28 Sivan and LIFTING the world from the BOTTOM UP

Those of you who watch this channel often may have noticed that when I'm recording here in my studio that I have a lot of different stuff on my desk and one of the things is this globe. And you might have wondered like why does he have a globe? Or maybe you didn't wonder cuz you think that's just like a normal desk thing to have is to have a globe. But there's a very deep reason why I have the globe and it's a specific type of a globe where you can spin it both directions. Usually a globe you can only spin it one direction. This globe can spin it both directions. And and the reason has to do with Chof Chesvan, with the 20th day of the third month of the Hebrew year which is called Sivan. Okay, so I'm going to explain this very briefly. Chof Chesvan, the 20th day of the month of Sivan is the day when the Rebbe, the Lubavitcher Rebbe and his wife the Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka arrived in America in 1941. Um obviously that's a significant day because if you know anything about their story they were escaping the Holocaust. They left from uh basically the last civilian boat that made it across the Atlantic um before the waterways were closed. So it's their rescue from war-torn Europe which is obviously a great uh miracle and a great cause for celebration. But there's a deeper aspect of the celebration as well which the Rebbe himself spoke about. And I want to share that with you. It's not just what the Rebbe and the Rebbetzin were running from, it's what they were going to. And in order to explain this I'm going to have to use this globe. So you know we all have this notion of the North Pole being on the top and the South Pole being on the bottom. We just sort of take it for granted that North is up and South is down. That's really arbitrary. And if you think about it it's really kind of chauvinistic and there are different cultural theories why the North became associated with up. But I'm not going to get into that. The point is there's really no reason to have North be on top and South be on bottom. Um from a Jewish perspective, from a Torah perspective, what is the top of the the Earth? Because if you're dealing with a sphere then any point on a sphere can be chosen to be the top, right? Um so it's Eretz Yisrael, the Holy Land. See if you take the Holy Land you put it on top. That's why I have this globe that goes both directions, okay? So if you take the Holy Land and you put it on top, okay? Um then what you get is a Torah true uh view of of the globe where anywhere and any point that you depart from and you go to the Holy Land you're going up. That's why it's called Aliyah. It's called ascent. Because anywhere you're leaving from, anywhere in the whole world, if you're going to the Land of Israel you're going up, okay? So that means that you know we normally think about Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, Western Hemisphere, Eastern Hemisphere, like um Equator, uh Prime Meridian. Okay, forget about that for a second. What we're going to do now is have a paradigm of top hemisphere, bottom hemisphere as far as holiness. So the top hemisphere means everything that's the side of the world where the Holy Land is. So that's sort of like the the the the side of the world where holiness is more revealed. And then you have the bottom hemisphere which is the place where holiness is less revealed, okay? The top hemisphere, that's where the Torah was given at Sinai. I know Sinai is in uh the Sinai Peninsula. It's not in the Holy Land proper. But it's a hop, skip, and a jump from there. It's very close to there. And if you think about Jewish history for 2,000 years 99% of Jews in in in in history have lived in the top hemisphere. So whether your great-grandparents lived in Yemen or Morocco or Lithuania or in Poland or in Germany or in France they were basically living a 2-3 hour flight from the Holy Land. And that's where 99% of Jewish history even in exile took place is on the top part of the globe. What happened ba- basically 100 years ago is this massive population shift where we had the Jewish populace shifting to the lower hemisphere, to the Americas, to Australia. All that is the lower hemisphere, okay? So the Rebbe explained it like this that when we're getting closer to finishing the job. What's the job? Perfecting the world. We call it Mashiach, the Messianic era, global peace, perfection, okay? What our prophets foresaw for thousands of years. As we're getting closer to that job, what we're trying to do is to perfect the entire world, not just a piece of the world, not just make a little corner of holiness, but make the whole world holy. And you see intuitively I sort of just go out on the whole world. Why do I go like that when I say the whole world? Because here's the deal. Um when you want to lift a building if you got leverage from the bottom you could lift all the floors of the building. And that's the metaphor. Actually the metaphor is from the Alter Rebbe, the Baal Hatanya. In the Likutei Torah he says why does the soul come to the body? The soul is so holy it should stay in heaven. He says it comes to the body in order to be in the lowest plane of existence, in the physical plane, so that its work in the in the physical plane can elevate not only the physical plane but all the the worlds, all of the planes of of existence. So the soul is actually able to elevate heaven and and even the highest heavens by going down into embodiment into the physical world. And the Alter Rebbe uses the word lever, lever. Um so the the Rebbe when the Rebbe spoke about his coming to the bottom half of the globe he used that same term that the Alter Rebbe used, the the idea of the lever. And basically it's the idea that when you want to lift the whole building you get up underneath and you lift it from the bottom and then you lift it all up. So basically think about it like this. By transporting the center of Judaism and how can I say the center of Judaism? Okay. Well, if you think about the Rebbe sent shluchim to the whole world. Where did he send them from? From 770 we're marching out. It's an old camp song. But the point is from New York. New York is the capital, the economic and political capital of the lower hemisphere. So by coming to the lower hemisphere and then sending the shluchim out from the lower hemisphere, basically what we're doing is getting that leverage bottom up, okay? So what does this mean in psychological terms, in emotional terms, in personal terms? I'll I'll tell you a quick story that I think really encapsulates the paradigm of bottom-up leverage and also why that's just so American. America is not just geographically in the lower hemisphere. America is sort of the paragon of the lower hemisphere. Because America is very much about bottom-up. It's not top-down authoritative. That's the higher hemisphere. The higher hemisphere is the old world and that's very authoritarian, top-down, okay? America is about rugged individualism, my rights, my freedoms, right? So that's all about bottom-up, the individual, okay? So I'll tell you a quick story. When the Rebbe turned 70, 1972. So many heads of state sent their wishes to the Rebbe for uh to wish him congratulations on his birthday. The emissary who brought the the well wishes of the president, president of the United States at that time was Richard Nixon, was a a Jew by the name of Herman Wouk. Now anyone who knows American modern American literature knows Herman Wouk because he was one of the great not just popular but but critically celebrated uh American authors of the 1900s. Now what's extraordinary and unusual about Herman Wouk is as popular as he was, as successful as he was, and he he won the Pulitzer and and many of his many of his his books were adapted into films um is that he his entire life he was a Shabbos observant Jew. He was raised Shabbos observant. And if you know American history you know that basically most Jews in the old country were observant. Most of those Jews when they came to America that observant lifestyle did not last very long. If one generation, many times the people themselves stopped being observant when they came to America. So the the Orthodox community was a tiny minority. And so you're talking about somebody who was born in the early 1900s, in the early part of the the 20th century in in the Bronx, and who was Shabbos observant his whole life. That was a rarity. Now Herman Wouk met the Rebbe as I mentioned, okay? And Herman Wouk had a very interesting conversation with the Rebbe about the Rebbe's dream or the Rebbe's vision for American Jewry. And Herman Wouk basically said, with all due respect, I know these people. I know the Americans. I grew up among them. I know how they are. I know their attitudes. I know what's possible with them. And Herman Wouk is speaking as an Orthodox Jew, as a Torah observant Jew, and saying most Americans are not Torah observant and they're not interested in becoming Torah observant, okay? So at one point in their yechidus, in their private audience, Herman Wouk says to the Rebbe, says, "Lubavitcher Rebbe, do you really think that you can tell Americans to do anything?" Right? That's what I'm talking about before. That America is very much this rugged individualism. Don't tell me what to do. My freedoms, my liberties. So Herman Wouk says to the Rebbe basically the Rebbe's from Nikolayev, from Ukraine. You know the Rebbe's from the old world, right? So Herman Wouk says to the Rebbe Lubavitcher Rebbe, do you really think you can tell American Jews to do anything? And the Rebbe says, "No. No. You can't tell American Jews to do anything. But you can teach them to do everything." Understand? You understand that answer that the Rebbe said? You're right, Herman Wouk. You can't tell them to do anything. If you come in here guns blazing and you start barking orders, you're right, they're going to run from you or or fight you. But you're not you're not going to win any adherents. But that's not what we do. We're not going to come in like that, authoritarian style. Top-down, oppressive. We're going to go We're going to go bottom-up. Bottom-up. We're going to lift it. can't tell them to do anything, but you can teach them to do everything. And that means engage them on their level. Show them some respect. Make a connection. Show them that you care. And then once you've gained their trust, show them how this is good for them. Show them you're not trying to fit them in a box and make them do what you want them to do for your convenience. You're trying to help them to to to fulfill their own greatness. Bottom up. So to me that's like the quintessential story where the Rebbi showed an American boy, Herman Wouk, the Rebbi showed an American boy that the Rebbi understood the greatness of American culture even more than a homegrown American boy. The Rebbi was saying, "I don't want the old the old country. I'm not lamenting and bemoaning, 'Oh, boohoo, we wish we had the old country, the old style top-down authoritarian approach that we had for for centuries.'" The Rebbi is saying, "No, no, no, I'm very happy to have come to the lower hemisphere and we're going to engage people on a lower level. That means we're going to speak to them where they're at right now. We're going to we're going to engage them on a human level, but it's going to work because if you work from the bottom up, then you lift everything everything. What does it mean to lift everything? If you engage somebody from top down, you can get behavioral compliance, but you're not going to win hearts and minds. But if you go from bottom up, then you get the whole person. And then then by extension, you get the whole world. Okay? So that's the power of Chof Ches Sivan. And like the Rebbi said many times, Sivan is three cuz it's the third month. Torah calls it the third month. What's three? Three is thesis antithesis synthesis. When you have two extremes and then you have the third power which is able to encompass the extremes, that is the idea of Sivan of three. And 28 is three to the power of three, three cubed. So 3 * 3 * 3 + 1 showing the completion of that. So you get 28 which also is Chof Ches which means Koach which means strength. So 28 Sivan is basically the power of what? The power of being able to paradoxically contain extremes. What does that mean? It means that when you go from the bottom up, then you can have the holy of the holy, the highest of the high with the most human of the human and the basic, relatable, relevant, everyday and there's no contradiction. We can have it all and we can direct it all toward our service of Hashem. And what is that? That's Mashiach. And that's why getting down underneath and getting that leverage is synonymous with bringing Mashiach. And that's why for me an American boy, Chof Ches Sivan is so exciting. Okay, I hope it made you a little bit excited, too.