Rabbi Aaron Dovid Poston: Crying Out from the Oppression of Corruption

[Music] welcome everyone to the event midrash welcome home to tara and i really mean it and i plead i beg for all of my non not so observant jewish relatives friends subscribers viewers i'm gonna say get with the program what program am i talking about it's it's when we get through tonight we'll talk about why you should come to israel whether you're observant or not however it makes more sense to at least strengthen your observance if you're going to be in the holy land the land of israel and we at yamada are more than willing to welcome you right you want to set up a learning program one hour a week we're here for you you want to learn every day with us we're more than thrilled okay so whoever is listening to this outside the land of israel no we are getting ready for a big program i think we'll kick it off at hanukkah time that hopefully the uh the sega the lockdown will be over people will be able to fly in from the far reaches of the universe right from china from taiwan yeah we we don't believe in one country we were an equal opportunity right from korea we have people in korea who we uh converse with uh regularly all over the far east the middle east the western hemisphere the northern hemisphere the southern hemisphere we're here for you so hazrat hashem get on that plane and come and learn or make israel your home and strengthen your observance that's all i'm going to tell you it's about becoming real with your spiritual self okay so without further ado i want to introduce we're going to be talking tonight or today wherever you whenever you're listening in parashat what viera where hashem appeared to avraham but we're going to skip all that we're going to get right to the point one of the reasons that god appeared to avraham was one of the reasons is to inform him to actually have him sit and judge should i or should i not what's the din of the people of saddam we're going to talk about saddam and there's no question because we're going to talk about saddam and all of the the corruption that goes on in saddam we're going to compare that to different things that are happening in the world today so i mentioned in my email to the students that are joining us it's going to be a little bit on the political side it's we're not going to mention names okay you'll have to guess who who we're talking about okay so he sits there's a halacha that says that if a court is sitting in judgment for a life um sentence right whether to live or to die we'll call that a capital crime and therefore the punishment would be a capital punishment if the court was 100 unanimous thumbs down kill him right he's guilty guess what happens he's let free he's exonerated i think the word there's a word in acquitted i guess that's the word because he's not really exonerated per se but he's acquitted okay so he's let off the hook however if there's one person who says that he's innocent then he's killed so when we learned that avraham was asked told sit in the very beginning because it's missing above it's yashaf your shave without above it means that god wanted him to be part of the tribunal because all of the angels said these people don't deserve to live that was god's base then that was god's court but god if his infant wisdom knew that avraham was going to find schutz he was going to find some merit and he needed to negotiate it come on how could you do this to these people right if i can find 50 45 45 which is an important number but we're not going to go into that tonight you have to guess and then 40 and then 30 20 and 10. we're not going to be dealing with this tonight the only point i wanted to mention as an introduction was how corrupt these people were and god in his infinite wisdom he wrote in the torah right we have an oral torah also that if the base then says he's completely innocent it's unanimous he's left they're let free in this case avraham was the one who came to the defense of the people of saddam and on because of avraham just think about that in a second it's really hard to swallow because of that this is why in the end that saddam was actually um overturned and destroyed okay what we're going to talk about now is chapter 18 verse 20. the verse tells us and the lord said now there's different translations i'm going to tell you what i think it means since this is the chabad since the very since the cry of saddam and gomorrah had had has become great and since their sin has become very grave this is consistent with rashi because you'll see in rashi that this is past tense if you have the same uh sour sheets that i have in rash it says at the very bottom now it came to pass that's what he means has already become great the sin has already become great or the cry has already become great we're going to deal with this because in a certain sense what the cleo card is going to explain he doesn't agree with rashi he's going to tell us that it means that it's continuously becoming great that the i'm going to use the word corruption that the affliction the innocent victims people who are called victims are crying out and if they're crying out hashem hears their cry so god is speaking to avraham in chapter 18 verse 20. since the cry of saddam and gomorrah has become very great according to rashi it reached its limit and god has had enough that's how rashi seems to understand it the clear car will explain that it was is continuously becoming greater and greater what does all that mean why should there be a difference of opinion we'll have to see and let's begin with okay let me give you another introduction that there are two issues at hand one is called snoot and the other one is called ghazal and hamas so what does that mean that hashem heard the cry of the victims when it came to smooth we're talking about either rape or taking advantage of of innocent young women okay so that is called snoot that's going to build one side the people who are victims of these crimes cry out the second shot the second idea that he's going to bring down is the idea of corruption the affliction that someone who is robbed someone who is on the the end the victim end of a criminal or aggressive and you know action is also going to cry out okay so let's deal with that as as we get to it he begins with this newt part and if you're on page that would be 88 in in the books that i passed around and you can find these source sheets i i beg you for your sake go to the yibbana website go to where it says the um the tuesday the tuesday the um the clear car and go to the right book you go to exodus genesis and go scroll down to the yara and you'll have to choose the uh the title hopefully it'll be clear at the end of the this year which title will be the fee to be because or since they sinned with sexual immorality meaning what are we talking about here we're talking about the word great as increasing or whatever has become great or we're talking about the cry or we're talking about both it's not so clear yet because he brings down the the part of the verse that for the cry of siddown and saddam and gomorrah was very great because of zenut on account of the sinner's newt that's all he writes now he describes it that the the desires the base desires of man rabbah will use the word as great without the word without the concept that it's continuously growing yet but he has the word literally means continuously growing or continuously moving so that's why i say that he disagrees with rashi but more than that because he himself says it that he disagrees with rashi and he describes why is it that this desire of man for sexual immorality is continuously getting great kiev because there's a small member there's a small limb within men now i want to just uh mention something i i mentioned a few weeks ago remind you something i said a few weeks ago that the word lush and kodesh the the language the holy language the words that we use to describe the holy language it's not hebrew but it's close it's a sister language why is it called hakodesh yes we mentioned because it's aloof and it's ethereal and it runs away from you and therefore you have to do hazard you have to constantly go over and over and over your lessons so that it doesn't escape from you that you should not forget the torah but the other famous reason is because there is no name for the sexual organs within man and therefore even here it's described as an average a small limb a small member within man but the important lesson here you can find the gamora 52 side two where it basically describes must be oh right the more that you try to satisfy your sexual desires the more hungry the more famished you become let's just go quickly to that gamora you'll find this number two on the sur sheet it's a man has a small organ used in sexual relations if he starves that organ and he does not overindulge he will be satisfied however if he satiates when he constantly feeds the organ and over indulges in sexual relations it is starving and therefore desires even more as it says now there's a verse in hoshia that's hosea 13 6. and this is the proof that the moore brings so i brought it when they grazed and were saved and satiated comma they were saying it and their heart became haughty therefore they forgot me now in hebrew i have to say that it says with the word roy and you'd would be hey is to be um like a a shepherd so it means to pastor a pastor means to feed feed passively i saw an amazing video this week about the difference between these cows that were fed grain or free-range eating the grass and it was absolutely amazing i mean i learned a lot but the meat the the quality of the meat the color of the meat the leanness of the meat just it was just much more healthier okay as opposed to quick growing right before they're ready to slaughter they just like have this uh the the grain-fed one just eat as much as they can and it doesn't really um turn into good meat as opposed to the one that is uh so why i bring this just i thought it was just interesting but he says like this i'll say it um that's that's what it so when you means feed them they will be satisfied and however the rest of the verse says sabu the yara but with you try to satisfy them yaram then they become haughty then they will forget me that's amazing right okay now let's go back into the clear car so not only does he talk about this idea of sexual immorality as the as what's behind the message of god hearing either the cry or the cry that was very great or just focusing on the idea that it was great and continuously growing he says so too it's also true by the sins of what thievery and hamas is criminally aggressive okay it's also kind of thievery alkane um and i believe this is where the political aspect i'm not going to go into politics but everyone's living through this with i'm going to call them either cruel laws or purely irrational laws made up by governments so i'll just translate therefore they place you should know what they did in saddam they placed amongst themselves laws that were not good i mean not beneficial there was no concrete anything that was beneficial either for society i'm just translating it right they placed amongst themselves laws or statutes that were not good that were not beneficial and here's the kicker and statutes and ordinances they couldn't even live by right i mean you look at some of the societies today every single one of the politicians they're all they can't live by them right they're all uh what's the word hypocrites right they establish these laws that they themselves don't even take seriously because you can't live by them and then he mentions canoda now we're going to go to gemara in sanhedrin 109b which basically says as is well known that the judges the judges were i like the word false but it means liar they were liars the judges themselves were just not true they weren't fit to be judges they had either biases interests themselves but what it does it creates such a sick society and if you want to go into like what how i relate to this how i relate this to like present day um look there was a huge fight whether or not to accept a certain individual onto the supreme court based on what um it's pop pure politics right nothing to do with the truth or the person's character uh it's just it's just unbelievable um it's just no words can express so what i want to do i want to spend a little time to describe what life was like in saddam and tell me when we described these things if some of our societies are what would you call our enlightened democratic societies forget about you know tyrants and despots and communism of course they probably fit in this even more so but i'm going to try to give you the examples without reading so much only where it's underlined where i had underlined it so the people sit down this is what they would say right you know it was like let's say a kibbutz you had some kind of commune or communal work where they all work together so if you owned a certain amount of cattle or sheep so of course they would take turns it's called a torah nude they would take turns guarding her being a shepherd or being a cowboy and uh feeding them or milking them or doing whatever you do with your with your livestock so what if you were part of the commune but you didn't own any so this is how it worked if you owned for every piece of herd you owned for every livestock you owned i'm assuming it's one month it could have been a week but you had to donate a day of your time to take care of it and if you didn't own any you had to donate two days of your time does that make any sense no anyways there was a certain orphan they gave and i'm assuming he didn't have any so he did something very interesting so they gave the job to a certain orphan who was obviously the son of a widow to take care of and he went he killed and he killed them all he went and killed all the animals what'd he do so he said to the people that if you owned one ox for each ox you own you take one hide right that's what's left after you killed in the heights and if you didn't own any of them you get two hides well what do you think well the people were kind of upset that doesn't make any sense he was trying to teach them a lesson so the people said to the orphan why are you doing this what's the reason so this is important he says the ultimate rule is parallel to the initial rule and meaning what comes out the consequences are from what you guys made up originally and i think this is going to be an absolutely amazing parallel i'll get to that hopefully at the end of this piece and go back to it but this is what he's trying to teach them just as you were corrupt i guess for just practical purposes so even the result is even more corrupt right the consequences okay i'll just read it anyway just as the initial rule was that if anyone had only one ox so um so they would have to um be on torrent uh as for one day and anyone who doesn't have any he has to do for two days so too let the ultimate rule that was the ultimate rule so therefore what comes after it meaning the parallel is going to be like we just said okay the other idea that this is how corrupt it was back then let's say you had a ferry that went across a river so if you took the ferry you paid one dollar if you walked in the water to cross the river you had to pay two dollars that make any sense that's how they would get you on that and if you had a row of bricks people would come by and just take one brick and then by before you know it you had no bricks left this is and if you walk through the ship with a big um a huge what do you call it a huge um bowl whether let's say it was grapes or garlic everybody that you passed by would take one and by the time you got through the end you got nothing left but they all said but i just took one what's inconsequential and if it's inconsequential what what what prime is there this is sick this is a huge problem and now this is the piece of the gemara that we mentioned there were four judges in saddam i think it means there were four types of judges and they were named for their actions there were people called chakrai which are called liars there's another name that they gave them which is a serial liar a habitual liar and there's another name they gave them safai which means a forger that's what i mean like fake but okay and then there were the mats ladina they were complete perversion of justice they were perverters of justice and this is who the judges of that society were okay now there's a few of the judgments in which they rendered and he wants to get the gomar gives us some examples and i think it's absolutely fascinating when i say fascinating i don't mean like i mean disgusting fascinating reminds you of certain laws they have in society today i mean maybe you don't go to this this extreme i have to admit maybe it doesn't go to this extreme but when you hear it you'll find something that it sounds somewhat familiar so let's say guy a hit guy b's life okay so guy a did a crime and he hit and he caused guy these wife to miscarry you know what the judge would say to guy b give your husband to guy a let him impregnate her and she'll give you a baby in other words he hit her and she lost the baby so let him replenish the baby replenish her with the baby okay i mean this is like okay let's say god forbid i mean that was already bad enough but let's say somebody uh severed the ear of somebody's donkey okay so a tore off b's donkey's ear so they would say to mr b you should give your donkey over to a who caused the damage and he's basically responsible for taking care of it until he grows another ear as far as i know i could be wrong as far as i know donkeys don't grow new ears so where's the justice in that in the case if one wounded another person what happens listen to this whoa it's like it gets worse and worse i don't know uh they would give the wound i'm sorry the one who wounded the fee in other words a wounded b okay so now what happens just think about this second there's a thing called bloodletting okay maybe the old barbershops used to do this so i heard it's called bloodletting if someone had a fever someone had an illness so they assumed that maybe there was right science be behind us for a certain type of illness that if you release the blood from the body so within the marrow the bone marrow would then produce more healthy blood i'm sure they didn't drain you entirely talking about just a few i don't know so they would put leeches on you i did that's the thing i know about putting leeches these these blood sucking uh little snail like animals slugs leeches huh okay but i don't know if that's that's not the way the torah described the uh gamora describes it but it could be the same idea if you let the blood go then the body produces within the new blood we would assume more antibodies a healthier blood that can fight off the the disease would make room for more antibodies to become activated so basically if guy a hits guy b b loses some blood so they're saying to guy b you have to pay a for being like a barber or being like a doctor who just let your blood out you understand he's like he's making you healthy you have to give him i don't know tip just give him a bonus you have to name a theme okay and that's pretty pretty crazy um one who crossed the river on a ferry this is uh they issued a new ordinance that if you cross the river on a ferry you have to give them four dollars but if you cross the water you have to give eight dollars so a certain time a launderer came and arrived the people said no i'm sad hey give four dollars for the for the ferry ride he says but i crossed in the water so they said to if that's the case so now you now you have to give the eight dollars because you cross in the water so what did he do he went ahead and he hit the guy um no he no sorry he didn't give the eight dollars and they hit him so he went for the judge so the judge says not only you have to pay them the eight dollars but you have to pay the guy that hit you additional fee for letting out your blood okay now this is not the piece i wanted to share and we'll get to it but eliezer the servant of avraham he happened to be in saddam he crossed through there and somebody moved and wounded him right we're talking about elianza avraham's servant very smart guy so what did he say to the judge he came for the judge in order to seek compensation he got hurt the judge says what are you talking about you have to give the guy that hit you money so you know what he did he hit the judge he smacked the judge he made blood come out of the judge so the judge one second he came to the judge fine he took a stone wounded the judge and the judge says what's going on so eliezer said to him you know the fee that you're supposed that this guy is to be paid by me in other words you originally accused me of hitting somebody which i did okay so i'm sorry i was hit therefore i have to pay somebody so now that i hit you what now you owe me so basically you can take the money you owe me and pay the other guy right and let my money remain where it is isn't that smart of eliezer the more continues to discuss the sins of the people of saddam okay basically they didn't want you to have guests right so basically if you were short they would stretch you on the beds if you were tall they would cut your feet off to make you fit i mean there was some really crazy stuff going on here i want to skip through this i don't i don't want to really skip through it but i'll tell you another idea they didn't want you to give to dhaka and charity well really no they didn't make a law like that you can give as much as you want you know what they did they met they had a law you could not sell bread and water to a stranger so stranger might come to town looking for hospitality money and whatever money they collected as a schnorer as a for charity that when you gave them the money you would write on it was a coin i imagine you scratch into the coin your initials if it was a bill which i don't think they had would you write your name on it and guess what happened nobody would sell them bread or water and they would die and then the people this is how sick they would go back and take the money that they originally gave the person like it's on the trust right a trust system amongst these i think there must be a movie like that trust amongst thieves a similar title anyway so can you imagine giving somebody money with your name on it because we know that putting your name on money does not help anything but in this case it's dumb it's called meet us dom these are the bad character traits of the people sedona very bad i wanted to skip to the bottom here because this piece we're actually going to hear again there was a young young woman who would take out bread to the poor people and she did it in a hidden way so she wouldn't become known but guess what somebody saw her it was revealed and so what did they do they smeared her with honey and they positioned her on the wall of the city and hornets or beans or whatever these things that attracted to honey they started stinging her to the point where she died in fact it says they actually consumed her and this is what it means when we read our verse in chapter 18 verse 20 because the cry of saddam and gomorrah is very great is great her name and the name for a young maiden is reva we're using the word rabbah but guess what this is what the gemara is telling us because of the sin of what of thievery okay but there's another mattress that also speaks about a naramu rusa a woman who's engaged they would engage in sexual relations with women who were still virgins but they were technically married they just didn't consummate the marriage yet that's what it means anyway refuted heard that rob says the word rabbah is an allusion to the matter of the young woman who's called a riva who was killed for her act of kindness it is due to that sin that the fate of people of saddam was sealed right because people did kindness this is a crazy crazy world we live in and i don't think that much has changed i mean the the extreme of it may have i i do believe that it has changed but um the concepts are still quite rampant inside our society so basically that's how we just ended that piece and it says that the love or desire for money is also something that increases and continuously grows and we have a verse in ecclesiastes five verse nine meaning uh chapter five verse nine whoever loves silver will not be sated with silver in hebrew maybe it sounds better but it's um oh hey kessif whoever has this desire for money will not be satisfied with money someone who has a desire for a million dollars i mean sorry one who has a million dollars has a desire for two million dollars whatever you have you're always looking for more i should say you always because some people are spiritually mature right and have gotten over this desire but we're talking about people who are not yet spiritually mature they have a certain amount of money and their whole life just looking to make uh make it double okay let's go on and he says al cain list al kane his colossians and that's why i told you he disagrees with rashi because he's going to explain like this that's the same word that was used in chapter 6 verse 5 by the by the mabul by the the flood look what it says over there and the lord saw that the evil of man was great in the earth the the yar let me just read this here the hashem god saw that the evil in man was very great okay and the clear car goes on commotion as uh was described already in its place meaning back in partisan here also the clear car says its explanation of rabbah is growing and increasing g'day la vajir lokaper rashrashi not as rashi had explained okay another thing and just to keep in mind just want to go back to that first rashi on the word rabbah because he explained something in terms of dramatic grammar so if you go back to the first source i gave you it says since it has become great remember the way the clear car is understanding rashi is that it's past tense and rashi actually says wherever the word rabbah appears in scripture the accent is always on the last syllable okay the last syllable however here if you look at the word you have like an upside down wishbone under the race but here the emphasis is on the race okay so he says if it was under the bet that would be translated as great or maybe present tense becoming great but this one has its accent on the first syllable syllable on the rash and that means has already past tense has already become great and then rashi gives other examples so why does the cleocard disagree i think he made a pretty good argument but he's going to make even a better argument he so he quotes the gamora it's really the medrash but we spoke about at the at the very end of sanhedrin 109b about the the um the na ramu rasa either the one that was raped right which we didn't describe yet but that was in the medrash or is the woman who was giving to her it was found out about and was painted with honey and left to die so he says regarding this regarding a particular young lady gam the midrash so not only did the gemara bring it down but also the midrash zesnam meaning that it deals with two different women two different young women one isn't involved with the love of money not that she was but with thievery and whatnot with let's say uh you know they were against or giving charity and the other one was dealing with sexual immorality so he says here kiriva zoo because this young woman she cried out because of what they did to her al-shannatna kemaklani because she gave food to the poor which is this is the increased desire for money which we'll call greed lead me to zoo which would bring you to this type of character trait of killing somebody over money right and so he says there's two types right hey riva one is the cry remember we were asking from the very beginning that god said since the cry of saddam and gomorrah has become very great and i mentioned to you that there's two aspects one is sexual immorality meaning the victim is crying out and the other is the because of theft or money issues that the victims are crying out so he says hey takasriba one is the crying out of the young maiden who's a na rama arrested the engaged young lady uh shared sa'aka of the year she cried out in the city the ain't mo shia la and nobody hears her right i remember growing up there was a story god forbid it happened but i think a woman was attacked in new york city and i think there were like 50 neighbors that all claim they heard it and each one said someone else will call the police someone else will deal with it and i don't know it's because there was so many people like if you knew you were the only one perhaps hopefully you would do something about it um but it's it's a sickness in society that where you would ignore the cause of someone in need to the point which i'm not sure if the person died but it was pretty bad it was pretty awful enough and the second idea one second and that's what it means of zakat saddam meaning the crying or crying out within saddam and the other cases meaning the women the young women that were already engaged to be married were abused and therefore zakat robbie mishpot is a very interesting concept so basically come down to what the idea that the crying out of the masses this not just the masses this this great cry for justice people were crying out for justice they wanted justice and i can see this today there there's a great injustice happening okay so i'm not going to mention any names i told you but it seems like it seems like there's a great injustice and just to appoint someone for the supreme court they want to impeach somebody or get rid of somebody it's crazy because as i know many of my my listeners are beneath one of the seven no high laws is to set up a system of justice you will be instrumental in who you choose you have to choose the least of the corrupt right people and if society is so corrupt i'm only going to leave you to not me the torah and we're going to see what you have to do he's going to describe the torah will describe what you have to do if all else fails you may have to leave the place but if you have the opportunity to change society you have to do whatever you can to help instill a proper system of justice the corruption it will eat at society so bad and leave it with as chaos which we're going to see shortly in chaos everyone will leave each other alive and even the righteous will suffer greatly which we'll see very shortly so did i translate that last piece uh miss pak means the affliction basically the um it's the same word used for the saras on the skin then i call that an affliction it's a sickness it's a real illness okay so let's go to the neck the len the next paragraph says urila de vareno as proof for our words so now he's going to go into the proof for everything he said and the fact that it says now this is like a combination of chapter um chapter 18 verse 24 and 25. it says which means even to wipe out or destroy that sadiq a righteous person with an evil person that's what avraham was bothered by i understand justice got it bad people suffer but why should the righteous suffer why should you wipe out your god you're able to distinguish between who's right who's good and who's bad right why should the righteous suffer avraham said from where did abraham come to even ask this question elohim having my mark because he understood that statement zakat saddam kiraba that the cry the outcry of the suffering of these victims in saddam is very great was dealing with znus zunus again is sexual immorality and this is a running theme the clear card goes over and over again with is the komakom uh any place where you find sexual immorality okay i'm going to read this word i hope i don't get it wrong and the musia never heard that word before in my life so on account of sexual immorality this word which i looked up in the jastro dictionary which is an aramaic hebrew dictionary english hebrew dictionary but i found the website called ba and it means chaos confusion or disorder so when there is sexual immorality what comes into the world is chaos and confusion and disorder and it kills as a result of this chaos it kills the good people along with the evil people and you can find that vika rabbah the because what should have happened the righteous people should have left so if you don't want to leave you better fight for justice in your place let me give you an example i met i'm in the mid 80s i was working in a bakery and it was interesting because it was had a walk-in oven where do you have a bakery with a walk-in musta they had a lot of business and so when you come first thing in the morning time to make the doughnuts or make the bagels very early in the morning you can basically walk in and sweep the oven before you turn it on okay this was a german family i worked for a christian german family and they had a walk-in oven that wasn't the point the point was that they left nazi germany in 1933 not again i'm not sure exactly how it worked but they told me they saw the writing on the wall i think that hitler yamakshama had just come to power or he was coming to power and they fled that was called an act of protest interestingly enough i had a conversation with a friend of mine um i'm going to guess it was about half a year ago when maybe a little bit longer when these riots were going on in america and he was a little bit um i'm going to say slanted towards black lives matter or antifa i'm not sure exactly where he fit in but he he um he was a little bit leaning towards the riots where the people should express themselves why am i telling you that so i had posted something about these people who keep the seven of head laws obviously all gentiles should keep them but the righteous ones the righteous among them are really actively seeking to make a change in this world and make a better world according to god's will and uh he wanted to know what i thought was a torah perspective and so i basically look if you're living in a a lawless society you have to vote you know you shouldn't participate in these protests you have to make a change through voting right through legislation through education there's so many ways but to break the laws of damaging people's property that's stealing right killing it happens you can't violate oh my god i'm stuck in a corner and i have to like hit back like i have to defend myself no there's so many productive ways but my point to him was that if all those fail you have to leave the place and he said where do you find such a thing i said we have a madrish if you remember correctly i was about to say hitler pharaoh yamashima right pharaoh was looking for what they call the final solution to the jewish problem okay he didn't want the messiah to come he had astrologers some guy i'll just mention him moses moses our teacher was descending on the world and his soul was very holy soul and pharaoh felt wherever the soul is going to get rid of him wasn't sure how what where so he asked advice he had three advisers what should i do maybe even proposed it i have a feeling ability either gave him the idea but bilum certainly said go for it man that's the right choice what was it kill all the jewish males yes that was bilum's either idea or uh suggestion or up with agreement what about who the other two guys job job remained silent and as far as we know and understand job was afflicted in order to cry out right as a result of his silence and who is the third jethro so when you compare jethro to job you really get a clear idea that job did not really handle correctly he should have done what jethro did what did jethro do he ran away he ran away in protest right well they say run away to fight another day at least you can protest from afar right if you're dead you can't really protest anyway it seems it certainly seems that jethro did the right thing so here he says why should the good suffer with the bad mean people why should the righteous suffer with the evil people because the righteous people should have left that polluted and infected place however the only the only um the only sin that actually it affects the the land itself is sexual immorality sexual immorality we all know the headings what they're what what they are obviously adultery but homosexuality and various things like that so to listen to impartials of our ielts if you go to vaikra chapter 18 verse 27 it lists all these ancestral relationships that are forbidden from the torah and it mentions towards the end bestiality and homosexuality okay it's not me it's the torah akadosha and at the end on verse 27 it says for the people of the land who preceded you this is telling the jewish people the canaanites they were in the land they did all of these abominations that i just mentioned until and the land became defiled in hebrew the titans so the land became defiled he feels even ida worship is does not severely affect the land like znude like sexual immorality does how do we know that anyway it says the land can never become impure for example through either worship how do we know let's say you have a mountain and people worship the mountain something that's mahuba cargo something that is connected to the ground can never become forbidden right or you mean you can't walk on that mountain anymore you can't mine that mountain you can't even use that mountain for directions just go around the mountain to the left what does that mean that's true so let's look at this gemara for a second just to show you just happens to be in gamora sanhedrin 47b was talking about the idea of people worshiping graves we're going to skip that point but basically this teaches just as objects of idol worship are not forbidden when they're attached to the ground this may come as a shock but like i said we're talking about a mountain so it's written in the torah you'll find this in deuteronomy chapter 12 verses 2 through 3. it says you shall utterly destroy all the places in which the nations whom you are to dispossess serve their gods upon upon the high mountains and upon the hills and under every leafy tree and you shall overthrow their altars and break their pillars and burn their trees with fire the sharing of trees it is an obligation to destroy their gods that are upon the mountains but there's no obligation to destroy the mountain itself if even if they are their gods meaning that if people worship the mountain itself as a god there's no need to destroy it as anything that is attached to the ground does not become forbidden so the governor says that's how it works out here too with the the story of the grave somebody and one of my students asked me how come the jews aren't out there destroying idols all over the world well this halacha actually only applies in eric's australia in other words maybe if you personally owned an idol yes and you want to do truva so you have to destroy your property but if i was in pakistan i don't remember what these taliban did but they blew up afghanistan we don't have an obligation to go out and destroy the idols that don't belong to us they belong to other people it's only in the land of israel that we have this obligation as that verse in chapter in deuteronomy chapter 12 verse 2 and 3 quite explain okay let's go on so we were how far down here we are so right after we read those words kilo hari melo hey him but we don't we don't destroy the mountains which would be their gods now as a result of the righteous people not leaving the place that had become polluted dinhu its logical conclusion would be that they will become what's the word punished with them let me give you another example you have a law called right when the city in israel and there's many details i'm not going to go into them all but if the city has 50 percent plus right it's a majority of idle worshipers so the city itself is destroyed and all the righteous people amongst them are to be just killed as well and all their money all the property even the righteous people but before they're decreed as they earn as the status of a city a wayward city that needs to be destroyed you have to send um diane you have to send sages you have to send people that can make that determination you're not going to do it from afar with binoculars you have to go in and inspect similar to what uh what's going on today you have to spend it send inspectors it's going to be play a very important role in the next paragraph we're going to talk about why it's important to inspect but anyway so if these inspectors come and you're you're a well let's say well no well you know the torah you believe in god and you have these uh entourage coming in to inspect if you're in the near hana wouldn't you flee wouldn't you run you would have to be stupid to stick around right now there's another interesting it says it's better to live in ariz israel in the city of ida worshipers than to live outside of the land of israel in a city of all jews and all religious and observant people try to digest that a second okay so obviously society can have such a strong effect on you and your children but when it comes to eric's israel the land itself also has uh such a strong effect in the positive sense so mizrat hashem people get this lesson and buy a ticket come home and come to the um baby trash and learn with us okay here we have the continuation where it says like this we said that they should have ran away because otherwise they'll be punished with them and there's another concept that we constantly talk about and it says call macomb she every time you build your own fences again sexual immorality that's where you find kedusha holiness and that's also in the medrush here it says interestingly enough if you go to chapter 19 verse 5 when the people of saddam are basically pounding on the door right and they want these men and i mean this guy i don't get him low offers his own daughters he says you know what damn take my daughters that's like incredible how can how can any sane human being do that but when you hear that they were homosexuals and i'm not making this up look at the words it says in chapter 19 5 and they called to lo and said to him where are the men who came to you tonight bring them out to us and let us be intimate with them in hebrew the name so we shall know them biblically right the word daya is knowing something intimately and we use that word in terms of sexual relations so if the men are asking for the men they're actually saying let us know then let us be intimate with them maybe that was just now i get maybe i can somehow going to download uh spin the bottle overnight or do something you know play mahjong i don't know horatio you to me that they were impure the whole place saddam and that's where they get the word sodomize that's the concept of sedom sodomize from this uh this concept of the homosexuality okay now we're in the last paragraph well i just want to mention one more thing that seems a little bit what should i say political so i was learning with someone today this piece in preparation and he said you know we were talking a little bit of the politics of what's going on in the world in terms of trying to have justice versus corruption and he said did you ever notice the heroes of the extreme i call them progressive left right that all their heroes have one thing in common so you know i i gave certain characteristics racial characteristics that i thought they all had in common no you know what they all have in common these heroes they all sorry they all resisted arrest and this is their hero if if the society is that sick that their hero is someone who resists arrest they all did that then where is law and order it's chaos it's absolute chaos and that was what the word andera lumucia means right that god will send chaos and confusion and man are they suffering from this but again so too that sadiq will suffer just as well as rush weinberg for so many years used to say sanity is contagious meaning insanity is contagious so sanity choose your friends well make sure you're sitting down with healthy people reading healthy books doing healthy things because if you're in a bad company insanity is contagious sanity is contagious so since it's contagious make sure this is coming chaos is coming guys chaos is on the way and guess what it's already there so i beg you wake up come home come home to torah okay now on the very last paragraph abraham actually had this claim he argued regarding this he said vishlama i get it hashem if you were going to send an agent you are going to do it yourself you are going to send an agent and what's the agent chaos the agent is has a name the shliyak of god is called chaos and what you're seeing right in front of you with whatever's going on however far after the elections in america you see this happening it's still probably for weeks but you know what's going to come out of this order it will come out of this but right now it's chaos what is chaos is where you cannot distinguish or it the angel of chaos will not be able to distinguish between the good and the bad remember this was avraham's question are you going to destroy the good with the bad because the truth is there is no person that's perfect right all human beings have some flaws and therefore hashem will send this agent of chaos who right because the fact is it doesn't need to distinguish everyone's guilty of something so therefore even for the um this called the angel of chaos will affect even the righteous because even the righteous have something to be afflicted with zes and what was their the bigger the biggest sin they have that they're living with them just living with them right we know this whole idea of a i i i forget the statement how to say in aramaic but the basic idea is that if you have a good neighbor right you're in good company if you have a bad neighbor you could be afflicted so the idea here is like if you had um sarah syracuse is not just a skin ailment called leprosy it can also grow on the wall of the house so if the person you're living with sharing a wall of the house in other words he's not even your he's not living in your house he's living he you chose him as a neighbor because you chose that house knowing that he's evil and if he's evil and he's talking lush and hard he's being a miser and he's doing all kinds of sins and he grows it actually not that he grows it but it grows on the wall of the house the whole wall has to be chopped down did you understand that you have to get rid of the the the affliction that's on the wall of the house so they the talmud tells us and judaism teaches us choose your neighbors wisely because you will suffer as a result of his sin okay so the wall that you thought was going to last forever has to be replaced it's going to cost you a bit of money but people will suffer as a result of their choices of who they hang out with now this is absolutely amazing what we're about to hear because remember avraham's having a conversation with god i get it god if you're going to be the one i'm sorry if you're going to send an agent i get you're going to send this chaos he can't distinguish between good and bad but you yourself said right god himself said in in verse 21 these are the words god said i will descend now and see one second so he's not sending an agent or you're sending an ancient well i don't know yet but god did say i will descend now and see whether according to her cry which has come to me they have done if that's true i will erect destruction upon them and if not i will know okay it's a little bit cryptic we'll get to it but basically it's like this era god says i will go down and i will see let me ask you a question can you imagine god going down to investigate about zeus right if god is so holy in kadosh and we already said that if you make fences against sexuality against the sexual immorality and nakedness so then you find kadusa hashem is the ultimate in kedusha how can god say i'm going to go down and see so it must be according to the clear car that the icker sin the prime sin that sealed the fate of saddam was not necessarily the sexual relations but something much worse something much prime more prime and that would be the thievery and the corruption that is the worst thing okay so if you think okay i live in a i don't live in a red light district i don't live in a sexual sexual immoral society i but i live in a corrupt society that's worse it's seemingly i'll say seemingly allegedly okay because he says like this in cain vadayna's if god himself is going to say i'm the one who's going to go down and see then it's it's not the prime sin because if it was that would not be a place for the shekinah to descend to now i do want to read one let me just see if i can find it i want to go to that verse so in genesis 18 21 the rashi says when god says i will descend now this teaches judges they should not decide capital punishment cases unless they see it meaning that they actually go to the site of the crime and investigate the matter okay so this is a that you have to go on scene you have to be on scene and therefore we doubt here i'm in mind with the clear car that the car was not the znus but the other issue and now if that's the case listen to this in verse 25 now these are also hard to translate for those who are familiar with hebrew we say shalom it we translate as god forbid or sacrilege right god forbid does not well let's say that's shalom but also literally let me just translate those words literally is mercy and peace it's like an excellent exclamation oh my god mercy and peace how could it be it's sacrilege right it's it's like a phrase mercy and khalilah what is that sacrilege right mercy and sacrilege it's the same thing it's just basically saying god forbid but guess what avraham used those words twice hallelujah in verse 25. look at it says far be it from you that's how they translated here i think art scroll translates it as sacrilege for you to do such a thing as this to put to death the righteous with the wicked in other words this really bothered avraham it really bothered him that the the righteous should suffer on account of the wicked so that the righteous should be like the wicked in other words they're not and yet you're making it like they are again far be it from you in hebrew sacrilege will the judge of the entire earth not perform justice in other words from avraham's point of view he wanted these people off the hook but god is the judge and he is going to do justice but from avraham's point of view he didn't look at it that way let's look at rashi real quick far be it from you okay we i think we read this no and if you say that the righteous will not save the wicked why should you kill the righteous in other words wouldn't it be enough for the righteous to save the wicked why does the wicked have to kill you know it's like the other way around according to him now far be it from you the word khalil which is hulet unfitting for you and that's what we're going to talk about shortly that it's not fitting for you in other words sacrilege it's sacrilege for hashem who's all good to end up killing also good people on account of um the evil as it says so you did to the generation of flood and the generation of this dispersion it doesn't look like it is proper so let's go back to the last few lines of the clear car he says meaning it's sacrilegious for you made sadiq la russia for you god not to be able to distinguish between the righteous and the evil people we all know that there's nobody that's perfectly righteous even that sadiq have an aspect of some sin nevertheless ain't hadin isn't it logical no things you shoving the initial is showing it's not logical sorry mcconnell called aina did but this is avraham's expression to hashem that it doesn't make sense that you will equate the punishment of the evil for the righteous to be punished just as the evil are and that's what he means and the part of verse 25 where it says let me just find the words it is 25 black sadiq russia i'm looking again it is there it's in the middle of the verse so that the righteous should be like the wicked right this is what avraham had had a problem with but guess what that's going to be the reality when it comes to the ownish at least in this world and look at the last rashi would you judge will the judge of the entire earth so the hay of hasho faith now allies with a khattaf as a question will he who judges not perform true justice so this is a warning to everyone okay you have to be on guard who your neighbor is it's a sin it's a meaning it's already ahead it's already worthy of consequences and ramifications if you choose to live in a society that is corrupt you have to make the effort making the effort and that means if you stand the chance of passing legislation or electing officials judges that are not corrupt a society that doesn't have crazy laws right to make any effort could be peaceful protests right so you make the effort and if that fails get up and leave move get out right move from that place and that is what the lesson is today so that's how serious it is okay so bazrat hashem you'll find like-minded people you'll get together and you'll at least protect yourselves as best as you can and create a society that's right hashem that is just because that's what god wants of you and for the jewish people among you we already have a place open and ready warm a warm welcome home to torah um and this is uh i could just give you a blessing have a a great winter right we're getting rained on hashem i say stay dry stay warm um but we want everyone to have a great shabbos and get into the get into the scripture get make it a lifestyle become god right uh consciousness to have god on your mind at all times because this is what he wants he wants that relationship and being an actress throughout makes it much more real okay so mizrat hashem we'll see you all soon and for short next week this rather show have a great life [Music] is