Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Increase the Light by Separating Religion from the State

[Music] in addition i refuse leima to avia adina vasmiriam ulu malaya basarabela and sarah freida vasra's or may they have refused layman but holy israel and uh indeed unfortunately it looks like uh covert kind of hasn't totally gone away and obviously our prayers are for everyone that is ill with that and finally we have a special sponsorship in honor of the upsharing of moshe kalimi may he grew up to be a talmud franchise uh by yosef kalimi he was actually a very good friend of mine from the from new york and uh we very much appreciate the sponsorship uh and indeed may moshe grow up to be a sadiq and i may really have kind of two unrelated thoughts but maybe they'll be maybe they'll be connected in the course of talking the first is a general concept of parashat shoftim that we have to pay attention to and that is the ramban points out in his dhamma to the book of javari that in a sense most of the mitzvos of davar and not all of them were mitzvos that moshe was already received previously but he is reiterating them because there's a special need for these misvotes before we are mentoring eric israel he is speaking to the new generation that is going to be entering the land of israel they will be entering the land of israel without him so there are certain things that have to be emphasized and among them is kind of the creation of authority structures if you think about it moshe avenue was kind of a one-man show moshe maynard combines many different leadership functions he was the religious leader he was the law giver he was the political leader but with moshe bane who's death these roles are going to be separated out and in point of fact we're going to see that there cannot even be an overlap between them so thus a lot of parsha shoftim is concerned with creating the authority structures that will have to be in place once moshe robano leaves the scene so it begins with the idea of judges and the sanhedrin which is the leadership it then moves to melek which is the political leadership and then it discusses navi which is also a spiritual leadership but it's of a non-halal variety in other words the navi is there to give us direct messages from god to give us inspiration to give us musar but you know the navi does not have an input in the halfway process the half process has to be based on precedent and logic it cannot be based on direct divine revelation if another comes and simply says hashem told me what the hell is that is the principle of allah me so ascension the torah is not in heaven so essentially what you're doing is you're spinning off the different roles all of which were occupied by moshe avenue and they're now going to be in separate categories there is the halachic leadership of judges and sanhedrin there is the spiritual we'll call it charismatic leadership of the navi who is giving me messages of hashem and then there is the political leadership of the melech now it's very very fascinating you know there's a famous ramban in hamish with whether ramban discusses the khashoggi right the maccabees the asmonians who established a jewish state and a jewish monarchy after defeating antiochus in the story of chanukah and the ramban points out they were chaside el yon they were righteous and saintly people and yet we know that eventually thesmonians degenerated and became hellenists themselves and in point of fact by the time of herod they were totally wiped out in fact the gemara basically says anyone who claims dissent from base hashmonae can only be a slave there was literally nobody around so the ramban raises the question why should it be that the great righteousness of the khashoggi should end in such an anonymous way and he says that it was sinful although the khashwan were righteous and they were sadiq there was a great sin that they committed in assuming the monarchy after the military victory they should have looked for someone else to assume the monarchy why was it a sin for the khashoggi to become malachi so the ramban gives two reasons the first reason which is the much better known reason is that yaakov avinu said that monarchy of the jewish people belongs to the tribe of yehuda and that's why we have the davidic line and therefore it is wrong for any tribe other than yehudah to assume monarchy over the jewish people that's the very well-known reason that this was a violation of yaakov avinu's directive lo yasur shaibut miude but then the ramban brings from the ushani a second reason which i've always found very intriguing very very interesting and very relevant even today the ramban says even if we assume that there's no prohibition for any other tribe to be a melee there's a special prohibition that a kohen is not supposed to be a miller so the aveira of malchus was not that they didn't give the maukos to a descendant of david hamillah but there's a special sin in a cohen being a milk in other words there has to be a separation of church and state now the concept of separation of church and state that is very familiar to us at least if you're an american to from the united states constitution actually the word by the way just as i don't want to give you a sharing american constitutional law the words separation of church and state do not appear in the constitution or the bill of rights they are an interpretation of the first amendment the first amendment to the u.s constitution says congress shall pass no law uh impacting on the free exercise of religion or the establishment of a religion the supreme court has paraphrased that as separation of church and state and there's no question whether that is an accurate paraphrase but i'm going to use the phrase that's commonly used separation of church and state now if you ask the average american why is it important to separate church and state they will say we need to protect the states from the influences of religion now obviously if judaism has a similar idea that's not because we have to protect the state from torah but it's the other way around we have to protect torah from the state the point of the talmud yerushalmi is that when spiritual leadership is involved in the political process the spiritual leadership itself gets corrupted in other words there is a concept and then this is what i submit to yushami means we don't want our kohanim to be a melissa because a cocaine is a spiritual voice a calling is a voice of purity a voice of truth but when you're involved in the in the internal operations of political power and political leadership your decisions aren't always going to be based on pure spiritual concerns but they will based on power and money and control and therefore the concept is the cohen and today we might apply it to the rabbi although i admit i'm making a little bit of a jump it should be outside of the system what is the expression to speak truth to power kind of outside of the system and as a result the calling is not supposed to be the mello so it's very interesting that although moshe rabeno combines political leadership and spiritual leadership in a sense the doghouse the torah wants the spiritual leadership to be me and indeed one could make an argument again i mean i don't want to get into it too much that religion the cause of religion and the cause of torah might be better served if religious parties actually did not exist or were not part of the political system this could be even defended on a purely pragmatic basis because given the fact that barack hashem there are so many religious jews in israel if religious jews wouldn't form political blocs there would be a constituency that virtually every party would try to get again i'm not sure about merits or whatever or shino but whatever it is most parties would have to try to incorporate the needs of religion as opposed to creating a polarization where religion stands for this and we stand for that so i think it's very interesting again i admit that what i'm saying is a little bit of a kiddish in the usami but i would suggest that the idea of a kawaii not being a melech is a function of protecting the integrity of torah from the initial notes from the challenges of political power jockeying money whatever it might might be now the one person who did recognize this was none other than pope john paul ii in which he had issued an order i think was around uh maybe 25 years ago already maybe 20 years ago in which he said that no ordained catholic priest was permitted to have political elected political office uh this was a gizary that a priest cannot be in a political position and in the united states there was uh robert grinning who had been a congressman for i think close to three decades and he happened to have been a jesuit priest and uh in obedience to that papal order he resigned his position really in the middle of his term because he was told he was not allowed to uh be in political office anymore did pope john paul learn the commentary of ramban or the talmud xiaomi i'm not sure although somebody told me i knew a fellow the quarterly record not alive anymore but he actually was part of a delegation that had a visit with the pope with pope john paul and he says when they walked into john paul's office number one he covered up his crucifix which was a very nice thing to do he didn't have to do it in his office or whatever it would be although i'm sure there are many other crucifixions around there but at least the one he was wearing he covered up and number two this may be a show on the shelf where some volumes of arts grow art scroll shots so yeah who knows you never know right i remember um i was once at a uh at an event a legal legal jewish scholarship event and the main speaker was justice antonin scalia who happens to be a you know very he happened to be a very devout catholic and he said he loves coming to orthodox jewish events because they're also very faithful to precedent and tradition and he said he just wanted to apologize that his schedule was very very busy lately so he hasn't been able to keep up with daphyomi but he still hopes that he could stay for shabbos and stay for the uh for the event and i'll tell you i heard two presentations that night one was a presentation from scalia and the other was the presentation from a very very very prominent orthodox rabbi and if i had closed my eyes and i didn't know and i had to guess which one was the orthodox rabbi and which was the non-jew i would have picked scalia as the orthodox rabbi he was talking about tradition textual analysis and not bringing in your own prejudices like all of the things that are really the integrity of the holocaust is exactly his legal philosophy so whether you like the result or not he basically said you have to have a fidelity to textual interpretation right that's often derided as originalism or what's the other word textualism uh that's like that's always defined as bad but in point of fact that's exactly essentially how we look at halal texts and the same way now of course one could argue that divine texts are different than human texts i mean one doesn't necessarily have to be maybe so committed to textuality when it comes to a human text but nevertheless the processes as he described them are very very similar so that's one point i want you to make the notion of getting religion out of politics is not so much to protect the political system but it's to ensure that religious values are not corrupted by partisan considerations now [Music] again i mean i i can't say that political parties are totally bad obviously uh religious jews are a group just like every other group and we are entitled to push for things that are important to us like any other group of people but i think we've all seen if you've looked at the the history of religious parties the corruption the fact that there were religious people with rabbinic ordination who went to jail because of bribery and corruption i think it shows you in a very very vivid way the dangers of religious figures being involved in the political system not so much in terms of undermining the system but in terms of undermining their own credibility as spokesman for morality the truth for values and the life that's a little bit of a commercial regarding at least the dangers of religious parties another point that i wanted to bring out in terms of the authority structures is number one you see that spiritual leadership itself is split not only is there a split between political leadership of melak and spiritual leadership of chauvet and sanhedrin and post we would say but even within spiritual leadership as i said before we divide the sufferings from the nubbing the navi and the chauffeurs are two different types of spiritual leader and the navi well of course we don't have divorce today but the number he gets direct messages from god so you would assume he would be the best guy to tell us what god wants and yet the navi is actually very circumscribed and limited in his ability to participate in the halachic process as i said before that is the talmudic interpretation of lo basha miami the torah is not in heaven and that is a very interesting phenomenon the idea that even someone that's an ugly and he tells you this is what god told me we don't listen to him that's not part of our lucky process is a very very interesting idea and it really is connected to the notion that hashem wanted the hawaii process to be based on human autonomy human reasoning through precedent through analogy and not through the charisma of someone who comes with a divine calling now you may ask well why why would that be so well the answer would be that that kind of ensures an integrity of the process because once you allow charismatic leadership to dictate halakhah well in the case of a truly righteous person maybe that's going to work but at that point you're introducing all sorts of potentials for charlatanism i mean you see this a lot of times in in in certain branches of christianity the charismatic preachers who say god told me last night that you have to give me your life savings and you know the 85 year old the widow in in san antonio no rights or life no of course it's always interesting why did god tell me and not tell her you know god should have told her to give me her life savings i mean that's a good touch i think but nevertheless you understand that when decision making is based on personal charisma there is always the danger of fraud and in the sense hashem created a fairly you know speculating hashem created a fairly transparent process in theory where halachic sakim have to be based on logic and precedent and sources as opposed to the simple idea this is what god told me this is the will of god don't ask questions now i don't want to get uh maybe i'm going to walk on thin ice now so i'm going to try to just walk very lightly and then run back but in many many ways some have argued that that is actually a serious problem in the process today not because anybody claims prophecy other than some mystics or whatever but but because you'll often find that halacha today is often decided by very brief pronouncements that are not really developed now the god of love doors says oscar how dare you question it or whatever it is and it's almost like a profit charismatic model as opposed to the reasoned model of a lengthy shayla chuva that is connected to sources and the like now there may be reasons for that part of it is that our godolam are much more burdened than they were in the past meaning to say now people have somehow gotten into their heads that every single shyla if i'm if i'm wondering if i should have cheerios or corn flakes for breakfast i have to ask rahim kaneski well if ravenski is getting questions about uh corn flakes or cheerios he doesn't have time to write a long schuma why you could choose whatever you want although that'll be the psych actually uh so part of it is well i don't want to say an irreverent expression uh killing the goose that lays the golden egg but part of it is we are putting so many questions to the godola adore that there literally is no time to have reasoned responses for all of them part of it is that part of it is a certain insecurity in quality israel where we just want the definitive answer thank you very much for feinstein complained about this uh rebecca feinstein who died in 1986 was considered to be by most jews certainly in america the post sake of the generation the guttle of the generation and by the way ramosha was such a magnificent person in terms of his righteousness his kindness his consideration i probably have told you my story that much of einstein ten times i don't want to repeat it but i have a story from when i was a child with promotion feinstein worrying about me walking in the rain he didn't even know who i was but he was visiting connect in connecticut so ramosa feinstein wrote very very intricate true votes on virtually every problem that existed in this time but his reasoning is so deep and so complicated and so complex that most people don't even ever never read the reasoning they just want to look at the last line like interesting question are you allowed to spay a dog right so that's the sheila right so they look the last line will tell you us or much so they skip everything in between because they just want to know a bottom line that's a superficial culture that we live in and ramosha was very very upset by that he said listen i wrote the chuba because i want to explain the reasoning i want you to understand the process i want you to see how i got from a to z and not just look at the bottom line but for many of us all we want is the bottom line and as a result in some ways and one can write one can talk a lot about this the hallucic process has kind of become sabotaged by almost a charismatic process it's like the prophet telling you this is what god says don't don't question it part of it is coming from the bottom up and part of it is sometimes from the top top down as well in which a certain amount of tableau date is demanded so the point i want to make is that the fact that the torus separates the prophetic function from the halachic function actually indicates that the halachic function needs to be a structured logical process and not based on god told me this is the answer don't question that that's the dean of lobos that's the din of ain han na vi or the like now what what that means operationally is a little complicated i mean let's say a navi comes and says i got a message from god that this is the so we don't listen to him because that is not a legitimate use of nivua now it's a little ambiguous what does it mean we don't listen to him does it mean that we deny there was such an arrow because god is not going to do that or do we mean that even if god did it god can't do it it's a limitation in other words is it a limitation on what god can do or is it a proof that that's not what god did i just want to point out that although the second thing seems more logical i think you see from the gemaran brother mathia that even if we know that god made that communication we don't listen to it in other words even if god said it the question then becomes so why did god say it a good question i mean if if this is god's rule i mean it's as if god says even if i tell you this is not don't listen to me god tells us this is we say to god we don't listen to you because you told me not to listen to you so god says well i'm changing my mind he says sorry god you can't change your mind so i mean i mean not that we can psychoanalyze god but but it's it's an interesting psychoanalytical problem so to speak that if god created a rule that we don't listen to him through prophecy to change the lucky process then why would god ever communicate by prophecy to change the presence unless he wants to just establish it as a precedent so something to think about a little bit in terms of the conundrum here now a final point about authority i want to share with you is that this is actually this parsha is actually a very very important source for the obligation to listen to rabbinic authority any student of halaqa knows that certain mitzvoth are dorisa their torah commandments and certain mitzvoth we say are merely people usually say with kind of a sneer merely midrabana and of course if you think about it so many of our rituals are technically rabbinic in fact there's more abundance that we do than dough rice's lighting shabbos candles lighting conic handles reading magilla not handling muksa not eating chicken and milk when in fact the torah only prohibits meat and milk certainly waiting six hours or even waiting one hour whatever your minute is mid rabanna and everyone knows some mitzvos are do right some it's a superb telling a guy not to do something on shabbos for you the server doesn't prohibit that the torah says i can't do work on travis i can tell that god did work in shabbos but so the conundrum is this anything that god said i have to do in the torah i must do because god said what obligates me to listen to their abundance why do i have to listen to the real mother they're people what makes me obligated to obey them the rambam's answer based on the gemara massachusetts is the kiev to obey the gaze wrote because they wrote this when they make a fence around the torah don't do x unless you come to y or not like reading magilla or lighting chanukah candles is based on the torah itself the torah says lo tasur do not turn away me call ashiya from anything that they tell you the day is the sanhedrin in to the right oh small to the left you know it's tempting to apply right and left to the contemporary way these terms are used that if you're overly strict you're going to the right if you're overly lenient you're going to the left don't go to the right don't go to the well that's probably not the original intention of those of those terms so here's what the rambam says when the torus says do not depart from what the ham say that is a kiev the torah is telling you obey the mitzvos the takanos and the gezeros of the kahane so anybody who transgresses a rabbinic law violates the torah prohibition of lo tassor mikhola shiyagidu when you're over on it you are over on a writer in fact you're over there you transgress not only a negative commandment of lo tassur but also a positive commandment the assist you shall do as they instruct you and the rambam's proof which is really based on gemaran chavez is from the noosa the text of the bracha we recite when we do a mitzvah dragon i like chanukah candles so what bracha do i say what is the first bracha bar hashem he has sanctified us by his commandments with sivanu he has commanded us lake near show hanukkah to light the hanukkah candle now where did hashem command us to light hanukkah hanukkah candles were hundreds and hundreds of years after matantora more than a thousand years it was during the second temple period where in the turret is to talk about hanukkah the answer is it doesn't but since hashem said obey the takanos and gezeras of khazal and khazal made the takanura gazera of the aratakana of near hanukkah so hashem commanded you to obey that gazebo i should say and therefore you make ibrahim so every day riser becomes a durability now it's important to to make this following point when the rambam articulates that lysasor is the mitzvah to listen to the the mitzvah to listen to the rabbana which is he talking about which ramban is he talking about if i don't listen to my rabbi do i transgress the negative commandment of life sir so let me just point out that this is a very specific context this is not referring to any rabbi and maybe not this is referring to the so so to speak the statutory authority of the sanhedrin of 71. all gizay wrote and that we have even though we don't really have a detailed historical love we assume come from the sanhedrin and therefore lysosor is not the source of listening to your local rabbi or your rebbie or even a girl that one might ask the question uh so what's the basis now why do i have to why do i have well do i have to should i why should i so i would suggest the following and again i'm i'm just as as i got out of the thin ice i'm walking back on it again but i'm going to walk back on the thin ice and i hope i will not be misunderstood i i would suggest again i don't think it's my finish necessarily that the uh the reason why i listen to a gutto is not the reason why i listened to a sanhedrin the sanhedrin was given the role of the torah to definitively decide what the halaqah is this is true whether they're interpreting the torah which is not really what we were talking about or they make takanas or gazebos their word is the law their word is the rashem even when they get it wrong god modifies his will to correspond to their decision so their decision is halal by contrast when you don't have a sanhedrin there is no definitive body that can say what the halakhah is in the sense of a definitive body so essentially what we're working in is what you might call probabilistic assessment of truth let's take the following example let's assume that i studied physics i took uh physics in 12th grade high school and i've come to the conclusion as a 12th grader whatever that albert einstein fundamentally misunderstood relativity and he just got it wrong now if we ask the question in terms of authority do i have the right to argue with einstein the answer is yes i do is there a possibility that i'm right and he's wrong yes it is einstein can make right understand makes a mistake indeed many physicists are critical of many parts of isis but in terms of probability what is the likelihood that the 12th grader is right and einstein is wrong it's not very high so it doesn't make sense to make decisions based on your judgment that einstein is wrong simply because of the overwhelming probability that einstein knows more about relativity than you do i would suggest that our gi shot to godzilla and even we've shown him even rishonim and perhaps even to our murayama after this and edward i mean even then is essentially a probabilistic assessment of comparative knowledge do i have the right to say refrain kaneski is wrong rebel yoship is wrong rolaji is wrong i do have the right to say that but it simply makes no sense for me to live my life based on that assumption because they know so much more they're so much more righteous so if the question is which one of us is more likely to be attuned to the will of god i would go with the god but you see the difference with the sanhedrin you're not making a probabilistic assessment in fact even if no you might be a greater not every person got on this imagine you might be a greater thomas haquim than the sanhedrin so objectively you might be more right but god said that's not how the system works the sentence says what is that allah masha and after the sanhedrin everything is based on probabilistic assessment this is a little subtle and a little tricky so technically the reason let's say i listen to the shogunate is not because it is the will of god but because it's more likely to be the will of god then the alternative i come up with for myself as opposed to a decision of the sanhedrin that is defined as the will of god okay so it's important to understand therefore that the technical parameters of life saucer does not apply to rabbis or godolim and the like it only applies to the decisions of the sanhedrin but according to the rambam if i'm over on these takanos and gazebos that is an israeli horizon you're actually i'm over on salsa and the mitzvah say now one could ask a question we have for example rabbenu gershom who lived even after the gemara now how long did we have the sanhedrin we had a sanhedrin keep in mind even after the khoravan in the year 70. and even after the barkhaus revolt in the year 135 we actually had a sanhedrin until the middle of the 5th century till the middle of the 400s when the romans discontinued it so there was a sanhedrin for more than 300 years after the korban desamikes but once the sanhedrin lapsed no body has the authority to make takanos or gazeros an amisura so how do you understand someone like rabbanu girsham who lived in the uh 11th century 10th and 11th century and he promulgated takanos and gazeros banning polygamy and banning divorcing a woman against her will et cetera what authority does rabbano gershom have given the fact that he was not a sanhedrin even if you say it was not just them it was a baked in yeah an economy but they're not a sanhedrin and the short answer is number one rabbenu gershom's takanos did not apply to all of all israel svardim did not accept it okay so it was not binding all of israel and number two uh the authority of rabino gershom was bottom up rather than top down meaning the jewish communities of germany poland and russia and france accepted him as their authority so they agreed to abide by his direction meaning it wasn't an authority that was imposed on them it was an authority that was accepted and that's a very different thing even today we could voluntarily accept authority and then we bind ourselves uh to his words so that was just something to think about in terms of rabbana i just want to add one more point to this because then i want to go into something totally different which is also very important i want to be sure to get to it that is asks a tremendously interesting question on maimonides on rambam and that is we have a cloud in halacha that any doubt that pertains to a doraisa law you have to err on the side of strictness this is called suffix and any doubt that pertains to a rabbinic law we air on the side of leniency this is called sapec the classic example is if i don't remember if i dive into arvid i don't remember if i dub in mind this is an example for men so what do i do so with respect to the shema since the recitation of shema from men is a key of the arisa if there's any doubt whether you said shema you got to say it again but the amita the recitation of the amida is only a drug on them so if i'm in doubt if i said the amiga i don't say it again if i'm eating a meal and i don't remember if i said a bracha rishona i don't recite a brother suffer because brocco rishone is rabbinic but if i ate and i'm full it was a bread meal and i don't remember if i bashed and i'm within 72 minutes of eating i bench suffice right there this is a well-known halal principle but says the rambanu kasha but if if you're going to go like the rambam says that every time i don't fulfill a rabbinic edict i am transgressing the negative commandment in the torah of lo tasor so if i don't know if i dive into the myriad amida i might be transgressing low to sur if i don't do it so every suffice to rabbana should become a suffix theoretical and if it becomes a subtle device you have to go to homer because my suffix and whether i kept it a rabbinic law is a suffix whether i'm transgressing lo tasor which is a torah violation so the ramban asks takasha according to the rambam how can we justify the principle of sape to rabban and lakula every suffix rabbanaan is a suffix the arisa of loytasu right this is rambans tasha and the rambam's formulation so the quest of mission who is the case of missionary cairo the author of the shokunaris the last work that he wrote is a commentary on the rambam that is called the keseth mishna and the quesadilla gives such a beautiful answer that once you hear the case of misha's answer you're going to wonder how could the ramban ask his question and the quesadilla says wait a second here what do you mean that if you don't know if you dabbing you might be transgressing like sausage what is my saucer my sausage says don't deviate from the directives that ghazal gave you the sanhedrin now who gave you the rule that they suffered through abundant you go the cooler gazelle gave you that rule so what do you mean how could i be making and not davin maybe i'm transgressing low sauce or because i didn't have it not true because if hazal tell you you don't have to dive in in cases of doubts you are in compliance with their standards it's not possible to say see listen if i don't know if food is culture retreat i gotta be strict because if i eat it and it turns out to be trade i didn't say but here if i don't know if i kept a draban in decade and the rabbana and said don't worry about it then when i don't worry about it it's not that i might be transgressing ladduster i'm that i'm not transgressing with us because my behavior is in full compliance with the directives of the sages right it's a beautiful beautiful logical answer and that is why we have a rule of suffix drew up on that laku okay now what i wanted to end with is really a totally different different topic and that is it happens to be that uh this very week tonight well tonight is the third of ellen and this is the york site of rough cook ref cook was nifter on the third of ello so it was uh before hakamata medina although cook is often referred to as the first chief rabbi of eric israel he was not the first chief rabbi of the state of israel that was of herzog he was a rabbi under the british mandatory authority uh but it's very very worthwhile to think about griffcook especially in our in our day and age uh ref cook was of course a lithuanian rav he was a talmud in the world famous yeshiva of a legend he was very very close his main rebbe was robbed of telitsville who was himself a moderate zionist andrew cook felt very very close to the civ and indeed the nasiv is said to have said that the whole yeshiva of the lush which produced many many guidelines would have been worthwhile just to produce the sadek of rough cook rafcook was a coin and he was drawn to the holiness of eric israel from a very very young age and he came to eric israel and initially he was the rav of jaffa there was no television television only dates from the 1920s when rough cook came there was yapha yato now is like a small quaint village which is a suburb of the big metropolis of tel aviv but then there was only yappa yap was a very old ancient city right that yapo was mentioned in tanaka remember that was the major port yona took a ship from yafa to escape from god so yap has been around a real long time tel aviv is only around since the 19 uh the 1920s and uh cook was the rub of yavo and then unfortunately he was actually stranded in hudsolares for more than five years he went to europe to attend the founding convention of a gudat israel and then world war one broke out and rav cook was not a workership was with his wife but he was not able to return to eric israel for five years five years of gunloads part of that time he was in switzerland uh he then took a job in london he was arrived to a yiddish-speaking kahila in london and he had a condition that if at any point the travel restrictions are limited or lifted he could return to israel the next day meaning that was a condition in his contract i think it is recorded that in all of the years he was in england he never wanted to see the countryside he never wanted to see the hills you know england has pretty country scotland in particular but he said the only physical beauty that moves him is the physical beauty of eric israel he didn't want to see the physical beauty of christ he did go to the british museum he did enjoy rembrandt very much he liked rembrandt painted a lot of rabbis and rembrandt's paintings of a certain aura a certain light and ref cooked that was reflected of holiness when ref cook finally came back he was then made rabobushalayam and then eventually the rafa rasheed the first of the chief rabbis of under the british mandate rav cook was an absolute gun he was a master he was the architect coming up with the hector mahira he devised the idea of selling land to non-jews during shemitah to prevent mass starvation and that's a very controversial idea to this very day the rabbinate uses it most kharadim do not accept the idea of hether but one should not look at her cook as simply a reformer who just did think her cook wrote a whole safe air justifying and explaining the hatred and all of the arguments that people raised against the heteroseera ref cook anticipated and addressed now again uh somebody tell them disagree with how he addressed it but one should not think oh if coke didn't think about this problem and that problem and that problem and that problem he thought about every problem and he addresses every problem although again other condolence may differ with this uh so the andrew mccabe was very it was and is very controversial and to this very day that your mother was controversial and there's a major question would ref cook even have authorized it today you have to remember that the conditions in eric israel in the early part of the 20th century is if that if farmers were not allowed to cultivate the land during shemitah there was a real significant risk of mass starvation as it were people were dying of starvation uh in the old yisha even even an inaugurated year and they should meet the year would have been catastrophic now hashem the economic situation of farmers in eric israel is very very different today number one food can be imported and number two we have various funds i mean things are still difficult but the idea of people dropping dead in the street without the hatred mathira is just not true it absolutely is not true nobody is going to die because shimita was kept strictly so many have argued that had draft cookman alive today he would not have martyred the hatchery bashir but nevertheless the remnant continues to follow rav cook's sock but the main controversy that many had with throughout cook was not so much to edubacher that was one particular detail but it was rev cook's overall gisha to the zionist movements and in particular to non-religious jews who not only were not show mermaids thought but many of them were actually very anti-religious and raf based on his mystical understanding and there are so many different components of this it's very difficult to summarize number one he was on a superficial level he was a very optimistic person he always saw the positive he always saw the good and he saw in particular that the shama of the jew was holy and radiant and he said that some people come to eric israel as an expression of their relationship to god others will come to god through their relationship to the land of israel and he said a zionist who says he doesn't even believe in god may be coming here because he says he's interested in jewish nationalism or socialism or communism or whatever it is but that's all in his conscious mind in reality it is the holiness of his soul that is dry and drawing him like a magnet to holiness and it may very well be that there's a clipper there's an externality that does not define any of this as a connection to god but in reality it's coming from a holy place so we saw holiness even in people who were desecrating troubles he was against desecrating it but he saw they're building up the land it's coming from a holy place and eventually he said it will turn into connection to god if not in this generation then in the later generations and therefore he was willing to validate and strengthen and build up even people who were far from hashem because he saw in them holiness and goodness and in a more deep complicated way he actually said you know we haven't we have an expression in english that is called a uh a wolf in sheep's clothing that means something bad that gives the appearance of something good ref cook said he didn't use these words there's an opposite phenomenon of a sheep that is in wolf's clothing what does that mean he said sometimes there are powerful spiritual ideas that have to enter the world but they're so noble they're so holy they're so pure that the powers of impurity fight them and knock them down and don't allow them to enter it's a very cannibalistic idea that there's powers of impurity like wild dogs that try to destroy everything that's so how does the kedusa enter the world an amazing idea the kedusha enters the world in the guise of being something impure a sheep that wears the garment of a wolf and that allows the holiness to go under the radar and not be detected by the negative powers of tuma so if cook said for example give you a few examples of this feminism now feminism in those days was at a very early stage right says feminism in its essence is something that's noble and good the striving for dignity for equality for respect to recognize all human beings have great potential it was a holy idea it was a good idea indeed the villain got himself writes as we approach mashiach women will assume more and more of an equality in the hierarchies of communities it's a kadosh idea but the way it enters the world sometimes is in the guise of impropriety this all goes all the way back by the way the seed of mashiach think about the seed of mashiach generated in the incest of lote and his two daughters and further generated with yehuda thinking he's with a prostitute tamar who's exactly his daughter-in-law and then russ coming to boast in the middle of the night and then david himself was thought to be a monster various midration everything comes in the guise of impropriety because the holiness of mashiach is so great that the kokota of tuma are going to shoot it down unless it looks like it's a bad thing and in that center of cook saw secular even atheistic zionism as something along those lines it was a holy idea but it had to get into the world under the radar of the koko tatuma of the calvin khashevan of the arrogant dogs so to speak whatever that means who kind of want to destroy holiness in fact if cook even saw in rebellion against torah positive messages that we need to absorb ref cook was not an open orthodox person like we don't go over it whatever it is worked very hard for smith shepard in fact there's a beautiful beautiful old trip that he made with ravi yosef hayam zanenfeld the head of vietnamese in which in the early 20th century they visited the non-religious kibutsu to inspire them for kashmiris and shabbos and they went together and that was a beautiful inspiring trip those who were part of that though the non-religious kibbutz mix talked about it for decades and decades how it really made a difference in their connection through cook was not a reformer but he said the following said that in the torah world people learn people dub and people do mitzvahs but at some point it becomes rooted it becomes mechanical it becomes superficial it just becomes a habit people lose passion they lose creativity so the people that rebel sense there's something fake there's something inauthentic about the superficial religious expression so they're going in the wrong direction they're moving away from torrential that's the wrong direction and we've got to find a way to help them find the right direction but the impulse of cook said is not an impulse of evil it is an impulse looking for authenticity looking for truth looking for meaning and they can't always find it in the old ways so they look for new ways and those new ways may be totally wrong but if cook said i'm not going to say you're an evil person you're a seeker you're a searcher you're looking for something deep you're looking for something meaningful and that is a challenger of cook said to the religious world to discover within themselves and within the torah new springs of meaning that can inspire so he saw even in the rebellion of the younger generation against the torah he saw that as potentially promising because it meant that these were seekers who did not want to live a life of superficiality and wrote now you can understand why these ideas were very very very controversial and they remained controversial to this very day joseph heimzenfeld who was our cook's dear friend but staunch ideological opponent said ruff cook you're encouraging you know you're looking at a michael chavez says that in apitours and you're saying good job you know you're deeper you're the from guy who learns all day is superficial but you're a man of death that's called macaze over here you're giving strength and encouragement for people to sin i'm okay you're okay you know your tolerance your acceptance now there's an interesting little trivial detail here review his whole life as the rav of yaffo he never called him the rag of yerushalayim and he certainly never called them the rapper rasheed he called them the afaroth why would he refer to him as yapparov so there's actually something profound there jaffa was a small town so to speak it was not you know it was not of national importance in those days what drove zlatan is saying is rav cook's approach is actually very very appropriate on a one-to-one basis you're a rabbi with a small congregation you work with individuals you build them up you encourage in other words in principle rav zona thought the rav cook's openness tolerance understanding is exactly what you need on a one-to-one basis but once you represent the whole community you shall i am eric israel you have to take certain positions about the integrity of the community so he said rav cook was the perfect rob of yappa but he says he wasn't against there was he was not right for usual value and he was not right to either operation again these are complicated issues and again since things get recorded i i shudder about the emails i'm going to get i hope i don't get too many uh negative emails i'm not here to defend her if coker cook does not need my defense uh i i hope i hope i'm trying to present at least the idea that you understand the controversy because on one hand drove cook's tolerance his love his care is something that was so wonderful and so sweet on the other hand people argued that he was encouraging continuing violations and he was building up people who were antagonistic to torah and that may have hurt the religious community in some way right so that's why there was that idea i will tell you that sometimes in the kharadi world where cook is denigrated and rebel yoshif rav cook actually made the shidduch between ravel yashev and ravari levin's daughter and ref cook was the messiah conducion and when people would say derogatory things about jeff cook in rubble yoshi's presence because that was the politically correct way to talk they didn't realize rebel yoshi's history with rupko rebel yashev said he would kick them out of his house he would say get out of here in fact you know what the the best round bomb with commentaries is the shapzi franco rambla that's a specially edited rambam with many many many commentaries and the story goes that a certain editor was assigned to anthologize rav cook's commentaries on the rambam but he was very hardy and he just didn't do it he just kept rough cooked commentaries out of the rumba so he got fired his employer fired him because hey you didn't do your job so he went to rahul yashif figuring that through yashim as the leader of 80 jews would side with him and yeshua just said i would have fired you too don't come to me for any protection you certainly deserve to be fired so i just want to read you a quote there again reflect has so many uh interesting quotes uh but this is a quote that i think we could incorporate in our lives where he said it in uh actually it's written it was written in hebrew so i'm going to read it in english the pure righteous that saddiken do not complain of the dark but they increase the light they do not complain of evil but they increase justice they do not complain of heresy they increase faith they do not complain of ignorance but they increase wisdom you know so much of our discourse is we're saying this is bad and this is bad and this is bad and this is bad and you're not because then page 554 footnote 25 says something that contradicts what rav shah said in 1951 so we have to burn your book and you're not be chorus and a cofer and so much of our religious discourse is about excluding about belittling about insulting and raf cook basically says a relatively simple idea which is said in other sources in a slightly different way and they talk about the idea that the best way to fight darkness is by generating light and the light itself fights the darkness you don't take a baseball bat and hit darkness you live a life of love you live a life of righteousness you live a life of wisdom you live a life of kindness and that imperceptibly influences the environment around you in a large scale or a small scale and the world gets changed for the better that way through cook said why do we have to attack why do we have to be little why can't we recognize the good in what people are doing even if it's not perfect because we're not perfect so i think on the third available it's worthwhile to think about rough cook's legacy to think about what he represented and to think about yes there are many controversies indeed but there's so much that we can and should incorporate of his life his actual writings are quite difficult he was mystical and poetical and his writings are kind of stream of consciousness they're not necessarily organized in a linear fashion very very challenging but like everything else uh even if we can't fully grasp the writings which would be of course be the highest level but at least we can try to incorporate some of this personality i don't have time for i just want to mention on the fourth of ello tomorrow night is the art side of another great great sweet girl who died in 1926 and that is grammar simpha duvinsk who is known as for his book or samaya and the rambam my yeshiva is named after the ortho mayor and meshech and they were very very different obviously were very very different godzilla but they also had much much much in common first of all there actually is a famous letter from er in which he defends the zionist enterprise over the attack right many people raised the tory carter for example sites in kumar and kosubos that says that the jewish people took an oath that they would not try to establish eric israel stayed in israel by force of arms right etc and they say we can't have a state until mashiach so we actually wrote a response a letter now some question is authenticity i'm aware of that but we do have a letter signed by him in which he said that our obligation not to establish a state is conditional on the nations of the world not oppressing us successively and since they didn't live up to their deal and that's even pre-holocaust we're not bound by our deal so he actually defended the possibility of statehood but i also want to point out that in terms of the mecha was known as a person of such kindness such sensitivity such goodness you know he had he and his wife had only one daughter one child and that daughter died and his wife never really recovered she was kind of a broken person and he in spite of his schedule he would take walks with her every night every evening together and he would hold her hands now again this may sound like not a big deal that's what it put down in the culture in which he lived holding your wife's hands in public was a very very big deal and yet in order to give her a little hazard and strength and comfort he did something that would largely not be regarded as so dignified for a rav of his stature but he decided what was more important and everyone that that knew him even the guardian even the christians in the city looked at him as a paragon of holiness and virtue he was a person who clearly had ru hakodesh you know the meshech he died in 1926. the mesh might have been written who knows 40 years earlier but certainly it was finished by 1926. he writes in participation he literally predicts the holocaust he says that those who feel that berlin is the new jerusalem and that is the source of the source of their joy and that is the source of their wisdom they will be made to see that berlin itself will become the source of destruction and exile and a reminder that if a jew does not know that he's a jew the nations of the world are going to be there to remind us 1920 yeah 1926 and this may have been decades earlier imamesh foresaw that the holocaust would come from queering okay let me point out that many thought the idea that germany would be a source of a holocaust was a very unthinkable idea simply because germany by far was the most civilized and cultured nation in europe much more so than england germany in terms of literature in terms of science in terms of philosophy in terms of music a very very very high level of culture of sophistication now granted the actual brutality of the murders were largely the the actions of poles ukrainians and hungarians that's exactly it but how could the orchestration of this destruction come from the height of civilized man but the meshiach says when you divorce your wisdom and your civilization from submission to god then the worst things are possible meaning people often ask after the holocaust where was god but in truth the real question of the holocaust is not so much why did god do it because god didn't do it right man did it but what does the holocaust say about man where was man how do human beings do that and the amazing thing is that the mesh the order of merciful who's tomorrow night was able to see this with great great clarity but it but as they say in many many ways in terms of although ideologically he would not necessarily agree with everything that cook said but they were both gohanim first of all and they both had the middah of ohiv shalom for road they've shown and when we think about them there was so much of their goodness that we could try to incorporate in our personalities and may we merit to learn from their ways and in that way create a kid hashem and bring goodness into the world [Music]