Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Do the Ends Always Justify the Means?

[Music] hi everybody and um i'm glad i was able to be around time i told ravi poston that i was at hasn't i told him it might be as late as nine o'clock amazingly the khasna was only around 15 or 20 minutes late which i assumed would be an hour late that's like standard israeli time and therefore i was able to get her a little early anyway welcome to everybody who's come and i want to announce as is usually the case we have a number of dedications uh the share tonight should be for the elevation of the nishama of again a young man that we were dominating for for uh more than a year and tragically he did die but we hope that our torah should be as for him fort sevilla bastavid and zev ben shalom who is the grandfather of khasya zahavi and again may all of these nishamas be elevated in ganedan in the merit of their generous support of torah in addition we are praying and dedicating the share for a rafa to you avraham ben esther and really all of those who are afflicted who are ill with covet or not with covet inoculated uninoculated may they have the blessings of refuge lima and may all of those who are healthy remain healthy and to bazrath hashem may all of the world progress towards rufua of course when we say refura in judaism we always say refua tan nephesh urafu taguf because healing is not only physically healthy although that is a component of it but we want to have a healthy soul a soul that is connected to god a soul that connects to people a soul that is filled with vat hashem israel and really a vat habriot like arunachalene who was the old wave shaolin varroa they've shalom the pursuer of peace the lover of peace so refua is a very very broad idea that is not limited to to physical health i'm going to start the parsha today with something a little wild and a little unusual a little wacky well shouldn't i say that's a little irreverent but it's it's a passage from the zoar that's quite quite fascinating and it certainly takes the verses out of context but it does bring out some interesting aspects that are even halachic aspects as well so it's just such an interesting zoar that i want to share it with you in last week's partial we of course read about the marriage of yitzhak tarifka and yitzhak was 40 years old according now it doesn't say how old drifter was according to some rabbinic traditions rifka was only three years old and according to other rabbinic traditions she was 14. either way there was a tremendous age difference between them and they were married for 20 years so yitzhak is now 60 and there were no children and the pasek says that yitzhak prayed that rivka should have a child and rivka prayed and the passage says that god answered the prayer of yitzhak so rashi raises from ghazal a very interesting question if both yitzhak and rifka are praying why does the torah say that god answered the prayers of yitra i mean god should have answered the prayers of ritka so the talmud says a very interesting answer that the prayer of yitzhak was the prayer of eight sadiq the the prayer of avram in other words the prayer of ritka was the prayer of a righteous woman who was the son of a ra i'm sorry who was the daughter of a russia so the prayer of eight sadiq the son of atsadik has more power than the prayer of a righteous person who is the child of a russia yitzchak has abraham's merit this is a statement in ghazal that rashi brings so the question people ask is gee i would have thought that maybe the opposite should be the case because if you're with sadiq the son of the sadder so you were raised to be righteous it was not a sacrifice it was not a break it was not a difficulty for you but rifka who came from a house of idolatry a house of paganism and embraced hashem and served hashem that's a greater accomplishment it's similar to what ghazal said elsewhere that the place where the boulder stands the penitent stands is higher and greater than the righteous person who never sinned because the penitents had lived a life in which they enjoyed all of those forbidden pleasures and they broke away and that took sacrifice so the question is why would it be the case that the prayer of eight sadiq the son of asadek should be greater than the prayer of sadekes the daughter of russia or sadiq the daughter of the son of a russia whichever it would be so there's a very very interesting insight from one of the great great bali mustard we know that the founder of the so-called muslim movements which concentrates on ethical behavior and moral development was ravisral solanger who died around 150 years ago and he had many many disciples and perhaps the greatest of his disciples was rav simbra zizzle of kellum kellum was the city he's called he's often called affectionately in yiddish the altar of keller the old man of california and he was an extraordinary educator pedagogue like i could give a whole talk about the altar of kellum he had a very very interesting fact i can't help myself when i come up with his name i gotta talk a little bit about him his big thing in kelum was the inner discipline of never allowing yourself to be distracted off your course and what he was trying to teach was calmness not to get excited not to get agitated to be calm no matter what emergency faced you and this was his thing his main foundation in the service of god was to cultivate a sense of serenity and calmness in fact he had all sorts of exercises give you an example after a fast in his yeshiva the food that was served was fish with a lot of little bones in it what's the point because after a fast we're hungry so we tend to eat ravenously we tend to stuff ourselves that's like an animal he wanted to force people to take their time chewing and eating even when they are very very hungry and he did this by having a lot of bones in the fish so you can't you know you can't eat it quickly etc these were exercises that he had other exercises and these were actually young boys the students were not old the students were like high school age essentially his yeshiva was a high school more or less that when you got a food package from home you couldn't open it up for 24 hours you don't just rip something open take your time uh there's they tell the story about kellum that one time it was a day of kriya satora and it looked like there was no coin there so they were going to call up a lady or call up the israel and then one of the boys noticed that a cohen just walked in so he went to the gaba and said hey cohen walked in so the gaba said thank you very much for telling us you have to pay the yeshiva five rubles what's going on because on one hand you gave us good news on the other hand why are you looking around and dominating who comes in you're not supposed to be looking around all the time so jacob kaminetsky who later became one of the great godoly hedor he spent like six months in the kellum environment but he really you know didn't like it was too regimented for him so he once said later he says every person should spend six months in kellom but then he added but no more it was too like overly regimented in that way but that's what the altar of kellum the elder of kellum's whole idea was to be calm to be deliberate don't rush don't get agitated don't have anxiety there's enough time to do everything if you don't rush in fact that's a saying i think in military surgeons have once you know when they have to do surgery under very difficult combat conditions i think there's a saying when they when you know how long does it take to repair an artery it'll take two minutes if you don't rush if you rush you're going to mess up and it may take a lot longer and maybe you won't be able to save the person at all right that's come again it's so interesting because we saw cilantro had different students who emphasized different things the altar of callum emphasized calmness serenity and order the altar of novartic another altar old man of the verdict was kind of wild he would do like crazy things uh like lock himself in a house for two years just to concentrate on serving god and then starting 150 yeshivos in a few months kind of the opposite of order just the notion of the muna and do what you have to do no matter what the altar of slovakia who was the who founded the great yeshiva of slovakia emphasized the greatness of man instead of the musser that puts you down this was the musser that said how great and noble you are in other words the motivator of his shita of musser was not you're so bad why don't you become better but rather you're so great why don't you live up to your potential that's called godless autumn so each of the students like took a different aspect in fact that's the sign by the way of a very gifted rebbe a very gifted teacher is that each of their students develops in a in a different way they're not cookie cutters the altar of kellum was different than the altar of slovakia the was different than the altar of the verdict and there were many many others as well some emphasized era fear of god and some emphasize love of god different aspects some emphasize regimentation and some emphasize freedom and creativity and they produced different students because different students needed different types of inspiration and different types of teachers so be it as it made that's a little introduction just so you get a sense of these personalities in fact maybe one day you know we'll have a share or have a class on these different types of personalities within the moosa movements that are so fascinating but be this it may going back to my original question this was a little digression and the altar of callum asked the question that i asked and that is why would the prayer of atsadek the son of asadek be greater than the prayer of eight sadaquez the daughter of russia rifka's accomplishment seems to be greater than yitzhak's so says the altar of kellum the following he says rifka's accomplishment was of course phenomenally great especially as a young girl that she was able to reject the idolatry and paganism and immorality of her family and embrace holiness but in a sense once she knew that she was not living in the right environment then she had to become in other words she had no choice in a sense the fact that she came to that choice is a great accomplishment but she knew she had to turn her back on it with yitzhak it's exactly the opposite yitzhak had the greatest parents that any human being could have he had an avram he had a sorrow and it would have been very easy for yitzhak to imitate his parents but the altar of kellum says the meaning of a sadiq bansadic means that even though you're a son of a sadiq you don't simply imitate what your father does but you become a sadiq in your own individualistic and unique way we know for example that avraham embodies the service of god through loving kindness and yitzhak embodies the service of god through inner strength and discipline didn't just become another avraham yitzhak forged his own unique path rifka also forged her own unique path but for rifka forging her unique path was easier than for yitzhak because rifka knew she had no role models yitzhak who did have a role model and nonetheless forged his own individualistic path that's a greater spiritual accomplishment that's what it means to be a saddek in your own right even though your son of athatic is a greater accomplishment than to be a sadaq the son of a russia because the sadaqa son of a russia knows they have to be their own person that sadiq the son of the sadiq doesn't automatically realize that which means part of what's going on here is the notion that no matter how great your family is no matter how great your parents are you got to be your own person too you have to forge your own individual identity without kodeshborjo you don't just coast you don't just imitate you have to become an innovator in your own relationship with akadeshwar that is the greatness the altar of kellum says with sadiq bensatic and that actually ties in uh to his own experience as a talmud of rebbi israel solanter if he saw cilantro was the greatest person you could imagine and yet each of his students pursued a different direct a different approach a different way of developing ethical character and and the like this again this is called the musser movement and the way it was originally envisioned you know people you know a lot of yeshiva stephen today have musser they study musser but that just means like for a half an hour or 15 minutes they look at a book that deals with ethical character like messily shacharim and so people say oh reviews vision triumphed and he won even though there was a lot of opposition at the time but the truth of the matter is i have to say and i hate to say it that whether you saw cilantro absolutely did not win that essentially his vision is virtually not carried out at all except in some very very isolated areas his point was not to simply learn a book for 15 minutes a day his point was to have a whole structured program of working on character in which you'd meet in groups in which we would analyze in other words we would sit together and we would talk about the struggles that we have and we would come up with actual situations that we faced this week i lost my temper i got angry and we would talk about how to work on anger to really so these are called now there are hashem in israel and other places small groups that get together that actually still do this they're called musabads and i would actually actually actually actually suggest you google google the words moussar m-u-s-s-a-r vad second word v-a-a-d you'll come up with information they have these for men and for women and this is a structured program to work on serenity to work on anger to work on generosity to work on benevolence and base it on torah sources but not just learn books but to develop practical strategies for how to become a better person uh now i i will admit i i am not a member of a muslim right now but i am very very intrigued with this revival of where we saw cilantro's real vision as opposed to the kind of fake vision of a musser seder in yeshiva which is just as they they does 15 minutes or at most a half an hour a day and uh half the yeshiva students learn something else anyway they'll learn halakhah or they'll learn mishnayas or or whatever it is i mean i i remember i was a yeshiva student myself and you know it was a common place uh not to pay attention to to musser mr seder uh so the muslim is a phenomenal phenomenal idea and it's even been taken over by people who are not orthodox there's even non-orthodox muslims now again i'm not in favor of being non-orthodox but the point is if any group of people are working on trying to become better people it is a good thing it is a good thing to kind of work on ourselves so that's a little all right now what is the no that's not the crazy thing i said i was going to talk about but i want to share with you a zoar on those verses that i again i shouldn't i shouldn't i should never describe anything it's always crazy but but it really is something that kind of blows your mind in terms of extreme symbolic interpretation on the pussock the passage says and behold rifka um i'm sorry yitzhak was 40 years old when he married rifka the daughter of basuel the arami from syria right from iran so here's what the zohar says the term yitzhak is a remiss to the spiritual ethereal nature of arneshama because yitzhak was almost not human because he was a korban was godly in a sense and rifka is a symbol of the physical body so when it says yitzhak was 40 when he married rifka that's a ramesh that 40 years after the coming of mashiach the spiritual soul will be reunited in the physical body yitzhak marries rifka now then it says and this is really enigmatic and rifka is the daughter of bisu el arami the suel is a name that we give to the lose bone from which comes the resurrection of the dead and that loose bone goes by the name pursueel i'll go over this in a moment and the letters of our me can be rearranged to spell ramai but suel the deceitful one now what is the lose bone we know we know some things about the lose bone from the gemara itself the loose bone is the small vertebrae at the very base of the spine we have 18 vertebrae and the loose bone at the ends like the tailbone is the 19th vertebrae and according to hazal's tradition that is the one bone of the body that never disintegrates no matter how long it takes and in fact it even calls it indestructible you can pound it with a hammer you can put it in a fire it never gets destroyed and even if the whole body decomposes the loose bone is still going to be there and that will be the bone from which there will be resurrection of the dead so the reason why rifka is called the daughter of besuel is because if rifka symbolically means the body this body that's going to be resurrected will be the daughter of the soil it'll come from the loose bone that is called besuel the deceiver now why why why does it have that name is going to be a little strange now the gemara tells us a further teaching that the loose bone gets no nutrition from any of the food that we eat so all the food that i eat nourishes my blood in my cells my bones but the loose bone so to speak gets no nutrition from any food that you eat except for the food that you eat at the malava mauka which is the festive meal that one is supposed to have when shabbos is over and you're escorting the queen and the loose bone gets its nutrition from that and that's why we say if you want to have a healthy loose bone for resurrection of the dead one should have the sauda of the lava malka now why is the loose bone called basu el the arami which is the soil the deceiver because the loose bone deceives because it looks like it's eating and it looks like it dies when the body dies but it actually remains remains alive so this is a wild explanation that is not rooted at all in the simple meaning of the verse but the zoar says that the lose bone is called a deceiver because uh it makes believe that it eats so to speak but it does not eat and that is what will produce the rifka which is the body which is resurrected with the spirit of yitzchak which is the nishamah going into the body now reviaco vemdin explains the following idea why is the loose bone so indestructible why is the lose bone the bone from which there will come resurrection of the dead so jacob and then says a tremendous thought he says like this man was originally adam and eve adam and java were originally intended to live forever why did death come into the world only because of the hate of the eights of death when they ate the forbidden fruit spiritually that poisoned all of their limbs they were no longer worthy of eternal life but the loose bone didn't get any benefit from the forbidden fruit because the liz bone only benefits from what you eat most say shabbos and this was eaten arab shabbos so the lose bone is indestructible precisely because it never got any benefit from the eight sadas and therefore death never permeated the loose bone as it permeated all the other limbs of the body so it's these two ideas are connected the fact that it only eats the mozai shabbos food is the reason why it is in fact indestructible because it never was tainted by the death that resulted from the hate of the eight's hadas okay so this is just the zoa again there's no particular it's not really what the parsha is talking about but it's illustrative of the amazing depths of meaning that can be found beneath the surface in kabbalah and perhaps it should also remind us of the importance of the sudas malava malaba malka it doesn't mean you have to make a gigantic meal most of the time that's not you know after shabbos we tend not to be that hungry but even if one eats the hatred one should actually wash and have a piece of bread uh but if that one has a piece of cake that would be good as well assuming you are allowed to eat the cake okay uh otherwise otherwise you got to do you got to make do with something else okay all righty so now though let me go back into maybe a more mainstream uh type of understanding one of the most difficult uh well the parsha really begins yaakov does two things he cheats ace of twice in this parsha his twin brother asa one at the age of 15 and the other at the age of 63 although the tory does not give you that sec the ages but if you figure out the calculation when they're 15 years old asap comes in right jacob and asa are two different personalities even though they're twins asap is a hunter asap is an activist asa physically is ruddy and hairy and yaakov is smooth one could imagine his skin is very light and he sits in the tent now because i'll understand that sitting in the tent means he studies torah all day yaakov studious yaakov is righteous yaakov is good asap is not necessarily described as evil you know we're so used to looking at ace of his evil that's not the description the torah gives him the torah does not describe asa as evil that's kind of what is superimposed on him but asap is described as a man of the field and a hunter and yaakov is described as the dweller of the tent and in story number one asap comes in off the field and he's hungry and he's starving and yaakov is cooking a lentil stew a red stew chocolate a power of chillent and asap comes in and says i'm starving give it to me or i'll die now what's going on here why is yaakov cooking a lentil stew so ghazal say that yaakov was preparing food to give to his father who was sitting in mourning over the death of avraham that's how i know how did i know that yaakov is 15 because let's figure this out avraham died at the age of 175. we know that we know that yaakov and asif were born when yitzchak was 60. we know that so if yitzhak was 60 avraham was 160 because avram was 100 when when jessica was born so if avraham died at 175 yitzhak was 75. if yitzhak was 75 yaakov and asa for her twins were 15. that's how i know they were 15 because avraham died now to me i always find this extraordinarily touching because because i'll say asav did not publicly become a russia until the day abraham died then asap started doing all sorts of things murdering and and raping all sorts of things and i think there's a certain implication here because let's imagine the situation itzhak is not only righteous but yitzhak has a certain otherworldly life that's why rifka is in awe of him right unlike sarah sarah talks to avraham directly when sora has a problem with the kids sarah confronts abram rifka has to make strategies and plans there is a sense that it says that rifka herself is in awe of yitzhak part of it might be the age difference and part of it might be that yitzhak is other worldly yitzhak experienced being a sacrifice of god yitzhak is a paradigm of holiness that's different than abraham avraham had a holiness i might say that was more earthy more involved with people yitzhak was musulak from the world so yitzhak has two sons how does yitzhak relate to a kid like asaph asap doesn't learn ether is a bum he says even if all he did was play basketball he's a bum so what kept asap in the falls for 15 years it was a loving grandparent as long as avraham was alive asap had somebody who understood it this is my reading i i don't really see a source the only source i have is that hazal do say asap did not become a russia till the day avraham died based on that source it seems logical to me because i see this in real life all the time where a child is not always understood by his parents but he could turn to his grandparents for support abram understood that even a kid who plays basketball doesn't have to be a bad kid and abram understood asaph in fact after this hearing you're going to feel sorry for asaf asa becomes a compassionate figure in some ways a tragic figure a sad figure and this will become even more evident as we go on so asap kind of loses his grandfather loses the only person of course sora's already gone lose is the only person who ever really understood him now rifka kind of doesn't like him and yitzhak doesn't understand him we'll see his actually did like him but yes i didn't understand him it's not a kid i yes i can relate to but avraham could relate to him and he lost his only support so asap becomes a russia and he says to yaakov you know yaakov buys so to speak the birthright which is a spiritual heritage for a pot of beans and aesop says behold i'm going to die why do i need this birthright and this doesn't just mean i'm so hungry i'm going to die he's basically saying after i die there's no life there's no uldama so what's the point who needs the spiritual stuff eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we will die so yaakov takes advantage of this yakov sees that asap doesn't care and yaakov purchases the spiritual heritage now let's analyze that you could say well is yaakov taking advantage of a starving person you could look at it that way or you could say that yaakov is totally justified if there's this spiritual gift that the person that has it just doesn't care about it then why shouldn't it go to the person to whom it makes a difference asap made that decision you know they tell the story i'll tell you a little story about this they tell the story about a man who needed money he was very very poor and he went into a a tavern just to see if he could find somebody to sell something to and they see this jew and uh the jew they make fun of him and they say what are you here for he says well i have uh a little bit of money and i was told to buy the first thing that anybody would sell to me that's what already told me to do so they started joking with him and one of the men said i'll sell you my own and i'll take the money that you have okay so even though you really can't sell your alum but the rabbi told this the hussein buy the first thing that you're offered so they draw up a document they saw a joke they said i hereby sell you o la maba in exchange for one ruble okay and everyone's laughing that the guy has a ruble etc so then what happens is when the guy who sold his old comes home he tells his wife you should know what happened today in the bar there was this idiot simpleton jew who was told that he should buy the first thing that he could buy and i sold him my olamaba isn't that funny then he notices his wife is not laughing and he says what's the matter don't you get the joke she says i'm not going to live with a man who sold his own get it back so he says it was a joke it was just a joke she says get it back so he goes back to the tavern the the the simple jew is still there there and he says listen you know there was a mistake my you know it was a stupid thing just i'll give you back the ruble give me back the document i'll rip it up so the custard says i'm sorry my rebbe said i should buy not sell he told me to buy the first thing that i'm offering he says i'll give you two rubles i'll give you a double he says the rebbe said to buy not to sell what can i do he says i'll give you five rubles nope so he goes back so the guy goes back to his wife and he says you know the guy gave me a ruble i'm offering him five rubles 10 rubles you know what do you want me to do she said get it back so he goes back and whatever the huss it says i i was only authorized to buy not to sell and the person went up like to a thousand rubles he went to his revenue everybody said yeah for a thousand rubles you could sell it that gave him enough money to marry off his daughters and everything else so the guy that paid a thousand rubles to get back his own bar went to the rebbe and he said what type of yahshuas is this what type of honesty is this i took one ruble i gave him all of my and now he gets a thousand rubles to give me back what belongs to me so the rebbe said when you were willing to sell your obama for a ruble it wasn't even worth that and when you're willing to buy it back for a thousand rubles it's worth a lot more you got a bargain in other words the concept is your connection to spirituality depends on how much you value it when you value it it is worth infinitely great when you don't care about it it's worth nothing so yaakov didn't cheat asap to asap this birthright was worth nothing because evasive is willing to give it up for a pot of beans then that's what it's worth it's worth a pot of beans yago didn't cheat him but for yaakov it was a big deal okay that's act one but then we have act two which is many many years later when yitzhak is on his death but actually italy didn't die then but thinks he's on his deathbed yitzhak is 163 at this point remember that yitzchak lives until 180. so we have one of the strangest difficult incidences in the torah where yitzhak wants to give his blessing to asaph and rifka knows that that's not a good thing but she can't talk to her husband about it so instead she goes through a whole strategy where yaakov impersonates asaph and yitzhak gives the blessings to yaakov thinking he's giving the blessings to asa and then when asa finally shows up yitzhak says sorry too late and you know asap is understandably a little upset about this and there are so many questions let me go over three three basic questions about this question one is on yitzhak why would yitzhak favor asaf over yaakov did yitzhak think that asav was more righteous than yaakov was asav yitzhak's favorite son now some commentaries do learn that yitzhak actually was fooled by some evasive's behavior because ace have used to ask number one number one asap was meticulous in honoring his father number two asap used to ask kind of very from halal questions he would say for example what tithes do you give from water and salt now of course there is no tithing for mother order and so so some actually say that yitzhak was fooled by asap into thinking that asaph was righteous uh right and uh indeed uh some want to learn it says that sorry it says that yitzchak was blinded right yeah was blind he couldn't see and rashi brings a madrish he was blinded by the tears that the angels shed at the al-qaeda so how melodically some understand this that yitzhak was so connected to the highest realms of kedusha that he could not understand hypocrisy duplicity and dishonesty so if somebody comes across as righteous yitzhak gets fooled riska on the other hand who comes from a family of liars and cheaters she does understand duplicity so that's shot number one that many beforeshim learned yitzhak was simply fooled into thinking that asa was a more righteous person than he was but i would suggest that there are a number of kashas about this in other words i can give you some textual proof that yitzhak certainly knew that yaakov was a bigger sadiq than asap first of all you'll recall that right before the incident of the brahms it mentions that asaph married a daughter of ishmael and ace of married a canaanite woman and it says explicitly this was a source of bitterness to yitzhak and rivka so yitzhak is aware that asap is violating the family tradition of marrying within the family of abraham and not marrying canaanite women so he knew asa was doing things that were not correct the second indicator is that when yaakov impersonates asaph and yaakov uses the name of god so if you remember what what the what yitzhak says the voice is the voice of yaakov and the hands are the hands of asap meaning the goat skins that are hairy well rashi explains when it says the voice is the voice of yaakov that is not referring to the physical voice yaakov venezuela were twins their voices were identical but he says you sound like yaakov because you're using the name of hashem and asav never uses the name of hashem so those are two proofs that yaakov that yitzhak knows asap is not such a righteous person number one ace have married a canaanite and number two yitzhak knows that asap never uses the name of hajim so as a result it is clear that yitzhak understands that yaakov is the better person so if that's the quest if that's the case why would yitzhak want to give the brachos to asaf right why would he want to give the breakfast to asus so i want to share with you a very interesting explanation of the melbourne we know that later in jewish history you know after the tribes after yaakov has the tribes we know that two tribes were yesah and zavulin he isakhar was a tribe that was totally devoted to the learning of torah and the sahara was i'm sorry that's isakhar and zavolin was a tribe that was devoted to commerce and business and zavulin used its resources to enable yi soccer to learn torah and what do ghazal say in the partnership between sahara and zavulan zavulin gets equal credit with isa because without zavulin nisakar would not have been able to learn torah in fact even today people enter into partnership sometimes in fact moshe feinstein says it has to be a real partnership agreement in which i would agree to support a person full time in their learning as a woman to their usahr see if you some give charity to a yeshiva so that's a mitzvah of charity but the soccer civil it has to be a real partnership in which you contribute the capital and they contribute the labor so to speak and that creates the partner now let me add that even zavolans are supposed to learn it's not like it's not like you know you can get exempt from learning torah by paying money but this is the specialty so here's the thing yitzhak looks at his son asaph and he sees asap doesn't learn atheism is not a study or maybe eighth of his add he doesn't have zitch fleisch he's not in a basement rich but i love him he is my son i don't understand him only abraham understood him but i love him what can i do to give him a connection to god and then i look at my son yaakov my son yaakov loves to learn he's in the basement now if you look at the blessing this is very important if you look at the blessing that yitzhak gave yaakov when he thought he was giving the blessing to asus it is a blessing totally about material prosperity may god give you do and reign and crops and political leadership this is what yitzchak envisioned yitzhak envisioned that the relationship of yaakov and asa will be the relationship that later became isakharenzivulen i will give asa the blessings of this world i will give ace of prosperity i will give him wealth i will give a merit israel i will give him political domination because asap is an activist you can't sit ace of down in the basement asa was a man of the field a man of action men of action are important in the world they build cities they build economies they invent they have factories right asap will be the man of action and he will use his resources to enable the yaakovs of the world to live godly lives and therefore yitzhak wanted to give the blessings of olam hazel to asaph in the hope and in the belief that asa would use his resources to help yahov and yitzhak feels this is good for asaph and it's good for yaakov it's good for asa because it allows aesop to use his energy and his talents in the ways that he's naturally gifted in but to use them for good causes and it's also good for yaakov because yaakov is freed of the burden of creating a society building cities digging ditches planting fields political intrigue military conquest let yaakov forget about all that let the aesops of the world handle the physical and political and material building of society and let the yaakovs of the world be the spiritual leaders that will give us the insight and the inspiration and therefore it's not that yitzchak thought asap was a bigger sadiq than yaakov it's the other way around he thought this would precisely be a subs redemption now what's interesting and tragic is that yitzhak is trying to make up for a mistake that was made many many years before now this is a thought from affirmation of hirsch sometimes when i say it i am severely criticized because it seems to be a critique of yitzhak and rivka's parenting styles so i have to say this is what the first says i mean it's not it's not for us to judge the others it says that when yaakov and asia were born and yaakov was smooth and asap was hairy so the pussac says the youths grew up and yaakov and asa became a man of the field who was a hunter and yaakov dwelt in the tents reverse says the critical wrong turn in their upbringing was by ign they were raised in the same way yaakov and asaf had different personalities yaakov vanessa had different talents but initially yitzhak and rifka's agenda was to raise both of them by putting them in the base of madrid whatever that meant then making them learn all day and the first says that wasn't what asap needed and if you try to make an asap into a yaakov not only will you not get a yaakov out of it but you will not get the ace of that you could have got what can i tell you the truth of the matter is we we actually see the consequences of this every single day in countless homes and it's a very very sad thing in which we're not always responsive to the individuality of the child's personality to the child's talents to the child's interests and we try to superimpose a framework talk about you know square peg in a round hole or whatever it would be that will be destructive to the child and what happens is that not only does the child not flourish in the way that you're trying to impose on him but he doesn't become self-actualized in the way that he could have become sex self-actualized had we been more sensitive this is what muhammad says in mishlai proverbs genocide educate a child according to their way their way everyone has their way and we've got to try to find what that way is you know not that i understand this but artists sometimes say sculptors sometimes say that when they look at a piece of wood or a piece of stone they don't really form the statue they just remove the impediments so that which is already imminent in the wood comes out yeah i i i can't say not being an artist i cannot say i fully understand what that even means but that's what they say they say we don't make the statue we remove the impediments so the statue that is there comes out you know that's what raising a child actually is raising a child is to try to remove the blockages that enable the personality and nature of the child to emerge in a good and healthy way i'll pee darker refer says the same way that parents especially when they have twins they sometimes dress them the same so issac and rifka were training yaakov venezuela in the same way that was destructive that made ace of a rebel so now what's fascinating is so many years later yitzhak is trying to correct the mistake that was made when they were children yitzhak is now saying asaf is different he needs different things asap is not going to be the one who sits in the base of madrid but asaf can be the one with energy the one with drive the one with creativity the one that will build cities and create governments and devise plants because he can't be confined in that basement way but he will use his resources for yaakov that frees up yaakov and that gives ace of the ability to do everything that he's able to do in other words it is a tikkun it is a rectification to vayigda arim arm was a parental failure and now yitzchak wants to rectify it so sounds good so what's rifka's problem rifka understands too little too late maybe this would have worked and again you see it's a trap it's a tragedy maybe this would have worked at an earlier stage in life but asap's path is already set if aesop gets the brachot he is not going to use it for the benefit of yaakov he will use it to destroy yaakov he will use it to get rid of the spiritual message that yaakov represents yitzhak has a utopian vision that is ultimately a bit naive yitzhak's vision is give asa all of the prosperity of olam hazar and he will devote his resources to enhancing the spirituality of yaakov rifka is the realist here rifka says that utopian vision ain't gonna happen now question number two though is why couldn't driftka tell you it's like that i mean so here you have a communication issue and this goes back to the native that says you know sarah tells avraham we got a problem with your smile but somehow rifka cannot tell yitzhak we have a problem with asap and then it sip says indeed and it says the point i made earlier that rifka was in awe of yitzhak and really she needed to shock yet into understanding because again the way the meforshim understand it although when yitzchak gave the blessings he thought he was talking to asaph but by the end of the story when asaph showed up and yeshua realized he was deceived he said the words these are critical words he who got the blessings will be blessed now this is very important the medrish makes the point that yitzhak understood by this shocking revelation that yaakov deserved the brahmos so it is important to know that this was not a bracha based on fraud because yitzchak ultimately validated the bracha itself but again there are so many peculiarities here and that is yaakov is described in our tradition as the man of truth avraham is loving kindness yitzhak is inner strength and yaakov is called ms this is a pasuk ascribe truth to yaakov yaakov now yaakov could be righteous you can call yak of a million things is yaakov the man of truth i mean think about the number of apparent deceptions or trickeries that yaakov engages in okay buying the birthright might be trickery although you could look at that differently but getting the blessings are certainly trickery because he masquerades as they say albeit now now again we have to give jakob credit he didn't want to do it right he told his mother what if my father discovers this and he'll curse me etc and rifka said i'll take the curse okay so we could say that yaakov was a reluctant participant but la maisa he is the one that said when when yeshua said who are you and he says i am ace of your firstborn. now of course uh because i'll say there's verbal manipulation the way he said it was i i am i and then asap was your first point okay those are tricks but obviously whatever yaakov technically said that he didn't utter a lie but he clearly you know deceived his father and then of course later with on we also have other things where yaakov pulls different stick with the sheep okay so jakob is a man of truth and yet yaakov gets the broncos through deception in other words that's a very very strange idea and here if jacob kamineski offers an interesting insight revlienneski says that the nature of god giving you a trial is to sometimes act against your nature to understand that sometimes even things that are totally abhorrent to you need to be done for higher good now this is a very dangerous idea because this suggests ends justify the means but the truth of the matter is it is true that the ends do not always justify the means but it's also true that sometimes they do sometimes they do in other words to make this statement that moral people like to say the ends never justify the means is actually not true i mean i'll give you a let me give you let me give you a very simple example uh let's imagine that you're a person who never lies you believe that truth is extremely important which is which it is which it is and there's a terrorist who comes in with a machine gun and says where's that fifth grade class so are you supposed to tell them oh turn right first classroom to the right are times in which you lie say oh they're uh in the baseball fields out there where they know whatever works now that's an extreme case but that does illustrate that to make an absolute statement that the ends never justify the means is an untrue statement as bad as it is to lie and again i mean the torah takes lying very very seriously so by avraham avinu whose natural tendency is loving-kindness what was the greatest nissan in his life to sacrifice his son yitzhak to show that even if it's an act of cruelty he's willing to do it for yitzchak it's not such a sacrifice because yitzhak lives within her strength so yitzca could give his life but abram couldn't would be very hard for everyone to take it so the same way that avraham is given a nisoyan that goes beyond his comfort zone yaakov has to be willing to lie for this higher purpose because yaakov is naturally the man of truth but the idea of nissan is to go beyond your nature meaning to say to understand that sometimes lying becomes necessary now again this is a dangerous idea because it can obviously be distorted it can obviously be abused but nonetheless the torah needs to establish that as important as truth is the man of truth must be willing to sometimes depart for truth when there's a fundamentally important purpose to ensure the survival of the jew the creation and the survival of the jewish people but refursh adds a certain twist refers says this is quite amazing that yaakov is not such a great liar here number one yaakov continues to use the name of hashem so that yeshua says the voice is the voice of yaakov so refersh actually says this is a kiddish this is not the pasha that yaakov lied but he lied in such a way that yitzhak would actually realize that yaakov is standing in front of him in line he actually says yitzhak knew at some point he was talking to yaakov so what's the point of yaakov engaging in deception because the following part of yitzchak's reason that he didn't want to give the blessings to yaakov is he thought that for yaakov to be involved in a political world in a military world in the dashmi world would destroy yakov they would eat them alive yaakov doesn't know how to deal with cheaters and deceivers and therefore i want him to live in a cloistered life and let asap deal with all of the liars of the world so yaakov needs to show yitzhak i know how to lie too i know how to play the game and because i know how to play the game i'm not going to be destroyed by that game and therefore you can give me the breakfast that's a very different understanding it's not that yaakov is actually deceiving asa but yaakov is symbolically telling a deceiving yitzhak but yakov is symbolically communicating i know how to play this game therefore they're not going to destroy me okay so it's a very very complicated dynamic but the final point i want to raise is that um there was a uh i think just a live you know the professor of harvard the president of harvard university for many years was a fellow derrick bach i think he's not alive anymore his wife was a professor at harvard herself her name was sissel a buck not non-jewish uh but sisil bach is a moral philosopher so she writes about morality and philosophy and her specialty is the ethics of lying and truth-telling so she's written a number of books on when is it moral to lie when is it not moral to life and she develops a very fascinating idea i don't think you know she was the first one but she developed an idea called a moral moral trace that means the following that even when something is justified even when a bad action is morally justified the fact that it's a bad action leaves a certain taint in your character this is very important an example would be look at the physical world if i'm walking by a fiery a fire in a building and there's a baby and i jump into the building and i rescue the baby did i do a moral thing yeah did i do a heroic action yes but just because it was a good thing doesn't mean i'm not going to be burnt because it's almost an inevitable consequence that you're going to get burnt and the morality or the correctness of what you did is not going to protect you from the burning so dr bach explains that the same thing is true when you have a justification for immoral acts even when you have a green light to lie it leaves a trace it leaves a begum in your character meaning just because you were justified in doing it doesn't mean it doesn't affect you in negative ways and here's what the medra says did yakov have the right to engage in deception our assumption is yes he deserved the brahmot ace of yitzhak's calculation wasn't going to work so did yaakov sin by what he did our assumption is no and the proof is that yitzhak validated the brachot by saying but let's see what happened to yaakov as a result of his lying as a result of yaakov's deception he flees irish israel and spends 20 years in loven's house and what is yaakov a victim of in loven's house over and over he works seven years to marry raquel and he's victimized by a substitution of leia which makes him work another seven years and then with the sheep loving keeps on changing the payment arrangements in other words yaakov lies to get the broncos and yaakov becomes a victim of the lies of lover and even more tragically yaakov is later the victim of the lies of his own children who sold yosef into slavery and convinced him that joseph was dead the saying goes i always forget is it what goes around comes around or what comes around goes around i always forget which way it goes but whichever way it goes he who engages in lies in fraud in deception in misrepresentation is going to suffer from the very negative forces that they released was yaakov justified yet but just because it was justified doesn't mean it doesn't have a cost and in fact the blessings were not even proclaimed the madrid actually says that the blessings that yaakov did receive were never fully fulfilled and they will not be fulfilled until mashiach comes okay so this is a very very confusing ambiguous lesson i wish i could be more definitive about this because on one hand the lesson is sometimes you have to lie and sometimes the ends justify the means and you've got to do what you have to do because so much is at stake that you need to take extreme edges but then you have a counter message but don't think you're not going to suffer because of it there are going to be costs to engaging in immoral means even when they're necessary it's a hard part in many many ways this is i i was telling my wife that i thought this story of yaakov and asaf is really one of the most difficult stories together with the sale of yosef which was coming down the pipe some of the most difficult stories to understand because in some ways i consider this to be more difficult than to say i mean the sale of yosef is simply how could brothers do it okay that's a that's a good question but this is more difficult to me because this means that the very foundation of the jewish nation is based on getting those blessings from yitzhak was based on this type of fraud or deception i mean i mean that goes to the creation of army israel so that's a real real difficulty and as i say part of the answer is sometimes extreme means are necessary for extremely important causes but they do have a cost don't think you get away with it it'll come back and bite you in various ways so something to think about and i wish everyone a good uh shabbos and be well [Music]