Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Pre-Pesach Constructing our Edifice for Freedom

[Music] hi everybody thank you for coming and hello to the people who are listening via zoom uh first today's sheer is dedicated aliyah of david mosheb and avram official and may this learning bee and they refuse bhattavora and jana tanya fresco ben iris and again our our learning and our prayers should also give them refuge lima as well as the young man that we are always miss paolo for binyam and israel ben hanita may all of these call him and may all of uh qualify all of the world uh and may this learning contribute to that again i just want to announce we are approaching pesach of course and uh there's a halache in chilhonora that one should give money special stukka to help families particularly during the pesach season this is called mao shritem and hibane does have what is called a kimcha de pisca fund to assist 30 families in financial distress and help them for the upcoming peso holiday there's an active link that you can uh connect to on the youtube description box and bizrat hashem in the merit of stuka we should bring gaoula to claude israel because i'll say among other things that it is the merit of stukka that israel arnie golem and pesach itself is a sman of gaula and it says man that's also for fort stukka again one of the beautiful things about hibana generally is that it not only has torah classes but it's also actively involved in khesed and khazal tells us that the world stands on three pillars torah avodah's divine service prayer and gamila sadim acts of loving kindness that includes stukka so i don't know if you know has been young yet maybe that will be a little down the future but they say two out of three ain't bad and you can get both torah and camilla skeset so it's a good place to connect connect to what i want to talk about today is connected both to last week and to this week and to the week after as well and that is uh it's going to overlap with some things that we've been talking about but hopefully there'll be something new as well and this is the overall idea of what are called the four partials that in the month of adar as we approach nissan there are four special shabbatots that have special torah readings which is the mafia and we've already done three of them and this shabbat is going to be the the fourth one and these are parashat shkalim the parsha dealing with the half shekel parashat zakhor the parsha dealing with the eradication of amalek parshas para the parsha of the para adhuma the red heifer that we read last week and then parashat takhodash which is a paracude base in the book of shemos dealing with the laws of pesach and the laws of the carbon pesach and the like and these four parshiots are leading up to pesach now bismarck we don't particularly do anything to celebrate them i mean uh there's an extra torah reading that's added to be sure uh many hasidim uh recite and actually some of the old ashkenazi congregations as well recite lengthy prayers that are called yots rose for these four special parshiots uh in the traditional yeshiva world and in the modern orthodox world yotsuros have gone out of style which is really a shame in many ways because they are beautiful very deep to filos many of them were written by the great uh religious poets the greatest of the religious poets rabbi al-azir khalil and people like rashi wrote commentaries on the yautz rose itself so you see how much rashi was makshavit to explain the midrashim and the different ghazals upon which the oats rose are based but i think it's fair to say that for most of us the four partios are not particularly significant other than extra-torah readings but in fact there is a very deep spiritual significance to the four parshiots and rav sadak of leblind explains that they prepare us in a very vivid and deep way for the holiday of pesach pesach is about freedom it's about liberation but it's not freedom from something it's freedom towards a goal it's freedom towards matantora it's freedom towards submission to the will of god it is freedom to have a relationship with god i've quoted more than once the beautiful statement of tagory that the human soul is like a violin string beautiful music but when the string is totally free and loose on the table freedom no restraint you're not going to be able to get any music out of that string it's only when the string is tied down you'll get music and think about that we sometimes think if only i would be liberated if only i would be free if only i wouldn't have all of these restrictions all the time i would be able to be have a happy meaningful life but in many ways it's not true we need the discipline we need the structure and within that structure we can express the music and beauty of our lives and that is what torah is torah is tying us down but not in a slavery relationship torah is tying us down to express the music within so when we talk about the freedom of pesach it's inescapable that we're also thinking about submission to god's torah that's what counting of the omir is about linking the holiday of freedom with the holiday of submission which is matantora but rav sadok says the following in order to prepare ourselves to create this edifice this mishkan this tabernacle this beitan mikdash of our lives we first have to clean or clear the building site of all of the junk and the garbage that accumulates again i'm this is a very important module to me you know in our sumac we're building a new a new base of meadows that's been going on for over a year so together with cobit we also have this construction site and you can see that in order to build you got to get rid of a lot of junk right you can't build something positive until you get rid of things that are negative garbage debris and like sir of sadok says if pesach is about building the relationship the arba parshiyat is about clearing away the garbage that's ma kev that prevents the relationship from establishing itself now what are the factors that destroy our relationship with god we know the factors that build our relationship with god i alluded to them earlier a few moments ago not sadistic famous statement that the world stands on three pillars torah avodah the militant those are the positive building factors that create a relationship with god what are the negatives that can destroy the relationship that's also in pirkei of us and there are three negatives and that is kinah tava vokavod mozi and olam kinna jealousy envy taiva is lust and covered a desire for honor and glory ego satisfaction they destroy a person they take a person out of the world as the altar of slovakia used to say not only does it take away your olam haba it even makes your life in this world pretty miserable i'm filled with jealousy i never enjoy the blessings that god gave me taiva lusts that are never satisfied no matter what i have covered i'm looking for honor you'll never be satisfied that way because honor is something that is insatiable because someone honors you someone goes over to you and say you look good today you'll be thinking why i didn't look good yesterday meaning the honor was never fully satisfied so the if the din if the pillars that establish a relationship to god are torah avodah gamilas hassanim the factors that destroy the relationship with the god are kinative of a covenant and rapsodic learns that the four parshiots are designed to help us clean out the kinah type of a covenant i'll explain why there are four if there's only three you got to work on and that allows me to be ready to construct the edifice of freedom and pesach in my relationship to god so rapsodic's overall thesis let me lay it out in skeletal form so so you'll get a sense of where this is going rav sadok's point is skalim helps us deal with jealousy zachar helps us deal with lust para which we read last week helps us deal with kavod so after we successfully halaway but after we successfully deal with kin a type of a kavod we're ready for the next step which is now we're ready to renew i can't renew a meaningful relationship with god until i try to work on these negative factors of kinetic of a covet right so that's the structure again i'll flesh it out in a minute but just to give you a sense of the structure of where we're going where rav sadiq is going and after you've eradicated so to speak tina taiva cove out you're then ready for khodesh his renewal you enter the month of nisan the month of redemption the month of liberation the month of gaula as ghazal say by nisan nigalo our forefathers were redeemed in the month of nisan the nissan asiden light the future redemption will also be in the month of nisan again that's an interesting question on one hand we do believe mashiach can come any single day except on shabbos or arab shabbos so mashiach could come in adorama she can come in tishrei but she can come in all of those months are good and we believe it's always possible but nissan has kind of the greatest chance nissan is the greatest potentiality of of redemption but we've got to go through the negative work so to speak or the positive work of working on negatives of kin a type of a cover so let's go over it uh briefly the relationship of shkalim to jealousy we actually did address so i'm just going to be very kitscher about that you'll recall the mitzvah of marxitta that every year we have to give or we had to give a half shekel towards the construction of the basa mikdash and you'll recall that there are two factors to remember about the marxist echo number one it's uniform rich and poor have to be equal and number two it's a half coin as opposed to a whole coin meaning it's a half shackle not a whole shekel now both of those lessons help us with jealousy because the fact that it's uniform means that god looks at the rich person and the poor person and that's not just money that's also talent some people are rich in wisdom and ability and other people are less so but when it comes to dignity in the presence of the almighty and access to god rich and poor stand with equality because god does not judge us based on what we objectively accomplish in life god judges by how much of ourselves did we put into the service so if i don't have talent or i don't have money or whatever it is i do my best i stand before god in the same dignity as the person who accomplishes so much more and indeed perhaps my accomplishment is greater because that person was only operating at a 15 capacity and i might be operating at an eighty percent capacity right the poor man who gives one dollar it might be a more worthwhile donation than the rich guy who gives ten thousand dollars because for the poor man it is a more significant sacrifice so martha sascha is an antidote to jealousy because when i look around and i look at people who have more money more power more talent more influence more charisma and i devalue myself and i think that what i am doesn't matter and it doesn't count and why do so many other people have all the breaks the marxist chakra reminds me that in god's eyes it's not so much what i objectively do in the world it's how much of myself did i put into this abayda and therefore there's no reason to be jealous because my contribution is as valuable if not more so than the contribution of the person that has so much more so that itself helps a person over jealousy and of course the other point is that it's a half because a half is incomplete unless you match it and that's a reminder that just as i need others others need me and once again i have importance i matter i make a difference when a person realizes that their life makes a difference that their struggles matter that the way they deal with their individual problems can have an impact in a spiritual way i'm the world as a whole and you can be a heroic person even if the new york times are the jerusalem post never even mentions you once because the heroism can exist in the private struggles and in the intimate moments in that sense that can really help me over jealousy because i know that i matter i know that i'm important i know that i matter to god and i know that i can make a positive impact in the world whether they know it or not because every time we live lives of kadusha and lives of goodness the world is tilted a little bit in the direction of being better than it otherwise would have been so again and we we actually talked about this at length i don't want to be my rick although it's a very very beautiful important point but you can see how the half shekel issue helps us overcome jealousy by making us realize that we matter and when i know that i matter it doesn't bother me that somebody else matters in their way because i matter in my way and god needs all of us to live the lives that we were given in the best way that we can and as i've mentioned before sometimes people think oh i don't need community i'll serve god by myself i don't need to work with others but here's something to think about first of all that's largely not true but second of all even if it is true sometimes the question is not do you need the community the question is does the community need you the question is sometimes what can i bring to the community it's not only what i can get from the community and it's important to know that each of us has something valuable to contribute so that's kind of how the half shekel helps with jealousy robsonic points out that jealousy is actually the hardest media to eradicate that's why it's the first of the four parties as if to say we need the whole month of adar to deal with it because that's the hardest one of all so we start earliest with with jealousy we then come to amalek now on the left this is going to be a little less clear molec is connected to taiva now tava now taiva our relationship to taiba is actually a little more complicated than our relationship to jealousy when it comes to jealousy i can say as hard as it is to eradicate yes it's very hard but i can say pretty clearly is a destructive negative meda that really doesn't belong now it's true that there is a passage in the talmud that says that jealousy of scholars increases wisdom but that's a different type of jealousy the jealousy that says you're good and i want to lift myself up that's positive but the jealousy that says i want you to fail i want you to fail because i don't want you to excel that is a very destructive jealousy and we can say that's totally bad so kinna is bad it's hard to get rid of but it's bad when it comes to taiva physical pleasure whether it's sensual eating whatever it would be or money accumulation of money our relationship is more equivocal i can't really say it's totally bad number one a person has to eat number two we don't have vows of poverty it's okay to earn money it's okay to have nice things it's okay to have a nice house and of course the very first mitzvah in the torah is to be fruitful and multiplying and as ramban writes in a very very interesting contrast called the gara sakotis the holy letter which there are a few translations out the ramban actually writes that the sexual relationship of husband and wife even if it doesn't lead to children very important is sacred and holy we don't regard any of those things are bad so we can say at least give lip service to the idea jealousy is traith but our relationship to tava i can't really say it's truth there is a legitimate place in the world for physical pleasure and indeed physical pleasure can often be a gateway to gratitude to god i make brachos i thank hashem rabia victor miller the chronological has a whole essay i can't really hope to duplicate it about what you to think about when you look eat a banana or an apple the color and the texture and and uh the different acidity versus sweetness and the balance of taste you're not you're not supposed to be indifferent to this you're supposed to taste it and enjoy it and then realize that it's a gift from god so when we say taiva is bad we don't mean it's all bad but we mean that when my mind is filled with materialism and sensual pleasure it crowds out the spiritual desire and yearning to be connected to god possessions are neither good nor bad possessions can be good if you own your stuff and possessions are bad if your stuff owns owns you the question becomes who is the master of the transaction i use my property in good ways support my family give stucca create a nice warm environment both for my family and for any guests or other people that may need me then all of your gash miata is wonderful and holy on the other hand if life becomes an incessant a collection of more and more and more for no reason other than to have more but i often read about these people in show business who own 20 cars 20 ferraris why on earth i i don't even understand why on earth do you need 20 ferraris i don't really get the point uh i mean it's not even like antique antique cars i can see a little bit of a javemina you're making a museum of old things but to simply buy like 20 20 21 automobiles literally makes no sense other than the desire for possessions sometimes they buy the same car you know 20 of the same car a hundred of the same suit like you know what's the what's going on possessions for the sake of possessions so here's what jeff seduck says let's look at amalek for a moment and this is also a theme that we spoke about we spoke about the idea that amalek which is the eternal enemy and source of hatred for the jewish people and for kadusa but a malek outside of us is empowered only because within us there's an amalek like the nightmare and elm street movies i think they were not that they ever saw them the concept is that the reality of the monster is a projection of the thoughts of your nightmares the thoughts of your nightmares create that reality well we have a very similar idea here it's the amalek within me that creates the amaleks outside of me and therefore the main way i eradicate the amalek outside is by eradicating the amalek inside what is the amalek inside of me that takes me away from god but sadok says it is coldness of spirit this is a very unique interpretation the torah says with amalek now the english translation is they encountered you on the way but khazal actually say and rashi brings it that karca comes from tar they made you cold and rashi says what that means is when the jewish people left mitzrayim everybody was scared of them the ten plagues the splitting of the red sea uh the jewish people were like a boiling scalding hot bath that nobody could touch what did a mullet do they jumped into the bath they were the first to attack now what happens when you jump into a boiling hot bath is you get burnt but you make the bath cooler for other nations so rashi is taking the word karka and translating it as it made you call it but the way rashi goes with it because i'll go with it is that a mullet took away the fear that your enemies would have had for you rap sodo goes with the same etymology but he goes in a different direction a shark is what amalek does is amalek makes you cold amalek takes away enthusiasm amalek takes away passion a mullet takes away schmuck gives complacency passivity boredom lack of interest that is what a molecule is a molecule makes you cult again i want to point out that when i read these words in rav sadak i always think they're very very autobiographical perhaps coming out of repsredik's own life because rav sadaq was a brilliant brilliant person even as a child he knew shas he knew kabbalah he knew everything but he was born into a non-khasinisha family and at a certain point he was traveling throughout europe as a young man meeting godolim to talk and learning and kind of exhibit how brilliant he was he would often refute even great great rabbis and he was not he was going to all different gedown and one time he wandered in almost accidentally to the ishvitzer who was a great khasir shireby popularized him later they made shiloh and he's listening to the ishvitz he was he was normally not impressed with hasidis that wasn't his thing and i don't know what the interpreter was talking about at the time but somehow it penetrated rob sudok's heart and emotions and in the middle of the ishbasser's speech he clutched his chest and he said my heart is on fire my heart is on fire and he said until now i was only a brain until now i was only a mind i want to be a person i want to serve god with my heart with my emotions with my feelings and rav sadhuk the tremendous elo the tremendous genius became the devoted hassan of the ishpitzer for really the rest of his life only became a rebbe after the ich brister died and after his cover rabbit bager's grandson of label ager died only at the very end of subject's life then he became a rebbe for a few years so when southwark talks about coldness i think he's referring to the idea that sometimes you can have even a great talmud who doesn't seem to have feeling passion emotion maharal writes about the idea that sometimes you could be so connected to torah that you forget about the giver of the torah you forget about connected to god you think about the torah in fact someone once said it to me i was once talking about having a relationship with god and i used god i didn't even say hashem so the person said that sounds too christian christians talk about relationships with god that's not a jewish thing yeah and in some ways the person has a point because if you think about it in our typical vocabulary we talk about connected to torah connected to mitzvos but we forget that that's the means to something beyond that so amalek rav says is coldness of the spirits so when we read about eradicating a molecule we are talking about eradicating my coldness as rav sadok says to become a human being and not just a computer but jeff sadok adds the following idea what is one of the most powerful factors that give us coldness in our bodies hashem even if you're keeping mitsubis he says it's an over-involvement in the materialism of the world just as a person that's raised on junk food will never enjoy the slow laborious creation of a fine cuisine and people who are accustomed to superficial pulp fiction are not going to sit down and read shakespeare or even william faulkner kalba khalmer when i am mshuka when i am totally invested in the world of materialism my heart is not going to be open to spirituality and the reason that so is physical pleasures are like junk food they give you instant gratification spiritual pleasures aren't that way spiritual pleasures are often not something that you get nirvana all of a sudden maybe that's new age spirituality but true spirituality involves work it involves effort it involves two steps forward and one step back and sometimes one step forward and two steps back you learn a piece of gemara you know it's laborious it's hard it's a struggle but you work and you work hard and then hashem can give you the gift of seeing the sweetness and seeing the goodness but if you live a world where you're overly involved in taiva you become blinded to the much more subtle but much deeper pleasures of rahnes so this is kind of an indirect association but rav sadak argues the same way that the half shekel helps me deal with jealousy when i think about eradicating amalek which equals eradicating the coldness of my heart that teaches me to keep my taiva in proportion now again i say in proportion i don't say to renounce it we don't believe in asceticism we don't believe in vows of poverty we don't certainly don't believe in chastity physical pleasure has a place in life but one has to keep it in its proper place and not let it overwhelm because among other things that creates a coldness of spirits and when there's a coldness of spirits that creates the inner amalek which makes us vulnerable to the outer amalak and therefore our relationship to taiva is dealt with in the parsha of merciat amalek eradicating among we now come to the third of the three things that we have to eradicate and that's covert ego gratification arrogant skyva pride and para duma helps us deal with that now here once again the association is not totally straightforward so you need to think about it and and even use your imagination a little bit but here's here's what rav sadhuk says all of us know that the ritual of the red heifer is one of the most mysterious in the whole torah and essentially it means you've got to find this red cow and you slaughter it and you burn it down to ashes and the ashes are mixed with spring water and whenever anybody is in contact with a dead body and they are tame they are ritually impure for seven days they cannot enter the temple they have to be sprinkled with the water mixed with the ashes just a little sprinkle even a drop on day three of their seven day period and on day seven they then go to the mikvah on day seven and at night at nightfall after the seven days they become pure now until you have that sprinkling no matter how long it's been if i went to a cemetery years ago and i've gone to the mikvah a thousand times i am not ritually pure until i am sprinkled with the waters of the red heifer uh that is why halal since we don't have the ritual of paradiumma today and all of us have probably been in a cemetery we are we have the status of tame now that doesn't have that many restrictions meaning a tummy person goes to show the tummy person diamonds they tell me a person learns you're a regular jew but a tommy person is not allowed to enter the areas of the temple so halachically the reason why most religious jews do not enter the temple mount is precisely because we are tame and we don't have the ashes of para duma and by the way i don't want to get into the halachic aspect of it there are some religious jew religious jews that do enter the temple mount but they don't argue with the principle they also admit that the area of the bay samitis and the courtyard they would not be allowed to enter but based on their identification the outer perimeter of the temple mount they maintain is outside of what was the temple area so yes there's a huge mahlokas can you go in the harabayas or can't you go in the hare by it but it is not a mahlokas in principle it is only a much locus about how confident you are in making your identification most religious jews most post can say hey we're not really sure exactly where the temple and the courtyard was so we're not going to take chances by the way this is an example of the government siding for a change with the most religious elements right the government is very in this and the government yeah we agree with the kharadam not allowed to go in the hierarchy the government likes when jews don't go on the higher buyers those who are lenient agree 100 right that a person that's tame cannot go in the area of the temple or the temple courtyard 100 but they claim as they say that uh they're more confident in their identification by the way every few years uh somebody claims to have discovered a para duma and by the way i used to think when i was a kid that a duma meant a cow that was fire engine red and if that's what it meant that would be a real real miracle because there's no such color that exists among cattle but it's not that miraculous really the color of a paradium is a very common color for cows it's the orange brown that many cows have the reason why para duma was rare and expensive is not because the color was unusual but because it had to be virtually a hundred percent that color and you were allowed to have up to one black hair but if there were two black hairs it was disqualified that was hard to find but the actual color is not an unusual color and as i say there are farmers that actually have uh this para duma but you have to understand that even if you have the para duma there's a real catch 22 that there's no way to prepare it because here's the problem in order to prepare the para aduma you have to have kohanim who are ritually pure tame kohanim cannot prepare the paradigma now how do they become ritually pure and now in the olden days the way it worked was whenever they had to make a new para duma they still had some ashes from the old para duma so they could be mitta here the kohanim who would then prepare a new para aduma but today we have a problem i have a par but i had i have kohanim maybe but how do i purify those gohanim to do a paradigma when i say it's impossible what's going to happen is elio hanavi who himself is a cohen when he comes before mashiach he's going to bring some old ashes from the last duma and that's how the process is going to start so when people think oh if you have a paradium we can now start purifying people unfortunately that's not the way the way it goes but the para douma rav seduc says is connected to kavod now why is it connected to kavod so let's go back to the idea that para adumo liberates us from the impurity of death now let's go back to the origin of death originally adam and khaba were supposed to live forever that was god's original plan adam and eve were supposed to live forever death came into the world because of the hate of the eight sadas chava ate the fruit and then she gave it to adam who then ate the fruits locust what was the fruit by the way there's no opinion that says it was an apple i don't know how apple became the popular representation some say it was the fruit of the vine a grape some say esrog some say gita wheat not even a fruit but grain others say figs that's where the fig leaves come in and the like many many different opinions but whatever it was it was a consequence of breaking that first commandment that brought death into the world now what was the hara how did the nakhosh entice hava to eat surat sadakir is an unusual point he claims that the enticement for eating the ethadas came from covent because the narcos says the day that you eat from this fruit haysem kelly kim you will be like god yodaya tovara to truly understand the nature of good and evil now whatever that means and that is a massively complex and difficult idea essentially the eight saddas is being marketed as a god pill take this pill and you will be like god wow be like god ultimate ego trip all-powerful all-knowing omnipotent omniscient and death came into the world because of egotism because of covenant because we went beyond our boundaries now this is a complicated thing because in many ways we are god like the torah describes the human being as being made in the image of god right that's what we are we are made in the image of god what does it mean to be in the image of god so the rambam explains image does not mean physical image god does not have a physical image god does not have a face a nose image refers to spiritual attributes of divinity we have intelligence we have free will we we have creativity we have power over the world we can create and we can destroy there is something god like about man because we are made in the image of god kabbalistically we take it one step further our actual souls are the essence of god this is what the balatanya talks a lot about god created everything but with man he breathed into man right man is the only human being is the only one that god didn't say let there be man god said let there be animals let there be birds let there be light god created everything with speech but the human being was created not with speech the human being was created with breath god breathed into man and the zoarch says when i breathe into you when i give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation i am giving you part of my life force that's the famous source of the saying that our neshama is a part of god now again that phrase which by the way today is a commonplace everybody uses it is an enormously com controversial phrase the vilmagone claimed that was a form of idolatry that every person is god but whatever that would mean we are certainly god-like that's selamat look him but at the same time if we're not aware of our limits if we break down the barriers between man and god if we don't recognize that everything we are comes from hashem and we're prone to arrogance and guide and conceit that brings death in the world and death came into the world says rabzado not so much as a punishment but as a reminder that as godly as you are there's an unbridgeable chasm and gap between created and creator mortality is the ultimate reminder that we're not god mortality so death is connected to covert it is covert it is arrogance it is an attempt to break down the barriers between man and god that brings death into the world and that is why the purification ritual is connected to ashes now i'm not going to explain everything here why a cow why red that's one thing but the notion that when i connect myself to ashes i achieve liberation from death the idea is ashes is a sign of humility of submission when avraham avinu prays for the evil doers of saddam so abram prefaces his prayer i am dust and ashes so you see the point here if death came into the world because of covet and arrogance we become liberated from death when we attach ourselves to the ashes of humility and submission so when i read parashat para it's helping me deal with the idea of covert by reminding me that it is only by humility that i achieve life many of you are familiar with the greek myth of the phoenix bird in which the bird is burnt down to ashes and it rises from the ashes the truth of the matter is although most people know it as a greek myth there is a medrash that talks about the identical phenomenon the netspurt that is burnt into ashes and rises and we don't know if that's literal or not again that's an important idea that not all midrashim are automatically literal but symbolically this is expressing a deep and profound teaching that we sometimes think that humility destroys my individuality that humility means i'm nothing that humility is self-negation like i'm destroying myself in point of fact it is humility that gives you life it is humility that gives you a connection to god it is my arrogance and my guide that separates me from god and connects me to death and it is the ashes of humility that connect me to the eternal source of life and liberate me from death so you see bakit sure the progression of shkalim helps me deal with jealousy by reminding me of how important i am almost the opposite giving me a sense of self-esteem eradicating amalek reminds me to conquer my over-involvement in the pleasures of the world which dull my consciousness and give me a cold heart which is the amalek insight that empowers the amalek outside and para duma reminds me that i escape the decrepitude of death and i attach myself to eternal life by the ashes of humility and the ashes of humility purify me and let me point out too that you have to understand something the reason why remember when adam ate from the eight sadasana brought death into the world they also were expelled from the garden of eden because death and garden of eden are inconsistent ideas the garden of eden is unification with god that is the source of life when you're prone to death you can no longer live in the garden of eden because you no longer have that relationship to god now keep in mind that the basal mikdash itself is described as kind of a replication of the garden of eden on earth so the same way when adam brought death into the world he could no longer live in the garden of eden so too every time i con i connect with death in the world i touch a dead body or i'm in a cemetery that reconnects me to the sin of the eight sadas and i must re-experience the expulsion from the garden of eden and what is the expulsion from the garden of eden not being allowed access to the temple which is the garden of eden on earth but through ashes i liberate myself from death and i reattach myself to eternal life and then what happens is i rejoin hashem in the garden of eden which on this earth is the basa miktas right so the besan mikdash is connected to the expulsion from ganeden and the reunification to donate now let me make one more point about the power oh i'm sorry let me just finish the point of the fourth week and then i'll i want to go back with one thought about the para aduma so if shkolim helps us deal with jealousy and zachar helps us deal with taiva and para helps us deal with carved if i have navigated these weeks correctly and of course all of us at best only have done a partial job but hopefully we do something we're now ready for hishachis renewal to create something positive and deep in our relationship to god and recedic makes the point that it's not enough in life to eradicate negatives as important as it is to eradicate negatives you know that just brings you down to zero right we were negative deficit we brought ourselves up to ground level barak hashem that's a wonderful accomplishment but now he got to start building with torah avodah jamilas and that's what chodesh reminds you of don't just think your work is done when you've gotten rid of the bad stuff you now have to positively build your relationship to hashem with torah avodah kamil and rav sadhak points out that there's never a break sometimes there's a break between shkolem zakhar or zakharimpara although this year there wasn't but there's never a break between para and chodesh khadesh always comes right after para so that's the shabbos and the lesson is that after you've inspired yourself by working on your negative bad medos you have to take advantage of the inspiration and concretize it with something good because if you let your inspiration wane away if you don't act upon inspiration it just disappears right i remember reading uh that robert hutchins who was the president of the university of chicago a very brilliant man he became president at a young age like 24 he was younger than a lot of his students so he was somebody once pointed out that he wasn't taking care of himself physically and they said dr hutchins do you ever feel like exercising so hutchins answered i surely feel like exercising but i know if i just lie down for a few moments the feeling will pass so i don't let it bother me and that's something i think you know many of us are familiar with but that's true not only for jogging and not only for playing tennis or whatever it is it's also true for spirituality there are moments of inspiration in our lives there are moments in which we feel we want to be connected to hashem maybe it's after a wedding or maybe it's after yom kippur or a pesach seder or you're at the kaito or you're just walking through the streets of yushalayam or you know you have some event in your life perhaps a child or a grandchild gets married and you want to thank hashem in some way and you feel moved and you feel inspired but the problem is you see if you don't concretize it by taking some action even a small one the feeling goes away by the next morning and therefore of southwark says when you've worked on kin a type of a cupboard you're inspired you're in a state of inspiration you've got to move right away to his you can't like just let it right because the inspiration disappears okay that's kind of the trajectory of the four parshiots and i think this actually means it's more important perhaps than we give it credit for because it's the spiritual preparation of pesach and the truth of matters i have to say that one of the things that may be lacking sometimes in our own aveda is the notion of the spiritual preparation for pesach because there is so much physical preparation that we have to do we have to clean our houses we have to get rid of the humans we have to buy matzah we have to uh prepare for the seder although this year i think it's interesting people know this year of course eric pesach is shabbos and the peso cedar is saturday night so on one hand people go crazy i'm not going to discuss the halachas but there's a lot of anxiety about what you do but the truth of the matter is in many many ways when arab pesach is shabbos there's actually a great pleasure involved because normally eric pesach you're running around the whole day and by the time you come to the seder you're dead tired here kind of you know once it's shabbat once you get over once you finish lunch which is a little anxiety because you gotta be sure the comments you know it's early et cetera when you're there you got this afternoon like there's nothing left to do there's nothing you need to do and there's nothing you can do so you get a chance to rest you get a chance to come to the seder and they a relaxed frame of mind so the truth is arab pesach on shabbos even though there's a lot of anxiety and a lot of halachos and a lot of complications that you need to work out it actually is a gift that you can come to the seder in a much more relaxed frame of mind but the point i'm making simply is this that because of all of the physical preparations of the seder we're not always able to spend time on the spiritual preparations of the seder and i hope that the four partios it's the last of the four but you can reflect and meditate on this would be uh something that can help us in our hamas preparations because remember hamas is not only bread chamez also refers to the atahara and when we burn the humates we're burning that we're burning that utah but let me end with one the final thought of rap sadiq about the paradiumma we know that the para duma is described as a hoke a mysterious law that we don't really know the reason for and even who had understandings of the whole torah when he got to this one he was stuck martha yakima i said i wanted to become wise got me many and this was too hard for me to understand the meforshim explained that it's not simply the fact that it's mysterious why a cow why red all right there's a lot of things that are mysterious why wool and linen why meat milk but what bothered hamelech was the notion of paradox inconsistency contradiction because the is that the ashes and spring water of the para duma purify people who are tummy it's a vehicle of purity and yet all the people who handle it become tummy and they need to be purified they don't need the ashes of the paradigm they need to go to the mixer so slow enough doesn't understand how can the same thing that makes people tahor make people tell me right it's the paradox well it's for sure that if malek didn't understand the paradox we're not going to understand the paradox but nevertheless rahzada gives an explanation for the paradox at least a partial explanation and he says if we go back to the idea that the ashes of the para aduma represent humility and that's what liberates you from death we can actually say humility can purify and humility can contaminate there is good humility and there is bad humility the good humility is i recognize my talents i recognize my abilities i recognize i have a positive role in the world but i'm not arrogant because i know that everything comes from god that's the humility of purification but unfortunately that humility can sometimes take a wrong turn in which it turns into self-loathing a sense of worthlessness a sense of despair a sense of passivity a sense of paralysis a sense that i'm nothing and therefore what i do doesn't matter that humility is no longer a spiritual myla a spiritual trait that is destructive it's kind of a from yet zahara it's a hr that comes in the guise of modesty but it's very destructive so if sudok says the ram is that the same thing that purifies can be that which contaminates is a reminder that humility must coexist with self-esteem that humility does not mean i'm worthless and i'm nothing humility means i recognize my strengths and i recognize my contribution but i know that they are gifts from god that must be employed in his service so the paradox can actually explain the idea that there's good humility there is bad humility there's the humility that purifies and unifies you with god and there's the humility that's a cop-out that estranges you from the almighty and we have to be careful to use our humility in the proper direction the great ravi rukhim the great masjid of the mir yeshiva before world war ii used to say a person who is not aware of his faults is a foolish person if you think you're perfect you're an idiot how can a person not be aware of all of their flaws but a person who is not aware of their greatness is a tragic person because he'll never become the person that they're able to become and the person they were destined to become because they're not aware of that which is inside of them and that is the meaning of how the ashes of the para aduma can bring purity and can also bring impurity so wish you all a shabbat shalom and to be well and stay healthy [Music] oh