Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: First Fruits and The Truth of Jewish Privilege

[Music] i'm sorry i was a little late i was in the old city for a um for sugar process of an old old friend of mine and uh as you know to get in and out of the old city is not always the uh the easiest thing especially if uh you're someone who gets lost uh as you wander around the streets hashem we're not we're not too late today anyway um i'm going to talk a little bit about the very first mitzvah in the parsha and the very first mitzvah in the parsha is the mitzvah of bringing first fruits now fruit is a little bit of a misnomer because the mitzvah of bikurim applies to the seven species of eric israel which includes krita wheat barley so we don't call that fruit that's grain geffen geffener grapes fig rimon pomegranate zaichemen is olives and divas as hopefully you know does not refer to b honey thank you but it refers to detani tamar and these are the seven meenam that eret israel is praised for and there's a mitzvah when there was a bait dash not today we don't do it today but when there was a bait in mcdush one took the first of those fruits as they ripened in the field you put a little ribbon around it so you'd keep a mental record of it and you would bring it to the beta mikdash in a basket and you would put down the baskets in front of the mizbayach and you would recite a mini history of the jewish people in only four verses beginning with arami ovaidavi love on the arimian tried to destroy my father the yard mitsurama my father went to mitzrayim and he became a great nation and the egyptians enslaved us and god and we cried out to god and god took us out now if those verses sound familiar uh that's a very good reason why that is so and that is that is actually the foundation of not only that part but is largely based on rabbinic expositions and elaborations of the four verses that i recite it when you bring be korean and just a little bit of commentary in that although it's not really our topic uh why did khazal decide that the parsha of bikurim would be the primary vehicle for recounting the story of the exodus well what let's see what the alternative would be the alternative would be is we uh we actually ought to read the story of the exodus now if if we were to read the story of the exodus that would be the first 13 or 14 chapters of the book of shamos so ghazal had a time management problem here if we actually read the story of the exodus we're not going to finish the seder in one night so hazal we're looking for a summary like a cliff notes a summary of the seath mitsuram that can then be elaborated upon and lo and behold we have such a summary and that is the mikra that is the declaration that one recites when one brings becorium so bikitsur there are two different mitzvos of bikorim there is the bringing of bikorin and there's the recitation on the bikurim and after you bring them and you recite them they're then given to the kohanim who are able to consume them now again it's a little tricky are be korean a corban no they are not bikram are not a korvan because they are not sacrificed in the basa mikhtash they are brought into the basement into the courtyard of the basement miktash they're put down in front of the mizbayach a recitation is made but then the kohanim take them home because it was important to understand that bequarium is not classified as a carbon because the kohanim eat them in their homes wherever they live they don't even have to eat them in yerushalayim well well they do have to eat them in your shalom in your shelling but they don't have to eat them in the basa mikdash itself right so this is the mitzvah of becorium now the third now there's a whole track date of mishnah about this mitzvah it's called masak bikorin there is no babylonian talmud on it because in the order of surahim there is no gemara bhavli at all but in the tamil ushalmi which does have gemara on the order of agriculture there is a ushami masakaspi karim but in perigimel of the mishnah of masakrikurim it describes the great pageantry and beauty of the ceremony in which different cities would come representatives of different cities would come and the anshe you shall i am whether it was the carpenters the tailors the shoemakers as each delegation would come they would rise oh the people of bethlehem the people of beit shan the people of swats baal they would stand up to honor the people who would bring because now obviously that doesn't mean they stood up for every single individual you'd have millions maybe millions of people but there were times in which people would organize delegations from cities and the ancient line would be muhammad in fact there's an interesting point you have celavaic of why you once explained you may have noticed a min hug and probably you know you for at least for the younger people in the crowd this is probably the only minute you have seen but i remember a time when it was not the minute that when a khatan and akala are walking down the aisle we stand up for them and as i say for the younger people you this is probably what you've always seen but i do know that when i was younger this was not a widespread minute and what is the origin of standing up for the khattan and the kala so most people will tell you because there's a maymerchazal is like a king and by extension a kala is like a queen so you stand up when a king or a queen walks by but there's akasha on that the khatan is not a miller until he's married when he when he's walking down the aisle he is a single man right so if anything i should stand up for him you know on the way back although most people are dancing anyway but the way there he's not a melody yet so here's what jeff sullivan says this is a very interesting said we stand up for the khatan and for the kala because you stand up to honor somebody who is about to do a mitzvah so i'm honoring the khatan not because he's a melech i'm honoring the khatan because and the kala as well because he and she are about to perform a mitzvah and where is the makar that you stand up to honor people who are coming to do mitzvahs be cory he says the mishna bequarium where the ansha you shall i am stood up to honor the people that are bringing because it's a beautiful macho in other words it's an unexpected source in other words the idea of standing up for the khattan is nothing to do with khattan it has to do with doing a mitzvah and the proof is from bikurim but i have to say i don't really understand myself the parameters of this i mean i have to stand up to honor somebody doing a midfield so so when you come to schulte to put on your filling and i'm already diving do i have to stand up because you're putting on filling i'm not sure i understand this because people do all sorts of mitzvoth that i don't stand up for but it could be maybe these are seasonal mixed votes once in a lifetime hopefully once in a lifetime mitzvoth although becomes an annual mitzvah and the like okay it also mentions that people would bring their becorum in very fancy baskets the wealthy people would bring their be korean in golden baskets gold or silver and the gohanim would take the bikurim and give them back their basket give them back their basket the poor people could not afford a gold or silver basket so they would bring their be corim in wicker baskets and they were too embarrassed to ask for the wicker basket back so the martin papakama remarks you see from here a very sad truism that the poor tend to get poorer because if you're so if you're so poor that you don't you know all you have is a wicker basket you lose the wicker basket right poor people wind up getting poorer with as little as they started off with to begin with and unfortunately that happens to be a almost a truism in economic and economic life in fact there was a famous famous study from the united states federal trade commission it goes back to the 1960s and this is very very interesting that retail food prices in supermarkets that were located in low-income areas were higher than the prices for the same products in higher income areas this was a famous study now there's actually a justification for that because in a low in the low income eras there's more crime the insurance cost more money they have to get extra security but it still was that for a can of peas or whatever a loaf of bread a poor person might wind up paying more money than a person who lives in a rich neighborhood just a very very sadly very very fascinating study and it confirms what ghazal says bus sir anya asliyani usa that poverty follows those who are poor now again that's a study i i haven't been keeping up with it i'm not sure if that's still the case but i do remember in the 1960s there was a famous famous study that for the same items poor people paid more than rich requests rich people didn't get the same items which people got fancier bread or something so they paid more but for the same wonder bread or whatever it would be uh the rich price was less than the poor price okay all right so bucketzer i want to focus on an interesting kasha an interesting question that the tosawas yamtif raises was the rabbi of prague in the 1600s a great great goddess and he wrote one of the great commentaries on the mishnah it's called toast vosimtif because he saw that just as there's a rashi on gomorrah and it's augmented by tosovos so too in mishkana you have rava bhajyami bhartanura who is like the rashi of the mishnah and the tososynthe wrote what he considered to be tossed his name was yomtov that was happened to be his name and the tosamptif fulfills the function of tosus and his this is saskatchewan the gemarian maid cotton says that originally the minute of quali israel was that when people would die families would pay whatever they could afford to give the guy a fancy funeral people had fancy coffins fancy garments and sometimes they would go bankrupt because they would really try to spend so much money on funerals so robin gamble saw how devastating this was for many people he was the nazi he was the head of the sanhedrin when he died although he had plenty of money he was very wealthy he instructed that he be buried in a plain wooden box with no adornments and that he wear plain white linen garments and the purpose was shalom lavayesh me shane lo not to humiliate people who couldn't afford it and because he set the example that has become the minute of at least religious juice although funerals are still much more expensive than you might imagine even a simple funeral in the united states berkeley of narrative it's much cheaper in the united states a funeral a a no-frills orthodox jewish funeral is on the average seven thousand dollars it's quite amazing you know why should it be that expensive but okay because to throw it you don't have that particular problem except for the maseiva but be it as it may raman gamlil set a precedence that we don't want to embarrass the poor by creating distinctions between the rich and the poor and therefore everybody is buried the same way we have a similar example and the fifteenth above that we celebrated last month in which uh the vinod israel the jewish woman would go out and they would look for marriage partners and it mentioned that all of the women wore borrowed garments and they were simple white rich women or people from rich families did not dress in a fancier way than the women of poor families and again the purpose was shallow levies so fracked the titus yamcha fakasha why in the basa mikdash do we allow rich people to bring gold baskets and poor people bring wicker baskets we ought to make a takana of uniformity that everybody has to bring their bikurim in a simple wicker basket not to embarrass the people who couldn't afford anything better why don't you make the same takana shalol levayesh as me shanglo this is the question of the toslos yamtif so the ptosis yamcha's own answer is you're right we should have made such a takana but since the mitzvah of bikorim brings glory and honor to the basa mikdash the house of hashem we want it to be done in as beautiful a way as possible so even if that means the poor people are going to feel excluded but if people can bring it in a fancy way gold and silver we want to do it because simchat beta volcano for the honor and glory of the house of god we will try to make it as beautiful as we could make it this is the answer of the ptosis yamcha but i want to share with you perhaps a deeper answer and one that's very relevant for this time of year there is a mishna in the last paragraph that's a very very important teaching rabby mayer says it of adam what does that mean a person must bless god for the bad things that happen to him in the same way that he blesses god for the good things that happened to him the gemara explains this doesn't mean you recite the same brother if god forbid there are tragedies like death you make the bracha dayan god is the true judge if there are joyous or happy tidings we make the bracha yanu thank you god for giving me life or i make them god does good right so it's not the same bracha but when it says you have to bless god either way it means you have to be macabre it with joy serenity and acceptance meaning the same way when good happy things happen in your life you accept them as good and right so too when tragedies happen in your life difficulties you accept them with joy now obviously if you think about it we don't mean it's the same type of joy you know if you're dancing on the table because you got engaged or because you have a child or because you have a grandchild nobody says that when you lose a parent you're supposed to dance on the table in joy obviously that would be absurd after all we have laws of available but it means in the depths of your heart you try to reach a certain level of understanding and it's an understanding that i don't understand it's an understanding in other words that even though i don't understand why this is the right thing and why this is the good thing i know there's a hidden good that god has put into this i know that this is a vehicle that will bring out of me certain potentialities and powers that i otherwise wouldn't have and this is absolutely the case we see this in israel all the time we see this even in the united states adversity can crush a person but as nietzsche said not that nietzsche is a source for a torah thought per se but here he's right that which does not destroy me can only make me stronger we discover courage we discover resilience we discover determination we discover abilities that we never had to draw upon because we were never challenged to draw upon them and it's precisely the confrontation with darkness that brings out a great light many of you might know rabbi seth and sherry mandel and i i knew them both from maryland and uh rabbi seth used to work in arsenal for a long time and the number of years ago they tragically lost their son to a brutal terrorist attack their son i think he was was he 12 at the time their son and his classmate jose fish run were exploring the caves under tacoa a beautiful beautiful place beautiful town and some courageous arab freedom fighters smashed their heads in with sharp rocks pounding and forgiving for being a little graphic pounding and pounding and pounding on their skulls till the brains ran out and the boys were dead i'm going to speak about the mandela's because i don't know the ishran family but i i know that they went through the same suffering but from the perspective of the mandels that i do know very well i can tell you that this type of tragedy they were beyond grief they could not even cry initially they could not breathe to breathe required a conscious decision to take the next breath they had they had other children but they literally didn't know it's hard to describe this they didn't know how they could continue living but if you know the the rest of the story eventually they created a foundation in memory of their son i was actually a very good friend of of my son the son was kobe and they started the kobe mandel foundation which aids provides financial and medical and psychological and recreational aid to families that have been victimized by terrorism and over the years they have helped really hundreds if not thousands of people and they took the darkest deepest tragedy that any human being could have and they used it as an impetus to create light and healing and comfort throughout the world now the strange dynamic is and maybe i shouldn't even say this but if kobe would not have died if life would have been normal they wouldn't have discovered that now again i i i don't please don't misunderstand me i'm not saying oh therefore you know it's good that a child died because of this just that's like saying as people sometimes say without a holocaust there wouldn't have been a state of israel so some people's response i understand is okay so skip the state of israel and skip the holocaust i mean i hate to say it that way by saying you say the holocaust was a good thing because it enabled the state of israel well that's not such a logical argument really and to say that the death of the child is justified because it resulted in the kobe mandela foundation is maybe it's an overstatement and i'm not i'm not making that claim and i don't think the parents would make that claim pretty obviously but what i am saying is that when tragedies happen we have two ways of responding we can respond by hatred by anger by shutting down by leaving the world psychologically if not physically or we can say i have this challenge how do i turn it into something positive how do i bring light out of this darkness or in the more trivial way of saying it how do i take the lemon and make lemonade out of it so there's no question that that's what the gum army that is the depth of this gemara the statement or the mishnah you gotta bless god for the bad means you try to reach a certain level in your life and it's not instantaneous you have to be very careful when someone's going through suffering you don't immediately say oh you know you can turn this into a positive purpose no a person has a right to grieve a person has a right to complain a person has a right to be bitter a person has a right to some degree even to yell at god but at some point there are voter has to move from victimization to turning it into something positive it may take time and sometimes that has to come from within them not by somebody else giving them words of wisdom that's one of the reasons why when somebody is sitting shiva we don't initiate the conversation we wait for them to see where what direction do they want to go and then we follow it up okay so that's the meaning of that gamora and there's a lot more we can say about it but just to understand generally the concept of accepting even adversity with joy we don't mean the joy of you know dancing around a table but recognizing that sometimes the greatest lessons of what a human being can become is how they deal with adversity and challenge okay beautiful very important but the gemara then quotes a braiser and the braiser wants to look for a biblical source that you're high of to be grateful to god even for the bad as well as the good and one of the mokoros that it gives is a pasuk visa you shall rejoice in all of the good ashar natan that hashem your god has given you so hashem is yet and that's the name of god that represents is elokim and that's the name of god that represents justice punishment or retribution midatadin so the gemara has a nice treasure this you must rejoice in whatever hashem gives you whether he gives it to you from hashem the media of or whether he gives it to you from elokim which is the meetha taden that's a very nice structure in other words that is how you know to receive because now here is the surprising question where does that passage appear in the torah where does the torah say you shall rejoice in all the good that hashem gives you whether it's from midat or mediatadin it actually is a verse in vicoria that at the end of saying you bring your be quran and you make this declaration it says you shall rejoice in all that hashem gives you now is it not a little strange that a din that says you're supposed to accept with joy not only the good things in your life but even the adversities should appear in the mitzvah of bikurim that's very strange the mitzvah bikorim was a singularly joyous occasion it was filled with joy the farmer finally sees the firstfruits and he brings them to yerushalayim and there is singing and there's dancing so that's where the torah says you have to rejoice even though things can be bad it doesn't belong there maybe we could have had it for example when arun lost his two children nanda venavio on the day that the mishkan was dedicated and they brought incense with a foreign fire they took their own fire and brought it in or other available they didn't get married there because i'll have a whole bunch of availas that none of and of eu did and a fire came from god and killed two of aaron's four children he had four sons he lost two of them in one day so perhaps there the torah could have said you still have to accept god's judgment is right that would have been an appropriate place to put it in but why are you teaching this in the parsha of bikurim beacorium does not seem to involve any element of adversity so in reality maybe the statement that i just made is not true that bikorim in a very gentle benign way is a little bit of a pinch of the ear that life doesn't always turn out the way you want it to turn out because i'll have a saying adam wrote said because is a small measure of grain let's call it an ounce or whatever it is a person gets more pleasure from a little bit of grain that they produce themselves then a whole bunch of stuff they get from somebody else and rashi explains why do i treasure so much something i produced my own labor precisely because it's a product of my labor that which i produce by my work in my effort is very beloved to me that which i get by inheritance well okay i'll i'll accept the money i'm not going to turn down the money but it doesn't have the same joy as someone who earns it someone who produces it right you grow your own tomatoes you're going to have more pleasure in eating those tomatoes than if you bought them at the markets anything you work for you have a certain pleasure and joy in fact one might even say that i'm just to on one level i mean there are many many other dimensions but that is one of the reasons why parents have such a love for children because of all that we invest in our children our time our energy the inconveniences what did they say they say if children wouldn't be created so cute you know we'd never i would never spend the time of raising a baby or whatever it would be but they have those big eyes and this beautiful smile you know what can you do they just take you over in that way and the love is in fact that's even why again i mean it's a complicated question sometimes a child that has special needs a child that you got to do more for there might be a special love hashem gives you an extra measure of love for that child and it might be connected to the extra effort you have to put in to give that child what he needs that's why when people start businesses they often frame the first dollar or the first shekel or whatever it would be the first amount of money that comes in because that represents what they've earned their first earnings it's very important so think about a farmer most of us are not farmers really but think about a farmer you know farming is a very very rough business really you know you gotta plow and then you have to you depend so much on the weather which is not always predictable you need the right rain and the right sun and you have to worry about insects and then all sorts of animals that might come in and you work hard and then finally at the end of the long growing season you see the first glimmering ripening wheat barley pomegranate date and you treasure that because that's a product of your effort and badafka just like you want to save your first dollar you would love to save that first fruit for you and your family so what does god say that very first fruit that you treasure so much you don't keep you have to give it up to god now overall that's a joyous ceremony it is joyous but it's a little bit of a very gentle reminder that sometimes life involves sacrificing to god that's which you treasure the most that's what you most want to keep you have to give up so be corim is actually an appropriate place to teach the idea i got to accept the bitter with the sweet because in bikurim itself there is an element of the bitter and the sweet and in a way it's easier for me to internalize that message by becoming because i'm in a happy mood meaning when god forbid a person is hit with tragedy they're not always able to internalize the message but the torah teaches you the message at a time when you're open to it because you have a joyous heart that life is not always easy life has challenges life has sacrifices sometimes what happens to you is not what you envisioned it's not what you dreamed it's not what you hoped but you got to recognize that it's good and again let me emphasize i'm not only referring to extreme tragedies i'm referring to life in general you didn't get the job you hoped you know you didn't get into the school that you thought you wanted to get to things didn't always turn out exactly the way you dreamed that they would turn out but the hay of adam primarily means look at the life that hashem gave you and see the good in it as opposed to looking at the life that you didn't get and you wish you had and never seeing the goodness in the life that hashem gave you you know there's a famous uh parable it's not a jewish parable per se although i see i've seen this many many times a lot of interesting parables or metaphors from secular or even christian uh are sometimes made into jewish they they turn them into jewish stories whatever it is but this i think has jewish versions as well but its origin is in the secular world and this was a speech given at a special education convention i think back maybe in the 70s a long time ago and this involved a woman who was describing her experience of raising a down syndrome child and she talked about the fact that you know every married couple they get married and they hope and they assume they're going to have healthy children with no disabilities who will be brilliant and achieve great heights academically and then you have a down syndrome and all of those particular dreams have to be redefined so the woman gave a very interesting muscle this is the muscle that she gave that there was a person who very much was yearning and dreaming of going to italy she wanted to see the coliseum she wanted to see venice the canals of venice she wanted to see the museums in florence now italy was her thing she really was journeying she was not a wealthy woman so she scrimped and she saved her pennies and her dollars and she finally was able to buy a ticket but for some crazy reason there was a mistake in the processing so she got a ticket to holland instead of italy totally different country and she was so embittered that every moment of her two-week stay in holland she was thinking about all of the italian sites that she was not able to see but she never got to see the beauties of holland holland is also a beautiful country it's beautiful in a different way it's not what you thought you were going to get but just because you didn't get what you thought you were going to get doesn't mean what you got is no good or maybe it's even better so she said her muscle was that we have dreams for a certain type of child and we didn't get that type of child we got a different type of child but if you spend your whole life focusing on the child that you didn't get you never see the beauties of what god did give you and that was your point about the down syndrome of not focusing on the road you didn't take you know life has infinite roads all the time i mean forks in the road i mean we reach forks in the road you know many times a day whether yogi bearers say when you reach a fork in the road take it great great great advice you know but if we're always thinking about the road i didn't take then we never go anywhere we're paralyzed we got to look at the road we took not only now if the road restructures out to be bad hashem we have shiva we have to recalibrate that's true but if the circumstance is beyond our control it's not something we can change this is just what i have this is my life i got to see it as good and this is the subtle gentle lesson of bikumi so now let's go back to the toasters yamcha's question the toast of the yamcha question was the mishnah says by bequarim that wealthy people brought their bequarim in gold and silver baskets and poor people brought their bikurim in wicker baskets so the joseph junta asks why do we allow a ritual or a ceremony that discriminates between rich and poor does that not embarrass the poor people and make them think that they're inferior so here's the thing this is a subtle point if the mitzvah of bikurim is designed to teach us to see the life that god gave you as a good life to see it in a positive way not to compare yourself to others and look at the life you don't have then wait a second here why should a person be embarrassed because they're poor and why should a rich person be ashamed so to speak that he's rich hashem gave wealth and that can be used in many many positive ways and hashem gave poverty that can also be positive a person can learn humility and compassion by the way i know another interesting statistic in the united states uh poor people again there are many many exceptions poor people are more generous in giving charity than rich people obviously rich people give more charity but in terms of percentage of income a poor person gives more percentage of their income to charity than a rich person and the reason is precisely because a poor person knows how tough it is and feels more compassion for those who are suffering it's an interesting idea right poor people are marketing so if the quran is about seeing the goodness of your life then we don't have to engage in pretense we don't have to pretend oh the rich person is just as poor as the poor person he brings a wicker basket what are you pretending what are you ashamed of what are you covering up are you making an implication that one type of life is less important or less significant than the other type of life be corim is about accepting your life with joy and badasska therefore i can say i'm poor and i'm proud of it and you can say you're rich and you're proud of it and each of us have our own each of us have our function each of us have our purpose each of us have our veda and we are equally beloved by akadeshwar and that's why if if in general in life we do what we are concerned with not embarrassing the poor the koram we're not talking about embarrassing before because in reality there's nothing to be embarrassed about okay that's why we allow the rich and the poor to maintain their distinctions because bekorum is the muckler muggler of adam so if you are then if i'm poor i'm supposed to accept it with simbra so i'm not going to be embarrassed this is my life i accept it with with joy now there is however one situation where we are concerned with embarrassment we're not concerned with embarrassing poor people that's why we allow the rich people to bring with the gold baskets but there is another area where we are concerned with embarrassment and that is the following when a person brings becorum as i mentioned in the beginning a person is supposed to recite versus arami or vedavi the verses that we recite in the haggadah the mishnah says originally the way this worked was if you knew how to read you read the verses if you didn't know how to read the cohen would recite them to you and you would repeat after the calling so if you were a literate person you read them you read them yourself if you were illiterate you repeat it after the calling but the mishna says the did not want to embarrass jews who didn't know how to read so they made a that everybody who brings bikurim the cohen reads and you repeat after the coin so you might ask on everything that i've said if bequarium is about not being ashamed of who you are then the same way we allow poor people to be poor and rich people to be rich and we don't say we have to obliterate distinctions so why do i have to obliterate the distinction between the illiterate and the literary the answer is there are some things you should be ashamed of and that is the fact that you're poor there is no shame in that whatever reason that's your situation and you know god loves you and there's no fault involved but you didn't learn torah you didn't learn how to read that's something to be ashamed about but look how but look how beautiful it is this is really like double reverse psychology the wanna point out that if you don't know how to read sukim you ought to be ashamed but they want to do it in such a way that you don't get embarrassed meaning if they were to say literate people read it and illiterate people read to them that would shame the illiterate person we don't want to shame them we don't want to embarrass them and that's why we make it that the cohen reads for everybody but the very fact that we make such a takana is communicating to the illiterate person and you know who you are hey we're doing this so you who know who you are shouldn't be embarrassed so what's the amaris going to think is there something i should be embarrassed about here answer yeah what a what a brilliant point in other words let the person know this is something to be ashamed of without actually shaming them because nobody's going to know who's ignorant who's not because you know even if the god of the door comes the coin is going to read it to him and then the simple farmer comes the one's going to read it to him nobody knows he's illiterate nobody's being embarrassed nobody's being ashamed but in the very exercise of making that rule there's a message that's being communicated hey maybe this is something you ought to work on in the coming year so that you too can read the torah okay because once again uh again i mean i'm not saying everything every single case of an amaranth is going to be uh culpable i mean there are many times where maybe it is circumstances beyond just control but in some cases it just reflected a lack of interest and that's something that is a be zillion you know it reminds me a little bit although it's not directly connected every story about ruff steinman where steinman was a great great goddess but also an extraordinarily sensitive person an amazing person in many ways he lived in abject poverty i mean his basically his small cramped apartments in binet brock uh literally looked like a hovel i mean just you know the ceiling whatever you know you wouldn't you wouldn't even consider it fit really for human residents but he and his wife didn't care you know he would eat like uh a potato and a cup of water uh for you know that's what he ate every day you know just he had the most deliberately poor standard of living but people would come to him you know people come to a child about should i buy a new car should i do that and initially they would be a little embarrassed i'm supposed to ask her steinman about the problems i'm having with my renovations and my ship sim you know but but he understood that not everybody was living on his level and he would give people eights us about kabul and him and about shepherd sam and about cars and about their different things and they felt at ease because he was not judging them he was not condemning them he was not telling them that they have to live at his standard but this was his standard so the story goes that a guy in bene brock came to him and said he's a businessman and broke hashem he's very successful and he feels he has to trade up into automobiles he has to get a new fancy car because he needs to impress his customers and associates but he is afraid that because people will be jealous of him they will give him an eye in hara right means when you're in your two ostentatious in your wealth people look at you in a negative way and that elicits sometimes negative judgments from heaven right maybe we'll give a share in that one time what is exactly the idea of the evil eye of ayan hara but the simple meaning is that the negative judgments of people it's not like a magic ray of the eye that's not what it is but the negative judgments of people elicit negative judgments from heaven god like scrutinizes do you really deserve all this so he's worried that people will be jealous and there will be ayan hara so if steinmen looked at him in a very straight face and said ah ayan hara people will be jealous of you and rush diamond thought for a few seconds and then said tell me have you finished the whole talmud he said no he says do you learn torah every day he says well i'm from but i don't always learn every day so simon was again silent for a few seconds and he said so i don't really understand your question what are people going to be jealous you need to say that in reality in reality what should bother a person is i'm not learning i'm not doing mitzvahs how much money i have shouldn't be you know the major thing that bothers me in life and that is why the poor person shouldn't feel bad that he's not rich but the amarett should feel a little bit bad that he's not achieving a higher level in his learning of torah right so that's kind of the lesson of bikorim and this is a kind of an expanded answer to the kasha of the tos yamcha so anyway i wish you all a good week in shabbat shalom and uh we are approaching rosh hashanah this has been of course a very very difficult year an unusual year at least since the middle of the year since purim and in many many ways again this is not thank god this is not the worst tragedy that the jewish people have ever faced or the world even has ever faced the holocaust was a lot worse but in many many ways this is unparalleled i mean the the situation of locking things down i mean even during the holocaust you know i mean there were there were mignon in auschwitz and the idea of closing down shoals and closing down yeshivas and social distancing and isolation and mask wearing for such a prolonged period of time and all of the optimistic predictions remember i remember they were saying six months ago or whatever it's five months ago oh when the summer comes the heat is going to kill the virus well it's been pretty hot and you know so far this virus is still kicking along so this has been a very very hard year emotionally hard year families being separated people dying in hospitals without being able to be with their loved ones in their final moments probably almost everybody knows somebody who died of covet i mean i know someone you know very good friend here in youtube who just you know one day he was here one day he was not you know he wouldn't he wouldn't have expected it in particular so it's been a very very rough year it's been a rough year and and even as the shows are gradually reopening you know there's there are religious issues here i i read an article and i can hear it that not everybody's coming back it's strange you got used to governing at home you'll like it like why why do i need to go to show you know and there are people who just stopped going to show right so uh so when the shows eventually go back to normal if they ever get back to normal or the new normal or whatever language you want to use you know it's not clear what's going on i mean everything's going to be rebooted everything is going to be new everything is going to be strange you know things are not going to just go back to what they were let's say before purim so if it is a new year this is a time where we can turn to hakadeshpurche to kind of help us make things better in terms of health in terms of connection with each other in terms of allowing our religious institutions whether it's our partaking isil or our yeshivats to function again the way they're supposed to function and hopefully function even better than they functioned so this is the time where all things are possible you know a new year is a new birth and uh the old things don't have to carry over into the new year so be israel hashem we very much hope there will be this and this renewal in a very positive way so be well have a good good job [Music] my gosh [Music]