(Way# 31) LOVING THE OMNIPRESENT: 48 Ways with Rabbi Aaron Dovid Poston

[Music] hey good day everybody welcome back to beyond the seven live from jerusalem with rabbi aaron david poston it's such a joy he's been teaching us so much these last it's we're going on a couple of years now uh but we've been doing uh the 48 ways to wisdom and today we've got part 31 it's going to be exciting especially after last week's i really enjoyed last week's class very very pleasant class so let's not delay let's just jump right in and see how the rabbi's doing tonight shalom rabbi um i heard there was some missiles even that went on there in israel yesterday is that true well it's what the news says i kind of believe i kind of believe it yes from the north from lebanon apparently we retaliated i really don't i haven't kept up with the news over the last 24 hours so i really don't know i think it was on thursday night or friday morning and uh yeah it's the proxy of iran anyway i don't want to talk too much about it we have to pray for peace of course those who listen are righteous gentiles and of course they're praying for the peace of the world and when there's peace in israel there'll be peace in the world and this has been a long drawn-out war for like you know 100 years so uh look we're praying for peace and we have to do things this is um it's up to us and where does it begin right the blessing is if you listen if torah if you listen to the commandments if you do what's right then there will be consequences positive results and that was what that is the promise that brings peace so uh we're shedding we're sharing the wisdom and hopefully you know uh jews and non-jews alike will come along come on board and and feel um connected in a way that can change the world very well said sir yeah beautiful okay so today's presentation is number 31 of the 48 ways to wisdom it is probably going to be one of the most difficult topics because it's loving the omnipresent what is why is god called macomb the place so that is a whole philosophical discussion that i don't know if i'm completely qualified um i will only you know any this whole this whole thing i mean we're talking about you have to define your terms so love we actually spoke about last week because it says love you right to become beloved right try to what be such a nice person where you get people to love you okay so i refer people to listen to number 30 of the 48 ways so we did define love and we'll redefine it again or we'll we'll hash it out again but what about hashem i mean we're calling we're going to call hashem hamakom it's a very strange terminology so if you think of hashem we have so many names something many people do not understand is that the names are attributes in other words hashem is infinite and undescribable indescribable extremely hard to get a a full picture of however this is what life is about and that's we're going to talk about tonight the idea of if love partially is a desire or a pleasure in trying to understand and have that relationship with hakuras who the holy one blessed be he even though we're going to now describe him as hamakom what does that mean okay so next week mizrat hashem it's the topic of number 32 is loving all mankind now that happens to be my favorite topic number one because when i came to asia torah to the shiva and i didn't know the roshi shiva for that long and i'm not sure if he himself had some kind of insight into my personality but he felt that he wanted to give me a personal customized lesson in life and he had me focus on the number 32 loving all mankind and amy he gave me an assignment and the assignment was to write an essay about it and to hang it up in a public area in yeshiva it was called the coffee tea room where people would take their breaks and there was like a bulletin board and he said for the next two weeks i want this your assignment to be hanging up so everyone can look at it critique it whatever and if somebody takes it down for if it disappears you have to have some extra copies on hand it should always be up straight you know consistently for two weeks and um it actually was taken down a few times and i did have to replace it but you know they had xerox machines back then believe it or not so it wasn't that hard i didn't have to rewrite it i just had to uh repost it so we'll talk about that again next week but just imagine this one number 31 is smack in the middle between being beloved right having people love you the natural feeling of wanting relationships with people having the feeling of wanting to be loved not loving god and then loving all people and they actually all go together but we're we're breaking them down so just keep in mind there's kind of like a theme there's definitely going on here it's flow yeah it's got beautiful flow oh that's it okay so hashem we did define love as a pleasurable emotion when you are able to uh focus in on the virtues of the other so if we're talking about hashem well there's a lot to talk about right i mean the very fact that you have you have to love life i mean that's basically the bottom line he is the giver of all life he created the universe and when you think about you know looking at nature looking at science looking at history looking at math whatever part of science you know there's so many different um um fields yeah yeah fields of science that you could focus in and totally like see the beauty see the mastery see the just so intense um the perfection perhaps right it's so amazing so basically when you see the virtues and when we talk about hashem there's power right there's such incredible forces there's also meaning right the whole idea of meaning and your life should be meaningful of course and and beauty is just examining you know the universe itself so so i want to just so now we define love what about hamakom it's going to be very difficult but the roshiv explains it like this it's not him i mean he's bringing it from earlier sources that if if i can get away with saying this even though i don't fully comprehend it okay so that hashem is beyond space right if it's place if makko means space or place loving the space and hashem just recognizing that hashem is beyond that beyond anything physical so then what does it mean to love the place because we're talking about hashem so to a certain extent we're actually saying that we are recognizing the transcendent transcendency the the supernaturality of kurdish marco beyond space and beyond time um for example the statement is i'm trying to find it on my sheet but i'll just have to uh wing it that the place is not hashem's place is not the universe but the universe is within god okay so that will already give you an idea that we are talking about something that is transcendental right hashem's place is not this world but this world is somehow within hashem um i would just tell you look bezrat hashem will live to 120 whatever it is will live to a ripe old age where we will examine and it's not just examining the truth is that it's our actual deepest desire to know god that's like like you can ask an atheist and ultimately if you if you said look i can i can get you like a one-on-one with god i can get you like a um i don't know five minutes 15 seconds in an elevator he'll go for it even though he'll claim to be an atheist because every single being really is a seeker a seeker of meaning right even an atheist wants meaning right and uh they're definitely attracted to power and beauty i mean who isn't okay so um one of the things when we we our god is one everything is interconnected and this is like like an ultimate thing when i mentioned about the names each name that is given to god is only like we can only know him through his attributes and there really are a lot of attributes in fact if you even think about it in the torah itself king david mentions attributes of god and we repeat these attributes moshe also says over attributes if they hadn't been written down the gemara explains that one one wouldn't even be able to start saying them because if you start saying them you're basically at some point you're going to stop and then anybody who you're having a dialogue with or watching you describe hashem would say and that's it you know like what do you mean that's it he's great he's this he's that and all of a sudden i mean you lose um vocabulary there's no more words you can describe because he's indescribable he's beyond description compare beyond compare yeah totally but we do have a lot of comparisons that we could try to imagine at least you know as we grow and develop you know a child sees his parents as god right as all powerful i mean whether it's feeding time right um time to go to the bathroom to get yourself wiped up and cleaned up and showered and what there's things that you cannot do you're just you're incapable of doing and you're totally relying on something bigger and you know something outside yourself and this is actually what we call transition hopefully we as we mature when we see our parents in this i'm putting clothes right this godly hopefully we didn't have too much of a dysfunctional family right an abusive a godly reflection that the transition to as we mature and realizing that there's something bigger and greater beyond us and beyond our parents and hope also then develop positively no unfortunately i know i'm aware that many of us and maybe this is part of this is i believe this is part of uh creation that we do have a lot of dysfunctional um relationships uh parents you know when they're younger and they have children while they're younger um treat their children one way and as they grow up meaning as the parents grow up 10 years later they're still having children hopefully they've learned a lot of lessons hopefully hopefully and the relationships with the younger children could be i'm i don't know how drastically different but they could be significantly different and uh we just hope you know so anyway this this is what life is really about so we have this um this vision when we were young but what is it about the love that a parent has for his kids again going back to partially for the definition of love is seeing the virtues and at least from the parents point of view right there's like these no strings attached unconditional love they're caring for um you know if you would ask like a parent that had let's say many children but one of them is a special needs whatever that means usually you can ask any parent you know do you love one child more than any other i would say 99.9 would say absolutely we love them all the same however in cases where there is a special needs child much more attention effort blood sweat and tears sleepless nights who knows what depends what their special needs were yeah this is tremendous more bonding because we described the word of love as have ahava i give through the process of giving and this child had more needs and therefore there was much more giving whatever the giving was whether it was time and energy as i mentioned um the parent actually has a stronger bond or a unique bond that he doesn't have or she doesn't have with the other children um at the same time there is not a glossing over of the negative of course the parent wants to see the negativity disappear or the person grow out of it or mature but there is a certain extent that if you ask the parent do you love your children can you describe why you love them most likely right they will describe the virtues right this is just to overemphasize the idea of the idea of seeing the virtues this is going to be what we described last week in being loved showing people your virtues you want to you know without bragging you really want to develop a relationship so you want to show them your real true self on the other hand we're going to talk about next week about seeing the virtues in others here we're talking about a kurdish marco again he is invisible um he is all existence that is intertwined the word yud and hey vav hey the the name of god that we described him is basically god created the language so it has very deep meaning on its own but it's basically an understanding of what was what is and yeah meaning the unit in the hand of love and the hey god's name somehow symbolizes to a certain extent besides mercy and and rock i mean there's a certain aspect of all existence and everything is intertwined and that's basically time what was is it will be here we're talking about place space uh the physical world so moving on there's an idea that we are a soul and a body right we're not just a soul we're also a body and when we what we're going to introduce to you to guys tonight is some of the words of the shema israel right where we say yes the uk above k is our god and he is one meaning the different attributes i.e yud kevke which is mercy is also the same god which is elokim which is din it's the same god everything emanates it's all coming from him but still that's only two of the names of the many names but to understand that what you would say is like left and right or i don't like to say the words good and bad but what seems to be not good and what is good is all emanated from the same place and that's what a jew that's what we're here to teach the world ultimately there's one god every everything absolutely everything is interconnected so what about the mind and body right we are a i say mind i should say salt and we do and we know there's in in today in the world and wellness and all this to talk about a mind-body connection but we're going to talk about a soul-body connection right so god did create us in this fashion in fact we talked about the name adam adam it means man the dollar mem that's put it like this it adds up to 44. right dollar is four and four and mem is forty the aleph is one it's forty five okay so forty five um one second i i just got a slight i wanted to take this somewhere else um but i just wanted i just want to mention that we talk about oh this is where i want to go with it of and aim so the father is of aleph bet is three aim is aleph mem so that's one the aleph and mem is 40. so that's 44. so you're 44 that's the word dom is 44. and that's basically the body that's coming from your mother and your father but there's an olive and that which makes it 45 that aleph is one and the olive always represent that always represents one so that just keep that in mind at the same time the olive is also like when you write it out it's above with two little it looks like yours so the yids are ten that's two each that's twenty because two yards and the votes twenty six and twenty 26 is the gematria of yud and hey and hey god's holy name god put into us the soul into where into this body that we are walking around with so we have all these physical pleasures that we experience as a physical being but those physical pleasures and that's what god created us to be don't don't um i guess this is a big hook-up for christians you know i think they think they're born in sin and they have all these earthly desires and there's something terribly wrong with that well we don't say that okay in judaism we say no all those physical dis pleasures that god gives you that hopefully you desire it's like a a trampoline like a jumping a jumping off point in other words god is giving you a taste on a physical level of what pleasure is because you're a pleasure seeker meaning you're looking for the ultimate pleasure and that's really what it means to love god because we said love is pleasure and god is the ultimate in pleasure so loving god is the ultimate so every time we experience something on a physical level whether it's ice cream whether it's a sunset whether it's in a relationship a nice a nice car a nice piece of clothing whatever it is just a comfortable chair to sit on you know that we're like ah there's this comfort level but that's not what we're that's not what we're looking for we're just getting a taste to keep us hopefully focused on the real true pleasure which is which is hashem himself that's the ultimate pleasure that we should be all seeking and i mentioned in the beginning even atheists would ultimately seek that if they knew there was a possibility that that was true i want to now take you to the shema itself as we know as those watching this probably know that the shema itself we're just going to talk about the first paragraph you can read in deuteronomy chapter if i'm not mistaken six first we're going to start with four right we all know shema israel shema can you shot her israel the lord is our god the lord is one but then it says you shall love hashem your god okay it's a commandment but it's a commandment believe it or not just like a man has a desire for a woman and a woman has a desire for a man that is innate okay hopefully you know people listening understand what i'm talking about here so too we actually have this desire to love hashem to know hashem to feel the pleasures of all those virtues but then it goes on you should love hashem your god with what with your heart not just all your heart and all your soul and all your resources so just to keep in hebrew the call luvadaga so there's two bets it could have said we call libra with all your heart but it's with all your hearts you have two hearts god created you he created you with an evil inclination and a positive right with both really in because you have a body and you have a soul just to you know like let's say it's the soul that really wants to soar high and connect and it's the body that likes to uh stay low and connected to the earthly yeah bass bass desires just keep that in mind okay so know that and all your soul nafsa these are other types of desires so you're talking about perhaps the first one is including physical the second one is already let's say beyond that purely spiritual which actually means all your physical possessions or your resources so there's a big mix here we'll talk about that a little bit um oh i want to just the next major point that i want to focus in on is immediately what's the following verse after this major revelation and i'm going to use that word this is a revelation right you should love god this is the whole point of tonight's today's topic and with three different parts of you or three different um um how would i call it um i don't i don't know the word um let's see categories three different categories what's the following verse and these matters i command you today shall be upon your heart to teach them so what are in hebrew and it will be these words which words do you think we're talking about just the words on this one line no the whole book in other words you want to your desires to know god to love god guess what the answer is right here this is how you will come to know god and love god now when i say it's the answer it's the answer for it's like the default it's the answer for us who are not scientists it's the answer for us who don't have telescopes it's the answer for us who don't have this scientific mind that can look at a i don't know through a microscope and just see god there are people hashem who will just see a sunset and realize there's a god right they'll see a baby being born and just know wow there's a god but how do you really come to the full and hopefully we will right because the torah is vast you know might be a rabbi very nice but you know what we spend our whole lives learning and it's not just the rabbis i don't understand everybody doesn't matter who you are there's no way you're going to grasp the whole torah in your lifetime it's beyond us which is okay i don't know i guess the christians say oh well if you can't do it that was like a test from god right he knows you can't no god wants you to and everybody has their own niche as they say you like halacha learn you like philosophy learn philosophy you like this aspect of judaism put more energy and learn a little bit more about that which you enjoy right it's for everybody right we say there's 600 and i say we say because it really isn't 600 000 letters in the torah truth is there isn't there's about half that amount so why did they say there's six hundred thousand letters two reasons that i know and one is that every letter as i already mentioned could be made up of other letters so like i said an olive is really a valve and two yards right a hay is a dollar with a unit underneath so you have many of the letters are multiples of other letters so that's one way to understand how there are 600 000 letters actually they really are six hundred thousand letters and there are six hundred that there were six hundred thousand jews that left egypt and we do understand that there are like six hundred thousand root souls just like we have a root soul in adam the first man trickled down to all of creation then you have let's take abraham isaac if jacob is israel and israel had 12 sons there is some aspect of number 12 because of the constellations whatever it is that the borders of the world are somehow let's say the 70 nations are somehow tied into these uh 12 tribes then you have 70 souls that went down to egypt like that adam saul went down then to 12 and then to 70 the 70 souls went out to egypt and they also can correspond to the 70 nations and then as we leave egypt to 600 000 i'm not going to go into that right now why that's important number it's a very interesting idea the number six and why number six is a perfect number because well i will a little bit they they they describe in the kabbalah as there's six directions meaning north east south and west and then up and down and of course then there's a center point that's number seven but in other words there had to be some perfection in terms of a number for this torah to have been received by the jewish people by the number six right six hundred thousand and so there are these root souls now you have let's say 15 million jews so there are only six hundred thousand root souls that are connected to seventy they're connected to twelve connected to the original top pyramid of adam marichon but then you have out of the 15 million jews we're we're all connected we're all connected to the original six hundred thousand um and the truth be told it doesn't matter how many we are this is an aspect and just an aspect of how the whole world is also connected through the jewish nation um i speak i spoke uh last thursday about the suffering servant of isaiah 53 all you have to do is read you know chapters 40 42 upward and you know that it's talking about my servant israel my servant jacob right it's it's incredible i don't know how anybody could be so confused and mixed up about who the suffering servant is um basically because this we just read partially which is going to describe to a certain extent what's going to happen when we go into the land of israel how there's going to be a blessing and a curse there's actually an acceptance of of a deeper level of the covenant the covenant that we had 40 years prior at mount sinai was deepened there's no such thing as a new torah a new testament it's a new covenant meaning it's the same torah but a deeper level and i mentioned that by converts it's incredible because the jewish people are all converts we all converted in mount sinai and we all entered another covenant a deeper relationship once we uh entered the land of israel it's so obvious right god gave you more commandments in the land of israel and you're now entering the land of israel and you have to be more committed but the the level of commitment is called arvoos arus means responsibility for each other actually collateral can you imagine why would anybody want to enter this covenant i think they got to be crazy right even the jews right back then in other words if you sin as a jew i'm responsible this is the whole opposite of christianity like i think i i'm not an expert but basically they're claiming one guy he's responsible and we're all clean judy's was no it always meant this that we collectively are responsible for the individual when we came into the land of israel and akhan stole we call it the spoils from i we lost we lost people in the war i'm sorry jericho right we lost people in the war and i 36 warriors what was that what was that all about it was israel sinned and we all know if you read joshua israel didn't sin one person's sin and yet we're all held responsible this is the suffering servant that you enter this covenant uh and i'm saying let's say someone who wants to be jewish someone who wants to convert to judaism they're entering knowing full well that let's say they feel righteous but they're going to take on the sins of the jewish people upon themselves and why not just live and let live why not it sounds like such a good idea you keep your commandments go live on a farm or go live on a mountaintop it's it's a whole new level now you have to really know the omni presence you have to know how much come you have to really be in love with god and then of course to love his creatures and to love the jewish people to make that a reality for yourself so what i wanted to say about that next verse after we said you should love god with all your heart with all your desire with all your your your resources and these matters i commend you today shall be upon your heart the the the very words yeah the very words in the shema itself are on the doorpost of every jewish home and not just on the front door by the way i mean i grew up not so religious we always had one on our front door i just thought that's where it goes little did i know and then i became religious and all my rabbis every door except the bathroom basically right and maybe uh you know whatever a very small storage room of some sort so every every room you're walking through you're like constantly surrounded by this reminder and um i only sought to fill in in pictures of survivors or neighboring world survivors pictures of people in the holocaust and it always had a very tragic like emotional response for myself uh i i held them in like i held the picture in like high esteem like wow these like angels like this is beyond me but you know what it's one of the misses that men do every single day and i'm putting them on i put them on every day uh and it's it's what is inside there's scrolls they're inside that's a filling it's the shma it's these words that you should love hashem and you should put these words right upon your heart and so how does one come to love god okay so we did describe already if someone looks through nature and science and all this it's very very nice but very few people can really get there right abraham was very special we have a tradition that he was so spiritually sensitive he kept not only the torah which wasn't even given yet meaning it wasn't communicated like it was going to be communicated on mount sinai he somehow knew whether it would call it intuitively prophetically spiritually he had some kind of ruach that he just knew that for example not to wear wool and linen in the garment right okay there's different opinions about what he did when he only kept the positive mitzvahs or only kept the negative mitzvahs but he definitely kept beyond the seven that's for sure okay that's our that's our theme right beyond the seven so he was able to like tune in but most of us are not really able to do that on our own and uh no way not only that he also can't believe it or not this is like a really hard pill to swallow but our tradition says that not only did he keep the 613 or let's just say whatever it was whether it was a positive or negative he even kept rabbinical misfits now that could like twist your mind around because how can that be if the rabbis didn't even live yet to explain remember the the idea of the rabbinical commands are to create a fence a fence a guard so you don't violate so the truth is if if avraham was really as sensitive as i described then he could certainly develop in his intuition to develop the same things basically the rabbis later took generations to develop which makes a lot of sense all right um you have any questions at this point no and everybody's fairly quiet online i mean we got people from all over uh joining us lots of people on youtube and a few on our a couple different facebook channels it's always nice to be with the people that show up regularly that have been catching the the progression of these 48 ways and i think it just gets better and better all the way to the very end of the book okay look i took a lot of notes and i want to try to go through them some of the things we discussed already so i'm going to try to skip those ideas um okay i mentioned universe is not his place he actually transcends the universe so he is the place of the universe the universe is not his place in other words he created space something he created but he himself transcends that so just keep that in mind this is like how undescribable indescribable he is we have to know that but jewish people are a nation of philosophers you know it's true we call him all kinds of other names uh the mercy for one herachimon and we go on and on and on so we call him all kinds of names but what we have to realize is that our just through our descriptions we can only love god up until his transcendental nature and that is like you know somebody asked me recently well you don't know god how can i how can i know god i can only know his and his attributes are not him okay these are we living in this world which is finite and he has revealed himself in a finite way okay so basically this person has to go back and learn a lot of kabbalah or maybe just understand that the the the god that the jewish people believe in is not like any other god of any other religion because they all think they got it down we're we're describing god as indescribable right even we have a name it's only an attribute okay even when we talk about his anger when we talk about him taking his wrath out on us ultimately we have to know that it's love right he wants like the parent wants the greatest good for his child for example let's talk about let's say a famous story the roshiva gives a child's playing with a ball and it's by the side of the street but it's in the park and the ball runs rolls out into the street and the kid runs out and he gets the ball and the car comes to a screeching halt and the driver sees he didn't hit the kid kid goes back and he rides away happens two or three times the third time guess what happens hashem the kid isn't hit but the driver jumps out of his car and takes the kid over his lap and let's just say i don't know if you can say this on there um but let's say he he gave him a few bruises so that this kid will know not to do this ever again this third driver is the parent it hurt the parent to do it but he knows that where she knows that if i hit hard enough i don't just give a little uh don't do that again but hits them and maybe you can't say this on the tv anymore or whatever i don't know but if they make the lesson lasting let's say like that okay they make the the sting of the lesson lasting that this could save the child's life right this kid will never forget hopefully never to run out in the street again so these are just attributes this is not who god is and ultimately we see that this beyond that is love and even that how can we describe hashem as just pure love whoever he is is even beyond that so the roshiva gave us this ideas that remember ultimately that child should come to a mature place where he realized realizes that the parent gave him that sting because he loves him right ultimately and that is that love that's the pleasure right you know you feel that love when you know that it's really true love and i know many people are not going to get this they've been hurt in their life and they just can't figure it out and unfortunately many are stuck in the victim mentality and everything is just bad and the world owes them something and i can't address it i have no idea how to address it globally i mean i do deal with people in these positions and i think what ultimately they need is love they need a lot of love and uh care and listening and and some some responding bitterness is a terrible thing to take over a life isn't it it just it eats away and gnaws it their soul so let's talk about how to get to this point of um of loving of focusing on those pleasures so number one you should focus your attention on this very fact that we are all searchers right and we're searching for this transcendental experience that is not just temporary because that's what the physical world does for us it does bring us these um it's contemporary you know this momentary satisfaction of some sort no we're looking for the real the real deal that's going to be long lasting i know that this is probably for a song you know looking for love in all the wrong places like that anyway i mean we do we do look for it in laurel you know whether it's sunsets beaches you know we're looking for the magic but what we're really looking for is something that's not mundane we we know that we're looking for something transcendental he quotes that he did a survey he he claims that 90 of the people he surveyed will acknowledge the fact they believe in a creator some kind of force right a power an energy and i think those important words to use so like even an atheist would somehow believe in this and even if he denies it he still knows like i mentioned that if you could put him in touch with the creator he would admit that would be that would be a transcendental experience so the truth is everyone's looking for it and we all know that it would be absolutely amazing if um we could only be in touch with god wow right so let's assume that's true um now the truth is many of us have been there we've all experienced moments maybe it's it was in the physical world but remember we're a body and we're a soul and the body is like that um it's like just the taste of it right now king david said let me just see where he says it i know i have the full verse here somewhere it's in psalms verse four and five four in five says read when i see your heavens the work of your fingers the moon and the stars that you have established with what is man that you should remember him the son of man that you should be mindful of him i mean try to imagine what king david what was going through his mind and he's looking at the natural world and he's having a wow moment right i see your heavens when i look at them the work of your fingers he knows that this is like beyond any human uh creation like what what is man what am i what what are we that you should even consider all the pleasures you give to us that you should be mindful of us so he was recognizing that besides i just want to while we're talking about king david we say blessings right so in other words this is a mindfulness a way that we could focus in on the pleasures the physical pleasures that we receive but we're elevating them to a spiritual point because all the pleasures we get is so that we can serve hashem and that we could recognize hashem and then we could actually feel the spiritual pleasure even though we're going to eat that apple and we're going to have a physical pleasure from the apple we're turning it around into a spiritual pleasure of thanking hashem recognizing that it came from hashem now the reason i mentioned king david is because even though today we have blessings and it was mainly let's just say it was the ancestor agadola the men of the great assembly which we're going back 2500 years ago developed many of the blessings this is already in the torah itself right when you eat and you're satisfied you should bless the lord your god that's moses he developed the first of the bro he authored the first of the brocco i think we discussed this before but that's on the food he basically after giving us the mana from heaven told us we have to show gratitude feel the love feel the love man and show gratitude for that joshua instituted the the bracha on the land you know the land is good and vast and plentiful and he's the one who gave us that bracha or let's just say he authored that raqqa and then you have king david and solomon his son who wrote the blessings on jerusalem now these are we call torah concepts that one should always have in mind but what happened when king david and counted the people and there was a plague and many of many jews died he realized what in what what are we missing here what what's the lesson right every time these calamities come to us again if you're spiritual minded you're looking for the transcendence you're looking for meaning and looking at the power so you know like a loving parent is sending you a message right ultimately right ultimately so what was the message and king david realized that we we forgot according to an opinion he developed the hundred broncos a day according to another opinion which i think makes more sense he reinstituted we always had this and we forgot we weren't doing it properly so what does this bring about if you imagine saying a hundred blessings a day which we do orthodox jews are making a hundred blessings a day hopefully right i mean i'm i'm doing my best to be in a constant state of awareness and gratitude because ultimately it's all going to come down to gratitude if you like i said before if you can imagine even the physical pleasures or the beauty and the majesty of hashem as king david says when i see your heavens i mean i'm just overwhelmed with your mastery and your your power right it's just unbelievable look at psalms 19 2. 19 2 reads the heavens recite the glory of god and the sky tells the work of his hands i mean let me just ask you about the words themselves the heavens speak what does it mean the heavens recite and what does it mean the sky tells so it means like if you're listening if you're really paying attention you'll you'll you'll grasp the message of course god is not speaking through these the sun and the moon and the stars literally speaking but the heavens are nevertheless reciting the glory of god um let's go to psalms 42 verse 3 to just imagine what we spoke about that everybody is a searcher 42 verse 3 my soul thirsts for hashem for the living god when he will come and appear before god okay when will i come and appear before right my soul thirsts you have to recognize that i mean maybe you do whoever is listening understands this right but even those who are not spiritually sensitive you're looking for love you're looking for pleasure you're looking for meaning in all the wrong places this is where through these words that i command you today and we're talking about the original hebrew i understand reading psalms could be very meaningful i understand that writing proverbs can be very you know full of wisdom and meaningful but if you understand that the original hebrew is a trevor treasure trove it's just it's unbelievable that if you have an opportunity to learn with a rabbi you have an opportunity to learn with someone who's not just learned in hebrew but is able to um you know bring down transmit the messages spiritual messages that are behind all these these verses um okay there's another idea that many of us have found it meaning they they had um an epiphany a spiritual moment right so you're basically trying to connect yourself to this transcendental and that's good that means you're on the right path [Applause] um another another point he brings out that yes we said love is a pleasure but your goal is your goal is to have this pleasure meaning because of the love so basically i think like when i spoke about the idea that you're a soul in a body it's the soul that ultimately in the world to come and even now can experience that spiritual pleasure the body is you take care of your body don't use your body just to experience just to have pleasures take care of your body and the body needs to have these pleasures but the goal is not this the physical pleasures i think we get a lot of um a lot mixed up a lot so the ultimate pleasure and the ultimate high is is the ultimate relationship with god uh rabbi karabakh sang a song i'm not a very good singer but it goes something like this lord get me high get me high heavy high lord get me high and higher it's a beautiful song so if you look it up on youtube karabakh lord get me high lord get me higher you'll hear the whole thing done in the original not by me at what 12 30 at night so what is jewish consciousness and uh anybody who was brought up jewish would know this um i was using and that would be like i mentioned you have the mezuzah yeah that's filling you have the shema is to get this idea of that god loves you and you love god and you're constantly as you live life every year you learn something new now this i'm going to talk about also learning is obviously going to bring you to that point because you shall put these words upon your heart learning you know putting yourself in a position like i mentioned about rabbis you want to put a rabbi on a pedestal so he should know everything he's called in hebrew a student he's a student of the wise and so he should know that he's just a student we're learning we're in a what do you call a learning curve we're in a process so too are we so too are you okay and we're saying it the shema twice sometimes three times a day right for sure right before you go to sleep also so this is like constantly on your mouth if you love god i mean i you know these christians say oh yeah i love god me and god like this you know like what are you talking about this is a process we're talking about something that is so beyond then you're just a finite being and you like know god and you love god hello do you realize that in even a relationship that there's more bonds to be made there's more of a connection that can be made right and you have your whole life to do it yeah don't waste time do it put your mind to it and concentrate on doing it beautiful um this was a little bit complicated i'm gonna try to read from here this idea that i mentioned there were three steps that was the idea because it says on your heart on your soul and with your might or possessions so there are like these three levels and he he spends a lot of time going through it but i want to i think the duties of the heart summed it up in a different way so i'm going to read this from here this is from duties of the heart voice chapter 2 the prophet moshe peace be upon him had already explained to us and warned us about this by saying and you shall love the lord your god with all your heart with all your soul and all your might now what did he mean he says his intent was you should love the lord your god with all your heart with all your thought though your might is corresponding to different types of people with their different mindsets with respect to their giving of themselves versus not giving of themselves either of their bodies money and honor why is that because some of them are prepared to give of themselves their body and money but not of their honor and there's a lot of examples we can give but um let's say for example i know it was jack benny there was some famous uh jewish comedian i think like these robbers came over give me your money or your life and he says no no please take my wife something like that like i don't know i probably didn't give it over right but basically um you know if you say serve god with all your money but there's some people that cherish their money so much they would rather give their life to some people that would give their life you have to understand that these are there's different types of people okay so others are prepared to give themselves their money and honor but not their body others are prepared to give their body and honor but not their money the sages say if it's if it says with all your soul which it does say so why would it then also say with all your might with all your souls like your whole life isn't your res your possessions like secondary and if it says with all your might so why do you need all your soul why do you need both why do you have to say this and that so the answer is should there be a man whose life is dearer than his money so for him it says with all your soul and should there be a man whose money is dearer than his life so for him it says with all your mind so you get to serve a god with all of these three different levels okay there's a lot here here we go one can also render the intent of this phrase you should love the lord god with all your heart with all your soul with all your might in the following way to be referring to the three ways in which people love each other this can be seen in three types of friends one one who volunteers towards doing the will of the one he loves with his money only two one who volunteers towards doing the will of the one he loves with his body or with his money and the third one who volunteers towards doing the will of the one he loves with his money body and life money body and life as the wise man says and this is in song of psalms 8 7. many waters cannot quench love neither can the floods drown it it's also written between king david while he wasn't king david and yahunatan it says about the love they had for he loved him as he loved his own his own soul so there are different types of relationships that people have and also in small 20 i know that was small 2017 and also in second samuel 126. about king david and yonatan wonderful was your love to me passing the love of women okay so you can see that different relationships have there's different levels of the relationship and god wants everything right he wants us to love him with all levels of those types of relationships therefore the prophet extorted prophet moshe exhorted us to love the creator that it should includes one's life body and money by the way when it says with all your life we understand it to mean that you should be willing to give your life to god in fact when we say the shema the the book of jewish code of jewish law says that one should be sweating one should be like full of fear of death willing to give their whole life over for the for the love of god um in fact rabbi akiva in the famous story where the romans he went ahead and taught in public torah even though it was against the law the romans were extremely uh brutal anti-semitic let's say uh and you know the truth is christianity is basically a um uh represented by what called adam uh rome and uh not much has changed uh in our even in our lifetimes whether it was 70 some years ago with the holocaust or even today with the the raging anti-semitism that still exists in the name of jc um okay i know that the in the missionaries to do anything to get people jews to not learn torah all right anyway let's go on and well you know what i'll just refer you go ahead and go to that yourself it's in i mentioned in uh above those duties of the heart it's in the chapter of loving god in chapter two describes all these um different ideas um a rabbi you know with my group i've been reading in the mornings we just finished uh reading the eight chapters of the rambam and uh chapter seven uh the rambam talks about on the partitions and their meanings uh and the read the whole reason behind it is to uh love exactly the way you're talking about love hashem i want to quote the rambam for you and you saw the torah chapter 2 um so what is the path in order to attain love he also describes fear so i don't i want to try to separate the truth because we're talking about love but so when a person contemplates his capital his wanders in great deeds and creations and appreciates his infinite wisdom and surpasses all comparison he will immediately love praise and glorify yearning with tremendous desire to know god's great name as it says in psalms king david psalms 42 3 and my soul searched i mean i think we read that one semen of my soul thirsts for the lord for the living god when he continues to reflect on this matter so then he'll get into fear we're gonna we don't have to talk about that right now but he does quote the same verse we already said in psalms 8 verses 4 and 5. when i see your heavens the work of your fingers i wonder what is man that you should recall him basically based on these concepts the rambam says i will explain important principles regarding the deeds of the master of the worlds to provide a foothold for a person's understanding to develop love for god as our sages said regarding that it's um in this manner you will recognize he who spoke and brought the world into being you'll recognize the power the immense power and love that hashem has for the world the more you study not only the torah but the principles the other parts of science as well so i just want to go down to another idea i just recommend this for reading and the rambam and say for amidst this number three the third myth is to love god i recommend you you read that on your own but basically we go back to this idea of i want to just end with this idea um that when you love somebody you love god right you want everyone to know about it you know i mean you want other people to know this person if it's a human being you're going to have your hesitations i get it because that means it's going to take time away from me he's just a human being and he's finite so if i tell everyone what a great guy this is you know they're all going to be hanging around him and i'm going to lose my personal connection or my availability of time that i could have spent with him so i'm going to keep it a secret but with hashem there's no limit to space or time so abraham said he went out of his way look in genesis chapter 12 verse 5 right it says abraham took sarah his wife and lord his brother's son and all their possessions they had acquired and the souls they had acquired in quran what's what do you mean what is what is the torah telling me here he acquired souls what what exactly is going on here they made converts amid these converts to benenoch converts to keep the seven no laws in rash he says regarding that in souls they acquired in haran whom he had brought under the wings of the shrine abraham would convert the men sorrow would convert the women okay and scripture says it's as if they made them because you have to understand in hebrew it's um it says the sn the souls they made they actually made them and they made them they um broke hashem okay now and in terms of like how we want how we should focus on what we want to do because we have the desire to know god and the desire to know god is ultimately going to bring us to the love because when we unknow him we realize how great and powerful and awesome he is um in perch shama in its chapter 1 mission of 15. sham i would say make your torah a permanent fixture in your life say little and do much and receive every man with a pleasant countenance the idea of why why should you make torah as a permanent fixture in your life this like we said you have the muzuza you got the filling you're saying the shema this is for jews but non-jews can certainly do everything they can to try to make some aspect of torah study a permanent fiction in their life uh in psalms 1 15 it says but his desire is in the law of the lord and in his law he meditates day and night i really don't understand where the christians even get off saying that the law was just like it's set up for failure right that's what they say they say that uh well god knew that man could not keep the law god wants you to keep the law god wants you to meditate on the law he wants you to be involved in his thoughts he wants the connection with you and when you do it an open mind and again perhaps with a jewish rabbi right with a a jewish source then you'll understand the beauty of it all especially in the original hebrew but with a clean slate and not with a christian mind in perky a vote in perhaps chapter 1 mission of 12 hilo and shami had received from the previous generation hillel would say be of the disciples of aaron not me aruna kahane the brother of moshe who was a lover of peace a pursuer of peace one who loves the creatures and draws them close to torah so think about this we just thought about being beloved that was last week loving god and next week is loving all mankind so i think there's a good way to end because we're talking about right this idea how can you draw people close to torah so you should be a teacher but you have to be an example so this i think all three of these ideas 30 31 and 32 fit in very nicely um i didn't really finish i got like seven pages of notes and i'm only on page four but um uh look it's it's we could talk about this forever you know what is the nature of god you can read the rambam's mourinho right the guide to the perplexed you can read some of the source material i gave you already uh the mitzvah number three and the rambam the love ram cal does a wonderful uh uh job uh right derek hashem the way of god yes right very very good right um yeah in other words when it says these words it's not just the torah it's the commentary it's it's the forcing that explains the threads of connectivity yeah so there's no point in me going through every possibility all i want to do is get across to you the main lesson is to love god is to know god right and how do you know god whether it's very unlikely that you'll come to know god through science but you'll get a glimpse and the more you know what i mean like i heard einstein even believed in god at the end of his life many scientists the more they know the more they know they don't know and there must be something much more powerful than they can even imagine and they come to believe in a creator but in terms of the nitty-gritty in terms of the the nuts and bolts we need to learn the torah to find out how to behave how to interact how to think um in other words it's it's deep thoughts and obviously we have our own minds and we think about it but some of the let's say either answers or even the questions themselves are expressed in the torah that god wants you to think about and that's a great starting point okay excellent excellent beautiful beautiful lesson today rabbi thank you so much for sharing that with us i know you stay up late in israel and your schedule doesn't allow for much other time this is just beautiful that you do take the time and pour out uh uh you know the truth of torah now folks you can always find more of uh uh rabbi poston's material on ybnei.com you can find him on uh youtube as well and uh have you folks as has your youtube across that million marker yet i know it's right on the console 170 000 and uh i don't know how many more weeks within two or three weeks i imagine i don't know exactly i'm not a problem very soon yeah that's a lot of outreach and uh we just uh you know pray you get the support at gibene you need because we know you do lots of lovely work there in jerusalem and more than uh uh the support you you're you're actually showing the love that uh uh you we can see in your face you have for hashem and uh we know that you'll be sharing that wherever you are there uh i like how you brought up today the place you know and described that for us because you know hashem is the place of existence and um yeah it's it's it's something practical uh wherever you are you there's no reason to be this we're in this world and that's the place but that's not hashem's place he's beyond that so we can only comprehend and understand what we have in front of us what he gives us to relate to sure that's it that's it and use every bit of it to relate to hashem that's the best yes all our means all our uh uh our mind and their our soul and uh our means it's beautiful well well put and uh um so yeah folks so hashem willing are we on for next week for part 32 the same same time hashem willing yeah yeah this was my i told you my original uh um project as soon as i held him along i was in yeshiva within the first few weeks i met with him the first time i mean i had a counselor so i had like uh a big brother and i probably he probably uh revealed certain things about my personality uh whatever i had shared with him to the roshiva and the roshiv had come up with this i'm just assuming that that's what happened um it could be that the shiva picked us out on his own just from looking at me and talking to me for it sounds like he nurtured it for sure um he really cared about every student and uh i was amazed i didn't think about it then i just said i wonder what gave me this um but it was years later that i real it all hit me like a ton of bricks wow what uh a genius you know when it came to uh reading personalities this is exactly what i needed this is probably my big tikkun in life love all mankind we'll talk about it next week hashem all right so folks till next week same time next week we'll be back with part 32 and that is rabbi poston's personal specialty brought to him by uh uh rabbi uh moshe weinberg the author of that behind him you can see it noah weinberg noah weinberg forgive me folks uh yeah i want to be correct uh but till next week folks we're going to sign out have a wonderful wonderful week [Music] is