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Tazria, Shabbat ha Chodesh ~ Aish Kodesh 03/31/2011
by Rabbi Henoch Dov Hoffman
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Index of Rabbi Hoffman's Audio Files[1]
March 31, 2011, Aish Kodesh Class, Parsha Tazria, Shabbos
HaKodesh
Let's review a little bit because we have to understand
that before we can understand this. I have a beautiful
song about Miriam's leprosy. This week we're talking
about tumah, leprosy, sexuality and life. One of the
things that's so grand about being a Jew is that we talk
about things differently than other people do. G*d gave
us this physical world where He s invisible and we have
to search him out.
The middle word of the Torah is DAROSH DAROSH. Chapter
10, Verse 16. Moshe inquired insistently. Moshe was
searching and searching, which brings us to the chumatz.
Chametz means sour. Pickles are chumatzim. Vinegar is the
same word. Chumatz is bacteria working on the flour. Each
mitzvah is a physical act and also metaphysical with deep
meaning. We re not just cleaning, we re doing teshuva.
You have to break your heart.
On Purim there s two types of simcha. G*d flashes a
situation where the Jews are saved from Haman, and that
was a great simcha, but there was a greater simcha that
after 1,000 years of searching and searching they rose
and received the Torah for the first time. G*d gives you
flashes of inspiration, which is the first simcha, but
there is so much more simcha that comes from a broken
heart. This was crucial for the Aish Kodesh to prepare
himself for the Warsaw Ghetto. In the darkness there
there s a flash that s outside of you and bigger than
you, but then you get bigger to receive it. In Jacob s
angels on the ladder go up before they go down. Jacob s
heart has been broken, he s been in a wealthy home and he
s been robbed everything. The angels are leaving, his
spirituality is leaving. When you feel that breaking of
yourself, you can expand your receiving vessels, kalim.
When the angels come back there s more space for them so
you integrate them at a higher level. The Lubovicher
Rebbe says a rock doesn t need anything. It symbolizes
all mute matter in the world. Then HaShem created soil,
water and sun, and the plant is free. But animals need a
little bit more. Animals need movement. That s the four
worlds of consciousness. At some level we re like a rock.
The fourth level is human life, which is speaking life,
which is purpose, meaning and growth to feel free.
Many people exist like rocks, or are like plants or
animals. That s why we use the four worlds constantly.
The deeper level of Purim was beyond the drinking and the
party. We repaired Sinai. There were two levels: the
flash revelation. First they said, We will do and we will
listen to their doing. This is the correct translation.
At every word of the first commandment they died and then
they were resuscitated by a dew that fell. It was beyond
their ability to conceive of, so they said Moshe, You go
up and bring it down. The next scene is very mysterious.
HaShem holds the mountain over their heads and says, If
you don t receive the Torah, this mountain will be your
coffin. That s the breaking part. This is where HaShem
becomes the helpmate against you. When you know you have
overcome some of your demons, you know that you re free.
That s why we do it in a dark room.
On Purim they were broken at the meal of Achashveros.
Mordechai was the head of the Sanhedrin. The other rabbis
said, We have to go to Achashveros s party. So they ate
pork chops on the Temple plates and they were all so
broken. Then Haman says he won t be happy until Mordechai
bows down to him, so the other rabbis kicked Mordechai
off the Sanhedrin. Gandhi said that if one Jew would have
not bowed down to Hitler- He called it the discipline of
non-cooperation. That s what Mordechai was practicing.
One man did a parody of the Nazis in their face. The last
thing Julius Rosenberg said before he was hanged as a
Nazi war criminal was, Today is Purim 1946.
You can see Mordechai and Esther both growing and
becoming bigger people. Mordechai said to Esther, Only
for this moment were you put here. And she figured out
how one person could control the situation.
When Miriam gets thrown out of the camp, it s the same
moment. G*d was not present. There were no fiery letters
in the sky. Like Miriam they re doing it outside the
camp, in exile.
When it becomes a capital crime to be a Jew, suddenly you
know that who you are is a capital crime. We learned from
Nadab and Abihu that being a Jew is a risky business. My
rabbi s uncle, the Bobover Rebbe, had thousands and
thousands of followers. He came home to his son in
Brachia in Poland near Cracow, the oldest Jewish
settlement in Eastern Europe, originally settled at the
time of the Romans. The head of the Nazis, Amman Goethe,
made a speech in which he said, The Jews have been here
2,000 years and their presence here will just be a rumor
from now on. The Bobover Rebbe came home to his son and
said, s Shabbos, we have to cut our payas and our beards
or they will shoot us. This is the halachah that the
rabbis evoked to Mordechai: you can t risk people s
lives. So all the rabbis went to the meal and ate the
pork chops on the Temple plates. And they were so broken.
Jeremiah prophesized G*d has not forsaken us and will
return us after 70 years. The idea of chumatz is
illustrated in this story. Moshe is searching and
searching. In line 16 you see Aaron didn t follow his
orders. This is the bull s eye of the Torah. In line 15
it says Moshe tells Aaron, You ate two goats and it s G*d
s will that you eat the third. But the goat was burned
instead of eaten. The word is used to describe Moshe is
actually foaming. Moshe was so angry he was foaming. This
is rage. So much is happening for Moshe. He lost his
nephews. He said to Aaron, I thought either you or I
would be the sacrifice, but now I see that your sons were
greater than we are. He implies that Judaism requires
human sacrifice. This is how we understand the millions
of martyrs. I highly recommend Of Gods And Men, a movie
about ten monks who decided to martyr themselves in
Algeria. All the people who said, m not converting, and
they were killed or they had to leave.
This is very provocative. Tevya said, Choose someone else
for a while. It s our job to teach Muslims and Xtians to
stop scapegoating Jews. We have to resist scapegoating.
The premise of the Torah is that it s happening all the
time. We read about Nadab and Abihu every Yom Kippur.
Moshe is enraged and the Midrash fills in the details.
The first seven days of the dedication of the mishkan
Moshe was the Kohane Godol. When Moshe said at the
Burning Bush, Send somebody else, he lost the right to be
the high priest. Moshe is talking to Aaron s sons, but he
s mad at his brother, and Aaron knows that. Moshe was
very conscious that the whole mishkan was an atonement
for the Golden Calf. He said, You should have eaten it in
the holy place even though you are in mourning. The
moment when Aaron responds is the moment when the baton
is passed. Aaron is saying, m in charge here. Aaron says,
If I had eaten the sin offering today would that have
pleased G*d? Moshe was in charge right until that moment.
This is hard moment for Moshe. He s a take-charge guy.
The brotherly rivalry is the whole theme of the Torah.
You have to go to the place of where you relate to your
siblings.
This is Moshe s dark room. This is how he s teaching us
to search for chumatz. The stuff in the cracks starts to
sour. The main image, SA-OR, is the gas that s given off
in fermentation. This is anger. Moshe is the
reincarnation of Abel, so we re going all the way back to
the first murder of the first sibling. The Arizah teaches
us that it s Abel and Noah. The two souls combine to make
Moshe s soul.
(Women had a much higher status, but the Xtian
environment affected it. The tone of the Talmud is much
different about women.)
Moshe is baring his dark room. In the end you see what he
was searching for: Aaron says, You re not telling me what
to do; I m in charge. When Moshe heard his explanation,
LISHMAH, deep listening, it was good in his eyes. He s
telling you how hard he had to work for it, because all
his reaction mechanisms were saying this is bad; I m
losing everything today.
We enshrine this idea of the good eye on Shabbos. You re
not allowed to criticize others or yourself on Shabbos.
BORER, you can t separate a bad thing from good; you can
t focus your eye on the bad on Shabbos. Repairing the
world is the job of a Jew. The only way you can do this
is doing it on Shabbos. If you can t do it one day a
week, you don t know when you re scapegoating. People get
so easily addicted. People find it extremely difficult to
do this on Shabbos. The other 39 malachas is a way of
being in the world. The Torah says you have to be present
and not try to change things, just be in the world, don t
change others, nature, yourself. Be here now.
Moshe is searching for the good eye. You learn the most
about scapegoating with your siblings. We don t have
problems with the Hindus. We have problems with Asav and
Ishmael, our siblings.
The greater you are, the more G*d is your helpmate
against you. He never lets Moshe off the hook. The deep
emptiness is where you have to make G*d your helpmate
against you. G*d doesn t let him off the hook one inch.
He had to wash every day in the mirrors he didn t want to
accept.
Listen to this line in the song about Miriam: If your
father spit in your face, wouldn t you go outside the
camp for seven days. When G*d becomes the helpmate
against you, wouldn t you want to be that face? Miriam
was lonely outside the camp. There were no fireworks, no
fiery letters. In the song she says, All I could see were
carcasses being stripped by birds. She is outside the
camp with a broken heart. When G*d becomes a helpmate
against you and you re in the Warsaw Ghetto or you re
sick and you feel G*d has abandoned you, that s what
Moshe and Miriam are trying to teach us. You become a
bigger person in the process. Or you can be a victim and
whine. But to find the face of HaShem in the Warsaw
Ghetto, you have to get this chumatz thing.
On Shabbos: am I really looking at everything with a good
eye? The weather? Make a little mark for all the
criticisms you do during a day.
This weekend is the last performance of a play called K2
done by a friend of mine in the Fox Theater. It was also
a very well done movie and the play is even better than
the movie.
The Torah was given in the wilderness because it is the
wilderness. G*d tests those who are closest to him. If
you want to embark on this journey of intimacy with
HaShem, there s crashing into walls. Finding your anger
and growth in the dark room. After 1,000 years of work,
the Jewish people rose and received the Torah inside,
because they were big enough now to receive the Torah and
not die. Esther effectuated what Moshe could not do.
The Torah is getting deeper because Deborah Miller is
getting closer to death, and the Aish Kodesh is her
rebbe. When G*d turns on you and becomes the opposite
then you turn, too, and do teshuva. This is the deepest
simcha. Moshe instilled a little bit of himself in every
Jew.
This song is done by Girls In Trouble and I m trying to
get their whole CD. Devorah related it to getting cancer.
Sometimes nobody asks but you have to go. We believe in
this deeper happiness that comes when the angels leave
you and you re in this dark space. The Aish Kodesh has
this belief that G*d s only desire is to give him good.
When we re in the Warsaw Ghetto we understand how much we
love HaShem, not how much we hate the Nazis. We don t
care about them.
We don t eat birds that hold onto their food when they
eat. When the scapegoat goes over the cliff, it s
torture. We never torture, but we have to get people to
register that pain. We have predators on the tapestry of
the mishkan to remind us that we re trying to find an
antidote to the human predator. G*d made us the biggest
consumers of the whole world so we could do teshuva for
that. The mishkan is a place where we come and say all
the things we did deliberately and not deliberately. It
was totally voluntary because nobody else knew about it.
You forgot something. A lot of the trouble we get into in
relationships are things we didn t intend.
G*d said, I didn t create you for a little job to be a
tree. Easy isn t in the Torah. Either you rule over it or
it will rule over you, even if it s just eating Cherry
Garcia. The word REDO means to rule over also means to
descend and be ruled over. It s hard to control appetites
for food, for attention, for sexuality, for power. In the
Shemona Essray which we say three times a day, we say if
I ask for something that s bad for me, please don t
listen. Teach me the difference between what I need and
what I want. This comes when our vessels are bigger. We
quote J. Paul Getty who was the richest man in the world
who said enough was a little more than he had. We live in
a society of More. The key song of freedom in Pesach is
Dayenu, it would have been enough for us. My son made up
his own verses for that song. He s a paraplegic.
Another type of animal we can eat has a reverse claw.
Because Moshe threw it in reverse. We need to shorten our
time spent in reaction.
I saw the Imam and he wants to come back. We have to work
on this. It s hard; they re siblings.
There s a burnout that happens when you go past your own
vessels. This happened to Nadab and Abihu, who chose not
to come back to their bodies. Spiritual people don t want
to live. Four went into the Garden, one died, one went
crazy, one lost his faith. They went past their own
vessels. Religion is not a security blanket. They were
not married. Akiva was the only one who was married and
he is the only one who emerged intact.
To change the world you have to cooperate. If Aaron and
Moshe had not acted together, they would have been great
people, but they would not have changed the world.
Barochot page 24B. Listen to this story. Not too many
people will teach this story. Rabbi Archa found a teacher
of brisas before Rabbi Yehuda. [The Torah is the five
books. Beresheit Shemote Vayikra . Then comes the holy
writings, not Prophets; Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes,
proverbs. That s part of the Tenach. Then we have the
writings of the tanyaim. You have to know what the word
Torah means. They wrote the Mishna and sayings called
Braises, Judah the Prince did not include in the Mishnah.
After that came the Amoraim, who wrote the Gemora. Talmud
is Gemora plus Mishna. The Mishna is divided into six
sidarim, six orders, Seeds, Damages, Laws of Purity,
Women. Then there s 24 tractates of the Torah, e.g.
Shabbat, Pesachim, Barochot. After the Gemora came a
period of writings called Geonim, also Babylonia. The
most available are Sadya Gaon. Then came the Rishonim:
Rashi, Tosfos, Maimonides, the Reef and the Roshe. Out of
their writings comes Shulchan Aruch. The final level is
the Archronim, the last ones, where we re at today. All
of those levels are called the Torah. The Kabalah (Issac
Luria of Sfat in 1500) is different from the Zohar
(Shimon Bar Yochaik, first century).]
If one is standing is prayer and passes wind, he waits
until the odor goes away. Then he prays, Master of the
Universe, you formed us with openings (valves) and
cavities. It is revealed before You our shame and
humiliation and our end will be worms and maggots. He
then begins from the place where he stopped. Upon hearing
this, Rabbi Abba said, If I had come to hear only this
thing, dayenu. This is what it means to be a Jew.
Student: One is feeling the shame, owning it, and being
thankful for it, recognizing it as another way that
HaShem is helping them break that vessel and open up.
Student: It s a moment through the embarrassment there s
thanks to G*d. It s an excuse for a holy moment.
Aish Kodesh is saying everything becomes a revelation.
You have to spin the Warsaw Ghetto to make it into a
revelation.
Student: That spin is the simcha.
Shame is such a big thing in the Middle East. People who
kill hundreds of thousands of people so they can hold
onto power, as opposed to Moshe, who says, okay, take the
baton.
Iraq was our most stable community for 2,500 years.
This week we re studying Parsha HaKodesh. We started with
money, we went on to memory. You have to remember all the
discouraging moments of your life, which is Amalak, so
you can let them go. Otherwise they will ferment, give
off gas, and anger and scapegoating and you will be
ambushed. In Germany children were to be seen and not
heard, and there s a big price to be paid.
There s a big mitzvah to make the matzos right before
Passover starts. Once you get the dough you can t hold it
with both hands; it s too much heat. Making matzo is a
profound experience. The flour is the masculine, the
water is the feminine, there s mechitzas between them,
and it has to go very quickly. There is a sense of high
urgency in a matzo factory. You have to throw the dough
that doesn t work in a tub of water.
Sacred Fire page 309
-This month shall be the head month to you .
There s two things going on in this little piece.
Changing the calendar to the moon calendar and the Pascal
lamb. The moon has degrees. The sun comes up the same way
every day. A Jew is waxing and waning. Sometimes the
growth comes from the waning, the darkness and we re
always reflecting G*d s light. We live in a sun world,
which is predictable and secure. The symbol of that is
gold. There is no way to predict an earthquake. It was a
big deal to change from the sun to the moon. Most people
spend their lives trying to get secure. We have higher
risk and higher responsibility. We have to take risks,
grow, and become bigger people.
The lamb was a god in Egypt because they didn t want
commerce in sheep. That was our declaration of
independence, putting the sheep blood on the door post.
Until this point G*d did everything. Four out of five
Jews decided not to go out from Egypt.
-Why were these two commandments .
We like this because we have to think why they are
related.
Student: They both set the Jewish people on a different
path.
Your Jewish calendar is a bulwark of differentiation from
the American calendar.
-According to R. Simeon b. Gamliel .
You will have transformed yourself from the male calendar
to the female calendar, so you can leave Egypt
immediately.
-There is another possible explanation . Faith is the
soul s way of knowing and seeing.
Freud said faith in G*d is a projection of G*d into human
fears. And the Aish Kodesh is saying the opposite.
Student: This goes against the concept of blind faith.
Religious faith is not meant to be a security blanket
because at every step we re asking people to take more
risk and more responsibility. Freud didn t understand
this. There s a very toxic level of doubt that undermines
everything. People are very cynical and skeptical and are
victims of Amalak attacks.
We have to teach people to see through their third eye,
their intuition. There s a holy doubt, which is G*d finds
room to exist in our minds because we don t know
everything. Nadab and Abihu taught us there s an inner
connection with HaShem that you don t see from the
outside, but it s an inner process. All emptiness is G*d
emptiness. Instead of filling our voids with eating or
money, we fill it with G*d.
-The soul of a Jew senses something .
All my rational mind can perceive is the physical world
and its measurements. Trusting that knowing is what we re
calling faith.
The Aish Kodesh is talking about a deep internalized
process.
-This ability of our soul to perceive is akin to prophecy
.
Our souls are G*d s candles.
-The Jewish people have inherited .
The Aish Kodesh says the best test is ask anyone what do
they see when they look at a Jew. The Aish Kodesh sees
the sons of prophets, the children of believers. He
believes in the nobility of our souls. I think it s hard
for people to see this. I don t think we see our own
nobility.
-It seems that there are two types of faith .
Aish Kodesh is saying your faith is there, you can t
access it at this moment because you re depressed. He
doesn t condemn the depression of the people. We live in
a very depressed world. We re not rejecting people who
are depressed. If Moshe is depressed, he can t be a
prophet any more. When Jacob loses Joseph and is
depressed, he can t be a prophet any more. Aish Kodesh
says you re depressed for good reason, but I can teach
you to be b simcha even here, in the Warsaw Ghetto.
-If we look at a person s body .
It required a conscious rational effort.
-Incidentally, this explains .
He s talking about a very complicated subject,
rationality and going beyond rationality to have a
spiritual life.
FINAL REMARKS
Student: We re talking about the darkest moments and how
do we find a reason to exist and find the essence of who
we are?
Aish Kodesh talks about a deeper sense of joy that comes
from this process.
Student: The brokenness, how when you re broken, that s
where HaShem can come in and enlarge Himself in you. And
I don t like that.
You can enlarge yourself and make more room for Him.
Student: My Dad passed in January and my whole faith was
shaken.
This is the fourth step, the moon, the renewal of the
moon that everything a Jew sees is something totally new,
whether it s passing gas or a new event in your life.
Student: I like the Girls in Trouble. When your skin
turns to snow, this is my bar mitzvah portion. Also with
the Aish Kodesh, where he likens the function of the soul
to the autonomic parts of the body which we can t
consciously access, but we can access it through ritual.
Student: I get his tremendously empathetic pastoral
sympathies. He says faith is in our DNA and if you re not
a prophet you re a child of prophets. The nobility and
spiritualism you have as a Jew is inherited and imprinted
within you and you ll find a way to connect to it. Hitler
said the same thing, but his response was to want to kill
them. The second thing that was remarkable to me was this
point in the parsha where we re halfway through the
Torah, DARASH, inquired insistently. It s our balance
point (Rabbi: It s empty space), the Jewish outlook that
it s balance, you find it by looking deeply.
Student: I could say a lot about just getting to tonight
and my mom being on the phone. When you were talking
about really having to distinguish between need and want,
I was thinking about how that relates to the heart being
a broken vessel and the beauty of breaking that vessel.
When I admit that I need something, it s painful, like
the vessel breaking.
Rabbi: Many people are ashamed to ask for help.
Student: HaShem had a plan that we d be in Egypt 400
years, but when we partnered with HaShem, HaShem s will
changed. It s a beautiful teaching about what can happen
when we re in relationship with HaShem and being an
active part of that relationship. When you were talking
about the third eye, it doesn t belong up there, that
that real organ of perception and connecting with the
world and spirituality is more the mouth and throat,
between the heart and eyes our cries and our words is our
really strong organ of perception.
Student: My mother reduces this whole structure to a
security blanket: if you get comfort, it s okay for you.
It s like getting an elbow in the stomach. Yet she
overrode her rational mind to keep chumatz out of the
house at Passover. Breaking and getting bigger resonates.
I don t know why I keep kosher or cover my hair.
Student: Faith is the soul s way of knowing ties to
everything else. It s not just about what we see
rationally, there s something beyond that. That s very
comforting for me.
Rabbi Henoch Dov teaches in Denver, Colorado. You can
contact him through his web page, www.RabbiHenochDov.com
or via email [email protected].
References
1. https://ia801501.us.archive.org/6/items/Parshas/Parshas.html (link)
Date Published: 2011-04-01 19:33:00
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