I wanted to make sure the end connected to the beginning so heres last years posts. I have till Vayigash to catch up and get back into posting.....
Hello to one and all. The Family Jewels is a revival of the weekly dvar Torah that I used to send out by the name of Points To Ponder. I realized afterwards that the name was already taken and therefore came up with this new name. The prayer is that these words of Torah and chizuk should be a zchus for all of my ancestors and a cause for an aliya for their neshomas, and at the same time be a zchus for my children and their children after.... I also will give a prayer that all of these words both today and in the weeks to come be as true as can be and that they should help myself and whoever else better serve Hashem. With that said lets get started....
Lets start off with some ideas and then try and tie them together. 1) "Breishis Bara Elokim" The last letters of these words spell the word Emes, truth. 2) Rashi brings down the chazal that says that the world was created for the Torah and for Yisrael. Our goal is to try and find our true connection to the Torah and by that better serve Hashem. 3) "Vhaaretz haysa tohoo vavohoo vchochech al pnai tehom....Vayomer Elokim yehee or vayehee or" "The earth was unformed and desolate, and darkenss covered the surface of the abyss... Elokim said Let there be light and there was light". 4) In the story of Kayin and Hevel after Hashem accepts Hevels offering and not his the pasuk says "Vayichar lKayin meod vayiploo panav" "Kayin became very angry and depressed" "And Hashem said to Kayin, Why are you angry? Why are you depressed? Is it not so if you improve, there is forgiveness?...." 5) At the end of the parsha it says " Vayinachem Hashem kee asa at ha-adam ba-aretz vayitatzev el leebo" "Hashem was comforted that He had made man on the earth and He grieved in His heart". Rashi says that man grieved and then it says "Hashem said I will obliterate mankind..."
The Torah starts off by telling us that in the beginning Hashem created the world. Emes - truth. The essence of the creation was for Truth. Truth is Torah. Truth is Yisroel(2). On Simchas Torah everyone goes up to the Torah, not just the scholars, not just the important people in the community, but rather every Jewish male goes up to the Torah. This is to teach us that the essence of the truth of the Torah is to bring everyone close to it and not to push them away. 4) What got Hevel to mess up? He got angry, he got depressed!!! "Let's say that you are sitting at a table, absorbed in your reading. Or you are walking down the street, engrossed in some subject that has struck your fancy, and all of the sudden, someone sneaks up from behind and yells, "BOO!" Before your conscious mind is aware of what happened, you react with fright. But how can a person be scared before he or she is even aware of what happened? Asks Rebbe Nachman. The answer, he explains, is that the person is not scared. Rather, there is an "other" within the person that is frightened. It is this "other" that fears and casts dread into your thinking and emotions. This "other" also usurps control of your cognition and decisions before you know it." (Quoted from Where Earth and Heaven Kiss by Ozer Bergman) This is the same "other" that got Chava to eat from the Etz Hadas and give Adam to eat from it and get kicked out of Gan Eden. He doesn't care so much about the actual sins that we do, he's in it to get us depressed afterwards. "How can you put tefillin on that hand? How can you daven with that mouth? Why bother? We see it again at the end of the parsha. Some opinions say "And He grieved in His heart..." Is going on man. Forget about the "chamas" and all of the other sins that mankind was doing back then, what was going to cause Hashem to obliterate the world?!?!?! Grieving!!!! Depression!!! We sin, we mess up, everyone does in his or her own way, its ok as long as we don't get down on ourselves and keep going in the ways of Hashem. How can we do this what can help us? By striving for the true truth which is to always come closer to Hashem Bsimcha!! We go back to 3) for some inspiration. The world was dark and desolate, tohoo vavohoo. We can't even begin to understand what kind of darkness that was, but yet Hashem came along and said "Vayihee Or" No drashas, no equations, no complications just "Let there be light and there was light" The Chofetz Chaim says that this is a huge inspiration to us, no matter what darkness we may have fallen into. All we have to do is turn to Hashem and He has the power to take us out of that darkness in an instant.
I'm not sure if any of that was clear but the bottom line is that Hashem wants us to come closer To Him through His Torah with happiness and any time we have negative thoughts all we have to do is know that it isn't us but rather the "other" and then ask Hashem to bring us back to the true light of His Torah. May we be zoche to be truly happy in our serving Hashem and through that bring the Mashiach and the Third and final Beis Hamikdash speedily in our days Amen!!!
A gutten.....
Peace & Joy,
8on
Hello to one and all. I hope that everyone had a wonderful week.
I forgot to give my introduction last week from the Zohar hakadosh, but it's all good, because it applies just as much to this weeks parsha and of course the rest of the Torah. It's actually quite simple, the Zohar hakadosh says that anyone who thinks that the Torah is a nice story book, or a nice book of the history of the Jews is a FOOL!!! So, ok we all know that that’s not what the Torah hakedosha is, we all know that it is The Living Torah. But we can all take some mussar from this statement and try and look just a bit closer a bit deeper as to what we can learn from the parshios and apply to our everyday lives.
"Noach was a Tzadik, a righteous man, perfect in his generations...." We can look at this in two different ways as Rashi points out. He was a Tzadik in his generation, the generation of complete corruption. Were he to have been in the times of Avraham he would have been an even greater tzadik. The second opinion is that were he to have been in the generation of Avraham he would have been a nothing. What did Noach do wrong? "Make for yourself and ark...." The Alshich says "Make an ark to symbolize your own behavior. You separated yourself from the rest of the people in the world, instead of giving them mussar and trying to bring them back to Hashem. Now you will isolate yourself in an ark with beasts and animals." Where do we see another ark in the Torah? By Moshe rabeinu. The difference there is that Moshe's wasn’t closed, he didn't have to hide, because Hashem, saw that not only was he going to be a tzadik but he was also going to be for the people and in the end even be willing to sacrifice not only his life but also his eternal memory for the people ("erase me from the Torah"). We live in very trying times. It's hard to be a Jew. What?!?!? We have now things and opportunities that previous generations didn't have?!?!? What I meant is that it's hard to be a real Jew!!! So what do we do? We build ourselves arks. Our shuls are our arks, our schools are our arks, our yeshivos are our arks, our homes are our arks, our Shabbos tables are our arks, and even more so we ourselves are arks. We have to look into the Torah for the instructions as to how to build these arks, we have to look to our Rabbonim who maybe understand a little better than ourselves. And after all of that we have to make sure not to make that same mistake that Noach made. We have to try our best to bring all of the yidden into our arks, and save them from the flood. This is end game, bottom of the ninth, the last quarter, sudden death overtime!!! It's now or never. So if Noach was a tzadik, why didn't he know this? Because he didn’t see the "nikudos tovos - good points" in the other people, and some say even in himself. Yes, there are those that say that Noach didn't even think that he was going to survive. That’s the yetzer harah!!! He says "what are you worth? Why bother? Whats that person worth? Why bother?? Lets not listen and look for those nikudos tovos both in ourselves and in all other yidden and in that zechus may we be able with Hashems help to strengthen our arks and weather the storm.
One last note to get us into the Chanuka spirit. Reb Nachman brings down that when the dove came back with the "olive branch" that was the ner Chanukah which we light with olive oil. As we'll try and learn more about as Chanukah gets closer, it is the light of Chanukah that can light up any darkness until we can see the dry land!!!
Have a wonderful Shabbos!!! Peace and joy!!!
Etan
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