Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz on Tisha B'Av: Apathy and Indifference is more Destructive than Hate

[Music] okay well hi everybody and uh obviously uh we're approaching the ninth above it is still possible tomorrow that the base of mikdash will come and then the fast will be cancelled uh and you know we should never give up hope but it looks like we'll probably we'll have a fast of the ninth above and uh god willing it should be the last fast we always hope uh that this will be it that perhaps this will take us over the top and we will merit to have the basamiktas rebuilt you know they tell the story about a rav who every era of tisha b'av would go into a safarim store and he would buy aquinos so the mochas farm just asked him he said you know listen i uh i'm happy to make a sale but uh you bought one i know you bought one last year and the year before i didn't want to keep on asking you but i'm just wondering why do you get a keynotes every year it's the same kinos that we say every tish above so the rav says you think i keep it you think i expect that we're gonna say kino's next tisha buff as soon as tish above is over i put it in sheamus i don't i don't keep it anymore and therefore i have to buy a new and new one every year and that's kind of an amuna in the coming of mashiach i actually wanted to start with maybe an interesting historical observation it's not uh so much nogaiah to practical mice but it's a very very interesting point the rambam writes in the perisha mishnayas in massachusetts rosh hashanah that the fast of tish above was observed even during the 420 years of the second temple right you're right the uh destroyed the first base of mikdash on the 9th of and then you had the 70 years of the babylonian exile and then you had the second temple that lasted under 420 years destroyed by the romans between the years 68 and 70 there's some uncertainty so obviously they fasted during the babylonian exile because that was the corbin of the first base amignas and obviously they fasted after the destruction of the second temple because then both temples were destroyed the same day four hundred and ninety years apart on the ninth above but the rambam's hidden is that they even fasted on tish above during the 420 years of the second basa miktas what sense would that make why would you fast over the loss of the basa mikdash when you have a basa mikdash we're certainly not going to observe a fast of tissue when the third base of mikdash is going to be rebuilt why did they do it during the second so i just want to give you two different answers the answers overlap a little bit but they are they actually are very different answer number one is that even when we had the second base of mikdash we never regained everything we lost with the first corbin there were a number of things that existed in the first temple that we didn't have in the second temple number one in the bayashini there was no aaren hakodesh in the kodi shaktasu when the cohen guttal would walk into the kodashak dasha manyam kippur it was an empty room there was nothing in there at all all you had was the outcropping of the evan shasia the foundation stone and he would put the um kipper incense down on that stone there was no aaron why because several years before the destruction of the first basa mikhtash righteous king yoshio who knew that the base amicus was going to be destroyed had the auron taken out of the kardashian and hidden buried under the harabayas where it is to this very day we don't know where it is and every once in a while people try to look for it but it's down there and as a result seventy years later when the second mikdish was built there was no arunachal dish now you may ask akasha so why didn't they make another one i mean uh you know you you everything else has replacements you build a new mizbayach you build a new menorah if you have to you can build a new war and there's no halacha that you have to have the arun that mosher abano made but the answer is very passionate the point of an auran is not to have an oran the point of an oran is it houses the luchas the tablets that hashem gave motion if that was hidden away we don't have the luhos we don't have the torah that god himself inscribed on that stone if you don't have the luchas there's certainly no mitzvah to have an oran so we didn't have an oran for the entire period of the by his shiny by the way the gum bhava basha has a beautiful thought the gemaran bhava basra says that in the aran hakodesh we're not only the second blue house that moshe brought down from arsenal but even the shattered luchaz that he brought down on the 17th of thomas which he shattered because of the gedo ego pieces of those luchas are in the arunachal dish as well in the arena kodesh is the luhas and the gemara derives from here that if a tamid has lost his learning and lost his knowledge due to illness senility alzheimer's dementia whatever it would be you must still honor him because of what he was because it's like the broken fragmented shattered luche that are still given a place of honor and esteem and that's analogous to it's who has forgotten his learning but be it as it may the second mikdash didn't have an rn didn't have luhis there was no prophecy for most of the second to make this because the very last prophets were and they died at the very beginning of the second temple so that connection to god through prophecy which is such a connection of intimacy we didn't have the colleen guttel who through his breastplate was able to receive prophetic messages from god that's called the ur in between him again just just to be a correct a semantic misimpression many people think the urine between refers to the breast plate that the cohen god of war with 12 upon which is engraved the tribes of ami israel and when ghazal say there was no urim vitumim in the bayashini they think the cohen guddal didn't have the breastplate and the jewels that is not the case the breastplate and the jewels are described in the torah and they are called hoshen the breastplate and abnehoshen the jewels of the ocean the uran vittomim is actually like a software package that in between the folds of the breastplate they would put a parchment that had special names of god and this would empower the urine between him to receive prophetic messages from god so that questions would be asked to the cohen guttal and the letters on the jewels would light up spelling an answer so in the bias shaney either we lost the software package or it just didn't work anymore meaning to say the coming gutter had the jewels but there was no prophecy and a final thing that we didn't gain was that the whole period of the bayashini we were under foreign domination we did not have independence we didn't have sovereignty we were persecuted by the um first persia then greece alexander then rome now there was a brief period of a bit more than a hundred years of the hanukkah story where the khashoggi the maccabees the hasmoneans rested control from the greeks and established a jewish autonomous kingdom for around 125 years that's true but hazal didn't consider that to be so so great because the truth of the matter is the hasmoneans themselves persecuted in fact it's such a such a historical irony the maccabees fought to overthrow hellenism in eric israel to establish the primacy of the torah and the maccabees were great great sadhikim but the bitter irony was that their descendants became the very enemy that the maccabees were trying to overthrow the hasmoneans became hellenists whether it's yana hamelech whether it's yochanan john herkiness is he's called but jochen and koengado who was a coengodo for 80 years and then became a sadducee at stookie you may remember george orwell's book animal farm which is really the story of animals who revolt to overthrow human oppression and some animals become oppressors that are worth worse than the original human owner that they overthrew and this was george orwell's parody of the russian revolution where lenin and stalin were not much better than the czars that they tried to overthrow well the hasmoneans are very much the same the market being more righteous the mockingbird saddiquim but the monarchy that they created became the very enemy that the maccabees were fighting against so as far as ghazal was are concerned the entire 420 year period of the biocheney is foreign non-torah designation so bukitzer this is answer number one why would we fast during the second temple answer because there were so many things that we were lacking in the second basa miktas that we had in the first place of mikhnash it was still a time of mourning no aaron no prophecy no urim vitumim no independence were subservient to foreign occupying powers so therefore tish above was still a zman of availas even during the bayashini that is answer number one answer number two is a bit different knew when the second temple was built initially by ezra by the way again just to point out the obvious that big beautiful model of the second temple that's in the israel museum used to be the holy land hotel some these people still call it the holy land model uh is really not the original by cheney that ezra nehemiah built this is the magnificent building of herod why herod was given credit to be able herod who is number one not jewish number two herod was a vicious murderer number three herod was a paranoid schizophrenic almost certainly herod was not a nice guy at all herod was a tremendous russia who did tremendous destruction certainly within the jewish people and truth as uh with all the other nations as well but somehow hashem gave him the success to be the primary architect and financier of the magnificent building that's known as the herodian temple and that is the famous model that we see but you have to understand just historically that the herodian temple that ghazal said was such a model of beauty that khazal said he who has not seen the herodian temple has not seen beauty in his lifetime that was towards the end of the biochemi the herodian temple lasted for less than hundred years so for more than three hundred years the bias cheney was a very simple structure but be it as it may the maforshim tell us when the bayashini was built the sages knew it was not going to last they knew this was not the messianic temple the very fact that there was no ark shows him it was not the messianic temple the fact that it didn't come through a mashiach it came through the permission of the nations of the world of cyrus it they knew it wasn't going to last and they knew it was going to be destroyed they knew it was going to be destroyed they didn't know when but they knew this was not the final mikdash and the proof of the pudding is that that is why the second bias was not built in accordance with the instructions laid out in the book of vicheskol the book of jejusko was the prophet who was contemporaneous with your meow fresco lived he lived in bravo already but he lived during the corbin bias region and he gave us a prophecy from god that the temple is going to be rebuilt and he gave us a detailed blueprint for that temple so 70 years later when ezra nehemiah built a second temple or darius ii build a second temple why does it not follow the blueprints of the book of vikrezuka now people will give you an answer but the answer is circular oh yeshusko is talking about the third temple and this is only the second temple well yeshua does not mention the third temple he says the temple is destroyed hashem will bring you back build it this way so why didn't right doesn't say it has to be a third temple it's the temple you're supposed to build but the answer is yeshuskill's prophecy says that this base amidst will never be destroyed and since the sages knew and understood that this temple is going to be destroyed they knew it was not yet time to follow yechezkel's directives and that is why the second bias is not consistent with all of the details in the book of yahushua see it's not because yeshesko said this is the third way did not mention anything about a number he said this is the mikdos that hashem wants you to have that shall never be destroyed if you know ahead of time it's going to be destroyed then it's not time for that bunion yet sir sullivan says every single tish above there was a parka there was a terror that this is the time that the other shoe is going to drop and every single tish above they fasted to pray that hashem should avert the tragedy and give them another year which means like this the fasting in the bayashini was not fasting over what they lost that was the first answer i gave you it was fasting so they shouldn't lose what hashem gave them now that's a very interesting idea because if soul matrix points out that actually means the reason we fast after the khorban is not the same reason that they fasted when there was a basa mintage when they when there was a base on mikdash the fasting was in the nature of achiva please hashem forgive us and don't destroy your temple after the khurban it's a matter of available it's a matter of mourning and that may reflect even the difference in davening so for example there was a time when the prayers of tish above were like slichos you recited the 13 attributes of mercy you asked hashem for forgiveness and now that kind of has been eliminated and we focus primarily on lamentation because the answer was when there was a basal mikdash the primary theme was praying to hashem that a tragedy should not occur okay it was not a tightness of mourning it was a tightness so that a saurus should not happen right that's rough solvatix analysis okay so that was one point just historically the idea that tish above according to the rambam not everybody agrees with the rambam you know i'm not sure if we have any concrete historical evidence one way or the other but the rambam sheet is that they fasted even during the bayashini a second point i want to make is we know that all of the laws of tish above are modeled on the laws of mourners what a mourner does right we don't learn torah except for the sad things if they drove we don't wash uh we sit on a low bench at least until the middle of the day all of this are the laws of aveilus the law we don't wear regular shoes married people do not have marital intercourse all of this is based on the laws of avenues but it's interesting that if you compare tish above and avemas you might call private morning versus public morning you see a very interesting difference when it comes to private morning it starts off very very strict and then with the passage of time the restrictions are lifted a little bit until you're able to join ordinary life so morning starts with shiva the seven day morning is very strict here you don't leave your house etc and then afterwards there's a period of another 23 days to make 30 days where the restrictions are much less severe and for most relatives after 30 days that's the end of it for a parent we observe morning up to a year but even so it's much more lenient after schloshen so the trajectory of private mourning is it starts off very very severe and the restrictions get relaxed with the passage of time by contrast let's focus on the time of year that commemorates our mourning over the destruction of the basa mikhtash there our movement is in the opposite direction we start off with the three weeks so the three weeks don't get haircuts first of all according to the law of the gemara there's there's actually no restrictions the three weeks is an unknown category actually but okay but let's just even even just look at the menhogem that they've developed that we've developed so the three weeks we have relatively minimal restrictions don't get haircuts don't make weddings hence fardham don't even have those restrictions either and then comes the nine days where we we don't do laundry and don't take baths and showers unless we absolutely need to and then comes above which is stricter and then tish above which is the crescendo of availas in grief do you see that you're moving in opposite directions when it comes to private morning we start off easy i'm sorry we start off strict and we get more relaxing as we go forward when it comes to public morning we start very very easy and it becomes increasingly severe and here ref celevaitrich also suggests a very beautiful thought that is because the function of the morning rituals move in opposite directions when a person loses a relative they lose a spouse they lose a parent god forbid they lose a child they lose a brother they lose a sister their life is often devastated shattered they don't know if they have the strength to move forward they're paralyzed they're muted can't even express what's going on so the purpose one of the purpose not the only purpose but one of the purposes of morning rituals is to give you an inner healing so you can gradually re-enter life the goal is that you should be whole inside so you can live again you can hope again you can participate in life again so the trajectory of availa starts off very severe initially when you're confronted with the shock of bereavement stay at home don't go out let people come to you let them sit with you in silence and if you don't want to talk nobody talks and just knowing that people are with you gives you a little bit of strength and a little bit of courage and then after shiva you're able to walk the streets and re-enter society and even if the grief never goes away you compartmentalize it a little bit you have it in part of your brain part of your consciousness but not everything in fact judaism is not happy with people who remain in a perpetually grieving state although it's understandable sometimes because god says you got to go on you've got to rebuild you've got to live don't forget about the people that you love but know that you honor them the most when you live a good and virtuous life and you don't let their death destroy you that's private mourning when it comes to the basa mikdash we actually have the opposite problem how many of us are shattered how many of us are devastated how many of us are paralyzed how many people can say i couldn't get out of bed this morning because thinking about the basa miktas made me so sad the generation that experienced the khurban perhaps was able to feel that way we find in musa basra that the generation at the time of the khurban basa mikdash they were so devastated they decided they would never eat never eat meat again how can we eat meat if there's no longer the meat of the carbanos said to them if you're not going to eat meat what are you going to eat they said we'll eat fruit how can you eat fruit you no longer have the first fruit ceremony will eat bread how can you eat bread there are meal offerings that you can't bring well live on water how can you drink water you no longer have the water libation of succus so what are you gonna do you're gonna starve you're gonna die is that what god wants you gotta live you gotta make your life so that generation indeed was devastated but we are like the blind man who never saw color how do you describe color the person born deaf who's never heard music we don't know what the best is we don't know what is represented we don't understand the intimacy with god that it enabled what is it that we miss what is it that we mourn for what is it that we cry for so our problem is not we're so shattered and we need a morning ritual to take us out of our suffering so we can relive and become normal people it's the other way around we are so indifferent that we need to be goaded into a state of grief in the hope that the externals of deprivation will somehow influence us inside as well so if the purpose of private mourning is to get out of your grief the purpose of public mourning is to get into a grief that you otherwise would not have felt you know they tell the famous story this is actually a famous story in israeli culture and that is after the six day war at the end of the six day war when jerusalem was liberated and the temple mount was reclaimed and the famous words of matagor habayit biadeno the temple mount is in our hands so many of the soldiers who were religious soldiers from the hester yeshivats they were almost the first people at the and remember we had we hadn't had access to the hotel for 19 years from 1948 to 1967. and the soldiers were there and the religious soldiers were so moved that they had this little connection it's only a little connection really the whole hotel is not even at the temple it's it's a wall of the outer courtyard but it's a connection to the the house of hashem and they were crying and sobbing and there was a non-religious soldier who was watching all of this and he started crying as well so one of his companions said to him what are you crying for this doesn't mean anything to you you have no connection to this religion to the torah so the giloni said i am crying because i don't know why they're crying there's something so powerful so strong here and i don't know what it is so i'm crying over that and the truth of the matter is what that secular jew said is exactly what we should be thinking about on tisha buff because we can't cry over the basamiktas because we don't know what that was but maybe we can cry because we don't know what to cry about and that's something as well somebody went to the semes and said what do i do i can't cry over the base of mikda said exactly that cry over your neshama that cannot cry over the base of bigness now it may very well be who knows we live in such an unusual difficult time with isolations and with quarantines and with uh yes minion no minion outside inside everyone's divided families cannot come together to this very day there are elderly people who tragically die alone and their own children cannot be with them and what a what a tragedy that that is but maybe one of the silver clouds is that we have maybe more of an awareness of how hard life is without a base and make this without hashem i without that intimacy of connection to hashem and maybe it causes us to yearn more for mashiach than we might ordinarily do now i will be the first to say that in some ways that's a superficial yearning for mashiach meaning oh i want to yearn for mashiach so i won't have to wear a mask anymore you know but on the other hand we all need what motivates us meaning we we look at the personal hardships in our lives and we then say ah if only we'd be zaika to the we could be out of these hardships so it's kind of a shalol but it can be a motivator anti-semitism is a great motivator it's not the highest motivator if cook said there are two reasons why people come to irish israel one is eric israel draws them because they have a sense of holiness the other is hutzler kicks them out right so the question is am i coming to eric israel because i'm being pulled or am i coming to heritage as well because i'm being pushed so the truth is the ideal is you come to eric israel because you're pulled there is holiness that is pulling me but you know if people aren't pulled sometimes hashem gives us a kick and it could very well be that's some of the great difficulties in the diaspora particularly the united states and in the rest of the world even before corona yet islamic fundamentalism islamic terrorism you had various indicators that life in the gola was no longer as optimal as people might have thought even religious youth might have thought that it was so maybe all of these soros are allowing us to feel pain a little bit more and to understand the sadness of the ninth above but as i think i said a number of times already the old saying absence makes the heart grow fonder it's very very significant because in our yearning to be close to god because we're so far from him that actually makes us very close to him because he yearns to be with us and we yearn to be with him and that makes us very connected very connected in spite of the hester upon him in spite of the concealment in spite of the gulles in spite of the hormone tish above has a special love it's the love that comes from the awareness of distance and the yearning to be together and again it's a paradox but in many many ways when we're distant we can feel closer than even when we're close when you're close you take things for granted so this is why the pattern is reversed we have to get into the availus instead of get out of the unveilus and the hope would be that the external deprivation would inspire us in various ways now i want to mention another very interesting gemara in massachusetts that's a little strange and this is a comment and some verses from the navi which is actually they're actually read as the torah of tish above morning after tishma of morning and it says alma of the horowitz why has the lands been destroyed i don't understand the navi says why has the land been destroyed and the answer is hashem says allah because they have abandoned my torah so the governing dharma has a whole commentary on this and it says when the basal mikdash was destroyed and jerusalem was destroyed and there were exiles and there were deaths and there was slavery the prophets could not understand why was there such a desolation how could there be such a destruction and they asked the man they didn't know and the prophets themselves didn't know and they had to ask god they asked god directly ma of the hearts why is the land destroyed and when hashem answered they have forsaken my torah it doesn't mean they weren't keeping mitzvos because if it means they weren't keeping mitchells the prophets would have known that it has to be something the prophets are not aware of so the gemara in adam says when god says they have forsaken my torah that doesn't mean they weren't learning torah but it means they were not reciting the blessings over the torah and that the naviem didn't know and the basa mikdash was destroyed because of the sin of not reciting blessings over the torah it's proton this is how important birch satore is not reciting the blessings over the torah is the reason for the orbit but wait a second here something doesn't make sense first of all are we talking about the first temple or the second temple we have to be talking about the first temple because it says they asked the prophets there were no prophets at the time of the end of the second temple now the first temple the prophets don't know why the land was destroyed the famous gemara tells us that during the first base of mikdash the jewish people were guilty of the worst of veros in the torah idolatry avodahzara giliaraya sexual immorality shivers murder these are the three commandments that you must give up your life before you transgress so and to say that naveem didn't know about that well that's impossible what did the novem talk about what are the books of prophets other than musser about those sins and so number one how could they not know and number two why is hashem giving an answer oh they didn't make birth they did a lot worse than that okay not making very good tourism let's say it's a sin but it's not as bad as about azara gilearaya so how could the gemara possibly say that number one the navium didn't know what was going on and number two the korban bias re-shown is because of lober batora takrila it's because of something much worse available offers a beautiful explanation of what the gemara means when the nibiru said we don't understand how there could be a corbin they weren't asking what were the sins that caused the corbyn they knew that the sins that caused the kharban are avodah zarah gila arayasvika they are asking a meta question they are asking okay i know the jews are guilty of the worst of aeros and that caused the khorman but given the fact that they were learning torah shouldn't the torah elevate them meaning how could they have come to those of errors imagine a person in yeshiva he learns well from nine to one and then he has a two-hour break so he goes downtown he rapes a few people burns a building down does some murders and comes in time for minha something's wrong with that picture shouldn't the torah elevate you shouldn't the torah sanctify you shouldn't it make you a better person shouldn't it make you close to god so rebellion lepian says when ghazal say that the naveem didn't understand how could there be a khorban they weren't asking what did the jewish people do that caused the khurban they knew that avodah zarah gilead but they were asking why didn't the torah make them better people how could they descend to avail zara gili rajasvi alma of the arabs so now we have to understand the answer so now we get the question the answer is they learned torah but they didn't make a bracha before they learned how is that an answer to this so here revellia brings the following there is a famous statement in ghazal that says he who treats clothing with disrespect will eventually not get warmed by those by that clothing in other words uh if i throw my clothing around if i throw it away i don't treat it respectfully it's going to somehow not help me when i need it and the proof that the gemara has is by david malek if you remember at the very end of david mello's life he was shivering the beginning of malachim aleph and he was covered with blankets and the blankets did not give him warmth and ghazal say that is because when he was much younger before he was even king and shalhamelech was pursuing him at one point sho went into a cave to relieve himself and he left his cloak by the entrance of the cave and david crept up to that cloak and he sniffed off a piece of cloth and then when show came out david was standing on a high hill and he could show that piece of cloth and says you see how close i was to you i could have easily entered the cave and killed you you were vulnerable and i didn't so why do you treat me as an enemy if you recall show momentarily became friendly towards dubbed et cetera but that that eventually went away but because i'll say david treated clothing with disrespect now it's not the same clothing the clothing that didn't give him warmth was not the closing that he caught but apparently clothes are related to each other so the blanket was the cousin of the cloak and the blanket basically said i'm not going to give you warmth because you cut up my cousin in a disrespectful way right group solidarity now we don't fully understand this but there is a concept of gratitude and respect even to the inanimate if things serve us we treat it with respect clothing in fact that's actually part of the argument for environmental respect there are a lot of different reasons but one of the aspects of a jewish ethic of environmentalism is that hashem has created a world where the water serves us and the ground serves us and the tree serves us and because we have a debt of gratitude even to the inanimate we should treat it with respect you don't worship it obviously but you treat it with a certain respect yeah that's right that's a very good example moshe albania was not allowed that's correct moderator was not allowed to be the one that hit the nile uh waters to turn into blood uh the are the fir for the frogs because the nile had given him protection when he was put on the nile and therefore he cannot do anything bad to that river that's exactly right so what do you see from that statement that when you treat something with disrespect and disdain it will not give you the benefits that it's designed to give you so revellia says if treating clothing with disdain means it's not going to give you warmth treating torah with disdain means it's not going to give you spiritual elevation birkha is a why does a person make a bracha and the torah because they thank hashem for the gift of torah they look at torah as a privilege as an honor as a joy and i express my gratitude if i don't make abraham over the torah that could mean even if i learn it even if i keep it but i look at it like a burden i look at it as something i'm not grateful i got to do it because god's going to punish me if i don't do it whatever it would be so here's what a valiant says if the question of the comment was how could their torah learning not elevate them to be better people the answer is the same way if you're a beget the beggar does not give you warmth if you're satori the torah will not give you spirituality and therefore it is shayach it is possible that you'll learn from nine to one and commit rapes pillages and murders between one and three yeah so the point that is making is ghazal do not mean the quran occurred as a punishment for the sin of not blessing the torah no the corbin occurred as a punishment for our vote of zara gillard it's not a question of punishment but why didn't the torah elevate them answer they weren't much of it and that which you're not makshef doesn't give you what it would give you otherwise now that's a bit of a scary thought in many many ways because you know a person does mitzvahs a person learns torah but sometimes we don't really appreciate it sometimes we don't get a joy we don't get it enthusiasm we go through the motions we have a complacency and the fear is that without the enthusiasm and the passion and the joy it's not going to lift you up you know the zohar hakadosh has a very beautiful expression that balatanya brings that love of god and fear of god passions reverence of god are the wings the wings that bring your mitzvos up to shamayim right the mitzvahs are like a bird but a bird can fly only with the wings and the wings are the passion that you bring and then it goes to shamayim and it connects you to god that's why they tell the story it's the story that the balshemptev once came into a show of misnomer of non khasid and he said i this shall is so crowded with torah and mitzvos i can't even move it is stuffed to the gills with torah and mitzvahs so the show was very proud they said even the balsham says it comes to our show and he sees it's full of torah and missus but actually it was a very sarcastic remark because he says the zoar says if i have torah and mythos without fear of hashem and love of hashem it just stays put it doesn't move to shamayam so the moshe says your shoulder stuffed with torah and mitzvahs it's like a warehouse it didn't go anywhere so this is something to think about as well and that is as i've said already many times if we want to base a mikdash we have to start with trying to build the basa miktas in our heart and part of that heart is the love of hashem and the reverence of hashem and the gratitude and the joy and the enthusiasm for mitzvahs again i i make the point i i'm not speaking down to anybody i am certainly speaking to myself even more so not to take things for granted you know there's no yiddish expression it's very designing it it's hard to be a jew but ramosha feinstein didn't like that expression raja feinstein says the message has to be it's a joy and a privilege to be a jew that doesn't mean it's not going to be hard anything meaningful in life is going to be hard that's actually truism things that come to you easy are generally not going to be worth that much so yeah it is hard to be a jew there are going to be hardships they're going to be challenges uh there'll be a lot of people who would like to destroy you oh okay it happens to that comes with the territory but that can't be your driving force your driving force in life cannot be how hard this is because first of all if that's going to be your ash gotha even if it'll keep you jewish it's not going to keep your kids jewish at some point so why am i suffering again explain it to me you know it's hard to beat you well you know but i don't have to suffer why should i suffer i mean that's exactly what happened uh to the lost generation of american jewelry after world war one between the wars by and large the whole generation many of whose parents were religious the whole almost 95 percent of the generation left torah left yiddish totally because if the message is it's hard to be a jew and i'm now in the land of the free in the home of the brave where i don't have to be obser observing as a jew then why bother so that's the message of loberge but many of you might have heard of orizo or uri zohar it's already been many many years ago but you know many many years ago was really a very famous comedian he was like the leading entertainer in israel totally secular very rich whatever a rich celery meant in those days he was the equivalent they used to say i don't know if you even know this guy anymore of the johnny carson in the u.s okay that's also a long time already but johnny carson was like the goddess of comedy and urizora was the johnny carson of israel and miraculously crazily he became from he became kharedi he's been now a teacher of torah for many many years at he left he left everything people couldn't understand it this was front page news in all of the secular newspapers it's like uh johnny carson converts to judaism or something you know and and uh goes to color you know it's a little you know it doesn't compute but no reason i wrote it wrote about it because people were so interested and he you know he writes about his story and he uses his story as uh a way of of outreach to jews who are uh you know from the other the other place so somebody approached him somebody who was in kirov approached him and wanted to know you know you've been in the secular world you're connected to the secular world you know everybody out there like what do you think are the most charismatic phrases and lines and ideas that can bring people in something catchy something emotional something charismatic so urizawa says something like uh take massachusetts and learn a toast voice with somebody which is now very technical very intricate and the person didn't really like the answer the person basically said i mean you know that's like technical stuff how is that going to bring anybody to hashem and urizara got very angry he said to this guy he was a firm guy he says you don't believe in the transformative power of the torah and there's a saying among salesmen you can't sell a product if you're not going to buy the product yourself you can't sell what you don't buy and that's a powerful statement sometimes we don't realize the power of torah and as rebellion said it's a self-fulfilling prophecy unfortunately if i don't believe that the torah can change me then it's not going to change me i'm a vazatora the torah is not going to give me warmth and here i'll just end with the beautiful story of the ponovich was of course a town in lithuania and there were eight hundred shtetls 800 towns some of them were city some of them were larger in lithuania each of them had a rav atom 799 of them died in the holocaust one out of 800 rabbanim survived that was the rav of panavic of yosef and he was a man who was obsessed because he was constantly thinking why did hashem keep him alive 799 other rabbanim died and he was a phenomenal builder of torah he built and he built and he built and he built orphanages hospitals basayakovs haders yeshivas kololim and he spent uh half of the year fundraising in south africa in the united states in europe in fact the satmirev said in 1968 when there was the first landing on the moon i think it was it was 68. so people were debating can there be life on other planets so the satmirevi said i'm not a scientist but i know there is no intelligible life on other planets because if there would be the punishment you're of would have been there to collect money and if the punishment thereof hasn't gone to mars i know there's nothing up there this is something rebbe said so the story i want to say generally is that there's a kibbutz in inertial still functioning now ain't harod was founded by shomer sawyer now was not just a non-religious organization it was an anti-religious organization it was communist essentially and they were anti-religion they they actually hated religion that when the kibbutz of ain't harod was founded in the 1930s there was a law there was a rule in the kibbutz that no holy book is allowed to come in a torah cannot be brought in it was not allowed to be brought in that was the rule we don't want to contaminate the holiness of our secularism so world war ii ended and ended in 1945 and a father of one of the members of the kibbutz had been in auschwitz and burkhashem he was able to come to eric israel and he wanted to spend the rest of his life with his son on the kibbutz the father was a religious jew and not only that the father who had been in auschwitz i think two to three years had smuggled in a little safer torah that he kept away from the germans for three years that's an absolute miracle he actually had a little tourist grow that he kept with him in the concentration camp if the germans would have discovered that uh the nazis would have discovered that they would have killed him instantaneously perhaps torturing him first and they certainly would have destroyed the torah scroll but a nice he got the torah he kept it for three years and he brought it to erich israel to welding amazing but eric israel was worse than auschwitz when they discovered that this man a survivor of auschwitz brought a safer torah into the kibbutz it's like the people of saddam gathering around loads saying give us these people they surrounded the house of the sun and they demanded that the torah be surrendered to them and they took the torah and they threw it over the fence landing in the mud now this was such a scandal at the time that even the secular newspapers mahariv and yudevachronot wrote editorials that said well listen this is a little too much you know this is not how you treat a torah even they thought this was improper and many religious jews and rabbis proclaimed we have to fast over this tragedy to the torah but the panavitcharov said this is a tragedy but it's a tragedy that gives me a bit of a smile and the panavitarov said i feel like rabbi akiva now this is a famous story in masaka's marcus where rabbi akiva and him are walking by the desolate destroyed temple and the begin to cry and rabbi akiva begins to laugh and the mask rabbi akiva who would be dying in a few years but at that point they asked ravi akiva why are you laughing and rabbi akiva said to them why are you crying and they said why are we crying we see the temple in ruins we see the kodashak joshua destroyed we see foxes and rodents coming out of the kodishaktas the desecration of god's name we shouldn't cry and rebbi akiva says from that very darkness because god has given us prophecies of destruction and prophecies of rebuilding but until i saw the prophecies of destruction being carried out to the maximum level i wasn't sure that the prophecies of redemption would come to the maximum level but now that i see that the prophecies are literal they'll be literal the other way as well rabbi akiva's great kawak was to see in the darkness the lights of redemption so here's what the puna victor of says i feel like rabbi yakiva in the desecration of this story because let's ask the following question if the kibbutz members of ain't harad literally thought the terror was worthless it was nothing then why are they going so crazy so this is an old man he has a hobby some people have a hobby of of you know greek literature some might have hieroglyphics some might have indian it's a michigan it's a crazy little worthless stupid thing let the man have his little crazy stupid thing what are you going so crazy about you got to throw it over the fence you can't even wait till the next morning to have it taken away says the ponovich that means that even these secular jews understood the transformative power of torah they didn't want to be transformed but they understood somehow almost like an instinct that if this torah stays even one night in this keyboards something's going to change we don't want it to change but something's going to change the point of it you're up says that's good because if they really thought the torah was nothing it wouldn't have bothered them the pandava draft points out indifference and apathy is much more deadly and much more deadly than hate because you actually love what you hate and in some ways when one has to go into that in great depth but if something elicits powerful emotions it is affecting you in some way apathy means it's nothing to me and therefore the puna victor of says if these are people who acknowledge the power of torah one day it will affect them and the pandavas says i predict that one day there will be a kolel in inherit and the beit knesset and the truth of the matter is inherent is not maya sharim it's not the neighborhood that's for sure but there is a half-day cola and ain't harold and there is a daily minion now you know 50 percent of the community is not religious but everyone tolerates the religion everyone gets along and indeed it's become you know a mixed a mixed religious secular community with shiorim and with davening as opposed to the fanatical hatred of religion which threw a sacred torah over and that's what the panavijarab said recognize the transformative power of the torah and it will do great things for you and this is a good message too for the other major theme of sinatrina we talked a little bit about last week because it really shows me that as long as the jew recognizes that torah can transform him even if he's negative about it there's a tremendous amount of hope that that person can be reached and the way we reach people is by love and by acceptance and by respect and by recognizing the good that they do whether it's violent whether it's policemen whether it's anyone who contributes to the infrastructure of this country because without that infrastructure you know the religious people would also not be able to survive and function and as i mentioned last week again but it's always bears repeating famous verse to him upon him upon him as water reflects the face that you show it so too the heart of man reflects that which you show it you show a person love and respect they will feel that towards you as well so be asus hashem may we try to build whatever bridges we can do and in that way each of us in our own small way are adding bricks to the basa mikdash and shamayim and if enough of us add enough of those bricks that minion will be completed up there spiritually and when it is completed up there it will come down minis and we will experience the redemption of the jewish people and the redemption of the world so you should have a good meaningful tightness and may this be the last tish above that we sit in fasting [Music] i [Music]