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Bereshit ~ Aish Kodesh, October 11, 2012
by Rabbi Henoch Dov Hoffman
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Aish Kodesh October 11, 2012 Bereshis [This duplicates
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Thank G*d for fresh starts. The Torah is round and we go
round in circles with the Torah.
Student: We go around the bais hamikdash and around the
year.
Rabbi: We always want to turn circles into spirals. All
the circles are working on the sepherot. We re working on
a new edition of the Triangles/Paradox book with
footnotes. Going around in circles with the lulav and
esrog, shaking the six directions. I was once working
with a family on rachamim because people were longing for
everybody to be nice but there were a lot of hard
feelings and nice doesn t work. They were using
blackmail, paying people to be nice. It s straight
manipulation. Being womblike is a good image. Mom s
relationship is so powerful. The womb has to #1 defend
the baby from the mother because love without boundaries
can be toxic. The baby needs separation. When the timing
is correct, the womb kicks the baby out. Going from there
to postpartum depression can be threatening. Some mothers
hold on to their babies too tightly and others don t hold
their babies enough. It s part of mom and separates from
mom. We re going to read in Beresheit that Sarah has to
die before Yitzchak can be himself. There s an incredible
wise Jewish custom. At every wedding the mothers break a
plate to sever their ties with their children.
I want to tell you how valuable this idea of rachamim is.
Nice doesn t work. Its balance of love and boundaries is
deep. HaShem made it ambiguous, why? The purpose of
creating man was choice. The mother has to make a choice
and the kids have to make a choice. Love and _____ v.
good boundaries. If you err on one side you end up with
Sarah, with your kid in the basement for 37 years. Great
people in the Torah don t cover up. The job of the
tzaddik is to tell you what they learn from each fall.
Student: That s not that the tzaddik keeps getting up
until he gets to his goal.
Rabbi: We did a hakafot and read a special paragraph.
Discipline and love, tenacity and yielding, right and
left brain.
Student: Devar Torah on the connection between the
holidays.
We start with Tisha b'Av where HaShem and the Jewish
people are lovers standing on opposite ends of a long
field.
Rabbi: A very, very long field, facing away from each
other. Tisha b'Av is hester punim, the hidden face.
Student: At Rosh HaShanah we re close to each other.
Facing each other?
Rabbi: Facing away from each other, like the Cherubs
facing opposite directions, like Adam and Chava in the
picture on the wall there. When people are facing away
from each other there is no intimacy. G*d doesn t change;
it s our perception that changes. In intimacy, both
parties are responsible for getting close. You can t wait
for the other person to do it. In the Warsaw Ghetto the
Aish Kodesh felt intimate with HaShem, but most people
experienced it as G*d hiding His face. G*d created the
world to be a game of hide and seek. Punim a punim or
hester punim (face to face or the hidden face). On Rosh
Hashanah the stated purpose is crowning HaShem king of
the universe. We say If like a king to his servants, that
s a relationship, but that s much more distant than a
father to his children. Rosh HaShanah is a coronation
ceremony. A relationship with the king is mostly fear and
with the father is mostly love. We say Avenu Malkenu, Our
Father, during the Ten Days.
Student: At Yom Kippur we turn and face each other.
Rabbi: Yom Kippur is called the day of our wedding.
Student: Yom Kippur ends with the N ila service. When the
gates close, people think they close in front of them,
but you teach that they close behind us. So now we are in
the sukkah. In reality, the sukkah has a door, but in the
metaphor there is no door because the gates have just
closed. We bring the lulav and etrog, the male organ,
into the sukkah, which is the yichud room. When we shake
it, it makes a wet sound. There are many wet images at
this time of year: the water ceremony, prayer for rain,
etc., and you teach that this is the sperm.
I am surprised at the people who get really uncomfortable
with this image.
Now the sukkah is the womb and the roof is the way to the
birth canal. Someone said the baby enters the world going
down and not up. I thought about it for a few days and
realized that the baby enters the world head first and we
are in the sukkah head first. Upside down doesn t mean
much in utero. The baby enters the world head first and
if we put who we are under who we were, we have the heads
touching with our feet on the ground and the baby s feet
pointing upward. This is like the Tree of Life and I
thought the menorah on the wall.
There are no birth images here. The image is conception,
not birth. We go through the dark of winter. The next
holiday is Chanukah, which celebrates the point of light
in a very dark world. Have you ever seen the first
pictures that were taken inside the body? The egg goes
shooting out of the fallopian tube looking like a
shooting star in the Milky Way.
The next holidays are the beginning of labor, the sap
running in the trees and the cracking of the seed. Then
comes Pesach with the baby in the river, the story of the
midwives, the blood on the doorpost, the waters parting,
the one nation being taken from the midst of another
nation.
There are two separate periods of growth. In spring,
through birth. Meditation on death is in the fall. Adam
and Chava didn t know if winter would ever end.
Person: The hava kadisha man said spring and fall are
dying season.
Rabbi: Let the warmth of the south be part of me. So we
re putting our body in rhythm with the world so we can
make a change. The focus of Kohelet- We studied this week
wisdom is pain. The wiser you get the more painful it is.
King Solomon said this from his own experience. There are
28 times from the 28 days of a woman s cycle. A time to
love and time to hate. Love and hate are married
together. The key idea is a time to be born and a time to
die. Death at Sukkot is vital. If you don t know the
difference, you re missing something so fundamental that
you ll be at a loss. Everything in the Torah is built on
the awareness of life and death. People who have never
been at a birth and death are deprived.
Shavuos is called the end of Pesach. Shavuos is the
gathering place to integrate. King David died and was
born on Shavuos; he is the symbol of integration. When we
shake the lulav in, that s King David.
In every Torah story there is some sexual aspect and
Xtians don t talk about it ever. That attitude has spread
to the Jews.
At the time of joy we have opposite images. At a wedding
we have the breaking of the plate, the breaking of the
cup. The Torah says everything requires a balance. The
skach has to be dead. We put a lot of death images into
Pesach. I love the clash of paradox.
The ultimate goal of both is birth of self and teshuva is
the goal of both birth curves. We looking to give people
an angle through the matzo and an angle through the
sukkah. It takes discipline to eat Pesadik food and also
to stay in the sukkah. Remember what it was like in the
desert because materialism can block your perceptions.
Materialism is confusing. People lose their grasp of
reality. Wealthy people try to instill in their families
the memory of what it was like when they weren t wealthy,
and we try to constantly relive through these holidays,
Pesach, Shavuos and Sukkas. Regal is the source of the
English word regular. It s the attack on food, shelter
and sleep. Shavuos is called a sukkah and Yom Kippur is
called the day of our wedding. That s when we signed the
ketuba. Purim, Chanukah and Tisha b'Av are rabbinic
holidays. We have rabbinic holy days. The Torah holidays
are more important, but the rabbinic holidays are very
important. Kadosh is something you set aside.
We re describing the structure of the whole Jewish year.
Person: The mixed message in the parent s desire to give
the kids the message, there is a certain shame the
parents feel at being in the state of poverty. There s a
lack of clarity.
Rabbi: The first thing is for the person to understand
the essence of this process. We re doing it because
Xtians go to church and we do this. We re trying to get
out of the regalut, the ritualized Judaism. There s
authentic teaching where you teach/model children to
speak their truth from their heart. If you model that,
they are going to get it. The problem is with ritual is
that people become shticky: do as I say, not as I do. If
you create an authentic home where you speak the truth,
the kids are going to get it. The core of the Torah is
speaking the truth from the heart. If you don t use good
judgment, you can tear the halachah up because you re
going to apply it in the wrong way. When we re authentic
with each other, things change.
The core the human condition is to say no to G*d and
rebel; that s man s faith in the Torah. All these stories
are about people who rebel. A stone doesn t rebel. Every
adolescent is supposed to rebel. G*d built it that way.
There s a whole section on the rebellious son. All the
Talmudic passages on death penalties, R. Akiva states
that it was impossible to make the death penalty stick.
The goal of the Talmud is to soften the Torah. It s not
an eye for an eye; it s the value of the eye.
A big part of parenting is handling adolescent rebelling
with good judgment. It s an art form, allowing the kid to
go out and rebel when they need to.
Person: And reeling them in when they need to be reeled
in.
Two of the finest people in the community had flooded the
school and were up on the roof.
The movie Footnote is all about one shoresh, palace and
trap. They have three generations of a Jewish family.
Most of us are very myopic and see one generation. It
shows the competition and other dynamics of the Jewish
family.
You can know a lot of things, but that s not life. If you
have your hand on the Tree of Life, things work. But life
and knowledge are not the same thing.
Student: Could you elaborate?
Rabbi: Did you see the movie about the Kinsey Report? The
kids were starved to learn about life. His course was
flooded with college kids. He was talking about sexuality
and his own boundaries got bad and he ended up in a train
wreck. There was lots of knowledge but nothing about
life. The word DAT, to know, has these two valences: I-It
relationship, which is knowing facts. People don t live
based on facts. Based on emotions. Then there s the I-
Thou knowing, which is humorously called knowing the
Biblical sense, hooking up the Tree of Knowledge with the
Tree of Life.
Student: Trees are competitive with each other. You can
see a vibrant forest or a sickly forest. You can see the
tree through the forest and the forest through the trees.
You can see the forest on the whole and also the
individual tree. If you can t recognize the individual
tree, you re missing something.
Rabbi: In Avitar, people are hooking into the Tree of
Life, which is a beautiful depiction, like aspens, which
are hooked together underground. The Western mind comes
in and says we have to blow that tree up and get to the
gold under the tree. To them it s an to be used as a
commodity, and we live in a very sharp juxtaposition of I-
It as opposed to I-Thou. We don t have the intimate you
in English because English is a business language.
Life starts in a paradise of total catering. He wants to
be fed, held, cleaned and diapered. The Garden of Eden is
a symbol of immaturity. They get their hand in the cookie
jar and G*d says Where are you? That question rings out
and connects to Tisha b'Av because it s the same shoresh
aleph yud kuf hey, it s the same word as the Book of
Lamentations.
Everything grows out of this story. There s an innocence.
I once met a nudist, who became an orthodox Jew. It
helped me understand Beresheit. Adam and Chava are naked
and unashamed and it s an ideal state. Clothing is
treachery. Let s look at it. Chapter 3 verse 1. This
story is the essence of the Torah.
-The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, and
they weren t ashamed.
The first story starts out with shame. It s an attempt to
be more authentic and real with people. The nudist said
it actually worked. People think it would be sexual but
it was actually a way for people to have less subterfuge.
We re all in disguise.
Person: There was a man who walked around for years with
no clothing.
Rabbi: Do people react to you differently now that you
wear a black coat? We live in a world of uniforms. Adam
and Eve started in a state of childlike purity. The word
for naked also means deceptive. If naked is deceptive and
clothing is treachery-
Student: You can fool someone with your clothes, clothes
make the man. It s a disguise. Naked is deceptive because
it s too much too fast. When you push the end, there s a
deceptive quality. When you go slow and do things in a
dance, it s different.
Rabbi: A Chinese woman said all it takes is a bare wrist.
We promote modesty because people can be desensitized by
nakedness and we want to make people more sensitive. The
purpose of the Torah and mechitzas is to sensitize
people. People can get jaded with nakedness.
Student: Everything in the Torah is a poison and cure.
Rabbi: How can nakedness be a cure?
Person: For shame of being who you are. When you re naked
and you re close to someone, you re just a human being.
Student: A person can be modest with clothes but can give
a false sense of intimacy.
Rabbi: It can be a cure because the whole Torah is
talking about intimacy. It s not just giving birth, but
giving birth between two intimate people to children who
can change the world.
R. Twerski had a genealogy that goes all the way back to
King David. You could tell that he was a descendant of
King David. The families in between worked hard on these
issues of truth, intimacy, building a vessel for wisdom
and love. Multigenerations of a family that work on
themselves diligently, you can tell. It pays off. I tried
to adopt that mindset, seeing relationships I didn t
like. They quit giving birth mentally, spiritually. Adam
and Chava are sharing their stories with us honestly
because they want us to know what it s like. It s a very,
very deep story.
Person: There s something deceptive about being naked,
saying what you see is what you get, because there s
other things that are hidden. It s a focus on
superficiality and a denial of what s hidden.
Rabbi: That s a delicious paradox.
We have people today who dress up for the power lunch and
it s all manipulative and nonsense. You can see this in
Arbitrage. The whole idea is to leverage the other guy
and overwhelm him with your plumage.
-The snake is more deceptive than any animal of the
field.
The Torah begins with aroom: naked and snake.
-and he whispered to the woman .
Switching to triangle AROOM: the synthesis is naked and
ashamed. What does that mean to have clothing of light?
They were not real human beings. They were too spiritual
to make choices. G*d had to de-spiritualize the universe
to make an arena where people could make choices. Where
there s too much light, there is no room for choice. It s
a play on G*d sewed for them clothing of skin. One with
an eyen is skin of hide, and with an aleph skin of light.
Why are we opening the roof of the sukkah? To let in the
spiritual light. The physical light is only a hint that
we re letting light in and the sukkah is letting in the
surrounding light.
They couldn t receive it. Their roofs were clothes. The
predator senses the weakness and jumps on it. The snake
is the symbol of that predatory desire we have in each of
us. That s the worst ethical fall.
The midrash says the snake became her sexual fantasy and
the end of the story is the first divorce.
Student: Your fantasy should be who you re with, not who
you re not with.
Rabbi: Everyone is in their fantasy.
They made love and there s no birth; it s sterile. The
idea of making love to the snake becomes a metaphor of
sterilized creativity, creativity run amok. You can make
love to the snake with a bottle of whiskey, heroine.
Fantasies don t talk back.
Person: We have negative fantasies all the time.
Rabbi: That s why shame is the key word. Adam says the
woman You gave to me. That was not the question. The
question was where are you in OUR intimacy? Shame is the
process of negative self-talk. Adam goes off with Lilith.
G*d is the judge in the divorce court. For 120 years they
masturbate with their fantasies and then they get sick of
it and they say let s try again.
Clothing of leather: migdey ohr there s the play again
and yagone, 69, suffering. There s a lot of suffering
between the clothing of light and the clothing of skin.
Am I going to live my life getting nourished from
superficialities? With the women it was the competition
between mink stoles and the men would buy a new car every
year. That was being nourished from the superficial, the
world of shells. Or can you connect to the world of
essence? Havdallah is an absolutely essential prayer
service, making the difference between the dark and
light, the profane and the holy, and we look at the
fingernails. Adam and Eve had fingernail material over
all of their bodies. The mitzvah of havdallah is seeing
the light reflected off your fingernails. They lost the
basic connection, got exiled, got divorced. It s a
metaphor for loss, separation, lack of intimacy.
Student: The baby is fed through the umbilical cord. We
re fed by the light of mom. And the moment the baby is
born the umbilicus turns into a tendon and can no longer
nourish us.
Student: There s a glimpse into the reptilian stage. It s
the automatic responses to stimuli, flight or fight.
Rabbi: Or fear. The way we violate each other. Can you
get any closer to the reptile brain than warfare? I had a
friend who said every time he pushed the button he had an
orgasm. Warfare is not so much fun, but also very
stimulating.
-The woman said even though HaShem said don t eat from
all the trees of the garden, from the fruit of the trees
of the garden you can eat, that s what G*d said, but from
the fruit of the tree that s inside the garden, G*d said
don t eat from it and don t touch it lest you die.
Adam lied. When a husband lies to a wife she doesn t
trust him any more. He lied because he didn t trust her.
The chain of mistrust started the divorce.
Person: The only lie was when Adam said don t touch it.
Rabbi: Little lies create big gaps in trust.
Student: What about the tree in the garden and the tree
outside the garden?
Rabbi: The word betoch is the key. We re trying to bring
out the essence of things. There s a superficial way to
know and an intimate way to know. Which world do you want
to be in? One tree was betoch. It doesn t come through in
English.
Person: It s translated in the center.
-You will surely not die.
He pushed her into the tree and she didn t die. The snake
found that one little mistrust in the relationship. That
s the predatory skill.
Student: You can eat of any tree in the garden except for
the one that s the essence of the garden.
Rabbi: You will know as much as G*d, your eyes will open
and you will be like G*d.
The seduction of the snake.
-You will know the difference between good and evil.
That s what euphemized as the Tree of Good and Evil. G*d
created us with egos and as rebels. We re talking about
the maturation process of all humanity. They have a
natural desire to be senior desires.
-It is an appetite to the eyes.
The eye sees and the heart desires. The hormones flow for
food and sex, and they are both combined in this story
for those who know.
We re trying to take this predator and turn him into a
mentch. We re trying to find an antidote. You have to
squirt it in to the part of the story you connect to.
-She saw it was good to eat and her appetite took over.
Rabbi: The forbidden fruit. That s the main motivation
for a lot of things, for eating, for sexuality. Every
mitzvah is designed to regress you to this rebellion
point.
-It looked very beautiful. It tastes good. I m going to
have a lot of knowledge by eating this, and she took from
the fruit.
Rabbi: The snake knew he could get her going if he pushed
her against the tree and she saw the threat of death was
empty.
Adam s eating is an afterthought and run on sentence.
-She gave it also to her husband and he ate too.
Rabbi: It s an afterthought. Guilty people don t want to
be alone. They want to bring someone else into their
crime.
Student: Except Elisha Ben Abuya.
-They were maturing, they knew they were naked. They took
the leaves of a fig tree.
Rabbi: The fig leaf as a cover up is still in our
culture.
Student: It s the highest of the fruits, soft and
completely eatable.
-They made for themselves belts of fig leaves and they
heard the voice of HaShem walking in the garden.
Rabbi: How do you do that? Here s the real breakdown:
-And man hid.
Rabbi: Torah s focus is not on crimes, but on the cover
up of crimes. It s what happens one minute after the
crime. Can I turn to remorse and not into guilt and
shame?
Person: That should be Parenting 101.
Student: Parenting of your kids or your Self?
Person: I walk in the door and the challah is gone and
the dogs are crouching down.
Student: A little boy said She wet my pants.
Rabbi: The next scenes lead to the first murder and G*d
is telling Cain there is sin that is crouching at the
door like a cat and its desire is for you. The sin he
learned from his parents are shame and blame. Sins get
passed down for ten generations. Until somebody puts a
stop to it, it keeps going.
Student: I m on the fifth generation.
Rabbi: Skip to chapter four:
-Now the man had known his wife Eve and she conceived .
Rabbi: Her payments were labor pains. She thought she was
going to die. There was no one to coach her about labor
pains. That s why she said I acquired a man with HaShem.
Cain means purchase. I purchased this baby with my pain.
Chevel means vanity. It s tied to sukkah. Mr. Purchase
and Mr. Vanity are the first two babies born. There s a
very important interlude here. They said you created us,
you create the children. G*d said I want you to know what
it was like to create the world and you. You give birth.
It s a deep thing to create something you can t control.
The child is wild card. You can t control its health or
anything about it. You can guide it. You have to give
birth. That s a profound moment.
Rabbi: Why did he bring an offering?
Person: He wanted to get good grades.
Rabbi: Cain brought seconds, Chevel brought the best.
They re fighting over G*d s attention.
Person: Why would Cain bring second best?
Rabbi: Very good question. Why do people feel
underappreciated?
People who live in losses, it s a whole frame of mind.
People lose their spouses and I say replace that loss,
use it as an inspiration to go on into the future. I lost
two students this year and I try to spin it that way,
what they gave me and how to replace it. The feeling of
being underappreciated is so common that it deserves a
lot of attention.
A ten year old girl said this is what happens in school.
The kids who want to butter up the teacher to get a good
grade or get the attention can t do their best because
they re always trying to please somebody else. That was
profound.
-HaShem turned to Chevel and his offering .
Rabbi: The word for turn is key. Lo sh ah, which is also
time. G*d is saying I can t spend time with you because
you have no time.
Most people have a hard time saying to the boss all the
Saturdays and these 12 days I m off. This is my
integrity. This is who I am. I knew a man who used to get
a new job every week until he started his own business.
-This annoyed Cain exceedingly and his countenance fell.
Rabbi: He s looking at his feet. He takes it totally
personally. No responsibility; only shame. The process
has now been replicated. Instead of taking
responsibility, he feels ashamed.
-HaShem said to Cain why are you annoyed?
Rabbi: It s not forgiven. You will be lifted up. You will
be elevated. You will be able to lift your head. Abraham
at the Akeida lifts his eyes up. Only when you lift your
eyes up do you see what resources you have.
It desires you but you can conquer it. John Steinbeck
wrote East of Eden and put these Hebrew words in a wooden
box and on the top engraved he put the words you may rule
over it with a wood engraver. Blame and shame is the
scapegoating. Hitler first felt ashamed. It s a process.
In this story people are blaming other people and G*d.
G*d becomes the big parent in the sky. The parents taught
them. This begins a chain of stories and you can t
understand one unless you connect them. You re trapped in
the mistakes of your parents.
Rabbi: If I didn t get attention and I felt hurt and
unappreciated, Cain got the message how do get love? His
name is purchase. Money can buy you love. People try to
buy and sell love all the time.
The midrash says that Abel looked at his brother and said
he s an idiot, he s reacting like a five year old, the
hell with him. That s why his name is vanity. How does a
spiritual person look at the schleppers? There s an
inherent arrogance in all spirituality. Once I think I m
getting closer to G*d.
It s about all the places we live when we re honest with
ourselves. They were the first tzadikim who fell.
-Cain spoke with his brother Chevel .
Rabbi: One line for the first murder. The midrash fills
in what they were talking about. Cain said this is my
field. I own the land. Farming created private property.
That s why bread is called war. The torah makes a big
deal out of this point. Abraham, the first Jew, muzzles
his sheep. Moshe led his sheep all the way to the middle
of the Sinai Desert. We don t mix linen and wool because
Cain grew the linen and Abel grew the wool. We have to
respect differences. The exodus is about being trapped
and enslaved by cattle people and reasserting our
identity as Jews, we re shepherds. Cattle people don t
like sheep people in Colorado or in Egypt. This is a
diamond. There are so many facets to this story.
Torah stories are not about good guys and bad guys.
Chevel had time to speak to HaShem and he brought his
first fruit. But there s a pitfall for spiritual people
for schleppers. Nobody in the Torah is black and white.
Even G*d: He is implicated in every sin that any human
does. Islam and Xtianity can t understand how you can
worship a G*d who isn t all white. Most Jews don t
understand either.
-G*d said where is Chevel your brother .
Rabbi: We move into the sukkah and become a vagrant and
wanderer on the earth. When we throw the dirt on the
blood we repay the bird for covering Abel s blood.
The human condition is so complicated and so simple.
SACRED FIRE PAGE 234
Abraham called G*d My L*rd and Adam called G*d My L*rd.
Adam was the first one in the Torah and Abraham only made
the midrash.
Rabbi: Abraham had a nightmare about the carcasses, the
covenant of the halves, smoking furnaces. Do you think
that meant something to the Aish Kodesh? Abraham is the
Aish Kodesh. Some people call G*d Ad*noi in Paradise.
A holy person is somebody who can connect to G*d in hard
times. Suffering is to be used as a crucible.
Student: Abraham did it out of suffering but Adam did it
because he was in Paradise.
Rabbi: Arizal says hard things happen to holy people
because they can connect the dots, connect to G*d with
suffering and with joy. Abraham is modeling for us. He
says I m Abraham and I m calling G*d Ad*noi here in the
Warsaw Ghetto.
Student: The Aish Kodesh says everyone has your own
personal niggun and if you sing someone else s niggun it
s like swallowing someone else s spit.
Rabbi: You have to find your purpose and if you re people
pleasing you re not fulfilling your purpose. G*d wants a
partner.
How can you differentiate and be humble? We call that
humble confidence. My teacher taught me how to be
original and creative. How to be Henoch Dov Hoffman.
Student: There s traps everywhere.
Rabbi: Chevel says my brother is an accountant. There are
traps all over. Rabbi Twerski gives us a model of humble
confidence. He quit a big shul to teach me and another
couple of guys an authentic Torah instead of catering to
boards and chazerai. That took a lot of courage.
I m either a copy cat or I m original and creative.
Person: When I build a house, we all have an idea of what
a house will be, what doors will be, what windows will
be. In the end I built a very standard house because it s
cheaper. But there are so many different ways to build a
house but the idea is the same: keeping your warm and dry
or cool and dry.
Rabbi: Did you bring a clean piece of paper tonight? Do
you have any surprises for me? It was all given to Moshe
and it s all original and creative.
-If it had not all been given to Moses the student would
not have been able to be creative .
Rabbi: I m doing Sukkot every year and it s the major
source of my originality and creativity. How can it be? I
m doing it every year? Without the structure given to me
from my ancestors, it wouldn t be innovative. It s an
interesting synthesis of form and substance, innovation
and structure.
Person: Creativity is a process, an essence.
Rabbi: The trick is to be humble and creative at the same
time. Chevel couldn t help his brother. He said he s a
materialist. He wants all the rest of us to appreciate
him.
Humble and creative is when I say I m going to do the
same Sukkot my great-grandfather did in Europe, all the
way back to Mt. Sinai, that s going to be structure of my
creativity, I m a traditional revolutionary.
Revolutionary through teaching 3,000 year old torahs. It
makes no sense to most people.
Person: You can be creative in your teshuva.
Rabbi: Picasso learned all the traditional techniques,
how to paint a simple apple, and this allowed him to be
creative.
Student: Music is the mix of the higher spheres and math.
Rabbi: It s one thing to say Ad*noi in heaven and another
in hell.
-This may also be the hint in the famous last words of R.
Shimon ben Gamliel .
Rabbi: Why did he say that? It s more than spiritual
arrogance. It s also not being ashamed of spiritual
arrogance. You think you re flawless? We are all going to
pay with our lives. Everyone dies in their mistakes. Then
you can accept your death in a different way.
Student: It s not that we get a death sentence for our
mistakes. We already have a death sentence and having it
attached to our mistakes makes our death meaningful
(trf).
Rabbi: What a great thing that the Aish Kodesh shared
this story with me because I never found this story in
the midrash. We read about the ten martyrs but we didn t
read about it this way. I never read this story about
this conversation before.
-They beseeched the Roman Speculator .
FINAL REMARKS
Student: People think from one place and live from
another. I understood what dynamic a person was living so
I wrote to her about it and she wrote back she used to do
it, other people do it, etc. I do this a lot, too.
The meaning of the birth pains: I always took this
literally, that now birth would be painful, but what I
heard tonight is that all of our creativity has a degree
of pain, whether it is the birth of things or the birth
of Self.
Trapped in the mistakes of the parents: One of my
children told me about something going on and I told her
that I learned it from my mother and taught it to her.
Sometimes I step out of the things that I was taught and
it s like stepping into the sunlight after being in a
fog, a moment of pleasure and freedom.
On Yom Tov I was higher than high. In any way you could
receive elevation, I received it. I had asked someone, a
rabbi I, frankly, wouldn t mind impressing, if he would
daven for my son because I paid for a bracha a year ago
that he should get married and he s still single. So I m
at a meal with this rabbi and a lot of other people and
he calls out to me, How s David? I just look at him.
David who? David Larson! And I m thinking the name s
familiar, I can t quite place it. Then he says, Where
does he live? I m thinking, Live? Somewhere in Denver, I
guess. I thought this was not the right moment to tell
him he had an elevated soul at his table and reveal the
glory that was me.
Person: Dan has talked to me over and over about this
drizzle down effect. He was talking about all the things
that went on with his Dad and Dan still continues with
the conversation. My mom is doing all the things that I
do and my daughter does and now I m starting to
understand her instead of getting mad and frustrated and
I m creating humor, and it s transforming my relationship
with my daughter, too. You get it when you get it.
Student: A moment of true simcha in the pain.
Person: The original thinking out of the box. I remember
times I would be riding my bicycle and there would be a
long hill and then I m day dreaming and find myself at
the top and I want to write down the ideas. Now they seem
clich but they came as part of my life experience but
they were real and fresh to me.
Student: It isn t the words, it s how deep the connection
is to it.
Person: When I connect with my gut other people resonate
to it. When we don t care how other people are going to
receive it but it s a real thing and we re not afraid of
judgment. We all have a niggun and no one else can sing
it. It s all of us singing our own songs together-
Rabbi: T chila means first. Abel could bring his first;
he could be original and creative in his relationship
with G*d and Cain didn t know how to do it. Abel brought
one scrawny little sheep but it was his best one, and
Cain brought a King Sooper truck, but it was all seconds.
If a truckload of stuff is based on pleasing somebody, it
s not your best. How do we learn to value our best?
Beautiful. Thank you.
Student: When I started reading the Chumash I couldn t
understand any of it. Going over it gives it so much more
richness. You said the Chumash was the Cliff Notes
version.
Rabbi: It s a code.
Student: Even in English unless you get the translation
from Hebrew and the nuances- My son told me the whole
Chumash is filled with jokes and parodies but you wouldn
t get it unless you understand the language. I feel
frustrated at being locked out of my religion.
I was really upset today. My father was driving and
thought he saw a dog, he slid into a curve and two of his
tires popped off. He was all confused and I think he had
one of those little TIAs. He s entitled to reparations
and he s entitled to all kinds of services.
Rabbi: There s so much shame in persecution.
Student: It s only through Rabbi Hoffman that I can
understand my father. He was illiterate and so ashamed of
it. He was a Jew and not allowed to go to school. I
wanted to thank you about that, helping me to understand
my father more.
Person: Enjoyable class. I enjoy going line by line
through the Torah. I appreciate the wealth of your
knowledge and the sparkle in your eyes when you see Torah
you haven t learned yet. I especially enjoy the class s
input today, very enthusiastic, questions. I enjoyed the
harmony in that. I heard anew one. It s not In the
beginning. It In the big inning. My facet is the flow. It
s not a particular sparkle. It s the movement between the
stories. It s not having made the mistake; it s being
deceptive about the mistake. We can talk about our
genuiness and creativeness. T chila first. It s nice to
honor the creative positives that we have, but can we
hold the creative mistakes and see our individuality born?
Rabbi: That s what I liked about R. Shimon. They created
a way for him to face his death.
The aspect of a Jewish spirituality connect in suffering
is a big truth but we can t just obliquely embrace
because that s dangerous.
Rabbi: It s always the poison and the cure. Life is
vulnerable. Only death isn t.
Rabbi: I have a book that s extraordinary, all the
eulogies for Devorah Miller. I ll end with one little
piece.
Rabbi Henoch Dov teaches in Denver, Colorado. You can
contact him through his web page, www.RabbiHenochDov.com
or via [email protected].
References
1. https://ia801501.us.archive.org/6/items/Parshas/Parshas.html (link)
Date Published: 2012-10-12 06:55:59
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