Thanking Hashem for the Ups & Downs (Parsha Behar) - Tehila Gimpel: The Land of Israel Fellowship

I try to be uh patient with Jeremy um because he has a lot of ideas from his place where he's sitting and not moving so much he has a lot of ideas lately about how things should be being run and so I try to be patient uh but sometimes Hashem forgive me I lose my patience and that happened yesterday and I felt very bad about it and I I kind of chewed his head off because he was you know whatever and uh nothing to be too proud of and then I uh I went to bed feeling terrible that I yelled at a person who's like barely had just woken up and he's already getting yelled at by his wife so uh so I felt really bad about that and I was I was really trying to work on myself because you know I apologized to him and he of course was like well you're under so much stress of course and he was really nice about it but I didn't feel uh at peace and in the morning I was I was doing I was I was praying to hasem about and I said you know I'm really sorry and I accepted upon myself whatever should come I said I know that I was in the wrong and so I am ready for whatever I deserve Hashem now word to the wise if you say that make sure you have good car insurance because because no sooner did I walk out the door and get into my car I managed to blow the mirror right off the side of my car by crashing into Jeremy's car now I felt on the one hand surprised surprised at the sight of my flying mirror on the other hand I said thank you hashm I see that you're watching me closely because no sooner had I accepted upon myself willingness to take responsibility and get whatever is coming my way I felt very uh tended to by Hashem see he's keeping me on the right path and so I just said Thank You Hashem as my mirror was sort of like dangling in the wind and I'm drying you know try trying to drive uh to my work trying not to crash because I don't have a mirror and I just said Thank You SM well played I accept that really Tred to keep a good attitude and then I call the um our local car mechanic and he says listen uh you know it's going to be really expensive to fix but it's probably covered by your insurance so you call your insurance agent so I get off the phone I'm like oh I'm just going to call the insurance agent I called the insurance agent she's like that's weird I thought I was in there but looks like you don't have that covered and I was like okay ashem I see where this is going I accept that well done this is really I'm accepting this and I just tried to keep a grateful heart in that situation and I drove to the car mechanic and then I'm getting ready for like the big Bill and then I'm just saying okay thank you aam I have no complaints totally deserved and then the guy's like oh you know what he called over like some work C like wait we didn't have another way to fix that and they somehow put it back together and reassembled it and then I went into the office I took out my credit card to pay and they said oh that little bit of work that's free you just go on your way so I didn't know if I didn't know if to be even more happier to say okay better watch out for what's coming next because that didn't really that didn't really go poorly enough but but why am I telling you all of this besides for to laugh with me at my uh at my foibles um which is fun um you know I was studying this coming week's paraa that we have because this paraa of botai that we're coming on is really the end the last verse says and that is the summary of what God told us at Sinai meaning now we're coming after that next week we're going to go into the stories that happened in the desert and then we're going to have everything resummed in the book of Deuteronomy and darim but right now we're coming on the end of God's message to us at Mount Si so this is like it's like the culmination and it's a really really important portion because it's telling us here we're getting to like the the point and what is really the point I think it's very interesting when we read the the portion something that really struck me this week in uh reading this coming week's portion is that when you read the blessings the blessings are beautiful the Torah portion divides into two parts one is if you follow the laws of the Torah these are going to be your blessings and if you don't follow the laws of the Torah these are going to be your curses but if you count the verses they don't exactly divide evenly what are the blessings the blessings are that you're going to have food you're going to be fruitful and multiply and you're G to have peace and God is going to walk with you that's amazing right but the curses the curses the curses start out and they're sort of the mirror opposite of that right if you don't listen to me you're not going to have food and you're not going to have rain and you're not going to have peace and then it just goes worse it just gets worse because here's the thing about good and bad there's sort of a cap to how good things can be right like things can be really good but it's not infinitely good things can just be really good like your life can be going well like if you're not sick you're happy with your family and you have a good job and a relationship with God there's pretty much no end to how bad things can go things can go infinitely wrong it's a really powerful and kind of scary message at Sinai which is that you need to be very careful because when things are good they're going to be good but if things are horrible you don't know how bad that can get and it causes us it's not you know we talk here a lot about loving Hashem which is so important but having fear of heaven and knowing how what a narrow bridge we're on when we follow the path there's kind of one way of doing things right and a million ways that you can make things things go really wrong and but when I was reading it what I what I found that was so interesting in the curses is that the curses are not as they get worse and worse they're not really about the original sins anymore there are certain curses that going to come on us if we don't follow the Torah we're not going to have food we're not going to have water we're not going to have plants we're not going to have right we're not going to have peace but then Hashem says to us if you walk with me and the Hebrew word is in carry meaning in happenstance it's translated as if you walk with me in happen stance then seven more curses are going to come upon you and then if you walk with me in happen stance seven more curses are going to come upon you and it keeps going on like this and what does it mean to walk in happen stance to me it doesn't sound like we're even talking about the original mistake anymore at some point walking in happen stance means to perceive that which is happening to you as just being a coincidence I think what the portion is teaching us is that the secret to avoiding those curses is when the curse first starts when Hashem is correcting us because we've made a small mistake and something goes slightly wrong you can say ah that was a mistake I was tired I knocked my mirror off I slipped off a horse whatever it was just a coincidence it doesn't really matter that's when the curses get out of control because the first curse is they're like okay you know it's going to be a rough time but the secret that the Torah is giving us at Sinai is to say when those things go wrong because they will go wrong you have two ways of looking at them you can either say well that was a coincidence and then watch out or you can say thank you Hashem for correcting me and I think that like you know right now there are people who are obviously suffering tremendously more than us but we've been through you know what for us was sort of a a little kind of smack you know sort of knocked out of our normal past of life and Jeremy's been struggling with you know physical things and I've been struggling with seeing him struggling with those physical things and keeping everything together it's been a struggle for us and even just this day of having you know an accident with my car these struggles I think that the secret that our Torah portion is giving us is that the immediate response has to be thank you Hashem for correcting me I'm going to try to understand what you're telling me because if it's not that if it's not that then there's almost no limit to how things can go and that's what the the Torah is teaching us the have you guys ever been in like a fight with your spouse or with a family member with a friend and you're fighting about something but the fight gets so heated that at some point you don't even remember what the original fight was about and now you're fighting about what you just said in the fight because the fight got so heated that who cares who took out the garbage or not now it's because you mentioned my mom and you told me that I was acting like my sister you know now we're already fighting about a whole different subject do you guys know what I'm talking about have you ever had that kind of fight where the fight is so bad that it's actually worse than the original thing that's what I feel like in this Torah portion Hashem is saying there's sins that we do and we can get punished but what's even worse than doing those sins is not seeing hashem's hand in our life when he's correcting us and trying to bring us onto the right path and we say ah coincidence we're going to walk with God in happen stance everything that happens to me is happen stance and that's when now it's already not about what we did wrong originally now it's something relational now it's not a mistake it's not that we forgot to keep kosher on or keep Shabbat enough now it's that we forgot the essence of our relationship with Hashem where Hashem is our father and he corrects us and he keeps us on the straight and narrow path through involvement directly in our life and so sort of that that for me has been where my life and and Jer you know my life here in Jeremy's event and in my own personal life has been meeting with the Torah portion and I I found that to be a powerful lesson as we're sort of finishing up the Sinai experience and Hashem sends us off from Sinai to live our spiritual lives inspired by that Revelation and kind of giving us a uh one last bit of guidance on our path