Shiur Torah #85 Megillah of Esther, The Cure Before The Ailment Mussar

0:00We have a lot going on next week. This is the last shiur in Boca Raton, and actually tomorrow I have one in Hebrew. But then next week, B'ezrat Hashem, we're going to Israel. We're going to go on a nice long trip to do as many shiurim as possible. We're going to be there for 40 days, B'ezrat Hashem. And send you guys a shiur on WhatsApp. So again, if anyone is not on it, they should join the WhatsApp group that I have. I send the daily chizuk, which is a 10-minute d'var Torah. Usually five days a week, I would say. On average, four or five times a week, I send it. which a lot of people like because it's only 10 minutes and it's relevant to our day-to-day life. And also I send my shiurim on the group, so anyone that's not on it should join. And if you guys want to have a separate group you want to create, no problem, I'll send it to you that way. But I'm not going to have a regular text message once I'm there.

1:11But as you saw, it's a very active group, so a lot of people talk, they communicate, Baruch Hashem, full of nice compliments. Sometimes it can get a little disturbing, so one of two things I would recommend: either put the group on mute, which is you press the button, the name of the group; after it shows you a screen, you press mute. You have a choice of putting it on mute for one day, one week, or one year. Put it on one year, and that way you don't get an alert every time there's a text message. which drives you crazy, because I know it drives me crazy, because I have several groups that I'm a part of, and yeah, on Google it's a little different. But the point is everybody can figure out how to put the group on mute, so it doesn't drive you crazy, because there's a lot of really resourceful things on it. And aside from Facebook, it's the only way you're going to be able to communicate with me once I'm out of here. So, I mean, you can call me. I'll give you guys my phone number if anybody needs to reach me, but...

2:12But Baruch Hashem, the group is getting bigger. A lot of people are joining. The group on Facebook is consistently growing, Baruch Hashem. A lot of people doing teshuvah, a lot of converts. The group in Texas is, Baruch Hashem, getting closer and closer. The woman that's in Florida, Baruch Hashem, should be converted by next month. So a lot of action, a lot of action, and a lot of good action. And we're seeing that a lot of the prophecies... in the world today are coming true and, uh... one of the things you know we see this week we're seeing, you know, we have Purim in a couple of days. Briefly, I'll tell you some of the halachot of Purim, and I'm going to actually go over the updates and everything else during the actual shiur itself because I think that, uh... what we're about to go over is probably one of the best mussar books ever written, but most people don't consider it a mussar book. So the basic halachot of what you're responsible for on Purim, it's only four things. I went over it last night, but for anyone who didn't watch it, four simple things. One, you have to do mishloach manot, at least two mishloach manot. The mishloach manot has to be something that can be made into a meal, so it's not just candy. If you have just candy, you're not fulfilling the mitzvah. It has to be considered a meal, which is mezonot and something to drink.

3:38So, some people put cookies, some people put sandwiches, some people put, you know, something they made, if they're giving it to somebody that they know. Most people usually put something that's already, if they're giving it to people that they are not really close to, they give something that's still in the wrapping. If you really know people well, then you can give them something you cooked if you want. But it has to be something that can be made into a meal. The second thing is that you have to give matanot la'evyonim, gifts to the poor. the gifts to the poor have to be at least the value of a meal. And it's two gifts to two different people. It has to be the value of one meal. So a meal is anywhere between $7 and $10. You decide. And you have to give two gifts to the evyonim. The third thing is that you have to listen to Megillat Esther. Megillat Esther, you have to listen to it twice: once on Wednesday night, tomorrow night, and once on Thursday morning. You have to listen to every single word. If you miss a word, if you didn't hear or didn't understand a word, you have to have a Chumash open. At the end of the Chumash, you're going to see Megillat Esther. You have to read the word yourself. So it's very important for men, women, and children to listen to the Megillah. If the children are too young to understand, comprehend, and be quiet...

4:59then it's better that you do it at a different time. Maybe have somebody come to your house. In our community, there are plenty of reading times. If you can't do it with your wife, for example, my wife and I can't go to the same one, so she's going to go one time, and I'm going to go at a different time. You have to listen to it twice. After you finish the Megillah, actually, tomorrow there's a fast. Here, the fast starts, I think, at around 6 o'clock in the morning—6:13, 6:13, 6:13. Okay, so it starts at 6 and ends around 8 o'clock at night. Everybody has to check their own local times, whoever's watching this. The Megillah is usually read a little bit before the fast ends, so by the time the Megillah is finished... The fast is finished. So then you go home, you have a meal. You're not obligated to have any special type of meal on the eve of Purim, just a regular meal. If you want to have a big meal, you can have a big meal; it's up to you. But the meal that is part of the mitzvah of Purim is actually the next day. During the day of Purim, you have to have a meal that includes basar and yayin. You have to have wine and you have to have basar.

6:09Basar and wine are because you're celebrating. So generally, if somebody is a vegetarian, this is one of those days you should consider breaking it because it's very important to fulfill the mitzvah. Obviously, if you can't and it disgusts you, then so be it. But you have to drink wine more than what you drink normally. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to drink to the point where you can't comprehend what's going on in the world. But also, you can get tipsy. But the most important thing about getting drunk, because I don't think many people go over this, is that you cannot go to the Beit Knesset drunk under any conditions. You can never go to a Beit Knesset, even walk into a Beit Knesset, drunk. Last year, unfortunately, I saw a few people who were drunk come into Beit Knesset. It's a big, big Chilul Hashem, a big ason. It's better to miss the entire prayer than to go to Beit Knesset drunk. So, yes, the best thing to do is to drink, fall asleep for a half hour, an hour,

7:09And then usually when you wake up, you wake up when it's pretty much over. If you're not a big drinker—I'm not a big drinker; I don't drink at all throughout the entire year—you still have to drink a little bit just to make the mitzvah. But for me to get drunk is probably not going to happen. But anybody else that drinks normally on a regular basis can drink a little bit more than usual and enjoy the holiday. Have a meal. And that's pretty much the basics of Purim. It's a nice time to dress up; anyone that's dressing up. Kids dress up, adults can dress up, should dress up. It's a fun day, and we should definitely use it as a time to enjoy. But one of the things that I wanted to go over today is Megillat Esther. I did a shiur last year, which, Baruch Hashem, had a very big turnout online. In person, not so many, but online it was actually very successful for, I think, at least six to eight months. It was probably my top shiur. But I want to go over some of the things we didn't cover last year. There's a lot of things.

8:15In my opinion, after looking at some of the details of the Megillah and studying it, it's probably one of the best Mussar books that you can ever read. Most people that know about Megillat Esther and didn't study it, think of it as a very nice story that has a big miracle in it. But the reality of it is that there's a lot of Mussar, there are a lot of lessons we can learn to apply to our lives, both individually and as a nation, that we have to learn from. Or else this is going to happen again, because it's happened several times. So, the whole Megillah is not very long. It takes, I think, about 40 minutes or so to read it and to listen to it. But to learn the Megillah takes more than that. I recommend everybody to get this one; in my opinion, it is a very good one. ArtScroll. ArtScroll makes very good quality sefarim. As a matter of fact, this is the first book that ArtScroll ever came out with. This is the first book that started ArtScroll. It's a very nice story. It was actually originally written in memory of a tzaddik who passed away. But it was so successful that it started the whole company, ArtScroll. So this is about 40 years ago. So they had a...

9:38a special that they sent out to customers, the book, for free. And it's amazing. It has great perushim, a lot of details, a lot of very, very interesting things. English? Yeah, of course, English. They have English, they have Hebrew, but the one I'm reading here is English and Hebrew. So, there's a lot of misconceptions about the story of Megillat Esther. So, the first thing we need to go over is, I guess, what happened before it. When did it happen, and why did it happen? Now, the first Beit HaMikdash was destroyed by the wicked Nebuchadnezzar a little over 2,400 years ago, by Nebuchadnezzar HaRasha, the king of Babylon. I'm sorry. Yeah, about two thousand. Yeah, so he destroyed the Beit HaMikdash, but he also received prophecy from Hashem about what's going to happen at the end of times. This can all be read in the Book of Daniel. After Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus took over and...

11:05Actually, Belshazzar took over. After that, Cyrus took over, and shortly after, Achashverosh took over. Now, the reason why I mention the other kings is because, unlike today, where the leaders of the world are mostly either anti-Torah, or completely ignorant of Torah, the leaders of those days actually knew and believed in the Torah. Even if they believed in idol worship, they still believed in the Torah. And the reason why, after he destroyed the Beit HaMikdash, the reason why we start off this Megillat Esther with a party that Achashverosh throws, is because Achashverosh was aware... or completely ignorant of Torah, the leaders of those days actually knew and believed in the Torah. Even if they believed in idol worship, they still believed in the Torah. And the reason why, after he destroyed the Beit HaMikdash, we start off Megillat Esther with a party that Achashverosh throws, is because Achashverosh was aware ...of the prophecy that Yirmiyahu made almost 70 years before, that Hashem is going to allow the Jews to build a second Beit HaMikdash. Now, this 70 years, this prophecy—actually, I'm sorry, Yirmiyahu made the prophecy almost 200 years beforehand—that there's going to be about a 70-year difference between the Beit HaMikdash. Now, this prophecy, everyone knew it. All of the kings knew it, and all of them were scared of it. Now,

12:25After Nebuchadnezzar died, his son took over, and his son was counting every single day to see if this prophecy would come true. Despite his father destroying the Beit HaMikdash, they were still all scared of the God of Israel, and they still all knew that the Torah is real. And according to the prophet... Not only will the Beit HaMikdash be rebuilt, but the enemies will be punished. So everyone was anxiously counting, wondering when this prophecy would come true and what would happen. When Belshazzar decided that seventy years had passed, according to his calculations, not according to the calculations of Yirmiyahu, which no one knew, he decided to throw a party. And not only throw a regular party. He wanted to take all of the keilim, all of the tools of the Beit HaMikdash, the Menorah, the clothes of the Kohen Gadol, and so on, and show off the treasure that he had. And he did something that not even Nebuchadnezar did. And he showed off all of these things, which is a complete desecration of Hashem's name, and he died that very night.

13:53Hashem sent somebody to assassinate him that very night. The same night. After him, Cyrus came in, and he decided that it was time to fulfill the prophecy. And even though he was a goy, he was a righteous goy; he was a righteous Gentile. He decided that the time had come to build the Beit HaMikdash. And not to celebrate that it wasn't built, like Belshazzar. It's time to build it. It's time to fulfill the prophecy. The Jews are a people that have been around. They're the chosen. Let's build the Beit HaMikdash. And he made a decree to build the Beit HaMikdash. But unfortunately, when he passed this law, we had the very same problem in his time that we have today. And the same exact problem that we've had for 2,000 years. Over 2,000 years. What is the problem? We had no achdut. We had no unity. So when he announced that it's time to build the Beit HaMikdash, out of millions and millions of Jews, only 42,000 showed up. That's it. That's it. Millions and millions of Jews heard.

15:21not only is the prophecy that Hashem gave to Yirmiyahu being fulfilled, but we have permission without fighting to go build a better Mikdash. People are either non-believers, or they don't like each other, this one's Ashkenazi, this one's Sephardi, this one's Temani, I don't like his prayer, I don't like his Chazan, I don't like this, I don't believe it, all the nonsense that we've been dealing with for 2,000 years. It's only 42,000 who agreed to go. That's it. So now Hashem decided that in order for us to have a better Mikdash, it's not for 42,000 people; it's for the entire people. So if there's no Achdut, there's no better Mikdash. So Cyrus was removed from power, and Achashverosh becomes king. And the first day that Achashverosh becomes king,

16:23passes a law, no Beit HaMikdash. Stop the building. So they've been building for a couple of years, stop in the middle, no more building the Beit HaMikdash. Now, the beginning of Megillat Esther is where the story begins of when Achashverosh not only stopped the building of the Beit HaMikdash, but he's also throwing a party. He's throwing a party because he believes that according to his calculations, the 70 years have passed, and since the prophecy didn't come true, it's never going to come true. The God of Israel has left Israel. So he's throwing a party, but what kind of party is he throwing? He's throwing a party for 180 days. Six months. A six-month party. Such a big party that he wanted to show off his wealth because Achashverosh was not your typical king. What we know initially when we just read the Megillah, we just learn that he's a king. We don't know the background story. Now, usually, you know, my father tells a good story. He says, he asked this, him or somebody else asked this rich guy one time, how did you make your money? He says, I can tell you how I made all of my millions except the first million.

17:47meaning that it's implying that usually, how people make their first batch of money is a big secret. Whether it's a scam or it's something they don't want anyone else to know. Whatever it is, no one wants to tell their straight secrets. So from the basic pshat, from the basic reading of the Megillah, we don't know how Achashverosh became king. So we go to Chazal. We go to our sages to find out how Achashverosh became king. And The biggest question we have to ask ourselves before we even go to Chazal, if somebody asks me this question, one of the people that watches this shiur has asked me this question. He says, why should we rely on Chazal? They weren't there. Rabbi Akiva wasn't there during the time of Achashverosh. You know, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi wasn't there during the time of Moshe Rabbeinu. Why should we rely on Rashi? He wasn't there during any of these stories. Why should we rely on their interpretation? So, to answer the question in detail, we have to go to Pirkei Avot. Pirkei Avot has six chapters, and it's a Mishnah. And the first chapter of Pirkei Avot gives us a very critical answer that every Jewish person needs to know. It says, I'll read it in English, Moses received the Torah, this is 1:1, first chapter of Pirkei Avot.

19:14Moses received the Torah from God, who revealed Himself at Mount Sinai, and transmitted it to Joshua (Yehoshua ben Nun). Joshua transferred it to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly. And they said three things: be deliberate in judgment, develop many disciples, and make a protective fence for the Torah. be deliberate in judgment, develop many disciples, and make a protective fence for the Torah. So why does Pirkei Avot start that way? Because Pirkei Avot is trying to tell us that the Torah is not just a book that we found in the middle of the desert. We have a direct lineage of exactly how we got it, from Moshe Rabbeinu all the way till now. Now, to give even more details of how it transpired, we have a list of exactly every single sage

20:40that took over. I don't know if I can probably take too long to go over it. I'll just go over it briefly. Every single sage from Yehoshua bin Nun and the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah who actually took over. Not only do we know the names, we know the dates. So no one can say, oh, maybe there was a lapse. There was a gap of time that... Maybe there was a mistake. Maybe it was a game of telephone. After Yehoshua bin Nun, along with Elazar, the son of Aharon, and Pinchas, the son of Elazar, Pinchas took over. Then he gave it to Eli. Then to Shmuel. Then to King David. Then Achiyah, the prophet. Then Eliyahu, the prophet. Then Elisha, the prophet, the student of Eliyahu, the prophet. Then Yehoyada, then Zechariah, then Hosea, then Amos, then Isaiah, then Micah, then Yoel, then Nachum, then Habakkuk, then Zephaniah, then Jeremiah, then Baruch the Prophet, then Ezra the Scribe, whose court included Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, Nehemiah, Mordechai, Zerubbabel, Shimon the Tzaddik, and then Shimon the Tzaddik became the high priest.

22:02The main Oral Torah that, as far as how all of the receivers, you know, if anyone wants to check literally name by name, is in the book Mishneh Torah by the Rambam, Maimonides. And generation 30—this is, by the way, the list I'm giving you is generations. So, for example, Zechariah, the next generation is Hoshea, the next generation is Amos. So it shows you from generation to generation who took over. Generation 35 is Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, who actually put the Mishnah in writing. But the first bit of Oral Torah that was written was not by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. It was actually by Yonatan Ben Uziel. Yonatan Ben Uziel actually wrote the first bit of the Torah, and which when he did in Masechet Megillah, it says that the entire country had an earthquake. And then a heavenly voice came down and said, who disclosed my secrets to mankind? And Yonatan ben Uziel said, it was me. But you know I did not do it for the respect of my father. And I did not do it for my own respect. I did it for yours. I did it for your glory because our generations are deteriorating so much.

23:29that if we don't do something, the Oral Torah, which is the real part of the Torah, the critical part of the Torah, the part of the Torah where without it there really isn't a Torah, chas v'shalom, without it we don't have anything, so we have to put it in writing. And he actually says, I want to write more, more commentary on the rest of the Torah. And the bat kol, the heavenly voice, said, you've done enough. meaning you're not allowed to write anymore. Why? Because the rest of the Torah that he didn't write about has the secrets of the exact time of when the Mashiach is going to come. And Hashem did not want us to know when the Mashiach is going to come exactly, because less people will end up waiting for the last minute to do teshuva. This is also the reason why Hashem changed age. If you read the beginning of the Sefer Bereishit, the beginning of the Torah, you see that Adam HaRishon lived to 930 years old. Noach was 600 years old just at the time of the Mabul. He lived more than that. Metushelach was almost a thousand years old. And so on. There were many people that lived literally almost a thousand years, hundreds and hundreds of years. But then you see the most righteous person that ever lived, the prophet of all prophets, Moshe Rabbeinu, maxed out at 120 years old.

24:55Why? Hashem decided, even before the generation of Moshe Rabbeinu, to limit the age. Because what ended up happening is that people thought, "Oh, my father lived till 500, so I should live at least till 350, 400, maybe even more, because medicine is getting better." Like today, people think, "Oh, my grandparents only lived till they're 70 or 80, so with medicine advancing, I should live till 120." They don't realize that your life or death is decided in Shamayim. They think it's decided by medicine. Mm-hmm. So, Hashem decided to limit life to a much shorter span because when people thought that they had a lot of time, they figured they could sin for a long time and then eventually do teshuva. This is the same concept, same wrong mindset, that people have regarding Mashiach. They're always worried about when Mashiach is going to come. Is he going to come next week? Is he going to come next month? Next year? When should I do teshuva? The reality of it is that the Mashiach, our own personal Mashiach, as we talked about last week, show up at any minute. It's called death. Somebody dies—that's their Mashiach. That's their time to wake up and pay the bill. So, Achashverosh decided to have this huge party. And Achashverosh's background story is that he actually used to be the guy that works and cleans the horses.

26:23For whom? For Vashti, his wife, for her father. He used to clean the horses. But then it says, the Midrash says, that Achashverosh, actually, is called HaMelech. Why is he given such respect? Massechet Megillah, page 11a, it says that really, Achashverosh bought his position. Meaning he had so much money that he made himself king. So how does a horse cleaner have so much money? He found a treasure, became the richest person in the world, other than Haman. Haman was actually the richest man of all time, next to Korach. Korach was the richest man of all time. Then it was Haman, and now you have Achashverosh. So it says, Sheva ve'esrim ume'ah medinah. It says, "It came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus, that Ahasuerus who reigned from Hodu to Cush, 127 provinces." To give us an idea of what the power and wealth of Ahasuerus is, he is one of very few kings in history that actually ruled the entire world. 127 countries. Every single country had to pay him taxes.

27:46every single country had to pretty much ask him before they went to the bathroom. So it was mamash, complete control of the world; no one has that today, you know, or at least for the last few thousand years. And this is one of the few that actually had it. So now, Achashverosh is having this big party to show that the prophecy did not come true, And he wants to make sure that everybody knows that it's canceled. So what does he do? He brings to show off not only his wealth, he wants to show off what he inherited from the previous king he took over power from. What did he inherit? The kelim of the Beit HaMikdash. So he brings them out also. Now Hashem could have killed him also. but he wanted to use them to bring salvation to the Jews. So He did not kill him; He would punish him later on. One of the punishments that He would give him is by killing his wife, Vashti. Now, once Achashverosh—Achashverosh had a lot of nerve—one of the things that he did was to show people that he had

29:12money and so on. We see it in the Midrash. It says the splendor, majesty, meaning Tiferet, is one of the words that describes the clothing of the Kohen Gadol. So we know from here that he wore the clothing of the Kohanim. But how do we know it's the Kohen Gadol and not the regular Kohen? Because the next verse says, When it's describing the different things, there were hangings of white, fine cotton, and so on, and then turquoise. The letter chet, if you notice in the Megillah, is extra large. It's very big, much bigger than the normal letters. And the value of chet is eight. What's eight in the Torah? Eight is the number of clothing, of garments, that the Kohen Gadol would wear. The regular Kohen would wear four.

30:12So this is one of the ways that we see that whoever wrote the Megillah was not just telling a story. It's not like a Harry Potter book. You know, a lot of people ask the question, how come Hashem's name is not mentioned in the Megillah? You have 24 books in the Tanakh. Megillat Esther is one of them. But it's the only book in the entire Torah that does not mention Hashem's name even once. So people say, oh no, maybe it was just a story. Maybe the goyim or the atheists will say, ah, this is just a agadah, it's a fairy tale. The people that don't believe, don't have enough Yirat Shamayim will say, oh yeah, you know, it's just somebody wrote it, it's not necessarily as holy as the rest. From little codes and intricate details of the Megillah, we're going to find out that not only is this book extremely holy and extremely good for Mussar, extremely good for a lot of things, But it's also something that could not have been written without Ruach HaKodesh. No way that a human being could have this type of, excuse me, this type of intellect to write the Megillah this way. So, moving on. Do you know who wrote it? I don't know. Anybody know? I know it was written at the time of, you know, it was decreed to be written by Esther, who was the queen.

31:35But as far as naming a specific person, I don't know it. I don't think it does name a person that actually wrote the Megillah, not to my recollection. It wasn't Esther. Huh? It wasn't Esther. Esther was a queen. She wasn't a sofer. The Torah is written by sofrim. Someone who knows how to write. Our Torah is not written by average people. It's not like my notes that you saw. Torah is something kadosh. So it has to be written with certain laws that have to be followed, how to use what kind of letters, what kind of shapes. You have to go to the mikvah, you have to be a very holy person. There are laws of how to write a Sefer Torah. It's not typing on a computer. So even though Esther was a prophetess and a very, very holy person, it doesn't necessarily mean that she had the skill set to write it. So now, in this seudah, for six months, it says, "And when these days were fulfilled, the king made a seven-day feast for all the people."

33:02who were present in Shushan, the capital. So, the king, after six months of partying, extended and made another party for another week. But what's the point? It says that for all the people who came to the original party, he made a party for them. Who were Chazal telling us that he's referring to? He's referring to the fact that there were many Jews who came to the party. And not just regular, ordinary Jews, rabbis. So the Gemara asks, why was Am Yisrael, later on in the story, judged so harshly to the point of extermination? It was decreed in Shamayim, it was decided in Shamayim, that Hashem decided to destroy Am Yisrael. Just like He told Moshe Rabbeinu, "Let Me wipe them out and start a new nation from you." That's pretty much what Hashem decided during the time of Megillat Esther. There was no Moshe Rabbeinu. He didn't tell anyone that He was going to start a new nation from him. It was pretty much a complete extermination. Why did we get such a horrible, horrible decree? The reason why is because the rabbis and the Jews could get out of it by saying, "Listen, we..."

34:25I can't not go to the party, to the party of the king. If we don't show up, he's going to kill us. We're locals. We're not the people that live in faraway countries. We live in Shushan. So if anyone doesn't go to this party, he's going to say, oh, he's going against the kingship, so we have to show up. Why did we get punished? Because we enjoyed it. Now, why was it a big deal to enjoy it? Because the whole party is against the Torah. The prophecy didn't come true yet. He's showing off what the goyim stole from us, what he stole from us, from the Beit HaMikdash, the house of Hashem, and you're going to enjoy the wine and the drinks? It's like somebody robbed your house and said, oh, you know what, let me send him a birthday cake. Or celebrating, you know, Hitler's anniversary. What are you doing? Going, okay, you have to go, you have to go, but you're enjoying it too. This is one of the worst things that we could have done. This created a Chilul Hashem. Chilul Hashem is the worst sin you can possibly make. And it's actually something that's happening still today. What is happening today? When you have these fake religious people that are resha'im and resha'im, yimach shemam ve'zichram,

35:53by the organization called Neturei Karta. Neturei Karta is a bunch of evil, wicked people that were born Jewish and dress Jewish. Not only Jewish, they dress in black and white with the peyot and everything, but they go and celebrate anything bad that happens in Israel. They celebrate because they're against the foundation of modern Israel. But listen, if you're not a fan of the Congress or the government of Eretz Yisrael, obviously anyone that's religious can't be a fan because they're anti-Torah. But to celebrate when Jews are being killed, to celebrate when there's missiles being thrown at us, to celebrate when the enemies... are advancing against Am Yisrael, that's a Chilul Hashem that couldn't be any worse, and that's what they do. There are even videotapes of them hugging and kissing the leaders of Iran and the top terrorist leaders. The worst part about it, if this was like an ordinary secular Jew, no one would care. It's like, ah, it's just some guy that's crazy. But when it looks like it's religious Jews, it gives the entire Torah, not just the entire Judaism, the entire Torah, a bad name.

37:11And there's no Chilul Hashem worse than that, and there's definitely a special place in Gehinnom for people like that, and hopefully they get there very soon. Now, people need to understand that we have an obligation to look Jewish. We learn this from Mordechai. When it mentions Mordechai in the Megillah, it says, the first thing it says, there was a Jewish man in Shushan, the capital, whose name was Mordechai, son of Yair, son of Shimei, son of Kish, a Benjamite, who had been exiled from Jerusalem along with the exiles of

38:15So it says, "Ish Yehudi." What's an Ish Yehudi? Now, if you pay attention, the only other reference to someone being called an Ish is in two places: one, in the Torah when it's referring to Moshe, Moshe Rabbeinu, and the second time is actually when it's referring to Hashem. The one thing that we learn from here is that Mordechai was not only a tzaddik, he was the Moshe Rabbeinu of his generation. Now, Ish, if you see the roshei teivot, what's an Ish? How does somebody call the Ish? Ish, Yirei Shamayim. A man who fears G-d.

39:20This is the description that Moshe Rabbeinu got. Yehudi, he was called Yehudi and he was also named Mordechai because he went against Avodah Zarah publicly. Now, why is he described as Ish Yehudi? How did everybody know that he was an Ish Yehudi? It's because he dressed the part. I think it's Rabbi Nachman who says that his prayers were so long, and he was so proud of them. His clothing—anyone that would see him, even someone blind, was able to identify: this one is not only a Jew; he's a man who fears Hashem. So, his identity was never hidden. And even though we weren't exactly in power at the time of the story, he was very proud to be a Jew. So we are obligated to do the same. We're obligated to look Jewish. We cannot look like the goyim. We can't wear the same type of clothes. This is the reason why, in today's age, people wear the black and white. One of the reasons at least. You're not obligated to necessarily wear the black and white, but you have to look like a Jew.

40:37So how do you look like a Jew? There are certain things that Jews have. They have tzitzit, they have a kippah. You know, there are certain things that Jewish people do. You have to look the part. When we get to a point, unfortunately, in some places in the world where we're embarrassed of who we are, we either need to learn a lot more Torah and get some serious help with our Yirat Shamayim, or we need to move. A lot of people that are still living in Europe, in places that have a lot of anti-Semitism, are crazy. They're just bringing harm to themselves. Moving on with the story, now to show off his gedulah, to show off his power, to show off his good choices, he wants to show... All of the people, his wife, Vashti. But he doesn't want to just show her and say, "Oh, there's a picture." He wants to show everyone that she's the most beautiful woman in the world. He wants to have her show her true beauty. What's her true beauty? He wants her to show herself naked. Now, Vashti was a very, very wicked person.

42:01But when she was asked to do this, she refused. Why did she refuse? Because Hashem punished her and put tzara'at, a disease, on her skin. Some actually say she even grew a tail. Why was Vashti punished so badly in this moment? Because Vashti sinned in the two worst sins for everyone. One is she sinned. Or three. First, she went against the women of Israel by forcing them to work on Shabbat. Forcing the women of Am Yisrael to work on Shabbat. Again, the goyim knew what Shabbat was. They knew probably more than even Jews know today. And they specifically did everything they could to make sure that the Jews stay away from Hashem. because they knew that as long as the Jews stay secular, Hashem is not going to help them. So the first thing she wanted to do was make sure that she destroys the connection between Am Yisrael and Hashem. She made the women of Israel work on Shabbat. The second thing is, she would make them work naked. The third thing is, before Achashverosh called her to come to join the party and show the men her naked body, she was actually also wearing

43:28the clothing of the Kohanim. So she was also desecrating Hashem's name. So Hashem, in His amazing ways, measure for measure, not only made a decree that she has to appear naked in front of everyone, but she can't because she's disgusting now. But on top of it, when Achashverosh decreed, when this whole thing happened, it was on Shabbat. So when the death penalty was decreed, it was on Shabbat. She was killed on Shabbat. She made the Jews violate Shabbat. She got killed on Shabbat. But before she got killed, there was a ga'avah battle. There was a pride battle between her and Achashverosh. You see the first time that Vashti is mentioned, it says, "the clothing of the Kohanim." So she was also desecrating Hashem's name. So Hashem, in His amazing ways, measure for measure, not only made a decree that she has to appear naked in front of everyone, but she can't because she's disgusting now. But on top of it, when Achashverosh decreed, when this whole thing happened, it was on Shabbat. To bring Queen Vashti before the king, but then, to bring Vashti the queen before the king, but the second time it says, but the queen Vashti refused. Why is the queen, after the name in the beginning and before the name a second time, is because Vashti, Achashverosh was trying to tell, listen, I'm the ruler, I'm number one, you are Vashti the queen, you're only the queen because of me." to bring Queen Vashti before the king, but then, to bring Vashti the queen before the king, but the second time it says, but the queen Vashti refused. Why is the queen, after the name in the beginning and before the name a second time, is because Vashti, Achashverosh was trying to tell, "Listen, I'm the ruler, I'm number one, you are Vashti the queen, you're only the queen because of me."

44:57When Vashti responded, she says, "Tell Achashverosh that I am the Queen, Vashti, and I come from a royal bloodline, and he used to be my father's horse cleaner. So remember who I am." So they went back and forth with aggav, and of course, this is usually the recipe for all disasters. And eventually, when she rejects, Achashverosh decides that he has to ask his advisors, "What should I do?" Achashverosh goes to his advisors, the closest to him. First, he goes to the wise men. It says, "Then the king spoke to the wise men, those who knew the times." What does it mean, "those who knew the times?" The first chachamim that he went to, he went to the Jews, he went to the rabbis. does it mean that those that knew the times? He says those that knew the calculation of when the moon renews. Only the Jews knew exactly the exact time of when the moon will renew. There's an exact math in the Gemara; it tells you exactly the six-digit number of the minimum days that it would take the moon to go around the earth.

46:21which is something that science only discovered in the last two decades. We already had it a few thousand years ago. So you know that the Jews, even though he was a big anti-Semite, were still the smartest. So he went to them. But the Jews figured out, listen, he wants us to judge what to do with his wife. If we tell him to kill her, tomorrow morning when he's not drunk, he's going to wake up, realize his wife is dead, blame us, and kill all of us. On the other hand... If we don't tell him anything, we say, no, no, don't kill her. Tomorrow, people are going to remind him, look, she went against you. What kind of advice are you getting? He's going to kill us anyway. So what should we do? So the wise men were called wise for a reason. They got out of it. How did they get out of it? They said, listen, since the Beit HaMikdash was destroyed by the previous king, by Nevuchadnetzar, Since then, so did the judicial court. So did the Sanhedrin. There's no more Sanhedrin. And since that time, there's a law in our religion that we're not allowed to make any rulings for anyone, not even ourselves. So I'm sorry, we can't help you. It's against our religion. So okay, fine, this is a party. I'll let you pass. So now he goes to his own advisors and it says, וַהַקָּרוֹב אֵלָיו כַּרְשְׁנָה שֵׁתָר אַדְמָתָא תַּרְשִׁישׁ מֶרֶשׁ מַרְשְׁנָא מְמוּכָן.

47:41It gives the seven names of the advisors. The last one mentioned was actually another name for Haman. And you see that even though he is the last one mentioned, he is the first one that responds with the suggestion. It says, וַהַקָּרוֹב אֵלָיו כַּרְשְׁנָא שֵׁתָר אַדְמָתָא תַּרְשִׁישׁ מֶרֶשׁ מַרְשְׁנָא מְמוּכָן. declared before the king and the officials, "Not only against the king has Queen Vashti done wrong, but against all the officials and all the people in all the provinces of King Achashverosh." In so many words, what he’s telling us here is, "Listen, Vashti made a big sin. She didn’t only go against you; she went against..." All of us. Because she did it in public, everyone is going to know. Every wife, for all of your officials, for all of the people, is going to know that if the queen can go against the king, then the wife can go against the husband. It's going to cause chaos. The real truth is that Haman actually had a lot of shalom bayit problems. His wife was the boss in the house.

48:57Even though he was very, very rich, his wife would tell him what to do and constantly go against him. So he wanted to, you know, he knew that if this whole thing gets publicized, that the queen is allowed to go against the king, then he knows that his life is over at home. He says, listen, you have to kill her. But one thing we learn here as far as Mussar is that we notice that, I said to someone earlier this week, that we notice that Memuchan, or Haman, was mentioned but yet he was the first one that responded. Which is, we learn in Mishnah Masechet Avot, Chapter 5, Mishnah 9, it says, "The seven traits that characterize a fool, an uncultivated person, and seven are learned ones." It goes into detail, but it says that a fool is one who speaks out of turn, in so many words. He replies inappropriately, he discusses the first things last and the last things first. In essence, the exact opposite of what a smart person would do. And one of the things that somebody like that does is that he actually speaks out of turn. He's mentioned last, but he speaks first, and you see here that Haman was not only wicked, but he was also a fool.

50:38But during this advice, which is usually not a part that we pay that much attention to, we see something amazing. Aside from giving Achashverosh the advice that he should kill the queen, he says, listen, you're the king of 127 countries. But to make a simple ruling like killing your queen or what to do with your queen, you're asking us because you have a rule in your own court, in your own kingdom, that you have to ask your advisors. I don't think you should ask your advisors. I think you should make a new law. You're the king. You should make the law and not ask anyone. If you want, you can ask, but it shouldn't be a law that you have to ask them. Now, this doesn't really seem like a big deal. What's the big deal here? This, at the end of the shiur, we're going to find out how this specific thing ends up being how Hashem shows His name in the parsha without showing His name. The simple explanation is that Ahasuerus listens to this advice.

51:54At the end of the story, when Haman is found to be the one who wants to kill Esther, Mordechai, and all the Jewish people, Ahasuerus is very heated and he decides to kill Haman on the spot. So we learn from here that if it wasn't for the beginning of the story, the background story, where Haman changed the rule, then even to kill Haman himself, Ahasuerus wouldn't have been able to do so. so in essence, what ended up happening is that Haman passed a law that ended up being his own poison. This is a beautiful way of how we see how Hashem provides the cure before the ailment. He gives us the solution before we even realize there's a problem. And this is the story of Megillat Esther over and over and over again. You'll see it. Different details, different things that happened, one after another, where you see that Hashem is constantly doing things that don't seem like much of a big deal, and later on, you know that each one of those pieces of the puzzle, if one piece of the puzzle wasn't there, the whole story would collapse. Which is the reason why at the end of the Megillat Esther, when Esther decrees to the Chachamim to write the story, the Chachamim say, "No, listen," one after another, where you see that Hashem is constantly doing things that don't seem like much of a big deal, and later on you know that each one of those pieces of the puzzle, if one piece of the puzzle wasn't there, the whole story would collapse. Which is the reason why at the end of the Megillat Esther, when Esther decrees to the Chachamim to write the story, the Chachamim say, "No, listen,"

53:21publicizing the story. Maybe the goyim, the non-Jews, are going to go against it. We're publicizing a story technically against them, that our God made these miracles and saved our nation. Maybe they're going to go against it. He says, no, you have nothing to worry about. The story is so miraculous that even the goyim knew that it's the hand of Hashem that made it all happen. Even the goyim admit that Hashem was in charge of all of it. So, we have to see it ourselves. Why do we have to see it ourselves? Number one, because, again, we see that this is a divine book that we have to learn. Number two, we see that Hashem has hidden Himself within the story, but He's still hiding Himself today. He's doing the same exact thing today. The story of Megillat Esther is the last generation of prophecy. This is the last generation of prophecy. But Hashem provided the prophets while at the same time hiding Himself. So He was pretty much in the mix between the two different worlds we've had. The time before Megillat Esther, we had prophecy, we had open miracles in the Beit HaMikdash. You know, amazing. Now, bubkes. We don't have prophecy and no open miracles that are to the public, that we know of.

54:36Because most people call it nature, not Hashem, unfortunately. And people deny Hashem at any chance that they have. Here we have the combination of both. Here is the middle between us and the connecting point between us and Moshe Rabbeinu. We don't have the prophets today, but we had them back then. We don't have the open miracles, but they did not have them either at that time. So, they were also questioning things the same way we are. But if you look at the details, you see that there are open miracles. It's just that you have to look for them. You have to admit that there are open miracles, and that's not coincidence. Which is actually the whole concept behind the thought process that Haman had. Haman, if you notice the wording of the Megillah, every time he mentions something, he always says, so in essence, he thinks that everything is a matter of luck and fortune. So, when there was a bad fortune that he was supposed to walk...

55:51and serve him for the day because the king decreed it. When he came back home to tell his wife, his advisors, and his children what happened, he's saying, "Oh, it happened. It's just a matter of bad luck. It's not that this is something that's happening from Shamayim or anything like that." After this, after he kills Vashti, Ahasuerus kills Vashti, and passes that new law, he gets depressed, so he has to find a new wife. He decrees that all of the virgins in all of the countries have to appear. Each one has to get ready, and there's a one-year time frame for each one of them to get ready.

56:57Six months that they have to be beautified with oil of myrrh and six months with perfumes. Now, originally, it was all of the virgins, all of the single girls. Then we meet Mordechai. And Mordechai says that he's a father; he has an adopted daughter named Hadassah, who is also called Esther. So Chazal ask a few questions.

57:58First of all, why was Esther also called Hadassah? Which one came first? It says, just as the hadass, which is a myrtle, has a sweet smell, her actions were such, and she was such a righteous person, that it was also like a hadass, it was also sweet. But aside from that, she was also exceptionally beautiful. However, the Gemara also says she had a greenish complexion. There's a Gemara, I believe in Megillah, where some sages state that she was 70 years old, not 25. It's an interesting Gemara. One of the things we've discussed in the past... but it's worth saying it again, is that we're always saying that the Torah is divine. The five books of Moses are divine. And we're also saying that the Megillah is part of the Tanakh, the written Torah, even though it does not have Hashem's name. So Megillat Esther is actually one of the best ways to prove that not only is the

59:24written Torah, meaning the five books of Moses and the entire Tanakh, is divine. But the entire Tanakh, which includes Megillat Esther, is also divine. And on top of it, the Oral Torah, the Gemara, which some people question, is also divine. All three sources of Torah come from Megillat Esther. From the one book that everyone questions, you have a proof, the best possible proof you can have. So the Gemara asks, in Masechet Chullin, where is Mordechai mentioned in the Torah? Meaning that if the Torah is divine, you're saying that everything that's ever happened in history... including this shiur right now that's happening right now, the conversation that you and I are having right now, every conversation that ever took place, everything that ever took place or will take place is in the Torah. You just have to know how to find it. Everything that ever happened is inside the Torah. You just need to know how to find it. So the Gemara asks, Gemara is the critical part, the foundation of the Oral Torah.

1:00:43It says, where can you find Mordechai in the Torah? And also, in Masechet Chullin, page 139, it has the same question about Esther. Where is Esther mentioned in the Torah? If this is divine, okay, so it was written a thousand years before Megillat Esther. But if you're saying this is divine and it has the secrets to the entire world, where can I find their names? There's no character in the entire Chumash that's called Esther or Mordechai. So where can we find them? And not only Mordechai, and not only Esther, but this specific Esther and this specific Mordechai. So the Gemara gives an answer to both. It says Mordechai. It's alluded to, it's referred to in Sefer Shemot, in Exodus, chapter 30, verse 23. When it's referring to the besamim, when it's referring to the incenses, the anointment oil, it says, "V'ata kach lecha besamim rosh, mor deror, chamesh me'ot, v'kinman bosem, chamesh me'ot, v'kaneh bosem."

1:02:07So it says that Mordor is where Mordechai is actually being referred to. This is in the Gemara. And the pshat is saying that the Targum, the interpretation of Mordor, is Miradachia, which, if you change the spelling, looks like Mordechai. Okay, this is nice. Doesn't show me it's divine. It just shows me that they just used a couple of words and changed it to a different language and made up Mordechai. This does not show me anything. If anything, it just shows me they're clever and very smart, but doesn't show me it's divine. Okay. We're going to get back to that. Where is Esther? Esther is in Sefer Devarim, in Deuteronomy, chapter 31, verse 19. It says, It's in Parashat Vayelech, during a section that Hashem is telling us what's going to happen after we make major sins. Major sins, no different than what was happening at the time of Megillat Esther, no different than what was happening before Megillat Esther, no different than what's happening today.

1:03:24It says, "But I will surely have concealed My face on that day because of all the evil that it did, for it had turned to gods of others." So the words "hester" and "astir" sound similar. But still, we do not have, we see that it's clever, we see it's interesting, but we still don't see how it's divine. How it proves all three parts. It proves the Tanach, it proves the Megillah, it proves the Chumash, and it proves the Gemara. As I told you guys in the previous shiurim, there's something called Torah codes. Something that Chazal, the sages, had already at the time of the Gemara. But we only figured it out using computers in our past generation.

1:04:25And if you look at it, if you go to the word Mordechai, and you take the Mem, which is the first letter, and you count 12,196 letters, you get to the letter Resh, another 12,196 letters skip, you get to the letter Dalet, and so on, you spell the word, every 12,196 letters skip, you end up getting to the letters that spell the name Mordechai. The same exact thing happens with Esther. You go to the word Esther, which is the word that's referenced in the Gemara from nearly 2,000 years ago, Esther. You count 12,196 letters. You get the Samech, another 12,196, you get the Taf, and so on. But usually, Torah codes, if you look at the things that we found about the Rambam, if you look at the things that we found about the Shoah (the Holocaust), you look at the prophecies we have in Sefer Devarim about the idol worship and the prophecy that Islam and Christianity will be born and, unfortunately, many Jews will fall into them and, B'ezrat Hashem, get out of them as well.

1:05:51But they will be the two major false religions in the world. Most Torah codes have small skips, not 12,000. They have seven letters or 50 letters, not 12,000. The bigger the skip, the more you think it's like a chance. It's not precise. It's not like divine. So why do we know that not only is this skip divine, and it proves everything we just talked about, but it's specifically talking about this Mordechai that's in the Megillah, and this Esther that's in the Megillah, because 12,196 is the exact number of letters in Megillat Esther. The entire book of Megillat Esther has 12,196 letters, and again, at the time the Torah was written, the Megillat Esther was not written. It's almost more than a thousand-year difference. So you see that the exact, precise number of letters is already written in the Torah well, well before the Megillah was ever written. This shows us not only that the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, and the entire Tanach is divine because it has information about things that are happening in the future. It shows us, on top of it, that Megillat Esther was not written by just an average person. It was written by someone who had Ruach HaKodesh, Divine Spirit.

1:07:18and obviously needed the guidance of Hashem to write every single letter, every single character, because it obviously has to match the Torah that was already written. And on top of it, you already see that all of this wisdom was in the possession of Chazal, our sages, in the Gemara, because without them we wouldn't even know where to start counting. And we wouldn't even know that there's even a possibility of counting 12,196 letters from that letter in the middle of the book or at the end of the book of the Torah. So you see that the entire foundation, all of it, is already written in all three places, and all of them completely agree with each other, showing that there's no way in the world that any of these books could have been written by normal people without either Hashem guiding every single step or Hashem Himself being part of it.

1:08:23Now after we meet Esther and Mordechai, it says something changed in this decree from Achashverosh. Originally, the decree was only for Ne'arot Rabot, Betulot. Ne'arot Betulot. It was only for virgins, only for single girls. But now, after it mentions Esther, it says, וּבְהִשָּׁמַע דְּבַר הַמֶּלֶךְ וְדָתוֹ וּבְהִקָּבֵץ נְעָרוֹת רַבּוֹת אֶל שׁוּשַׁן. It says now, the decree changed, in essence. Now it just says, instead of saying virgins, it says women, many young maidens. Meaning here, Chazal explain to us that now it's including even married women. Now, the Gemara says that even though Mordechai adopted Esther, he also married her, so she was his wife.

1:09:25Hadassah, you mean? Hadassah and Esther are the same person. Right. Hadassah and Esther are the same person. So he married her? He married her, yeah. She was his wife. So it says, don't read the word bat, lak'chalo bat. Read it, lak'chalo bayit. This is in Gemara, Masechet Megillah, page 13. And she was actually his wife. Now... But she wasn't family? She was the daughter of his cousin. she wasn't blood-related to that extent. She was allowed by the Torah. She was his uncle's daughter, so she's allowed. And he married her. But now we have a problem. This Achashverosh is looking at women. So she's doing everything she can. She was a big tzaddeket. She was a prophetess. He was a prophet. But they were also very, very righteous people. And she's trying to do whatever she can to continue hiding that she's Jewish. But at the same time, she has to stay Jewish. She has to still do the mitzvot.

1:10:50So one of the things that during this 12-month preparation process that Achashverosh would have each woman get ready, he would give her whatever she wants. Whatever she asked for, he gives her. So she didn't ask for anything, but she was given seven different attendants. So what did she do? She said, each one of these attendants will come on a different day. No attendant will ever come to me twice. Why? Because this way I can count the days. the days of the week, so I know when Shabbat is. She's a prophet, she doesn't know when Shabbat is, she doesn't know how to count in her head, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, she doesn't know. No, she doesn't know. No, she does know. But she didn't want anyone else to know that she's keeping Shabbat and she's acting differently on Shabbat, so she made sure that the maid that comes on Shabbat never comes during the week. So the one that comes on Shabbat only sees her once a week, so she doesn't know that she's acting differently on Shabbat than the rest of the week. that she's not lighting fire. So she thinks, no, she doesn't light fire ever. So this is one of the ways that she hid that she was Jewish and she was still keeping mitzvot. You see, sometimes you see the stories about the sages and the people in the Torah and how much they sacrificed in their life just to do, you know, the mitzvah of keeping Shabbat. Any mitzvah. It really breaks your heart when you see people today, you have to beg them to do it.

1:12:19Then, back then, they would kill themselves just to keep Shabbat. I actually read a story—I haven't finished it yet, but it's a very good story. It's in the Zman magazine. And this past month, this Yemenite guy, who lived in Yemen, tells a story of how his brother was kidnapped by the Arabs. And after 46 years, he finally got them. He finally found his brother. They reunited. But he tells the background of how they grew up and how they started teaching these kids Torah from birth. They also made them work at a very, very young age. So even at five years old, the person would already help the parents and already help the family with work. But how would they pay them even until they got much older? They would pay them by allowing them to learn Torah. That would be their payment. So the kids would work all day, travel from city to city, carry bags, feed the horses, feed the camels, sheep, whatever they had them do. But the reward is the best thing in the world—to be given some time to learn Torah. Today, you have to beg people to learn for five minutes. You know, so it's mamash. The generations have changed so much.

1:13:45it should make us think. Now, one thing I actually found as a nice chiddush is that it's very interesting that despite what all of the women from all over the world did during this 12-month preparation process, still Esther, the seventeen-year-old Jewish woman, is chosen by Achashverosh. Of course, this is all divine intervention. This is all Hashem doing it. But what I found that's very interesting is that it says that the preparation process involves mor. They have to put besamim mor. So if you remember, the myrrh, That's the description of what they give to Mordechai, of where you can find them in the Torah, mor deror. And the perfumes, if you remember, Esther's original name was Hadassah. Why Hadassah? Hadassah because it smells very sweet. So it's very interesting that the preparation process for all of these women is, in essence, their...

1:15:13The same things that Mordechai and Esther already are. And this also shows us that when it came down to Esther, she specifically says, she requested nothing except what Hegai, the king's chamberlain and the guardian of the women, had advised. Meaning, whatever they told her to take, she took it. But she didn't ask for anything special; she didn't ask for anything. Why? Because she didn't want to be picked. she's already married. She's Jewish. She doesn't want to be a queen. If you think about this for a second, ask any woman today that doesn't have to lie as a critical part of her life. Ask any woman today: Would you marry Obama right now? Right now. Be the First Lady. I doubt any woman in the world would say no. Even if she doesn't like the way he looks. Even if she doesn't like his religion. Even if she doesn't like... what he's done, or anything like that, she'd still say yes. Why? Because unfortunately you don't have Torah. You look at superficial things. You look at, hey, wait a minute. King of America, the President of the United States. Materials. I get everything I want. Even more so with Esther. It's a real king.

1:16:35Obama may be powerful in America, but in reality, he's not the king of the world, or any president in the entire world. Not Netanyahu, not Putin, not anyone. There's no real king in the world today that controls that many countries. But here we have someone that actually controlled 127 countries, controlled the entire world. And the woman, Esther, is not interested in becoming queen. She's not interested in inheriting power to 127 countries. This shows you... Right! This shows you the level of righteousness that she was. Now, after he chose Esther... is not interested in becoming queen. She's not interested in inheriting power over 127 countries. This shows you... Right! This shows you the level of righteousness that she possessed. Now, after he chose Esther... He had a big party. But the biggest part of the party, the reason why he did the party, is because he wanted to make her really, really happy. And the reason why, Chazal tells us, is that every time he would ask, she was very mysterious. She listened to what Mordechai, her real husband, was telling her. He said, under no condition are you going to tell anyone who your people are and that you're Jewish. So, Achashverosh was trying to

1:17:57make her happy and show off for her. Why? Because he wants to convince her to tell him where she's from, who her parents are, where she's from, and who she's related to. The reality of it is that Esther actually does come from a royal family. One of Esther's grandfathers is Shaul HaMelech. Shaul was the first king of Israel, the official king of Israel, is also one of the most righteous people in history. So much so that, you know, it's a very famous story of how Shaul and David HaMelech had problems where Shaul tried killing David HaMelech because he thought that David was trying to go against the kingship. He was trying to go against what Hashem decided. And it was obviously a mistake. David HaMelech was a very big tzaddik. And one of the most righteous men that ever lived until this day, people from all religions read what he wrote, which is the Tehillim. But Shaul, to the goyim, a lot of the goyim, especially Christians, think that Shaul is portrayed to them like an evil, wicked king. But in reality, the Torah tells us that Shaul was actually so righteous...

1:19:18that if the roles were reversed, if Hashem would have picked David, King David, to be the first king, and Shaul was the one that was going to be the second king, because that's what ended up happening, and Shaul would have tried to kill David, David would have let him. Because Shaul was technically more righteous than King David at that time. And King David—a lot of people are confused, and for a long time, I didn't know myself—is that it seems like when King David and Shaul met each other, you know, King David was a little kid, like a teenager, and Shaul was much older, but it's not true. At the time Shaul became king, David was 28 years old. He was already a grown man. So this is also a lot more confusion that you have in a lot of the non-Jewish sources. Not that our Torah is a history book, but you see that when you look at the Divrei Chazal, you look at our sages, we have exact details, dates, and everything that we possibly need to know exactly what actually happened. Can you call him and tell him you can do work afterward, and you can come to listen to Torah? Sure.

1:21:01Okay. So, this whole party, he's trying to convince her. She's not doing it. She's not telling him. And this little bit of detail is, again, another piece of the puzzle that if it didn't happen, the whole story would change. Why? Because at the end of the story... In order to get Ahasuerus to agree to kill Haman and to tell him what happened and everything, Esther devises a very clever plan where she invites the king to a dinner that she's going to make for him and Haman. They come and he says, okay, so what's your request? Why did you invite me? She says, no, come tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm going to tell you the secret that I didn't tell you when I got married. Remember when you asked me, where am I originally from? Tomorrow I'm going to tell you. That's why I'm having all these events. And after I tell you, then I'm going to ask you for something. So if she would have told him where she's from originally, she wouldn't have been able to use it, you know, years later. And this is pretty much all he ever wanted from her.

1:22:26to know our story, to know the secret. You know, the longer the secret is kept, the more you want it. Now, after they get married, Achashverosh is doing everything and anything he can to enjoy Esther's The Gemarah says that at this time, Esther is considered still married to Mordechai, and her relationship with the king Achashverosh is considered, you know, she's anusah, she's being forced, like rape. It's considered anusah. So it's not violating her marriage with Mordechai because she's not doing it willingly. Once a woman is willingly with another man, then she's never allowed to be with her husband. Now, at this time, obviously the king doesn't think about this, know about this, or anything like that, and he's enjoying as much as he can with her. So much so that it gets to the point that two of his servants, two people that are heads of his servants, Bigtan and Teresh, decide that

1:23:45him sending them all over the place throughout the entire night, 3, 4, 5 o'clock in the morning, to get wine, to get strawberries, to do this, to do that, is driving them crazy to decide, "Okay, we're going to poison him, we're going to kill him. I can't take it anymore. Since this new queen came into the castle, I haven't been able to sleep, it's driving me crazy, we have to kill this guy." Now, at this time, they're speaking right next to Mordechai. Because Mordechai, as soon as Esther became queen, the king of Achashverosh says, you know what, I wish I would have a servant or an advisor like Nebuchadnezzar. The king of Nebuchadnezzar used to have an advisor. His name was Daniel, Daniel the prophet. He was a holy Jewish person that gave us a lot of the prophecies that we know today about the end of days. And he was the advisor to Nebuchadnezzar. So he tells Esther, I wish I would have somebody like him. She says, yeah, you know what? There is a very wise man that I know. She doesn't tell him it's my cousin. There's a very wise man that I know and his name is Mordechai. He's also a prophet. So he hired him on the spot that he's going to be one of his advisors.

1:25:11So now, Mordechai is always near the ear. He's always near the king. He's always near the castle. So Bigtan and Teresh got very, very upset that Mordechai was chosen for this position and not them. On top of that, they're very, very upset about the fact that the king doesn't let them sleep at night. So they decide to poison him. And on top of it, when they're doing it, they're talking about all this next to Mordechai. So they're talking about Mordechai also next to him. How could they do it? They're talking in a language called Tarsian. Tarsian is an ancient language, and no one spoke it at the time unless they were fluent in many languages. What they didn't know is that Mordechai was one of the members of the Sanhedrin. In order to be a member of the Sanhedrin, you had to speak 70 languages. Why? Because the Gemara says that if a witness in a case would come, and would speak a different language, you have to understand them in their language and never use an interpreter, because an interpreter could change the words. It subjects it to risk. So you have to be able to understand that person in their language. You have to speak those languages fluently. This also shows us the value of Jewish education. A lot of people don't have an idea of what the Torah is, and they think, nah, what is it? You just learn the story, you just go to college.

1:26:33go be a doctor, learn science, learn this, learn that. They don't realize that when you really, really put your head into the Torah, you learn everything along the way, and much, much more advanced. That's why you see people who have actually spent their life learning Torah from birth and were really committed, not just people who just went to school. A lot of people went to yeshiva and ended up being ignorant. It's not because of the yeshiva. It's because, unfortunately, people are either not dedicating themselves or sometimes you have bad teachers. But the Torah itself, if you actually have a whole family involved in the education of a child, you see that the kid is going to be much, much more advanced and mature than anyone else at any age. And actually, that same story about the Yemenite guy, that was one of the things that the Arabs actually admitted when they saw... 46 years after he saw his brother, he said... Yeah, they got together after 46 years. But he said during the story when his brother was taken, he was about 5 or 6 years old. And before his brother was captured, they went to this town full of Arabs, no Jews. And when the adults were talking, the 6-year-old would respond. And he said that the way he would respond, all the adults would be impressed at how he knew so much. And the Arabs said, "Now I know what they mean."

1:27:52And I have proof of what they mean when they say the Jewish people are the People of the Book. I have proof of it right in front of me. They were so impressed with the six-year-old and how he handled himself. You know, because they're six-year-olds, what do they know? They know how to walk a dog, what do they know? You know, so it's really amazing when you have Torah from a really early age. It's extraordinary, and it changes the person's entire brain. Now, one thing also that you'll hear in my shiur, Baruch Hashem, and in many rabbis' shiurim, is that usually when you mention things that happened, whether you're using the Gemara as a source, or using the Pirkei Avot as a source, or using different parts of the Five Books of Moses, or the Tanakh, you notice that we mention where we got it. You know, sometimes you said just the name of the book.

1:28:54Sometimes you mention even the page and the verse number. Where do we get it? Actually, one of the sources that the Gemara uses is actually Megillat Esther. It says that, first off, every time a righteous person is mentioned in the Torah, it says, "and his name is Mordechai," "his name is David." Whereas every time a wicked person is mentioned, it says Goliath Shmo—Goliath is his name. So it's the name first, then it says it's his name. Whereas if it's a righteous person, it says his name is so-and-so. So it's, in essence, a way of honoring. But aside from that, one of the other things that we learn in the Megillat Esther is that when Mordechai finds out about this evil plan of Bigtan and Teresh, he tells Esther. And Esther tells the king in the name of Mordechai. It specifically says, the matter was investigated after it was discovered by Mordechai. The matter became known to Mordechai, who told it to Queen Esther. And Esther informed the king in Mordechai's name.

1:30:21So we could have just said, Esther informed the king. It specifically says, Esther informed the king in Mordechai's name. This we learn in the Mishnah Pirkei Avot, chapter 6:6, when it says, originally, no, I'm sorry, 6:7. The Torah is even greater than priesthood or royalty. And then it gives you different details of what the Torah does. But at the end of that Mishnah, what do you do with this Torah? It says, learning in order to teach. Anyone who learns Torah

1:31:21Needs to learn with an intention to teach someone. You don't necessarily need to give a shiur to everyone every Tuesday at 8 o'clock, or say it's 8 o'clock but really start at 9:30 because no one shows up on time. But you need to teach someone. If you have kids, you teach your kids. If you have a wife, you teach your wife. If you have a couple of friends, you teach your friends. If you have co-workers, you teach anyone that you can teach. You have to teach, and if you have absolutely no one to teach, you teach yourself. So you learn Torah with an intention. The intention is to teach. You learn in order to practice, meaning you have to keep going over and over what you're doing and also put it into practice, to actually do what you're learning. Don't just learn Torah and say, "Oh, you can't rip paper on Shabbat? Oh, okay." and then rip paper on Shabbat. Obviously, you have to practice. You have to learn the halachot of Shabbat. You have to learn the halachot, all of the halachot, and actually put them into practice. That's the point. The next thing it says is, pondering over what he has learned and repeating a saying, if you're mentioning a verse, repeating a saying in the name of the one who said it.

1:32:47For you have learned this: whoever repeats a thing in the name of the one who said it brings redemption to the world. As it is said in Megillat Esther, "And Esther said to the king in the name of Mordechai." Verse 2:22. So, when you are mentioning your source of where you got your information, you're actually bringing the Mashiach that much closer to coming... to coming. And aside from that, it's also very good etiquette, very good character trait to do, because you're showing that you are learning from someone and not necessarily showing ga'ava, that you actually know everything, because you really don't. So you're not allowed to steal anyone's idea. If you have an idea, if you're using somebody's lecture as an idea or something like that, you have to mention where you got the information from, as it says in the Mishnah.

1:33:50So after it's discovered, they find those two people guilty. They put them each in a room and confirm that they wanted to kill the king. And they hang them. And they write this information in the Book of Chronicles, the special book that the king had, that King Achashverosh had, to remember anyone that did anything good for him. Now, this is also another key part of the puzzle. How so? If anyone does something good for you, you say thank you, you try to return the favor. If you're in a position of power, let's say if you're a CEO of a company, and somebody did you a big favor, and they need a job, you give them a job. If you're a king of 127 countries, and somebody saved your life, You had to give him something. Give him a few dollars. Give him a country maybe. Saved your life. Here we see the king Achashverosh, as generous as he was to everybody else, to Mordechai, gave him nothing. He saved his life. He gave him nothing. This is a very big part of the puzzle. If he would have paid him right away, then later on in the story,

1:35:19when Haman was planning on killing all of the Jews, when it came time to fulfill the prophecy, fulfill pretty much Hashem's goal, which is to destroy Haman, part of the whole mission was to bring Haman to the highest level possible, get him to be the number two person behind the king, in order for his fall to be as great as possible. But how to do it? By showing that Haman is evil in his nature. He's trying to not only kill the Jewish people, he's trying to kill the most important people to the king, one of them being Mordechai. Now if the king would have paid back Mordechai, he wouldn't have even thought about Mordechai ever again. But after the first dinner that he had with Esther, he went to sleep, couldn't sleep, They said the angels kept throwing him off the bed. He woke up and he said, you know what, he had a bad dream. He's thinking and he has a bad dream about Haman, actually chopping off his head and wearing his crown. He said maybe somebody's trying to assassinate me.

1:36:40Why would anybody try to assassinate me? I'm so generous. I give people money. I give them this. I give them that. So, let me look at my Book of Chronicles to see if maybe I forgot to pay someone who did me a favor. This is where Mordechai shows up. If he had already paid him, Mordechai wouldn't have shown up. He would have said, "I already paid him," and passed him like everybody else. Because he didn't pay him right away, the reward was available for later, which ended up saving, was one of the key parts that saved Am Yisrael. This is the same thing of how we have to look at our life today. Sometimes somebody does a big mitzvah; they arrange a shiur Torah, they donate a lot of money, they do any type of mitzvah. I actually have a guy in the other shiur, in the shiur in Miami, God bless him, Baruch Hashem, he's doing teshuva, he started keeping Shabbat, mitzvot, and so on. And he tells me, just yesterday, we did a shiur in Miami, and he tells me, listen, you know, let's say, Baruch Hashem, I'm keeping Shabbat, but it's very, very difficult for me. Not because it's hard to keep Shabbat. Because he's in the car service business. Car service business. When are you going to use most cabs? Shabbat. Weekend. Friday, Saturday. It's a very, very big financial loss for him. Tens of thousands of dollars. But when you know the truth, you can't escape.

1:38:00When you know when the promise is from Shamayim, it's from Shamayim. So on one hand, if we don't know that it's from Shamayim, we don't believe that it's from Shamayim, then we say, listen, I have to go get my reward right now. I have to go get my reward right now. The king, I did you a favor, I saved your life, give me the reward right now. Hashem, I did something, I did a little mitzvah, give me the reward right now. But, if we know that Hashem has our best interest in mind at all times, then we know that anytime we don't get reward right on the spot, it's because there's a much bigger one waiting for us when we need it, not when we want it. When we need it, it's much more valuable. When we want it, it's just a short-term desire. There's a...

1:39:08There's a good joke I heard. This kid comes to his father and he says, Abba, Abba, I need, I need this costume. What costume do you need? He goes, I need to be a cop for Purim. Listen, his father was very, very cheap. Didn't want to spend any money. He said, no, why don’t you be a criminal instead? It's an easier costume. no, I need it! I need it! I need it! I need it! You know how little kids jump up and down and make a big mess. I need it! I need it! Okay, okay, fine. For Purim, you're going to get the costume. Fine. So, the day before Purim comes, his father gives him a little, half-broken gun. He says, "Okay, you're a cop." "Abba," Where's the costume? He said, I'm going to get him a costume. He goes, no, that's the costume, the gun. He goes, yeah, but where's the uniform? He goes, no, you're an undercover cop. No one's going to know. This woke up the people yesterday. It didn't work on you guys. You guys got sleepy. I should tell you my jokes. I don't have many. It's been a long day. Long day. Hashem.

1:40:29So again, we see how Hashem is providing the cure before the ailment. Okay, so fast forward, we see that Haman obviously hates the Jews, hates Mordechai specifically. Mainly because Mordechai does not bow to him, especially after he becomes the number two person behind the king. He does not bow to him. He doesn't do anything. At some point, actually, he doesn't even acknowledge that he exists. And people come to Mordechai and say, "The king said that everyone should bow to him."

1:41:30Why aren't you doing it? Why are you going against the king? I'm a Jew, I can't do it. It's against my religion. There are three things that a Jew is not allowed to do even if it causes them death. One, idol worship. Two, a sex crime. And three, murder. So there are three sins that if someone puts a sword to your head or a gun to your head and says, do this or I'll kill you, you have to die for them. If someone tells you to violate Shabbat, you're allowed to violate Shabbat if they have a gun to your head because Shabbat is put on hold when your life is in danger. But there are three things you have to say, no, kill me. I can't violate the sin. The three things are idol worship, a sex crime, and murder. Idol worship is if somebody says, listen, say that J.C. Penney or Buddha or Muhammad is true. One of these, uh, nonsense religions is true? Yes, or we will kill you. Do not say "kill me." Not allowed. Uh, bow to one of these crosses—any of these things—not allowed. You have to die. The second thing is, uh, sex crimes. If somebody tells you, "Listen, have, uh, you know, have sex with this married woman, have sex with this non-Jew, or I'll kill you," you have to die.

1:42:57Not allowed. This gives us an idea, by the way, that it's better to die than to be with a woman who is not allowed to you. Better to die. So just realize how big the sin is when people do it voluntarily. Do you understand? Torah tells you, this one, being with a woman who is not allowed to you, you have to die instead of doing it. It's one of the three things, only three things in the entire Torah you have to die for, because the Torah says, Hashem gave us the Torah for us to live, with three exceptions. Believing in, saying that you agree to a false god, and another one of them is a sex crime.

1:43:57And the third one is murder. Your life is not more valuable than anybody else's. Everyone is brought to this world. You can't say, "Listen, kill him or we'll kill you." You have to die. You can't kill somebody else. There's a very famous story from the Shoah, the Holocaust. A righteous man, a very wealthy man, comes to his rabbi. He says, "Listen, rabbi, my son is in the Holocaust, but I have a way to rescue him. It's going to cost some money." It's going to cost some money, but it means that someone else who is Jewish is going to die. What should I do? The rabbi tells him, "I can't believe you're asking me this question." The man said, "Don't answer, rabbi. I got the answer." And he let his son die. He let his son die. People today wouldn't even go to a rabbi. They save their son. They don't care about anything. The whole neighborhood does. People are selfish. But when you have the Torah, you realize your life is not more valuable than anybody else's. And if Hashem wants you to live, it doesn't matter what anybody else does anyway. But this gives us a lot of mussar because you hear that Mordechai refused to bow to Haman, and this is the one major thing that made Haman

1:45:22hate not only Mordechai but all of the Jews. He already hated the Jews from birth; he was from Amalek. It's in his blood to hate the Jews, but Mordechai made him heat up. It's like somebody's already angry, and you're poking at him. It's like somebody—and I remember, like on Wall Street, you know, I didn't have any good middot whatsoever; I had no Torah—so if it was a bad day, the worst thing you could ask somebody on Wall Street if they're having a bad day is, "How much money did you lose?" What difference does it make? You're already hated. You're already upset. How much money I lost? Like, it makes a difference? What, are you going to give me the money? Or something, you know, silly questions. Silly, rhetorical, you know, just ridiculous, actually, questions that people ask just to make conversation. And it's the worst thing you can do when somebody's angry. So, here we see that Haman already hates us, but Mordechai is specifically making them angry. How is he doing it? Because Haman would walk around; he would want everybody to bow to him, but not only to him, to his idol. So he would wear a chain with an idol. So everyone that would bow to him is also bowing to his idol. So Mordechai not only doesn't bow to him, but every time Haman comes next to him, he shows him the bottom of his shoe.

1:46:50Why is he on the bottom of the shoe? Because of the background story. Chazal tells us that originally Haman and Mordechai were both generals in the army. And at one time, they had a war with a different country. They were both on the same side. And Mordechai would teach his soldiers good middot. You have to only eat a little bit each time, so we preserve this food because we don't know the next time we're going to get a delivery of food. You have to eat a little bit every day. You also can't be too heavy because if you're too heavy and we get attacked, you're going to die, and so on. Teaching them like soldiers with good middot. Haman didn't teach his soldiers anything. His soldiers were like animals. They're like pigs. So as soon as they got the delivery, they finished the entire food. Now, the soldiers get hungry the next day. They come to Haman, he's their general, he goes, okay, give us food. He goes, I don't have any more food. And he saw that this huge army is getting so angry, they're about to kill him, they're putting him in charge. So he ran to Mordechai, he says, please, please give me some of your food, you have a lot of food. He goes, no, why would I give you any food? He goes, if you don't give me any food, all my soldiers are going to kill me. He goes, why is it my business? You made a mistake, you taught them the way you did, you trained them like animals.

1:48:12Now deal with it. No, no, please, please help me. Give me some food. He goes, what can you give me? He goes, I promise you that as soon as this war is over, I'm going to be a slave to you for the rest of my life. I'm going to be your slave. He goes, okay, you saying it doesn't mean anything to me. How do I know that if the war is over, you're not going to back out? He goes, no, we're going to write a contract right now. but there are no pens, so what did they do? On the bottom of his shoe, on the bottom of Mordechai's shoe, he engraved, he engraved that I, Haman, am Mordechai's slave forever, and he actually put his blood on it to fill up the engraving, so you know it's from him. So every time Haman would come, "I'm Mr. Big Shot," Mordechai would show him, "Hey buddy," You're my slave. You're no big shot, nothing. You're my slave. So he's heating up even more. So he already hates him as it is. He knows that everything he's saying is true. And on top of it, he is heating him up. So this kind of brings us to a question. Technically, you're not supposed to make somebody more angry when they're already angry at you. What's the reason?

1:49:36No, any ideas? Making him more angry? He's making him even more angry. Intentionally? Intentionally, not intentionally. The point is he's doing it. Circumstantial? You feel me? One of our obligations is to make fun of one of our obligations in the Torah is to make fun of false gods. So one of the things that Mordechai is doing here is technically making fun of a false god and a false person. There is a statue, but Mordechai is a man of truth. He's never going to go against that. And in reality, he knows that Hashem is the one that runs the world, not Haman, not any power, and he's not going to make a sin of idol worship or any of these arayot v'lo ya'avor types of sins. Even though, unfortunately, a lot of Jews made the sin and bowed to him, which is the reason why we're in this mess in the first place. So Haman, at the end, became a slave to Mordechai. No, at the end, Haman died. Hashem is the one that runs the world, not Haman, not any power, and he's not going to commit a sin of idol worship or any of these arayot v'lo ya'avor types of sins. Even though, unfortunately, a lot of Jews sinned and bowed to him, which is the reason why we're in this mess in the first place. So Haman, at the end, became a slave to Mordechai. No, at the end, Haman died.

1:51:03But before this story, before this whole story, before Haman became so powerful, he was technically supposed to be Mordechai's slave, but he ran away. He couldn't handle it. No, he was a wicked, wicked person. He didn't want to be a slave for anybody. So now Haman decides, okay, I'm going to destroy. I have this big position with the king. I'm going to plan when I should go and destroy the Jews. Get convinced the king to destroy the Jews. Remember I told you Haman was the second richest person of all time. Korach was the richest person of all time. Haman was number two. He was even richer than Ahasuerus. So Haman believed in luck. He didn't believe in Hashem. So he made a lottery of when is my luck going to be good to go against the Jews? And he decided the month of Adar. Why the month of Adar? Because according to their Torah, Moshe Rabbeinu died in Adar. Well, he didn't know. If he would have read the Torah, he would have seen that Moshe Rabbeinu was also born in Adar. He was born and died on the same day. So a lot of miracles happen in Adar. So now Haman comes to King Achashverosh, and he says this,

1:52:28There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your realm. Their laws are different from every other people, and they do not observe the king's laws. Therefore, it is not befitting the king to tolerate them. If it pleases the king, let it be recorded that they be destroyed, and I will pay 10,000 talents of silver into the hands of those who perform the duties for deposit in the king's treasuries. So in essence, what Haman is doing here is trying to buy the king's favor. He says there's this people, they're different, but he doesn't say the name, he doesn't say Jewish people. People that are scattered, they're all over the place, but they have this weird religion, they look weird, they don't obey the laws of the king. And since they don't obey the laws of the king,

1:53:28better off to get rid of them. Why? Because one of their laws is so crazy where if they have a cup of wine, and a fly goes into the cup of wine, they take the fly out, and they drink the wine. But if you, King Achashverosh, touch the wine, they'll throw the wine out. What he's talking about? If you have an uncooked wine, one of these expensive wines that are not cooked, like the grape juice we drink, really good wine, if a non-Jew touches it, you are not allowed to even give that wine to your dog. But this is not discrimination against the non-Jews. This is also discrimination against Jews that don't keep Shabbat. don't keep mitzvot. A Jew that does not keep Shabbat touches that wine, the wine goes in the garbage. These are not the laws of the rabbis, these are the laws of Hashem. Why? Because in the old days, I don't know if it's necessarily done as much today, but in the old days, wine was one of the major ways that they would practice avodah zarah, idol worship. They would give wine and use wine for idol worship.

1:54:43So, here is, Haman knew these rules. And he said, listen, king, if you touch their wine, they're not going to drink it. They're going to throw it out. But if a fly, a fly, a bug goes into their wine, no big deal. They drink it. They throw the bug out and they drink the wine. So, a bug is better than you, king. You shouldn't tolerate this type of discrimination, these types of people. And on top of it, I'll pay you... 10,000 silver talents. How much is 10,000 silver talents? 10,000 silver talents is 24 million ounces of silver. 750 tons of silver. And based on today's value of silver, approximately $16 an ounce. I did the math. It's $384 million. Haman is paying... nearly half a billion dollars to allow him to kill these strange people that don't have a name, that are dispersed everywhere, that are going against the king, and a bug is better than the king to them. Based on all this description that he just gave to Achashverosh, he lied about all this, but the point is, this whole description, why wouldn't he agree? But here we see that...

1:56:06in order to do his will, Haman was the ultimate negotiator, but also delivering the wake-up call from Hashem. What are these three signs that he says? It says, Vayomer Haman l'Melech Achashverosh yeshno am echad. So the word yeshno literally means "there." But yeshno comes from the root of the word yeshanim, "sleeping." So Hashem is telling us this whole thing is happening because you're all sleeping. You're all sleeping in the middle of a shiur Torah. You're all sleeping. You're not doing this. The whole nation is not doing teshuva. The whole nation is going against Hashem. You're sleeping, He says. Hashem is telling us here. Second thing. He says, this nation, it's scattered and dispersed, meaning that they're not together. The Ashkenazi hates the Sephardi, the Sephardi hates the Ashkenazi, everyone hates the Yemenite, the Yemenites hate everyone, this one is Polish, this one is Russian, this one is this, this one is that, different minhagim, different machloket, problems, that's not just today.

1:57:33Hashem says, just like you had at the time of Cyrus, I told you, you're supposed to build a Beit HaMikdash, only 42,000 people showed up—no Beit HaMikdash. You still don't do teshuva after a few years? Okay, I'll destroy you. You're not united. What is the significance of being united? I said this a couple of times in the last week, but it's good to include in this shiur also. At the time of Noach, the people of the world sinned by committing numerous transgressions. They stole, they raped, they engaged in bestiality, they practiced homosexuality, they wasted seed, and so forth. But they didn't go against Hashem directly; they went against each other. But how long did it take... Noach to build the ark, like 150 years, 150 years? 120 years. 120 years. So, Hashem allowed him to take that long because He wanted to give the people time to do teshuva. They didn't do teshuva, Hashem destroyed all of them. Only Noach, his three sons and their three wives, and Noach's wife, and Og, the king of Bashan, the giant, survived with the animals. Hashem destroyed the entire world.

1:58:59but if you fast forward after the flood, about 350 years, you have the Tower of Bavel. The Tower of Bavel was built by the people of the world who knew the sons of Noach, meaning they knew people that were there at the time of the flood, and they decided that they're going to build a building to reach the sky and fight Hashem. As foolish as it sounds, that's what they did. They built a very, very big building to go fight Hashem. They weren't fighting each other; they were fighting Hashem. And Hashem hardly punished them. He didn't kill them; He just changed their language. All of a sudden, everyone spoke Hebrew on one end before this happened. Hashem's punishment: all of a sudden, this guy speaks Chinese, the other guy Arabic, the other guy Spanish, the other guy French. So everyone's talking, but nobody understands each other. And this led to the destruction of the building, but the people themselves, the world, Hashem didn't destroy. So when you think about it, it should be the opposite.

2:00:16generation of Noach went against each other, not against Hashem. The generation of the Tower of Bavel went against Hashem, not against each other. Why didn't Hashem destroy them, the Tower of Bavel? Why did He destroy the ones of the, you know, of the generation of Noach? This teaches us the power of unity. The power of being united. Hashem said, listen, going against Me is one thing. Going against each other, I can't tolerate it. It's even worse than going against Hashem. He says, the generation of Noach didn't go against Me. They went against each other. Once they went against each other, I couldn't tolerate it; I had to destroy them. generation of the Tower of Bavel, even though they were going against Me, at least they had unity. At least they were together. It's worth keeping them. This is also what we learn here. When the Beit HaMikdash was supposed to be built, the second Beit HaMikdash was supposed to be built, 42,000 people showed up.

2:01:40No unity. When this whole story takes place and Am Yisrael is nearly destroyed, no unity. At the end of the story, if we fast forward to the end of the story, Hashem not only saves us from Haman and Achashverosh, from a major disaster the way they were going to destroy Am Yisrael in one day, something that never happened before and never will happen. But not only saves us, but He also builds the Beit HaMikdash. The secret is the unity. Haman knew this. He says, as long as they have Sinat Chinam, Hashem is not on their side. The second tool that he used is kavod.

2:02:41He went to convince Achashverosh. He says, oh, they're going against you, they're going against you, so he's trying to please them, so he's giving them kavod. Kavod, anyone that's wicked, that's the number one way to get to their heart. And the third thing is money. Money, obviously, is the number one tool that people use today. So if you've got to go, you've got to go. Hodu L'Hashem Baruch Hu. So, but not only some money, he's giving him $384 million. $384 million is hard to negotiate out of. But he's also putting Am Yisrael in a position where they can't just talk the king out of it. It's not like you tell him, listen, I'm going to pay you more. They don't have $384 million. On top of that, they can't give him, they can't explain. They can't rebut this whole thing about how they disrespected him. And last but not least, the sinat chinam is not up to them. They have to change their own actions. They have to change as a people. So these are three tools that Hashem used against Am Yisrael, that Haman used against Am Yisrael, and that Hashem, in essence, signed off on to allow it to happen. To make everyone do teshuva.

2:04:09As soon as the decree was sent out, Mordechai found out. It says, Mordechai learned of all that had been done, and Mordechai tore his clothes and donned sackcloth and ashes. How did Mordechai learn about what happened? Because the actual decree that was made and publicized, some say that it didn't mention the name of the people. Only the insiders knew what was really happening. But actually, some say that Eliyahu HaNavi came to Mordechai in a dream. ...and told them what's happening and that this whole decree is against Am Yisrael. But not only that it's against Am Yisrael, he told them why it happened. It happened because many years ago, an event you all forgot about nine years ago, you all went and partied with the king and enjoyed it. Because of that, how do you do teshuvah for something you already forgot about nine years ago?

2:05:33You don't even know. So that's the problem they have here. But the good news is that Hashem provided us the ability to do teshuvah. So even in this decree, He said, Haman decided that since everything is based on luck in his eyes, he says, listen, right now is Nisan, we're going to have it in Adar, where the decree pretty much, this whole death penalty that the king agreed to, almost a year from now. So Hashem is giving us a lot of time to do teshuvah. But Mordechai is not waiting for a year. Immediately he rips his clothes, puts on a sack, puts ashes on himself, walks around the street, crying and screaming, and praying to Hashem, crying to Yitzchak Avinu, He's saying, Yitzchak, when Esav, your son, the wicked son—Yaakov and Esav—when Esav, the wicked son, cried to you after Yaakov stole his blessing, you gave him a blessing anyway. Even Esav, after he cried to you, you answered him, and you helped him out.

2:07:01Now we're going to be sold and slaughtered. We're going to be killed by Haman, who is a descendant of Esav. Amalek comes from Esav, and Haman comes from Amalek. All I can do is cry to You. Please help me, talk to Hashem for me, because that's the only way. So, when you think about it for a second, technically at this point, Mordechai, if he used his—not his Torah—and used today's common sense, which is wrong, you think, listen, my wife is, my undercover wife is the queen of the world. Let me just tell her. She tells the king. That's it. Chalilah, it's finished. What's the problem? What am I so upset about?

2:08:04But instead of that, he cries and prays and knows that the only way for salvation is through Hashem. Why? It says here in Jeremiah 17:5. Chapter 17, verse 5. Ko amar Hashem, arur ha'gever asher yivtach ba'adam u'vasar yisim z'ro'o. And thus said Hashem, so it's Hashem Himself saying this: Accursed is the man who trusts in people and makes flesh and blood his strength and turns his heart away from Hashem. Hashem is telling us something critical here. Someone who, instead of going to Hashem, goes to, relies on, and puts all of his faith in his boss, puts all of his faith in his friends, puts all of his faith in his customers, or puts all of his faith in the president, gets a special curse from Hashem. There's no one worse than him. Why? Because you're saying that Hashem is not capable of doing what one of His small, tiny, minuscule creations can do. goes to, relies on, puts all of his faith in his boss, puts all of his faith in his friends, puts all of his faith in his customers, or puts all of his faith in the president, gets a special curse from Hashem. There's no one worse than him. Why? Because you're saying that Hashem is not capable of doing what one of His small, tiny, minuscule creations can do.

2:09:33There's no bigger chutzpah than that. Mordechai obviously knows this. He says, why go to anybody? I'm going to cry to Hashem because Hashem is the only one that can save us out of this. Not, man, why go to the king, go to my wife, go to Haman, go to anybody. No, only Hashem can take us out of this hole we're in. There's no Hashem, one way we're going to know that. Because this is the same problem that we have had for generations. Every city and every country was mourning, just like Mordechai was. But it says here in every province, any place the king's command and decree extended, there was great mourning. So, it says, it's a superfluous word, meaning it's using the same word twice. What's the significance of it?

2:10:34It says that the further the country was from Shushan, from the capital of where the malchut was, the worse the mourning was. Meaning they mourned even more. They felt worse. The people that were close to the castle weren't really too worried. They figured, listen, we're close to the castle, we're close to the king, they're not going to kill us. We're friends. We're government officials. We're friends of the king. We play golf together. This is no different than the mistake that we've been making for generations. Same mistake that the German Jews made during the Holocaust. Same mistake that the European Jews made during the same Holocaust. Same mistakes that people are making until this day in America. Well, you think, no, no, we're government officials. We're part of this organization, that organization. Listen, my friend. The Japanese... There were a lot of them before World War II was officially joined by the United States. A lot of them were in the United States. The minute Japan, which is a country that many of them were not even associated with anymore, bombed America, every one of those Japanese people was rounded up and put into camps. A lot of people don't know this. All of them were put into camps and stayed there for a long time.

2:11:57So people think that, oh no, listen, if something happens against the Jewish people, we're okay because we're friends of America or anything like that. You can't trust anyone but Hashem. That's what I'm trying to say. And unfortunately, people are making that mistake because what ends up happening with those types of people that have their trust in people instead of trust in Hashem, what happens to them? Hashem curses them. And how does He curse them? They're the first ones killed. You see the people that are in Germany. Who did the Germans kill first? Which Jews did they kill first? The ones in Poland or the ones in Germany? In Germany. Same thing. So it's throughout all of history, not just the Holocaust. All of these Nazis and haters of Israel today and in the past. But that's just the reality. But it's our fault. That's really the key here. It's our fault. Not saying anything bad about any Holocaust survivors or anything like that. They're all, b'ezrat Hashem, in a better place today. But the reality of it is that it's written in the Torah: If you go within my laws, Hashem gives you special protection. Those that are righteous are in Gan Eden. Those that aren't, they're in gilgul. But the point is that all of this suffering comes for a reason. Why? Because we put trust in men.

2:13:20As the book of Jeremiah says, you put trust in man, Hashem curses you. It's as simple as it gets. It's not the most pleasing thing in the world to hear, but it is the truth. Now, as soon as Mordechai walked around as he did, the messengers and the people that worked for Esther saw him and they reported it to Esther. Esther, as soon as she heard that the Tzadik Mordechai is walking around with a sack, crying, screaming, with ashes on him, it says, "וַתִּתְחַלְחַל מַלְכָּה אֶסְתֵּר" — it means she was greatly distressed. But Chazal say that it actually means one of two things. She either started bleeding on the spot, or it's possible some people say that she actually was pregnant, with a baby and she had a miscarriage. On the spot. It's a biblical word. It's not a modern Hebrew word. Okay. Greatly distressed. That's the pshat. But the literal meaning means full of חלחלה (chalchalah). She became full of holes.

2:14:48So the Chazal explains it in Masechet Megillah, page 15, that her stomach loosened. Meaning either she, blood came out because she became niddah, or if she was pregnant, some say in Midrash Panim Acherim, she actually had a miscarriage. So she called Mordechai, she sent him clothes, Because she wanted him to come to her. He's not allowed to go into the castle with his sackcloth. Mordechai did not accept it. Why did he not accept it? Does he have ga'avah? Does he want his sackcloth? No. What's going on here? It says that Mordechai knew the only chance he has is if he puts 100% faith in Hashem and doesn't stop praying. He doesn't have time to go meet with anybody. He has to pray. He has to cry. He has to see if Am Yisrael would not stop. He couldn't go into the castle. He couldn't do anything.

2:15:48And the messenger was asking, "Mordechai, what is this about and why? Why are you crying?" She doesn't know what's happened. She doesn't know the decree happened. So what Chazal is telling us also in the Midrash is that she was actually asking that this Tell us, what is this crisis about? I mean, is it possible that the... Why are you so distraught? No, she doesn't know about the crisis. She was very private. She wasn't involved in government in any way, shape, or form, and she was only allowed to see the king if he called her. But people... No, this just happened. This just happened. So it wasn't necessarily news big enough for her to know. Mordechai himself only knew from prophecy. From the prophecy, okay. So, she was telling them, what is this? Did you hear something? Did you get a prophecy? Did you hear something that is a decree against Am Yisrael? So bad that it's like if they deny the Torah, what is this? What is this? It says, on the one side and on the other side, meaning the Luchot HaBrit, the Ten Commandments. They were written on both sides. It's an exodus. So,

2:17:11Because the Am Yisrael denied the Torah or something. What's happening? Why is there such mourning? So, Mordechai told her messenger not only what the decree was but why it happened. It's a sin that we can't even fix right now. It's a sin from many years ago. All the rabbis did a Chilul Hashem and enjoyed the party when they were celebrating that the Beit Hamikdash was destroyed and it's not being rebuilt. We're being punished for it. Actually, Mordechai is the only one that didn't sin. He's the one that told everybody not to go. And he's the one that's crying more than everybody right now, because nobody listened to him. And he's also telling Esther this, and he's telling her also, by the way, even you, it's not going to be just an easy conversation, because there's money involved. When there's money involved, it's not just conversation. A man paid 384 million dollars. It's a business.

2:18:11to do this deal. What are you going to do? You can't give him money. You don't have any money. It's his money. No one here has 384 million dollars. What are we going to do? So he tells her, listen. You have to go and see the king. Right now. And tell him not to do it. Beg him. Save our people. She sent her messenger back. And she says, listen, the king, you know that the king has laws, and no one is allowed, including me, the queen, to just go see the king uninvited. So if I go there, I'm making the same sin that Vashti made. She didn't want to come when he invited her. Me going there uninvited is the same thing. So I'm guaranteed to die. I can't go.

2:19:12Not because I want to save myself, but because it's been 30 days since he saw me, so I know he's going to call me anytime soon. So let's just wait a few days. He's probably going to call me next week. Why should I put everything in danger? And this, what Mordechai responds, teaches a lot of Mussar. It's very powerful Mussar for today's generation of rich and religious Jews specifically, in my opinion. Vayomer Mordechai le'hashiv el Esther, al tedami b'nafshech le'himalet beit hamelech mikol haYehudim. Ki im hacharesh tacharishi ba'et hazot, revach ve'hatzalah ya'amod la'Yehudim mimakom acher, ve'at uvet avich tovedu. Umi yodea im le'et kazot higa'at la'malchut. So, Mordechai says, he replies to Esther, he says, do not imagine, do not hallucinate in your soul that you will be able to escape the king's palace any more than the rest of the Jews. Like, don't think that just because you're a queen, you're going to stay the queen when this decree is passed. They're probably going to kill you also. But in the small chance that you survive...

2:20:37For if you persist in keeping silent at a time like this, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another place. But you and your family’s house will perish. It says, if you stay quiet now, don’t say anything, just remember, Hashem is going to save the Jews anyway. He promised that He's going to be our Father forever. He promised He's going to protect us forever. Even through bad times, He's not going to destroy us. But you have an opportunity because of the position that you were given. Who knows? That's the reason why you were put in this position. Being taken from being my wife to being the wife of this king, that's a goy. It's really the only reason why you're there. That's why Hashem put you there. But if you decide to not say anything, don't imagine that... This is a good idea because Hashem is going to save the Jews anyway. And you may never have an opportunity to be the tool that Hashem used. You're never going to be able to be the tool that Hashem used to save the Jews. But the salvation is going to come from another place. But what does it mean by your father's house will perish? It's reminding her that she is a descendant, a granddaughter of Shaul HaMelech.

2:21:55Shaul HaMelech, even though he was a very, very righteous person, at the end of his life, he made a sin. And that's why Hashem took him out of this world and took the kingship away from him. But Shaul HaMelech was a very righteous and very modest person. So Chazal in Masechet Gemara say, why did Shaul, what merit did he have to have such a granddaughter like Esther? It says, because Shaul was very modest, a very modest man. Even though he was so big and he was powerful, he was head and shoulders above everyone, both spiritually and physically, he was still a very modest person. And he was gifted a very modest granddaughter, Esther. But he still finished his story with a sin. At the end of his life, why? Because Hashem commanded him to destroy all of Amalek. And Shaul made a mistake. He said, listen, Amalek, I'll destroy all of them. But why kill the sheep? I can use all these sheep as korbanot. On top of it, when he got to the king, Agag, Agag is a little scrawny, little nothing.

2:23:18Why am I going to kill this guy? What can he do, this little guy? Nothing. So he let him live. Hashem specifically said, destroy all of them. So the prophet Shmuel came to rebuke Shaul and went to the king and killed him himself. And Shaul never picked up a sword in his life. But he went and he killed the king himself the next day. The problem was there was enough time. There was a few hours' difference. Enough time for him to be with his wife. And that's where Haman came from. So from the mistake that Shaul, Esther's great-grandfather, made, Haman, the very same Haman that's about to destroy Am Yisrael, was born. So, the mistake your grandfather made, you have an opportunity to fix it or not. Because all this is happening because of a mistake of a previous generation. So now, this is where the action happens.

2:24:44So Esther tells Mordechai, "Tell the entire nation to assemble, to come together, and everyone fast for me three days. Because I'm going to go and approach the king without being invited. I'm going to listen to you, I'm going to do what you said. I'm going to go approach the king, which means that if I perish, I perish." If I go to the king, and he doesn't like that I came, according to the law, he's going to kill me on the spot. But if I die, I die. I'm not doing this to protect myself, she says. I'm doing it to protect, you know, to protect Am Yisrael. But if you're saying that I have to do it right now, I have to do it right now. And if I die, I die. But at least have Am Yisrael wait and fast for me three days. I will also fast with all of my maidens. We're also going to fast for three days. So all of Am Yisrael has to do teshuva to get Hashem to bring mercy on us. Mordechai does what she says. He assembles all the Jews, and they all start fasting.

2:26:14After three days, Esther approaches the... It says, now it came to pass on the third day, Esther dressed up as she... Esther donned royalty and stood in the inner courtyard. It says, Esther... But Talmud comes from the word Amida. Amida is the Tefilat Shemoneh Esrei. So she was praying Tefilat Shemoneh Esrei. She was praying to Hashem, crying to Hashem to help her. Bring mercy so the king doesn't kill her when he sees her. Because she's in a place she's not allowed to be without being called. But the king sees her. Says, what is it for you, Queen Esther? What is your petition? Even if it be until half the kingdom, it shall be granted. So, surprisingly, he was in a good mood. Not only in a good mood, he actually ran to her. He saw that she was shaking uncontrollably, very, very nervous, and he ran to her and hugged her, and he said, "Why are you putting your life in danger?"

2:27:39Must be something important. I'll give you anything you want up to half the kingdom. So the first thing she says to him, she says, what's wrong with you? She says, when I knew that I was here next to Your Majesty... i became, I was overcome by your high dignity. She's giving him kavod. She's making him feel good. She's pumping him up. She says, the only thing I want is I want to invite you to a party that I'm making for you, and I want you to bring Haman.

2:28:39That's all I want. So here we see, if you remember before, we said that Haman is using three tools to get his evil plans. What are the three tools? Sinat Chinam, right? The baseless hatred among Am Yisrael. Kavod, he would give Achashverosh kavod. And a lot of money. And I thought something interesting here is that the solution to the problem is the same. How are we getting the solution? First, Esther tells Mordechai, assemble the nation. Assemble the nation, that already solves the problem of Sinat Chinam. If we're assembled, there's no Sinat Chinam. If we come together, there's no Sinat Chinam. kavod. She's giving the king kavod. She's telling him, listen, you're so mighty, you're so great, you're so this. I'm making a party for you. Totally for you. You and bring Haman. She's giving him kavod. And I thought, money? When you have Hashem, you don't need any money. When you have Hashem, you don't need any money. No, but she has to offer him something.

2:30:02He's offering her chatzi hamalchut. I'm saying, when you have Hashem on your side, Hashem pays the bills anyway. She gives him back the chatzi hamalchut. So it says, she was trying to make him jealous by inviting Haman. Obviously, she's trying to trap Haman. But she's trying to specifically tell the king, bring Haman. So the king said, "Bring Haman." Why are you asking for Haman? But he didn't exactly have the best communication between the king and the queen, so he just got jealous. Which is perfect for this plan. But one interesting thing about this verse, it says, Chazal says here in the Rabbeinu Bachya, that in the verse it says, "Yavo hamelech ve-Haman hayom."

2:31:03Let the king and Haman come today. The word "Yavo," the first letter is Yud. The word "Amalek," the first letter is Aleph. "Ve-Haman," the first letter is Vav. "Hayom," the first letter is Heh. This spells Hashem's name. So it actually says that when Chazal asks where is Hashem's name in the Megillah, it says every time. When it says Ha-Melech, without saying Achashverosh, it's actually referring to Hashem. So she's really saying, if it pleases the king, let the king and Haman come today. Meaning she's really pleading for Hashem to come, not King Achashverosh. She's asking for mercy from Hashem. So they come, you know, the king says, hayom, this is important. He left everything he was doing, got Haman to get ready right away, and he wanted to hear what was going on. What's this big party she already prepared for us? They go to the party, wine, dine, l'sa'angeis, whatever you want. Why did you make this party? Up to half the kingdom I'll give you. And she says to him, the only thing I want, the only thing I want, is for you to come again tomorrow.

2:32:27Tomorrow, I’m going to tell you the secret you’ve been waiting for since the day I met you many years ago. You’ve been waiting to know who my people are. Tomorrow, I’m going to tell you who they are, and then I’m going to ask you for something. So now this is the biggest secret in history. He’s been waiting for years to find this out. Haman leaves the party very happy with himself. He's thinking, look, I thought that this whole party is going to be because she's friends with Mordechai. He doesn't know she's his wife. She's friends with this Mordechai guy. She's probably going to talk to me about it, probably try to convince me not to do it. But I see that not only has she not convinced me, but she made the whole party. She only invited me. She didn't invite Mordechai. So obviously, she's not a fan of Mordechai either, really. She's giving me more honor. So she probably wants something from me, to do her a favor to help her out with something else. So he's all happy. He goes outside, and then he notices Mordechai, and Mordechai doesn't even acknowledge him. But Haman was too proud to

2:33:47go after Mordechai by himself. And he went home, he says, listen, I'm just going to destroy all of his people, but now he's making me so mad, I'm going to go after him. I'm actually going to talk to the king and tell him that this specific guy that you're advising, we have to kill him. So he goes to his family, He tells them, "Look, I have all this money, I have all these sons, I have all this kavod, but all of it is worthless to me. All of this is worth nothing to me. All the money that I have, all the power that I have, all of this is worth nothing to me, as long as I see this Mordechai sitting in the king's gate." Not that Mordechai is not bowing to him. He's not going to tell anybody that he's upset about Mordechai not bowing to him. He's just upset about Mordechai even being in this position where he is for the king. So Zeresh, his wife, and all his friends tell him, "Listen, convince the king and tell him to go hang him. Go take these tall trees."

2:35:15fifty feet long. These beams, fifty feet long, and hang him. So he was really excited about it. So excited he couldn't sleep, he went in the middle of the night with the people to go put it in the, you know, to put this tree. Now, one of the Midrashim, Abba Gorion, says that he couldn't find a fifty-foot beam in normal places, but one of... His sons, by the name of Parshandasa, he was actually a governor in Mount Ararat, and he supplied a 50-foot beam that they had from Noah's Ark. Now, this obviously was written many, many years ago. Before they made the discovery, maybe 15 years ago, 20 years ago—no, it was long ago, 50 years ago—but it only became public in the last 15 years or so. They found Noah's Ark exactly where it says in the Torah, Mount Ararat, which is in Turkey.

2:36:31They don't obviously have... It's not like hanging outside where they could see every single part. It's inside the mountain already. It's covered. But there are some people who went inside. The point is that you have... The location of it is not only written in the Torah, it's also written in the Midrashim, by somebody who has been there. So that's the point. Um... So they're building this beam. That night, the king tries to sleep but can't sleep. Hashem sends him some angels to throw him off the bed every few seconds. He can't sleep. He has a bad dream before he wakes up. In his dream, Haman takes his sword and chops his head off. So he wakes up and he starts to think about, why did Esther, why did my wife, the queen, invite Haman to this party? Are they both trying to kill me? Are they both trying to do something? Why isn't anybody telling me? Maybe I didn't pay somebody who did me a favor in the past so they know that it's not worth it to tell me if I didn't pay somebody that did me a favor. So then he wakes up and he says, listen, bring me my book of memories, the book of chronicles, all the people that did me favors. to this party? Are they both trying to kill me? Are they both trying to do something? Why isn't anybody telling me? Maybe I didn't pay somebody who did me a favor in the past, so they know that it's not worth it to tell me if I didn't pay somebody who did me a favor. So then he wakes up and he says, "Listen, bring me my book of memories, the book of chronicles, all the people that did me favors."

2:38:03and the person opens it, and actually Chazal says that the person was one of Haman's sons. He opens the book, and the king says, yeah, read me the first thing you open. He opens the book, and it shows that Mordechai saved his life from Bigtan and Teresh. But he doesn't read it, and he changes the page. But again, it appears the same thing. it's a miracle, and it chose the same thing. And he says, no, no, read it to me, read it to me. He changes the page again. And again it happens. Now the king gets really mad. He goes, read me right now what you have in front of you. He's trying to see, what are you hiding from me? It says, and it was found, written there, that Mordechai had denounced Bigtan and Teresh, two of the king's chamberlains, who sought to send their hand against the king Achashverosh. So, in the beginning, it said Bigtan and Teresh. Here it says Bigtana. Why? Because when the whole thing happened, one of...

2:39:30Haman's son was actually the scribe who would write it in the book. And he didn't want Mordechai to get the credit. So, especially since his father, Haman, got the credit for doing it. So what did he do? He wrote Bigtan or Teresh. Bigtan or Teresh. Meaning that Mordechai went against Bigtan or Teresh. So it seems like one of the people, maybe there was a mistake here. Instead of it being, "I saved the king," maybe there was a mistake here. Maybe I killed somebody, and maybe the king killed somebody innocently. So the miracle that happened here is that the word Bigtan, and then there's Teresh, and he put the letter Vav, Vav which is "or," Aleph Vav. So by miracle, Hashem moved the Vav to the end of Bigtan, became Bigtana.

2:40:30and the Vav, he moved it to Teresh, so it's VaTeresh. So it looks like he saved him from Bigtana and Teresh. No doubt, that's why it's written that way. But here, Ahasuerus also discovers something amazing. He realizes that until this point, because nobody really reminded him of these people, nobody reminded him that Mordechai was the one It was just written in the book. Up to now, Haman was constantly taking the credit for doing it, for saving the king's life. So he realizes that Haman doesn't deserve all this credit that he's getting. Especially since he had this bad dream. On top of that, right at that moment, he hears noise outside. Who's the noise outside? It's Haman, building the pole to hang all the Yidden. He says, "Who is it? Make them come over here." They say, "No, it's Haman." He says, "Okay, what's going on here?" He says, "Okay, Haman, how would you honor someone that the king really loves, who really did a big favor for the king?" So Haman immediately thinks,

2:41:54to himself, which actually shows that the writer of this Megillah had Ruach HaKodesh. Because it says, Vayomer Haman Bilibo. Now Haman said in his heart. How could you know what somebody's heart is thinking? No, but the point is that the person that wrote the Megillah had to know what Haman was thinking to himself, because it wasn't said somewhere. Vayomer Haman Bilibo, meaning that Haman was thinking in his heart. So, uh, Haman is immediately thinking about what he wants for himself. So what does he say? He's like, oh, no, you should bring the, uh, the crown. Your crown should be put on him. So he's like, so it's in a dream. He had my crown and your clothing. And also it should be on a horse that you rode, your horse. and you should have somebody walk him and say, this is what shall be done to the man whom the king desires to honor. This is for a person that the king wants to give him kavod, this is what he gets. So, now the king is even more convinced that Haman wants to do all this. He goes, okay, do all that for Mordechai. He goes, which Mordechai? There's a lot of Mordechais.

2:43:16Where is Mordechai the Jew? Mordechai the Jew. He says, which Mordechai the Jew? Mordechai the Jew who sits in the king's gate. That specific one. Haman. Haman. came to Mordechai, and he's going to try, you know, Mordechai is in sackcloth, looking like a mess, like, I have to give you all this respect now, for one day. He goes, yeah, but listen, I need to get a haircut, so I need you to cut my hair. He goes, I don't know how to cut hair. He goes, no, no, no, my friend, the Gemara says, Mordechai says to him, no, no, I know your past, nobody knows here, but before you became a general,

2:44:16used to cut hair like the rest of your family. You're a barber. You're a poor little barber. So cut my hair. So he made him cut his hair, dressed him, and to climb on the horse, he climbed on him, kicked him a few times, made him mamash suffer. But now, the most interesting part, the punishment of what happened is actually how Hashem shows us how pride comes before the fall. Right before this, Haman was on cloud nine. He got the decree that he wanted against the Jews, he had the money, he showed everybody that he had all of it, he got invited to this dinner. He didn't get invited... And now Hashem is quickly, very, very quickly showing how pride comes before the big fall. He raises you to the top to really, really, really, really high. And when you're wicked, He brings you even higher just to make sure the fall is even bigger. So now quickly he went from building the tower to hang Mordechai to now he's walking Mordechai with the horse and telling everybody that this is the respect you give somebody that the king...

2:45:38and his daughter sees this. Now, Haman was embarrassed by this whole thing, so what did he do? He didn't want anybody to know that he's the one that's walking Mordechai. So he, because he put Mordechai with the clothes of the king, and he took Mordechai's sack, and he put it on himself, so nobody could recognize him. So his daughter thought that it was actually Mordechai. walking her father, walking Haman. So she takes a bucket from the bathroom and pours it, and it lands on her father. As soon as he sees, as soon as the bathroom contents fall on him, he looks up and she sees it's her father. She jumps off the roof and commits suicide. Wow. This is in Gemara Masechet Megillah, page 16. You still have to say, oops, sorry. No, no oops, no sorry, no nothing.

2:46:39The embarrassment sometimes is the, not sometimes, embarrassment, they say both in this world and the next world is the biggest punishment. Rabbi Alon Anava, who saw the other side, and other people that, even non-Jews, many millions and millions of non-Jews that had clinical death and went in front of the Beit Din, every single person says the worst part about it is the embarrassment. embarrassment, because now you know the truth because you're over there. There's no "Oh, I forgot," or "Oh, I didn't know." As soon as you arrive on the other side, your neshama already knows everything. It knows all of the sins and knows the truth of the Torah. So it knows where you stand. So that's the worst part of all of it: the embarrassment of all the sins we made. As soon as this... whole situation is over, Mordechai returns to the king's gate, puts back the sack, because he realizes that, okay, this was my last shot. I thought that maybe the one thing I'll be able to do is, since the king never paid me for saving his life many years ago, maybe now if he sees me in my sack, he's going to ask me what happened, I can tell him.

2:48:00this is what happened, save us, but now since he gave me this honor by walking with the horse and everything that I just got, now I know for sure I can't rely on anybody and only on Hashem. So he goes back, he puts the sack back on, starts praying to Hashem all over again, like nothing happened. And Haman shows up at his house, it says, it says with his head covered, his head covered with excrement. From his daughters... So he tells, as soon as he sees his family and they see him all disheveled, they realize, okay, everything is, their God is getting involved. He says, "If Mordechai is of Jewish descent, you will not prevail against him."

2:49:01will undoubtedly fall before him. So they already, all of his dear friends, all of a sudden, they're not called his friends anymore. In the beginning, when they first mention his friends, it says they call them ohavav, his lovers, his friends. But now, when they're telling him that he's going to fall, obviously this whole thing is not bad luck because Mordechai is a righteous Jew. Now they're called wise men. They're called Chachamav. They're called Chachamav. Same people. When somebody says something true, they're considered wise. but also you see here that as soon as they saw the tides had turned, immediately they left the ship. But even before he was able to change, even before he was able to clean himself up, immediately it says, while they were still talking with him, the king's chamberlains arrived, and they hurried to bring Haman to the banquet.

2:50:27which Esther has prepared for the second dinner. So, while he still has all this disgusting stuff on him, they said, "Listen, you can't be late. It's the king. It's not a joke. Take him with you." So, already as he's arriving at this dinner, the king is already disappointed, seeing this number two guy that he's having bad dreams about and everything. He sees him with all this stuff. This is how you show up to the queen's dinner? Yep. And he tells the queen, "Okay, whatever you want, up to half the kingdom you can have." And she says, "If I have found favor in your eyes, please don't kill me and don't kill my people. If we had been sold, because we've been sold—me and my people—you've always wondered who I am and who my people are. We're the people that were sold." and now we're not only sold, we're going to be exterminated. We're going to be destroyed. If we were just sold, I would have just kept it quiet because, you know, who are we? Whatever, we just got sold. We're just slaves. It's not worth it enough to bother the king about it. But here there's someone that wants to destroy us. I'm pleading with the king, don't kill us. Who wants to kill you? Who wants to kill my dear queen?

2:51:54Who dared to do this? The man who's the adversary and the enemy is the wicked Haman, the one sitting right next to you. Haman was put in a spot, a hole he can't get out of. Haman was put in the same situation as the Nachash. in Bereshit. When Haman, if Haman was in front of only one of them, he could weasel his way out. If he was just in front of Esther, he could say, "No, I didn't mean to, I didn't know you were Jewish, I wouldn't have passed it if you were Jewish." If he was just in front of the king, also he could say, "Oh, listen, a, uh," You have to know that the Jewish people are really bad people. But now you can't use both of those arguments and still stay alive. So he's putting Hashem in a situation where he had both of them and he can't respond even. He can't defend himself. This is the same thing that Hashem did with the Naḥash. After the Naḥash, the snake...

2:53:19said Lashon HaRa to Hashem and convinced Adam and Chava to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. When Hashem came to Adam, He said, "What did you do?" And he said, "No, it's because of the wife You gave me." He said, "Okay, you went to Chava, what did you do?" She said, "No, it's because of the Nachash." and He didn't even ask the Nachash, He didn't ask the serpent anything, He immediately cursed him. Why? Because He knew that if He would have asked him, "What did you do?" he would have actually had a good excuse. "You created me this way," or something like that. So Hashem put him in a spot where He cursed him immediately, and he has no way to get out of it because what he did was evil, and Hashem does not have the interest in loving people. Before all that, the Nachash was the ruler of all the animals, no? Okay. He just finished the first one, Baruch Hashem. He finished the first one. It's a big book. It's like 500 pages. No, no, no. I didn't finish that. What I have is from you. Serious about success, my friend. Serious about success. So, after the king finds out...

2:54:39he runs out, you know, he gets really, really heated, walks out, and during this time, one of the angels comes and pushes Haman on top of Esther. So the king walks in, and he's thinking to himself, wait a minute, this Haman, he's the same one who many years ago convinced me to kill my last wife. I can't, Vashti, I can't leave him with my wife. So he runs right back. And as soon as he runs back, he sees him on top of his wife, on top of Esther. Puts him in a bigger hole. And then, Eliyahu HaNavi dresses up as Charvonah. Charvonah is one of the chamberlains. And says to the king, you know, Haman is making a tree to hang your friend. You know, the one that saved your life, Mordechai? Right at the same second. Yeah, that one? Yeah, he's making a tree to hang him, your friend. So, putting him in a deeper, deeper hole. And the king, the king says, go hang him there. Hang Haman there. And that's what they did.

2:56:07Again, we see how this whole thing, this whole story, could have never happened without Hashgacha Pratit. How so? In the beginning of the story, when Haman advised Achashverosh to change the rules of the kingdom, he told him, change the rules, just... don't have any advisors. If you want to ask us, ask us. If you don't want to ask us, don't ask us. Just do what you want. You're the king. You rule 127 countries. Why? Because if you have to ask advisors, then Haman knew that later on when he wants to ask him for something, he has to convince other people too. But if it's just the king and the king can make a decision, then all I got to do is convince him of whatever I want and it's just one-on-one. So Haman is doing it for his own interest. But as long as he has advisors, even if I'm one of those advisors, I have to convince the other 10 people or 20 people. So he convinced Achashverosh to change the law in order to make the king completely rule and dominate everything. That very same weasel move that he made was the only reason why the end of the story is as such.

2:57:31where as soon as the king decided to kill his number two guy, this is obviously usually a thing you have to talk to advisors about. He didn't talk to anybody; he killed him on the spot without asking anyone. Impulsive. Because Haman told him to do it that way. Right, right. But this shows how before we even knew that Haman was a problem, before we even knew that the entire nation of Israel had a problem, throughout the entire Megillat Esther, we see that Hashem already provided the cure before the ailment. Before we knew we were sick, He already had the medicine. And this is the major Mussar Haskel that we have to learn from the entire Megillah. This is the basis of the overall story. There are a few other details after it, obviously, that we didn't cover. But overall, this is the major part of the Mussar Haskel of the Megillah, that in our life today, it's very, very easy... to feel alone when you're not learning Torah every day. When you're not learning Torah every day, it's very easy to get stuck in your problems. I have to wake up really early tomorrow because I have work. Because I have to go to work really early because I have to make money. And I have to make money because I have to pay the mortgage. I have to pay the mortgage because I have to keep this house. And all of these things that build up in our head. and how we are responsible for doing all of these things.

2:58:55and how everything else is more important than Torah. And there's no worse thing that we can do because that feeling that we get when we're doing everything, on one end it's good because we're thinking, oh, okay, I'm getting stuff done, I'm fixing this, I'm fixing that, I'm working, I'm doing all of this stuff. But unfortunately, that feeling doesn't last because when the check doesn't come in on time, or when we lose a little bit of money, or we don't get paid, or something like that, then we realize that all of that work we did was for nothing. On the other hand, when we know that regardless of what we do, we're going to make our best effort, but regardless of what we do, whatever Hashem decides to give us, that's what we're going to get. Whatever our actions dictate, that's what we're going to get. When we realize that everything is in the hands of Hashem, then the thought that our effort to work and deal with materialism ever comes before Torah would never even enter our minds. Why? Because we know that it's coming from Him anyway, so we might as well do more of what He wants, and then He'll give us parnassah another way. And that's the main thing that we have to understand. If we do what Hashem wants, He'll show us

3:00:20The medicine that He already had for us, because the medicine already exists. How are you going to make the money that you want to make? He already has it. How are you going to become healthy? He already has the cure. How are you going to solve your problems? He already has a solution before you even know you have a problem. Once you do what He wants, He'll open the closet and show you exactly where it is. But unfortunately, as long as we're not doing what He wants, as long as we don't have unity, as long as we don't have love amongst each other, as long as we're not doing what's ratzon Hashem, as long as we're not putting Him before money, He's not going to show us where it is. When we do, we can see the very same miracle that Am Yisrael saw in Megillat Esther every day in our life. a personalized one, just like they all got in their generation. Any questions? Everyone have an amazing Chag Sameach, Chag Purim Sameach. Have a great break on Pesach. And b'ezrat Hashem, we will send you some more shiurim from Israel. Amen. Amen.