Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: An Eternal Love without Conditions

[Music] thank you all for coming once again to the tuesday night rabbi writer with specials here on the fashion show tonight uh tonight she was sponsored by carol and ron on on behalf of the before shalema of their son israel he had surgery last week emergency surgery and broke hashem he passed through that but he still needs our our prayers for a complete reform amen again i want a second that bezrus hashem benyamin and all of the words of torah that we will be learning tonight uh should be uh for his uh for his benefit and uh israel obviously in the united states some important things are happening today i will not get into politics because on the very rare occasions and it's very rare that i have i always get severely criticized by somebody somewhere so i'm not going to say anything other than we pray that hashem should have wrachamim on the jewish people and really the world and whoever winds up winning should be a shaliah to carry out khasadim for for the jewish people and to bring us closer to the guru of so that's a nonpartisan endorsement of of shalom i apologize i want to go backwards the past two weeks okay well maybe even america was a predator okay yeah i hear but i want to apologize the past two weeks i was not talking about the parsha i was talking about shabbos so i want to get back to the parsha but i want to talk about something at the end of last week's parsha but it's going to be indirectly connected you know nakama libouts one who was really a phenomenal teacher once remarked that there are some midrashim that are so familiar to us that we heard them even as children that we literally think they're in the hamish and in our minds we think it's in the text when in fact it's not in the text and one of these great midrashim is the story of rama veena who was thrown into a kim shannon now the torah indirectly alludes to the story because it says avraham avinu came from or costume or costume is really a place but hazal darshan that or is also a furnace and it's a reference costume means the babylonians and it's a reference to the fact that when avraham broke all of the idols of tehrakh his father so nimrod had avraham arrested and he basically said you either bow down to i those you'll be thrown into a kitchen and avraham avinu was willing at a very young age a very young age to die al-kirsh hashem he was thrown into a fiery furnace with the intention of thinking that he would die and bruh hashem because of his ammuna there was a tremendous miracle that avraham aveena was saved and that's the meaning of the passage hashem a sharehold say see i am the god that took you out of the furnace of qasdem now you'll recall that avraham had a brother haran and haran was the father of lot and sarah lothan sora brother and sister and haran took the position he wasn't going to say what he believed in until he saw what happened to avraham so if avraham gets saved taran will become a believer if if abraham dies haran will be inaudible i believe in hashem too haran gets thrown into the fiery furnace and horan dies now i just want to clarify an obvious point many people often jump to the conclusion o'haran is not such a right he's not a righteous person he died because he was not righteous that's not emmaus the truth of the matter is haran also died you see the fact that haran didn't do shiva until he saw avraham being saved that's not such a khisaran when he saw the miracles that hashem did he became a mayman so haran went to his death as a mayman the only reason he died was not because god was punishing him he died because his level of ammuna was not deserving of a supernatural miracle that's the only thing you can say there was no riches in heroin at all and in fact this farm bring down that because haran was willing to be most ernest and to give his life for god that is why claudi israel comes from haran because after all haran was the father of surah imena and yitzhak comes from avraham and surah and then yaakov and the shift so in effect haran is a co-builder of amy israel because he too was moser nephesh because of his his ammuna but to be zaika to a miracle you have to be willing to die if you're not willing to die if you think you're going to emerge safely then by definition you're not willing to be my nephesh to hashem okay so this is a beautiful beautiful thing to know about avraham avinu his devotion his ammuna his willingness to die later we say he's willing to sacrifice his son yitzhak but as a child he was willing to die for his ammunition and yet and yet the torah does not mention the story of war costume it's a remez that we get from the word or costume why does the tyrant not mention it why is it left to the oral tradition nahumalibus actually tells the story that when she was making a point that many mid-russian people think are mamesh in the hamish so she gave an example like avraham and or costume everybody thinks this in the she was giving a shirt to a bunch of old army officers and an old general who was not even religious he was a hilani but he had remembered learning as a child says what do you mean when i was a child in the haider or thomatora of course avraham bjorkhastim because so she gave the general a tanakh you know the general new hebrew and told him find the story in the tanakh show me in the where it gives the story so he's leafing around and leaping around and he can't find it because of course it's not there so finally he gives her back the sanak and says give me the full version don't give me kitsur don't give me an abbreviated tanakh give me a complete tanakh so it's a good question why isn't the story of war custom in the hamish itself and the morale offers a beautiful beautiful idea you know pierogi ava says that call ava she talia bedovah any love that depends on an extraneous factor i love you because whatever that because is butler dover when that because is no longer here butla ava the love becomes butler as well but when we have an ava no taliyah bedovar unconditional allah what happens that love is going to be intact and the mishna in perique gives an example of the love of david and yonasana that that was an abbas now it's important to understand that even unconditional love let's say that the most common unconditional love that we have in our own lives tends to be the love that parents have for children now unconditional love doesn't mean a love without discipline any love without boundaries if i love somebody i will want them to be good i will want them to i want to lead them in the best way that i could lead them i want them to be the best person they could be so too unconditional love doesn't mean unconditional acceptance of whatever a person does but it means that even when there's discipline even when there's punishment even when there's chastisement it is not coming out of rejection and hatred in itself is coming out of love so here is the thing let's imagine that torah would have given us the story of avraham in our costume and that would be before and then when abram is 75 hashem says go to this land that i will show you and i will make you a great nation we would have logically posited a cause and effect because avraham was righteous because he was good because he was devoted because he was willing to give his life for god that is why god chose him now in fact that is the case there is a reason why god chose afra but if the torah would have given you the reason that would have made god's relationship to avraham and ava hatsumuya bedovar what's wrong with that well what's wrong with that is what's going to be if in the course of time we no longer have that a moon and we no longer have that devotion we're no longer willing to give our lives hashem if the original relationship with avraham avinu i will make you a great nation i will bless you i will bless those who bless you and by the way i'm going to make another semi political statement an observation has been made by a number of different people that the united states really has quite an amazing history you know starting from the 13 colonies in the 1700s it became the most powerful nation in the world the most prosperous nation in the world and many say it was because it gave freedoms to the jewish people because hashem told avraham i will bless those who bless you and i will curse those who curse you and if america has any service now i guess like i can talk all night about the decadence of america the corruption of america you know hashem those of you that are here are here and that's good uh but you know you can't forget the haqqara sato you can't forget that the united states was and hopefully still is and will be a country where with all of its decadence and all of its immorality and all of its kashmir's and things are getting worse in a lot of ways it was a place that told jews you have the right to serve your god and practice your religion and hashem told abraham those that bless the jewish people are going to be blessed by hashem and that was the key to the prosperity of the united states and i think we will say if god forbids america itself ever betrays that particular direction that will not only be bad for the jews that'll be bad for america meaning say ultimately america itself will no longer be that source of source of blessing okay again i'm not saying in respect to any particular candidate but here's what the morale says the morales nakuta is if hashem would have said avraham did this great thing and i'm choosing him that would have made it ava hathaway a bit over so hashem eliminated the backstory if you ask yourself in the hamish why did hashem come to abraham hashem says to avraham go go to this land that i'm going to show you what's the reason from the hamish itself there is no reason at all there is no reason it's a mystery but what's the point of that that makes it an ava abidabar so even when we're not worthy even when we're sinful there'll be punishment i'll be godless they'll be meet for sure as i said before unconditional love does not mean a love without consequences for bad behavior so characters hashem's love that is goran a stricter dinner israel precisely because for your own child you know you're you're a bit more strict but it does mean that hashem's relationship of love with israel can never be abrogated now this is a very very interesting insight first of all it's enormously important because if you think about both christianity and islam later islam their fundamental claim was they admit that god had a special covenant with the jewish people they admit the historicity of the exodus and the giving of the torah and hashem saying you are a treasure among all the nations they admit that but what do they say they basically say that because of the sins of the jewish people god has banished them god has abrogated their covenants christianity says that specifically in fact one of the terms for the catholic church was the new israel they don't use that term anymore but that they took the place that's called i think the fancy term is supersessionist theology in which there was a superseding islam more or less made the same claim and that we say is not true yes the jewish people are punished for araveras we have golos we have khurban we have persecution that's in the torah that's in the token hashem does not let us get away with things we have to do chuva but it's always always in a context of love and this is in the torah the afghan zos even when you are in the land of your enemies lo ma asked him i have not rejected them logged him i have not cast them away look to destroy them and therefore what's important here is that in addition to this very very important point the morale is also making an important point in parshanut in interpreting you know when you have the torisha biksav you have the written torah and then you have the oral torah so we tend to read it like it's all one book meaning to say whatever the oral torah says is what is in the written torah the morale is teaching you an important kudu of parshanut and that is the fact that the torah did not write certain things in the text is in itself a lesson that on some level you read the text as if the thing that the oral law describes didn't take place meaning was there a reason for hashem choosing avraham certainly or custom is one of those reasons but the tarashi biksav writes the story as if there is no reason because that upgrades it to an ava shaina talia bedover that's a wonderful thing hashem caviar is stuck with us he can't get rid of us and here let me share with you another story one of the navim who lived really with the ten tribes is the navi hoshea hoshaya is the first of the twelve niveam that in english are translated as the twelve minor prophets that is an absolutely awful translation there is no statement there's no such thing as minor prophets all prophets are major but we might say the smaller prophets because their books are smaller their books are shorter so the twelve books are put together as opposed to year me oh which are very very big books these books are smaller so we'll call them the twelve smaller uh prophetic books and the first of the twelve prophetic books is hoshea not yeshayo and the beginning of hoshea starts off with a very strange story hoshea is commanded by hashem to marry a well-known prostitute gomer and he marries this prostitute and this prostitute continues to practice your trade and it's not really clear what is hashem telling him to do and why is hashem telling him to do it i mean imagine i mean i'm sure even she didn't expect that type of marriage proposal hoshea is a nubby a holy man a madrega that we can't that is far far greater than any goddaught today if someone that was mamish a navi and he marries a person of such a low character so the gemara gives us a fascinating backstory as to what with this but first let me just mention that there is a huge mach locus freeshynam how to understand the story this is very important some rishenam understand that he literally married a prostitute in the flesh barbanel doesn't like that because that sounds a little too much so there are bernell learns this was a prophetic dream that hashem sent him a dream that he did all of these things but it was not something he did lamaisa okay but that's a side question whether it was an actual event or whether it was a prophetic dream what is the meaning of the experience that he's going through so the gemaran soccer gives us a beautiful backstory to understand what's going on hashem tells so shaya like he would tell all the prophets go to the jews give them musser tell them to do shuva from all of their average but hoshea said to hashem hashem the jewish people are like your wife you're like the hassan you're like the the husbands and they are like your kala and they are a color that has committed adultery over and over again they've gone remember the torah itself describes adultery and that describes aveda zara as adultery so what is the halacha if a woman commits adultery against her husband not rape but adultery the husband must divorce her so hoshea basically said to hashem why don't you divorce the jewish people get rid of him and make a covenant with another nation again let's compare this to myself when hashem tells maisha rabbenu after the shayta ego i will destroy them and i will make a covenant with you maisha habaner says if they're not coming along i'm not coming along meaning you're going to erase them erase me hoshaya was willing to say he didn't directly say make it happen with me but he said you know god listen isn't this game going on a little too long they keep on sinning and sinning and sinning and sinning a navy speaks to them sometimes they listen for a short while other times don't even listen at all god let's just forget about them hashem wanted hoshea to understand in his own life whether it's a dream or real what it means to essentially love somebody that is undeserving of your love but you love them anyway married to prostitutes she continued to be a prostitute after they were married divorce her osha says i can't i love her too much and hashem says to hoshea now you know my problem now you know this is exactly where i'm at strictly speaking we can't really use a lotion that god is stuck with us because every every decision hashem makes is his own decision i mean there's no no one is that we bother shalom but it is hashem's will that his love is another abidable and the navi needed to internalize the emotional connection hashem has with am israel by living it out in his own life either in reality or at least in a prophetic vision a prophetic dream and that is why the nouveau of hoshea in terms of this story ends with verses that to this very day are recited by men every day when we finish putting on arts villain hashem says i have betrothed you speaking to the jewish people i have betrothed you to me forever they rastically but sedek i have betrath you to me with righteousness meaning i look at your righteousness judgment meaning hashem is saying love will be tough love there will be judgment there will be me the sadden but it's coming out of a loving relationship and again it's very important the mishpath hashem the medin of hashem which is real and which is awesome it's connected to the raster and we will betroth you to me with faith that means the faith you have in me and the faith i have in you the faith i have in you in your inner goodness the adatas hashem and you will know hashem and we know that das is not just intellectual knowledge but thus is the emotional intimacy of being connected on all levels that's why marital intimacy is called us and on this level we are connected to hashem with this indian of in fact it's interesting that you'll notice there are seven expressions describing this marriage at the olam forever sedec seven so some say that's one of the makairas why a kala walks around a hassan seven times because she is praying by that gesture that the bounds or the binds that connect the hassan and the kala should be based on those seven ideas so it's an important point that you know it's similar in some ways from a different vantage point to what yaina went through remember yana hanabi we read on yom kippur yay navi was impatient why is god having mercy on this corrupt city of ninhvay and hashem shows him you know what do you think i don't care you think i don't care it's a city of ignorant people a city of bad people you care so much about a little plant that was that was giving you shelter on a hot day and i shouldn't care about a city of ignorant people who don't know the difference in their right hand in their left hand him doesn't care you know we dismiss we say these people whatever i mean then they weren't even jews that's also important they weren't even jews but you know we look at you and say oh they're not religious enough they're not good enough they're not learning enough well what difference do they know they don't count that's not how hashem looks at them hashem looks at them as his children hashem has love for them that doesn't mean there's no meet a sadden that doesn't mean there's no accountability that doesn't mean we get a free ride we don't we we have uh two thousand years of gullis that says that there's a meter said in the world but that hashem is just indifferent and therefore the navi himself has to experience what it's like to have an abba shayna to leave her because then you understand on some level the infinite love of the replenishing the infinite love of the evangelism something that we can't even measure but we try to experience a little bit in our own lives so this is an elaboration of why the morale says the story of war custom is not in the torah and of course the balatanya writes that no matter how far a jew might be from following the torah in the innermost essence of his soul there is the hidden love and the hidden era the hidden reverence for the ribonus alolan that can make its sudden appearance at any time that's why the batanya pointed out that's why you'll find that even jews who imam is totally removed from hashem are willing often to give their lives hashem because there's something in them that will come out at various times like they tell the story about this they tell the story that reverend cutler came to the united states uh during world war ii and uh you know he spent all the war years trying to get people out of europe he did not start a yeshiva till after the war was over and he would travel to washington even on shabbos to negotiate to make deals of course he didn't know english so he always took with him his uh uh irving booney was a great great american lay leader in fact one of his daughters kind of her as a very elderly woman but she lives in yerushalayim and one time ref cutler and brunim came to meet with henry morgenthau who was the secretary of the treasury and he was controlling a lot of refugee work and and the like and morgenthau was a very assimilated jew uh he may have intramarried i'm not sure but he was like totally non-observant at all and uh initially when when ravarin was talking about what needed to be done to save jews so morgantown basically said can't do it the rules don't allow it we have rules we have regulations we have protocols we can't really send money to an enemy that we're fighting a war with because remember a lot of jews could get out by you know there were nazi leaders who were taking bribes they were letting jews go for money but that was illegal technically so morgan though said sorry can't do anything so reverend cutler said um i think that morgenthau was so concerned about his job and his covert that he's willing to let jews die so boonim decided not to translate that he didn't he didn't want to antagonize morgantown so he just said something like uh you see the rabbi is very upset you know maybe we should reconsider this so reviron somehow intuited that boonham did not translate what he said so he grabs this quote and says translate exactly what i said so boonham subunum says rabbi cutler feels that you care more about your prestige and your honor than jewish lives and that's why you're refusing to work this out so boonham writes later that morgenthau took up his glasses and he put his head on his arm for around a few minutes and then he lifted his head and says tell the rabbi that for the jewish people not only would i give up my job i would give up my life and morgenthau was very late in the war so unfortunately not as many people were saved as could be saved but in fact morgenthau did quite a lot the war refugee board and they they saved a few thousand jews and he was very very devoted to the cause what would a hassett say the ava mesut the hidden love for god came out that's why one of the nice things you know i i i you know as as you know i work for a samaritan or samaya is um we're in the business of what's called kira vrakokun kira prakoka means drawing near people who are far from mushrooms a very common expression everybody says i'm in kira of kira prokokim you know everyone it's a very very common expression but interestingly enough uh the rebbe lovato rebbe did not like the term cure broke him he didn't like to use it because he said what do you mean kira for helping cure for hoka means taking somebody who's far from god and bringing him near no jew is far from god a jew may not know it so you have to teach him and help him understand it but the jew is already a karaoke that's what you are you're karaf to hashem right so he didn't like here okay that's it's a very interesting you know people oh well that's just semantics okay it's true but it's but it's a fascinating mindset to understand what unconditional love is a jew that is on some level very far from the torah just in terms of behavior let's say but intrinsically is close and beloved by the ubanishable and this goes back to avram where the bahira of avram is not given a re there are of course there are reasons hashem didn't do something without a reason but the torah ki ilu there is no reason to make it ava shayna teriya bedova but now i want to focus on yet another idea you know there's a famous question that the reshainam asked there is a ghazal that says that avraham avinu kept the whole torah even before it was given that somehow by intuition the same way most of us understand it's wrong to kill it's wrong to steal that's kind of logical unless you're psychotic avraham was able to say hmm i look at the world hmm wool and linen no good you know animals that don't have split hoofs no good and we can't even explain this but he saw in the structure of the universe how the misfits of the torah fit in because hashem looked in the torah to create the universe and therefore he wasn't commanded again don't misunderstand this we're not saying he had to do this but he saw that this is the way the world operates he's talking about rise of bary alma so avraham did it in reverse his stock lb alma he looked at the world he did reverse engineering and he saw uh the torah is the foundation of everything so the the reshaina maskakasha if it is true that avraham avinu kept the whole torah before it was given then why didn't he give himself a breath until he was commanded because after all he he knew there would be a mitzvah of bris in the torah he should have hopped around and he should have done it on his own he should have done it on his own so this is a tasha that's asked by the roshanin themselves uh rebellio mizrahi the great great commentator on rashi from the fifteen hundreds in in turkey gives an interesting turrets his turrets is that ghazal say when you do a mitzvah that you're commanded to do you get more reward than if you do a mitzvah you're not commanded so for example a woman is exempt from sukkah and lulaf because it's time bound however if she sits in a sukkah if she takes lula she gets reward she gets reward for those mitzvahs but the reward for those mitzvoth is greater for a man because a man is doing the mitzvah as a mitsubishi a woman is doing a misverse as an ana mitsubisa by the way tosa says to kasha wouldn't you say the opposite if i do what i have to do so why do i deserve so much credit i do more than i have to do extra credit so toaster says a fascinating psychological idea tosuva says once you have to do something you have a stronger yatsuhara not to want to do it meaning when i'm doing things extra that feeds my ego i'm special i'm righteous i do things more than other people do but when i'm just doing what i'm supposed to do what's the ego gratification like somebody goes to his rebbe and says rebbe i dive in chakras today so the baby says what do you want a medal that's what you're supposed to do so for care the very fact that there's no ego in doing what you have to do means it's a greater spiritual accomplishment because the eight sahara is great okay be it as it may but by bris miller here's here's what revelation says by brismila you only have one chance to do it so if avraham knew he was going to get a command down the road then he's not going to do it as eno mitzvah because then he permanently do it as a mitsuba other mitzvoth i can do as an ana mitsuba and if god commands me later i'll do it as a mitzvah but brismila once i do it as an aina mitsuba right i've lost the chance that's reliable but the maharsha gives another answer the marshall's answer is that the kasha does not start off in the first place because the the principle that avraham avinu kept the whole torah before it was given was a result of the bris the bris elevated his comprehension so he saw the torah in the world until he did the breath he didn't have that comprehension so you can't ask akasha why didn't he do a brisk before the command because he knew the whole torah the answer is he didn't know the whole torah till he had the bris meal so the question is what is so special about the bris that it would give him that extra understanding now let me ask a second question about the bris we find that avraham and sora's names were changed when avram was given the commandments of brusmila at the age of 99 sorai became sarah avram became avraham the way the madras explains it hashem took the yuj of sarai and split it into two hays so everything comes from the woman right all of the brackets come from the women hashem took the yud two hays abram gets one a and sora keeps half of the yud that she had right so essentially avraham got a certain thing from sarah question is what's the shaitas what's the connection of the changing of the name to bris mila and is there a significance that avraham essentially got his name change getting it from sarah what does that have to do with brisbane so let me answer that question first and then i'll go back to why avraham understood the whole torah only after brismila there's a passage that we say every day in davaning kibaka hashem suryamim and that means with the name hashem created worlds the gemaran menachus explains that the letter yud was the spiritual kawak through which god made and the letter hey is the spiritual through which hashem made o the kaa through kaa sur o lamim hashem created multiple worlds the yud is allah the hay is all the mozzarella again the valatanya writes in in uh the heilig bays and um he explains the idea that every letter of the aleph base represents a certain configuration of divine energy that aleph is a certain structure a certain conduit for divine energy in a certain direction base is a different type of energy in fact this explains something about other marisha and other marie shine names the animals so mark twain once wrote a parody of this where khaba asks adam eve asks adam why did you call that thing a lion anyway so adam is very impatient adam says it looks just like a lion what do you want me to call it now that's a joke in english but if we substitute the word arye for the word lion mark twain was merchaven to the altar rabbi i doubt that he had ever learned the algebra he's teaching because what is a lion if you take the spiritual energy of aleph and the spiritual energy of race and the spiritual energy of yud and the spiritual energy of hay and you combine those forces in that order you will get a lion si rufayosios so when other maricio named animals he was just doing reverse engineering he was looking at their spiritual composition and he said ah a cow comes from pei reshay a lion comes from allah foreign right because the the the the the the the undifferentiated spirituality of the the ordained soul of of god's divine light gets mediated concretized channeled through the different pathways of the olive base but not simply as um not simply as simple forces which like olive but through the combination of the letters like a chemical reaction right when you take oxygen and hydrogen which are gases but you combine them in a certain way you get something new you got water right so so the cerupham of the osios create cocos but be it as it may therefore the dominant spiritual koak that created ulamaba is yut and the dominant spiritual koat that creates all of hazel is hey now why is that so so the morale says in a sense is the most spiritual of all letters because you'd has the is the smallest yet has the least physicality yud represents the world of pure rookneys that is why the very first letter of hashem's name is yud because it comes from the highest of the spheres the sphere of kessar which is kind of totally beyond physical reality so since islam is not a physical realm at all khazal use physical metaphors they talk about a meal et cetera but but as the rambam writes it's totally spiritual so it's the kayak of yoon that gives rise to alum now what is hay hay is actually a composite of two letters if you can visualize a hay you have a dalit and then the left leg of the hay the morale calls it the yud daliya now if you'd represents pure spirituality the knowledge represents pure materialism why is dollar pure materialism because matter exists in the context of four dimensions we have length we have width we have thickness and we have time this is also important people think that what's called the time space continuum was invented by albert einstein not at all it was recognized certainly by ghazal and the truth is even by non-jews even by the greeks going there that time is an incident of matter now it's hard for us to understand this i don't understand it either because that means when there's no matter there's no time meaning not because there's no matter there in fact even to say ayla is infinite is not quite correct and these are concepts we can't really grasp because even infinity is kind of a measurement of time this is something that transcends time montgomery so dalid represents the material world which is bounded by four dimensions and what is yoda's spirituality so what is hey hey is bringing godliness or revealing godliness or uncovering the godliness in the physicality of a material world view it is pure spirituality that is not connected to the material hey is to be mahnis the ud into the dallas again uh the elder ebby has a famous expression which is not his own expressions actually he quotes it from a medrash but but everybody uh quotes it from the tanya and then zakareshboroku's greatest desire was to have a derivative right anyone in khabar has heard this expression uh maybe a million times that it was the abrister's ratsun in fact the alto rebbe has a beautiful beautiful description which i always felt in my own speculation that he was writing autobiographically he says on some level that sadiq who loves hashem doesn't really want to live in this world because this world you're cut off from being connected to hashem he wants to leave but then it turns the other way around but his love for hashem is so great that if hashem wants him to stay and uncover the godliness in the darkness then he will stay gladly it's an amazing thing that on one hand his love of hashem leads him to say i don't want to be here but then you reach a higher love and you say if that's my job if that's what the reboundish liam wants then i will stay and i will do what i can to make a diribat that's why it's interesting that a hay is only half of you meaning when you're living a pure spiritual life you have ecstasy you have passion everything is exciting and wonderful when you gotta confront the sordid realities of everyday life you're not always gonna be living on such a high you know it's like a hey you're not like ecstatic passionate always but you're doing something even more important one could compare it for example uh you know uh when you're when you're living on pure oxygen that could be very exhilarating but you know you have to learn how to breathe on your own so you get off the respirator you get off the oxygen and you're breathing in carbon dioxide and other things so you say gee it was much better the other way yeah but this is how you grow this is how you become healthy ultimately by doing this so this is why ailemah is the letter yod is the letter hey this is the gemara in menaches by the way the kumari menache gives another reason why hey is islam is is totally open at the bottom but there's a narrow opening at the upper left so that's a little bit of a remiss that in islam it's very easy to fall through the bottom you know that's very easy because you know you're really walking on a very thin ice but there's always the possibility of chuva by entering from the top but sub is not going to be easy hashem accepts chuba but beside me it's not going to be there i got to i got to climb the letter and get through through the top so it's kind of a warning that it's very easy to make mistakes and it's a little more difficult to rectify the mistakes okay now this is a gemara in menaches there's another gamora in yovamus that's uh anyone that's married undoubtedly heard this at their cheva bracos and if you've ever been to asheville brothers you've heard this as well i'm sure more than once a beautiful gemara that talks about the name for man is ish and the name for woman is isha they share two common letters aleph and shin but the man has the letter yud and the woman has the letter hey and yud in hey of course is ka hashem's name so the gemaran yuvama says ah when a man and a woman have god in their marriage the man is a man the woman is a woman everybody's doing everything right but take hashem out of their marriage take out the yud and the hay what are you stuck with ash selfishness anger divisiveness they will destroy each other in their egotism my beautiful message keep hashem in the marriage and you'll have shalom take hashem out of the marriage you'll have ash this is gwar yuvamis i'm sure all of you have heard it that they shove abracas probably more than once but what the gemara does not explain is why does the man get a year then the women get ahead so based on the morale's explanation in menaches you see a very interesting thing and that is represents what we might call the purely spiritual hay represents the ability to integrate the spiritual into the physical and uncover the spiritual in the physical to make the derivative so here's the thing this is a generalization it may not be true for every single man every single woman but the generalization is that men often get corrupted by their encounter with the physical world it brings out competitiveness testosterone egotism so a man is like an emphysema patient who needs to be hooked up to pure oxygen tanks so that's why men have to have their yeshivos their kodolim even their minion we have to go to minion okay corona is throwing a lot of things off but you know you go dominion you kind of get away from the world so the world will not drag you down so the man is connected to you it the one of the special unique cohosts of the woman is that the woman has a superior capacity to uncover the spirituality even in the physical and mundane and in fact the morale actually says that this is one of the roles of azer connecto acer can be a helpmate for the man is to teach the man how to do that as well the man beteva is a yud the woman beteva is a hay and she can help the man become that way as well by learning to integrate so to speak the gosh the the ruchnius into the gosmius to uncover the latent spirituality that is really underlying all physical life so whether it's changing a diaper taking care of kids you know if you think about this you know people don't like to talk about it so much because they're a little embarrassed let's say somebody's in yeshiva and they're learning really really well they're learning like yo mumba lila and they get married and all of a sudden you know they got to be home for supper and they gotta you know go shopping and they gotta do and a person might think gee am i losing my rookness because you know i got married i had a more spiritual life before i was married but that's a big mistake before you were married you were on a supplementary oxygen tank now you have to breathe real air and that you know makes you healthy ability right that's the azer connector okay so this is so i mentioned two gemaras essentially the gemara in monaco and the gemara india vamos now let's go back to bris mila bris mila is a surgical procedure so to speak on an organ of the body that you might call the most animalistic part of a person uh you know we share many things in common with animals we eat and animals eat we reproduce we procreate animals procreate but the sexual function might be the thing that's least susceptible to voluntary control like that's why there's a halal it's not just but there is a halacha that when you dove in you have to have something that separates the lower part of your body from the upper part of your body so we don't have even if you don't wear a garble that's why you have pants uh whatever it would be or belt uh if you were simply wearing a robe let's say a robe that you put over like a a poncho and there was no uh nothing under it you would have to have a belt you could not doven without a belt because you're a mahlev to separate between the upper part of your body that rubber and the lower part that kind of represents animalistic functions so it's a strange thing that the breath is done on the part of me that is most animalistic so the safer says the significance of that is that the torah is teaching me that even in the most animalistic parts of our being there is the potential to create holiness and connection to god that we serve god not only when we dive and not only when we learn but when we eat when we procreate a person can have in mind i'm eating to serve hashem i make a bracha i work to earn money i need to get stuck i take care of my family etc i play basketball and i meant you have you have two guys who are playing basketball during lunch uh after 120 years one of them is going to get reward for the basketball game because his kavanaugh was he was doing it to be able to serve hashem better the other might not get that reward if that wasn't a conscious motivation so the bris mila is a tangible ritual that reminds us that there is no real dichotomy between the physical and the spiritual the physical is also an expression of godliness albeit one that is concealed one that needs to be uncovered so now with this understanding we understand why avraham avina was able to comprehend the torah only after brismila because what are mitzvos myceos you take leather you make filling out of it you take wool you make citrus out of it you take wheat and you grind it into flour you make matzah you're taking the physical stuff of the earth and you're elevating it and you're consecrating it now from a spiritual perspective you can almost say that doesn't make sense the world is physical the world is material if i want to connect to god i've got to get away from that materialism but what do mitzvahs tell us mitzvos macias is all about taking the physical and elevating it but until avraham had bris miller he didn't fully comprehend that the physical could be elevated maybe you have to disengage from the physical but bris miller taught him that even the physical and the animalistic can be sanctified and then he understood leather to fill in wool scissors flour matzah citrus fruits you know estrogen it's physical why would the infinite god even care about all this physical stuff the answer is because they're sparks of holiness in all of those things and now we understand the shinu hashem because both avraham and sarah got the letter hey as a result of prismila and hay is all about the yud being connected to the dallas okay so that is the heightened perception of brits mila that both avraham and sorrow were able to to grow uh and this is an important this is a very very important lesson i mean again uh often when people who were raised in a yeshiva environment or even if they came to shiva later so their perception is they can only be servants of hashem in that particular environment that is somewhat minotak from the physical and material world and the downside of that is that once they leave that environment they figure oh if i'm not going to be able to learn all day what's the purpose in other words they don't have a a coping strategy for a different type of life but on the deepest level every type of life has an avenue of kedusha as an avenue that can be opened up an avenue that can be explored and on some levels it might be a higher level because although the hay is only half of a yud the hay is a higher level because the yud is holiness via separation and rejection of the world the hay is the derivative to make the dwelling place for ajahn in the lowly world that we live in and as the bellatonia says the neshama may have a historical shema may have a great great yearning to separate from this world but the true love of hashem says i will engage in this world because this is what hashem wants and what hashem wants is what i want because that's what it means to love hakadoshbara so again i wish everybody well and that's just hashem uh we should be healthy and call yourself should have much much [Music] progress [Music] a