Tisha B'Av: Disconnected from Our Soul - Rabbi Akiva Rutenberg

[Music] so I'd like to begin we know that today we are mourning the loss of the Beit HaMikdash we are mourning really many tragedies that took place over the millennium and it's interesting and resumption Pinkus points out there were we mourn something it means there's a like a death right whenever what else do we have a concept of mourning where there's Mesa when there's death other than that you don't have the idea of mourning so what is death and what are we mourning that it's sort of similar to the concept of death social Pincus says that death is the disconnect between the body and the soul the neshamah and the growth and when there's a disconnect between the body and the soul we see in our life death and we mourn that the neshamah is not with us anymore and we mourn that the body doesn't have the ability to do this a hood and bits world that it once happened what are we mourning today with the loss of the atomic - but I want to speak about in the next few minutes is what we're really learning is the disconnect between us the Jewish people and our neshama our soul our collective soul our connection to a sham to spirituality to kedusha that makes us feel totally connected and that is the underlying theme behind all the tragedies that befell the Jewish people throughout all time the beginning of a thaw yummy onabi says in call us well Avadh how we're sitting alone and it actually compares the morning of the Jewish people to his owner to a prostitute and it's interesting because a prostitute it might seem like she has many connections but there's really no connection to anything we say Jerusalem yerushalayim was earshot overall active a city that connected us all together when we mourn the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash the - Bertha Mae - the assault that happened on this day and many other sufferings and tragedies happen to the Jewish people throughout our history we also must mourn how many millions and millions of Jews we lost the intermarriage to assimilation and in a way this is the quiet tragedy because we don't feel the pain in a like a stab a wound and it happens very slowly or sometimes not so slowly but millions and millions of Jews have been lost in particular in the last century or two - intermarriage and assimilation I don't know the exact statistic but all you have to do is look around and speak to people who are observant Jews today and there's an extremely high proportion of them there are descendants of people that came after the war Holocaust survivors immigrants that came to the United States in the last 40 50 60 years there were two million Jews in New York in America and primarily in New York in the year 1900 I'm scared to see the statistic of how many of their descendants I let alone observant but even Jewish at the end of the first-base emic - the ten tribes got stood up from the two tribes and basically at the korban of the beit hamikdash at the bottom of the second of the first way to make - we lost 10 out of the 12 tribes lost the morale mentioned that the word mitzvah the word mitzvah the root of the word comes from the letters sadiq love test what a static love test mean so it means a connector a connection actually in modern hebrew the word sava whether we're like for the army or the word for a company has the same root when we do a mitzvah we are connected to something far greater than ourselves and this famous points out that the word head is actually connected to the word of disconnect we all know the famous maracas ow that tell us something which on the surface seems very strange what was the first tragedy that happened on tisha Bob the maragua the spies they came back to Israel they told the Jewish people it's terrible you can't go there it's a land that eats up its inhabitants all these problems everybody cried they didn't follow you're sure in college they cried and Mama hazael says like a message went out that says you cried for nothing so this is going to be a day when you cry forever and on the surface of this and I was this thing to a share my room and why why Jacobson who just pulled it out very beautiful and he said does this make any sense if you imagine we know that Hashem is our father a loving father who loves us and cares for us you imagine if your parent would say because you made a mistake today and this day forever you're going to suffer it sounds terrible what does this mean and the answer is that it's not a punishment it's a consequence the very problem that caused us as a Jewish nation to sin at the time of the spies is the very reason why we lost the furtive atomic - and the second basic - and all the tragedies that we suffer when you go back to the first sin recorded in the Torah it's the sin of cayenne and have oh right Cayenne kills his brother hello the first cent how does a brother come to kill another brother and why did he kill him there was no shortage of real estate back then why did he kill him the Torah tells us because he was jealous that he's carbon his sacrifice was accepted faster than hitting kaya now think about this for a moment you're killing out 50% of the world's population and you're doing it because his car ban was not accepted you're a cop I was not accepted does this make any sense who are you bringing the carpet to it makes no logical sense whatsoever and in essence the sin of the Maracana of the spies also makes no logical sense God took them out of Egypt in the most miraculous ways a maidservant at the sea so are more miracles then then then you test kuben there living on maan and then they're saying and we don't trust that God's gonna be able to take us into the lands of Israel it doesn't make sense and the only way to understand it is that at some very deep level there was a disconnect there was a disconnect that caused this fear a disconnect of their bodies and their souls a disconnect then we're going to speak about in the next few minutes and it's interesting that it was the sin of the Maracana in the sin of the spies that caused our not to go into the Land of Israel that we refer to as the as the day of suffering they're all suffering is going to be connected to not the sin of the golden calf it seems like the golden calf as much as it affected them as a nation it brought them back to a - to mortality but yet that they could have overcome but the syllabus of the spies that's the prototypes in that's the that's the sin that in a certain sense is the connector or the the source the root of all the galoot and all the problems that we have today if you think about it the sin of the of the Golden Calf came about commentaries say they wanted something tangible they wanted a tangible way to connect to God some say was fear because they saw Moshe Rabbeinu it looked like he had died but at the root of it it came from certain ideas that were wrong but the sin of the spies was a sin we're going to discuss as total disconnection there's a very famous book in Parshat baku coat i in the middle of what we call the toka car the toka car is the curses the negative things that happen that will happen to the jewish people if they don't follow them it's both and in the middle of this whole talk of all the negative things that will happen there's a very strange verse that just jumps out in the middle of it that really doesn't seem to fit at all with the rest of the total thought and it's very strange in general and the verse is taught a shallow Raja Tarzan Sharma local hobby steam cloud we totally evolved a Rothko and the way most commentaries explain this is that you take the words literally why did all these bad things happen toss out a shallow Avada thermal no kotoba steam cloud with totally above near of coal because you didn't serve God with simcha with happiness and a full heart as Rashi says Miro shook at the time when things were so good for otro talk when things were still good and it's a very strange person first of all it's strange that the Tories in the middle of the talk are telling us why we got to this point and it's strange that this is the very reason why we have why all these bad things happen I think if you ask most of us we would say it happened because of the eight Sahara because of tava because we had desire to do the wrong thing that's not what it says it says it happened because we didn't serve Hashem with simpler and a full heart when things were good why is simpler so important what is the importance of simple that he gets such prominence over here and I want to share with you something that I personally for myself and my family I call it the miracle in mumbay it's going to be 10 years of 10 years now the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving I'm walking out of my office and I'll never forget this we another and walking out of my office and my wife calls me and she says is your father okay and I said why would he not be okay and she said my mother called me and said that there was an attack in India and I didn't even remember that my father was in India but he had he would he traveled there often at that time for the cancer research that he was doing and I flippantly responded India's a big place a billion people what's the likelihood that he was involved even if he is there 10 minutes later I get a call from my mother your father's ok and it became clear over the next few hours that as many of you remember there was a very organised attack in Mumbai India and I believe 12 different locations the Taj Mahal Hotel the Umbria hotel the train stations the kebab unfortunately the rabbi and his wife were killed in the Chabad and a very very coordinated attack and my father used to stay at the Ambria hotel and anybody who was upstairs in their room if you stayed upstairs in your room you were fine but if you were downstairs in the lobby of the hotel when the gunman came in and in particular if you had a white complexion and particularly if you were wearing a yarmulke your likelihood of survival was very very very small and my father was standing there with the yarmulke with two other Jewish people another one with yarmulke as well in the lobby of the hotel and they didn't have to check out for like another hour and my understanding is the Mumbai Airport is not the kind of place you want to just hang out in at least at that time and there was another gentleman my father was with lived in Israel and he had this feeling and he said I want to get out of here and they left the hotel they didn't even check out they just took their bags went into a taxi and later my father realized that he actually saw the gunmen walking in front of his taxi that's how close he was to the attack the next night was Thanksgiving and not to get involved whether Jews should celebrate Thanksgiving or not and in my family we didn't do it religiously for sure but since then it became a religious holiday Thanksgiving a pseudo Dada a celebration of Thanksgiving and it's very fitting that the next speaker in a few minutes is going to be rabbi clásico because 24 hours after that Thanksgiving that Friday night Emmett had its first major Shabbos home bar my class goes home and it was the first major shopper tone ever my rabbi class goes home after he had a fire in this house and they rebuilt the house and I found myself literally 48 hours after this happened to my father sitting in rabbi classical's dining room with 70 Emmett students a hundred people in the dining room and plenty of room for everyone to sit and I looked at the very short chapter into hilum called mizmor Latour da AB psalm of thanksgiving and we say this chapter when we're saved from a danger we say this chapter in the time of the beta mag - when you brought a car bomb called a sacrifice of Thanksgiving which by the way the commentaries tell us that when all when Messiah comes and all the carbonyls are gonna be different corpus toda will still remain and the Corbin thought was a very special thing a person who would bring it when he was safe from a danger when they made it across an ocean when he made it out of an illness when they got out of jail and their special Hallows and mocks whole thing is supposed to have and it forces you to share this this carbon with so many different people and I look at this very short chapter that I say every day of the week except Shabbat and it spoke to me differently than it ever did before and I see the words mrs. Morel it toda psalm of thanksgiving her real Hashem Coloradans I call out to our she'll to the whole world if do it I shan't be simcha but Allah for not being or not serve God with joy combi before him with even a higher level of joy you know there's so many words a biblical hebrew for happiness and joy some want to say that similar to the way the Eskimos have words to describe snow we have words to describe simcha in the brothel and hot I'm hot on a collar say in the seventh brothel we give to the metallic Allah we say we say Dulari not the table that Nevada our Father Shalom very own I'm not gonna try to translate that right here but each one is a different level of happiness and joy miss Bartlett Olga starts off and it says you do it I shan't be simcha serve God with joy but all the phenomena come before him with even a higher level of joy and the obvious question that I asked myself both as a therapist and as a rabbi and as a thoughtful person I think everyone needs to ask himself this question how does Hashem command me to have an emotion simple as an emotion how do you tell a person to feel something either I feel it or I don't feel it you can't tell me to have an emotion and then I look at the next word and I don't believe in the entire tehilim Dava uses this word and he says do you should know and what's the next line he says key Hashem who are Elohim who are song of the law and afternoon and I believed of in our mouth his teaching of something very very powerful which goes very much again so much of what our society says and that is that simcha happiness is not something that you need to arrive at that point you don't have to work on yourself to become happy you don't have to have everything going right to be happy happiness is actually your natural state now how can I tell you this what does that mean happiness is your natural state what I'm saying is is that there's two main reasons that a person is not happy one is because things are not going the way they want they think they should be worth this much they're worth that much they think their kids should be respecting them this way and they're not they think that things are not going the way they want and the second is because they feel lonely and disconnected and on that double America saying two key Hashem who elokim Hashem we know is me that successive Elohim is me that said then when we say on Yom Kippur Hashem well okay and what does that mean it means we are saying that when everything in our life is cus it well looks like judgment it's really custard everything is cussing who are saalu below anak blue he created us we are part of him and move its own burrito we're the flock of his sheep if you think about the animal that's the most relaxed it's the Sheep because he's protected by the shepherd I haven't spoken to a farmer recently but I never heard of sheep needing to be on xanax because they're protected if we incorporate these two ideas davin ll of says you're automatically going to be Basim car you're going to be happy but then I asked myself another question why here why now now that I'm Alex went through so much tragedies in his life why at this point when he's saved from a danger is he talking about simcha it's natural to be some car when you make it out of jail when you make it across the ocean why over here does mm I'll have to talk to me about simcha and I think the idea is is because word of it is teaching us is that gratitude and simcha are directly connected mizmor lasorda up psalm of thanksgiving eve do a shamble simcha gratitude and simcha are directly tied to each other if I can be a person that is trains myself to be grateful about all the blessings of my life I will automatically be in a state of simpler what I would like to suggest is that there's a triangle there's gratitude this simpler and then there's the keyboard there's the connection that we have with her Sherman with our mitzvahs it's brought down the name is Oscar tsadikim that if a person does a missile with simcha it's a there's a thousand times greater reward for that mitzvah then I miss her not samba simcha now Rizal Accardo says that the way I became who I became was not because I did Mitsu's better than anyone else but I did it with more simcha after I came up with this idea I actually saw the rebus or cilantro the founder of the Muslim movement once said that the reason that children are happier than adults is not because of what we think that they're naive but rather nobody taught them not to be happy adults and as we grow up we're told oh this is not going on you lost your job you can't be happy today this one wrong you can't be happy today this one wrong but in essence and presenters have had more time in the future I'll elaborate more on this idea there's an attitude of gratitude that's essential to us as a human being to being the simpler to being happy and if we can create this attitude of gratitude in ourselves then the way we do mitzvahs is totally different when I do a midst of this simcha I am who bar to that Mitzvah I'm connected to the Mitzvah the Mitzvah is coming from me it's not just something that I'm doing and when I do that Mitzvah my children and others around and community members everybody will want to be connected to that because it's real and it's connected think about our relationship as the rabbi class go often talks about everything in our relationship with Hashem it's just it's a relationship think about our relationships with our spouse with each other these three ingredients are the key gratitude simcha and connection if you want to have a very healthy relationship with your spouse figure out ways look for ways to feel that gratitude feel gratitude in everything that you do and that brings you to simpler and then your relationship that's built on gratitude and simcha will be a relationship of connection that will be very very hard to break away from that remote chef Einstein the great sage of the 20th century very famously in many many different essays is bothered by a question he says I don't understand he lives in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and he saw countless Jews who sacrificed so much for MIT's vote and their own children and grandchildren just went away in droves and he said I don't understand they did so much sacrifice for Torah why did their children not continue it and if remoter than saying I don't think I could say but Moshe said the problem was because they said it's very as I need it's hard to be a Jew and emotion wasn't blaming them for saying that but he was explaining the consequence of saying that because if that father would have sat down on his chair Friday night and said it's hard to be a Jew but it's so so worth it then that simcha would have been something that would be able to continue for generations but when the children saw it's difficult for my father I have such respect for him but why do I want that life and if I might suggest and I don't mean to be controversial here but I might suggest in our own lives we may also be doing Shrestha signing it we may also be saying to ourselves and our children it's hard to be a Jew without recognizing that we're saying it when we in our families and we talked about how difficult tuition is how difficult this is and they're all difficult don't get me wrong but when we talk about all the difficulties at some subtle point I think the message gets sent that it's hard and I think that if we can train ourselves to have an attitude of gratitude it will make all the difference I'm gonna end with the Hebrew word for a Kurata tove right when we say the word gratitude in Hebrew what do we say how kurata talk if you look at the word it doesn't mean what we think it means it doesn't say gratitude it says recognizing the good we know there's something called cuff which Oh coffee table is when someone does something for you and you're disrespectful you don't recognize that most of us think there's coffee table and there's her car set off and that's it there's two things I don't think this is true I think that there's Cavuto and then that's a person who doesn't recognize the good and then there's being a decent human being which is recognizing the good that's not how current etaf Hakata Taub is recognizing the good seeing the good even when the situation doesn't look so pretty finding the good in the difficult moments and if a person trains himself to do that they can be in a state of tremendous tsimko all their life with the the last braja of Becket Amazonas Nebraska at Omaha native the one who does good and is good and if I asked you where is the source of that Braco way to come him come up with that bracha you'd probably tell me in the time of swan waha mela the jews control the whole world no that's not the source the source is actually an event that happened today the city of bait our was what was was was was taken over and the Gemara talks about how much blood flowed from that city for a long time after the event so you asked me so why are they making abraca had vomited and the Gemara tells us because they were not able to have a proper burial but months later when they came back I showed me the miracle and their bodies were intact and they were able to have a proper burial does that make sense that's we were giving thanks for and I would suggest that yes that's what we're giving thanks for because they were able to be mikoto except for whatever reason why this tragedy had to happen and yet see how chefs hand in the goods they were able to have that burial and it's interesting today when do we make a profit over how native we make Abraha when you have one wine on the table and somebody brings you another wine which is better you like it better you have a Chardonnay on the table and somebody brings you the merlot that you like better and we make a profit off our natives and I'd like to suggest what's the connection between that broth ah and the city of Bay Times and I think the answer is is that if we want to be the type of people that can be mocker towed they can have an attitude of gratitude even in the most difficult moments we need to be able to be people that appreciate the merlot over the carbonation over the the other one that we can appreciate every nuance of good in our life and I also want to suggest that I think sometimes the internet and the way that news travels today we can end up becoming a society where we're only talking about tragedies and although it's beautiful in a way something bad happens and the whole Jewish people are talking about this this beautiful absolute unity but there's a little bit of a negative that I think we have to be careful from that we don't become so focused on negative and sadness because when somebody has a miraculous situation very often it doesn't travel anything near as fast as the tragedy and we ended up having this attitude that life is terrible there's so many problems and there are definitely problems but we need to train ourselves to appreciate the good to appreciate all the bracha and in in our life and if we can work on ourselves to certify shamba simpler the service met with joy to fill our lives with gratitude and joy we will have a keyboard we'll have a connection to mitzvahs that Bazaar tishell will bring us the beta me - [Music] [Applause]