Rabbi Akiva Rutenberg - Parshat Vayeira - Transform Your Life Through Giving

[Music] shalom everyone hope you are well this week's parasha is practiced by yara and departure starts off with avraham avinu our forefather who had just had a brit milad a very old age who was in pain but he was in even greater pain because he could not host guests because it was a hot day and no guests were coming to his home and avram loved doing hospitality and he sees from a distance three what he thought were idol worshipers were actually angels but he runs after them brings them into his home treats them like royalty slaughters an animal for them and we see from here how hospitality has said kindness and giving was such an essential part of who avraham avinu was later at the end of the parsha we see the exact opposite we see the city of saddam that was destroyed because the people the inhabitants there hated hassan they would literally kill somebody for doing an act of kindness we see how important kindness is to us in to the torah to god and to judaism we also see something interesting about avraham that avraham even though at the time there was a yeshiva shame behavior that taught about torah and monotheism but avram was the only person who was doing outreach he was doing kirov he was he was it says in the past that he built up the people he was one of the reasons he would do this hospitality was to tell them about divinity about god and tell them how special they were why was avraham the first one to do this and i think we have to go back to understand what the importance of is why is such an important concept in judaism we have a possibility to hillary that says that the whole world was created on the concept of hassan and revolves around in right in the beginning of his book he says in dara hashem he says the reason that god created the entire universe was to do acts of kindness because god is by essence good but without creating a universe without creating people he had nobody to do his goodness for no one to bestow his goodness upon so we can understand that the human being was created in god's image we too if we're able to we're since we're supposed to be god-like if we can do acts of god of kindness that's really the ultimate act of being godlike i'd like to just show you some other ideas and connection to avraham avinu and connections to the idea of kindness winston churchill very famously said you make a living by what you take you make a life by what you give there's a very famous story with mr rothschild the wealthiest jew of his time who was a friend of the of the austrian emperor but through some anti-semitic people in the in the in in the austrian government they told the emperor that mr rothschild's hiding money from you and he's not paying taxes and the emperor said okay let him show me his books and mr rothschild showed all his books to um to to the emperor an emperor looks at the books and he goes this is not all your holdings your whole you have a lot of other properties then you're presenting over here you have a lot of other funds than what you're presenting here and mr rothschild said no you don't understand i'm only showing you the money that i gave to charity i'm only showing you the acts of kindness that i did because those things you can never take away from me the rest of the money i have i don't really have because he actually felt that unless he used used his funds for something good it was it wasn't really his it wasn't really his what was really was his was what he used for for kindness and it's interesting another example of this um those who who look at the life of mr rockefeller who is the wealthiest the wealthiest person in america maybe the wealthiest person who ever lived in history based on you know amount of money he had it at the time and his life was was was a dichotomy his the the first a total contradiction the first half of his life he was miserly and and couldn't care less about charity and about giving and about caring and in the last half of his life he was an entirely different person who built libraries and and and endowments for universities and in in one of the biographies i saw about him in in a book by by dale carnegie called how to stop worrying and start living a great book in the back of the book he has a little biography about about rockefeller and he says that he was advised by somebody when he was in his 50s and he was destroyed by worry and his whole life was literally in misery and he and he was advised to cut back on the time he works and to start giving and he started giving by opening libraries and he saw the difference it made in people's lives and he entirely changed as a human being through his acts of kindness and at the end of his life when they broke up the monopolies they were worried about hurting him and telling him the bad news and he said oh it's just money he entirely changed his perspective how he looked at things through his acts of giving why is giving so important so i think that from a torah perspective the reason it's so important is because we believe that we are all created in hashem's image and the entire universe and the world is made up of hashem we're all created in hashem's image each of us has an ashram al-kami as a soul that's divine and if we really tap into that by doing it something for someone else we are connecting to hashem we're connecting to our essence and our purpose in an amazing way and i believe this is the giver's high this is why we want to give so much because when we give we grow we expand we go outside of ourselves and we become bigger people avram was able to tap into this feeling this connection to another human being and when he saw another person doesn't make a difference who they were where they were from what background they were from he was able to connect to their divinity and feel that sense of oneness with them and therefore doing kindness doing acts of of hospitality and giving and caring for them was extremely natural and not to do so was the opposite unfortunately in sedona we had to have the exact opposite of that and i think that if we can think about the these ideas of of of giving of caring of of expanding ourselves to to give to others we're able to literally be like avraham avinu and and grow and become greater and greater people through our acts of of giving there's there's a very good book called why do good things happen to good people and this the book has many many different studies of of where people who do acts of kindness and in research studies that were done through universities all around the united states one of the very interesting studies that was done was they looked at people who did volunteering for organizations and they found that if somebody volunteered for two different causes they lived so much longer than people who who did not do acts of kindness um so much so that the difference in their longevity was similar to somebody who smoked and stopped smoking that that was that was how how much how much longer their their lifespan was and there's so many benefits to doing acts of kindness to becoming a bigger person to get to becoming a more giving person and i think that this is what first drew avraham avinu was was teaching us was teaching us over here tori gives us so many different mitzvoth but it's not just about what we're doing it's about why why we're doing it why are we keeping the mitzvot what is it about what's the depth what's the understanding behind it and i think that when we look at it from this perspective we understand that all the mitzvoth all the mitzvot between man and fellow man are really there to help us become greater people to help us care about each other become a better person become a bigger person the talmud tells us that a rich person who gives to a poor person the rich person gets a much better deal than the poor person per person gets a nice meal out of it and he leaves the rich person is greater and bigger and is is a bigger person because of that and i think that if we can incorporate these ideas we can all live a more meaningful and purposeful life in the narrative of our vermont vindu shabbat shalom you