Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Jewish Identity and Pride

[Music] hi everybody again thank you for coming it's good in these coved months to have a live audience so i do i do appreciate it first i just want to make a few announcements before we begin the share rally poston has decided to extend the fundraising campaign for ibanez an end of the year campaign and again i want to repeat that i encourage people who enjoy the shiorim and benefit from ibanez many activities both in torah learning and in loving kindness and social justice to contribute it's a very very worthy cause it does many many things not just uri torah but getting involved in the community providing shabbos and yukto hospitality various services tu bishwat sader purim pesak seder and the like one of the new projects or newer projects is to actually try to create a dormitory facility for students of torah who are already jewish as well as candidates for conversion who are in the process of becoming jewish obviously this is a major undertaking that would take some financial resources so once again it's a wonderful thing to have a caleb to have a portion in haksakat in the strengthening of torah so i would encourage you certainly if you want a u.s tax deduction get it in before december 31st but neither event it's a great great mitzvah to do in addition uh today today tonight's share is dedicated by arkadi babakanov in memory of his grandfather whose york site is on the 12th of tevade and the grandfather's name is abba hiya ben the son of sabah and shimon and may all of our learning of torah be the iloina may it be for the elevation of his soul and again we very much appreciate the support and finally uh once again we pray for a refuge leima for binyamin israel benjamita a young a very courageous young man who is going through a very very difficult time and he is in our thoughts and artifilot that he should have a rufus israel among all of the sikh of israel and once again this torah that is learnt here should be for the uh his good health and the rufus uh so now we can uh begin our our shira and again i want to go a little bit backwards uh this parsha of course is the last parsha of kumash and it talks about the golden years of yaakov kind of anomalous someone just pointed out before this year that the happiest 17 years or the happiest years of yaakov's life are the 17 years that he spends in egypt uh connected with his son jose seeing the greatness of yosef again i uh this is that's not really a commercial for nephesh beneficial but nevertheless the joy of being connected with josef was so so great that it kind of gave yaakov a new lease on life and gave him much joy but i think we're going to see that mixed with that joy was a great great deal of fear and trepidation at the same time and that's going to be very important point because yaakov knows that as cushy and as comfortable as these years are excuse me it is the beginning of a very difficult egyptian exile of slavery and and servitude so here i have to go back a little bit and one of the most perplexing events in the whole torah is the very long story of yosef and his brothers that's a very very complicated story and every single year we wonder how can it happen and i can tell you that in spite of what i'll say tonight next year you know you and i are going to be asking the same questions it's one of the eternal questions that one conjugates one meditates one wonders how could it be in fact one wonders on both sides of the equation how could it be that brothers would either want to kill their brother or sell them into slavery and especially that these are not just russian these are the tribes of israel these are you know 10 tribes of out of the 12 tribes how could it be and then even if we understand what the brothers are doing how do you understand jose's behavior yosef was separated from his father thank you yosef was separated from his father for 22 years he was sold at the age of 17. and uh he was elevated to be the michene lamella the second to the king at the age of 39 and that is when he eventually revealed himself to his brothers and brought yaakov uh to uh to mitzrayim 22 years of separation throughout those 22 years never once the the attempt apparently to contact yaakov and then when his brothers finally come he does not reveal himself to his brothers he demands that they bring binyam in to egypt in spite of the brothers telling him that this would kill our father and then he frames binyamin with a uh by placing the cup in the sack of binyamin and he demands that binyamin be taken as a slave while he generously offers the other brothers the right to go home in freedom what type of behavior is this how do you understand the brother's behavior how do you understand yosef's behavior as an aside i just want to say you know people often discuss as a philosophical question how do we know that the torah is from god maybe the torah is a man-made document right how do you know the torah is from god and i'm not going to fully address that issue this i just want to make one little point and that is if we would have written the torah we would not have written it with these types of stories the torah has many many negative attributes of the jewish people the story of of makhiras yosef the story of the feito ego now there is deteriorators not poor punches the torah is willing to discuss flaws impediments character problems so you know if we would be writing our own story we would make it much more positive than in fact is the case and that actually proves or at least indicates the divine origin of the torah because god is a god of truth and everything is revealed everything is uncovered everything is discussed but nevertheless we still have to understand what is going on with yosef's brothers and what is going on with yosef right see these are two separate parts of the equation with respect to josef's brothers i don't want to spend a lot of time on that because that's already a few weeks ago but let me just mention the important idea of the soporno uh we know of course that yaakov had a love for rafael that was far greater than his love for leia now the torah even describes yaakov's feelings towards leia as yaakov hated leia now i have to say it's inconceivable to take that passage literally it's a davar pashut that yaakov did not have hatred for leia in fact yahweh loved leia number one if he had hatred for leia uh he would not even be allowed to cohabit with her and six out of the twelve tribes of israel come from the relationship of yaakov and leia and of those six tribes that include shavit levy the kohanim and the livium and moshe rabbenu and shavit yehuda from whom the mountain baked a vidcon the davidic line and ultimately mashiach so to describe leia as a hated one of course leia is the one that's buried next to yaakov in maratha so describe so to describe leia as a hated wife is certainly a kind of a biblical hyperbole what the torah must mean is that the love for rachel was so overwhelmingly great that by comparison the love he had for leia was like a hatred but it's only a hatred in a relative comparative sense right so if for example the love for leia i'll make up a number which is meaningless the love for leia was at 50. the love for raquel was at 500. 50 is love also might be very strong love but compared to the love for raqqa rachel died tragically in childbirth giving birth to pinata and what therefore happened was all of the love all of the passion that yaakov had for rafael he transferred to the children of russia primarily yosef because joseph was older and eventually to benjamin and this created on the part of the brothers the other brothers jealousy envy in fact the kumari even indicates that perhaps yago should not have shown such a favoritism again it's not for us to judge but hazal to intimate at various points that maybe it was not the best strategy for yaakov to show that type of favoritism uh to yosef and then yummy but that was the reality now the soporno explains that the brothers have a shame shamayim kavanagh in what they did because they saw a certain pattern that was emerging they saw that avraham had two children avraham had a yitzhak and ishmael and ishmael gets sent away and the destiny of the jewish people resides with yitzhak and yitzhak from his wife rifka has two boys yaakov and asaf and the same thing happens like good son bad son asap gets sent away albeit with some type of brahma and the destiny of god's covenant with abraham is now going down only to yaga and now they see that yaakov is showering the children of rafael with honor and glory and love and not only that but jose was reporting on his brothers negative behaviors right they were eating average they were eating limbs that were separate again that also needs an explanation uh they were improperly behaving with the canaanite women whatever it would be so what are the brothers afraid of the brothers are afraid that yosef is replicating a pattern that has already happened in two generations and what's going to happen is that the covenant without without hashem made with abraham is going to go exclusively to the banayra tale and the binet leia as well as the banegashwa the children of the maidservants are going to be cut off now this is a serious thing because this does not only affect your own individual life this affects your destiny this affects your eternity this affects the future of your children your children's children all the generations that sofa alum that they would no longer be part of this covenant with hashem they would no longer have the role of the jewish people of ami israel they would become like the ishmaels of the world like the aesops of the world who have a role to be short indeed they have a role to be sure but it's far secondary to the glorious destiny of the jewish people so the soprano said the brothers convened the equivalent of a bait-in of a court and they determined that yosef was a road day for what is the law of a road if somebody tries to kill you you're allowed to kill them right someone's going to kill you you kill them first that's a matter of self-defense the brothers felt if someone threatens my physical life they have the din of a rodev if someone is threatening my spiritual destiny for eternity khal vahomer how much more so a forcially are they a rotate and the basin actually came to a passat this is the soporno that yosef could be killed it's not that they rejoiced they were not just murderers they actually determined that yosef was endangering their spiritual future and even reuben reuben basically came back and said hey listen we don't have to kill him let's just throw him into the pits whatever it would be and yehuda said let's sell him into slavery we can get rid of him in other ways but be this in may the supernova says there was so to speak a halachic justification for their behavior because they viewed yosef as a rotate now fascinatingly i one should not look at this explanation as a whitewash it is absolutely clear that the sale of yosef was a great set but what you see here is this what you see is that when you have jealousy and envy that poisons your judgment in other words they convinced themselves they had a legitimate right to what they did in other words this is not just people who acted sinfully they thought they were acting properly and they were acting with shame shamayim and they were acting for proper religious and spiritual reasons but in reality the reason they saw the reality that way was because of envy and jealousy and that taints your judgment that throws you off course and by the way that's very practical relevant lesson for every one of our own lives that often we think we're acting for the sake of god we're acting for the sake of heaven we're acting for pure motivations but we have to look inside if there's jealousy and envy everything is a skew everything is not going to be in the right place now in fact the origami cutters are the fascinating point rouve hey let's not kill him let's just throw him into a pit ruben's intention was to retrieve him later but before reuben got back uh he went yosef was sold now because i'll say on the verse the pit was empty it did not have water and the government chavez asked the question well if the pit was empty of course it didn't have water what's the point of saying the pit was empty it didn't have water there's a dresha ah it was empty from water but it had something else it had snakes and scorpions so ruvain is saying let's throw yosef into a pit that has snakes and scorpions well wait a second here the mishna says in ivanhoe so the kumar says in your vamos that if you throw somebody into a pit of snakes or scorpions that person is going to die for sure scorpions are not very accommodating when somebody falls on them now if reuben's argument is we shouldn't kill you safe what is he dating by saying hey let's not kill him let's throw him into a pit that's filled with poisonous snakes and scorpions what it what is reuben trying to accomplish by that he's still a murderer now you could learn i mean it's possible to learn that reuben didn't know or even the brothers didn't know in other words there are snakes and scorpions and god did a miracle they didn't see the snakes of scorpions but the arkham says quite an amazing thing and um i have to tell you ahead of time don't try this at home because the urichaem's thesis might be a very risky thesis to actually apply in your life the ark i am says rouvain is making the following argument to the brothers we came to a conclusion that the osap is a road dave and jose deserves to die but ruben says how do we know we're right how do we know that god approves of our actions if your argument is well if we execute him and we're successful that's proof that god has validated our judgment not true says the earthling because since human beings have free will god gave us free will to do good or evil this is a an enormously controversial proposition in jewish philosophy but the uraciam actually says if i have free will to do good or evil a corollary of that is i could harm a person even if god did not want that person to die in other words this is colec this is actually arguing with a famous teaching of the vasalovas the khaba salvage says it is impossible for one person to harm another person unless god has specifically decreed that that person suffer harm now this is a very complicated idea let's imagine somebody goes to a 7-eleven at 2 o'clock in the morning and unfortunately encounters a robber with a gun and the robber shoots him and kills him god forbid now let's analyze this according to the jaguar of us and then according to the arakaya you'll see the difference did the rapper have free will to pull the trigger or not pull the trigger did god make the robber pull the trigger absolutely not the robber had free will in the last minute he could have done shuba he could have thrown away the gun he could have said i repent i want to serve god i want to be righteous so the pulling of the trigger was absolutely his own decision god did not make him do it as the rambam points out the whole idea of reward and punishment reward for good deeds and punishment for sin only makes sense if you have free will free will means responsibility and accountability if god makes me do something whether it's good or bad i don't deserve condemnation and i don't deserve credit so on one end the guy that pulled the gun made his own decision and the other man says the fabulous the victim would not have died unless god decreed that it's the victim's time to die i don't mean necessarily because of a sin i'm not saying the victim was sinful there may be a million reasons why god decrees it's his time to die maybe because of sin maybe because his natural allotment has reached its end maybe because he's an atonement for other people otherwise we're i'm not addressing why god decreed that that person died that's a separate issue but the quebec says that guy was destined to die now here's the problem how can we say that guy was destined to get to die if the rapper had the choice to pull the trigger or not pull the trigger what would have happened if the robber wouldn't have pulled the trigger says the guy would have died to a heart attack the the building would have collapsed it's an amazing thing i cannot harm you unless god decreed it and if god decreed it it would have happened to you anyway this is quite astounding if you consider something like the holocaust that means that though the nazis made their decision for which they were accountable but if they wouldn't have made a decision six million jews would have died and covered whatever it would be that's why the the harvest of us actually asserts there's no such thing as a human being who can harm another human being it all comes from god on this point the orgaim is arguing the urichaem is saying that there is a fallout of free will that allows me to inflict consequences on people even if god did not want those consequences to take place because god wants free will free will is a higher level of god's will than the particular consequence that happens and therefore going back to rumen's argument reuben says if we kill him that's not a proof that he's guilty because a baal bakira can inflict damage on a person even if that person doesn't deserve that bad thing to happen but says they are kind since animals are not creatures of free will animals can harm people only if god has decreed that they're deserving of death therefore ruben says let's throw him to the scorpions if the scorpions get him that means he deserves to die if this for whatever reason if the scorpions don't get him that proves that he's innocent now as they say this is quite a dangerous experiment uh do not attempt this at home but the archiem says and by the way this this idea was actually taken over not from the euro time but it was taken over by as you know fundamentalist christian sex that's the whole idea of playing with snakes i mean their their argument is that uh if you know you're good with god and god you know wants to give you life the snakes are not going to harm you right that that that i mean that actually comes from an idea that is similar to the arakayams uh idea of course let me point out that if that's true and jose was not harmed by the snakes that should have told the brothers that he's innocent and righteous and yet they still sold him what does that show you and that shows you once again how powerful jealousy and envy is that even when you see a mirror that god is doing a supernatural miracle to show that yosef is deserving of life the brothers say i guess these were wimp scorpions or whatever whatever whatever whatever it would be i mean this is also a muscle about you just don't see the reality in front of your eyes okay as i say this is an enormously controversial proposition the idea of do human beings have the power to harm other human beings without a divine providence and then the rambam that takes it even further the rambam says even if it's not a human evil things like tsunamis things like disease the rabbi says sometimes god just leaves you to nature god is not micromanaging i mean this is a fundamental question in jewish philosophy to what degree does god micromanage what happens to us or to what degree does god create a system and the system kind of is a self-operating system that will affect people in different places wrong wrong time wrong place etc in other words if you die in a tsunami is it because god decreed you die or no the processes of nature generate tsunamis and you happen to be in that place so you know that's what happens to you again a huge huge issue and this is subsumed under the terminology practice is divine providence is their divine providence on a micro individualistic a microscopic individualistic level kabbalah and hacidos very much says yes everything that happens is directly decreed by god on the other hand the earlier what you might call the earlier rationalistic tradition in jewish philosophy like the rambam took the position that ashgasha practice was limited to righteous people and average people are left to kind of the laws of nature unless they pray or do chuba and are deserving of a very obviously comprehensive are deserving of a specific intervention but there's a default setting the rambam says in which god is not necessarily involved in what's happening uh i want to point out this is this is a little digression that you know when we talk about kabbalah we look at kabbalah as something esoteric that most of us don't learn that only a few people in the generation understand and all of that is true but ravari kaplan once made an interesting point and he said kabbalah has become the mainstream religion of judaism in other words even if we don't understand the depth and the intricacy of kabbalistic ideas the world view of kabbalah is the bread and butter of what is taught in virtually every yeshiva every basiaco every seminary for example this idea of pratis which is a beautiful idea permeates all of jewish teaching today and the rambam's view is not even mentioned iran does not even mention in fact if somebody were to say the rambam's view without saying in the name of the rambam they would be called an api chorus and yet that actually was the ramazan to you that most people in most of their lives are not governed by a direct divine providence they are simply left to the laws of nature but the reason why you don't hear this idea anymore is because this was a rejected idea this was rejected by kabbalah and later it was rejected by khasidas and in effect as ramayana kaplan pointed out we are all uh even if we don't study the technicalities of kabbalah is there a difference between as opposed to arts is that uh worthy of mentioning yes that is worthy of mentioning that that's a further refinement there are those that say that any jew who lives in eric israel will always have hashikara practice but i just want to point out that in the rambam's rejection of that he does not differentiate perhaps that might be a machokas rambam and ramban again the issue of asgar pratis is an enormously complicated issue i mean for example even the basic idea that on rosh hashanah god decides who will live and who will die i mean how do you reconcile that with the rambam saying that god is not micromanaging what happens to you i mean isn't the whole dinner of rosh hashanah and yom kippur presupposing an individualized kashmir so how can you then say oh god leaves you to nature so a lot of questions for those who are interested i strongly endorse i'll give a little blurb for my friend and colleague robbie akivator dr akiba tatz a great great teacher who wrote a very fine book on free will where he discusses a lot of these issues i think he disagrees with my interpretation of the arakayam but okay besider that's fine and that's a book where you can get a much further discussion so i i don't want to fully elaborate on this but just to make you aware of the issue of micromanagement and divine providence is actually a very central uh issue in judaism and the commentaries discuss it very extensively okay so we have a little bit of an insight in yosef's brothers but now let's look at the other side of the equation let's look at yosef himself 22 years yosef is in mediterranean now just to give you a sense the first 10 years he started off as a slave and he gradually rose in providence until he still was a slave but he became the head of a household of a prominent egyptian no woman potiphar whose daughter he eventually married us when there was this charge against him mrs potiphar leveled a false charge against him yosef was languishing in prison for 10 years 10 years and that is when he met the butler and the baker and he interpreted the dreams and he asked the butler that when you are free and you stand before pyro put in a good word for me which the butler eventually did but ghazal saying that because yosef put his trust in man instead of god another two years were added to his prison sentence it took the butler two years to remember uh jose who was languishing in prison so that means 10 years as a slave rising to the head of potiphar's household 12 years in prison until he's finally brought before pyro by the way that itself raises fascinating questions are we condemning does god condemn yosef for simply asking a human being to put in a good word isn't that what we call hishtadlus yeah of course jose believes in god joseph did not think human beings would give him his liberty but the same way you should you have to go to work or arrange some way of making a living you don't simply say i'm going to stay in bed and god is going to put the money or the food in front of me and the same way when you're sick you go to a doctor even though god is the source of healing and the same way when you have an enemy and god will give you victory but you still have to have an army so if joseph is in prison and josef wants to get out and needs to get out so we ask somebody to intercede for him that's certainly something we would do if we had the opportunity so josef is faulted for turning to a human being to offer assistance and he and not only is he faulted but he's punished with two more years in prison very very difficult in fact not only is jose's behavior not improper one might even argue that behavior like yoshi is mandatory you're you're obligated to do what she does have a great answer for this i mean two answers that are given by the miphorsian is that trusting god is a function of your spiritual level meaning to say this in another point he says the greater your trust in god the less human intervention you need in your life the less you have trust in god in other words it comes to catch 22 it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if i don't believe that god will take care of me 100 then i'm going to have to do more to get my prognosis yosef had reached such a high level of that the look that would have been reasonable for 99.9 of the world was excessive for him meaning the measure of what is excessive and what is normal is a function of what is your spiritual level of and on his level of he should have relied on god exclusively on our level perhaps we would have needed that human intervention that's one idea verbena bakaya gives another idea that's very fascinating he says even when you seek human intervention you should seek it from righteous people not from evil doers apparently the sarah mushkin was not a righteous person and therefore he says of course i mean joseph didn't have any righteous people to turn to him and he said you don't turn to richelieum now that itself is quite interesting because uh in the history of israel when we're negotiating for money for yeshivats or whatever in the united states i'm thinking of you know we often will turn to political leaders who are hardly paragons of righteousness and we don't say we only negotiate with sadiq if that would be the case we wouldn't really be able to work with almost anybody in the political in the political system but it says that even when you have the ishita of turning to human beings to help you you try to get righteous and moral people and not people that are resilient okay but be it isn't me this is yosef's 22 years until he's brought before pyro at the age of of of 39. in those 22 years he did not contact yaakov at all now one could say perhaps one can give an answer well he didn't have the opportunity he was a slave he was in prison but even after he became missional abella he didn't contact jacob until this whole business would be yummy and what's the basis of his behavior to his brothers now even if you're going to tell me well why should joseph be so nice to his brothers yosef is angry yosef is full of pain yosef is full of resentments even if you're going to say that which we don't assume because we assume yosef is inside it but even if you want to learn that yosef is filled with rage and anger and hurt but surely this is not a rage against binyamin so why is he putting binyamin through all of this and what about yaakov himself his father so the rage against the brothers certainly does not explain what he's doing to benjamin and it does not explain what he's doing tiago although i have to say some modern commentaries actually suggest that yosef suspected that yankov was part of this whole process that's quite astounding because they say why did yaakov send him to see his brothers in the first place knowing that his brothers hated him and were jealous and some suggest that yosef actually felt that yaakov was in it that yaakov wanted to get rid of him that's very very difficult i mean described yosef as always thinking of his father that whenever yosef had a temptation he would imagine his father's face in front of him so preposterous he knew that yaakov was not against him so even if you were to accept the jealousy idea that would not explain the behavior towards being younger and the behavior in terms of the young people so there are two basic approaches in the mepharsha that try to explain what yosef's behavior is based on explanation number one is a very well known idea of the ramban yosef had two dreams when he was a 17 year old boy he had the dream of 11 sheaves of grain bowing down before him before his sheba brain and then he had a second dream eleven stars bowing down to his star but this second dream added a detail plus the sun and the moon the eleven represented his brothers including benjamin and the son represented his father yaakov the moon represented his mother but of course his mother rajo was not alive in fact that was yaakov's argument that your dreams are foolishness because your mother will never bow down to you but in reality the mother also refers to billa the maid servant of russia who raised yosef like a mother after rosho died yosef had these dreams and yosef understood this is the rambam that these dreams are prophecies from god that yosef will become a king you also become a ruler yosef will become someone that even his brothers and even his parents will acknowledge as a melis and yosef knew that these were not delusions of grandeur these were dreams that were coming from god and although the brothers dismissed it yaakov knew the same thing aviv yaakov guarded this yaakov on one hand told jose why are you telling your brothers this foolishness but in his heart yaakov knew it was true as well so says the ramban if yosef has dreams that he's supposed to be a melody then he has to play out this role if he were to simply reveal himself to his brothers that would be a nice family reunion you know they'd have to work out the issues to be sure but they wouldn't look at yosemite he's their long-lost brother so yosef has to be a stranger so they bow down to him they acknowledge him as a malek who is making life and death decisions about their family but it's not enough to have 10 brothers bow down the dreams require 11 brothers he has to get binyamin down there but he can't get binyamin down there by saying i'm yosef bring him the yemen has to come not knowing that yosef is their brother so benyamin two bows down but that's not enough either because now you have 11 brothers who acknowledge yosef as a melon but what about the sun and the moon what about yaakov and dylan so here's what the ramban says yosef's intention in framing benyamin was that after hearing that if benyamin does not come back yaakov is going to die of grief he actually wanted yaakov to come down to mitzrayim not knowing that yosef was his son so that yaakov and a guest by bill as well would bow down and plead so the purpose of the frame up was to bring yaakov to the state of acknowledging yosef as a king and that part of the plan was not carried out because yosef broke down prematurely after yehuda's speech about how selfless he would be to give up his freedom so that benjamin could go home so in reality the last part of yosef's dream was not totally fulfilled although it does say later before his death he bowed down when jose visited him and according to rashi he actually bowed down to yosef but other before him saying he was bowing down to the shrine so we don't know so this is the famous thesis of the ramban that all of yosef's behaviors were a mechanism to fulfill the divine destiny that he would be acknowledged as a melon by his brothers the barbado in his commentary raises a very serious question on rambam and it's basically do the ends justify the means here you have a dream that comes from god that you're supposed to be a king but does that justify you to lie and to cheat and to bring pain number one to have revenge against your brothers and number two to bring pain against benjamin and jacob because since i have this dream i can lie and i can cheat and i can accuse can't do that you have to behave in a moral way you have to behave in a good way and if god wants you to be a king hashem will make it happen one way or the other remember a dream is not the same as a commandment god did not say to you say in this dream do whatever you can to be sure you become a king god simply told joseph what is going to happen but what's going to happen does not give me carte blanche to do whatever it is i want to do to make it happen it's up to god so because of this the hubris now offers a different explanation for jose's behavior that is yosef assumed their responsibility to bring his brothers to chuva either to bring them to truma or to determine that they've done shiva repentance yosef was sold as they said before as the committee said because of the jealousy and envy that the brothers had towards him and the jealousy and envy that the brothers had towards him was the jealousy of the children of leia for the children of raqqa which goes back to the idea that russell was the favorite wife there was a jealousy there was a hatred there was a resentment there was a begrudging of the greater love for rachel than leia that culminated in yosef needs to know that the brothers have overcome that hatred and resentment now when joseph was sold and the brothers don't know where he is they don't know if he's dead they don't know if he's alive they don't know where he is at all obviously yaakov's love for the child of raqqa was transferred to ben yemen and of course you see binyamin is the favorite son because yaakov lets all the other sons go in yemen he doesn't want to let go so obviously yosef is afraid that the same jealousy and hatred that they had towards him they now have towards binyamin who in effect took yosek's place so yosef needs to put them through a test i'm going to bring binyamin down to egypt i'm going to frame him i'm going to say i'm taking him as a slave let's see what the brothers say to that if the brothers kind of say well good riddance not our fault then that shows they're still consumed by jealousy if on the other hand they plead and they beg and yehudah represents all the brothers that shows they've overcome that jealousy and they've done shuva and then yosef can reveal himself so according to the imarbanel the purpose of yosef's behaviors was not to fulfill his dreams but to ensure that his brothers have overcome the hatred and resentment which caused his medivh and therefore they have done shiva for the faith of selwigan this is the apartment now the question that one might raise is one could ask in the abarbanel the same type of question that the abarbanel asked on the ramban is it yosef's business to make these 10 individuals do sugar especially if he's causing pain to two innocent people then yum in and yucca i mean if you sinned against me and you have to do trouba you have to ask my forgiveness you have to do chuba or i sinned against you and i have to ask your forgiveness you know i can't manipulate you into doing shiva by uh threatening you by lying by making false accusations that's what we might call a mitzvah of error you're trying to do a mitzvah by doing sin so the same problem thereby with the ramban that it's not yosef's business to manipulate reality to become a king we could apply to the abarbanel's children paradigm it's not yosef's business to manipulate reality so that these 10 brothers are going to do trouba especially if that's at the cost of inflicting such severe pain on binyamin and yakov so i want to supplement the ramban i want to supplement the apartment now with kind of an additional idea here and that is there is a sword that is hanging over everybody's neck and they're waiting for that sword to fall or maybe you'll use the other english expression for the other shoe to fall that is god had told abraham that his children will be enslaved and persecuted in a land that is not theirs and they didn't know when that's going to be but they know that it's in their destiny that there's going to be a slavery there's going to be a persecution when yosef is sold in mithralia even though the brothers don't know where he is and yaakov doesn't know where he is yappo thinks he's dead yosef at least knows that this is the beginning he's the advanced party this is the beginning of these services of mediterranean yosef understands ahead of everybody that why am i here what am i doing here why am i a slave initially answer because i am the one in whom the beginning of this slavery is taking place and when your safe contemplates the extraordinary amazing life that he's gone through from slavery to imprisonment to being elevated to the highest position in the land the head of a world empire the one that is the food supplier for the whole known world because of this famine yosef realizes as as the commission says over and over again that there's a reason that he's here god put him here he has a mission and the mission as he defined it was to prepare the jewish people to survive what is going to be a tragic dehumanizing experience of slavery and servant keep in mind that it was not a done deal that we would survive we were in mitsrayam from the time that yaakov comes to mithraim which is the official beginning we don't start the golis from yosef we started from yaakov when yaakov comes to mitram to tell you that cfmetralium is 210 years now hashem told we would be in mitzrayim for 400 years god took us out 190 years earlier than he should have taken us out why is that because after 210 years we had reached the 49th level of impurity if you hit level 50 you're irredeemable we hit the fortinet level of impurity and i don't even understand what this means but it was so bad that we if we would have waited the amount of time that it takes for dog to become comments less than 18 minutes we would have hit 50th level as it were four-fifths of our population died they hit level 50. the one-fifth that was taken out were not righteous they were just at level 49 and god had to take them out so the famous statement that the 400 years run from the birth of israel is what we would call a recalibration it should have been in mitzrayim itself god had to recalculate because we had to be taken out so yosef understands that we're going to face tremendous difficulties in egypt not just in terms of physical persecution but spiritually we will become assimilated to tuma to impurity to idolatry to all sorts of adversity and morality we will go lower and lower and lower until there'll be nothing left to redeem so yosef understands that it is he understands before anybody even knows that he's in mitzrayim that it is his divine destiny to give us the tools to survive the egyptian exile and to be the role model for how we survive and yosef did this in many ways first by the personal example of his own life yosef exemplifies the idea that whether you're at the nader the bottom of oppression or the height of greatness you remain a humble servant of god who languished in prison yosef was a slave he remained faithful to god yosef was a leader who could often be filled with arrogance he remained faithful to god he shows us no matter what the situation and even when you're in an environment without role models without community without the support of others you stay the course you remain righteous and focused joseph is showing us no matter what your environment you're not a victim of your environment you can transcend your environment so first and foremost we have yosef as roma not just for mizrahim but for really all of the goliath that we face whether it's the gallows of oppression slavery or the government of affluence because yosef lived both parts of that and showed us how to remain and whether you have a community or don't have a community because you didn't have a community for all of those years so this was a tremendous example of spiritual resilience and courage and determination but yosef has a second strategy as well the gemara and khazal tell us that if the jews were the 49th level of of impurity and they weren't going to hit level 50 what merit did they have what allowed them not to sing to level 50. so there are different listings of this but i'm going to give you a listing of the mcfilter the mesuta says there were four merits that the jewish people had that prevented them from sinking into the 50th level one is they did not intermarry even though apparently there were opportunities the other is they did not speak lush and horror against each other now that doesn't so much refer to gossip among my friends but it refers to they didn't turn jews into the authorities to get temporary advantages number three they kept their jewish names and number four they continued to speak lashona kodesh the hebrew language now these were the merits that enabled the jewish people only only twenty percent of the jewish people to leave matriarch now if you analyze these merits these were not undertaken for religious reasons the jews were idle worshippers except for the tribe of lady the jews did not practice circumcision except for the tribal they weren't from they weren't religious they weren't serving god so you might wonder you're not serving god so what's so significant about hebrew name hebrew language not speaking russian horror what is that i go to tel aviv i meet a guy in a disc attack i don't know if they have discontext today and the guy is uh wearing a high necklace around his neck he speaks hebrew and his name is rafi i'm supposed to look at him as a sonic like wait no what is raviol yeah he's rafi and he speaks hebrew big deal it's not connected to god nothing is not connected to torah not connected to mitzvot why is that such a great thing the answer is apparently maybe we have to redefine things apparently there is something great about because he's identifying as a jew he says you are my people i don't know torah yet i don't know even god yet i don't know shabbos i don't know conscious i know i'm a jew now that's not the end point the purpose of the exodus of egypt we must remember over and over again was to get the torah at mount sinai okay there is a goal here the goal is to submit to so it's not the end point but it's the beginning the jew was redeemed from egypt because he had a sense of peoplehood achtus israel even the troublemakers dustin and avira who were the perennial troublemakers who eventually died in the korach rebellion but you know we should remember how righteous they were in some ways they were task masters in egypt and when slaves didn't meet their quota the egyptian overseers demanded to know who was slacking and thus on the aviram refused to reveal the identities and they were beaten for it let's remember this before we dismiss doesn't vrv as just bad people let's remember that first of all they were of the one-fifth that left mitzrayim as karwick did and second of all they were beaten before they would turn against a fellow gym so you see the thing that kept us going hanging by a thread to be sure because when you're level 49 you're not really doing so good but the thing that kept us above the quicksand was the unity and togetherness that we felt for each other the august israel the connection i want to have my hebrew name even if i had an opportunity to kind of blend in somehow i only want to be with a jewish woman i will not turn against another jew to get some advantage even during the holocaust sometimes jews would inform on other jews i'm going to speak my language i'm a jew and i'm proud of it and it's that actress and unity that is the root of redemption yosef understands that now here's the thing if yosef knows that when yaakov comes to egypt that's the beginning of the exile and yaakov knows that as well by the way that's why god appears to him in a dream at night night is always gathered and god tells yaakov don't be afraid because yaakov is afraid yaakov is afraid that the jewish people will vanish they'll hitler they'll hit level 50. so what does yosef have to do yosef has to be sure that the golos cannot begin until there is a sense of unity and love and togetherness among the jewish people so i'm really just adding to you barbados it's not a matter of ten guys who have to do chuba if it would just be a matter of ten guys after you trooper yosef should just let them do trouba at their own time at their own pace but yosef understands that if there is hatred if there's resentments if there's animosity we're not going to survive the goals of mitzrayim and it's yosef's job to give us those survival tools and what is the saying hashem always gives the refuge the heat the cure before the sickness so yosef has to make sure that the brothers have overcome their hatred and only when they overcome their hatred let the goalless begin now i can reveal myself now i can bring yaakov down now the godless begins because we have the wherewithal to survive that goats you see you know i used to live in chicago so in chicago uh those days davon avenue was a very very jewish street now it's a little mix now it's indian it said there's still some jewish stores but then it was all jewish it was like 13th avenue in borough park or whatever whatever it would be if you know that and on devon avenue there was a kosher style coaching style non-kosher kosher-style restaurant called the bagel it might still be there i don't know and uh the bagels sold you know ashkenazi jewish food that was strafe you know brisket corned beef matzo ball soup all of the ashkenazi favorite food and i remember walking by one shabbos after davening and there was a sign in the on the window that said we provide a free glass of wine with every bowl of chocolate that you order and i was thinking to myself as i walked by now this is this encapsulates everything that is wrong about american judaism which is sometimes called gastronomic judaism bagels locks ethnic foods et cetera here you have you know non-kosher some guy sees the sign he goes in i assume they have people who do go in for this he buys non-kosher shoaland in a non-kosher restaurant on shabbos like what does he think he's doing is he doing something religious is he observing shabbos is he serving god and then he has non-kosher wine to boot unless it's man of shabbos which might be a bushel i don't know but whatever it would be so i was thinking this is meaningless this is empty sentimentality because he remembers you know children from uh bubbie and zadie whatever it would be and it has no spiritual significance and it's superficial and it's stupid and i walked by you know that's what i thought as a 25 year old person but as i get older and older i feel much more that there was something meaningful in that gesture it's something that's very sad it can bring you to tears the person walks by a person doesn't know what chavez is doesn't know what conscious is doesn't really do anything judy maybe he goes to synagogue uh you know once or twice a year when you're shoving them kipper three days a three day or you and even then they're bored most of the time and they'll like show up for people come for chauffeur blowing at the end ready to come at the end they want to hear the chauffeur although that's actually not even that important to part of a ritual i come in for silver blowing whatever it is but he walks by and he sees challenge and he thinks about a grandmother who maybe made sean and he remembers that shabbos might have been a special day and he says i want to have a part of that i want to be connected to that i want to feel a little bit of that and what he's doing is he's identifying with the jewish people in the only way that he knows and you can call that superficial you can call that ignorant you can call it all sorts of negative things but you know those were the jews who were able to leave betraying because they identified as part of chloe israel and from there you eventually come to god if you don't identify as being a member of the jewish people if you don't rejoice in their joys if you don't suffer in their sufferings you're not going to be connected to god you know that's why you know i'm sure many of you have experienced this i think maybe men more than more than women that you're in an airport you've not been girly where everybody you know most people are jewish but let's say you're in kennedy airport or whatever and if you're noticeably an orthodox gym you have a kippah you have citizens whatever whatever it is so sometimes people will go over to you and they'll say you know i'm a jew too or they'll say i'm a member of the tribe that they like to use that phrase and you know i have to admit that you know very often i'm personally irritated you know why are you bothering me i got things i don't say that but you don't think okay you know another two you know what whatever it is or even in the 7-eleven sometimes you know 7-eleven and some guy behind the counter who looks like puerto rican they're a little saying yeah we'll whisper because kids be in a conspiratorial tower i'm at you like it's a murano or whatever it is you know and you could be irritated but if i'm irritated that's a fault that's not a that's not something good because really if people come out of the woodwork even just to tell you i'm a jew but they're basically saying listen i don't know what you're doing i don't understand what you're doing but i want you to know that we're family we're connected we're related that's a good thing because that is how they could get out of ms ryan that's how they got out of australia and that's what yosef has to do yosef cannot allow the galot to begin until we have the refuga that will take us out of the goldens and the refuge that took us out of the garlic was not misvotes because we weren't keeping those mitzvoth it was ah the unity of israel caring about one another now it's true that there's another hazard that says we got out of mitzrayim in the merit of circumcision and the carbon passage but you have to understand that hashem gave us those mitzvoth only after we were found to be deserving because of the ethnicity connections should have said okay i'll give you mitzvoth to put you over the top but had there not been that connection due to jew of israel then we would not have been given those mitzvoth that would have put us over the top we would have picked level 50 and if we hit level 50 uh there is no had salah there is no uh there is no salvation so we have to remember that the villenegon writes that the egyptian galut is a prototype for all goliath and if indeed we were able to be redeemed from egypt only because of the abbaty israel and the akhdut and the sense of jewish peoplehood that's going to be true for the final goula as well [Music] monday [Music] is