Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: True Obedience to G-d

[Music] okay hi everybody and i apologize for being a little bit of a little late uh as you know there's something going around going on in the old city and as well as the new elections or the new government so everything is kind of coming together but today shir is again sponsored by khaya shifra [Music] and once again for the young man binyamin israel that's going through a very very difficult situation right now and he also is very much in our prayers and our thoughts and may the learning again be a refreshed reformer for him and also for all of the israel the parsha that we're dealing this week is really in many many ways one of the most mysterious mitzvos of the torah and this is the mitzvah of para duma the red heifer and in fact it is described that the name of the parsha is khukat khukat is a hawk a choke is a specifically technical term that's utilized for those commandments that do not make sense from a rational perspective we have and mishpatim mishpatim are the types of commandments that even if god wouldn't have commanded i would have intuitively understood their importance typically interpersonal laws don't steal don't don't murder most people kind of understand that those are wrong but a choke is a davar now again it wouldn't i don't think it would be correct to say a mitzvah without a reason certainly god must have his reasons but a mitzvah whose reason eludes us we're not really clear about it and of all of the hukim para aduma is considered to be the most enigmatic you know king salman writes in kohelet that he sought wisdom but he saw it was too far from him and the medrash explains that he he gave reasons for every mitzvah of the torah once he got to paradiumma he was stuck and he realized therefore that even those parts of the torah that he thought he understood in fact he actually did not penetrate it isn't just para dumas akhok it's like everything it turns out to be a hoax because there are so many levels of divine wisdom that whatever we perceive of the torah is nothing more than the tip of an iceberg and there are so many levels under that tip that again the greater you are in torah maybe you get more of a a deeper level but still most of it remains totally uh totally beyond us and this is the hoke of paradigm now again just to be sure people know what it is i'm sure most of you are familiar this is a specific ritual that is necessary for a person to be purified when they have come in contact with a dead body we know in the torah and i will actually talk about this at length later in the share but just as an introduction when a person comes in contact with a dead body and by contact i mean either touching it moving it carrying it or even being under the same roof with the dead body even if i didn't touch it at all the torah says the person is tame he is ritually impure for a period of seven days just to be sure we understand this what does it mean to be ritually impure it doesn't mean you can't go to show you can go to show you can dive in you put on filling you keep shabbos you keep kosher we count you for a minion but it does mean that a person cannot enter the basa mikdash cannot eat the corbanos if they were calling they cannot eat trauma basically the laws of tuma are primarily concerned with access to the basal mikdash and his tame for seven days but in order to be purified he must undergo purification rituals and the purification rituals for too much are two ritual one is he must be sprinkled with a mixture of the water and the ashes of the red heifer on day three of his seven day period and on day seven and after that on day seven he goes to the mikvah and he will become tahor at nightfall okay so that basically means if i went to a funeral and i became tamae to a mets that's called my day one so if i did it on sunday soholically i would have to be sprinkled with the ashes and spring water on the third day which would be tuesday and then on the uh seventh day well that raises a little bit of a problem because you don't do it on shabbos so everything would have to be pushed off uh and then uh that'd be on sunday and then sunday afternoon i go to the mikvah i am tahor sunday night now the problem is of course that bisman although we do have mikvah we don't have para duma so what that actually means is if anybody was ever in a cemetery in their entire life they remain we remain in a permanent condition of tumat met the impurity of met until we have the affair the ashes of the paraduma and that is why you hear the statement over and over again that bisman everybody is considered to be tamamet now again without a beta mikdash that does not affect us that much because we don't have a temple anyway but this is the hierarchical reason why we don't enter the harabayas etc because of the status of tumat to mathmet now every once in a while you hear some excitement that they discovered now let me make it very very clear again again you probably know this i apologize but the reason i mentioned it is because many years i labored under a misconception i used to think i guess maybe as a child that para duma meant you had to find a fire engine red cow now that is very rare in fact as far as i know there is no such thing so you have to understand that the actual color of a para duma is a very common color for cows it's kind of the orange brown you know orange brown says you know later cows have that so the reason why the paradium is rare is not because the color is so unusual but it's because of the virtual hundred percent requirements that they're not be anything other than red so halakha permits there to be up to one black hair okay well i don't know how many hairs a cow has but it's you know it's in the millions uh and you have to examine it meticulously hair by hair by hair by hair and if there are two hairs that are not the requisite color it is disqualified as a para duma in addition there are many other laws uh it could never have borne a yoke it could never have done any work even if you put i mean that there's very i mean uh if i'm the owner of a paradigma and uh i i put uh i put my my briefcase on top of the parka for a moment when i went to do something para dumas puzzle because carrying a load makes it puzzle if indeed it made it if it bread with a bull or something that would make it puzzle so there are many many halacha even if you have a paratuma it's very easy for it to become disqualified in a variety of ways but every once in a while i think right now that people claim there are para dumot in the world like i think there's some fundamentalist christian farmer that has a para duma he's in contact with the rabbis in lakewood to be sure that he doesn't do anything wrong they know that they should tell somebody oh because they study the bible too they read the bible it's in the bible and uh they read it and they contact the rabbis because they know it's a jewish is a jewish ritual for the temple and again as you know the the restoration of the temple from the perspective of christianity is bound up with a whole bunch of other theological concepts that that we don't accept but it does excite fundamentalist christians but here i just want to point out i just want to point out i don't want to get too technical because this actually is a very technical halachic discussion but i just want to point out that even if you have a paradigma you know what are you gonna do with it because here's the problem the problem is the paradigma is shifted it is then burnt into ashes it's then mixed it with spring water etc and then we have this powerful potion that can be metaher people wonderful but the problem is all of that stuff has to be done by kohanim that are in a state of ritual purity so how do they become ritually pure to make the paradigm now you may ask me well how did it work in the past the way it worked in the past was the following uh they had they had ashes from the first para duma that moshe albanu made now when the supply grew grew low they would still have enough to purify the few kohanim that were needed and though those few who were pure were able to make a new para duma with all of the ritual in other words you had to have some leftovers from the old para douma in order to purify the kohanim to make a new paratuma because if you don't have some residual old ashes of the pre-exist pre pre-existing paradigma then you don't have anybody that can do anything with the new paradigm and that's our problem so the fact that we have a paradigma does not in and of itself help us we will not be able to purify the jewish people so what's going to happen eventually so how will we ever become pure will become pure because one of the things elio hanavi who is also pinchas is a reincarnation of pinchas the kohen gadot elio navi is going to bring back some ashes of the old of the last there were actually nine para dumas mashiach will be the tenth of the ninth para duma will sprinkle will purify some of the kohanim that are needed to do the avodah those few kohanim will then be able to shift and burn and prepare the new para adhuma that will be sufficient miraculously to be metahere all of um israel okay so you have to understand that although i guess on some level we could say the fact that we have a paradigma perhaps perhaps god is giving us a sign that you know we're approaching the messianic age but still keep in mind that until we get the ashes of an old paradigma we're really stuck there is no particular way we can use the para aduma to effect purity yeah i i meant to ask you about the quran that's supposed to go to the cemetery are they still uh yes yes so this is an important point uh a coin is of course normally not allowed to come in contact with the dead but the torah makes an exception for the relatives of father and mother and wife and child and brother and sister who unmarried sister and the cohen is not only uh permitted to become tame but he's even obligated to become tummy it becomes a a mitzvah but that does not change the fact that he is supposed to make himself tommy does not negate the fact that he is dummy and such a coin would still need to be sprinkled on day three and on day seven if he never went to the cemetery even for his relatives oh then he's not tummy he's not tummy you know because the tumor is not uh the fact that somebody died the tumor is only if you were in contact uh with the dead body yeah oh you're asking others you're asking why can't i assume that a coin is uh yeah that's good that that may be possible but let me just point out there's another concern at least and that is uh hutzler is considered to be automatically tumat's met so which which actually means any calling who was ever in automatically has the status of a tami match whether he lived in khutslawat or whether he was traveling there so that's a that's a whole other issue but if you have a kohen who never left eric israel and never became tamalemath theoretically he could be tahar and he could do this assuming he's a kohen of course that's another issue that would have to be determined because um today you know or being a cohen just means you know you get the first aliyah so we we rely on anybody who says he's a cohen a person walks into show and says he's a culling so we accept his word but when you want to do service in the beta mikdash the evidentiary standard is much much higher and many many kohanim would actually not be able to prove their kahuna status for purposes of the service in the temple the other thing yeah yeah i just wondered uh because of an article i read a few years ago that there is a way of uh from the blood test a blood test to determine if you are in fact a real co-man yeah yeah so uh it it is true that there is a dna a genetic marker that's fairly accurate that can show a male descent from aaron the problem is this the problem is that that cannot establish kahuna i'll give you let me give you a very simple example a simple example let's imagine you have a cohen and a cohen marries a non-jewish woman which of course is forbidden they have a child now that child is not only not a calling that child is a but because he is in the male line of iron he will have the genetic marker so in a sense therefore the absence of the marker might be might be horrific proof that he's not a calling that's true the presence of the marker cannot establish kahuna because there are like examples or you know a lot of examples if a cohen married a divorced woman there are many many ways in which you could be the male descendant of a cohen and not be a culling uh marrying a guy you're a guy marrying a divorced woman you're a halal right so they're different situations yeah it doesn't the konig who sprinkles the one that's teleported to tommy doesn't he have to be right so how does that happen in other words you don't have any components that are toddler so even though you have the the uh you have the uh the uh part of the ashes of the father how does that help no no that you're correct but that that was my point uh elio hanabi will be the elio hannavi who's a cohen will be the initial sprinkler so he'll be the one that'll start the process and then you'll have other kohana more now tohar who can keep on going but then he becomes something well okay that's what i'm going to talk about that's the next thing that's the next thing i want to talk about now i so again i just want you to just to familiarize yourself a little bit with with what is the ritual of para dumas so you understand uh what it what it is by the way you may wonder i mean uh okay i mean how many people needed when there's a base on makdash how many people will need the services of the parhaduma basically everybody to bring the carbon pesach the pilgrimage festivals so so the question becomes i mean how long can this supply last you're talking about one one so another thing you need to know is this uh you actually don't have to use up the ashes because essentially what you do is you mix the ashes with spring water and then you dip the heisup bush in or the coin does and he sprinkles but he doesn't have to take any ash the water itself the water that is mixed with the ashes has the koa of being metallia so you don't have to you actually don't have to deplete the ashes as the water supply goes down you just add more water and as long as the water touches the ashes the water has the coax and that's why the pyra-aduma can actually last for years and years and years and years because you actually don't have to deplete the actual ashes themselves so again just something to be aware of to know what the what the procedure is i'm sorry i didn't hear is there a ratio of how much is the how much water uh no no the only harvard requirement is that the water must cover the ashes so essentially it's uh it's more water than edges okay now here's the question let's go back to the initial idea that the para aduma is called hok the inexplicable mitzvah of the torah now here's the thing the kaira there are many many commandments in the torah that are frankly inexplicable i mean this is not the only one you're not allowed to wear wool and linen fill in have to be square and black you know i mean if you're simply looking at uh why is para duma the paradigmatic choke that even stymied what makes it more difficult than many things in the torah that you know i don't fully understand but you know we do it so the meforshim explained that the reason why para duma is the hog par excellence is not because it's simply mysterious a lot of stuff in the tour is mysterious but because it is self-contradictory it is the contradiction of para duma that makes it difficult to grasp and that is what you what you alluded to and that is on one hand if i am tame and i'm sprinkled with this spring water and ashes i become pure so it's a vehicle of purification but there's another that says all of the people that were involved in transporting the ashes and the like they become tame they become tamik so the famous expression mit hair es satamayan it can it purifies the impure um it contaminates the pure that's a hoax how can the same thing do opposite things now this raises yet another question i don't want to be overly technical but i want people to get a picture so people sometimes ask the question hmm if that's the case then how can you ever get all of the jewish people in a state of purity isn't there going to be the last guy holding the bag because because here's the problem uh let's say i'm a coin i make you taller so you're taller but now i'm tummy so now i got to get sprinkled by another guy so i'm tahor you know again it's three and seven so i'm sorry but he's telling me so it keeps on going and going and going and going and going so there's got to be one guy at the end well he's like designated tummy you know that he can't he can't become tar so how does that work so i want to clarify something again this is very important just in terms of basic knowledge the tumor that requires being sprinkled with para douma is the tumor of tumat meth but the tuma of para aduma all you need is mikvah to get rid of in other words like this if i sprinkle you i'm not tamamet i didn't touch a dead body i i have a new tomah called the tumor of para duma well how do i become tohor i just jump in a mikvah and i'm fine so the last guy holding the bag jumps in the mikvah and he star in other words you don't need he doesn't need the purification of para duma if his tumor is para dhumatuma you only need the sprinkling of paraduma when your tumor is too much met so that breaks the infinite sequence that you otherwise would have okay now let me share with you a a a a an astounding vort from the vilna gone which uh i i once said it's at a group where there were people from lakewood and they they they literally denied that the villenegon could have said it because uh but but he does say it and uh you'll see why it's a it is a fairly astounding proposition that maybe in the yeshiva world would not be so accepted that is all of us know the famous teaching of khazal that the torah is compared to water and there are many many reasons why torah is compared to water water is necessary for life torah is necessary for life water purifies a torah purifies water by gravity goes from the high ground to the low ground that's how rivers flow so the torah leaves the arrogance and it goes to the humble right these are famous ideas but the vilna gone gives an amazing other parallel to water he says water has what we call a koach hatzmiha water facilitates growth you pour water on seeds you get growth but the water is indifferent whether the growth is a positive thing or a negative thing meaning to say water will facilitate growth if you pour it on beautiful flowers and vegetables and grain and water will facilitate growth if it's weeds or poison ivy or whatever it is water is masmiac whatever is embedded in the ground whether it's good or whether it's bad so says the vilnigan torah is exactly that way if a person in his epinemia in his internal character has mido tovat kindness generosity goodness humility the learning of the torah is going to intensify and deepen those midos togos now that of course is not exceptional we would expect that but what's unexpected is the other thought if a person has in his heart arrogance selfishness and egotism the learning of the torah might actually make him worse now you can understand this rationally if a person for example is very competitive and arrogant then his success in the learning of the torah could be another avenue for the one-upmanship that he can show now this is what the lakewood person uh denied like the person it's impossible that the villenegon said that learning torah can make a person worse so i said to well don't we sometimes see a very bad me don't among people who learn torah so his answer was they would have been worse without it okay you know maybe i can't i can't prove it okay but nevertheless and in fact i want to point out that the vilna gone statement in this context is is um there are there are a lot of contradictions it's very very far from a simple matter because there are other statements in rabbinic literature and the vilnigan himself talked about it that learning torah refines a person it makes a person better it elevates a person there's a famous mahmur khazal where god says let the jewish people not even believe in me but study my torah because the light of my torah will bring them back to me that's why i often say when it comes to jewish outreach there are people in programs that say you can't really start learning torah with somebody unless you first convince them that the torah is from god and it's divine and it's not man-made and only then can we learn torah because if they don't accept that the torah is from god then they're not going to absorb anything and therefore before we learn mishnah before we learn hamish before we learn gomorrah we have to have our 40-part series on how do we prove the divine origin of the torah but in truth i would submit that that is not a that is not necessary in fact we we could start off by saying okay i believe the torah is from god you don't but even you would say the torah may have wise things to say let's learn what the torah says and when a person learns what the torah says that there's a spiritual power in the torah that can make a person more receptive so sometimes it's worthwhile to start with what you might call second order questions as opposed to first order questions because first order questions are often not answerable until a person is already exposed to the guts of torah learning so this is a complicated issue meaning there are passages that say torah makes a bad person better but the vilna god is saying torah makes a bad person worse because torah is like water it magnifies whatever the person has an amazing amazing statement and especially coming from the ville nagon because as you know the vilna gone was not a slack when it came to torah learning i mean the villenegon was not a person that said ah don't learn spend your time saying to him and the villain spent much of his life learning 22 hours a day and only slept two hours and as two hours were divided into four sections of 30 minutes so he never slept more than 30 minutes at a time he would measure his beetle torah per year in terms of numbers of minutes and i assure you even when he called bitter torah it would probably not even be considered bitter torah in fact there's a whole story he once came to a city for akhasana and uh in those days it was such a big deal to see the villenegon that people would actually charge whether he was sleeping on a second story that somebody would set up a ladder and he would allow people to climb up on the ladder and they get to watch the villain sleep for for a minute and they pay money etc uh so people were watching the villain go and sleep and the story thank you and the story goes that he slept 31 minutes and he got up and he started sobbing and crying that this is a sleepy town it took away one minute of his torah learning and it's recorded that the town was heartbroken that they hurt the villenegon so much and the villenegon said he's not going to come back to this city they took away somehow they took away a minute so the story is that 25 years later he had to come back to the city again and he only only slept 29 minutes and he says hashem hashem gave me back what i lost and it's recorded the whole city made a yamcha that day uh so the vilna gone uh was makshev he considered torah alerting to be the greatest most important thing and yet he says you have to work on your midos because if the medos are ratten the torah can accentuate rat and meat out that is why in reality it is said that the vilna gone was actually the spiritual forerunner of the mussar movements of rabbi israel salantar which emphasized character building and medos and you can actually trace this because the vilnigan's primary disciple was raphaim of alejandra and rafael velajan had many many disciples but one of his great disciples was a hidden sadiq rav zundel of salad and rezundal of salons i was not a rosh shiva and was not a rav he was a wood cutter and a very poor worker but he was a great great hidden sadiq and many people didn't know who he was but there was a little boy that would follow him around because the little boy surreptitiously the little boy suspected that there was something special about this man that little boy was none other than ruby saw slunter as a little boy and he would he would catch rabzundel in the act of whatever mitzvos he would do the secret structures that he would do the tested that he would do without anybody knowing about it the learning that he would do and rezundel was his rebbe and the reviews hostility said over and over again that resentful of solant was the most important influence in his life so it makes a lot of sense to me that you can actually trace rabies laundry's activities to a messiah to a tradition that goes back to the vilnicon so let's go back to paraduma for a moment yeah that's right these uh these mices that you're bringing are these fables or are they real you know uh who knows uh you know the old story they say it by hasidic stories but the same is true for non-cathedral stories they say uh if you believe uh they actually happened you're a fool if you believe they couldn't have happened you're not because meaning uh the people are righteous enough that these things could have happened uh whether they actually happened you know who knows who knows that you know you know you never you never know uh but certainly the idea of the villain sleeping in half an hour generally that that is recorded now it wasn't his whole life but a number of years he lived with that standard now why am i bringing in this fascinating digression because i i want to suggest that it answers what you might call a minor interpretive question that the mephorstrom said this is the inexplicable law of the torah so the before shall ask a question maybe the question doesn't wouldn't bother you so much but it is a question of a virtual mask para doom is only one mitzvah so why say this is the hulk of the whole torah simply say this is the hoke of para duma in other words say zot ha and i would suggest maybe that according to the villain you can actually give a beautiful answer because the hoke of para aduma is paradox how can something be good and purify and at the same time make you tummy but according to the vilna gown the paradox of para duma is a paradox of the torah itself in which if you have good meat out the torah makes you better if you have bad meat though the tory makes you worse so the torah itself can purify and contaminate so means the same paradox you have in paradigma you actually have in the torah in the torah itself you know recently a very very uh dear friend of mine was nifter some of you may have heard about it there was an article in michigan magazine uh rabbi yitzhak lowen brown who was the head of the association of jewish outreach professionals which is a organization of kirib workers and for many many years he was the head of the atlantic seaboard ncsy he was a hasidis yid but he worked with public school kids and he made many of them many of them are religious but natori was really phenomenal really phenomenal phenomenal and um one of the ncsy is a co-ed co-ed organization and you know sometimes the cenius is not 100 and uh etc so the perennial problem that ncsy always has is that they want to recruit teachers and leaders who are from a yeshiva people but some of the yeshivas don't like their students to go to ncsy programs because they're co-ed and the like so uh my own risha shiva revereman once described ncsy says ncsy is like para aduma he said it purifies those who are far from torah it really makes them religious but on the other hand it may have a negative influence on those who were from so so this was one of robbie lohan brown's perennial challenges how to recruit people uh for ncsy uh so uh the show was that they tried to get uh married people or whatever it would be but um but i was involved with the ncs1 in the 1980s and really it was a a very very amazing experience you know when i first came there and i saw the co-ed stuff and these were you know high school kids and they were fooling around and running around and screaming and yelling you know and i was wondering how are you going to get something good out of this like you know what's going on it's just wild kite as we would say and yet after a year after two years after three years those very same kids became very very wonderful wonderful from binay and binostora and uh he was able to create that type of atmosphere and therefore i have to this day i have tremendous unbounded admiration of course for ruby low in browns francis why generally it's a really really phenomenal phenomenal program but okay but be it as it may that was my russia she was remarked that he considered ncs3 to be a little bit like the para aduma now there's another answer to why it says the choke of the torah and refrains malevolent says because in a way your whole attitude towards torah torah as a whole depends on how you deal with the hoke let me explain this when i keep the parts of the torah that makes sense to me i think a lot of things make sense so you never know am i doing it because god commanded or am i doing it because i'm a fellow traveler with god because my agenda and god's agenda happened to be the same at this point am i serving god or am i serving myself the hoke is the ultimate test do you keep the parts of the torah that don't make sense to you and that is exemplary of your attitude towards the torah as a whole the marks you as an evide hashem the mishpat does not mark you as an evil hashem because maybe you're doing it on your own and if i'm so levitt says and especially human beings rebel against having to do something we pride ourselves on autonomy on choice so when something makes sense to me i choose to do it when something is a hoax i am a vatel myself i nullify myself to the higher authority and human beings don't like that process of nullification freimfits gives a beautiful example of this if you remember at the end of the book of shmuel small base when david is being pursued by his own son of shalom so there's a man shimmy bengara who is of the family of sha'al and shimmy bengara is throwing rocks at david and he's saying god is punishing you because of what you did to my relative [Music] and you deserve it and yo of ben syria who is david's uh general who is very quick to the sword wants to kill shimmy benga and david does not let him pakshimi bengal is the ancestor of mordechai and utters very immortal words which are theologically actually subject to a big dispute if god wouldn't want me to be humiliated it wouldn't be happening and if it happens it is the will of hashem and i must accept it and i cannot lash out and kill him for shaming me this opens up a real pandora's box of discussion can one human being harm another human being if it's not god's decree that the person should be harmed dublin is saying no and the cover travis alvarez takes that position there are other positions in jewish philosophy we'll leave it for another time now what's interesting is though that i read this and i admire david wow what patience what acceptance what humility and yet there's a real problem when duffer's on his deathbed and he gives instructions to shaloma it's kind of like i hate to say this way but it's kind of like the godfather he instructs him i have a bunch of enemies be sure you finish them off one way or the other and he mentions specifically shimmy bengara don't let him get away with this so just reading the sukkim what's going on i mean david had this attitude i accept whatever god is giving me and on his deathbed he says finish him off so it's a little complicated it's not so clear what the answer is but one answer might be that shimmy bengara in fact deserved to die because of the disrespect that he showed a king that's called mohammed you rebel against the king you're high of miso but david did not want to kill him when he was in the immediate pain and humiliation because david would be afraid that perhaps he's not acting the shame shamayim he's acting for personal revenge so he waited until he cooled down and then made an objective judgment that's one way of learning okay but be it as it may what was the plan that derived or devised the plan was he told shimmy bengara because of your disrespect to my father i am confining you to jerusalem you're under not house arrest you're under city arrest and the day that you leave the city you're going to be high of misa okay don't leave the city or you're in big trouble so the story goes that shimmy bengara lost some donkeys and his servants went out looking for the donkeys and shimmy went with his servants to look for donkeys and obviously had guards watching for this shimmy banger was apprehended he was executed now what type of idiot would do something like that he was told if he leaves the city he's going to die now he didn't go because it was his mother's funeral i mean a person might say some things happen i'm going to go no matter what it wasn't even such a big deal he lost donkeys okay donkeys are expensive but he has people looking for them so he's going to put his life in danger and he knows very well that he's going to be watched what's going on like it's an idiotic thing to do it's not a rational thing to do so if i'm says was a good reverse psychologist had he not told shimmy you can't leave the city shimmy would have no interest in leaving the city but as soon as mele tells him you can never leave the city again it becomes unbearable to stay in the city i have to get out i have to get out right if somebody were to tell you you can never have chocolate again the rest of your life at that moment there'll be this unbelievable yearning to have chocolate even if you know even if you don't even care about chocolate that much never to have it in my life because when we're told we can't do something right we don't like to be much is the paradigm of mukhrak because it doesn't make sense to me but i do it anyway that shows true obedience to god you know uh this is the way it works uh the husband that wants to take out the garbage so his wife will uh have an easier time so he's about to take out the garbage he has the garbage in his hands and then there's a voice from the other room that says please take out the garbage so some husbands not me but some husbands will feel an instinctive tightening of the chest i don't want to be told what to do don't nag me i'm i'm going to do it anyway don't tell me what to do etc and this even expresses itself in halacha we know that when a person is bar mitzvah there's a a mitzvah to make a souda we make a festive celebration because of a bar mitzvah again technically that's only if it's on the birthday itself but no that's called asu mitzvah why is there a mitzvah to celebrate a bar mitzvah so the reason is this is based on a statement in the gemara goddal hamid souvavi osa he who does commandments that they're commanded to do get more reward than people who do commandments they don't have to do meaning interestingly enough if you do a commandment that you're not commanded to do you still get reward but it's lower than the reward of a mitsuba villain this is very relevant for women by the way women are exempt from many time-bound commandments women are exempt from lu love and women are exempt from sukkah there are exceptions but let's say lulav and sukha women are exempt but if a woman wants to take little love or a woman wants to take sukkah sit in the sukkah she gets reward she gets rewarded by hashem for a mitzvah but it's a lower reward because she's an aena mitsuva by the way very fascinating machlokes based on the rambam and rabbenutam if a woman voluntarily does a mitsvata say that she's exempt from is she allowed to make a bracha a who follows the rambam actually pascagon that a woman cannot make a bracha it would be a bracha in vain because since she doesn't have the mitzvah how can she say the words sanctified us with his commandments so many swardham other than moroccan spartan follow the rule that women who take low lovers sit in the sukkah do not make a bracha on the other hand ashkenazim follow the rule of rabbenutam which is codified by the rama that not only can a woman do the mitzvah everybody says she could but she can even make a bracha on the mitzvah because the statement ashiki deshanu that hashem sanctified us the mitzvoth is not does not mean hashem commanded me the person doing it but hashem sanctified the jewish nation okay but be this may bottom line is that when you do a mitzvah that you're not commanded you get less reward than when you are commanded and going back to bar mitzvah that's why bar mitzvah is joyous because when the child was doing mitzvos as a 12 year old it was ana matsuga he'll get rewarded but he was not commanded now that he's commanded that's a joyous occasion that's the makor that is the source of bar mitzvah now the question is this why is it the case that if you do a mitzvah that you're commanded you get more reward couldn't you make the opposite argument meaning if all i'm doing is what i'm expected to do okay i did my job that's good but i didn't go beyond it if i do something i don't have to do it's like time and a half if i if i work in my regular working hours i get a regular salary i do over time i get more so one could make the argument that if i voluntarily do things i didn't have to do to serve hashem i should get more rewards than people who just do their job so toso says in massachusetts a great psychological insight tosuva says once you become commanded to do something the yetzer hara creates a resistance against doing it so when i do things and i'm not commanded i'm doing it because i want to do it all right that's fine i want to do it but when i do things because i have to do it that's actually much harder it's much much harder because human beings rebel that's why you know in the reform movement over the past uh 25 years moves in both directions but but on some things the reform movement has become much more traditional on some things i mean obviously the left agenda has skewed it in other directions but in terms of rituals hebrew things like that the reform movement is much more traditional than it used to be and one of the positive developments in the reform movement is more and more reformed congregants are putting on to fill in so trillin is now a growing phenomenon in reformed congregations that's the good news the disheartening news is that it's almost 100 women uh that are doing it uh there is no growth of to fill in among men there's only growth of filling among among women uh how do you explain that well a lot of things women are more spiritual than men i mean that actually has a lot of a lot of truth but one answer might be women are exempt from putting on villain men are obligated so when it comes to obligations we rebel when it comes to optional expressions on our own that we're willing to do right we're willing to do extra things more than we're willing to do mandatory things so going back to swinging it back to departure beloved says it is the hulk the unconditional submission to that which does not appeal to my logic that really shows my connection to the torah overall that i'm not just doing it to satisfy me but i am a vatel myself i nullify myself uh to the almighty now let me just end with with uh one uh final idea here that is throughout this year uh we've been emphasizing that the primary hoke of para aduma is the paradox paradox is the difficulty here that it's mithame the pure and it's metahere it purifies the impure and this is considered to be a choke and even didn't fully understand it but notwithstanding that fact the meforshim tried to give some havana some understanding of the nature of the paradox and that is the following para dumas is an antidote so to speak to the impurity of met why did death come into the world to begin with so if you'll recall adam and java were originally supposed to live forever because of the hate of the eight sadas eating from the forbidden fruit death came into the world and other minecraft were niksha they stumbled in that height because of the snake because of the nakhash that enticed khaba who then enticed adam what was the primary enticement of the nakhosh so rav sadak learns that the primary enticement was an appeal to the egotism and arrogance of man the key words are the day you eat from this fruit you will be like god to know good and evil in other words the the whatever however you understand this very very difficult parsha what is being offered is a god pill right remember like the matrix the red pill the blue pill et cetera says take this pill take this fruit you will be god ultimate ego trip so death came into the world because of the defect of covet and egotism and here is the thing that's difficult in many ways and i think we've spoken about this man is god-like we are after all made in the image of god we have the power of creativity the power of free will the power to destroy the power to create although not ex nihilo we can't create something from nothing but we can create many many things including a coronavirus apparently uh right things can be things can be created positive and very very uh destructive and the like so we are godlike and that god-like uh part of us is very important i mentioned last week ref sullivan's idea that that is the majesty of man but at the same time that can lead to arrogance and ego and therefore death is the great demarcation point between the creator and the creation death is the ultimate reminder that we are not god with all that we can accomplish so instead of looking at death as a punishment death is the necessary sign that separates us from god despite the fact that we are so godly in many many ways so if you correlate death with covet you can now understand why the purification rituals of death how do i become liberated from death how do i become separated from death by humility and submission so this does not explain the paradigma totally why a cow why i read but it does explain the notion of being sprinkled with ashes because ashes is the ultimate symbol of humility and self-abnegation when avraham avinu pleads for saddam avraham avinu says i am dust and ashes so the correlation is this death comes into the world because of ego and arrogance and gaiver i become liberated from death by connecting to humility and submission and self-abnegation again borrowing rep solivatic typology that we discussed last week death comes into the world because of adam one and we become liberated from the tumor of death by adam too and huh adam too adam too again uh you have to go back to the lonely man of faith if you heard it last week we talked about it but if not you can get the essay on the internet it's very very worthwhile uh to read the lonely man of faith by uh yosefto uh sullivan uh and that is why para duma purifies me again it's like the ancient greek myth of the phoenix bird the phoenix bird is burnt into ashes but it rises from the ashes and by the way people know it as a greek myth but the truth of the matter is i shouldn't say there's a greek myth there's a mimer hazal that describes a bird the same way now these things don't have to be literal these types of midrashim were not meant to be literal but there's something very deeply profound and that is in the process of what you might call self-destruction i achieve rebirth by self-destruction i mean freeing myself from my egotism and my arrogance which some people might describe as a form of self-annihilation actually gives you a rebirth and a reconstitution that liberates you from death in a spiritual way that's paradium so now recedic says the following with this idea though we can understand the bit of the paradox because on one hand humility is a wonderful quality but the humility when taken in a wrong direction it destroys your self-esteem it destroys your worthiness it destroys your sense that you can accomplish important things becomes destructive there is the humility of submission to god that's empowering and then there's the humility of a sense of worthlessness that empties you and that's what paradum is saying the same ashes that can liberate you from death and bring you closer to god if taken in the wrong direction can make you tummy and destroy your relationship with god there is a so to speak the humility that elevates and then there's the humility that destroys and therefore para duma which is a symbol of that humility encapsulates uh that particular paradox so we have actually a little bit of a partial explanation of why paradium does have that paradox now obviously this cannot be a complete explanation if it was mohammed would have figured it out if he didn't there's still much more to say about it but at least you have some type of sense of of how this how this works so wish you all a shivortov a good week and uh should we should uh all be safe [Music]