Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: How to be The king

[Music] okay everybody good uh good to see you hope everyone is doing well uh tonight so we're going to be looking a little bit at parshas balak it's very very interesting if you think about uh the events that are described in the torah during our 40 years of wandering in the desert it's interesting that around 38 years are totally passed over they're not discussed at all there's a real big jump in parsha you're kind of jumping from year two to year forty i mean you say the haita miragulim happens a year and a half after we left mithraim it's in the second year of the exodus and then there's the story of korach which is a little indeterminate when it happens and then we have para duma moshe hitting the rock uh on all of us i'm sorry before motion iraq all of a sudden we're in the 40th year and a lot of things happened in that last year first miriam died and then uh moshe and arun hit the iraq and it was decreed that they would not enter the land of israel and then eventually arun died and of course moshe is not going to die until a little later on so really the torah literally passes over with almost complete silence 38 years in the desert and ghazal explained that for those 38 years the shekinah did not talk to mosher avenue moshe rabeno himself was in a state of excommunication because of the sin of the spice and like nothing happened now of course i shouldn't say nothing happened we still had the mun every day except on shabbos and until miriam died we had the traveling well and until arun died we had the clouds of glory so there was plenty of diluting but there were no new mitzvos that were given there were no new prophecies moshe rabeno himself was cut off from his connection to god in a very very powerful way it's almost tragic in a way but it's passed over in total silence but as i said before a moment ago in the 40th year a lot of things are happening miriam dies moshe and arun hit the rock instead of speaking to it whatever their sin was exactly and we have the story of balak what's going on the jewish people are now poised to enter the land of israel and there is a king of moab and the king of moab whose name is balak hires a professional sorcerer a professional curser have curse will travel who is villa and bilaam was given an extraordinary ability whoever bilham cursed was cursed whoever abilum blessed was blessed bullock wanted a higher on to curse the jewish people question number one what was bullock's motivation what did balak have against the jewish people the torah says that moab was afraid of the jewish people and the nation of moab said they will lap us up like an ox laps up or eats up the grass of the field and the jewish people became disgusting in the moabites eyes because the moabites were so afraid but there's a very simple question on this if you look in the book of devarim which is moshe rabeno's review of a lot of events so a lot of details are not written in the torah as they happen but they are written when moshe is reviewing it shortly before his death moshe mentions that when we were poised to enter the land of israel and we wanted to make a shortcut through moabite territory god told us do not wage war against moab because i gave the moabite land to moab remember moab if you recall is related to lot lot after sedona his two daughters had incest with their father and the oldest daughter gave birth to a child that she called moe of connected to from my father and the younger daughter gave birth to a child that she called amon from my people and they became the ancestors of the nations of moab and among and when we wanted to go through their land god told us do not wage war so we requested going through their land we said we'll pay you for food and water and when moab said no we had to go around we couldn't enter eric israel through moab we had to go around until we were east of the jordan river and that's how we entered eretz israel so the question is this if indeed god commanded moshe not to wage war against the moabite people then what was the moabite nation afraid of that they found it necessary to hire bilaam what was the pakhad what was the mora did not god command al-tatsar ethmoaf do not make muhammad with them so one answer might be that okay that's what hashem told moshe and that's what moshe presumably told the jewish people but the moabites didn't know perhaps right that that is a possible answer on the other end why didn't motion tell them so i want to share so again what you're saying is a perfectly possible answer i i admit that but the shame ishmael one of the great hasidic masters offers a different explanation and the shame ishmael says moab and balak was not afraid that the jewish people would wage war against them moab and balak were afraid that the jewish people would simply enter eric israel and they wanted to stop that by all costs by destroying the jewish people in the midbour what's so bad about the jewish people entering eretz israel so this goes back to a theme that i think we've mentioned more than once and that is god's relationship to the jewish people in the desert is fundamentally very very different than the way he's going to relate to us once we come to eric israel in the desert we have what is called a spiritual cocoon we are immunized from the daily pressures of life our bread is the man that comes down from heaven our water is the traveling well in the merit of miriam we are surrounded with clouds of glory the presence of god is palpable obvious ever-present visible constantly now that has a cost when you're in the presence of god with that type of immediacy every alvera has an immediate feedback you do a sin people die because there's no hester upon him there is no concealment of divinity divinity is open in open divinity there is reward for goodness and there is punishment for evil it's only in the world of concealing women the person gets seems to get away with a lot of things at least in the short term and that's tester punim so there is a cost in having that intimacy with god but the midbour was an unparalleled intimacy with akris barco in a supernatural revealed manner now once we come to eric israel life is going to be very different there's no longer going to be the man that falls from heaven we're going to have to plant and plow and harvest and thresh and make our bread we're going to have to either dig wells or rely on rainfall we're not going to have this miraculous well that travels with us we're not going to have the clouds of glory we're going to have to build societies and dig ditches and have lawyers and doctors and accountants and cities there will be a tremendous at least relative to the midbar a tremendous hester upon him a concealment of divinity and this could have some serious effects the torah itself warns us that because you will not always see the miracles of god you might attribute your success to your own efforts for your heart will become potty and conceited and arrogant and you may forget god and you may say the otsumyadi it was my strength that gave me all of this success and the torah warns us again and again and again against the sin of arrogance but at the same time coming to eric israel gives us a unique opportunity because it allows us to show godliness even in the mundane meaning in some ways it's easy to connect to hashem when hashem's presence is so visible and so palpable it's much more difficult to connect to akades barcu when you live in the world of hester panim of concealment when you live in the world in which things seem to follow some type of course of nature but eric israel was the great crucible in which we took all of the ammuna and all of the bhitar that we absorbed over those 40 years and we translated it at least the way this was our mission we translate it into building a society and bringing god into the physical tangible material lowly world you know the balatanya quotes but it's such a familiar phrase of the baba tanya who's quoting khazal that it's almost the mantra of chabad anyone that if you have any experience in the babbages you have heard this at least 10 times and maybe a hundred times and that is hakarisporcha was nisab hashem's greatest yearning is leo dirab to have a dwelling place in this lowly world right so a bad person will say the avoidable it's really from the matters but as they say most people know it from the balatanya who uses that lotion so here is what bullock is afraid of the jews in the desert are a holy nation they serve they learn torah they serve god but they are so distant from ordinary life that their holiness is not a reproach to us we can continue to do whatever we do because we're real people living in a real world in other words if i live in a real world let's talk about the private missionaries that people have and i cheat in my business and i'm dishonest and i do all sorts of things and somebody says why can't you be like that great rabbi so one of the things i might say is that great rabbi is not involved in business he's not involved in the world he's separated from the world so when you're separated from the world it's easy to be holy it's easy to be righteous but i am a man that's involved in real society i deal with real people i deal with real problems you can't expect me to be that holy and that righteous and that committed to because i got a real world i have to deal with so vis-a-vis the non-jewish nations it's kind of the same thing bolak was perfectly happy to have the jews remain in the spiritual cocoon of the desert as long as they're in the desert yeah they're holy they're righteous they serve god that's because they have the man they have the behe they have their name they're really irrelevant to our lives in our society because they're living on a totally different plane so what they do has nothing to do with us and what they do is not a reproach to us so let them stay in the desert but bullock is afraid once they come to eric israel and once they confront the same sordid realities that we the moabites have to confront and they still keep a torah and they keep mitzvos and they serve god that becomes a reproach that shows that god can be served even within the confines of the physical world bullock didn't want that to happen because if that would happen that would be a reproach on all of the societies of the world that were not living by again not by the torah standards they were non-jewish but by noah laws or whatever it would be and therefore the shame ishmael says that bullock's goal was not so much to prevent the jewish people from attacking him but bullock's goal was that you know they should be destroyed in the desert meaning they should never have the opportunity of reaching eric israel because what eric israel is about is the ability to bring kedusha even in a materialistic economic political world where the presence of god is not always that visible and not always that perceptible and the midbour was actually a preliminary school to show us the presence of hashem so we will have internalized that idea that when we get to eric israel our eyes will be attuned to seeing the presence hashem this is what the shame israel did you want to thank you it's like right right that's exactly right there's just to be sure people know the gemara digmara makes the point that you know rich people might have excuses for not learning torah i was so busy with my business i couldn't learn and poor people can say i couldn't learn because i had to make a living to put bread on my table what do you expect of me but the gemara says in each of those cases there were outstanding people there was one tana who was extraordinarily wealthy who still became great in torah and then there was hillel who was tremendously impoverished and yet he managed to become that he was so again the shamer schmorl is saying colon israel in eric israel would be mahayev all of the other societies which would not be the case as long as we're living in the midbour because the midbrain has nothing to do with other societies the midborn was a unique category that could not be replicated that was the shame ishmael now this may answer another kash because peter mufasa mask akasha if balak is afraid of the jewish people and bilaam has the power both to bless and to curse that's what the human says so why does balak seek a curse why doesn't balak ask bilaam to bless moab that moab should be successful why don't why doesn't he seek a bracha for him rather than a curse for army israel so one answer is the khovitzim gives that's the nature of anti-semites that's the nature of people who hate jews it's not so much they want a better life for them they just want to hate they just want to curse they just want to be mcallen no matter what that is why in fact has been pointed out very well that in some ways hitler's campaign against the jews was a self-defeating proposition just for germany itself i mean germany lost i mean besides the holocaust germany lost uh some of the greatest scientists in the world albert einstein niels barr and the like uh that uh in a sense it was almost a suicide mission to drive out jews from germany and yet that's the nature of hatred hatred is not looking at what's better for a society it simply hates but according to the shame ishmael we have another answer there's no point in bullock giving moa of abraham the whole point is to prevent ami israel from entering the midbar he needed to utilize the concept of the concept of curse okay so that's a point number one i wanted to to to share with you and of course uh point number two i just have a few a few different points but they're they're going to be somewhat related you know ghazal say something very interesting about bilum very extraordinary thing about bilaam that god gave the umota alum a prophet because otherwise they would complain and they would say oh the jewish people are good because you gave them a prophet like moshe robinu if you would give us a prophet like moshe bainu we would also be good so hashem gave them billam who was as great as moshe ravina and still they continued in their evil ways now wait a second in a way this is a non-sequitur argument the the um's argument is if you would have given us a moshe rabbenu we would be good also hashem gave them abilum build them as a russia right so the experiment has not been replicated the experiment is give us a motion so here i would like to suggest the following idea and again this will dovetail a little bit with what i said about korek we think that you know moshe was sadiq billam was a russia and we asked the question hashem didn't give the nations a righteous person so the nations still have an argument if you would have given us a righteous person we would have been good but maybe you can look at it another way moshe and bilam started at the same place they had greatness they had talent they had abilities they had phenomenally elevated souls and both were given extraordinary powers from god powers of prophecy powers to make miracles powers of blessing and curse god-like powers in effect these are two human beings who were elevated to the pantheon of small g gods you know not not god but they were given god-like powers what happens when you get a god-like power what happens to you well what can happen to you is you become a villain you become intoxicated with your power and your ability and your arrogance or the other way around you remain humble because you know that everything comes from hashem and was given to you for a specific purpose it's not that god gave the jewish people a good guy and god gave the um to olam a bad guy god took two extraordinary people and god gave them both the same powers one chose to use those powers to destroy and rebel against the almighty and one chose those powers to be in evidence hashem gave the same people to the [ __ ] and to the jews and it was their bakira that defined what they would become an amazing thing so billam had all of the equipment so to speak of myself an amazing thing that's why by the way when hashem turned his curses into blessings they are recorded in the torah because they are really as divine as moshe they are divine they are divinity they are not just bilaam's words bilaam's navuos are as great as moshe's navulos coming directly from god now that's an extraordinary thing because once again it goes back to the notion of greek tragedy maybe it's inappropriate for me to keep on explaining the torah by reference to a greek category but i find it a very compelling category greek tragedy is the idea that true tragedy is when a person is destroyed not by something that is outside of them rather building collapses on somebody that's sad but that's not tragic tragic is when there is a greatness within you but there's also a flaw within you and it is the flaw within that destroys you that was the story of korach we talked about and that's also the story of billam bilaam was moshe rebeino but the arrogance and the gaiva and the corrupting of power think about this i mean this is actually a theme in science fiction stories and comic books even about a regular person who all of a sudden is given this tremendous power a tremendous power uh i could you know i can look at a person and say die and the person drops dead i can say get a million dollars he gets a million dollars whoever you curse is cursed whoever you bless is blessed that could go to a person's head and in the case of billam indeed it did it destroyed him and that's why what does percolable say perky elvis describes billam and those who follow billam's ways as having three characteristics it says jealousy and evil eyes jealousy you desire more and more and of course prairie yogurt says jealousy lust and an inordinate desire for honor my cnn they take a person out of the world they destroy a person and that's what bilaam was bilaam was greatness that was destroyed by the kinah and the taiva and the kavith that is within and as i said with practice correctly in a way there's a lot of overlap here we see this to this very day we see it often in the political world and sometimes we even see it in the religious world where people who are really great really talented people who are for who could be forces for good get destroyed from within and that is a tragedy it's a tragedy for them a tragedy for their families and a tragedy for quality israel that is not able to benefit from what these great people could have done this was the story of alicia benavoya the one heretic in ghazal who was a great great man great in torah learning and he was destroyed from some flaw within and as a result he died as a very tragic figure and he was aware of it as well so now let me share with you a very very interesting gemara that may give us some further elaboration on this point the gemara in bracos actually wants to quantify what was bilum's great talent what gave him the ability at least to curse why were his curses always successful except in this case so the warren bronco says because in every 24-hour day there's a fraction of a second where there's great divine anger in the world and if you push the button during that exact second you will unleash divine fury on your target this is called eden the time of fury bilaam knew when that exact moment was the gemara actually says there's a way we can know it as well it says i mean in that fraction of a second the red comb of the rooster turns white with freight that's the second the gemara says robbie mayor had enemies who were persecuting him and he wanted to curse them and he wanted to wait for that moment of anger so he could push the button so he tied a rooster to his bed and he was staring at the rooster to see when the red comb would turn white but he fell asleep and he missed the opportunity truth is you could miss it with blinking your eyes as well and then he understood hashem was telling him that's not the way to go and you'll also recall his own wife told him that as well i'm not sure it was before or after she said you don't pray that evil doers should die you pray they should do chuva you know it's not right to curse anybody okay be it as it may though it says that bilaam knew the exact moment now let's ask a simple a few questions here what is the spiritual purpose of hashem putting into the world a moment of wrath why is there such a thing why is there this moment of potential mass destruction so the swarms say that that introduces into the world the idea of a fear of god now we know that fear of god has many many levels the lowest level of fear of hashem is fear of punishment they better behave because there's accountability a much higher level is reverence and awe and then you come to love of hashem which is even higher but at a base level you have to have some type of fear of punishment if you think the world is hefcker if you think god is going to let you get away with whatever you want to get away with then you know things can break down so you need no god is loving god is merciful god is compassionate but god also holds us accountable in some way so what makes our neshama be margish a matadin the fear of them because our neshama senses that moment of divine anger in the world and that is mashrish a certain a certain fear which is the root of yarata oneesh fear of punishment so the purpose of the ida nrisra the moment of anger is to inculcate and internalize within our spiritual persona the idea of accountability and most of the time god is merciful most of them god is tolerant but we need to know we need to have that awareness now if we're not aware of it consciously unless we know this torah teaching but the neshama feels it then hashama feels that moment and that gives the neshama a kharada a trembling impact that's why it's brought down by the way it's so ingenious that the way hashem neutralized billam by not giving the villain the power of cursing is that god took away the eden risk that that day that the days that bilum was involved there was no eden risk so he's trying to push a button and the button is not connected to anything anymore ah so i think the arizona says the following you'll recall that bilaam tried to curse us three times and every single time hashem changed it to a blessing and finally balak is kind of disgusted and bullock says to bill villain get out of here you haven't done me any favors but bilum comes up with the plan b bilham does come up with the plan b he says i tell you what why don't you send the daughters of moab and they can entice the jewish people into idolatry and fornication and what happened was that actually did work uh jewish people were enticed and 24 000 people died there was a plague and only pinchas who killed the head of the tribe of shimon was able to stop the plague so listen to what the irizal says this is such an ingenious construction what gave billum the insight to come up with the plan b because if bilum realizes he's not able to curse today because there's no iden ritsra in the world if there's no moment of anger in the world then the shamos are no longer attuned to fear of punishment or reprisal as a result they are much more easily enticed into sin than they would otherwise be because they no longer have the ureth owners so bilham says if i can't curse because there's no eid on risk that means the neshamas don't have a pocket of transgressing god's will it's a good time to entice them to sin because their defenses against sinning are much weaker than would they would normally be and that is why bilham came up with plan b so bill was a smart operator you got to be flexible even in the cursing business uh if this approach doesn't work you figure out why it doesn't work and then go with an alternative approach and in fact with sarenu very tragically and unfortunately bilum's plan b was quite successful at least in terms of killing 24 000 uh people in amithral and it would have continued had pinchas not stood up and we'll talk about pincus a little later so that's the purpose of the idiriska but now question number two tosos and messages asks the following tasha if an isan rizzka is less than a second the gemara gives you a calculation what curse could you utter in that time that would be effective by the time you get the sentence out the eden risk has passed so what can you do with that eden risk what could build them do so tosos gives two answers answer number one is kind of a technical answer as long as you begin your curse in the appropriate window you'll be allowed to finish it so i begin my curse in the identity so i kind of keep the window open and i can finish what i want to say by the way it's aliyah sure brings down in a footnote that some khasidim used this as a justification for davening after zaman kriyashma morning has a time davening is a joshua has a time and sometimes khasidam will pass that time and their argument is as long as we began in the right time we could finish afterwards and they make a kalbahomer because they say if even in cursing as long as you begin the curse in the right time you could finish it afterwards we know that hashem is much more generous on the good side than on the bad side so if the bad side allows you to be late as long as you began early so call the homer on the good side you can begin early even if you're going to end right okay obviously we don't pass in that way and besides unfortunately in many hasidic shows it's not simply that they end after this month they begin after this so that's not going to be your turrets in either case that's a whole big interesting question of why that was so uh what is the justification of missing usman krishna missings montfila okay i remember it's not just i mean i say but i don't want to use this i remember uh hearing eric just hear you shalom there was a time that i had to leave shabastavaning before kriya satora so i didn't hear a torah reading so in the afternoon i wanted to hear a torah leaning i know in sikh and moshe in gaola they have mignon all the time so i figured it was around two o'clock i figured i would go two o'clock and i would probably get a kriya satova i came two o'clock expecting to hear a late creosote there was a minion that was beginning at two o'clock how how that possibly could work you know it's totally beyond me but okay but that's huh it's non-creation somewhere in the world somewhere okay maybe that's it so i had to wait i came at two o'clock i had to stay till like uh 3 30 uh to get uh to get a chris i get a career satoru that's when they wake up that's when they wake up okay they take it very literally whenever you wake up okay that's answer number one of tosus that as long as bildum began his curse in the right time the window is kept open the answer number two is there is a quickie curse that bill unperfected that's only a two-syllable word and that could be under the gun khalem kalam is with a destroy them so bilham figured out the exact millisecond or fraction of a second when it would happen so there's a beautiful vote from the hassam so fair that it's it's a drush but it's it makes a lot of sense with what they were saying kalem destroyed them could actually be read as an abbreviation for three words kalayat kidneys leif heart and final meme is moach mind meaning to say the greatest form of destruction that a human being can have is not just physical destruction but it's when their intellect their mind and their moral sense is subordinate to their passions and emotions now again collages kidneys again how this fits medically is not so clear biologically but in uh literature and this is even true have to among gay men and certainly in ghazal the colios are seen as a source of sexual passion belay two right is always expressed as a seed of emotion again biologically you know we don't deal with it but in all in all literature and certainly in the torah in ghazal the late is the seat of feeling and emotion the malach is the mind the mind is the source of intellect but intellect is also the source of morality moral understandings what is right and what is wrong the intellect can sometimes be enslaved and directed by the emotions meaning i am primarily a person that is driven by tives and desires and yearnings and emotions and i employ my intellect in the service of whatever emotional upheaval i'm undergoing think for example of the entertainment industry that is i guess worldwide it's probably a multi-trillion dollar industry i would guess and think about these people many of them are absolutely brilliant the special effects they create the types of shows the types of games that are created it takes brilliance it takes a mind but the mind is at the surface of generating fantasies and imaginations and typhus that will entice people into all sorts of parts of life that are not really elevating that are really degrading that's called kalim you're motivated by the coyotes by the passions and by the emotions and the moa is simply subordinate to those passions and emotions in many many ways that's the story of bilham himself bilham had a great mind but bilham was like a runaway train wreck billum was so consumed by his typhus by his jealousies by his lusts by his guyva and covet that all of his talents were directed toward servicing those titus but dylan had another deficit which is even in that extra pain villain was smart enough that he was aware of it you know they all saying ignorance is bliss although not really ignorance is less if i'm not aware of how bad things are so at least i'm living under the illusion that things are okay but bilum was no dummy bilham understood as elisha benavoya understood the tragedy of his life bilaam understood that side by side with his spiritual greatness there were urges within him that he didn't know how to control anymore that he wasn't able to limit and bilam understood that all of the great talents that god had given him were hijacked by those typhus for that desire for kavod and ego and wealth and billam felt at least he was not able to disengage from that but he also felt what a tragedy it is so in effect the curse of kalim which is the biggest curse pilum can come up with is may you be like me may you be like me may all of the talents that god give you be hijacked and subordinated and controlled by the baser aspects of your personality so all of your gifts become filthy and all your gifts become dirty and all of your gifts become worthless because all of the potential that you had has essentially been drafted into the service of evil that's kalem so backwards yeah that's right that's exactly the point yeah so now here's the point exactly right the opposite of kalim is melech what is melech the mind love the emotions klayot the kidneys which are passion what is the meaning of a melech the greatest melis is the one who rules over himself this is what pierce says it doesn't use the word mella but it's the same idea isaiah gebor who is the true mighty hero not the one who conquers cities conquerors countries he conquers the evil within himself and indeed the possibility upon which this mishna is based says moshel barucho milo haider he who rules over his spirit is greater than the one who conquers the city and that's a melech so melech is when what is dominant what is the the the the ruler so to speak is your mind that means the moral and spiritual sense of right neuron and that directs your emotions and your passions now again this does not mean hashem wants us to be automatons computers without feeling in which we simply make mental decisions and act upon it rather hashem wants us to feel emotions of joy emotions of sadness where that's appropriate but the emotions come from the sacral from the mind from the sense of what is right and wrong in fact this is actually the whole thesis this is the primary thesis of the balatanya why is now whether they are this way or not is another question but why is hasidis called khabad and why the term was utilized by the alta rebbe by the first above your rebbe because early hasidis primarily operated on the emotional level like having a kaobah minion you want to get you excited get you aroused the bala tanya maybe because he was lithuanian so in a way he was a lit [ __ ] the balatanya was very suspicious of emotional arousal and the reason that was so is because yeah emotions can sometimes inspire you to be in a good place but they're very unpredictable and they're uncontrollable number one emotional states paths can pass very quickly and number two you could be you can be aroused for good and then you could be aroused for bad things you're allowing your emotions to take you over so fortuitously it may take you to a good place but it could also take you to a bad place so the bellatonia had a cheetah that true available should not come from the emotion but it should come from contemplation meditation thought that's what is an abbreviation wisdom understanding internalization of understanding but but the by latonya was not advocating like you know who's that guy in star trek uh dr spock you know you're just like a computer developer was advocating emotion but he said the deepest lasting emotion comes from your mind opening up your heart to truly i see the beauty of torah the greatness of god now in some ways that's a madrega that many of us almost never access like you know we we use our minds and then we have emotion we go to a callback when we get emotional it's comparatively rare i think that we actually reach a level where through the mind itself the emotions become unlocked but that is the balatanya says an authentic emotion that reflects the essence of who you are that's not an external emotion that comes from within and therefore that's called melech the moah rules over the lave and the clayos in two different senses one is restraining them that's a negative sense the moa can restrain my leg and clause that's a necessary function as well right i want to kill somebody my moloch tells me don't do it that's a negative sense but in a much deeper positive way the malach itself can open up emotions of love of god and reverence for hashem that can literally be ecstatic and overpowering and authentic because they don't come from an external point that's really why this was called because it was designed to basically say that the moloch is that which opens up the lathe and declines now you do see this an amazing thing you do see this among great great cadolum that literally the mind controls the emotions in ways that we don't even understand they say that sometimes the habit time would get angry if people would be running around if kids would be running around making noise disturbing learning would give rebuke and it seemed like he was very upset very angry and as soon as he finished the rebuke he went back to learning with the chavru as if nothing happened now we know that's a very unusual situation because normally when we get angry we're upset and when we're upset you know it takes a while to calm down a little bit you can't just go back to what you were but did go back to what he was because the idea was he was not angry in the sense of losing control he made a decision that the halacha says this is a time for tokuga this is a time for rebuke so he had a kind of he had to kind of put on the anger coat okay i have to be angry for the next two minutes he puts on his anger goat and he's angry for two minutes once the two minutes are up he puts it away okay i'm not angry anymore because now my ability is not to be angry literally it was totally based on what his away there was at any given moment poor him we're not getting into the halachas right so the gemara records there's a mitzvah they get drunk and poor whether that means actually get drunk okay that's but many many people have a minute of getting drunk and poor ravi saul cilantro used to drink a tremendous amount and he was very intoxicated now i can tell you obviously when he was intoxicated he was not vomiting on the floor he was saying director whatever he was speaking at a very high level but he was sicker at some point he would ask someone what time is it emporium and if purim was over at 805 he immediately became sober they told him 805 you know he went back to normal when he's supposed to be drunk he's drunk when he's supposed to be sober he's sober because every aspect of his life was controlled by what hashem wants him to do and wants him to be at that moment in time that's another you know just like they have these some of these tibetan monks they can actually control their heartbeat they can actually control these involuntary processes of the body that somehow the the brain the mind can actually control this is something that most of us cannot do at all but that's true but but it's true even for the physical part of the body such a capacity does exist and it's certainly true for emotions and passions they can be controlled we often look at emotions as kind of a wild animal that's simply within us that's just there that we have no control over or the most we can do is bottle it in we can't really change it but in fact malachi's teaching that we can change our emotions as well by the proper perceptions and the proper understandings and this is what mella is i think about also ramosa feinstein with moshe feinstein and well let me digress for a moment because i i am so fond of this story that whenever i have the smallest excuse i tell the story marcia feinstein was considered to be the goddess in the latter part of the 20th century he was nifter i think in 1986 or 87 and i grew up in hartford connecticut and for a while during my childhood where moshe feinstein used to visit hertfords because he had a relative there and our joke was he wanted to go to the one place in the world where nobody would ask him any shyless and you know there weren't that many learned people in hartford connecticut but i was zoga i was in fourth grade i was zoha to be in the car i used to dive in in a show and then walk to school a block a block away and i was talking to be in the car that would pick him up for chakras every morning and i remember a lot of things i remember a lot of things because i had never seen a rabbi like that and i remember his face had a shine like a divine shine and i remember that uh i had never seen this as he was wrapping up his filling he was learning missionaries i had never like seen such an idea that you know even when you're doing that you're learning or whatever whatever it would be and very short man but very very sweet so anyway one time we went to show and after show it was raining and i was still daubening until i was finishing up that i was a fourth grade kid but i had the key to the show you know whatever i was trusted and it was raining and i was going to walk a block to school it wasn't a big deal but 15 minutes after davening there's a knock at the door i opened the door and the guy who drove me to show with everybody else said rabbi feinstein remembered you were in the car and he asked me to come back and get you because he didn't want you to walk to school in the rain now this was absolutely remarkable all the people who knew me you know didn't bother to you know give me a ride back because they didn't care and i didn't care frankly i didn't mind walking in the rain and even today i don't mind walking in the rain it doesn't bother me sometimes i don't have a coat and people offer me a ride now it literally does not bother me to walk in the rain call me crazy whatever you want to call me uh but who was the one person who even remembered there was a nine-year-old kid who might have to walk in the rain it was the god of hadoor who had all of the problems of cloud israel on his shoulders they used to make a joke every person who got smita every person who got rabbinical ordination in the united states had ramosa feinstein's phone number in the back of his paper so he would know who to call if he was stuck right your motion was available for everything and yet that's what they said there is nothing that is too small for a great person the only people that are not great that say some people are not important a truly great person everybody's important and you know you have to know what an impression that makes on something what impression that makes on a child that this greatest rabbi in the world cared enough right so i always whenever i have any excuse to tell this story i tell the story but okay but the reason i'm bringing it up is really for another point about a melech if you ever see pictures of a moshe ramosa spence every minute that he had writing things he was always writing writing kedushim writing chuvas in fact he very rarely in fact people say he very rarely even looked at a saver because he just wrote everything remembering everything by heart he had no occasion to look look up anything but he was just writing and he would write in a bass madrid and people would go over to him and they would have shylus and the shiiteless could be luck shyless they could be personal problems they could be issues of illness death bereavement and no matter what he was doing he would stop and he would talk and he would give the person as much time as they needed and there was never a sense that you were inconveniencing him or you were taking up his time and in the lower east side by the way there were also people who were homeless and mentally ill and they would also come and bother him uh and he would you know always talk to them and if you ever look at any of moshe's hiddusha marchubas you will actually see they are very complicated they're very intricate they're very very difficult to follow and he would be in the middle of writing one of these very complicated things i know myself if i'm writing something very complicated i don't want to be interrupted he was interrupted constantly and then as soon as the interruption was over he was able to resume from the middle of a sentence now most of us can't do that either if there's a whole elaborate complicated sequencing of reasoning and we're out of it for an hour or two hours or three hours it's going to take a little bit of time to get back to where you were but he was able to engage disengage leave it stop it go back to it because you have to understand that when you're a miller you're not operating on the basis of emotion you're operating on the basis of what does god want me to do at this moment in time and if god wants me to learn torah that's what i'm doing and if god wants me to comfort a widow take care of a child answer ashila that's what i do but that's not an interruption of my life because my life is not writing torah and my life is not answering childless my life is doing the will of hashem at any given moment so everything is one continuity it's not a break it's not an interruption things are an interruption only when you're you know you're following your emotion right my emotion right now is i'm in this intricate sugiya where my emotion right now is i'm talking to you about your problem which is so emotionally draining how will i get back to my issue right so when your emotion you it's very hard to engage and disengage in that way but when you understand that everything is a continuity in terms of this is what god wants at this given moment in time so you're not really going from one thing to another it's all one thing and that's also the idea of melech i remember seeing it with the emotion again i i should mention that sometimes people would discuss extremely painful issues and of moshe would cry with them and after he would cry he could still resume this in the middle of the sentence amazing many of us would be so devastated we wouldn't be able to get back to what we were doing but that's the notion of a melech that the melech the moah rules over all of those emotions so emotions are very very powerful and again i i want to repeat the goal of being a jew is not to suppress emotion it is not to destroy emotion but it's to access the emotions that come from the contemplation and realization of the greatness of hashem and the greatness of the human soul and the beauty of the torah and then those emotions open us up to be connected to the will of god and then we can look at every part of our lives as a continuity of that evolution now this is also irrelevant as i as i get older i've looked upon this this is also a relevance meditation about aging because you know one of the phenomena of aging by definition is the things you did at you're not going to be able to do at 30 or 40 or 50 you know whatever it is obviously we get older there are things you no longer can do and that can sometimes be a great source of sadness even if a person is relatively well there's a certain sadness i can't do the stuff i used to do but if you understand that life is about serving god and every age has its challenges and its missions then yeah my job when i'm 60 is not to serve god the way i did at 20. my job at 60 is to serve god the way i should at 60 or 70 or 80 or 90. and at that point you can find a fulfillment and you can find the joy in every stage that life gives you because you're no longer linked to the specifics of accomplishments you're linked to an overall goal in which the moach is that which directs your emotions and your feelings so again i wish everyone well much luck and i i need to of course emphasize that i am not giving musser from a high point looking down these are issues that i very much grapple with too and when i speak i'm also speaking to me and i hope that i will be attentive to the things that i say as well but may all of us be soccer that instead of being destroyed by making our moa subordinate to the lave and the klayot may we be zoha to this ending of being a melech where the mullah the mind will control the wave and the quiescent habit over good week and beware [Music] here [Music]