Rav Yitzchak Breitowitz: Yom Kippur - Hashem Expects us to Make the Right Choices

[Music] yeah hi everybody thank you for coming and in the secular calendar today is October 8th still and uh it's the day after the secular anniversary of uh the great Massacre that plunged us into mil and uh it's a time in which we certainly have to uh commiserate with the families that are suffering with the that are still risking their lives with theim who are still languishing in captivity and we hope and we pray in the sh TOA that we've just entered the Shana the new year that we've just entered should be a year of Rim a year of GAA a year of Yeshua a year of of good health and I think it is important even though you know you can always question should we commemorate a secular date but Lisa it's in everybody's Consciousness and uh therefore I I myself want to dedicate uh this year for the Yeshua of am Isel and all those who are in distress and of course that's our normal dedication as well uh the sh is dedicated Raa to B Ben feda denil Ben s the lasting Unity of the people of Israel for all of those whose Health has been affected by the War uh alzar yua benav Sim and B shami an anonymous contribution was made for the of all of our and all of our hostages to return safe and totally healthy to their homes hashem's protection for cl Isel the G in these days is still collecting for the again uh we have reached 75% of our goal you can all help get us over 100% in the next few days and a link can be found uh on the E website and the YouTube description box uh finally uh you may have heard that there's a very very serious kind of catastrophic hurricane uh going through Florida uh many people are affected including many many Jewish families as well and uh we send them our ra and our empathy and we are also missal that should protect them and they should not suffer uh suffer any harm again These are times of din times of confusion it all comes from AES and there are reasons why they come we don't always figure it out we don't have Nim that's one of the things that we have lost but uh still at a minimum we have the general idea that this is a time where our Chua is is very very necessary and uh very very important uh so we're coming to Yum Kipper yum Kipper the track date of the talmud that deals with yum Kipper is called Yuma Yuma is Aramaic the day it doesn't have to be called yum Kipper it doesn't have to be called anything when you say the day the big day the big day is Yum Kipper now we call it a big day why why we call it a big day well some people think well after all on Rashana God has a preliminary judgment who will live and who will die but it's not finalized until yam Kipper so yam Kipper is the day of life and death in fact somewhat ominously the tragedies of H Raba of Toro last year were decreed on the Yum Kipper just a few days before the event we didn't know that so on one level of course yum Kipper is ominous yum Kipper is frightening yum Kipper is scary life and death to which we said both days of Rashana we're going to say on yum Kipper as well and yet that is not the aspect that kazal chose to emphasize uh the says there were no days as joyous in CLA Israel as the day of yum Kipper and the day of the 15th of and the gumar says yum Kipper of course yum Kipper is a happy day the day of forgiveness the Day of Reconciliation the day of togetherness with God the gumar has to go through a whole pillow which is not our subject tonight what is the great thing about the 15th of and when we get to the 15th we'll talk about that but jum Kipper is not even a question how happy joyous wonderful forgiveness even the English word is so significant atonement divided into three English words someone said Russia in English at one Min you are one with God you know I I I heard a little snippet of a tape an old audio tape from the 1960s from rev yoseph be salvic reev salic of of Yu who is a wonderful Wonder a brilliant and a wonderful speaker in uh in Yiddish and in sometimes he spoke in Yiddish that was his first language he was a tremendous orator in Yiddish and then when he started doing it in English he became a tremendous orator in in English as well and he he likes to say he liked to say things in very surprising ways he says what is the main Mitzvah of yum Kipper so people you know answer and he calls out to the audience what's the Mitzvah of Yumer so people say ch he said no no no the mitzah ofer is listen yipper is a very easy day you don't have to feed him at all right okay maybe that's it it's a good time to have have guests in your house he says is wel welcoming God normally the process of CHA is you go to God and Kipper God comes to you and you're job is to open your heart to receive him and he said that was the very first jump Kipper when God forgave the sin of the golden calf so the P says the came down to earth in a cloud we say this in right and God stood there meaning he learns the the P Hashem was there first Hashem was with waiting for Moshe the Chua is not only we return to God but God returns to us and therefore he said you want to know the Mitzvah of Yer welcome hasem into your heart inas in particular particularly the alter Reb he talks about there's an old M inad and where I guess most of us are relatively close to this amount of time that jum Kipper should ideally be observed D for a total of 26 hours that's not required but if you add together the pre you know the starting early and ending a little late 26 hours caned the gatria of the shame is 26 hours it's that fusion withes with the of RA and yum Kipper is described as t T refers to the most Sublime spiritual pleasure 26 hours of t with the that's why it's brought down in different that although among the kabad rebes rash there would be a lot of sobbing and ding a lot ofos a lot of you know sorrowful grieving and mourning and focusing on your worthlessness Etc asking Hashem for Mercy says yum Kipper was a very different atmosphere it's interesting yum Kipper there was no crying y Kipper was the notion of reveling in the connection of God who forgives you and wants to be reconciled to you provided you want to be connected to him but Hashem is a very uh good guest he comes wherever he's welcomed you welcome him he comes you don't welcome him he's not going to bother you so to speak so my own Mas was over at chome glass um great great GLE who had learned in Mir he was in Nel he was nifter um he was ni in 1969 a long time ago but I remember he used to say he used to lick his fingers he used to say every minute of Yer is sweet as honey and he look his fingers I can say it was like tast honey one should enjoy one should enjoy yum Kipper and even though we're going through this Litany of sins I think I may have mentioned this forgive me if I did you know when I was uh six or seven years old one yum Kipper night my parents took me we went to a Yi shell which I had never got we had never gone to before or or after but for whatever reason yam kit we were there and I remember when they were saying the ales they were singing the AL to a joyous tune not just the ashamu asamu all all shows have some type of tune to the asamu the short V but for the AL you're not going to hear it set to music and this was a juny tune and even as a six or seveny old who is a little little familiar with the sitter um um although I have I shouldn't waste time I do have to tell you a little joke about that in a second but but I was surprised why are you so happy about the Al and then as the years passed by and um I never heard that again so I began to think that my childhood memory was not accurate you know you you remember things as a kid I probably was no that probably wasn't right but then I read R salivic said that when he was in Berlin and he went to a show in Berlin they said the AL which he had never heard in Lithuania so I was really happy wow my memory is right I'm right so that's one thing but D salvic explained the logic of it it's the joy of getting rid of the filth let's imagine you had a beautiful beautiful palace and a sewer pipe burst and there's all sort of disgusting stuff in the floor and you got to deal with that disgusting stuff and that's hard but if you take a longer term perspective every shovel full that you're getting out of the house you're making the house clean and beautiful and you can look at it that way the I'm purifying myself I'm getting rid of it I'm getting rid of it and I'm joyous because God is accepting me as I'm working to clean myself up now my other yum Kipper story about the sitter which is really like it's not really relevant to the message but I just have to share it with you because it's a cute story uh when I was in first grade so sometimes when the teacher went out they would get a monitor a kid from an older class to kind of watch us for five minutes so they got a fourth grader in and we were remun just you know we're not going to respect a fourth grader so finally the fourth grader said I'll offer $10 to anybody who who can find the kiddish Forum Kipper in the sitter so we're looking through it looking through it can't find it you know finally the teacher comes back and this fourth grader this fourth grade girl who go at school she mocks us and says yum Kipper is a fast you idiots you know whatever anyway that fourth grade girl grew up to be a very prominent federal judge in Washington DC the court of appeals Sharon Prost I I always feel like I want to contact her about this but uh you know but I knew when I from the time I was in first grade that she was a very very smart uh very very smart lady when she was even in fourth grade that's my my other yum Kipper yum Kipper St okay uh but be it as it may I want to share with you that um there was a man who died a few years ago ra Hoffman who was a therapist uh but he was a bentor he had he was a person who learned in yeshivos and was connected to G is all of his life and the gdolim trusted him ra the greatest of the gdolim would send their students to him because he understood the values of Torah but he also had an extreme emotional sensitivity to what people were going through and uh recently they put out after his death they put out uh his talks uh called vadm both in Hebrew which was the language that he gave them in and English translations and I highly encourage whether the Hebrew or English that you check out rev Hoffman's what call Vadim his meetings because it is so normal it is so balanced it it it and it's so attuned to the emotional realities that people face in which they're kind of guided how to come to aades in a healthy balanced way which is a very very important necessity today so in the beginning huh say again schomo Hoffman H FF M an schomo Hoffman uh I've become I really didn't know him when he was alive but I become a big big uh fan of his approach and in the beginning of his book on shuva he tells a story that dates back to 1938 you know before the really the beginning of the Holocaust Hitler was in power but the invasion of Poland was not until 39 and 1938 Romo Hoffman was a young boy of 16 and he was a talid in the Kevan Yeshiva now kevron of course was essentially the Israeli branch of the great SL in Lithuania it was founded in kevron and then in the 1920s there was a a tremendous massacre in kevron and as a result kevron relocated that that's why we have the anomaly of yes Kon in yush so 1938 Kon was already in Yim and the rashash of Kevon was a very great man rabesa who was a very close helmet of the altar of slatka and a son-in-law of RA mosha Morin who was the rosesa of slatka in Europe and one day Hoffman says he was 16 years old and he bumps into before R and re says why are you so sad why do you look so depressed why are you depressed now so schl hman said why shouldn't I be depressed I read the rambam and the rambam describes Chua and the rambam says what is the definition of Chua you have not done Chua until Hashem who knows all secrets can testify God is your witness you will never return to this sin again that is Tru not chuva gamur not extra things not extra Chua basic chuva basic chuva is God can testify God knows the future you'll never sin again so hman said 16-year-old boy none of us do I mean I certainly haven't done shua I'm going to go back to the sins in different ways of course I'm toen of course I'm heartbroken my Chua is worthless nothing him it's interesting he didn't attempt to answer the rambam there are answers for the rambam but simply says who says we P like the rambam is the rambam the only definition of chuva we have other definitions and he pointed to the great other safer of Chua which is the sh Chua of rabenu Yona one of the great Ron and R defines Chua very differently R defines Chua as a commitment to the road that you're choosing in life in life there are many roads the Torah describes the road of life and the road of death the road of braa and the road of kalala chuva is not so F focused on your ultimate destination your destination may take years don't think you can successfully do chuva in 10 days or a month what God is looking for on yum Kipper is are you committed to a path and if you're committed to a path even though in that path there will be mistakes there will be obstacles there will be hardships there will be failures and sometimes it's two steps forward and one step back and sometimes it is one step forward and two steps back but you're telling hes in sincerity this is the path I want to go that's tra and he said how important it is he gave him mush it's interesting mus let's say you want to go to benra right he's telling to in 1938 before there was a state of Israel and uh you ask the uh the uh the cap station how long does it take to get to Ben from yam so he says it's a 1 hour trip so you get into a cab and the cab is going 1 Hour 2 Hour 3 hour you know you don't see benra so you ask the cab he says I was told there's only one hour we we've been I've been in the cab 3 hours uh where's benra so the cab driver starts laughing it's kind of almost a diabolical laugh he says b NE we're going south we're approaching Beva Mito we'll be in a lot you know in a while he says you're further and further you started off one hour from benra now you're four hours from benab right kind of you know you took the wrong cab so said so on one hand who's in a better position the or when was the guy in a better position when he was in yush and 1 hour away from b or when he's in mitz and he's three or four hours away from B we would think oh he's much worse off now because he was only one hour away and now he's three hours away says no because when he was 1 hour away he didn't know which road he has to be on now he knows the road and if he knows the road he's going to get there even though it's going to take longer he's actually ahead I again I have my own story about that you know uh when I lived in Silver Spring Maryland and I taught in Baltimore so if you know that part of the United States you got to go north right you're going north from Washington to to Baltimore and the major highway that you're taking is 95 north right if you go 95 South you're going into Virginia and the like now as you're driving 95 North there are turn-offs that if you're not watching you could be South so when I first moved and I was not so familiar I was driving along and I was daydreaming a little bit and I'm driving from Silver Spring to Baltimore and all of a sudden I notice the Washington Monument the Jefferson Memorial the Lincoln Memorial for those of you who are not familiar let me just say you don't see that on the way to Baltimore you only see that when you're going into Virginia so I realized with a sickening feeling o I must have taken the turnoff I must be on 95 South which I didn't know how to get back really that was that was the problem now here I can't even explain this process but this is a psychological process I didn't want to admit that I was lost because if I admitted I was lost I didn't know how to get back so I started making up stories to myself I said you know maybe you could see the Washington Monument from 95 North you just never noticed it before you know maybe you're okay just keep on going but you know I could I couldn't fool myself that much but I wanted to I really wanted to I I wanted to kind of not think that I was lost just keep on going this happens in Investments all the time this is the famous uh throw good money after bad you lost $10,000 but you don't want to just lose $10,000 you put more and more money in and as Albert Einstein famously said insanity is when you do the same thing over and over again and you think you're going to get a different result that's the definition of being crazy so the very first step to getting on the right road is to know that you're on the wrong road once you know you find a way to move you find a way to get back and this is what told the 16-year-old schomo Hoffman that's make your choice God does not expect Perfection God does not expect total eradication of sin that takes time but he expects that we make a commitment choose the road and therefore he said nothing to be I mean sad about nothing to be despondent about make your choices you make the right choices God is going to deal with you with compassion and with forgiveness which is interesting so once again that uh on one hand the rambam said what the rambam said and one needs to interpret the rambam the rambam has a very very high bar but said well we love D like the rambam the rambam is not always the the final word that's a wonderful thing to keep keep in mind the truth of the matter is many people even try to read the St in the rambam when the rambam says God has to testify you'll never return to that that means you'll never return in the same way it doesn't mean you'll never do this sin again but you're a little different meaning you were doing it 10 times a day now you'll do it five times a day you know that you're not going to go back to the same old same old pattern so this is important because I as I say I I think the whole period of el rashash yam Kipper is a period that many people experience dread many people experience anxieties now on one hand as I said before Rashana it's a serious time and we have to take it seriously but Chua overall should be seen as a joyous opportunity and that's why Kaz say for that yum Kipper is a happy day a day of T 26 hours of being connected to a KES shame right the 26 hours and and and theik so in that connection I want to mention a thought that we begin yum Kipper with something that's a very highly legalistic ceremony the ceremony of col nidre the analment of v and conre has a special niggan that's been around for a while uh and there's a certain solemnity you know it's so interesting that even the reform movement that got rid of you know so many things they couldn't call nidre cannot be touched you have to have call nidre now it's interesting um call nidre was actually used as an anti-semitic accusation against Jewish communities for uh centuries in which uh there were anti-semites who claimed that Jews make deals business contracts and then they go to the synagogue y Kipper Knight and they got released from all of their contracts and uh they can go ahead and uh cheat and lie and steel and the like uh this was an anti-semitic accusation uh however in truth there were some Jews who actually took that erroneous position then when Rafal h was a young Rabbi a young Rabbi he was not in a position of prominence at all he actually wanted to abolish the recitation of K initial so that Jews should not use it as a way of breaking promises and commitments and he wasn't able to pull it off because the community demanded that there be C again that's an interesting irony because rers is best known as a great great foe of the reform movement and yet he himself at least in this one instance was actually a reformer he wanted to change a of the but the question becomes we know that breaking a vow is a very important uh a very great sin but why would we begin yum Kipper with some declaration that all of our vows should be should be enol now in truth there are two different texts of col nidre there are two different ways of understanding what K nidre is doing uh when it says that God should release us from our vow is the meaning we are seeking analment of our vows from last yum Kipper to this yum Kipper in other words we're seeking of our past vows and that's a procedure similar to atares Nadim where you're trying to uproot the vows that you made in the past and there's another geara that says we are stipulating that any vows we make in the future should not be binding look look in your ma meaning is kidre an analment of the past or is it a stipulation that future vows should not take now again let me let me point out it is the that colit has nothing to do with promises you make to other people we're not talking about that but it means different vows you make to God different commitments and the like so is col nidre retrospective or is col prospective the original ofre that goes back to the time of the gim focused on the past later the reim said they looked at it as a stipulation for the future and some combine both texts they say we are seeking analment from all vows that we made from last jum Kipper to this jum Kipper and we will make from this yum Kipper to next jum Kipper grammatically this creates kind of a nightmare because U you know Aramaic grammar is not a well-known discipline even among and a lot of the verbs theard does it mean I I vowed or I will vow meaning depending on whether it's a past or a future you got to change all the Aramaic words uh to reflect that and that's a bit of a complicated idea you know there are professors who have written articles about about kidr is inconsistent because even if you say it's past some of the verbs are future oriented even if it's future some of the verbs are past oriented so it's a bit of a mishmash but the thought I want to share with you is to try to derive the spiritual significance of looking at col nidre from the perspective of the past and looking at it from the perspective of the future because I think that each Vantage Point gives us an important insight about shuva and therefore the significance of col nidre at the beginning of the ampper service is not only its significance in the laws of nadarim V but its significance as a paradigm Fort Chua I'm going to start with the future orientation first because that is the most common text in K that you're making a stipulation which H allows you to make that any vows that I will make in the coming year not to other people but to myself shall become null and void right future let me start with a story in about a very renowned and degenerate sinner who was known as azer Bia El Lazar Bia had what you might call today in the addiction vocabulary of today he was a sex addict it said there was not a single prostitute in the world that he did not visit and one time he heard about one person very very far away that he had never encountered and he traveled a very long way to beat with her and the basic story was that you know she did what he did that was her job but she was kind of disgust he disgusted her that a man should be so mishuk so sunk in these degenerate behaviors that she basically said you know you're a l life you're a nobody to be rejected by a prostitute as being beneath her is a pretty big insult and that caused him to engage in and he went through a very strange and bizarre seemingly conversation he said mountains and Hills beg Mercy for me he talks to the mountains and the hills and what's even crazier is he gets an answer the mountains and the hills say we have to ask God for Mercy for ourselves we can't really help you mountains and Hills then he says Heaven and Earth beg Mercy for me and he gets the same answer we have enough trouble for ourselves sun and moon beg Mercy For Me same answer then finally he says Kim stars and planets same answer at this point he had no one else to turn to so he said it's all up to me I have no one to seek Mercy for me and he sobbed and literally his Soul left his body out of his grief out of his chuva and a voice from Heaven came out and said re he got smly rebi M has a share in the world to come he redeemed himself in that last moment and when the would tell over the story they too would cry and they would say a person could get his whole in one minute one second we can go through a whole life and never have that minute all you need is a minute all you need is a minute but we sometimes don't always get that minute what a wonderful thing one minute so the mam explained a little bit what is this dialogue what does he mean he's talking to the mountains he's talking to the to the sky what is he saying to them what is his argument so the sa rash ven written some of you might know uh Nathan Leen a very very uh famous from attorney from Washington who actually now lives uh much of the year in yam so his grandfather was one of the great in Poland before the Holocaust raron L who wrote a beautiful safer hadash and he gives a great interpretation of this a he says that initially when a person lives a life of debauchery a life of sin they don't think about it but at some point there's a crisis in your life that forces you to think namely The Prostitute rejecting him so at that point he can't deny what his life has become his life is a train wreck but then because we are uh characters of infinite rationalization we always have a plan B and that is okay maybe I'm messed up but it's not my fault I want to put the blame on someone else meaning our first response is oblivion but when the Oblivion doesn't work we want to blame and make ourselves victims so typically a person can have different levels of victimhood the first villain that you always blame are your parents my parents raised me in a bad way my parents were abusive my parents were mean my parents didn't take care of me properly symbolically parents are called mountains and hills harim are the ofos G which are Hills are the imot so when he says mountains this is like a mental process going through his mind mountains and Hills beg Mercy for me he's basically saying Mom and Dad it's your fault I became the way I became and what is the answer that he gets internally parents may have something to answer for again there are abusive parents and they do inflict damage Dage on their children that they were not denying that reality but ultimately that doesn't take away the responsibility that every person has to try to go beyond that environment so what he hears from his parents in his mind is we may have to ask God for Mercy for our mistakes but that doesn't take you off the hook and he goes to the other ones as well he says Heaven and Earth Heaven and Earth is your environment a person says I was in a bad environment bad friends Bad Teachers bad schools didn't have role models in my community of course I became what I became what do you expect once again the same answer yeah maybe the community was bad but you can go beyond it you're not stuck and then sun and moon he says in in an agricultural economy uh the Sun ripens the crops and and and the Torah even describes the light of the Moon which is the reflected light of the sun ripening the craps so a person might say my economic condition prevented me from serving God either I was so involved in my business Affairs that I didn't have time to serve Hashem properly or I was poor poor and poverty made it difficult once again though you see this is an interior monologue really with himself and then refers to you know um like we would say genetics today but you know kazal talk about the fact that the stars or the constellations that you're born under can impact on your personality he who is born under the planet Mars will be lover of Bloodshed so today you know some people say oh we don't believe in masle that's superstitious but whatever we believe in DNA so so it makes no difference if the fixed factor of your personality is the kav or ma or whether it's your DNA the point is there is part of you that is hardwired there is part of you over which you don't have control you're born in a certain way so a person might say I just have a bad nature God it's not my fault right this is a whole challenge of the Human Genome Project that's mapping and sequencing all of the human genome and we're discovering more and more so scientists believe that not only are physical characteristics determined by genetics but even emotional characteristics and this raises profound philosophical problems about responsibility how can I be responsible for killing somebody I have the axe murderer Gene I have the disor disorganization Gene that's the one I have Etc in other words there's a whole philosophical problem that once you locate things in the biochemical structures of the body are you destroying the concept of free will now kazal already answered thatal say he who is born under the red planet will love Bloodshed can't stop that but you can make a choice to be a a moh or a murderer meaning within what is called genetic determinism there is always the capacity for virtuous choice so essentially the joshan learns that Alazar Ben Jord is going through all of the excuses in his own mind ticking them off it's my parents it's my environment it's my economic circumstan is it's my genetics I have an excuse I need an excuse I want an excuse the greatness of this man was in the final moments of his life he had the honesty to recognize there are no excuses human beings have the power of free will we are more than the victims of our circumstances we have to rise above it obviously people who have been victimized deserve compassion I I I understand that this may be a little delicate they need to be given emotional support of course but ultimately you can't live your life as a victim ultimately you got to make choices you got to rise above it a Elby I remember once hearing from a a radio psychologist a beautiful thing somebody was basically saying how can they be a parent since uh they were raised by abusive parents so the psychologist said that God gives everybody two chances to have a parent child relationship the first time is when you're the child and the second time is when you're the parents so if it wasn't right the first time you can still make it right the second time God is giving you that other chance you see we're not just victims you see because if all we are is a product of everything that was done to us that's a debasement that's a zilzil that's a cheapening of the C MIM within a person the image of God within a person so a person has to realize that if they allow their victimization to stymy their spiritual aspiration that is a self-imposed restriction that is not a reality so the first step of chuva is to recognize that all of the excuses that I think I have are of my own creation and that I would suggest is the definition of col nidr about the future because what you're saying is I know that in the course of the year I will put restrictions and limitations on myself these are nador but I am declaring that they are null and void that I am a free agent that the self-imposed limitations I put on my myself are my own Illusions and are not binding in other words seen in this way it's a statement of responsibility and a recognition that all of the excuses I have that TI me up n are really just excuses in fact this is the idea of the uh Anum Kipper we have five things we don't do right we don't eat we don't drink uh Etc uh these are called the Eno right so people look at the Eno as afflictions but there's another way to look at it they are expressions of Freedom an Kipper I free myself from the bonds of the body I'm not a slave to those things that's why it's been pointed out you know um should you wish somebody at somal right in Hebrew we always say have an easy fast Cal so some said well no I shouldn't wish you would Som Cal you should have a hard fast now fasting is supposed to be hard so I thought to myself that maybe there's a difference between the ninth of and jum Kipper because it's two different types of fasting the ninth of is a fasting of grief sadness Devastation so you experience suffering the fast of yum Kipper is Transcendence I'm above the physical I'm an angel I don't need the food and the drink and the other things and as a result Yumi yeah have an easy fast it shouldn't be one in which you're concentrating on your connection to eating and drinking and that's why it's so beautiful that the rambam has the laws of regular fast days and the laws of yum Kipper fast in two different sections of his book and he has two different titles the laws of Tish hilos Tanis the laws of fasting the laws of yam Kipper the rambam invented an unusual title H the laws of resting resting on the 10th of and he includes resting from or ceasing and resting from food it's not called a fast it's not called a deprivation it is called a cessation or a resting you're resting from the demands of the body so somal I think is actually very very appropriate so that I I would submit to you maybe the lesson of the future orientation in which I declare as ref hofman said I'm choosing my road on yum Kipper that this road is a road I'm free to take and any restrictions or limitations I put on myself like nidor are null and void because even if I think they're real and significant they are imaginary I can go beyond them I'm free in fact it's so interesting maral says a beautiful idea at the end of yum Kipper right we end yum Kipper with the blowing of a chauffeur at the end of him Kipper the blowing of a chauffeur this is one of those things that even people who are very very distant from yish kite and they don't even go to shanam Kipper but they'll go to SCH to hear the chauffer they have to hear the chauffeur and why do we blow the chauffeur at the end of Y Kipper the tourah says it's a z to the fact that when they're used to be the Jubilee year every 50th year which really began on yum Kipper not on rashash they would actually blow the chauffer Anum Kipper Anum Kipper in addition to rashash to the slaves would know that they're free so we don't do it on yum Kipper today but as to Y we blow right after Le so the moral asks an obvious question yoil is every 50 years so if the only reason you're blowing chauffeur after yum Kipper is to commemorate the chauffeur blowing of yo then you ought to do it every 50 years why do you blow the chauffeur of yoel every year it's yoel it's only once every 50 Earth so the moral offers a beautiful understanding of the tour and he says the tour doesn't just mean it's a commemoration of yovo but rather the meaning of the chauffeur blowing every year parallels the meaning of yoel because what what did the chauffer mean in yoel the slave goes free you are free you're no longer enslaved every yum Kipper the final message of yum Kipper is you are a free person you're free from the bondage of your sins the Aus of your past and you're free to make the decisions that you need to make it's a beautiful thing the slave is liberated now that's exil ating that's empowering it's positive but it's also a bit scary because it basically means that the final message of yum Kipper is you are we are responsible for our lives we are the captains of our ship we may not be able to control what happens to us externally that's from Hashem but how we choose to respond is not from hasem say everything is in the hands of Hashem accept the decision to serve him God does not make that decision you make that decision we make that decision that's what the chauffer is you are free go home as a free person you're not a slave anymore so all of this I think is built into the future orientation of yum ker but what about the other version in which you are annulling the vows of the past now let's take a practical example let's assume a person was on a diet and they were tempted by chocolate so they made a v chocolate is forbidden to me I won't eat chocolate and they make it baneta not bin they Mish they're not supposed to do this but they Mish make the language I make an oath I'm not going to eat chocolate at that point chocolate is as prohibited as kazer if a person eats chocolate after they made such a vow it is just as bad if not worse than eating a piece of ham but there is a procedure that you can go before a basin and if you can show that you regret making that vow and it was not a vow made for somebody else's benefit the analment can take away the vow in other words the analment of Monday can affect what happens the preceding Sunday you're changing the p you're not just having a new future you're changing and uprooting the past this is another important lesson that chuva is not only about changing your future Direction but Chua is about reframing and redefining your past now I remember from my um College days the famous novel Great Gatsby great work of American literature in which at some point uh Nick carow if you don't know these characters that's okay but remarks to Jay Gatsby you know you can't change the past and Gatsby says who lived a whole fraudulent life Gatsby created a whole identity for himself says says of course you can change the past what Fitzgerald meant we we don't have to go into now but thees of chuva is you're not just changing your future you're changing your past like a net changes the past what does it mean to change your past I did have AOS so God forgives me my future is clean but how can I change my past and yet there's a gar that says Rish says if you do chuva out of love out of love of God not only does he erase your sins but your sins are converted to Mitzvah how can a sin be converted to I understand forgiveness I understand eras I I mean that's also a tremendous gift but eraser leaves you with a zero meaning if I if I was in a negative billion and God erased all my debts that's a wonderful thing but at the end of the day that leaves me with a zero in my bank account that's better than owing a billion dollars but it's a zero R luy says no if you were in a negative billion you're now in a positive billion the Aus become mitzvas how can a varus become Mitzvah and the short answer is that if you use the negativities in your background as the basis for how you serve God then God retrospectively will look at all of those AOS as something that prepares you for your mission again let me give you a concrete example I've used this example before let's assume a person was an alcoholic a drug addict for many many years andem they finally got the courage and the determination to work on themselves and they've kicked it they're out of it I know I know you're never totally out of it but they don't do it anymore they're clean they're sober wonderful how do they deal with their past the 10 20 30 years there are two ways of doing it one way of doing it is that's a different life I simply amputate it I'm not connected to it anymore and that's fine that's called the chuva of amputation that may be necessary just like amputation is necessary but that does mean you're left with this huge hole in your life yeah the next 20 years are going to be wonderful those 30 years are just an abject failure okay sometimes you got to do it that way but what if you don't just forget about those ear but you become a drug or alcohol counselor who is able to help people precisely because you went through those experiences and had you not gone through those experiences you wouldn't have been able to do what you're doing what you're doing is you're taking those negative experience experiences and they become the source of your positive growth you've reframed them you've redefined them you've captured them you've subjugated them at that point the sins become the foundation of your spiritual identity this is actually a very important uh idea not just an extreme Cas of like addiction it's relevant to many many many people who come from let's say non-religious backgrounds often the way people do Chua is they kind of just forget those backgrounds yeah I came from Montana I came from South Dakota okay now I'm from I'm not connected to that world anymore I'm amputating myself from that world it was not a world of Torah it was not a world of Ras that's not my world that's amputation sometimes necessary just like medical amputations are sometimes necessary but you see that leaves you with this great part of your life that's just one big zero okay but I think the better chuva is not to ignore where you come from but to ask yourself why did aades put me in that environment now we're not going to get a definitive answer why are some people born into you know 50 generation rabinal families in yam and some people are born into a farming community in Montana I don't have the answer but the one thing that I can tell you is Hashem put you in wherever environment he put you because that is what your n needed your n needed 20 years in Montana you got to figure out what do I take from that experience but you can't ignore it you can't just say oh now I'm inam so I'm just going to be a member of the K World in which I will never really be a member because I'm 20 years behind rather just as I can look at the 50th generation Maya sharim and say they they have precious gifts they'll never have it's equally true that the guy who grew up in a farm in Montana has a precious gift that is theirs that the May charm person never has and each person has to figure out the meaning of their life so you look back right the notion that about shua gives up connections to those old that old world of course there are things you have to give up I mean of course I mean there are violations of I mean if a person happened to be a a strip dancer in a nightclub you know okay you know we're not going to say h just keep up the connection of course one has to figure out things but one has to ask themselves as well what did I gain from those experiences and then those experiences get redefined that's changing the past it's not just a future orientation where God wipes the Slate clean and from now on things are good you're actually converting the past from something negative to something positive I've mentioned this many times I'll just end with this I mentioned and forgive me if if I'm repeating the great of who suffered tremendously and was so devoted to to spreading Torah under very very difficult conditions Parkinson's for many years uh he's not he was not a baluba he grew up in a from family uh very very esteemed family in Chicago but uh it was a modern family he went to a co-ed High School Etc he was on the debating team the basketball team a world very different than the world of the Mir Yeshiva and he comes to the Mir Yeshiva and you know he had never learned gamorra more than uh an hour or two hours straight at all and in m he has a morning Sater for 4 hours and then he asks the Kusa he was exhausted mentally exhausted he says so what do you guys do in the afternoon here figuring the afternoon they must go on until you live he said well we just do it again he he couldn't he couldn't he couldn't even believe it so when he died he died uh I mean he was very ill but his death was very unexpected when he died suddenly so all of the eulogies were harping on the point that you see man can come from such a degenerate environment and he can transcend it he can escape it he can repudiate it he can move away from it that's how great he was he turned his back on all of the superficialities of American culture now I myself came from roughly a similar environment and you know I was a little offended actually because I said you know I don't look at my experiences even in a CO at day school or whatever it is as such a bad thing and I'm going to say maybe it's I don't have the right to say it I don't think R nen looked at it as such a bad thing not that he would send his children there not that he would Advocate it but here's the thing if you knew the rashash one of his great strengths was his ability to relate to people on all levels so often modern Orthodox kids from co-ed schools would come to miror and would see this rash in a big black coat and a long beard and the fact that he had Parkinson and his speech was impaired made it even more difficult and they thought he would he would have nothing to say to them this is he he has nothing to do with their world and all of a sudden he would be start he'd start talking about jump shots and all sorts of basketball vocabulary which I myself don't don't don't even know and the kids were amazed because here was a person who knew their world and lived in their world and showed them you can still be a and Anem meaning he didn't live a life in which he denied where he came from he used all of that environment to connect to people to inspire people I mean I know of others who literally created a new I you know I'm not judging them it's not my job to be critical I don't have the right but I know people who came from Modern envir ironment and they they reinvented themselves in AR Israel did not reinvent himself n v remained The Chicago Kid on the basketball team who grew to be a god Obi Israel and the Riva of the world's largest Yeshiva but never by denying what he came from and using what he came from as the source as one of the sources of his strength and that is the idea of chuva redefining your past not just changing your future therefore kidre offers both of these perspectives so I want to wish everybody AAR and again may this yipper bring Shalom and to and may each and every one of us find the closeness toes the light of yum Kipper The Joy of yum Kipper and may that Joy carry us forth in the entire in the entire year so thank you [Music] there some here