Rabbi Avraham Reisman - Weekly Torah Portion: Re'eh - How to Increase Your Blessings?

this week's torah section discusses blessings and curses first of all the jewish people come to israel and they get on these two big mountains one is called har grizim and the other one is called eval they're near shechem and they have this whole ceremony of the kohanim and the livium being in the valley between the two mountains and they turn to one mountain and they say blessed will be the person that keeps the torah and it doesn't discuss specifically or generally torah but it discusses specific things which which are not in the parameters of our lecture today to talk about why these things were chosen to be the things which are mentioned that if you do this you're going to get blessed and if you do this you're going to get the opposite et cetera et cetera then afterwards we have a whole long rampage of what's going to happen to the jewish people if they don't keep the torah properly first it says all the different blessings they're going to get if they keep the torah and then show them if they don't what's going to happen to them and it's very very how would they say this it's not for uh the general public it has a lot of very uh nasty details about what's going to happen to the jewish people and the question is when we talk about blessings and we talk about curses what are we talking about what do we mean now there's a gemara in the tractate called megillah on page 30 that says an interesting thing in about 10 days we're going to have rosh hashanah the jewish new year and the gemara says that the rabbis made it a custom that we should read about all the the curses which are mentioned in this parachute parshas ki tovo because when we read them at the end of the year we say to ourselves all these problems all these curses that's last year this year we're going to start a new page we're going to turn over our life and we're going to have blessings so we read the curses and the lotion of the way the gemara expresses this that the year should end the kilo terror and its curses the takal shanna the new year should start and its blessings so we read it in order to get rid of all the difficulties we've had and start the new year on the right foot as we would say and i was in oshkosh for many years so we had two what technician two synagogues one was the ashkenaz which i usually dove in and then keeper i used to say lectures in certain sermons in this fight synagogue and easter diving with them also and a major part of their prayers are different pu tim which are like sort of psalms type of songs poems really which discuss that the years difficulties the years curses should end and we should start a new year and they have very nice tune for it and they sing end of that beginning of good end of christmas beginning of blessings and it's very nice to sit there and participate in the prayers but the question arises how do we get rid of the curses so easily if i could just say if you look and get rid of the curses so then that's great but it doesn't really make any sense because i've read about these curses and this portion this is a chapter of the torah how does that affect us that we should not have any more curses and we should start the year with blessings so we could always say that this is some mystical supernatural power that by saying it uh it helps and we do believe in supernatural powers etc etc but since i'm a lit [ __ ] you know what lit [ __ ] is we have different types of sex in our orthodox community we have those that are more mystical they are the hasidim and they are the more the logic those that deal with the physical world a logical level and we call the the lit facts we want things to be understood according to logic we know that there is more out there but we have to base our judaism our relationship to judaism our understanding of judaism and logic to understand why it works and how it works so therefore what i'm going to discuss a little bit today in this this lecture this year whatever how does one great blessings and how does one get rid of curses and how does reading this portion this shabbos which we're going to all have a lot of kabbalah if we listen to it get rid of those curses let's start a happy last year how do we do that so obviously in order to do that we have to understand what is a blessing and what is the curse how does one get a blessing what do you do to get a blessing sam what do you say how do you get a blessing you say uh prayer or what is it called a brah abraham oh okay that's not bad by saying abraca you get a bracha when you say one of these little prayers before you eat after you eat with et cetera that's a bracha and that gets you a blessing but still we don't understand how that works this is also on a mystical level you say abraca you get but why does it work how does it work anybody else have an idea something you know within the realm of logic go ahead doing a good deed okay there's no question about the fact that doing a good deed is a good thing but it still doesn't explain the ramban one of our middle middle medieval commentary says it doesn't really make sense why do you get blessed if you do a good deed what relationship does that good need have to do with you we have a pharmacy in detroit so one of the guys walked in they bought a one of these lottery tickets they want a million dollars right we only got 20 dollars out of it but the guy won a million dollars now because he did a good deed therefore he won the lottery for a million dollars what does one thing have to do with the other yeah what do you say is making me so good at this okay the one the listing they said is because they're not really sensitive okay a person that it's a good a person who is good continues doing good deeds and if you do good deeds so then again we might say that you rank getting getting a blessing a blessing but let me move you a little bit more in the right direction the word blessing in hebrew is called bracha there's another word which is very similar to this and it just has one extra letter in it a yud it's called breika you have bracha which is blessing and brekha which is a spring which is a well and the gemma and the reformer and the rabbi say that a person that does person that thanks god for what he has he is causing the well of goodness to flow towards him so bracha means a blessing and means a spring now there's another word which has the same letters and that is barach barak means a knee right in the old days in order to drink from a spring have you ever gone on one of these long hikes and then you come to one of these springs of fresh water so everybody jumps into the water or at least bends over and starts drinking from the water so that's what they used to do they used to bend down to drink from the well so bera which means to kneel which means a knee and bracha which means that you are kneeling to god connects you to the breka which is the spring which gives life and subsidence you like it it's not mine but it's all right now have you ever traveled to elact okay no if you do you should go there it's very nice even though it's a halachic problem it is aired so i'm not antswell but for your fellows it's okay you can go to iran you travel through a desert and the desert is bleak and you're traveling for kilometers after kilometers and i drive down there because i don't you know go to the airport and fly i drive down there and then suddenly you come to an oasis of green vegetation you come to trees places called yat fosso and the place is blooming it's beautiful and a lot of our produce especially now in shemitah comes from there so what happened why was it all the way there it was bleak and desolate and suddenly it's blooming what made the difference no come on water water an oasis in the middle of the desert why does it bloom why do people go to these oasis because the water the spring is the source of life therefore when we are looking for a broker when we are looking for life and substance we are looking to connect to the fountainhead of the fountain of youth the fountain of life the fountain of existence now what does this mean how do we connect to blessing how do we connect to the fountain of water which gives us life through a broker now the thing is like this there are people that have content to them and there are people that are all a big facade right uh you've heard of the paper tiger over here in israel they have the paper police car right i don't know if they still have them they used to put on the side of the road a cardboard um figure which looked like a policeman sitting in his patrol car said to the people when they're speeding down as they see it from a couple of kilometers away oh there's a policeman there and they slow down and then they get closer and closer and closer then they see it's only a paper policeman and then they start flying again but the idea is that there are things with real substance and there are things which are are just a facade how do i we live our life do we live our life with substance with meaning with a direction or do we live a superficial life the first one we tried it was supposed to um anybody here from hollywood okay so i have a friend of mine that grew up on sunset spring and sunset strip he used to be a psychologist there so he told me you learned ucla he cannot walk down sunset strip why because he knows what's going on in the back alley's over there what yeah well a lot of other things besides the shakespeares that are there but plenty of things but people are burning themselves out right for a little bit of superficial pressure for a little bit of a high they're destroying themselves hollywood is all about how many how many famous actors committed suicide or if they didn't commit suicide they drove themselves to situation they had such terrible terrible lives why because money is not blessing fame is not blessing even enjoying yourself is not blessing only if you have substance only if you have a true meaning to your life then can you really really enjoy life and really have a blessing so the idea is that before we start the new year we have to get our priorities straight what are we looking for what type of life do we want to live so if we read the bronchos and the clause now what is the word klola mean a curse what is the word of christ the word close is cal light something which has no substance is kal it's light it's a light weight a person that's a lightweight has a life of clover of difficulties of all kinds of problems which you can't solve they're looking for substance they're looking for meaning in their life so therefore koala is cow no substance and no meaning oral it says oral person should be cursed what is curse order is from the same words as aveer right you're full of hot air right if you're full of hot air you're going to have a pretty lousy life but if you have a broker breaker you will connect to the source of life and and the fountain of youth so then you're going to have a good life so this is what the rabbis mean and this is very important whenever we the rabbis they have a superficial meaning and they have a deeper meaning our job is to understand the deeper meaning of the rabbis there are many many examples about this which we don't have time to talk about there's a whole book written by the marami pragma to explain difficult pieces of the rabbis which they seem to be saying strange things and he unders explains what the deeper meaning is but all that being said we have to start the new year on the right foot why because if we have our priorities then we know where we're going and what we're doing how do we do that we read the broncos and call us and we see look you have life in front of you can even enjoy it you can have meaning or you can suffer it's up to you to decide once you decide that then we can start the new year all the difficulties all the problems which we have somebody told me there's supposed to be some movie that a guy could communicate with the future in the past so the son was spoke speaking to the father 30 that was 30 years earlier so he speaks to him over a radio ham radio and he says to him dad you died from cancer you died of cancer so he said really i died of cancer so he said you better stop smoking so the guy throws out his pack of cigarettes and he changes the future and he lives and he does die of cancer if we could do that right re-learn from our mistakes retroactively and not do the things which are going to kill us so then we'll have a much happier life the thing that ends off over there that the father and the son they live happily ever after because of the fun the son gave the father the hindsight to be able to not make the mistakes he wanted to make or he didn't make it in life we have to also have the ability to appreciate what's bringing us down what's making our life not at the level where we really have substance to it and by doing that being able to start and we're not going to be able to do everything but take one thing at a time one thing which we realize is bringing us down one thing which we could do better and then it's going to be possible for us to end off the curses the emptiness and start the blessing a connection to the source of life now there's one thing i'm going to tell you which is just interesting aside he was talking about going to learn in baltimore i studied in baltimore near israel many many moons ago unfortunately life has gone by but i when i first came to baltimore i was came age 15 from detroit and i was going to a high school over there in detroit which you know was a nice school but nothing very special so i came to baltimore and they had what was called elul and rosh hashanah yom kippur this month we're blowing the chauffeur and then they had rosh hashanah now i was used to davening you know if i dive into one esther for three or four minutes that was a longshot estrella right and over there on rosh hashanah they dive in shimon asked for three quarters of an hour an hour they can dive into monastery okay it's a neutral underestimate it's longer but what are you doing for three quarters of an hour darling so the first time it was very difficult for me but then i started thinking to myself if i'm gonna have to wait around for an hour or anyway you might as well do something so i started looking into the text i started trying to understand the text and the deeper understanding of the text then i started seeing how can that relate to me how can that help me change my life and by doing that i picked up tremendous insights from those smallness the whole year i had insights to be able to improve my learning and my studying this was sort of a meditation that i did even though how can i an hour okay and not everybody can dive in that but at least take the time to meditate to appreciate who you are and what you're doing in order to be able to be able to fix things up i had a friend of mine i mean you know i do have a friend of mine who works in harvard and he was working together with ellie wiesel you probably all heard of billy rizelle you know he is ellen everybody he was a holocaust survivor wrote many books one nobel prize at any rate they worked together on the writings of different hasidic rabbis and there was one casita gravity which called the piachetsugo piercetsukureba who lived in varsha he was killed and varsha in the destruction of our surger ghetto and he was a tremendous educator we have many books of his which are used for education to this day now a few years ago they were rebuilding the varsa area of the ghetto and the tractors unearthed certain cans and in the cans there was hebrew writing so they took the hebrew writing to rabbis and they saw that they were writings of this pachesca and that he had written their very deep concepts about how to serve god and that he had certain principles of meditation which he recogni recommended for his students in order for them to be able to connect to now how do you connect to akersburgh what how can you next to connect to god you have a radio internet how can you connect to god so the rabbis tell us a very interesting thing you connect to god by connecting to yourself every human being has an ashama has a holy soul this holy soul can lead him and raise him up to levels of an ability to relate to godliness to holiness to spirituality so how do you find god right you know that they say peanuts i i searched for the enemy and i found him and he is me i'm the enemy the other way around is also true if i'm looking for god how can i relate to god everybody has within him this neshama this neshama gives him an ability to be able to feel godliness to relate to godliness so just like the spring which we get our water from we have to bend down to it in order to to be able to benefit from this cold cool water we have to be able to bow ourselves down relate that there is a god and we have a soul and if we look at ourselves and what our real deep real deep desires are we can come to understand god himself we can come to relate to god himself so the idea of this period of time the next couple of weeks is to try to figure out what our priorities are what's going to make us really happy what's going to make us give us a real a really good life and then try to implement a few things we'll make which will make us better that is the way we'll get rid of the old curses and we will begin to get blessings in our life now there's one more thing that i wanted to tell you in respect to this in this week's parasha we talk about bring bikurim you know what bikuram is what okay i'll explain in short it says i'll read a couple of sukima i mean there's supposed to be a commission so therefore i'm going to read a little bit of hummus so we can say that this is here it says when we will come to israel and we all have been able to come to israel we have to appreciate that do you know how many generations wanted to come to israel and they couldn't make it how many people died coming to israel rabbi huda levy one of the great poets of the jewish people he wrote paul after poem about coming to israel and they say that finally at the end of his life he managed to get to israel he came to the western wall and there he was killed by an arabs so they i'm not sure this really happened but that's what they say but they say he accomplished what he wanted to do he's willing to die for it and then he made it to israel but we don't have to die we have to live in the earth's world we have to appreciate being an earth so what it does for us the opportunities it gives for us and we have to be able to use them properly so it says and you will inherit the land volatile miracius called prior dome and you will take from the first fruits of all the things which grow in your land and you are going to bring them to the temple and you're going to give them to the priest in the temple and say god i'm happy i'm a jew god i'm happy you've protected the jewish people for thousands of years god we appreciate what you're doing for us and since we appreciate what you're doing for us therefore continue to do good things for us so from over here we learn a very important principle do you want god to give us blessings you want god to be good to us appreciate what you have some people no matter what they have they don't appreciate it's never enough for them you know where the highest rate of suicide is in which level of economic level of uh right japanese high school students okay and anyway i'm not sure about japanese highest yeah okay why because they have their whole life set out for them they fail one test their life is ruined their life is real okay that's pretty bad but anyway uh statistically the richer you are the greater you have a chance of committing suicide the poor guys they're not going to commit suicide because they're too busy fighting for their lives but the rich ones they don't appreciate what they have no matter what they have they were they were born with a gold spoon in their mouths and therefore they don't appreciate what they have there's some story about some guy song about uh if i would be richard corey or something like that if i'm too old for you guys there's a guy corey he's the richest guy in town he's the most successful and in the last stanza he committed suicide never heard of richard corey i'm really out of date at any rate so the more you have doesn't necessarily mean the more you're happy if you don't appreciate what you have so then then no matter what you have you're never going to be happy the first step of having happiness the first step of having a blessing is appreciate what kalispo gives you as long as you appreciate it you appreciate it let me give you this more if you don't appreciate it god says i'm giving this guy things what is he needed for he doesn't appreciate it anyway so the first thing the jewish people do when they come to israel is they go and they take the first fruit and they bring it to the priest and they say thanks for everything that you're doing for us now the last portion in the previous portion the last thing which is written in the previous portion is all about a molecule have you heard about a molecule you know who amolek is a molecule is the people that are trying to kill the jewish people all the time if they're the germans in nazi germany or if they were homo harasha in in persia and iran right or even the iranians today possibly ambalic are the ones that are trying to destroy the jewish people what do they want from the jewish people why do they want to kill us why did the nazis want to kill the jewish people what ideology yes what was the ideology do you know okay so what do they have against god he's always with us so why should they want to kill us they should join us they feel like their mission is to kill us why why is their mission to kill us because god sent them to kill us like all right but what is what is their rationalization what is the rationalization of the nazis they wrote it mind comforts written by by hitler himself and many of their decisions what that we were in pure and they went to purify disputes what was impure about us got it very good what's your name what count if you read the nazi writings the jewish people brought the christian jew judea philosophy of morals morals that's why they hate us because we have morals they don't want a world of morals they want a world of power as is right right what is the expression my next right right that's so they do not want to have a higher power which dictates the amolecum the gemara says when they killed the jewish people they they tore off their bris milo and we won't explain what that is you should know what it is by yourself and they threw them up into heaven said we don't want you in this world god get out of here we don't want god in this world we don't want morals in this world and it's interesting that the nazis didn't read the madrid probably and they say the same thing we don't want god in this world we don't want morals in this world thank you very much so now the last thing which is talked about in the previous portion is a lack of appreciation the abu lakim they said we don't want god we don't want to be thankful to anybody we don't want anybody to dictate what's right and what's wrong we don't want any morals what does the torah answer to them the torah answers to them and says to them because of the fact that we want to eradicate a muleki philosophy because we want to eradicate nazi philosophy we want to create a situation where a person realizes that the world has morals the world has god and we have to appreciate everything that god gives to us even though it might have happened a thousand years ago we have to appreciate it and especially what we have now we have to appreciate now over here i'm going to tell you a little play on words which is very interesting it says over here velocita miracius called prihadama you should take from all of the first fruit now halachically speaking that's not correct you take the kurim only from the shiva tamini do you know what the shiva tamil there are what the seven fruits which are specifically uh identified with israel with is with with the land of israel so we have grapes we have pomegranates we have dates we have figs uh we have what wheat barley olives right those are the seven so it says that you take from all but it's not all it takes it's only from the seven not from all of them so why does it say from all so i'm going to explain this on two levels i mean explain this on one level of a more simplistic explanation and then i'm going to explain it to you in a little more uh how would you say this uh what hints which we take out of of the hummus we know and this is something which we have to appreciate whether a person is healthy or some sick whether a person is wealthy or solemn these things depend on a spiritual flow from god i'll tell you um i had a little bout with a little bit of a physical health issue nothing very dangerous but it was very inconvenient so there was a period of time that i had to take certain medicines that take care of certain things and my body wasn't functioning properly we'll leave it at that during that period of time i appreciated god's creation of the human being if we knew if we appreciated how many different systems have to function and if any little thing is not exactly in place how much misery that can cost us we would really appreciate ourselves much more there's a blessing which we say after you leave after you go to the bathroom it's called a shariat so when i was a young boy i remember still in detroit so i had a girlfriend a girlfriend a girl that lived next door to us and she wasn't i was going to a religious school and she wasn't going to religious school so she asked me about different things that we learned in school so i told her that we learned the school that after you go to the bathroom you have to say this blessing and she cracked up what i have to go to the bathroom you have to make a blessing like crazy she was really ticked off what she was jewish yeah in fact later she married a friend of mine at the end a friend of mine killed her and committed suicide i don't ask it was very bad that end over there yeah yeah some other time i'll tell you that story also at any rate but so she was really so i was thinking to myself you know it's very funny go to the bathroom and you make a bronco but then go to any uh what is it called um someone that takes care a doctor for uh uh for if you have to go to the bathroom what is it called what no no audiologist if you ever go to a urologist and you find out what's going on in life so you'll find out how much is dependent and and so little and then after this about that i had things back went back to normal again which wasn't necessarily going to happen i was so happy every time i say this i share it i say it with such kavon they have no idea why because you have to appreciate that everything comes from god now the rabbis tell us that when the temple was built so it was possible to find which source which spiritual source was the source of every different thing which existed in the world so therefore if you wanted to plant something in israel even though it grew only in let's say in india but you could find the source of this plant in the temple and you could plant on that source whatever you wanted i don't know what grows in india or whatever but so everything comes from this source the temple everything emanates from therefore when we say mirage it's called pre-odometer seven in kabbalah always represents the seven spheres which the runs the world there are seven spheres which we're not going to go into and when we give from these seven fruits we are affecting all the different so the different sources for all fruits which exist in the world so miraculous called priyadama even though it's only seven it's from all the fruits but there's one more thing over here this me called mirace miraculous call has three letters which are really shouldn't be here it should say racist pre-order what is may racist call so we have the letter meme these three letters are very very important to us now let me explain to you why it says that bilam wanted to curse the jewish people bill and why is the curse of jewish people so the gemara asks how could he do it because there's a time when the god is angry at the world and if he would make a curse at that time he could be able to curse the jewish people so the boy says it's only one second how can you do it so the governor said he'd say one word what is the word he would say destroy them over here we have khaflam with mim also so the mem is the word which is used for destruction what did the god do he changed these letters around and instead of having call aim he had melech the same letters if you turn them around they become lamin switched around from colleen destruction from a curse to melech to control over the world so therefore when we say these things we have the ability to change from destruction from curse to blessing now over here we have an interesting thing there are three major organs with the torah or the rabbis relate our actions to we have the mind we have the heart and we have whether the cloyo the kidneys whatever the mind is intellect the heart is emotion and the cloyot or the kidneys are basic physical desires now how do we run the world some people run the world and themselves the basic physical desires they dictate what kind of emotions they have and at the end they have the philosophy eat live and be merry for tomorrow we will die if you want to have a hedonistic life so the kidneys will supply the philosophy if you have hof lamin kidneys so if you have the cloyot dictating your emotions dictating your mind that's destruction that's hollywood that sunset stream going after your your physical desires what is the way to really live your life melech the mind has to decide what's really good for you then the emotion has to relate relate to that it's not good enough to know that smoking will kill you a lot of people know that people can kill you and they keep on smoking it's only when they becomes something that they can appreciate they understand i used to smoke many many years ago so one passover i was given a book about halocha and medicine and there were 200 pages about all the different things that smoking does to you i finished reading that i stopped in the middle of a back i still didn't have the fact broadway hundreds right i stopped smoking because it wasn't just a mental understanding i appreciated i felt i'm killing myself let's stop smoking so if the mind dictates what the heart believes then it's possible to live your life in appreciation and in happiness so therefore that's what we say the miraculous culprit appreciate where you get what you get from understand it and don't go after your physical desires to make your decisions for you but go after the mental understanding of what's good for you then the bracha will come and the klola will be turned around the kaleem will be turned around to abraham and i once told this in in a different synagogue uh in new york so the rabbi said to me yeah of course the quran is life says what's the departure after kisobo it says nitsavim you're going to stand strong you're going to continue living your life in the proper fashion how zenu you will listen to god the zoi and then you will have the blessing that you need i wish you all a good year that there should be a lot of blessing you should be able to overcome the things which are holding you down and we should all have a wonderful yearbook you