Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz - Taking Captive a Woman of Beautiful Form

[Music] I just want to mention tonight she or is in the continued revolution a mother's doctor shem harvey Caston is doing very well and now he's home from hospital his name is i'm are even risking should have a complete recovery me everyone as well and getting ready for Rosh Hashanah and in a positive and constructive way normally this year we try to focus on behalf of Taurus I'm hurting a little bit because of the season of the young Narayan and the fact that the health tourists are all dealing with a single theme of comfort which we had already explored so I want to focus today and something in the parsha that's morally very problematical extremely difficult to understand I'm not I'm not going to explore the moral problem although I tend to buy it I want to move in a different direction and that is you know this is partially sites a and you might know that of all of the Parsee oats in the Torah this has the most Mitzvah this has depending on the count exactly between 55 and 70 mid sides of the 613 min so select oven that is a huge huge huge percentage of the mid spokes of the Torah so obviously there's plenty of halakhah in this parsha to go through but the very first Mitzvah in the part racism is a peculiarly difficult Mitzvah to get the ethical sense of and that is the halacha that pertains to the captive woman in times of war the torah seems to say that you capture a person you capturing women in time of war you have intercourse with her the first time you get a free pass but afterwards if you want to stay with her there's a certain ritual that must be performed the ritual is essentially designed to discourage you from wanting to be with her you have to let her fingernails grow long you have to shave off her hair she wears the garments of captivity whatever that would mean exactly she cries for her father and her mother for 30 days and only afterwards are you allowed to to marry or stay married or and if you decide not to marry her you must set her free you cannot continue to own her as a slave because you initially abused her by the initial intercourse if you were to simply take her as a slave you could keep her as a slave but once you went ahead and had relations with her the only option is the only two options are she either gets freedom or she becomes your wife and obviously the toda prefers the freedom option because the Torres says you have to go through a ritual to make her unattractive and thereby more likely to be sent away well not necessarily not everybody gets pregnant every time but certainly the the Tom wood discusses at great length the problem of the child that you may get from such a relationship and again the Gemara indicates that these children will often be not very very good children because of the circum the improper circumstances by which they were they were raised can see yes well well that's a complicated issue because essentially you obviously have responsibilities for your children but the problem basically becomes if this woman is a non-jew if a Jewish man let's pre and about slavery for a moment if a Jewish man has intercourse with a non-jewish woman under the laws of matron major lineal descent not only are those children not Jewish they are hierarchically not related to their Jewish father people don't realize that maitre lineal descent is not only an issue of religion it also is an issue of parentage technically not a Jewish man does not have paternity over the children that he has from a non-jewish woman now that would mean from a strict a logic standpoint the obligations of a parents to a child would not exist now certainly if we look at the morality of it if we look at going beyond the letter of the law and embracing the spirit there is no doubt that a person has a moral obligation in God's book to take care of the children that he brought into the world but as a technical matter he is not the halacha father these children do not have a a father it's quite interesting people don't realize this people think matron it maitre lineal descent is simply a religious thing are you Jewish are you not Jewish either that it is actually a definition of paternity now this whole parsha is rife with ethical difficulties number one this initial encounter the free the free bite at the Apple are we talking about rape here or in other words is the Torah legitimating rape in time of war as long as you limit it to one time is that what we're talking about or are we talking about consensual relationship right so the first time is a real big problem besides the fact that even if it's consensual obviously there's something that's sinful and being with the non-jewish woman but the question is rape or consent the second issue that you have to figure out is even the continuation of the process is very difficult you're given the option to marry her if you put her through the ritual well is that against her will is that she wants it is did she become Jewish or did she remain non-jewish meaning there are so many unanswered here both in terms of the initial rate and in terms of the continuation of the relationship maybe the one thing that's clear is if you're not going to marry or she gets your freedom okay that sounds good but the nature of the marriage and the nature of her conversion and whether that's coercive or whether it's voluntary it's not entirely clear and in fact if it's entirely voluntary why do you need the ritual to begin with I mean let's just assume that she for one whatever crazy reason she genuinely wants to convert to Judaism there'd be no reason to go through a whole ritual of cutting off her shaving her hair and the like so you thought so art is an extremely problematical issue the one thing that I do want to share with you is there is at least one source and only one that I know of that does make explicit that the first bite at the Apple so to speak is a consensual thing and not a rape and the parsha of your photo are should not be seen as any type of legitimation of rape in time of war now it still is a concession because obviously being with a non-jewish woman is is generally sinful but here cuz I'll give a very interesting and unusual insight they say the Torah made a concession to the eight sir Hara and that is in time of war passions are very inflamed they're very excited it is difficult to control oneself and the concept would be that if the Torah would not give some type of outlet for these passions then it's quite likely it would break out and even a worse more virulent type of form so the Torah in a sense is permitting a certain measure of sin in order that it should not lead to violations that might be a lot worse now normally that's not the way the Toller works normally the Torah works with the some system of values and prohibitions and if you live by them that's great than if you can't if you don't you don't hear this is a very rare instance of the Torah actually allowing albeit discouraging something that would normally be sinful in order to permit an outlet to prevent something from being worse without defining what that worst thing would be perhaps the worst thing would be rape you know who knows who knows what it would be murder and in the light so I'm the first to admit that a Shinjo photo are is an ethically very very challenging issue war in many ways is almost an alternative universe and although is true that one must try to maintain an ethical standard even in time of war and of course the idea is really very very exceptional in that standard really probably the most ethical athletically conscious army in the in the world but still there are going to be system failures and you oh are is one of those failures that the tourists trying to adjust and modify and prevent from becoming something something worse so I acknowledge that those are very very serious questions and I'm not going to talk about them tonight because I just want to share with you an allegory of the ariza which is very very far afield from Sciuto shall make trial from the simple sense of the verse but it's very very relevant to the month of Elul and that is the I resolve says the following that the whole you fought Toa can be understood not merely as a particular halakha of war time which has many ethical difficulties but as an allegory of the journey of the soul on earth and it begins this way the language of the Pacific is keisei sale of milk a Yamaha when you go out to war against your enemy when Asano Hashem a local copy Odessa and God will deliver that enemy into your hands they shall beat achieve yo and you will capture that captivity you will have captives in time of war so the I result says who is your true enemy what is the greatest enemy in your existence that is the answer Haram that is the passion within you that tries to take you away from godliness by focusing on hedonism pleasure short-term gain arrogance anger all of those bad results that are the coming from this yet turn around so the tour is giving you the following promise if you truly engage in war against your true enemy God promises you will have a measure of success this shall be - of yo you will capture from the h ahora that which the answer Hara has captured from you the HR has hijacked much of what is good in a person and has diverted it to improper ends but if you truly truly want to fight this a turn around Hashem will give you the strength to overcome these temptations and then it goes on and says and you see in captivity a beautiful woman a you fought Toa so the arena brings from Bazaar that the phrase a shut your fat Toa is a reference to one's neshama once neshama is full of beauty full of radiance full of goodness full of potential but it gets captured it gets hijacked and you see and you want to get it back you want to get back to your good self so what do you do so this is the ritual you shave off her hair you let her fingernails grow very long so the ariz all says shaving off the hair is a symbolic gesture of divesting your head divest in your mind of all the false ideologies and thoughts that take person away from God get rid of it divest yourself of the false ideologies what is letting the fingernails grow on what do we do with our hands we grasp things right so the hands are material pleasures acquisitions when your fingernails are very very long you become disabled from grasping so consequently the the reclamation process of this Asian chief @lr is number one trying to divest yourself of false ideologies and false ideas and number two trying to divest yourself of materialism and hedonism in an extreme way that takes a person away from spirituality and then it says she cries for her father and her mother 30 days so father and mother father is God a college barcode mother is Jewish people it's as if to say that is a Jew any products of my relationship to God and my relationship to cloud Israel and God is dad's Abba and Kali sell this email because when a person lives a life of sin and rebellious they are betraying akka the sparkle and they are also betraying the Jewish people as a whole because after all as the old saying goes a chain is only as strong as its we this link and if you're part of a chain that goes back 5,000 years from the realm of Edom I like that well that probably was born in 1948 so whatever it is 57 5 7 7 8 - 1948 a Brahma vino then in the sense you're just breaking that chain a Jew that rejects God rejects Torah is giving his Lurie posthumous victory in many ways Hitler tried to destroy the Jewish people if they're the tremendous tremendous damage but he could not destroy in fact such an interesting irony that Hitler was so confident at some point at least that he would wipe out of Israel that he was concerned that nobody would even know there was a Jewish people and therefore his great victory would not be celebrated so do you know that he collected vast amounts of Judaica and he wanted to create a museum in Prague that would be the museum of this extinct people known as the gym now interesting that because of all those artifacts were collected and preserved so I remember around 25 years ago the Smithsonian in Washington had an exhibit of that stuff was called the precious legacy and it traveled around several places in the United States this was actually Hitler's Museum of the success of the Holocaust get some interesting things in it and but the British and Hitler did not succeed but once again we can do to ourselves what Hitler was not able to do and therefore a person the neshamah must cry for the betrayal of the father which is God and the mother which is on Israel and then it says for 30 days their result says this is a romance to the thirty days of the month of lol only have 29 days but apparently rounding it off the 30 days of the month of ello which are set aside for repentance and introspection and spiritual accounting the Ox arcane and after you've gone through this process you are ready to be united reunited with the holy essence of your soul and I'm just continuing the took him and if you don't want if you basically don't want to go through this process then set your soul free do not abuse her which means to say what that means exactly is a bit tricky but I think what the ariza was suggesting is that it's important to be honest with yourself even in your rebellion that if you reject the spiritual will of God then reject it don't define what you're doing as godliness an example might be again with the issue of gay marriage that you know the Torah prohibits homosexual relations and sometimes people do it but you see from the mid Russian that it's much worse to make a sin a mitzvah than it is to treat it as a sin meaning to say if you're going to send be honest with yourself that you're sinning do not define it as a holy act so that's why the memory tells us that's a dome that was destroyed for sodomy among other sins was not destroyed because of the practice of sodomy but they were destroyed because they legitimated the practice by writing a ketubah and having a marriage ceremony this is actually diminish itself so that's what it means set your soul free do not abuse your soul by trying to make the argument that what you're doing is holy and okay so the truth of the matter is the truth of the matter is that there is there is a very very big McLucas an argument among in the Talmud itself regarding how you understand that I was presenting Russia's view Raffi's view is there is one free bite at the Apple so to speak you are 100% correct I should have mentioned it there are many other commentaries who basically say nothing is permitted until you go through this process so in my suckers condition you will see different different opinions I understand that the second view of the view that you just presented makes it a little easier for us because we're not dealing with any type of initial contact but even then the ethical problems go away because it's still not clear whether she has to consent to any anything even if it happens later so you're still going to have some type of problem so the iris all turns what is an ethically problematical parsha into a very very beautiful mystical allegory about reclaiming your soul through the process of intellectual contemplation divestment from materialism and spiritual honesty including tears crying emotional catharsis and locating it situating this variance vadhaka in the month of ello which is the which is the 30 days yes yes 100% he doesn't know I can't I don't know what the mentality of the rapist your understand correct and that indeed could be part of the psychology of the institution meaning to say the Torah gives you permission but then says there are going to be consequences to your decision and there indeed could very well be a hope that as a result of those consequences you're going to do this now it's not going to work in all cases obviously but in some cases it will so the the post well again whether it's rape is a question but whatever it is the consequences of his action may in fact be a deterrent in undertaking the action to begin with that that's it that's exactly right they were brother there was half brother into the rape correct well that's correct rape is not an act of love rape is an act of violence that's well established so there's no particular reason why a rapist wants to hang around with the victim afterwards is that this is another unusual law of the Tauri which I'm not going to talk about it but I'll mention physic again you could think about this and discuss it the Torah basically says that if a man rapes a woman he is obligated to marry her and he may not divorce her now there it is clear that she has the right to say no she does have the right to say no she is not forced into this marriage by any means but it's a very peculiar rhetoric because it's making the assumption that she would want to have some type of demand that he marry her and the Torah says yes and the way we typically look at great we could not imagine in a thousand years that the god forbid the rape victim would want to actually marry the guy but apparently tortured huh Georgia say again do we have one case where he literally wanted to in she of course what she went along with the to it so it's a little strange what were some of the difficulties sometimes in biblical narrative is it's hard for us to capture the mindset of ancient society so although the tourist wisdom is eternal but sometimes the way the characters behave they're situated in history in a particular time and place and we just can't put ourselves there we're not we're not we don't quite understand the the mentality but apparently there was a notion that a rape victim but sometimes demands that she be taken care of because she was damaged goods or whatever the perception was and therefore he said what do they say in this time I mean I don't want to make light of this but you broke it you pay for it meaning to say you damaged me you take responsibility which is a very very foreign idea to contempor Sensibility so again another thing I'm not going to address that that that you can think about and and and alike okay so in terms of the extra haha that means clothing is that which covers up your true self wreck your true self is you and the clothing is a barrier that covers you up so it says remove those blockages remove those inhibitions towards expressing your relationship with that she'll don't allow yourself to be covered up and blocked in anyways yeah in fact if I get that dress for a moment on that I may have mentioned so I'm not sure if I mentioned it to forgive me for a PT as I mentioned and if you remember with not when a breslav story about the prince that thought he was a turkey oh I meant you okay so I don't know okay all right in any event this is the result and it's also brought by the commentary the ORAC I am this is the allegory of the ace yet you felt torn okay so now I want to switch lenses and go back to the whole logic part of it and give a comment of rushing Rashi has a very unusual for logic comments which is not his own he got it from the Meldrick and that is the following what type of war is this halakhah of your thought so we're talking about because halakhah recognizes two types of wars there is a war mm allege it amid worse there is what is called milk I met Mitzvah a war which there is a mid server to fight and then there are milk come out that are called milk Emeth reshoot optional Wars non mitzvot Wars what is a mitzvah war so there are three or perhaps four categories of wars that are missile wars one is the war against time elective you can identify them the other is the war against the seven nations of command which are extinct but the original seven indigenous nations the third category which is unfortunately very much alive today and those are virtually all of the wars really all of the Wars of the State of Israel is a war of defense to protect the Jewish people and the Land of Israel from enemies who want to destroy it so whether they're Palestinians I already ran whatever it would be generally speaking the defensive Wars of medida Israel are classified as mitzva wars they are not optional Wars they are myths Wars now that itself has a very interesting implication which one suggested to mention and I'm not going to address because it's not the subject but I threw out things for you to give you a homework to think about and that is you know we read last week people that are exempt from fighting wars people that just got married etc just had a vineyard so the Mishna says that only exempts them from optional Wars and I'll discuss what is an optional war but for a mitzvah or polio soon everybody must fight we take the cut time from his privacy hood room we even take the collab from under the Koopa meaning even women it seems now this does raise an enormous Lee interesting and controversial question regarding the propriety of the exemption of students of Torah from military service we know that one of the controversial issues occurred the law has changed at there but indeed the countrywide controversy that the State of Israel has faced really since 1948 is the exemption for students of Turin actually not only for suburban even for already a different religious sensibilities from military service now the problem which I'm Hakan which I'm not going to address fully is simply this if we assume and this seems to be correct that the milk amount of Medina Israel our milk emotes Mitzvah because they fall under the third category to protect the land and the population from enemies that try to destroy it and the mission of moussaka so that tells us milk MS Mitzvah there are no exemptions then it would stand to reason that nobody unless their physicals they have a physical disability but no able-bodied person can be exempted or is entitled to an exemption from participation in no huh mr. Mitzvah so this is not just a she voice and that's all this is not just sociological issue I mean the basically problem is in her buckle itself it would seem that there might not be a basis for any type of exemption at least if there's a combat necessity now again the character argument is that there's not a necessity then judgments can be made about other priorities but in terms of a categorical exemption there apparently would not be again I don't want to address that either but that's no commitments on that what is no comment for sure just to be sure they're right so those are mitzvah Wars now Mohammed Rashad is a non defensive war of aggression now that sounds pretty bizarre is the halacha telling me that under Torah a Jewish state can simply declare war against a non-aggressive party simply because we want to conquer their territory that doesn't sound very moral either so here you have to understand that the term they'll come in tree shoots optional war is a bit of a misnomer because there is a protocol that's that reclamation of that war would entail and that is number one there has to be a mela which we don't have today there has to be a sun Hedren that has to authorize it but number three which is most important there must be prophetic authorization via the divine breastplate that the coen go to earth which which is another way of saying God has to give you the green light and it must be done through the medium of prophecy and therefore for all intents and purposes there is no such creature today as milk summit reshoots the only wars that are halakhah Clee sanctioned today are defensive Wars now even then you get into a lot of interesting questions granted Netanyahu has not been calling upon him for advice except around election time but you know defensive wars are Mohammed mitzvot offensive wars are not permitted today because we lack the prophetic for us but then you get all sorts of all sorts of questions regarding preemptive strikes right in other words again what is a defensive war obviously if the enemy has crossed into our territory or if the enemy is shooting missiles into our territory so we can take whatever action but what if you're talking about preemption meaning to say they haven't done anything yet I want to take a step to go into their territory to disable their resources prevent a future attack like all the way back in the 1980s when Israel bombed nuclear reactor and Iraq etc so there's no question exactly how preemptive kind of defensive war be and we can week for example conquer a country because we feel if we don't in 15 years it'll be you know some power against us so there are going to be definitional issues as to what halacha regards as legitimately defensive in nature but the basic distinction is fairly clear defensive wars are okay offensive wars are not unless you have the entire process that you need for milk cement or shoots which requires mela son Hedren or in the children okay you want to miss the coloring goggles breastplate which really means prophecy God says yes now why would God say yes that's an interesting questions yeah who knows it could very well be that God might feel or God knows that a certain country would do better under Jewish control but that would be God's decision so to speak it wouldn't be a decision that we would be allowed to make now listen to what Rashi says Rashi says the parsha of a you thought TOA what type of war is the Torah legitimating this particular thing right he says it's only an optional warm which wouldn't apply today at all because if it's a Miss for there would be no possibility at least if it's the seven nations of commandment of taking a Canaanite captive because the Torah requires the eradication of the Canaanite captives and therefore you thought TOA only applies in an optional now I have to admit I have a problem with this Rashi because it seems to be there's an undistributed middle here because I understand Rossi's points that you can't apply this to the war against a male or Kanan because there'll be no captives but that's not that doesn't exhaust the category of mitzvot Wars the myths reward today there's certainly no myths with to eradicate every combatant so yeah that's right so if that's so what stops Rashi from extending your photo our to the milk come out mitzvah of today which is defensive and Rocky's arguments that it can't be talking about the for war because there are no captives only applies to two of the three categories of the Mitzvah war it does not apply to 30 now indeed you might recall you might use just a few months ago I think it less than a year ago the Ralph Sabrina the head rabbi of the IDF I don't remember but there was some issue that as a Shiva student he had published an article just a purple article just a theoretical article about the various Howick out of Asia to fought or that might be applied in contemporary warfare and he just did this as an academic exercise he was not advocating anything at all and somebody on earth that old article and he got a tremendous amount of trouble I'm not sure if he resigned and was replaced or something but but but at least there was some contemporary discussion about the possibility of your thoughts or even today but according to Rashi it couldn't happen because now she says it's only no summit reshoots it's not no summit Mitzvah O'Reilly proof seems to be a little problematic okay that is the horrific side of the equation so now I want to do a little bit of crossing the borders here and that is it's a little peculiar according to the Ariza and the Zohar and the orihime the allegory of you are at the story of the fight alone is an allegory of the struggle of the person to reclaim his soul from the clutches of the inter-arrival now if we were to ask it is that type of milsim on a kin to a mitzvah war or an optional war we would certainly classify it as a for because after all it is the most important duty of my life so is it not a little analytically peculiar that a story that signifies the fight against the eighth Sahara should be articulated in a narrative that is very specifically limited to optional war instead of a Mohammed Mitzvah meaning we would have expected that the allegory of the a turnaround belongs in a narrative concerning missile wars and not in a narrative concerning option words so essentially therefore the halacha and the allegory are very mismatched because the whole logic story is referring to optional Wars and the allegory is the greatest myth I have in my life to fight the æther era right so there's a certain dissonance between the ha logic structure of the story the prosciutto shil McArthur the simple meaning of the narrative and the spiritual message so a very very great Ralph not alive anymore of Yosef seven and now you made a pretty rough sever examine was among many many things but one of his accomplishments was he was the founding editor of the encyclopedia Tom did the Talmudic encyclopedia he was a brilliant brilliant writer in modern Hebrew he was a tremendous master of all rabbinic literature and photographic a photographic sense I was a very very rare commodity rf7 was in all circles he knew rough cooked very well as he was young man he was connected to Habad connected to Miss Rafi me post sake and he was connected to the brisk Arab and many of the khatola were very much anti Zionist so he was connected to everybody he knew everything wonderful wonderful writer and a perceptive person with a mastery of Torah but also a very very sensitive soul that's well Omar you're six ever to get that maybe I was well-known as he should be even today his for him are magnificent now occasion I'll just give you example just things get distorted one of these classic books which is still one of the best books for them ever written on the young until them is a safer called Mohideen bahahaha which is really a holic overview of the analytical issues of every function every time the Shiloh's the question is that we showed him the acronym so you can read Mike in 20 pages you can get a good summary of all of the major holistic issues of every empties now we're observing included at the end of his book what he regarded as a recent holidays your mots modes and he discusses the whole logic issues now our arts growth saw that modem by allah kyle was such a beautiful safer which it is that they commissioned a translation of modes and by rockler so it's called the festivals in morocco you can get to they printed it in two volumes it's a translation of representants book but because articles constituency are largely non-zionist they omit it they just omitted without indication a whole chapter of his safer they omitted the chapter on your mantra now that is a fairly outrageous thing to do it's one thing to say to at least indicate we have not translated this you know he that would have been a wrong decision but at least they're saying we've omitted some things but to omit part of an author's work when you're translating that work without indicating that something has been omitted is really very inexcusable censorship and what they said was they said something even worse they said well but observing wrote this in the early 1950s if he would have been alive today and would have seen you know all the different things that go on he would have agreed with it no I mean you're making this up okay but be this admit I don't want to guys that's just gossip I don't wanna go get into that but here's what Rocephin says again what's our question our question is why would the allegory of the answer Hara be situated in a parsha that's dealing with optional water syrup seven although the Muhammad Ali answer is certainly in Muhammad Mitzvah you have to fight it the way you fight in Mohammed Richardson the tactics of this Muhammed Mitzvah are those of no common Christian what is what do we mean what is the primary how logic difference between Muhammad Mitzvah and Muhammad we should at least wear the same if I don't mean the defensive work with the almalik war and the seven nations when you're fighting on my left are the seven nations you've got to destroy the enemy when you're fighting optional Wars you capture and reclaim the enemy here the lesson is when a person does chuva the optimal way of doing chuhwa is not by destroying your best but by capturing reclaiming and sublimating and in a positive direction there are two types of true enough so that they talked about this as well there is a true vibe that is a tin to an amputation person hats god forbid at Gingras armor leg sometimes the only choice you have is to amputate it to cut it off to disregard it otherwise it will contaminate poison infect the rest of the body and the body will die that is a true bug called amputation but just like physical amputation is a last resort and even when it's done it could be accompanied with a lot of phantom pain which can be extremely phantom pain is not a job it will be extremely painful so too when do we try to simply forget our past our past comes back to haunt us we can't really disengage and if you any of you read The Great Gatsby essentially Great Gatsby is a work of of potential Shuba which got frustrated essentially for someone who tried to escape a past and the past came back and then eventually destroyed him in some ways well he was a bootlegger yeah yeah but the kind he tried to create a new identity but but the point basically was that what he was dragged him down it again I mean yes yes yeah things came out exposed etc so the innocent may therefore the higher level of chuhwa is not to destroy who you were but to take that path and use it as the source of your unique strengths now again I'll give you a simple example let's take a drug addict let's say a person was an alcoholic or a drug addict for many many years and now they finally do Chuba they're able to change their lives now one way of dealing with the 10 20 or 30 years of dysfunctional behavior is to simply make believe they never exist don't think about it get away from it but you know as they say that's very difficult that's an amputation and that still leaves me leaves you with the idea that those years were a waste now let's assume that instead of just ignoring that guest the person uses the very negativities of his experience as his basis for helping people it becomes a drug counselor and alcohol company that is not obliterating it that is taking his sin and using it as the source of the positive energy of growth in which the sin itself becomes redeemed by being the foundation of his iboga this is the tactic of the optional war in which you capture the enemy rather than obliterating now this is something that people who are about a children often have to go through you know you come to you sham I am and you meet people who are no tenth generation you show me so they come from 50 generations of rabbis and you come from North Dakota or Montana and you've been religious you know for six months or whatever it is and you realize that no matter what I do I'll never be you know I won't even be you know as educated as the fifth grader of this family but here is the secret that a person needs to know it is true that the tenth generation economy has many many gifts that I will never have but it's also true that the person from North Dakota has many gifts that says your shaman is never gonna have because Hashem decided where our souls would be born and at least before we were capable of making decisions what our environments would be and if he put us in a certain environment we went to a certain journey that is because God decided that will be the source of the uniqueness of our contribution in the world this is the chuhwa knot of amputation not of being ashamed of who you are not escaping you are but embracing that past and using it in a positive in a positive way in a way that you couldn't have done had you not gone through those experiences and that's why people often really become religious they often abandon the talents that they had whether it's a music or art or whatever it is they often cut off family ties and these are things that I know firsthand from dealing with people in these situations and sometimes that may be the way to go because sometimes you have to amputate when there are toxic destructive relationships I don't deny the reality of that but that's a last resort and that is not the goal of chuhwa which involves reclaiming yourself and not obliterating yourself so this the fight of the a Sahara is a mitzvah war but you fight it like an option war in terms of capturing rather than rather than destroying and this is the meaning of a very enigmatic passage in the Gemara where the gemara says when you do chuhwa out of love God does not just erase your sins but your sins are credited as if they are Commandments as if they're mitzvot how can my sin become a mitzvah understand God forgives got erases that itself is a phenomenal kindness of the Almighty like I shouldn't even say I understand that that itself is a tremendous present but I understand that takes me down to zero I had a million sins God erases them I start with a clean slate brush em but a clean slate means zero in my bank account but the Gemara says much more than that when you do chew by the love of God you don't simply have a clean slate all of those deficits are now positives of lately it's like a prediction went over to the town of Russia and said I'm so jealous of you all you have to do is chew by the glove and you're gonna be way ahead of me all of your heroes are gonna be misspelled but how can that be that's very strange and that same it becomes the answer is yes because when you use all of those negative experiences as the basis of the creative energy that you bring to God God looks at all of those actions is kind of the prep work the preliminary work to get you where you were you see if all you're doing is amputation you're not gonna be credited with any of that because you're just getting rid of it when you use it it actually becomes part of your Mitzvah identity so this issue about cutting off family cutting off interests this is why by the way you often find in the religious world a certain measure maybe I would call it a subclinical level of depression if I'm not referring to clinical depression kind of a kind of a a certain malaise a lack of joy a lack of enthusiasm because everybody's afraid to be themselves a little bit because other people will look you know you know it's not done this isn't done that isn't there everything's a fear this isn't done that isn't done etc you know I've heard stories about people who took out the garbage not wearing a jacket you know they said it affected I don't know if these are true but it affected the shittest with their daughters you know you know all of these different people are watching you all the time different communities and the point is when you're not yourself you're cutting yourself off from whom you are there is gonna be something not natural about that that's gonna be painful that's gonna cause a certain pink it may not be a cute thing but at least this what you might call a subclinical certain depression in life that you're just not expressing yourself and we don't believe that the talents and the abilities that God gave you are evil things that you're supposed to frighten denying destroy but you rather you use them and you elevate them and you concentrate them and they become the source of your strength and the source of your contribution so again I'm elaborating under several but this is Rev sevens beautiful beautiful insight that the war of the eighth Sahara must be fought like an optional war where the enemies caught and reclaimed and not like getting missed for where the enemy is obliterated you know the great receive of mirror lessons to be thinkable who died a few years ago you know his stories very well no shake ah go boy raised in Chicago he went to a co-ed High School he was on the basketball team he was a debater although he came from a religious family he was not a butcher but better baby but grew up an environment is decidedly not the Shiva Shimon's of of the marry Shiva and he was he's related to their membership would he become he grew up to become who we became and of course he is a very heroic figure because he suffered debilitating illness multiple sclerosis absolutely debilitating illnesses and he pushed himself onward onward nomini it was a very very heroic person in that in that way but I remember attending the Lavanya and there were a lot of eulogies and all of the eulogies made the same point which I was a little offended at and the point was look at how a person can escape the limitations of his environment he grew up in such a common environment co-ed high school basketball team like a garbage environment and look at how he was able to reject that environment and become what he became right that was kind of the dominant chord of the eulogies but I would suggest to you that there's something missing from that picture he did not become who we became in spite of his environment he became who he became because of his environment because one of his very exceptional qualities of many exceptional qualities was his ability to relate well with American teenagers and he would often talk to Americans even middle school kids he was ocularly would say you know listen I played basketball I was in the coed school he understood and he had a sensitivity to people and a receptivity to people because in his life experiences he was exposed to many many different things so instead of simply saying he rejected that life to become something better he took those experience and he assimilated them into his religious identity in a very positive and constructive granted those were not sinful I'm not suggesting anything was sinful there but but just the idea that even things that were regarded as off the beaten track are not conventional within the issue with your world they were part of his positive identity so the issue was not oh look at how a person can escape from such a bad thing it's the other way around he took those experiences and he made them the source of something very positive and very deep and that is how we have to be as well whether we come from Montana North Dakota different types of family circumstances different types of difficulties and trials these are not things to be ashamed of these are the victories in life that made us who we are and they bring out the unique qualities that we have in our over there they don't have to be spoken about to other people if you don't want to talk about them nobody's saying you have to publicize every single event in your life but at least internally they are our victories in life that make us who we are and therefore our job is to use them as a source of positive spiritual energy rather than simply amputate and ignore what they represent and this is why the allegory of the a Sahara is bad Oscar in the parsha of no cement ratio services and collaboration and the thoughts of the great Irish number Yosef seven so I'm a good night and a good week [Music]