Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: War Against G-d - Amalek Today

[Music] okay uh hi everybody uh thank you for coming and uh stove and we are approaching purim although i think we'll have one more cheer before purim and uh today we have our dedications ali at neshama israel yosef yehudah the art site will be the tenth of other cheney this is the father of saria khabib regular who you may know as a very uh very good well-established author and lecturer in her own rights and uh we hope that our learning should be lili nish matau binyami israel benjalomo again someone that we care very much about and the family are here and we welcome you and hashem should give you and then although i'm not given the sponsorship i happen to know who the sponsor is but this is in memory of the shama of rav liezer uh ben dove rav danziger danziger who was nifty on rashford at a seva tova of an age of 101 years old danziger i didn't know him well personally but i can tell you from his writings was one of the last true disciples of rav simpson to follow her she truly was one of the great expositors of the torium derek eretz philosophy he was a very very big talmud who certainly knew shas but he also understood the indian of torah m derek eretz and sometimes he found himself in unusual situations because the tendency of the orthodox world has been uh in more of the kharadi direction of rejecting toriyam derek and that was true even within the breuers community and he was one of the holdouts who basically articulated with great clarity uh the philosophy of refshimchan refoil hirsch i do know uh two of his sons i don't know all the children and both of them are the main editors of the art scroll shots and all the other projects so uh they are great great to marbeet say torah and certainly uh rav danziger zakhoino levraka contributed much to quality israel and broke hashem he was saying to see doros of children grandchildren great-grandchildren who followed in the pathways that he uh he set out and finally uh co-sponsored by davor and jakov shore with the nusar in the youtube description etc in which again they were very yaakov was very complementary i appreciate it but you know i'm not going to read it but thank you very much and um in addition a purim is coming up and ibanez will be running a matanotely of yonim fund you could access it on the website uh be sure to indicate if you are keeping purim on the 14th or the 15th because your matanese of yonim have to be given on the day that you yourself keep poor him so remy poston will distribute it on both days but he needs to know uh who's a you shall i emporium and who is a udalit purim uh we know that in the month of ajar for the donor and the recipient uh it should be for but i mean that's a much locus but it should be ideally that the donors and recipients should be the same for him uh because it's the same day uh we know that uh during the month of adar and then when it's a leap year it's utter shaney so we do have special four torah readings uh leading up to nissan and these are called the arba parshiots and in the olden days in the middle ages these were very festive shabbato these were special things that were done today we don't do very much with it other than i have the extra torah reading but if you look in the sidorim you'll see outro special prayers were composed etc in fact i read a very very fascinating article i didn't even realize this that even uh as as recent as a hundred years ago there was great great hazonus for parsha shkalim parsha sakhar and there were khazanim that every single year they would have a new negan for the pieutem of the outros i mean very few people even say yo to us some do but even those that say it go through it very very quickly they don't make a big production but apparently in russia this was a big big big deal and the like and uh two weeks ago we read parsha shkalim and this shabbos we're reading parashat sachar to remember amalek the shabbos before purim is always part and then after purim we'll read about the para juma which we'll get to later and then khodesh the shabbos pirach nissan we read about the laws of the korban pesach but be it as it may the one that's coming up for this week is parashat parshah sakhar is important for another reason it is not only one of the four special torah readings it is wiposkin the only one in which there's a mitzvah to orisa now kriya satora interestingly enough the reading of the torah on shabbos on yamtif is actually not a torah requirement the torah does not obligate you to read the torah the reading of the torah on shabbos is a rabbinic decree although it's a very early rabbinic decree it's a rabbinic decree from moshe rabbenu so it's interesting moshe albano himself instituted rabbinic decrees and the reading of the torah monday thursday in shabbos mithra is from ezra at the time of the second temple so torah reading is not a khi of the arisa but the one torah reading that is a key of the arisa is the torah reading of parashat sachar because there's a mitzvah in the torah to remember the evil of amalek now what does it mean i mean so why don't i do it every day why why order once a year so cause i'll say there is a general rule that memories get weaker after a year so consequently you need a booster shot before 12 months have expired in order to keep the memory of amalek fresh and that is why we have to read parsha soccer once a year now keep in mind the torah does not say it has to be the shabbos before purim that's vada rabbanan because haman was from amalek so we connect the downfall of amalek with haman so the timing of it is midrabanan but the kiev the arisa of a public reading of parsha well well even that's the question of the reading of parashat or that's the arise now even then there's all sorts of questions well is the requirement of a safer torah theorizer or can you read it from muhammad is the requirement of a minion to raisa or can you read it be a fetus meaning it's not so passionate people think oh the torah reading of parsha sakhar is the arisa in a lot of ways it's not the arisa the particular timing is not dorisa some say the need of a safer torah is not the arisa and some say the need for a minion is not the arizer so we would put it this way the torah is not makayev all of these pratim but through these pratim you are fulfilling a mitzvah theorizer of remembering amalek based on this the sam cipher says a very interesting question that is actually relevant this year but the answer he gives is too late so i'm giving this talk a little late he points out that between the parashat soccer of a non-leap year and the parsha sakura of a leap year between last parashat sakhar and this parshasaka is actually 13 months it's not 12 months so the memory has left us it's not strong enough so the qusam cipher says therefore that uh parashat sakhar is taken from the end of parshas kiseitsei parshas ki saith say we read before rosh hashanah a few weeks before rosh hashanah so the hasam cipher says in a shun up shutter in a non-leap year that is prior to a shannon mubarak that is prior to a leap year one should have kavanagh when parashat says read to fulfill the mitzvah arisa of remembering amalek and the baal kore that is reading should have kavanah to be mozi the sibor in the mitzvah the arisa of parshasaka by the way that is selfish proof that the key of the arisa does not have to be the shabbos before purim because obviously if you're yod say with the ki he says a that's not the shabbos before purim so my age is a little too late because that already passed but nevertheless it's something to remember that since the key of zakira is because after 12 months there is shikha when there is 13 months you have to be makhabain to have parashat when they read ki seisei like this is a kiddish of the hassan sultan now there's a theme well there are two myths about amalek really there's a mitzvah of zakira samalik remember the evil of amalek and that we fulfill by reading and then there's a mitzvah of mercia malik to physically eradicate their memory that would actually mean according to the rambam if you met an amaleki in the street you'd have a mitzvah to kill him if you knew he was an amaleki and the like zakira and marcia makia by and large were not able to keep today number one either amalek well again amalek as an ideology is not extinct we'll talk about that but amalek as a national entity may be extinct although there's an old messiah from ravsajagon who claims that the armenians are the descendants of amalek we have a whole armenian quarter in the old city okay i wouldn't tell anyone to act upon that assumption uh things might be dangerous so generally speaking machias somewhat like we don't fulfill but we still have to fulfill sakhirasamalik remembering the evil amalek so first i'm going to i'm going to connect this to purim but i just want to make another point a kind of a peripheral point but it's an important point although it's not really part of the shear tonight that is a beautiful thought that refraims mulevitz used to express a molecule is a nation but a molecule is as a nation is descended from a person called amalek there was a guy called amalek so who is amalek malek is the grandson of asaf asav had a son elifas and the lipas had wives and he had children from those wives but alifa's also had a concubine eliphaz had a mistress whose name was timna and from the union of alifa zentimna came amalek so amalek is kind of an illegitimate child in the sand not a momser but amalek is illegitimate because our mother did not come from a marriage a mother came from a concubine ap luggage now the gemara gives us a very interesting backstory timna like hagar was of the royal house of mizrahim timna was an aristocrat she was of the nobility and she had a strong desire to connect to the family of avraham she saw that family as godly as holy and there was something in her neshama that wanted to connect to kadusha but for whatever reason avram yitzhak yakov they rejected her they thought she was not worthy so her feeling was if she's not going to be accepted by the good part of the family she'll go and connect herself to asap to the bad part of the family at least she's connected to avraham and even they did not accept her as a wife which was at a certain dignity in khashevas she was simply a mistress a concubine a shivra so here you have a woman who came from the height of royalty she was rejected by the family to which she wanted to enter and even when she was accepted into the bad part of the family they also treated her with second-hand status refrain shalom it says that is the genesis of al-malik amalek is produced from rejection a mallet is produced by delegitimation frame shall ever said this very specifically because he often has russia vermeer he occasionally faced the question of whether a buckler should be kicked out of yeshiva because he's not learning well or whatever it was that's an issue that every every yeshiva has to face sometimes some people are kind of just hanging around do you ask them to leave sir him had a shita that he never kicked anybody out unless they were an active negative force in being a negative influence on others if heim said let him stay and rafhaim's language was he didn't want to be responsible for creating a molex in the world and when someone is rejected that could give them the hatred of amalek now we have to understand this we're not giving a pass to evil people you know we could say hitler said hitler hitler became hitler because when he tried to sell his paintings as a young starving artist in vienna people refused to see the great talent that he had and some of them were jews so he hates the jews because they didn't buy his paintings well there you know rejection does hurt it hurts everybody but most people who get rejected don't grow up and kill you know six million jews and you know millions of other people right so of course there's accountability we're not giving a pass to richoham but refrain points out that we have a certain acharyas not to add gasoline to the fire and rejection can cause a person to become you know to bring out tendencies of evil that might otherwise have been dormant so one of the lessons of amalek is actually a musser to us do not create rejection in fact in this connection there are two beautiful stories involving the khafiz hayam and i'm not sure if they are the same story or their two stories because as you hear the stories it may be a part one and a part two or it may be two different people but there are two stories about how the train dealt with someone a rabbi was once speaking in florida and he was talking about the idea that he had heard there was a boy in rotten who was mahal shabas and that boy was sent to talk to the which was really really scary was not the rashiva of radha in fact did not have a position officially but he just was the he was the head kind of like the altar of slobodka but even more so so for a boy to see the scream would be like the scariest thing in the world especially and the story goes that was kim saw the boy for five minutes and the boy's life was changed forever and he became a shama shabbos and a bentora and it's homozygous and the rav said in miami if i only knew the secret of what the prophet zhaim did i could change the world who knows what the khabib time said to that boy right that's the speech so in the back of the audience this never happens to me i don't know in the back of the audience an old man with a walker and a cane put you know forces himself to stand up and he says i was that boy and i'll tell you what the kapitz said it says i was 14 years old and i was so i was smoking basically he was smoking in jobs i was so frightened i'm going to go to the time and i go to the time and i'm already as a fourteen-year-old i'm taller than the very very short and he had piercing blue eyes which actually were unusual for uh the lich fischer jews the polis and they normally have brown eyes but you know godolam sometimes have these piercing blue eyes like an unusual color and the habit you know i'm towering above the habitation and the khabit khayyam takes my hands and his hands and i feel the warmth of his hands and then tears come out of his eyes and the tears hit the part of my hand that was not covered by his hand and the tears were like boiling hot tears big tears and the khabit shrime just looked at me and said shabbos shabbos and in his eyes i felt the enormous pain of hashem's torah being violated and the tremendous love that he had for me and the rakhmim that he had for me because i was not keeping hashem's torah and i said to myself i could never do this to the now and indirectly i understood i couldn't do it to hashem and i couldn't do it to myself i didn't realize what this was i had known you keep shabbos i figured big deal i smoked once and how bad could it be and now i realized and that changed me so what changed me was the love that i had for me and the pain that he felt over my soul and about the torah now that's one story now there's another story they tell and again i'm not sure if it's the same guy that the khabib time had asked deybacher to leave because he said the bakr was a bad influence on other students he had to leave so the bucker is leaving he's very abashed and says where are you going so the baker said the rebbe told me i have to leave yeshiva he says you have to leave yeshiva but just because you have to leave yeshiva doesn't mean you can't stay in my house you stay with me and i'll learn with you so the boy got to learn with the it's an amazing thing because on one end has to protect his yeshiva and that i shouldn't even say yeshiva he has to protect the bakra more learning in yeshiva that they shouldn't be dragged down by bad influences but that doesn't mean he doesn't care about the other person he cares about the other person and he learns with the other person now people ask akasha well wait a second here because i'll have a clown that you never say deniskar a sinner shouldn't come out ahead all the good guys in rotten who learn yamamba island they should die again they keep mitzvahs they don't get to learn but the kid that's because shabbos he gets a habrusa with the kavitz that's not fair why should he get it he's a person but the short answer is think about it it's not so push it that uh you know it's it's so enjoyable to learn with him it's a big responsibility uh you're number one you can't schmooze in the middle you certainly cannot say any leshan hara right so you know learning with the kabbalah is kind of a i mean it's a great great privilege but it's kind of a burden right people think sometimes i would love to be have a carusa with the god of hadoor i'd love to learn to climb kenowski you know it may not it may not be right actually it may not be maybe it may not be so good you know you'll do whatever it is uh eight blocks uh in 15 minutes you know you know it's not uh if you're not holding there it may not be the right the right cabrusa for you or whatever whatever it would be so i'm not sure as i say i'm not sure if this two stories involve the same person or they're two different people but it shows you a remarkable thing you don't reject someone and in fact with rush diamond i saw a video tremendous video the amazing thing um where the the manahalim the the principles of a of a yeshiva katana of an elementary school and bin ibrah came to him and they said there's a widow who wants your son to go to our heider but the weather was a little bit totally from but a little bit too modern for architecture are higher up in eight torah they're yeshiva ship people and they think the woman either has a television or whatever an iphone or one of those types of things you know it doesn't pause it possibly it's not proper for our hater that we should take somebody that's a little bit more modern than everybody else so steinman started yelling at rich diamond who was the softest of people started yelling at them he said you're baligaiva he says in brisk we went to haiti with mahalole chabas we didn't have separate schools for every type of jew everybody said the briskerov went to school with people who were not even from and now you're saying that somebody's a little more modern you know we can't they're not good enough for us to be in school and then he says where do you want her to send your child to the moon you want to go to the moon are there schools on the moon that she could go to how is she going to get the transportation excited he started saying he says and but then they said rashford tyra are against it and rush diamond says they're not questionable they're ballet they're people of arrogance people of conceit and then finally the manila said well we were told that if we admit this type of person we're going to lose a lot of people a lot of the khashoggi were going to pull their kids out so if you simon shrugged his shoulders and said all right do what you have to do then he said by the way what's the boy's name they said uh we don't know we don't know we don't remember his name so if steinman said this is amazing he said you mean you deny a bachr access to yeshiva and you don't dive in for him you don't dove in that he should have faslah you don't darwin you don't care enough to even remember who he is so you can die yeah if you feel you have to kick somebody out crusader you make your decision but that doesn't mean you don't care that's an amazing thing and refrain from leopards is saying that that is the shairish of a mullet now there is a very important idea in hasidis and kabbalah that although we bismarcher do not fulfill the physical mitzva of eradicating amalek there is an amalek inside of us that empowers and gives ka'ach to the amalek outside of us and therefore even bisman we have an indian of mechias amalek by eradicating the amalek within us now it's similar there used to be horror movies uh with halloween whether it was this kind of our nightmare number thing was i i i promise you i did not see any of them i just happen to know uh what they're about so don't don't but don't be crochet that i actually saw this stuff but the idea was that your nightmares somehow create a reality external to yourself that the monsters outside there come from the visions that are generated within you and that's mamish what the swarmakitaisham say about amalek amalek the amaleks of the world get their power from aspects of amalek that are within us so until we eradicate the amalek within we will be subject to the amalek outside of us and therefore aina kinami the actual mitzvah of eradicating an external lama like may not apply today for various reasons we don't know who the nations are but the whole idea of the spiritual poison of amalek which very much affects us we have to work on eradicating the amalek inside so what is the kayak of amalek both outside and inside that we're thinking about eradicating and that's the purpose of remembering remember i'm alike so you'll know what to eradicate right that's the paradox remember to blot out the memory of a remember to utterly destroy their memory right that seems to be a non-sequitur that seems to be an incoherent sentence but not really remember what amalek represents and then try to eradicate him from your personality so there are actually a few things that amalek represents you know when we think of amalek we think of amalek as kind of the the evil axe murderer who comes in and just indiscriminately destroys like hitler or the nazis but because i'll have a little bit of a different picture of a molecule instead of looking at amalek as the radical evil that wants to destroy amalek is the cynic malek is the three-piece suit professor who says there are no values there are no truths my opinion your opinion everything is relative so amalek represents cynicism amalek represents skepticism amalek represents a denial that there's such a thing as an absolute value in life and the swarm points this out that this is why the gematria the numerical equivalent of the word amalek is similar to the word doubt nothing really matters amok represents we would call nihilism the notion that nothing in life makes a difference and we see this because when amalek attacks us it's described as means encounter i'll give you another chat in a minute they encountered you but the cherish of that is mikra mikra is happenstance coincidence amalek looks at the world and says there is no god there is no hashtag there's no divine providence there is no absolute standard of morality everything is a matter of convention amalek represents moral relativism situational ethics a world in which there are no true values unfortunately this idea of amalek still exists i remember reading years ago it was a long time ago i hope things got better but i kind of doubt it in which jewish high school students jewish high school students were discussing the holocaust and some students actually suggested you know how do we know that what hitler did was wrong i mean if hitler thought that jews were responsible for destroying the economy of germany whatever various theories he had then wasn't he justified in doing what he did who are we this is the famous of people who are we to say that his decision to eradicate jews was something evil now that is pure amolect it's not amalek as the anti-semite who hates jews it's a different type of amalek it's the amalek that says there is no standard now as a result reb sadok says a beautiful point rashi gives another shot to the word karcas so one i one meaning of is happenstance coincidence mikra suffolk but rashi connects it to coldness and rashi gives a muscle again it starts from the mattress rashi says that when the jewish people okay uh when the jewish people left mithraim they were like a scalding hot boiling bath the whole world was scared of them they saw the marcos the creos yamself the splitting of the red sea they saw that god loves the jewish people nobody was going to mess with the jewish people the very first nation that attacked us was amalek they were the first they jumped into a scalding hot bath what happens if you jump into a scalding hot bath you get burnt i'm all like lost indeed but you make the bath a little cooler for the next guy in other words amalek established the precedent that you can fight the jews yeah we lost maybe the next guy will win right that's how rashi says karcher they made you cold in the sense they took away the fear and respect and reverence that the world had for you rabb sadok uses the same etymology of coldness but he uses a different twist than raji he says amalek represents coldness in matters of spirituality in other words a person is supposed to serve god with excitement with passion with geshmak with fire and when you simply go through the motions and you're cold inside that too is ammonic so the ideas are connected because if you have a cynicism oh right then you'll also have a lack of passion a cynic cannot be passionate they cynic by division says nothing matters if nothing matters then what is there to be excited about right so i would suggest that the two faces of cynicism coldness of the heart are very much connected a coldness of the heart and i'm thinking rav sadok is being very autobiographical in this remark because you know rav sadaq was not born of hasid uh although there were already were kasim rabzaduk was born in the eighteen hundreds so they were hasidim but rav sadaq was not from a family and as a young man he was a great eloy a great genius he mastered chass and posted him at a very young age in fact it is said that he never ate a meal unless it would be a mitzvah meal which means he would not eat unless there was a brit or a shovel brachos or a kasana now he didn't have that every day so he darwin time to eat breakfast there's no brisk that day what does he do so he'd make a sea of animal sacks they would just like learn amy sexton and make us see him so he was a tremendous tremendous brilliant genius but he was not a cousin he looked down and to see them as well he said ah these are too enthusiastic they're always singing they're always dancing they're always drinking but for various reasons he was traveling through europe uh and he was meeting different rabbanim liz for shikidolem and galiciana gadolin and he walked in one shabbos to uh the ishpitzer and the isp surroundings gracefully and the inspector is speaking by sudan actually popularized the maeshilok's but you know they've heard it they've heard it before it wasn't especially special to them rap sonic was transfixed what we would call tomorrow christian term he had an epiphany he had a spiritual awakening and in the middle all of a sudden southwark starts screaming he says all i am is a brain all i am is a brain but now my heart is on fire my heart is on fire doesn't anyone feel the fire doesn't anyone see the fire and from that time onward he became a very devoted husset of the ishmael now as they tell me although the israelite was a was a big talmud reptile was probably greater i mean i can't say i know but rafata could very well have been greater than the ishmael in learning but he saw in the ishbitsa a mori derek a teacher in how to serve god that for 30 years if did not teach public public he was very respected people would talk to him privately he did not teach public he did not teach publicly in the lifetime of the ishmael no in fact even after the interpreter died he deferred to rebecca vegard's son that's all the other story rebekah beggar also was not a husset but uh rebecca veger's a grandson grandson of anger's son of label lager actually also became a cousin that was a very big scandal in rebecca vegard's mishpacha but they were like defectors you know from the non-hasidic world into the hasidic world so when rav sadak talks about coldness in avodah hashem as being amalek i sometimes feel that maybe he's talking about his transition from being the cold intellectual to a person who feels without the feeling that's amalek so one aspect of amalek which is really i subdivided into two is cynicism moral relativism and then coldness of the heart and lack of passion and that's a scary thing i mean sometimes even people who are very religious you keep all of the commandments but we go through them like we're dead we go through them without life without enthusiasm without joy without excitement at least tells us that is the showrish of amalek so that's one shirish of amalek that we try to uproot but the other sharish of amalek does get us back to the axe murderer hatred it's an interesting combination almost on one hand amalek is the cool intellectual cynic who is not bothered by anything because there are no absolute values but then amalek is the fanatic hater hater who wants to destroy in a sense those are two different problems right they're not the same problem one is the guy that doesn't feel and the other is the guy that fanatically hates and wants to destroy i mean is there a catcher and how do you how do you be both so to speak you got the worst of both worlds there you got passion but the passion is directed to hatred and destruction but the truth is on a very deep level they actually are connected because the one thing the cynic is most afraid of is that there may be meaning in the world because his one principle of life is there isn't meaning and someone who stands up for meaning he's going to hate he's going to want to destroy you know it may be almost blasphemous to say this uh hitler which is the closest that we have to amalek hitler was actually a very perceptive observer of judaism hitler understood a lot about judaism you read mein kampf he understood it and he hated it his hatred was precisely because he understood what it was and he wanted to destroy it judaism was about meaning it was about purpose it was about living for something beyond your self-gratification it was about protecting the vulnerable and the weak and in hitler's crazy mind he saw that as against the notion of power and struggle and getting what you can no matter what the cost he said judaism cursed the world to curse christianity as well he said by teaching compassion forgiveness charity it's basically saying don't show your strength limit yourself and he hated that so it's quite amazing again forgive me for talking in these terms he understood exactly what the torah was saying he understood it maybe better than a lot of jews and he hated it so as a result the cynic who believes there's no value beyond my gratification that can turn into a hatred against everything that stands for that meaning so although people like to say that it's common that hitler wanted to kill the jews and he was not attacking judaism because he didn't care if you're religious or not religious right that's a common point but in reality his hatred was a hatred of torah and judaism and the torah says that's what i'm all against is amalek is a war against god yeah it's matt you know since you can't fight god directly so he fights the jewish people it's a war against god hitler was also a war against god it's very complicated so the point i'm making basically is we have these two opposite pictures of a molecule that are coexisting one is cynicism lack of feeling lack of passion coldness then we have the idea of hatred so when we fulfill the mitzvah or the idea of the mitzvah of which means trying to destroy the amalek within us we see two things we have to work on one is to turn ourselves or work on ourselves to be people of passion and simbra and joy in advaith hashem and the other is to transcend the sinatra and the polarization that divide us from each other that were the cause of the corbin by ashani sinatrina and which will be the reason of the goula right if the second base amiktas was destroyed because of that hatred it will only be rebuilt when there is love and there's unity in and those are the two prongs of amalek the lack of passion and the hatred and even indifference because indifference is a form of hatred as well it's a cult taker that actually might fit the cynical vision of the hatred so here let me share with you a an interesting gemara it's really connected to parchesculum but but it'll tie into the parashat soccer as we're going over this we read parsha shkalim which is the myth of giving a half shekel every year and we read it rashad or the shabbos before reshredishadar and that's because that's when people started giving shkalim for the base of mikhtash and the reason is because the fiscal year of the bais amiktus begins nissan so they have to use newly collected funds so we have to have money for the new carbanos from nissan so they started collecting other right this is a mission we begin collecting the half shekels when the time of the temple uh from mercury this other so here's what it says reshlakish says the following statement it was well known to god that harmon would try to buy the right to kill us by giving ten thousand talents of silver shackles he would use shekels as a way of getting a right to destroy us although he didn't have to give up the money akash let him do the job for free but haman thought he had to buy the right so hashem gave us a mitzvah of our shekels to counteract the negative power of haman's shekels our shekels defeat haman shekels so the question is why are we worried about hormone shekels i mean haman is long gone whatever he tried to do on purim on the 14th of adar didn't happen the skull muhammad are not a present reality that we had to counteract and even when there was a base of mikdash after human was killed what are we counteracting what are the shkalim of harmon that somehow would be against us that we have to defeat by our half shekels so here's the thing it's yaduwa it's a very well known idea that mcgill us esther is the only book of tanach in which the name of god is not mentioned there may be another candidate for that and strangely enough it's the book of divine passion and love sheer hashirim also does not mention the name of god but there's one word in shira sharim which is a little ambiguous when it describes love it calls it shalhavesya it is like a torch now the word for torch is shall heveth shall have is an unusual word but there's a maclocus is it just a poetic term for shall have it or do you divide it into two words shall have it the torch of god so possibly if you divide shall have essen into shall have it maybe you have one mention of god but at most you have only one mention and if shall have esther is just a poetic extension of the word shall have it you don't have any mention of god but we have a tradition so it's esther and uh and uh she was but we in fact that's the whole theme of concealment i'll have to talk about it next week the notion of the concealed miracle hester esther comes from the word concealment but there is a tradition the zoar says that whenever it says the word melech in magilla's esther it has a double meaning it does mean indeed the flesh and blood it certainly means that but there's a higher meaning in which it's a reference to the melaka the king of kings so for example when the passage says the king could not sleep double meaning couldn't sleep so he got his servants to read him the chronicles where he discovers that mordechai saved his life it also means this is the time of the redemption as it says unto hillary naylor israel the guardian of israel does not slumber or sleep double meaning higher meaning lower meaning so now let's go back when haman comes to achashveirosh and haman wants to buy the right to kill the jewish people so harman has to make a case he has to say you know i mean you can't just say i want to wipe out a nation you've got to give reasons so human gives a lot of reasons some of which are still anti-semitic arguments that people make today yesterday there's a certain nation number one their mafoja they're scattered meaning they're not in a single place so if you get rid of them no one's going to notice the same sho knows me they have these different laws they don't assimilate well just say they don't keep the king's laws it is not worth the king's trouble to keep him around they're not abiding they don't mix they don't assimilate they don't go with the plan get rid of them and the gemara gives a lot of examples whenever they got to do something they always say oh it's shabbos today it's pace after day it's the umpif today it's like i remember when i taught law school i mean uh you know the young narrative and circus i mean it was a real real prep well i can't do this you know it's like like ten days uh where i had to cancel and reschedule and all sorts of things and uh for students it's even worse if they don't have you know cooperative professors uh and the like right and harman gave another example if a fly falls into their wine they just take out the fly and drink the wine but if you the king touched their wine they got to throw it away you're worse than an insect you want these people around so that's harman's tirade but keep in mind says to the king is understood on two levels you mean haman to human king but there's the spiritual source of haman which is none other than amalek is mukachreg is prosecuting to the almighty saying let the jews die they don't deserve salvation so when it says there's an amer mephoza uma foreign scattered and divided haman is making the point since they're not in one place there'll be no danger in getting rid of them but what does those same words mean when it's the angel of haman on molech to hashem mafoser and mephorat sinashina they are separated against each other in other words the kit right of amalek is that the jewish people have that sinatrina mephozuma foreign and then they don't keep the rest of the torah et cetera the melak means hashem so it turns out that when we talk about hormone shalem haman's shekels that has a double meaning the money that harman wants to give to akhishwaras but in an allegorical symbolic sense the shekel of haman is the argument that hormone is making to god to buy the right to have the human meaning the amalek the sorrow the angel of amalek is making to god why they should have the right to destroy the army israel so the sheikh lahman is not just the physical pieces of silver that harmon was it was going to get was was going to give to akshay rosh that was long gone but it refers to the taina the argument the claim that is being made in shamayim mephozomophora which means the great weakness that is identified the kit right the accusation at least one of them is muffo zaruma furad beno amim and that is why as soon as esther gets the news from mordechai esther's language is knows go and assemble all the jews in shushan and fast but you didn't just say fast go and assemble actus unity that's the only way we will be miss gabriel over our malik so seen in this way let's go back to resh lakish rishlakis says we were given the mitzvah of shekel to counteract the shekels of human so i asked the question the shekels of haman are long gone what what needs to be counteracted the answer is we don't have to counteract the silver but we have to counteract the spiritual currency of mephosaur mufal benamim the disunity the sunnah and that is counteracted by the half shekel how is that so now there's the half shekel that we give counteracts the shekels of hama how is that so so this is in two different ways one aspect of the half shekel and we talk a little bit about this is the uniformity requirement the rich does not give more cannot give more the poor cannot give less now the question is we understand why the poor cannot give less there's a minimum requirement oh you're poor borrow i mean there's a minimum requirement for membership we can't waive the fee totally but why can't the rich guy give more somebody comes to a yeshiva and says i would like to give double full tuition there's no yeshiva in the world that's going to say sorry we can't take more than full tuition we'll take it right with gratitude a guy comes to the basement and says i want to give you know 10 shekels nope can't take it why is that so so the swaste ms says the following when it says rich and poor it does not only mean rich in money and poor in money but a person could be rich in many many talents they could be rich in wisdom they can be rich in organizational ability they can be rich in leadership they can be rich in charisma then there are people who seem to be bereft of a lot of these things and from our negative perspective from our superficial perspective one person looks like he's a great person and the other person looks like he's an epic person but the emma says when it comes to access to hashem which is what the marxist shekel represents my portion in avodah rich and poor stands before god with equality of dignity how could that be reason is very simple because hashem does not judge us by what we objectively accomplished in the world hashem judges us by how much of our abilities have we given to him so if the rich person gives a hundred percent i mean we're never 100 and the poor person gives a hundred percent although the rich person whatever in whatever ways gave much more in god's eyes they are equal and if the poor person gave a hundred percent i mean even in money this is so if a multi-millionaire gives ten thousand dollars to a stalker and a very poor person gave ten dollars to the stuka it could very well be that in hashem's book the ten dollar contribution is more valuable it was a bigger sacrifice the mabitz a great great rabbi the time of riverside gives a muscle uh that if one person could learn a hundred blood of gomorrah a day that's phenomenal and he does 50 which is still phenomenal and another person struggles a whole week to do one blood so we look at one guy 50 blocks a day finish his shots like every month or whatever it would turn out to be and the other guy never struggles to do one blood so in our estimation the 50 black guy is much greater in hashem's book it's actually the opposite 50 blood is really great but he's only giving hashem 50 of what he can do and the guy is doing one blood is giving god 100 so teachers like to say the most important thing is effort but in the classroom that's not what you're graded on we have to be honest you're graded on objective accomplishment so in a way it's a platitude when the teacher says all that matters is effort but in hashem's book the platitude is a reality it's true it's the way things are how much of yourself did you give to akadesh park and in that way the ani and the ashier have equal access to al qaeda yarba the rich guy does not have more connection to god and the poor guy does not have less connection to god all of us are equal rev wasserman says that this is the meaning of a passage in the rambam and hill when the rambam discusses free will every person could be righteous or not righteous so the rambam states something that seems to be a hyperbole exaggeration every person could be as great as sadiq as musher avenue or as greater russia as your ravath now i understand free will every person could be ethic okay i got that like moshe rabeno is that something that's even possible moshe was the greatest snobby who ever was ever will be i could be at sadiq like maisha remain what does the rambam mean wasserman is miyasha if he explains the rambam by reference to a commentary of the radak so i have at least one writer rebecca and learned tanakh it's good to know and that is the beginning of yahushua talks about by yamasha maisha died and yeshua became the leader and maisha is described as aved hashem the servant of god the slave of god the redox has a beautiful point what is the significance of calling somebody ever hashem the radak says this is a reference to the well-known halachic rule masha khanna whatever a slave acquires a slave finds a diamond the slave finds a thousand dollars whatever a slave acquires halal he may hide it that's the separate thing but how logically it belongs to his master so an evan hashem is someone who says everything i have every talent every ability every year i give for hashem's glory maisha was ever hashem because everything he had he gave to god this is the razak beautiful radak it says when the rambam says every person can be as great as sadiq as maisha rabbenu that does not mean we can accomplish objectively what majora beno accomplished i will never be a navi like moshe i will never be a hakem like moshe i will never be a leader like moshe moshe is a million times a billion times infinite times greater than whatever we are with our lowly talents but the same way maisha was in evan hashem that whatever he had he gave to akaddish parker's glory we can be like moshe to be in heaven hashem and in that sense our madriga is equal to moshe at that point because that's we're connected right so now how is that an antidote to disunity because remember the shikley harmon is the sinatrinam and this counteracts it well in a very simple way because number one a lot of hatred comes from jealousy i look at other people who are smarter than me richer than me better than me stronger than me and i feel inferior and that inferiority creates jealousy it creates hatred but the lesson of marxis hasheca reminds each person of how hush of they are how beloved they are that they're equal they have the equal opportunity to connect to akadesport that takes away jealousy that takes away rivalry that takes away sinatrina now it's also true the other way around because sometimes hatred comes from guyva from arrogance i'm better than that person that person is ignorant he doesn't know anything i learned you know who needs people like that but if you recognize that that person also has the potential to be connected to god then i see their toshiba so the rich person sees the kashivas of the ani and the honey sees the kashivas right of the asher and then there's another point which i think i said before and that is the fact that you give a half shekel and that a whole shekel reminds all of us that we are incomplete unless we connect to another and when i realize i need you well suppose again it's both things i realize i need you but i also realize you need me and i have a role in the world so it builds up my self-esteem and it makes me see the importance of you and those are bridges so now it's very very beautiful how our half shekel counteracts the shekels of human because the shackles of haman is the kitchen shamayim is the antidote to polarization and sinatra so those are some things to think about it's parashat sakhar coming up we think about again remembering amalek eradicating amalek but the amalek we got to start off with is the amalek within ourselves and the two ideas would be to transcend the cynicism indifference and lack of passion the creeper salive the coldness of the heart and to transcend the hatred divisiveness and polarization that exists within israel so actually the truth is next week i'm actually going to continue this so it's almost going to be like a two-part share connecting this in more detail into purim as a musician we will have uh one more share before before thank you [Music]