really is another side to the story and this is can can be best expressed by looking at the famous acronyms that our sages have devised for the month of elle they have found ello murumas alluded to in various sukim and the like and i want to give you three of them the first one everybody knows i'm sure you've heard of the other two are maybe a little less obvious but also carry a very powerful message the best known uh acronym for ello is the uh the verse in shira shirim shireshirim the song of songs is uh written as a romance a passionate romance but ghazal almost got centered there were rabbis who basically said the song of songs does not belong in the jewish bible it is sensual it is romantic it is a secular love song or actually a collection of wealth songs in others people don't know many commentaries interpret the word shireshi rim not qualitatively not it is the song that surpasses all other songs but quantitatively it is a song that is comprised of many smaller poems sheer of shirim and in the refrain the young woman says about her lover anila dodi i pledge myself to my beloved vidodee lee and my beloved pledges himself to me and khazal say that the young woman is israel and the lover is god and essentially what amy israel is declaring is my loyalty and my love is to my creator and my creator's love and loyalty is to me and what is the famous message the rasheed the first letters of those four words ani li dodi with though delhi is hello so instead of looking at elo as a time of pakha fear like we're preparing for the court case which you know in a month we're going to be standing in trial for our lives in front of a judge and a jury that's kind of out to get you anilo d under underscores the fact that ello is a time of love a time of reconciliation a time of relationship and khabad there's a very very famous famous mushroom if you have any connection with i'm sure you have heard this more than once it's from the altar webb that ellen is the month that is hamelech in fact in a week or so you'll see a lot of signs from the different houses and what is the analogy that the whole year the king is in his palace and yes he's open for appointment you can make an appointment but if the king is in his palace you need an appointment but there's a time of year where the king goes out in the field and anybody who wants to approach him can approach him he's accessible he's available and ello is said to be the time of year hamel it's a different view of ello ello is not this scary time where i'm shaking and i'm quaking like when we saw solange described it padella was a time of love of loyalty of reconciliation remember that moshe rabena went up to get the second luchot after the first ones were broken after the federal ego he went up rosh chodesh and they came down on yom kippur so the 40 days from rosh chodesh to yom kippur are called through yom kippur uh when he came down with the second lukat are called yame ratzon for mim ken i think uh you know particularly you know we're kind of a weaker generation and sometimes when the musser is very harsh and very very critical it's a little hard for us to take and it's important to kind of understand now again i i have to be careful here i don't want to distort anything there is a reality that god is deciding on yom narayim who will live and who will die we cannot really get around that i mean we don't have the choice it's going to it's going to happen whether we like it or not but you have to understand that it's in a context of anila dodiva dodie you know i remember when i was a um uh when i was a college student so uh i took a course one of my courses was in uh earlier early american literature so one of the i think i mentioned this more than once one of the excerpts they have in anthologies of early american literature was a very famous sermon given by a prominent puritan preacher jonathan edwards which basically described sinners in the hands of a wrathful god and this was really kind of a real mustache moves he basically speaking to his christian congregation and he's saying you are like a repulsive insect that someone is holding over a fire that all he wants to do is squish it and throw it into the fire and that's how you are in front of god who is disgusted with every aspect of you well i suppose that is an approach one might take to bring their congregation uh to but that doesn't seem to be the way ghazal are describing it anila dodi bedo de li i want to do chuva not because i'm afraid god's going to hurt me if i don't but i want to do chuva because i love god and god loves me so i want to do what's right when i love someone i want to make them happy i want to give them just as hashem wants to give us brachot and the like right so that's the first drummer again as i say that's probably very well known and i'm sure most of you all of you probably have heard anila dodea with doji lee but what's interesting is anila dodiva dodi lee is in shira shirim and that's the most famous remis but there are two other ramosm to the montebello that are actually in the torah itself one would have assumed if it's in the torah it would actually be more famous but it's actually less a little less known than anita dodiva dodi ali and that is uh one of them is from later on in the book of devarim when it talks about uh umal hashema loke et le vavra god will circumcise your heart and the heart of your children milan and it's the same idea et's is encoded in a pasuk that refers to circumcision of the heart now this of course the term circumcision of the heart is a metaphorical expression obviously we don't want our heart to be circumcised quite literally that would pose a severe health risk to kind of take the heart and cut away some of the heart tissue but rather the metaphor is very very simple we know for circumcision that until the brit until the foreskin is cut away it's called orla so orla is that which is blocked and the cutting away exposes that which was covered same thing with fruit i mean the reason why fruits for the first three years after you plant the tree you're not allowed to eat right you can only eat the fruit after three years what is that fruit called or or allah means it's blocked it's removed from use or allah so consequently orlav refers to a condition where your heart is blocked you're not able to connect to what you really feel what you really are inside when you're blocked in your connection with other people you're blocked in your connection to god and you're even blocked in terms of really connecting to yourself that's the condition that is called or lots of and even if a person is religious and a person is observant and a person is doing mitzvot but a person is kind of going through the motions and they don't have a genuine feeling a genuine connection to things they're blocked that's called or allah so the second dramas of elo is that the month of ello is a month that we can achieve a circumcision of that heart we can release the blockages or get rid of the blockages and connect to hashem in a positive loving way so it's not just the protestation of you know anila dadev dodie but the actual removal of the impediments that prevent us from living authentic integrated unified lives of authenticity and reality again it's something to think about you know uh sometimes we're so involved i mean rightfully so in some ways that don't get me wrong we're so involved in the details of the mitzvot that we lose sight of the purpose of the mitzvot the purpose of the mitzvoth is to have a connection to hashem now remember just to give you an example of how absurd things are many many years ago i was talking about this idea about developing a relationship with god so somebody said and one of the people said i'm very uncomfortable with that language that sounds too christian jews don't talk about a relationship with gods we talk about mitzvot now there actually is a kernel of truth to that observation because in a sense god is unknowable right so so we only know god through the medium of the torah but i think it also highlights what you might call almost an occupational hazard so to speak of even an orthodox religious jew that is we're so fixated on the trees maybe even the leaves of the trees the branches of the trees that we don't really ever think about why am i doing all this what is it supposed to bring me to and how do i get there and that's called orla talev there's kind of a blockage there and ello is a month where we could achieve the milata lev um that's the second drum is the rebel now the third rammus of allah goes all the way back to parashat's mishpatim in the book of shmot although in the mitzvah various mentioned in this project or last week's project as well that is irma city of refuge what is city of refuge well we know i think we talked about it more than once a person kills another person inadvertently without malice but they're negligent if it's a totally unavoidable accident you don't go to the ear mclaugh but there was a certain carelessness you didn't look both ways at an intersection you went through a stop sign at two o'clock in the morning where you thought nobody was around and god forbid you hit you hit somebody in other words there's a certain element of negligence carelessness legally to use the secular term would be called manslaughter not murder so the torah creates a whole punishment system a very interesting punishment system where the person goes to certain cities of refuge and he remains in those cities a very strange sentence until the kohang gadol dies very very strange we talked about that a few weeks ago uh if the cohen godol dies a day later goes free after a day cohen gadol dies 50 years later he's stuck for 50 years if he dies before the cohen godol he's buried in the aramic lot and his body is not exhumed to the family plot until after the current god all dies okay we spoke a few weeks ago about the indeterminate sentence but i just uh want to bring out ire macleod now in the parasha vir mikla it says the following a share load sada he who did not wait in ambush with premeditation elokim inaudible god prepared for him a protection i have given him a place where he can run now there is the air machlad so in that pasuk same thing ina liado god has prepared for him so this pasuk tells us elo is an ear very significant anir mclaughs is a place of protection and refuge for those who committed unintentional murder irmiglot is normally a spatial concept right there's a certain area but what we're being taught is that just as there's an ear miglat in space there's a concept of ir miklot in time and hello is the heir miklot and what that teaches us is this in a sense every sin is a form of murder it's really a form of suicide in a sense because god gave us a life god gave us time when we waste our time we don't use our time properly we essentially have taken the gift of life and we have destroyed it right when people say i waste time wasting time or doing bad things in our time is really a form of suicide because you're taking the substance of life and dissipating it so all of us are murderers sometimes we murder other people by humiliating them but but all of us with all whatever virus we have we're murdering ourselves but god knows that we don't do so with malice we don't do so with evil intention we're wrote shogenko we're shogek we don't think we're careless we don't always focus things happen l is the spiritual equivalent of the ear michelette that allows therefore to be an atonement let me point out that people sometimes make a mistake they think the purpose of the aramic lot is to protect the rhodesia from the blood avenger who would be allowed to kill him it's a protective function now that is true that is a function but that's not the only function because let's imagine that the retsaya is a wealthy guy and the rochefort would say well thanks a lot for offering me security in the year mclaughs but you know i have a much nicer house and hurt salia and i can afford my own private security that's a lot better than the emergence you see if your mcleod would only be a security device then the rotator should have the ability to say i'll handle it myself but the answer is he's not given that option he must go to the year mcleod no matter how good his private security is because it is not simply security it is actually an atonement which we we give to him whether he likes it or or not so these are three ramazim for the month of ello the idea of loyalty and love that is reciprocal between god and the jewish people anila dodiva dodi li ello is a time in which we can overcome our blockages and inhibitions and that's the idea of milata lev um and the third is elo is the time of reflection it is the ear mik lutz that can be an atonement for the sich that we commit with the substance of our own of our own lives so all three of these messages are really very very positive messages i know that refrasco levenstein used to always the greatest great masjid the great paul musser always talked about ello as golden golden moments of time that we can use for good uh purposes and of course obviously we we have several weeks for the ryan so i will be talking about this more than more than once but i think it's important that we we look at it in a positive way in fact the safer even says that the fact that we go through this annually is actually a hashem because it allows us to look at our life in small increments imagine you know imagine if we would have rosh hashanah yom kippur every 10 years every 20 years so that means i have to look back at my life over 20 years and try to fix things that's a very difficult task hashem gives it to you every year you know how much could you mess up in a single year well we actually we can do quite a lot but but still it's a more manageable type of thing and therefore karish parker kind of gives us a frequent tests so to speak so we're able to work with smaller increments in improving ourselves and the like now if you look at the jewish calendar it's almost always the case that parashat rea the parsha that we're reading this coming week is either the shabbat before rosh chodesh as it is this year or it's the an black it's always the first parasha of either shabbat mavorhim or shabbat or rosh and as is always the case there's always going to be a connection between the parsha of the week and the calendar a date and the maforchum have identified a number of ramazim in parshat riye itself that pertains to the start of the season of chuva which is elul rosh hashanah yom kippur and i'll just mention a few of them i don't want to mention all of them that would go on quite a long time but i want to mention number one when mosher abenu lays out the idea that behold i have set before you the blessing and the curse you may notice and perhaps an early person always mentions the cleo car so perhaps you already mentioned this but the cleo car points out that in the hebrew there is a grammatical shift between the singular verb and the plural verb see i am putting before you in english you know you don't see anything but in hebrew rei is the lash and yakit lift is a russian rabbit right but what is the idea of of combining a singular and a plural uh here and the kliyokar says that this is a remiss that each individual must know that the decisions they make impact on the whole community the idea of calli israel i raven's that each of us are responsible for each other means that i'm not only responsible to god for my mitzvoth and my average but i bear a responsibility for every other individual as well so it's kind of reciprocal on one hand that sibor is obligated to be concerned about the yakid but the akhid also knows that his decisions impact and sibor you know we sometimes say if i want to go to hell that's my business what do you care you know it's none of your business but the truth of the matter is the talmud you saw me gives a very famous mashal to people sitting on a boat and let's imagine i'm sitting on a boat and under me the boats as a whole and water's coming in and when you come to fix the hole i said no mind your own business it's the hole is under my seat well the answer is the water gets in under my seat the whole boat is going to sink and that's exactly our predicament so the kleoker says the rea and the lyft nephem is a reminder really that every individual matters and every individual's behaviors impact andet sibor as a whole you know for example in a yeshiva or a mignon if some people decide you know not to participate in the learning or in the or in the mignon that creates a certain weakness with ripple effects that can actually bring down a lot of people so we have to realize that we do have a responsibility towards our communities and our communities have a responsibility towards us we can't let people fall between the cracks we can't ignore people because they're insignificant or they're not our group they're not our clique they're not you know our people so to speak because there really are no uh me and them the me and the them are all the same we're all on the same not necessarily on the same page because people have different views and rightfully so but ultimately we are in the same book and in the same boat and when something endangers or hurts any part of amithrael it is something we have to be concerned with that is rem is number one rem is number two is that mosher ebenu seems to say that there's only two choices in life i have given you the path of blessing and goodness and they have given you the path of death and destruction right you have two roads god is saying there are two roads in life the road of mitzvot the road of torah the road of abu dhabi that will bring you blessing and goodness in this world and certainly in the world to come and then there's the road of death destruction uh the road of averts the question is isn't there a third road isn't there something in life that we would call neutral meaning if you look at human actions it seems there are three types of actions there are actions that are misvotes that you're supposed to do there are actions that are they wrote that you're not supposed to do and then there's a whole bunch of stuff you can do it if you want and don't do it if you don't want right hand connection always gets these questions like people ask for clam kaneski questions i mean i'm just giving an example like uh should i eat the corn flakes or cheerios for breakfast so iframe kaneski will answer kiertsonecha do what you want i mean i i didn't see this particular but people asking these these questions of like you know optional things and they'll say do what you want what are you bothering me so why isn't there a neutral here why is there only the path of death or the path of life what about neutral so the truth of the matter is but actually writes there is actually no such thing as neutral in life every single thing we do is supposed to bring us closer to god and if it doesn't bring us closer to god then it's putting us further from god and we try to avoid it now let me explain this because you can again misunderstand it uh this is not suggest like people might say oh so according to the clubhouse i'm not allowed to take a vacation i'm not allowed to eat ice cream i'm not allowed to read an enjoyable secular book because it has to be a mitzvah activity there's a more subtle point here the krebs and the rambam for example recognize that there is a role in a spiritual life for vacations there is a role for relaxation there is a role for recreation there is a role of playing basketball or golf or whatever it is we're not saying everything has to be a technical mitzvah there's plenty of room in life for optional activities but the goal of the operational activity should be something that energizes me that relaxes me that positions me to be able to serve god in a better way so even when you go on vacation there's a way of thinking about it there's a way of envisioning it there's a way of integrating it into your spiritual structure you could go to the grand canyon and use that as an exercise in contemplating the wonders and the beauties of god's creation although i'm not suggesting that you need to go leave israel for that i mean hashem we have on a smaller scale to be sure but we have wonderful wonderful things to see in eric israel as well that wonder of cook you know if cook was a very very hard period of his life uh around world war one uh ref cook happened to find himself outside of land of israel during the beginning of the war and because of the uh the war and the like he was stranded he was not able to come back was with his wife he was not able to come back to arizona for almost five years five years for a while he was in switzerland and then he became rav in london to a to a lithuanian congregation in london and he made an explicit condition that the day that they eased the border restrictions he has the right to leave i mean he made the condition that no matter what he gets to leave immediately when the restrictions were lifted but lamaisa he was a rev in london i think he was in switzerland i think only for a year or less than a year and then he was in london for four years and it is said that rough cook refused to you know you know england has you know very pretty countrysides he refused to see it he says he didn't want to take his mind off the beauties of eric israel he did go to the british museum because he very much enjoyed rembrandts now rembrandt painted quite a few pictures of rabbis and the like and he said rembrandt was a guy but rembrandt has kind of a jewish sensibility in terms of the aura and the whites and the like so he did enjoy rembrandt but he would not look at the natural beauties of anything outside of of eretz of eric israel but be this made the point i'm making simply is this that when the saliva says there's no such thing as neutral he's not saying that the only things you're allowed to do are mitzvoth but he's saying that even when we do recreation vacation whatever it is we do it with the intention that i want to grow in my avodah hashem this gives me energy this gives me relaxation this gives me enthusiasm and then as the rambam writes the vacation or the jogging or the running or the touring actually become mitzvahs because they are stepping stones in your avodah and this is what moshe rabbenu is marames by saying there's only two choices in life you're either engaged in the blessing path that brings you closer or by definition you're going further one might compare the game of life to an escalator that's going down i don't know if you ever did this when you were when you were younger i used to do it i haven't done it recently uh do you try to run up a an escalator going down see if you could go faster than they again i haven't done it for a while uh but uh you know it's a little it's a little hard it takes a little bit of an effort because the escalator is going down and you want to run fast enough that you can go faster up then the escalator is going down now if you only stand still you'll be going down so the velma gown says not quite this way that life is like a downward escalator if you're not actively trying to go up you will go down you never stay in place the person can never say i'll just stay in place it doesn't work that way if you're not actively working to grow you get pulled down by life and the escalator is a perfect pic you know metaphor or muscle for that type of phenomenon and that's the lesson of the two pathways blessing curse there is no middle ground and the third idea so one is the plural singular the other is no middle ground and the third is the word hayyom very significant hayyom behold i am putting before you today you may recall if you have a good memory for the rosh hashanah's avenue you may know that the word hayyom is kind of a word that appears actually quite often in the rosh hashanah dabbling it's almost like a highlighter right at the end of musaf you know after we've been dominating for a few hours so we have it's sung usually to a jaunty today this is the day god will give us strength i i know this is that's a partial page if you look in the boxer it doesn't go through all the letters but but you see it's the start of an olive base to god leno to and this in its original version if you ever look at a moxer like professor goldschmidt's very excellent master not not to be used for davening because there are so many interesting side things you're not going to die when you're going to read all the comments but but uh well the vermont is as they what we say but but professor goldsmith gives you all the original pu tim the original readings and uh and he gives you the whole olive base the whole 22 letters of ayom which eventually got shortened but the word hayom today today today and i don't know if it was connected to the torah's usage of it but in real rease something very great and powerful every day is a new decision see a person can sometimes envision his life i'm on the bad road i've been on the bad road for years i can't get back on i don't i'm no longer at the fork in the road but the image that is being presented here is every single day you are standing in front of two roads so the road you took yesterday does not dictate where you need to go today every day and really every minute is a new opportunity that's very significant because sometimes people might feel they're the point of you know beyond beyond the point of return they're already right i've been going thousands of miles right uh many many years on this bad road i'm no longer at the fork where i can just go on the good road and that's why robin ryona who wrote the great great one of the great great books on shiva robeno yonah who was the ramban's nephew he wrote the great immortal classic gates of repentance it's a book that people often learn this time of of year says that although chuva does require contemplating my past but that comes afterwards initially you have to feel like the saying goes on the t-shirts today is the first day of the rest of your life in other words you forget about the past what i did is what i did but life is full of new opportunities and what i am today doesn't have to be dictated by what i was yesterday and without what i can become tomorrow is not controlled by what i am today that freedom to move on the freedom to change the freedom to grow that's the meaning of hayyon don't get bogged down don't get discouraged by whatever my past may have been and that's why the word hayom is so important because you know just like the saying goes you fall off the horse you got to get on again that's life you know all of us we fall off horses many many times all of us have made many mistakes all of us have done things that we regret but that doesn't mean we can't fix it that doesn't mean we can't go on that doesn't mean that we can't discover new channels of light and growth and and the like so those are some ramasim in parashat riye that we need to think about in terms of yamim narayam in terms of ello and the like now let me bring out another aspect of this we know that before the ninth above we have three half taurus that deal with paraneos deal with catastrophe deal with tragedy they're called the shlochad de paranusa three haftarus of tragedy two of them are from the book of year miyahu and of course the one right before tish above is khazon yeshayahu it is the vision of isaiah and these are about tragedies perennius god's warning that will be the destruction of the temple but right after tisha buff we then have seven half tauros of comfort this is called the famous shiva den the seven have tyrus of comforts and all of them come from one prophet all of the observers come from one prophet the nabi yeshayo he was he's the great uh prophet of comfort and the like and that's going to take us all the way till rosh hashanah meaning all of the parshiots until rosh hashanah are going to be the shiva the seven of toros of comfort now after the seven of terrorists of comfort we already have rosh hashanah shabbat shiva and we have toros that deal with shiva and repentance so let's think about this i i want to clarify something just a little bit of information here first of all what is the origin of haftara we know we have a torah reading and after the torah reading on shabbat on yomtov we read haf torah which is from the prophets so when i was a little child and i first heard the term so i came up with a real ingenious shot i said oh yeah the prophets are less important than the torah so it's half torah yeah that's what it is there's torah and there's half total it's pretty good but when i got to half dollar i i didn't i i couldn't figure that out uh what is this half dollar at the end of shabbos so uh so i thought my shot must be incorrect now obviously haftara i mean it's not even spelled like colorways with a tat means announcement and the historical origin of the torah actually dates from the time of antiochus the time of the macabre because at some point the greeks did not allow the public reading of the torah but for some reason they didn't mind other prophetic books so the original idea was the haftarah was a replacement for the inability to read the torah it was a substitute when barak hashem the hasmoneans were able to re-establish the public torah reading they thought there was still a good idea in keeping the prophets as as well and according to rashford shabbat shabbat minsa they would read a haf torah from ketuvim in other words very very interesting shabbos morning torah and the vm shabbat afternoon a haftarah from kesuvan whether it's tehillim or the book of evil or whatever or mcgee laughs whatever it would be for some reason that mina got discontinued but that actually was an original minute that on shabbat there was a torah from the ketuvim but be it as it may anyone that ever looks at any hamish knows that there's a tremendous tremendous diversity of minha gim for what is the haftarah for a particular parsha ashkenaz yeki italian has some unique minhagem etc and that is because the gemara does not standardize what the huff toros are it's a general idea that the torah should either be connected to the parsha or connected to the occasion and it does not tell you what the haftaris have to be so every kihillah had the freedom to make their own decisions in other words there are certain aspects of jewish liturgy that were never standardized and it was left to individual congregations to make their choices with the general guideline but one of the guidelines that ghazal did say is mandatory is that you must follow the pattern of three haftarus of tragedy followed by seven haftaras of comfort followed by haftarat of they didn't tell you what they have to be you could choose anything you want but you have to follow the pattern now what's the pattern again paranoid that is a mandatory pattern so here's my question if you look at the torah you always see that the process is actually in a different order from tragedy from galut from quran we do and from the chuva comes the redemption and the comfort the pattern is not tragedy redemption shiva the pattern should be tragedy shiva redemption we see this in the humish itself itself describes guru as coming from chuva we see this in davani consider the amidah right the amida says hashivainu avinu help us do so forgive our sins and then go elena redeem us go el israel and the rambam says as well ain't israel negan the jewish people are redeemed through repentance now hashem now that may scare you if the jewish people are not going to redeem unless there's repentance we're in big big trouble but the rambam says hashem promises us that the jewish people will repent and come back to god's and there will be a gaulah so the question is why is the pattern of torah tragedy followed by consolation followed by redemption it should be the other way i'm sorry followed by in other words it goes tragedy it should actually be tragedy now i understand that that doesn't work with the calendar dates because that would mean when rosh hashanah comes we're reading about comfort and redemption okay but putting that aside schematically and thematically it is not following the proper sequence of events right do you see they see the problem in other words the pattern of the route is inconsistent with the humish it's inconsistent with fila and it's inconsistent i mean you know being inconsistent with the hummus should be enough more than enough but it's inconsistent with the rambam's ruling that ain't israel nigalin see that's the problem so let's go back a little bit and think about the seven of terrorists of conference first of all it's very important to note that that's more than double the have terrorists of tragedy three afters of tragedy seven have taurus have come but one of the problems that people have when they study tanakh especially when they study nivea machronium like ishayo is there seems to be so much repetition saying the same thing over and over and over again so if i were to ask you give me two sentences what is that first tough torah of comfort shabbat nakamura what is that about says oh yeah god is comforting the jewish people and telling us he'll bring us a redemption from our suffering okay good next shabbos what is the second half torah about uh god is comforting us and telling us that he will bring a redemption towards tsarot okay i thought that was last week's afzar what's the next one about same thing what's the next one about same thing okay how many times do you have to say the same thing over and over and over again i mean okay i got the idea and that's the problem that's why it's actually hard to learn via macronum sometimes because whether they're talking about sins they keep on talking about that uh over and over again and when they talk about the good things they're talking about that over and over again you know so how do you understand it so the truth of the matter is there are different approaches if you take a commentary like the malbim so the malbem tries to make every single word mean something different so if it talks about sason simcha so the album will laboriously give you a different meaning for each thing so there's never repetition and i think most of us intuitively might think that that's the right approach but the truth of the matter is many we shine them are very very ha they're perfectly willing to live with repetition the ebenezer has a very common expression k fell horinyan the milim show note that it's repeating the same idea milam shown up and the question is why would a holy book waste words by repeating the same idea over and over and over again and i would suggest to you that if you understand the function of prophecies of comforts you understand why there has to be a repetition they say many children remember i actually actually remember it myself the first time that they were lost or separated from their parents let's say in a shopping center i i mean i remember this i'm sure you know most a lot of people remember it i was with my mom and we were going through uh i was going shopping she was taking me to the apartment store and i was attracted to some toys somewhere so i wandered off and then i looked around and i didn't see my mother and i remember there was this feeling of terror i'm abandoned you know i'm banned i'm lost forever you know where am i going to live type of thing it was only like 10 seconds you know like 10 10 seconds thing and in those days things were safer today god forbid you have all these kidnappers and whatever then life was relatively safe then but still i had this terror somebody started crying and my mother allah shalom takes me and says i'm here i love you i'm here i'm here now i didn't i can't tell you how many times she said she loved me whatever it is but let's say she said it five times now alumnus a person might say why do you have to tell me you love me five times you said it once already so i know the answer is that the language of the heart is different than the language of the head i may have heard you love me and that went into my head but when a person is broken when a person is scared when a person feels abandoned they need to be reassured again and again and again you can't be a brisker london and say why say it twice you could have said it once and you have to understand when the jewish people were devastated by corbin by gollus by persecution and they felt rejected by god and they felt god did not care about them and god hated them god couldn't just say oh don't worry about it guys i love you let's go on god has to say it through the prophets over and over and over again because we need it and we need to be reassured we need to feel the reality of god's relationship and that's why there is a lot of repetition here it's as if hashem is saying i know you've suffered a lot i know you've been through a lot i know you feel rejected i know you feel devastated but i'm here for you i'm with you i'll give you strength i'll give you courage don't worry don't worry i'm here i'm here i'm here i'm here you understand the issue of why does god repeat it doesn't really apply because it's like the mother that's why it's very good actually sometimes when you learn the vm you have to remember that these were originally oral addresses they're addressing an audience so they're telling the jewish people god has told us again and again and again right in a book you can read the same book a hundred times but if you're talking about an oral address they have to hear the message many times in fact uh one of the ways you could teach the vm is to actually make it like a play i don't know if that's sacrilegious or not in which somebody plays ishayo somebody plays the audience and uh certainly the navi shayar was actually a very very beautiful language just to kind of use it in a dramatic sense and i think you get a sense of how what it really was like which we don't really have when we're just reading the book so now let's understand this when a person feels rejected by god they don't really have the psychic energy to do chuva because they think god hates me god has rejected me i'm not worthy of being with god so in order to be energized to do shiva you have to internalize the fact that god loves you and god cares about you there's a there's an idea here that no person becomes better unless they understand that they are already good [Music] if i think i'm worthless that does not energize me to do chuba that creates a despondency and a despair in which i just give up or don't care so here's how it works in terms of actual chronological sequence suffering brings you to chuva and shiva brings you to comfort and redemption you're not going to get the comfort and redemption until the juba so chronological the chuva precedes the neha but psychologically i have to internalize the idea that god loves me and wants to redeem me as a precursor to the chuva that i need to do and therefore our preparation for the process of truva we have seven weeks in which we internalize god's love for us and god's desire to redeem us and comfort us so there's enough camina there is a difference between the chronological sequence as it will actually unfold and the psychological stages i need to go through to go through that process chronologically the chuva brings the gala but psychologically i have to have an awareness of love my redemptibility as a condition for the chuva and that is why ghazal enacted the sequence of the preceding the goula chuva does not emanate from a sense of my worthlessness chuva emanates from a sense of my preciousness and that is why i focus on the kama because that allows me to internalize the love that hashem has for me for i'm israel and the like so again i wish we want to wish everyone a a cho de stove and uh may indeed may all of us merit uh to be soccer to all of the great great blessings that the montevello brings and may that be a precursor in turn to the shannatova metukam [Music]