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Nitzavim - Vayeilech ~ Aish Kodesh 09/22/2011
by Rabbi Henoch Dov Hoffman
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Aish Kodesh September 22, 2011 Nitzavim Vayelech
Everyone, including future generations, is standing here.
The main thing about being a Jew is going to Jewish
courts. This is the essence of Jewish identity. When you
have a beef with a Jew, you don t go to a non-Jewish
court. Tomorrow we will convene a court of three men and
will release you of vows for the past year and the coming
year. You read all the commitments I made, promises,
handshakes, even when you do something three times so
people think you ll be coming the fourth time. You say it
three times, the court says it three times. It s very
meaningful. It s officially judicial. Very few people go.
It is the basis of Kol Nidre, which is the corporate
group doing the same thing. It says I m canceling all my
commitments. Tomorrow it s individual and on Yom Kippur
it s group.
Before a wedding the necktie and the shoelaces of the
groom are untied, because that is the day of Yom Kippur
for them. All of the holidays are incorporated in the
wedding. The sukkah is the chuppah and the yichud room.
The mothers come in and break a plate; it is the most
important thing and the first thing that people stopped
doing. It shows that the mothers break their ties to the
bride and groom. It says you have to leave your mother
and cleave to your spouse. We also break a glass. The
second note of the shofar is shevarim, broken. Unless you
re a little bit broken you re not going to do teshuva.
When you do teshuva you re saying you re not going to do
it again. Crying: you have to weep for your losses. There
s a force here, in the middle of the shofar, which says
you re never going to get anywhere so you might as well
crawl back in. We are interested in things like people
getting fired from jobs. We re going to look at a case
study like this. There s also a movie called Up In the
Air about a man who goes around firing people. We got
fired from a lot of countries, like Spain, France,
England, and Morocco.
The key word of this holiday period is Psalm 27, the hope
sandwich, hope to G*d, have good courage, hope to G*d.
What happened to Lot s wife? She turned into a pillar of
salt for looking back. This can happen to us if we live
with too many regrets. How can you not internalize this
process of being Jewish and being fired from countries?
Moshe says you are standing here all of you today before
HaShem; you re the heads, the elders, policemen. He lined
them up in a circle and the people opposite them were to
teach them. Across from the policemen he put the angry
people, the people who cut wood. Across from the sages he
put the infants; he said if the scholar loses touch with
when he was a child, he s in trouble. What do policemen
have to learn from angry people?
Student: He has to be able to recognize his own angry
because he has power and that s dangerous.
If a married woman had an affair, then both her and her
lover would have to take this test, and everybody who
showed up to watch, the assumption was that they were
coming because they wanted to see someone being
controlled who was out of control, and they had something
that needed to be controlled, too. The story of the Sotah
is that if you don t bring your money to the Temple, you
ll end up bringing your wife to the Temple.
What does a college professor have to learn from an
infant?
Student: The joy of being rather than over-
intellectualizing, and the children need to learn how to
order their thinking.
One of the big moves that Israel made in the recent
demonstration is that the soldiers get training in
minimum use of force. It s a volatile situation. You need
enormous discipline.
The women are across from the heads of the tribes.
Student: the women have the mothering and the strength.
Person: It takes a lot to prepare for Shabbos. One place
we go the woman does a lot and she sits back with this
perfect comportment. Women have compassion to lead with
softer, kinder, gentler manner.
What does running a government have to do with running a
house?
Student: future voters are like future citizens, the
children.
The leaders are taking care of us as if we re their
children.
Person: the women can learn from the leaders that there
are concerns bigger than theirs.
There are different levels of government. The top, top
people the presidents, were across from the people who
carried the water. There are still towns in the Ukraine
that have no running water. The most humble job was the
water carrier.
Student: The presidents are the do-ers and the water
carriers were the know-ers.
The gap between the wealthy and the poor is getting wider
and the buzzword is class war. If you don t connect the
front of the line with the back of the line, it becomes
dangerous. I met the guys I used to work with in the
mountains in 1968. We had a situation like that, a boy
who was a scapegoat ended up dying under a logjam in the
river. He tripped and no one noticed. I had to tell his
parents. We carried a big army radio and hiked 120 miles
in four days looking for him. (He wasn t in our group; he
was in Ashcrofters.)
Student: The guys at the top can t survive without the
water.
Moshe says to the people, for this commandment that I
command you today it is not hidden from you, nor is it
across the sea; rather the matter is very near to you in
your mouth and in your heart. I place before you today
life and good and death and evil. Choose life. That
becomes a very important idea, that the Torah is the
blueprint of life, that HaShem made reality and that s
very, very close to us. HaShem is not a distant force but
an intimate force that creates the context for our
choices and the consequences for our choices. HaShem is
not an old man with a gray beard pulling strings. He is
the context in which we live including nature and good
and bad consequences. HaShem s name is HaMakom, The
Place. It s not distant but intimate and close if you
invite it in.
This is my esrog from a year ago. Intentions and thoughts
are real, not magic. This is the one I blessed and this
is the control that I didn t bless. 99.9% end up like
this and this one is still fresh. I bless it on Friday
night and at havdallah. They say when meshiach comes
there will be the smell of the esrog. This is the first
time it lasted a whole year.
Every mitzvah has an emotional part and an action part.
We want them to be in harmony with each other. Some
people feel one thing and think another and live in a
very dis-integrated world. Emotion, thought, speech and
action. The mindfulness is we re born in a very physical
world and your mind will think only of physical things.
The Indians who saw Columbus come couldn t see the ships.
You have to work to have mindfulness of a spiritual
reality. It s not just going to come to you. The Torah
says we have this whole spiritual dimension of life that
you can access if you work on it. Our thoughts can be
much more powerful in changing reality than just saving
this esrog. The Aish Kodesh is teaching us constant
mindfulness and the way of doing that is through these
mitzvahs. The worst word for mitzvah is ritual because
most people think of ritual as meaninglessness. Good deed
doesn t quite hit it. Doing something nice for somebody
can be a mitzvah, but then there are things like this.
Emotional, thought, speech and action. We light the
candles on Shabbos. They help us learn this process and
call from us a bigger self to go from the concrete to the
spiritual dimension. The mitzvah is the travel brochure
to jump from one dimension to another.
Isaac Luria of Sfat wrote a whole book about the thoughts
that go into blowing the shofar. Some shofar blowers read
that book before they blow so they put these spiritual
things into it. Whatever I teach about it, it changes the
way I blow it. Thoughts have great power here. It s a
primitive cry, not a musical instrument.
Student: Tekia come to attention. Shevorah start moving.
And the actual enemy. Someone in Denver wrote Israel O
Israel and he worked on it here and in London for years
and years. His name was Boris Bernstein. They had me go
down to a studio in southwest Denver and just blow some
of the various calls and the sound engineer took the best
of the calls by their evaluation and put my track onto
the symphony itself.
They used it to wake people up in the morning and get the
camp going. Rosh Hashanah means the head that changes and
also means the head that sleeps. Why would we juxtapose
sleeping and changing?
Student: change requires movement and progress. Sleep is
rest.
Person: You have to wake up to change.
There are things that make the esrog beautiful. These
bumps make it like a human brain, and these nice lines
and the tip of it and the shape. It s called beautifying
the mitzvah. I go through a lot of them, maybe 25, and
select the best for me, because I m going to hold it and
pray with it.
A lot of people can spiritually sleep through their whole
life. You don t have to make these connections. You can
live your life as a diversion or a distraction from being
mindful. The shofar is an alarm clock.
I m going to read you a story of mindfulness. It s about
how people deal with things and change. The Talmud is
always based on disagreements. Part of this idea of
becoming bigger, I have to listen to other people to
become a bigger person.
A certain discipline came before Rabbi Yeshua. He was
Shimon Bar Yochai, a very important person. You don t
know who he is until the end of the story. At their
highest level they call themselves children because
children love to learn. Adults just see sentences. Rabbis
see words, but the children see the story in each letter.
If we have a Torah with a questionable letter, only a
child can judge, because he doesn t bring his
projections.
The student said is the evening prayer optional or
compulsory? He said it s optional. The same student came
before Rav Gamliel, the head of Sanhedrin and asked the
same question. Rav Gamliel replied it s compulsory. The
disciple said he said it s optional. Rav Gamliel said
wait until the others are here, the shield bearers, and
ask again. Gamliel said it s compulsory, does anyone want
to argue? Yeshua said no. Gamliel said someone said you
said it s optional. Yeshua stood up and said the living
are able to contradict the dead. I m alive and he s
alive, how can the living contradict the living; I
confess I said it was optional. Yeshua remained standing.
He was the smartest guy in the Sanhedrin. Gamliel was
making him stand in the corner for disagreeing with him.
There s a lot more to this story. Everyone in the group
started murmuring. How long will this go on? On Rosh
Hashanah Gamliel distressed him. They had argued which
day was the full moon. In another case he distressed him.
Come, let us depose him. There were 70 greatest rabbis.
He can t do this! They appointed another man, Eliezer ben
Azaria. He s in the Haggadah; he was 18 years old. It was
very humiliating when the whole group rose up and threw
Gamliel out. Azaria went to his wife and said should I
take this job? He calls his wife my house. It was how the
rabbis showed the women respect, by calling their wives
my home. We re trying to learn good habits of
collaboration. A woman is a home for her husband. When we
make matzo the man is the flour and the woman is the
water. Without the water, the flour blows off. The
attention of the man goes all over the place.
He says what should we do? She says perhaps they ll fire
you, too. She said by the way, there are no white hairs
in your beard; will the other rabbis respect you? very
down to earth and practical. That night there was a
miracle and the hair turned white. He led the group and
they changed the rules. Under Gamliel there was a guard
at the door and he let only consistent people (thought,
speech and action) who were mature in; their insides and
outsides had to match. The symbol of hypocrisy is the pig
because it looks kosher but it doesn t chew its cud. When
Azaria became president they took the guard away and they
had 700 new students.
Gamliel has a dream: You re right and they re wrong. That
s a major step in teshuva. There s always a voice that
says you don t need to work on that. You have to get past
that voice. The next day it put his mind at ease, but
with the new students there was a tremendous energy,
great creativity, new things. A convert came before them
and asked if he could marry a Jewish woman. Ammonites and
Moabites couldn t marry Jewish women because they wouldn
t give food to the Israelites. Meanwhile the Assyrians
had conquered the land and moved the tribes around. One
rabbi said yes and the other said no. How converts are
treated are a big litmus of conservative and liberal. The
Sanhedrin said we vote for Yeshua. There s a saying if
one person calls you an ass, blow it off. Two people call
you an ass, start thinking about it. Three people call
you an ass, put on a saddle. Gamliel has been broken.
Gamliel said that since they followed Yeshua, I m going
to appease, AH-PAH-YASE (the Hebrew is the root to the
English) Yeshua. When he reached Yeshua s house he saw
the walls of the house were black. He said to him, it s
apparent you make charcoal for a living (that s even
below the water carrier). Yeshua said oy (the oldest word
in the Hebrew language, thousand of years old) to the
generation whose leader you are. He was saying we ve been
colleagues for 20-30 years and how out of touch are you
that you didn t know I burn wood for living? Gamliel was
wealthy and did not have to work at all. You know not the
suffering of Torah scholars. A lot of them had to work at
menial jobs. Two rabbis had to make shoes for
prostitutes; they blessed them: you made shoes for us and
you never looked up. We ve come into a time when scholars
don t work. It s a big issue; the scholars of this time
did work.
He continued: you don t know how they work, how they get
money for food. Gamliel said I ve afflicted you; please
forgive me. The first step is forgive everybody whose
hurt you before they ask at this time of year. You have
to let go of your hurt feelings; then you can go to
others and ask forgiveness. We have to let go of the ties
that bind, and that includes hurt feelings. It has
nothing to do with the other person. You do it for
yourself. I learned that from Forgiving Doctor Mengele.
Only G*d can give atonement; that s a different thing. I
need to let go of all this pain to go on in my life. She
knew a lot of other survivors who never let go of it. You
don t need to have the other person there. It s
relenting; letting them wash away.
Student: I saw her speak in person 25 years ago at BMH.
She taught me start the process by not bearing a grudge,
because bearing a grudge gets you in the kishkes.
Scapegoating is the key word for Yom Kippur because a lot
of time we turn the anger from ourselves to the other,
and then we feel terrible. I had a cousin who stopped
talking for 20 years after he said, You didn t wait for
me to carve the turkey. As Jews we have post traumatic
stress.
Back to the story: Gamliel said please forgive me. Yeshua
ignored him. Gamliel says do it for the sake of the honor
of my father. His father was descended from the great
Rabbi Hillel, the philosophical ancestor of Yeshua.
Yeshua said okay. It s not anything any American would
say: do it for my grandfather. Saturday Night in Paris.
We live in our imagination; we can jump time. After
Gamliel was fired he never missed a day in the study
house. He didn withhold after he was fired.
Student: He wasn t sulking.
People withhold to get even. He didn t withhold. He was
fully participating and didn t miss one day of Torah
study. He s teaching us how to move on from tough,
conflicted situations. This is what made him great. When
they have a breakdown in relationships because of their
disputes, they tell you. They tell the story. They said
who will inform the Sanhedrin of this development? A
certain laundryman said I ll go. Rabbi Yeshua gave him a
message: let him who is accustomed to wear the robe
continue to wear the robe and vice versa. Akiva said
locked the doors to the study hall (keep Gamliel out).
Yeshua said better that I go myself. He knocked on the
door, said let the sprinkler son . Akiva said you are
appeased. Did we remove Gamliel for any reason than your
honor? We can t remove the new guy. Let s settle it this
way: in matters of sanctity we elevate but we don t
lower. They ll alternate.
The prayer is optional but we treat it as if it s
mandatory. Every argument is a thesis and antithesis. We
teach Torah dialectics. The Jewish law is the synthesis
of majority and minority opinions. This is one example of
a vast number of laws that contain different opinions.
Maariv is in fact optional. The difference is time s
shorter because the head of the prayers does not repeat
the Amidah. That s the sign, only because of this
argument.
This is one of the great stories of our people.
G*d promises Abraham that we will be like the dust of the
earth. Open your minds and hearts. It s an incredibly
beautiful Midrash, but terrifying. By using this metaphor
G*d intimated just as the dust is found everywhere, so
will your children be scattered. (I found articles about
orthodox Jews in Nome, Alaska.) Just as the dust is
blessed through being mixed with water, the people of
Israel are blessed only through water. Water is a
metaphor for Torah because it goes from a high place to a
low place. We create a dwelling place for G*d at the
lowest place of reality when we study together. It s a
very special activity. Torah study links up worlds. Just
as soil outlasts metal, the people of Israel will outlast
all the nations of the world. Soil is constantly trampled
and so are the Jews. I will put it into the hand of your
Torah managers those who have said prostrate yourself
cause your wounds to fester for your own good to detract
from your sins. Isaiah said prostrate yourself so we will
pass over you. They would lay them down in the public
square and pass their plows over them. It s a good sign,
the public square made out of earth lasts forever, and
your children will outlast all the nations and will last
forever.
SACRED FIRE page 121
The Aish Kodesh is trying to explain how he could be in
the Warsaw Ghetto and not be totally terrified. He got
these thoughts to be deeper and deeper; you can see from
the start of this book to the end.
We re using the snake as a symbol for evil and we have to
find G*d in the evil. In that way we learn that there is
one G*d. It s hard to see G*d s face when Nazis are
always trying to kill you. The Torah is careful to
distinguish religious naivet from faith. The Aish Kodesh
is not saying this is the best of all possible worlds and
he s not dismissing anybody s pain.
He looked at the snakes and they could have been our
servants. He distinguishes the serpent from other
animals. The lion kills to eat food. The serpent has no
reason to bite; he says Heaven whispers in my ear to bite
and I bite. When it s unreasonable, it s a sign that
heaven is whispering in their ear. The sign that the
whisper is coming from heaven is that the Nazis took away
from the war to kill Jews. Lachish means whisper and
venom. We call prayers whispers. Whispering sweet
nothings. Chanah, who designed the Shemona Essray prayer,
called it the whisper that charms the snake. What is the
snake? The snake is our needs. If we just try to get what
we want selfishly, we become the snake. If we see the
difference between what we need and what we want, the
snake becomes our helper and we rule over it.
Student: It sounds like Passover when we separate out the
chumatz from the matzo.
-we can see
He doesn t use the word Nazi. It would get him caught up
and he didn t want to be put in the same place they were.
We want everyone to prove our own darkness.
Student: He didn t want to honor them.
-We can deduce .
Israel has never been in natural event, not from Day One.
Putting a country in the middle of a billion Arabs.
Nothing about Israel is natural.
-It is possible that this is what is being hinted .
The exodus never made any sense to Moses. They were on a
two-week trip and G*d said Go trap yourself by the Red
Sea. The plagues took a year and Moses said, Just take us
out of here. Great people admit how they misperceive
things.
-Moses also pointed out to G*d .
He comes from generations who have nurtured spiritual
understanding to see the essence of the events. He can
see the spiritual core because it makes no sense in human
terms. It s a hard idea. He s not just putting us on. It
s not foolish optimism. It s a real, spiritual connection
with events. He can see HaShem s presence in that
situation.
Viktor Frankl said some people can only regret what they
lost and they died very quickly. Some people could come
to Auschwitz and say What is G*d asking me now?
-This is what enables the Jewish person to bolster
himself .
Jerusalem was the place of diligent spiritual
mindfulness. This is how he s describing his work there;
it s a pilgrimage. He has a holy duty to give his Jews
faith. It s heroism of the deepest thought in my book.
-Even though as hinted at .
Number one command of HaShem: Be happy and make others
happy. That s called avoda, work in the Warsaw Ghetto
because there were a lot of unhappy people there. It s
hard to make a dramatic movie out of people playing music
in the sewers.
-That is, I achieve this .
He really anticipated people s comment, You re going to
say I m just rationalizing. He takes the doubt and puts
it right in there. He doesn t defend it or deny it.
-Perhaps I made others happy .
They would say the rebbe suffered worse than we did, this
is one of the main ways I was happy and I made others
happy. When the chazzan started crying on Sukkot because
the rebbe lost his family, the rebbe said no, don t cry,
daven with joy. He could use that as a tool to build the
faith of the people. It s still our job to resist. We re
living in a time of great depression all over the world.
-So we pray look down from our holy dwelling .
Our great people could remember their teshuva in every
parsha from one end of the year to the other. What is
your handle on all these ideas?
FINAL REMARKS
Student: You may have a broken heart but you have to make
the effort then it s going to change. G*d will intervene.
Person: I m very conscious that I want all my time to
myself but I m pulled to religion. If I give time then I
won t have time, but I was experiencing it as not being
linear. I m re-evaluating it.
Student: there are so many weird things that happen that
seem to be so coincidental or out of place, so when we
talk about remembering the exodus and the miracles that
G*d did for you in order for you to continue to have hope
that the natural order of things is not the only way that
things might go, if there is a vast, eternal plan (and I
believe there is) where we have free choice and how to
make good out of what seems to be horrendous and say that
G*d is good.
Person: I like where the Aish Kodesh says you have to
bolster your faith supernaturally. It s a nice
combination with your teaching Moshe sitting people
opposite each other, especially the president sitting
opposite the water carrier. There s the humility of being
a water carrier and he needs to develop malchut, the
sense of kingship of the leader. Seeing one s
potentiality. If we think we are worthwhile of having
relationship with HaShem in this horrible situation; it
is a wonderful message.
Gamliel walking arm in arm with the charcoal burner back
to the study house.
Student: I m an atheist.
Many people concluded from the Holocaust how can there be
a G*d?
Person: I don t think that my believing in G*d or not has
anything to do with there being a hurricane. Going after
truth, forgiving. There s a lot to be said for not
forgiving. If it takes not forgiving to find truth- One
little extra piece might change the way we perceive the
whole thing and lead us to truth.
Student: I ve been involved in a battle with myself and
whether I can come up with an answer. I can t trust
myself. I ve been carrying a lot of anger towards other
people and towards myself.
And you never know which one it is. We call hell the
place of permanent ambivalence. The most powerful things
in the Torah have to have a very beneficial aspect and a
toxic aspect.
Person: the comparisons of the people who were opposite
each other. People are people. I might tell you what a
great past I had and how much money I used to have, but I
still put my pants on the same way. National Geographic
did a study, how the president and first lady had to be
rehearsed, and he said, m going to sneeze.
We have limited perception unless we look up and see the
person opposite us.
Withholding is self-destructive.
Student: I like the image of beginnings touching ends in
lots of ways. I ve been away from rituals a lot in the
past four years. I ve been reminded how important the
ritual is to understanding. Do the ritual and the
understanding will come.
Doing things and listening to yourself. The Shmah means
deep listening. Often we can t hear the voice of our soul
or the voice of our children. You do and you listen to
what you re doing is Nassay. Do and listen deeply to your
doing; not we will do and we will listen.
Person: the importance of the front of the line
communicating with the back of the line. Also that
forgiveness has less to do with the other person than it
has to do with the forgiver.
Student: Something bad happened last week and good things
have come out of it. I was asking, Why are you doing this
to me, HaShem? Someone turned up in my life I hadn t seen
in six months, which was one thing. Then she chided me
for something I said, and because of this other thing
that happened I wasn t the least bit reactive, I was
grateful. The last thing was that someone reframed the
whole thing for me and turned it into something very
different. G*d is in control. You don t have to be in the
Warsaw Ghetto to be frightened of the world, but when you
see how G*d is in control, the world is much less
frightening.
Person: Instinct is a fabulous movie.
It was profound, his sitting there by those gorillas.
We re going to have a Rosh Hashanah seder over various
foods. On the last night of Simchas Torah he found a
warehouse and gathered up the last 20,000 Jews and danced
with great abandon and joy. This Torah was brought to me
miraculously.
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: 2011-09-23 06:00:07
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