Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So, Rabbi Greenberg, welcome to another installment of Unraveling Religion. I'm your host, Joel Lessees, and I want to welcome our audience today. I'm sitting with the renowned international Torah scholar, Rabbi Heschel Grinberg. Welcome, Rabbi Grinberg. How are you?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: I'm doing fine. Thank God. And thank you for inviting me. It's my pleasure and honor.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: It felt a very relevant time to have a conversation concerning world events and Judaism. And I just was wondering, with everything that's transpired lately in Israel, what are some things that you might like to offer about the situation currently?
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Well, it's a time that we can only talk about it with a lot of emotion. Because if your brothers and sisters are massacred on a Jewish holiday, holiday of joy, and if you are human, you can't just be cerebral about it. You have to be moved, emotionally shocked, dismayed, troubled, grieving. And then we work very hard on trying to transform the sorrow into some positive energy. Because we believe very strongly that everything that happens means that it's challenging us to do something. If it's a negative thing, to change it, if it's a positive thing, to embrace it. And we can't just let life go by us and ignore it. BAAL Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement, said that everything that we see or hear has to serve us with a lesson in the way we serve God.
You know, there are millions of things going on around us that we don't hear or see. They're not relevant to us. But if something happens that you see, you see an accident. Your eyes beheld something that was unusual.
You can't just say, well, it's not my family that was involved. It wasn't me involved. I didn't do the. I didn't cause the accident. I wasn't the victim of it. I could ignore it. No, God wants you to pause for a moment and say, why did God want me to see this? What's the lesson? And there could be many lessons. And every person has to find the lesson that strengthens his or her commitment to being servants of God.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: One of the things that we share, and it's been very important to me, the influence of the Little Baba, Cherubi, Menachem Mendel Shnirson, and his influence on the visionary leadership for our generation of just the infusion of new energies, new life, new vision about what Judaism is can be and where it's headed. And I'm just wondering from your own perspective, what you feel the Rebbe may have felt or said about the Events that just have transpired.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Well, I can only go by what he said in the past when we were able to hear him speak.
And there are several things here. Number one, how to respond to a tragedy of this magnitude. Especially what we can do to prevent a tragedy like this from happening again. What are our vulnerabilities and what is the positive side of this? Rebbe was the most positive person I have ever heard from or seen. Always looking for the positive in everything, but not ignoring the negative, not ignoring the sad things.
So I'll start with a negative and then go over to the positive.
The Rebbe was very strongly, spoke very strongly about Israel's security.
This developed in a way that proved the Rebbe's point that if you give up your defense of the land, they will come in there and they will just wreak havoc. The Rebbe was also very strong about the belief that Israel belongs to the Jewish people. Not because of the Balfour Declaration, not because of the UN partition plan, not because the UN gave or America or the other countries of the world said, you can have some of the land. Those are all arguments that are not going to sway anyone. The Rebbe was very much in favor of telling the truth. The truth is that Judaism believes that the land of Israel was created by God. He gave it to the Canaanites and he took it from them and gave it to the Jewish people. The Jewish people were not always excited about conquering the land. They were commanded to do it because God wanted them. And history proves the point that Israel is not a land for anyone else. Because in the 3,000 years plus that we had the land of Israel, no other nation was able to colonize it. The Romans destroyed the temple and they took over Israel. What did they do with it? They didn't do anything with it. The Arabs didn't do anything with it either. It was a wasteland.
Maimonides visited Israel in the 12th century.
He thought of living there and he said, it's impossible to live there. The land was overrun with all sorts of bandits and wild animals. It was. It was a jungle. So the Rebbe was very strong in telling the truth that the land of Israel is ours. It was given to us not because we took it or we wanted it because we have no other choice. It's our obligation. But then the Rebbe would talk about these tragic events because there were many tragic events that they were all harbingers of the messianic age. They were all preparations for the time when the world will become a world of peace and unity. And Holiness and goodness.
And the miracles that we witnessed in the Six Day War, for example, the Rabbi says that was what the Bible refers to as God is going to sound the shofar, the ram's horn, to herald the coming of Moshiach and the final redemption. Well, the Rebbe took that metaphorically. Shofar makes a lot of noise. It awakens people. The Six Day War was a miracle that awakened people.
And so I guess he would say the same thing about this tragedy as well. This is a wake up call for the Jewish people. But I think the Rebbe would say another thing. And this is only. I can only speculate what the Rebbe would say because he didn't speak about this period specifically. But if you look at what happened before the attack, Israel was split into two factions. Israel was never as disunited, split into two as it did before. And the enemies of Israel took note of that and they said it openly. They said Israel's at its weakest point in history and that they attacked because they knew that we were vulnerable.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: So what's the antidote for that? The antidote for that is unity. And that's exactly what happened. Israel has never been as united as it is now. Maybe in the six day war, maybe that was. I remember the 60 war, I remember the unity. But I think this is just as united, if not more.
The challenge, the Rebbe would say, is don't only be united in times of crisis. Take it to the next level. That even when the crisis is over, and I hope it's over very soon, you have to maintain that unity. Does that mean you have to agree with everyone? No, of course not. Jews don't have never agreed with one another. Sometimes we disagree with ourselves. We're always going back and forth arguing, and we're always looking at all angles. And some differences are illegitimate, of course, but some differences are legitimate differences that reasonable people could disagree and disagree stridently. But you don't become an enemy of the other person. You don't call them names that they're evil or this just because you have a strong disagreement. That type of unity is the challenge really that I think this event has put in our lap.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And so during the course of unraveling religion, which began in about November 2007, I've interviewed a few rabbis. One was Rabbi Godiah Gerfein from Israel, from Jerusalem. And he taught me in one of our. We did three different conversations. And one of them he taught me about the four rivers and the four exiles. And I'm just wondering, I know that we're in the time of returning from what number? Exile. That's the fourth. This is the last.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: Well, there's different ways of counting it. If you leave Egypt out of the exile, Egypt is the mother of all exiles. So we're sometimes not counted. After Egypt, we go through four exiles. The four exiles are usually the way they're counted are the Babylonian exile destroyed the first temple. Then the Persians took over. Under their auspices, we built the second temple, but under Persian domination. And during that period, Haman, the prime minister of Persia, launched this plot to have all Jews annihilated. And then you had the Greek empire. That's why we have the holiday of Hanukkah. They tried to impose Greek values on Israel. And then with the destruction of the second temple, that's called the Roman exile. And even though the Romans are no longer in control, Jewish literature, Talmud and others consider everything that happened after Rome to be an extension of the Roman Empire and the Roman exile. So we're in this exile close to 2,000 years. Yeah, these are the four exiles.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Four exiles. But Rabbi Gedalia Griffin correlated those were. Those were foreshadowed by the four rivers. The four rivers.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: There's a lot of discussion of a lot of fours that we find at different places that correspond to the four exiles.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: And so just so for the audience, because of maybe gematria and the association with every character having both a sound and utterance and a numeric value, could you talk a little bit about the number four and what its significance is in Judaism?
[00:10:05] Speaker B: Okay, Judaism, especially in Jewish mysticism, numbers are very significant.
If we were told that we're not allowed to communicate with words, we have to use numbers, we can do it. We might have a hard time because sometimes numbers can have different meanings. But if I give you a number, 613, you know, I'm talking about the number of commandments in the Torah. If I say seven, well, you know, seven emotional traits. And there are so many other things we could communicate with numbers. So four is not just a nice number. We refer to the four matriarchs. But four is also representative of every process, from biological to intellectual to spiritual, goes through four stages, leaving giving tzedakah. Giving charity is referred to as something that happens in four stages. So I'll use that as an example to illustrate the point.
When a person gives charity, the traditional concept of charity is taking a coin out of your wallet and giving it to the poor person. So the coin is a small item that represents the letter yud. The letter yud of God's name.
Now you put it in your hand. Your hand has five fingers. The letter hey, which is the second letter of God's name. Hey is five.
Now when you stretch out your hand, you create one long stretched arm that looks like the letter vav, the third letter of God's name.
And then when the poor person takes the coin in his hand, there's another five. That's the second letter hey of God's name.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: So the process of giving charity, you go through these four stages, but it goes deeper than that. The first thing that happens when you want to help someone, you're into your own existence. That's humans are, they're self absorbed. In order to give something to someone else, you have to reduce your own, your own footstep. You have to limit yourself, contract yourself.
That's what I was constantly. Which is the letter yud. Yud is the smallest letter in the Alphabet. Like the coin is the yud. Well, psychologically, when you, when you reduce your own identity, your own ego. Because if you're just absorbed with yourself, why would I want to give to you something? If I'm it's my money, why would I part with it? So you have to first reduce your own ego, withdraw your own presence from your mind. But you can't do anything just because you have no ego. You then have to develop a plan of what you want to do. Now for the other person, it doesn't have to be just giving money. It could be helping someone. You have to develop a plan. First of all, you have to develop an idea, who you're helping, how you're helping, when you're helping. And that's the second stage. That's the letter hey. The letter hey has expansion. It's one wide horizontal line with a vertical line on one side and another vertical line on the other side. So the hey is representative of developing a model, a system.
But then that's all in theory. You have to then translate it into an actual plan. You have to actually give it, do it, execute the plan. That's the vav. The VAV is a line that stretches. That means you're extending the plan that you have in your mind to the outside.
And then there is the fourth stage, which is the recipient. If the recipient is not ready to accept your help, you can't help them. If an alcoholic is not willing to change, then you can do all the good work that you're doing, but they have to be ready. That's the second hey, second letter hey. The expansion of the Recipient, Yes. And if you just have three, it's an incomplete name of God. It's an incomplete process.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Yeah, you need each one of the four components.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: Also, intellectually, when you're giving a class, you're a professor, and you try to educate students who don't know the subject, the first thing you have to do is take away your own understanding of the subject because it's too deep for the students if you're going to just tell them what you have in your mind. If Einstein is just going to talk to his college students the way he have it in his own mind, that he would overwhelm them. So you have to have first symptom. You have to contract your own knowledge and develop a blank in your own mind. Get rid of what you know. Then you have to bring it back in a level that can relate to the student. Then you have to transmit it. The student has to then absorb it. So you have four levels in every process. Biological. You know, the fetus starts off as a, you know, as a zygote, as a. You know, it's a small entity. It has no form and no shape. Then it develops into something larger the first 40 days, the Talmud says that's when the fetus becomes a more substantive.
You can find a heartbeat. Then the rest of the nine months of gestation, it becomes fully developed. And then there's birth. There are four stages. I once gave a talk on this, four stages. And the gastroenterologist said, wow, this is what we teach in gastroenterology.
So everything. Why is everything in the. Wherever you find patterns of four, it's because that's how it is with God and creation of the world. It also goes through those four stages. That's why Kabbalah talks about four worlds, spiritual worlds corresponding to the four letters of God's name. So everything is divided into four. Now, if you want to divide it further, then of course the kabbalists divided into 10. But those 10 could also be divided into four parts more generally.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: So a couple things that came to mind as you were describing the process of four and the notion of. I guess that's an aspect of Tzedakah. Correct.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: I mean, it's one manifestation of the four stages.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: But what came to my mind as you were describing this was the sheer. The vast act of creation, of Hashem himself for us, that the coin, the hand, the extension and the receipt is the physical realm that we are in. Is this not correct, that God has himself given us this and we are the recipients of what he has given. And what ties this together for me is in 1994, I was in. I did a summer program at Pardes Yeshiva in Jerusalem. A summer program. And we studied the Tractate on Shabbat.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Which starts off with that there's two or four that. Two forms of carrying that are really full.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Yes, yeah, yeah. The receipt or offering of an exchange from inside the home to outside the home and vice versa. How the owner of the house gives to the poor person outside the home. And so I just was wondering if.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: That also said, the Kabukabbalists say that that Mishnah, which talks about two that are four are referring, corresponds to God's name that has four letters. And the two. Is that name of God referred to as the Tetragrammaton, actually has another name of God embedded in it. That's two letters, the yud and the hey is also an independent name of God.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: And then there's the four letters. So there's two that are four.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
Which corresponds to Ishnisha. Right. In a certain kind of way, I would guess.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: Well, no. Ish and Isha is the yud and the hey.
[00:18:03] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: First two letters.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: Okay. And just above.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: And the. He refers to the offspring.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: Oh, okay. And. And just for the audience, Ish and Isha.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: Okay. In Hebrew, the word for man is ish. The word for woman is isa. And each one has a letter in it, one of the letters of God's name, the man. The word ish has a yud in it.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: And the word Isha has a hey.
Now, if you take those two letters out of those words, the word spells H. Fire energy. There's masculine energy and there's feminine energies, and they. They can be very destructive.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: That's why marriages. I. I don't know if I don't know the statistics, but I think good percentage of murders happen between the people.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Who are the closest unbridled passions.
Right.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: So the Talmud says you don't even have to go to Kabbalah. The Talmud says this, that if. If the marriage, if the man and the woman have the yud and the hey, God's name in them.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Then you have a beautiful marriage.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: You have a very holy marriage. And the two energies complement each other instead of clashing with one another.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: But if you take the yield and the hey out of the marriage, if you take God out of it, then they become two very powerful energies that can only destroy one another.
[00:19:26] Speaker A: And so brings to mind a couple things. Now, prior to the creation of the physical world, there Were two kinds of competing energies, were there not? Was there was. I don't remember the name of it, but there was sort of the very forceful energy and the godly energy. Do you. Is this.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: Oh, they're both godly energies. They're called the world of Tohu.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: Chaos and the world of correction.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: The world of Tohu is a higher world actually.
It's with very powerful energy.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: But with very limited vessels.
That means that the energy could not be channeled.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: It's like plugging an appliance into a 220.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: When it's not made for that and you'll just.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: It's a 12 volt. What? And when it's a 12 volt, you.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: Plug the 220 in, you're going to.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: It's not good.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: Have an explosion.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: That's what happened to the world of Toho. That's a spiritual world where the energy was more than the receptacle, the instrument.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:32] Speaker B: Then, then there's the world of Tikkun, where the energy is not as strong, it's not as potent, but the vessels are very ample vessels. They can, they can adequately transmit and channel the energy.
We are products of the world of Tikkun.
Humanity is Tikkun.
But physical matter around us comes from the world of Tohu.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: Oh, interesting.
[00:20:58] Speaker B: So we get why do we eat? For example, if you think about it, why do we eat? Because if we wouldn't eat, we wouldn't survive. But why did God create a system where human. Why would a human being have to depend on food which has no mind, has no soul, it's just food. And the answer is no, it's not true. The food that we eat comes from a higher source, from the world of chaos, very powerful energy.
And when we eat, it energizes our soul.
But that's why Judaism, food has to be kosher. We have to recite a blessing to thank God before we eat. We have to eat with the intention that we're going to use the energy to do good.
And that way we're able to capture that superior power of Tohu and internalize it in a safe and peaceful way. Internalizing it without it wreaking havoc on us. So that, in other words, that's why we have a craving for food. Where does hunger come from? God created a system that we are hungry, otherwise we wouldn't survive. But there's a deeper reason for it. Because the soul of the human being recognizes the spark of holiness in the food.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: And therefore it Develops a sense of craving, of hunger for the food. What are we really hungry about? The BAAL Shem Tov once said, we're not hungry for the food. We're hungry for the spark of the world of chaos that the food has that we want to capture that spark.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: Yeah. That's so interesting. And so in reading about those two worlds, it was.
Hashem wanted the blending of those two worlds. Is that not correct?
[00:22:44] Speaker B: The ultimate goal is that the world of See, each world has a deficiency. The world of Tohu chaos has very, very limited vessels, not very good wires to conduct the very powerful, very powerful, very powerful energy, but not very powerful instruments.
The world of Tikkun has very good instruments, very safe and secure, but the energy is limited. The ultimate goal. And that's what will happen in the messianic age. The two worlds will fuse.
And we're working at that. Every time we do a mitzvah, we're actually creating that mechanism for it to happen. Yeah.
[00:23:24] Speaker A: And for a moment, Rabbi Greenberg, if we may return to this notion, I wanted to talk about this at greater length.
When we spoke about the yud and the hey of the ish and Ishah, and how without the Yod and the hey of ish and Isha, or man and woman without the divine element, it's, as we said, it's sort of an unbridled passion that is uncontrolled. But I was wondering if you could speak about maybe a little bit about the influence of Torah, about how we draw the yud and the hey into a marriage so that we elevate the union of man and woman, or Ish nisha to a level of sanctity.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: Well, Torah is the philosophy and the guidance book.
When we follow the teachings of the Torah, number one, it gives us discipline.
So if someone asks, well, what exactly is Torah? One would answer simply, it's a discipline. And when you're disciplined, your energy is safe.
A little child doesn't have discipline, so when he gets upset, it throws a tantrum.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Adults also throw tantrums, maybe in a different way, but people commit crimes because of tantrums that they have, they can't just. They can't handle when things don't go their way.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: So if we just view Torah exclusively as a. If a Torah would just be viewed as a discipline that would have tremendous power to channel the energy that we have in our lives.
And especially when we have two competing energies. That's husband and wife, one person and another. You know, relationships. Relationships are the most important aspect of Humanity.
If we don't have relationships, then our humanity is deficient. But relationships have a tremendous amount of potential conflicts that can destroy the relationship and destroy others and part of the world along with it.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: So you and I have been, you've been teaching me or I've been sitting with you a long time. And one of the kernels or core takeaways for me from our time of intermittent teaching is that there are essentially three foundational elements to like family, marriage, which is the foundation of like, you know, humanity, Judaism, Israel is the foundation of the home. And those three things as I understand it are Nida. Oh, you're talking about Shabbat and kashrut.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: Yeah, the three, well, three of the most fundamental practices that a Jewish home would be deficient if it didn't have those intact. Yeah, those are observing of the Sabbath, Shabbat, keeping of kosher and family purity. What those three things do is family purity obviously brings purity into relation. Relationship. The relationship is not just a, a sexual, sensual, materialistic existence. There's some holiness in a relationship. Judaism believes that sexuality is a very holy thing. It's like, use an analogy, it would be like a jewel that you would want to put it in a beautiful setting. Yeah, you're not going to just leave the jewel around, you know, to get soiled in the dirt. Yeah, same thing with sexuality. It's considered to be very holy. It's God's most powerful force that he put into humanity.
So family purity regulates sexuality in the marriage.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: What else does family purity include?
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Well, family purity means simply that during a woman's period and seven days beyond that, there is separation, physical separation, which has the byproduct and benefit that couples learn to communicate without physical intimacy. You can develop spiritual intimacy. If your whole existence is only physical and intimate, physically intimate, then you don't develop a communication style and an ability to relate on a non physical level.
So then there's a separation for seven days after the woman's period and that at that point the woman goes to immerse herself in a mikvah, a ritual bath that symbolizes purity, purification.
Some people look at it as she's going back into amniotic fluid.
A rebirth of sorts. There are different ways of explaining it, but that's essentially the family pure.
And Shabbat is simple. We don't work on the Saturday, Friday night to Saturday night. It's a day that we are devoted to something that is holy. We rise above the mundane. We eat, yes, we have, we enjoy ourselves, but we don't, we're disconnected from the physical world to a great extent. And I think today, more than any time in history, six days of the week. God says, you're my partners and creation. I want you to work. I want you to change the world.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: One day. Recognize you're not in control. I'm in control. And on a higher, deeper level, it's a day when the whole world is elevated into God's thought. During the week. God creates the world through speech.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: He's projecting out of himself.
Shabbat. God creates the world through his thought. The whole world is in God's thought. That's one way of looking at it that Hasidic thought uses.
Then we have kosher food. Kosher food makes the mundane holy.
There's nothing more mundane than food. We depend on it. We engage in it constantly, more than any other thing, any other exercise. And by making food kosher, we're able to elevate it. We make the world around us holy.
Most people think there are ten commandments. There is no such thing as ten commandments. Right, but please don't hang up, don't tune out, because I have to explain what I mean. There is a body of 10 in Exodus and Deuteronomy, which are referred to in the Torah as 10 statements. But those 10 statements have more than 10 commandments in them. There are 10 categories of commandments, but those are not the totality of commandments either. In the Torah, the Talmud says there are 613 commandments. Now, if you start counting them, the bad news is there's more than 613. So where do they get the number 613? So obviously, sometimes some commandments are consolidated within others. So the total number is 613. And if you add 6 plus 1 plus 3, it gives you 10. So the basis of the 613 are the 10 statements.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: How many bones are there in the human body?
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Well, the Mishnah says there are 248. Of the 613 commandments, they're divided into two categories. 248 positive, do this, do this, and 365 negative. The ones, the things that we're not allowed to. You're not allowed to steal, you're not allowed to murder, and so on.
So the Talmud says that 248 correspond to the bones in the body. And the mission actually enumerates all the bones in the body. And then the Talmud says that 365 corresponds to the 365 days of the year, of the solar year. The zohar says the365 correspond to what it calls gidim is usually translated as sinews. Maybe it's blood vessels, maybe it's sinews. But there's something. It's not clear what it refers to, but there's some part of the body that corresponds to the number 365. So it's understood that when we fulfill all the 16 commandments, it energizes our entire body, our entire being.
[00:31:48] Speaker A: I mean, it's practical, you can trace it rationally. But it's also. There's an intuitive element that is very validating. So I'm curious if we could talk about Torah and the three Shabbos, family purity and kashrut, his means or ways of responding to what happened with the territory.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Okay. If you asked me in the beginning of our conversation what the Rebbe would say, and I didn't mention everything, but the Rebbe would respond by saying, it's a time to strengthen Jewish unity, of course, but also a Jewish observance by doing as many mitzvahs that we can do. But the Rebbe would single out specific mitzvahs. Number one, putting on tefillin.
Putting on tefillin, it says in the Talmud, creates an atmosphere, an aura of respect for the person who wears the tefillin. So the Talmud says, where do we have the name of God on us? As refers to the tefillin, because the tefillin contains scriptures that contain God's name many times over. So that boiling tefillin creates an aura of respect and fear, if need be, to start up with the Jewish people. And the Rebbe started the sixth day, right before the sixth day war, a tefillin campaign, campaign to get all Jewish boys over 13 to put on tefillin. The Rebbe also spoke other occasions about having a mezuzah on your doorposts. Because the Torah tells us the mezuzah is a protection. Giving tzedakah, giving charity, is considered to be a powerful force that protects people. Prayer, of course, saying psalms in particular is a powerful force. Lighting Shaba's candle. Women are required to light a candle or two candles or any number of candles before sunset Friday before the onset of the Sabbath. And it's interesting that the Hebrew phrase for Shabbos candles are nerot, Shabbat Kodesh, the candles of the holy Sabbath. The initials of those three words is nesh, spells the word neshek. Neshek means weapon.
That our weapons are lighting of the Shabbat skins. Why are they a weapon? Because all evil in this world is darkness, the absence of light. How do you get rid of darkness? You can't take a broom light, you have to turn on the light.
So when you have a mitzvah that involves actually lighting candles, physical light that represents the spiritual idea of light more so than any other particular mitzvah, and that dispels the darkness in the world.
So these are things that the Rebbe would recommend doing in order to get protection for the people and strengthen their spiritual power to vanquish the darkness and the evil.
What's going on is that terrorism works.
And that's why it still exists.
Because no one was talking about two states until Arafat started to attack, hijack planes and other things. And then the world starts talking about two state solution. Now, if there wouldn't have been terrorism, people wouldn't be talking about a two state solution. But even with terrorism, why does it, why is it Israel's burden?
[00:35:26] Speaker A: I mean, and if you want even just to interject this quickly, like you're not, you know, not only are you talking about providing a population with land and support, Israel's supposed to do that, but there are surrounding nations that won't even, won't even absorb the population itself.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: What they want, we can't give them. Well, let's compromise. That's what America says. Okay, so Israel compromised. It withdrew from Gaza and it destroyed the lives of 10,000 Jews. What did we get? Tens of thousands of rockets. And now this massacre. They destroyed whatever we left them. We left them with agricultural sources that would be very good for their economy. What did they do with it? They destroyed it right away.
We let them bring in tons and tons of concrete. What do they do with it? They didn't build homes and hospitals and schools. They build tunnels, terror tunnels.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: There's no one leading that community towards constructive outcomes and toward building towards something and toward raising things up. Like, I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit in framing all this with divine providence, what that is in Judaism and why it would be important for people to learn and understand.
[00:36:45] Speaker B: Well, the Bal Shem Tov taught, and this is a departure, one could say, from Maimonides, although Maimonides has some people try to reconcile Maimonides with BAAL Shem Tov, that God is watching over every little detail of creation. If a leaf flutters in the wind and lands in a different place, that was all part of God's plan. And it's connected to the whole overall plan of the whole universe. The universe is pretty big.
It's a vast universe.
[00:37:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: And yet a little leaf moving on Earth is not even a speck of dust compared to the Earth, and certainly not even a speck of dust compared to the universe. Yet God is in control of it and he's watching over it and it affects the whole universe.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: That's the basis for the Bs teaching that I mentioned at the beginning, that everything that we hear or see has to teach us a lesson. Because the fact that you heard it or saw it means that God put it in your consciousness. There's a reason for everything. So everything that happens now, it doesn't mean that we know the reason for everything.
So we sometimes have to be creative in thinking of what lessons we can learn. I remember the Rebbe would take every event that happened when they reached the moon.
First they orbited the moon, and then the Rebbe would teach lessons from that. And every major thing that happens in the world, you have to look at it and say, what is this going to teach me? Because God is presenting it to you. It's not. There were no coincidences.
[00:38:26] Speaker A: And so this is for my own curiosity, but that I assume was pretty revolutionary, considering before the BAAL Shem Tov influenced Judaism in Hasidis afterward. Hasidis, to me, has not just a tremendous level of observance, but a profound mystical component.
[00:38:49] Speaker B: Right before the BAAL Shem Tov, people understood that there is divine providence, but not pratit, not on every detail.
There's divine providence on humanity, but not on everything else in creation. There's only a very general providence. That was the understanding before the BAAL Shem Tov.
That's at least some looked at it that way. Today, there's not a Jew in the world that is steeped in Judaism. Even if they're not identified as a follower of the BAAL Shem Tov, there's not a Jew in the world who doesn't accept that. That's now the accepted thing, that God watches over everything, every little detail.
So that's a very fundamental teaching because it brings meaning into everything that happens in our lives. Nothing is haphazard. Nothing is just coincidental.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I think. I think in my own spiritual explorations I've come to. My curiosity has led me to an understanding of, for myself intuitively how true that is, that if you can take time to meditate, reflect, ask why for any event long enough, if one really reflects very deeply, introspects, reflects, contemplates, praise about any event, I look at it from my own understanding, which is not refined but I look at it as sort of like the light of the event is husked. You husk the event. The light is freedom. And the wisdom that that light offers is embedded in our experience that we can offer to community. And I feel like that's kind of the whole point of why one is able to understand that the world is there is divine providence and that there is an event, a lesson, a meaning in everything that happens.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: Right? Everything has the ability to teach us something.
The Ethics of the Father says that a wise person is someone who learns from everyone.
The BAAL Shem Tov took that to mean not just learns from everyone, but to learn from everything.
Every experience is a teacher.
So while we contribute to the world, the world can contributes to us is a reciprocal relationship.
[00:41:30] Speaker A: Rabbi Greenberg, thank you so much for taking time with me.
[00:41:32] Speaker B: Thank you for inviting me.
[00:41:34] Speaker A: It was a wonderful talk. I hope maybe we can do it again sometime in the future.
[00:41:37] Speaker B: I will again.
Better times.
[00:41:41] Speaker A: Better times. I'm sure they're coming.
