A Heart of Flesh - Ari Abramowitz: The Land of Israel Fellowship

i want to invite ari here into the conversation to bring the parsha which is so critical in to this conversation this is the parsha that the jewish people have been reading for thousands of years and we always read this parsha right before rosh hashanah so the message right now it's for us very much so so ari take it away shalom friends these are very intense times wasting times during these days feels like an even greater tragedy than usual because of the great potential of spiritual growth available to us during these days and for me it feels like every direction i look in the god is speaking to me very loudly i'm not always spiritually sensitive sensitive enough to understand the message but that doesn't change the fact that i feel like i'm being spoken to in a very profound way and you see being sensitive to the type of communication is still a skill i'm nurturing and developing it's in it's an art that i've personally come to believe is available to us on the deepest level when we're in the land of israel and that is why i wanted to share this message to you from this holy special place this building right behind us on the arugud farm because this building is a manifestation of the concept that with hashem's help i'm going to try to share with you right now you see when i first came to israel i was learning with one of my rabbis in the holy city of jerusalem and he said a very strange thing we were sitting and learning with him and he said this room is filled with japanese music and one of us said to him rabbi what do you mean japanese music i don't hear any japanese music and he said it is this room is filled with japanese music and we said what do you mean rabbi and he went on to explain he said imagine there was a shortwave radio here on the table and the radio was tuned into a station that plays japanese music meaning we would hear the japanese music here in the room but if you're tuned into the proper frequency you can hear it he went on to explain that god is everywhere he created the entire world the whole world is filled with his presence but when you're in the land of israel you can tune into a frequency in which you can experience god's presence in a way that you simply cannot experience anywhere else in the world you see when jews from around the the world when they come to our mountain they walk into this breathtaking building they say wow this must be your bait knesset this is the most beautiful bait canes that i've ever seen now what's a bait knesset it literally means a congregation a place where people congregate it's the hebrew word for synagogue but for some reason i felt significant internal resistance to calling it a synagogue because like many of you there are certain things in life they come with a certain amount of baggage and one of those things that have baggage for me is a synagogue you see when i was a little boy i would go to synagogue with my family every sabbath i never wanted to go even though once i got there it wasn't all that bad i would see my friends and there were few old men that would give me a candy if i shook their hand smiled and said shabbat shalom but there were stretches of time that felt very long in which i would mumble words out of a prayer book most of the time whose definition i didn't even know what it meant i didn't even consider what it meant now i'm not trying to belittle this experience for much of the uh for much like time that we spend with the children or spouse you can't always engineer the ability to spend quality time with each other you really need to make it a point to spend quantity time and within that quantity time you very often find quality moments so while the majority of those countless hours of prayer felt like mumbling words i wasn't thinking about nonetheless they became engraved in my heart and became a part of my very essence and when you pray three times a day for the ingathering of the exiles and the return to jerusalem and the rebuilding of the temple that desire becomes one with your own desire just as it's become one with the desire of multitudes of generations of jews who have mumbled these words to themselves as well yet after moving my life here to the land of israel my relationship with hashem has transformed in indescribable ways and the old way of relating simply didn't satisfy what my my heart and my soul needed in the land i don't even know if i could use the word transform it's as if it went from being a two-dimensional black and white relationship to a three-dimensional relationship with vivid colors as opposed to going a synagogue and often feeling like it was a chore or a distraction to continuing on the rest with the rest of my day my prayers and my relationship in the land of israel has become much more of a dialogue with god where i pour out my heart to god and prayer and everything that happens to me throughout the rest of my day is is his response it's a dialogue it's a communication in the first book of kings god comes to king solomon in a dream and offers him one wish now many of you may know this story and say yes solomon wished for wisdom and i thought that was true up until jeremy pointed out to me that if you look in the original hebrew it was not wisdom that he wished for but a love shomaya a listening heart wisdom is something that you have in your head a deep understanding of the truth of things but a listening heart means that you're listening to hashem that you're in communication with god that my friends is what's happening to the jewish people now as is foretold in this week's torah portion and the lord your god will bring you to the land that your forefathers possessed and you shall possess it and the lord your god will circumcise your hearts and the heart of your offspring to love the lord your god with all your heart and with all your souls so that you may live this was the last shabbat before rosh hashanah the last shabbat of the year and to put it mildly this was an eventful year it was a dramatic year and i think many of us sense that it was only a taste of the intensity of what's in store not only for israel but for america and the entire world and as we speak right now in the land of israel as the sun begins to set we are ushering in the 25th of elul which was the day in which the world was created rosh hashanah is the new year for all of mankind for adam and eve were created on the sixth day which means that tonight and tomorrow is the 25th of elul which is day one the day heaven and earth were created so we're entering a time of creation and recreation and so these days are precious every moment is a valuable opportunity to do chuva to repent and to seek to align ourselves with the creator of the universe and what are we commanded to do we're commanded to return to god to return to ourselves our true selves to choose life and what is true life true life is a true deep and loving relationship with god this is what the whole world is yearning for they may not know it but the unrest anger and volatility volatility that's overtaking the world is coming from a deep and often subconscious thirst to connect with god hashem through your holy prophet yahushua ezekiel you stated i will take you from among the nations and gather you and from all the lands and i will bring you to your own land then i will sprinkle pure waters upon you and you will become cleansed from all your impurities i will give you a new heart and i will place a new spirit within you i will remove from you a heart of stone and place within you a heart of flesh i will place my spirit within you and i will cause you to follow my statutes and you will guard my laws and fulfill them you will dwell in the land that i gave your forefathers and you will be for me a nation and i will be for you a god please hashem manifest this promise in the world today not only for our sake but for the sake of the entire world hashem we've been praying in synagogues around the world for thousands of years but our hearts are yearning for something more our hearts are yearning to rebuild the holy temple in jerusalem and return to you in the great house of prayer khibaiti bait filayi my house is a house of prayer for all nations it's not just a synagogue that we want hashem it's to return to you in a house of prayer for all nations thank you my friends back to you jeremy thank you ari thank you ari