Rabbi Akiva Rutenberg - Greatness Is When You're ALWAYS Learning...

we're now just a few days before the holiday of chavuz the holiday of receiving the torah and i think it's so appropriate that we're sitting here today celebrating the completion of a learning process and as we know when anyone completes a whole chapter a whole book of the talmud and those of you who participated in that major event in in what's now called the siem hasha stadium some people still call it metlife stadium but that's incorrect it's the cm hasha stadium and in in history i believe that's what it's going to be referred to as the siemens stadium and you were there there was there was a at when they completed the entire talmud literally thousands and thousands of people spent years seven years seven and a half years completing the talmud they said something called hadron and hadran means i will return to you because we never completely stop learning everything that we do in learning is about looking at what we accomplished with our eye on what we can accomplish more we are constantly in a growth process now i've mentioned here before what do we call the greatest torah sages what do we call them to come in here tonight and he's definitely welcome whenever he can come here revad you'll say come here tonight what would we say we'd say this here is a great talmud what does it mean tamil here is a great student of the wise at some point shouldn't he become do we have to keep calling him a tamil he's 80 something years old we're going to call him but rather we realize that the greatest sages are those who are constantly learning from those younger than them from those who maybe don't even have as much learning as them because we can learn from everyone around us and as long as we realize we're constantly in a state of growth and of learning we can get to amazing places but we are just a few days away from the holiday of chavuz and we're in this period between pesach and chavuz a period of time of spiritual growth every one of these days maybe rabbi good maha will share with us a little bit of the kabbalistic ideas of the spirot of the mystical concepts that happened during this time between pesach and shabbos but we're in a process of growth that leads up to the receiving of the torah the jewish people when they left egypt were at the lowest point in jewish history the 49th level of tuma and they left and 50 days later they were at the highest level of kedusha of holiness anyone who has that opportunity to study torah will know that the closer you get to haasenai to the receiving of the torah the closer you are to the source and you'll find certain who lived in the 1700s who in some ways was like a risho like a rashi but in general you see a constant decline from the greatest sages where the sages who wrote the mishnah like rabbi akiva i know i mentioned his name first rabbi huda hanasi rabbi mayor and literally three four hundred years later we have the tana we have the amaraam abaya and rava ravina ravasi and they say about themself and these were great sages themselves they say if the tanayim were people we are donkeys ben you hear that they say if the tanayim were people we are donkeys they felt so far removed from the tanayim that they felt like they were donkeys and how did they go from the lowest level of impurity to the highest level of purity in 50 days it doesn't make any sense but as you know somebody once came to a rabbi and he says why is it that whenever i ask you a question you answer me with another question and the rabbi answered why not okay so we we jews we like asking questions okay so the same question i can really ask on many of you i can ask the question on some of my own relatives who grew up totally secular totally totally secular and are now teaching torah and i believe the answer is is that in the shama the soul that's inside of us that hashem put inside of us is pure there's a prayer that we say every morning we say what does that prayer mean my god the soul that you put inside of me is fear something like that okay so daniel actually translated it correctly most people without thinking about it if they do know what the words mean think it means god the soul that you placed in me was pure that's when i was a little baby and now you don't want to know you don't want to know what i did what are they you know i am so far away from purity that i don't even feel comfortable in the synagogue i don't feel comfortable learning torah because i you know i did things i shouldn't have done i saw things i shouldn't deserve i'm totally disconnected but actually what daniel said is 100 correct the prayer does not say it in past tense it says it in present tense god the soul that you gave to me is pure today on may 7 2013 it's still pure the soul is and always will be pure because the soul is a piece of god that's right inside of our self and that piece of hashem is so close it's so holy that all we can do is make separations between that and ourself but as soon as we connect that spirituality to something real and we open it up as my father gave an analogy once he said it's like my father's a scientist you can see from this analogy he said it's like taking a plastic bottle with air inside of it and putting it on the bottom of a pool what happens to the bottle it goes flying up to the top and this is what each and every one of us are we're that plastic bottle that as soon as we take away the impediment as soon as we give ourselves a chance we go flying up and i think it is so appropriate that we celebrate the completion of a semester and the beginning of further growth right now during this period of time please find this chip please i want you to be comfortable please in the chat um right now during this period of time between pesach and chavuz tonight you're going to have an opportunity to hear from many of them rabbis that are here this evening you have an opportunity to hear an idea that will hopefully make your chivus holiday more meaningful as sarah mentioned we are going to we are beginning to start preparing for the summer semester of ahmet and one of the themes that you're going to be hearing about this evening in addition to spiritual growth in addition to preparing for shivuas is the idea of jewish leadership because very often in life we say let somebody else be a leader let someone else take you know take responsibility but each and every one of us and i can tell you that in this room it's not the minority but it's the majority the overwhelming majority of you who have tremendous leadership ability an ability to make a difference it doesn't necessarily mean being a rabbi sometimes you can make a tremendous difference just by being just by sanctifying god's name by wearing one of these frisbees wearing it proudly and standing on the subway and when somebody when there's an elderly woman that comes in the subway moving away and giving her your seat and in front of 50 60 people at 8 30 in the morning on the way to work you made it hashem you sanctified god's name that was pretty easy you know you know staples tells this thing my mother has it says that was easy haven't seen this thing it's like a big thing it goes that was easy that was easy sometimes the smallest things are so easy and we can make that kid hashem we can make that difference a husband and wife that works to have children buy it it's not easy to have sheldon bite especially today i think it's probably one of the hardest times in history to have shaolin bay we have so many pressures that are pulling at the jewish home and i think it's maybe it's just from my own experiences but i think in queens it's even harder and i think sometimes being in the bucharan community it's a very very difficult place to be sometimes to have sholem bay a lot of different pressures fighting against having shaolin by it but if you work to have shaolin bay and you work on yourself and you work together to create that shalom by it there's unbelievable kids hashem that comes from that when people around you and the effect that you have is unbelievable without getting up and preaching and lecturing people when people see a couple that has a true shalom by it that makes a really big kid of hashem