Are You A Tinok Shenishba or Just Ignorant By Choice? (9 Minutes)

0:02Ignorance, if it's an unintentional ignorance. There's a Mishnah in Pirkei Avot that says, if you sin out of ignorance,

1:09It's not something that you have no option. You have an option, just like you spend X amount of time learning about your career, X amount of time deciding who your wife is going to be, X amount of time picking video games at Walmart, X amount of time doing everything that you do. You could spend the same amount of time or even half the amount of time to learn the truth and you say, "Hey, wait a minute, I can't eat milk and meat." So if your learning is just because you didn't get to it... But your learning, that's different. If your lack of knowledge comes from a lack of learning that's purposeful, then it becomes an intentional sin. And that's a problem. So no one can beat the system. You can't beat the system. So anyone agnostic, anybody that's not fully committed to Judaism and the laws, then would be... Yeah, so there is a Gemara... that talks about this. Actually, this Mishnah also discusses it as well. There's a concept called Tinok Shenishba. A Tinok Shenishba means like a baby that was lost.

2:26Like, I don't know, if somebody, a Jew, was born in Siberia and he's surrounded by polar bears, and, you know, or a Jew was born in the middle of Africa and, you know, there's no Judaism there, or he was born in Russia and it's a communist country where if you kept Shabbat, they'd shoot you on the spot. So, pretty much, one generation, maybe you kept some things in hiding, by the second or third generation people got so scared they forgot Judaism already. So unless someone lived there their whole life, their entire life, not just part of it, they cannot be considered this lost child, this tinoch shenishba. Now, there are many people, unfortunately, who did have some type of ignorance throughout their lives. Most people today, 80% of Am Yisrael, don't keep Shabbat. It's not because they all hate God; most of them are simply clueless. But they can't claim that they're all tinoch shenishba. Even though there are people that say that everyone's a tinok shenishba, it's completely wrong, it's completely against the Torah. A tinok shenishba is if you lived without knowledge that you're Jewish your whole life. Meaning, the minute you know that you're Jewish, and that Judaism requires you to do stuff, you know that Shabbat exists, you know that kosher exists, you no longer qualify as a tinok shenishba. Meaning, okay, you lived in Russia.

3:54Gorbachev and all of his terrorist friends were your buddies. They were beating you up with the KGB. Great. Unfortunately, it's terrible. It's horrible. I understand. Okay, but you moved to America, right? You moved to Israel. You moved to, I don't know, wherever you moved to. And there's a Chabad next to your house. There's an Orthodox shul next to your house. There's internet. You know that there's a Jewish community center. There's a beit midrash. You have access to shiurim. You have access to limud Torah. You have access to religious texts. You are no longer isolated. You have the opportunity to grow in Torah learning, to observe halacha, and to be part of a kehillah. So, what's stopping you? What is holding you back from embracing your heritage and contributing to the Jewish people? There's Jews. There are people of all races, black and white. There are people who wear yarmulkes. You see the Chanukiah, you see the menorah. Every year, you know, you go to the party. So you know what Chanukah is, right? Okay, you know you're Jewish. You're no longer that baby. So, what's the problem? The problem is that so many, so many Jews are not following the law that certain sects of Judaism decide to make their own law and say, "No, okay, they're excused. They're all these lost babies. They're all excused." And unfortunately, it's a lie. There is no validity to it whatsoever. If you look at the Gemara, the source for where this is, tells you exactly the definition it has told you. And again, you must be under those extreme circumstances your whole life.

4:47of Judaism decide to make their own law and say, no, okay, they're excused. They're all these lost babies. They're all excused. And unfortunately, it's a lie. There is no validity to it whatsoever. If you look at the Gemara, the source for where this is, it tells you exactly the definition. It has told you. And again, you must be under those extreme circumstances your whole life. So live in Siberia from the minute you're born to the minute you die. Meaning, even if you are 87 years old and discover that you're Jewish, and you have, I don't know, a year left to live, you have to try. You can't say, "Ah, you know what? I already wasted 87 years; Hashem will forgive me for the last year also." No. You're obligated to do it. You're obligated to try. Yes, He's not going to expect you to be Moshe Rabbeinu. Because you've only had one year of exposure to Judaism in your life, He obviously put you in that situation to give you that test. But you're not excused; you're never excused. Especially in our generation—the generation of the internet—if we want to find out how to build a rocket ship, we just search for a video on Google, and in 15 minutes, you can learn how to build a rocket ship; you just need the tools and the funds.

6:04So you can't figure out who that is, you can't figure out how to keep Shabbat, you can't figure out kosher, but you can figure it out, it's just a matter of desire. So why do those fake rabbis and fake organizations that are desecrating Hashem's name give people a lie and tell them that they're all excused? Because if they tell you what I just said, the vast majority of people would stop coming to their shuls. Because most shuls, and most places, you know, in America, are not like New York, where there's a shul on every single corner, or like Israel, where there's a shul on every corner, and you can walk to every shul. Most shuls, for example, where we live in Florida, you have to drive to shul in most cases. Unless you live inside a community, you have to drive to shul for 15 minutes, 20 minutes; everything is 20 minutes in Florida. It's the same concept everywhere else. In Texas, everything's a half hour away. Which means that unless you live right next to the shul, you can't go to shul on Shabbat. So if the rabbi of the shul tells him, "Listen, by the way, according to the Torah, you can't drive on Shabbat," okay, so I'm not coming to the shul. So the rabbi's like, "Wait a minute, I'd rather him come, because then, if he doesn't come, he's not going to send the $500,000 he sends every year. Because he's not going to see me, he's going to forget about me, he's going to send it to some other Reform shul. He's going to send it to some other shul that's closer to him. So I have to keep telling him that it's okay,"

7:28to drive on Shabbat, or just not say anything and let them sin for 25 years. It's evil. They're going to be punished for it. They're going to be punished. The people that are letting other people sin, according to the Gemara, get a much bigger punishment than the ones that actually sin. But everybody gets punished. No one's excused. But the ones that know for sure and don't say, according to Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi in the Gemara, and also in Sanhedrin, and also in Shabbat, those people take on a bigger part of the sin. There are three different sources. There are people that know the truth and don't tell people. they take a bigger part of the sin. As a matter of fact, in the Gemara, in Masechet Shabbat, page 54, it says that the reason why Hashem punished the righteous, or the people that were supposed to be righteous, the rabbis, during the generation of the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, was that He punished the rabbis first. You would think it would be the opposite, at least the righteous should be punished later. Or don't punish them at all—they're righteous, no? They're rabbis. They have a beard, they have a hat.

8:35You can sweep the floor, nice jacket, what's going on? They read Chumash, they read this. Don't even punish them. Okay, punish the other people that drive on Shabbat. Makes sense, right? No, Hashem says punish them first. Why? Because they didn't rebuke the people. They didn’t tell people to stop driving on Shabbat. Didn't tell people to stop eating milk and meat. Didn't tell people, listen, you have to eat kosher all the time, including pizza. You've just experienced another Torah class.