The Beit HaMikdash Destruction Started with Children

0:10In the old days, the tradition was for Sephardim, and I believe some Ashkenazim also had this minhag, on Tisha B'Av, when you go up to the Torah, in the morning prayer, Shacharit, you bring the Torah, and usually the tradition goes Bar'chu et Hashem hamevorach. But one thing they would add on Tisha B'Av to commemorate the loss that we had almost 2,000 years ago, 1950 years ago, was Baruch Dayan Ha'Emet. They used to say at the Bimah, they used to say at the Bimah every time there was a new Oleh, they would say Baruch Dayan Ha'Emet. Why Baruch Dayan Ha'Emet? Blessed is the Judge of Truth. That's Emet, that everything that He brings is Emet. When you think about the Midrashim that you read, whether you read even directly from the books, Sefer Yirmiyahu, Sefer Yeshayahu, you read some of the things that happened during the Beit HaMikdash, or if you read, it's really not a surprise. It's not a surprise that all of it happened.

1:37because Hashem promised that it would happen. He said it in several of the parshiyot in the Five Books of Moses, such as Parashat Ha'azinu, Parashat Bechukotai, and Parashat Ki Tavo. Hashem said that all of these horrible things will happen if we don't listen to Him. This is the reason why Say both "Din VeCheshbon", meaning that we find no flaw in God's judgment. He said it's gonna happen and it happened. Why? Because we didn't do what He said. As hard as this is to accept, it's a reality. Now, one of the things that you do on Tisha B'Av, regardless of whether you're Sephardi or Ashkenazi or anything else, is you read Megillat Eicha. You read Megillat Eicha on Tisha B'Av twice: once at night and once in the morning during Shacharit. Megillat Eicha was

3:02written by the prophet Jeremiah, who saw the Churban of Beit HaMikdash, who saw the destruction of Beit HaMikdash. And as he says in the third chapter of Megillat Eicha, which in English translates to Lamentations, "I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of His anger," meaning, I know suffering. I know suffering. How do I know suffering? I saw it. I saw it. Who is wise? Someone that has nisayon, someone that has experience. If someone comes to you and tells you, "Listen, I know how to make money. It's this and it's that. You do this and first you buy this, and then you sell this, and then you buy this, and then you sell this." Okay, great. So how much money do you have? Oh, I have nothing. Why should I listen to you? You’re broke. Why should I listen? You have no money. Why don’t you use your own advice? Oh, no, I didn’t get a chance to. Okay, so you go try it. Do everything you just said, and then if it works out for you, come back and tell me. So, no one's going to come to a homeless guy and ask him for financial advice. No one's going to come, at least not if they're smart, to someone who's single and without children.

4:28Asking for parental advice. Listen, what do you think I should do with my kid? You have any kids? If you don't have any kids, you shouldn't give me any advice about kids. Why? You have no idea what it means to love a child. I remember before I had kids, I used to complain about everybody else's kids in my mind. Every time, in my mind, I had a lot of conversations about them. That's why I'm never bored. I had a lot of conversations in my mind about other people's kids. Ah, this one doesn't know how to do this, this one is this, this one is that, this one is this. It's very easy to complain about other people's kids, especially if you're on a plane. If you're on a plane, it's a kapparat avonot. I think if you go on a plane and there are other people's kids on the plane, you don't have to go to Gehinnom. Why? All they do is cry, and it's a nightmare. Why is it a nightmare? Because it's their kids. And you don't understand... The significance of it being their kids. If it was your kid, you'd understand. You understand the kid's scared. You understand the kid's in pain. It's the first time he's on a plane. His ears hurt. You understand that there's nothing that the parent can really do. You understand. It's your kid. But it's their kid. They don't know how to... Why do they bring the kid on the plane? Why do we have to suffer because they have kids? And all these things. So...

5:55have to have some experience before you start complaining about people, before you complain about anything. Before you tell people, "Listen, listen to me, I have some words of wisdom for you." The Prophet Jeremiah says, "I have some words of wisdom for you." What? If you don't do what Hashem says... Serious trouble to say the least. Why? I saw His hand of wrath, the one that no one likes to talk about in this generation of Mashiach. No one liked to talk about it nineteen hundred and fifty years ago either. No one would like to talk about it ever. That's why Hashem commanded us to talk about it at least several times a year in the parashat hashavua and... Unfortunately, the Yetzer Hara is very, very creative. Sometimes he convinces the people that speak to take the entire parasha that talks about the tochacha, the rebuke—what happens if you don't listen to Hashem?—and there's like three words that are blessings, and that's all they're going to talk about for an hour. What about the other thousand words? Oh, no, that somebody else will do it.

7:17No one likes to talk about the tochacha. No one likes to talk about the rebuke. It's not comforting. It's not nice. It's not politically correct. It's not pleasing to the ear. It's not even pleasing to the mouth. But nonetheless, Hashem commanded us to do it. In a generation of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, Rabbi HaKadosh, the question came up. They said, how is it possible that Rabbi HaKadosh only had 24 explanations for the verse in the Torah that talks about Hashem's rebuke, when Rabbi Yochanan had many more—he had 60 different explanations. They said there's no way that Rabbi Yochanan was a bigger sage than Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. Rabbi HaKadosh, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, who put together the Mishnah, came before Rabbi Yochanan. This means we go down in generations. So you can't say Rabbi Yochanan was greater than Rabbi HaKadosh, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi. So how come Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi only had 24 explanations for the verses, and Rabbi Yochanan had 60? It says because at the time of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi...

8:45Some of the people in his tzibbur, in his crowd, were old enough to have lived and seen the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash. So when he would start saying the commentary on what happened in the Beit HaMikdash, they would start crying so hysterically From memory, not from, oh, what happened to my grandfather? Oh, what happened two, three, four, five generations ago? No, no. Oh, what happened last week? Oh, no, what happened, you know, when I was a kid? I saw it. The crowd started crying so hysterically, he had to stop. He said it got too loud; they couldn't hear him. Too loud from crying; no one could hear. Everybody started crying, he cried, everybody cried. Why? They saw it. It's not that they talked about it, or that this happened to my grandfather, and I read this in a book like I'm reading to you from a book. This happened 1,950 years ago. No one's crying. This, Rabotai, is one of the greatest losses we've had in the last 2,000 years.

9:59which is that we lost the ability to cry over the Beit HaMikdash. The fact that we lost the Beit HaMikdash is hard to explain. Why? Because most people say, "Beit HaMikdash, like, why are you crying over a building? Just build a new one. You know, GM builds a new building, GE builds a new building, Berkshire Hathaway builds a new building, Coca-Cola builds a whole building, Amazon builds buildings. Build a new building. No, what's the big deal? You Jews have a lot of money." Build a building. You want them alone? Oh, you own the bank too? Okay, so you loaned yourself some money. Build a building. What's the problem? Why are you crying over a building? That's because we don't understand what we lost. We don't understand what the Beit HaMikdash really was. But our wisdom has deteriorated so much in the last couple of thousand years, our neshama, our holiness, has deteriorated so much in the last couple of thousand years that the average Jew today, I'm not talking about Talmidei Chachamim, I'm talking about the average Jew today that's not a Talmid Chacham, simply does not understand why we even cry about Churban Beit HaMikdash. I know, I personally did not know for the vast majority of my life. It's a building. Build a new one. Don't build one. Build one. has deteriorated so much in the last couple of thousand years that the average Jew today, I'm not talking about Talmidei Chachamim, I'm talking about the average Jew today that's not a Talmid Chacham, simply does not understand why we even cry about Churban Beit HaMikdash. I know, I personally did not know for the vast majority of my life. It's a building. Build a new one. Don't build one. Build one.

11:27Things come, things go. Why are you crying? It's hard to understand. Why are you crying? In the synagogue, when you do the lamentations, when you read Megillat Eicha, usually there are a few tzaddikim that cry. Most of the time, the places that I've gone to, the reader cries. Balcoe cries, most likely because he's one of the only ones that actually understands what he's reading. And then there's a few other people in the crowd that are sitting on the floor with the rest of us that are crying. Some cry silently, and you see some tears falling down their cheeks regardless of how old they are. They're not ashamed of being grown men crying. Some are quite young but are very emotional and connected to Hashem. Some cry loud, some cry low. It's those people that cry that the Torah says will have the merit to see the new Beit HaMikdash. What about the rest of us? What about the rest of us that want to hear motivational speeches like I heard last night?

12:57minute-and-a-half. Instead of giving a mussar (ethical) lecture about the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, they got a motivational speech that was given to a thousand people live. Motivate them? Motivate to what? You're supposed to cry. At the end of Tisha B'Av, meaning towards now, towards the end of the afternoon, maybe you want to motivate them to do teshuva, maybe you want to motivate them to become better. But in the beginning, you are supposed to cry. Tell people about the destruction, why you're the one that did it. I have to tell you what you did in order for you to do teshuva over it. We lost the ability to cry. We lost the reasoning of why we even cry. Some have become so arrogant that they add different reasons why we shouldn't cry. But in the generation of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, crying was out of their control. You couldn't help but cry. What is this like? Talk to anyone who has survived the Holocaust about the Holocaust.

14:16Don't talk to their kids. Talk to them. Kids, Baruch Hashem, also cry for their parents and so on. But in reality, they don't really know what happened. Why? They didn't see it. They heard about it, like us. Maybe they lived some part of it, like from the stories through childhood. They heard about it, maybe more than us, but still, they didn't see what actually happened. Didn't see the whole bond that happened to our nation 70 years ago where six million of our brothers and sisters were murdered in cold blood in the most vicious way in the history of mankind since the destruction of the Bet HaMikdash. The viciousness of Edom... did not change an ounce, did not change a millimeter, did not change a cent, nothing. From the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash until World War II, nothing changed. Exactly everything that happened in World War II happened in the Beit HaMikdash and Megillat Eicha.

15:35You see that the actual Megillah, the actual book, starts with the word Eicha. Eicha yashva badad, ha'ir rabati. Alas, she sits in solitude, the city that was great with people has become like a widow. Alas, meaning how did this happen? Eicha means how did this happen? How could this be? How did we get here? We were the greatest of the great. We were the chosen ones. The world was created for us. Or so we thought, until we got demolished and nearly annihilated. Where else does it say in the Torah "Eicha"? Moshe Rabbeinu says "Eicha." Moshe Rabbeinu says to Hashem, "How am I going to take control of all these people? They're so great. They're so big. There's so many of them." In the Book of Devarim, another place where it says "Eicha" is from the prophet Yeshayahu. In Yeshayahu chapter 1, verse 21, he says,

16:56The prophet Yeshayahu says, "How the faithful city has become a harlot! She was full of justice; righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers." Here we see that three great prophets... have used the same language. And the sages explained to us what is the difference between the three. Moshe Rabbeinu saw us at our greatest heights in spirituality and materialism of all types in the history of Am Yisrael. Where? At Har Sinai. At the time of Har Sinai, Sauce on how every mother gave birth to six babies at a time. Imagine you have five identical twins. Average family, ten births, sixty kids. By the time you finish breakfast, it's dinner time. This one wants eggs, the other guy wants malawach. This one wants jachnun, and the other one wants some egg and cheese, and...

18:22all the same age. Can't complain. Oh, no, he's a Mefunak. What Mefunak? His five other brothers, his five other sisters, the same thing. He saw us at our greatest age. He saw us at a time when we were called Dor De'a, the generation of knowledge. What knowledge? Knowledge of Hashem Yitbarach. When we arrived at Mount Sinai, Hashem ripped open the sky. He ripped open the seven heavens and... And he told Am Yisrael, said to everybody, "You heard a voice. Look, no one else is here with Me. That's it. You have nothing else to worship. Don't think that maybe you missed out, that there's some idol somewhere else. I am just here alone." Am Yisrael was at the highest stage we've ever been. Moshe Rabbeinu...

19:22says to Hashem he has no confidence in himself that he's able to control all of these people. One little complaint, you have millions of people following suit. One guy complains, "Oh yeah, we don't have any food." Well, you know food is coming at 11:59, and at 12 you can have food. But by the time the other guys heard it's 11:59, already 3 million heard what he said first: "Oh, we don't have any food." So they all complain about the mann. So by the time there's already a response to the answer, already 3 million are too busy complaining. You can't even hear the response. You can't even hear the teshuva, the answer, because you're so busy complaining. Moshe Rabbeinu says to Hashem, "Hashem, I can't. How? How am I going to do all this? Eicha? How am I going to do it? How did I get to this position? I don't even want the job." Our greatest stage ever, we were as close to Hashem as we ever were. Fast forward to the generation of Yeshayahu. Yeshayahu says a different Eicha. Yeshayahu says a much, much different Eicha. He says, "How a faithful city has become a harlot."

20:45This, rabotai, is the worst possible description for a human being: a harlot, a woman that's prutza, a woman that's promiscuous, a woman that even looks promiscuous. These have the worst descriptions in the entire Torah to such an extent that even Bilaam HaRasha knew this. With all of his evil and wickedness, he knew that... Elohim sonei zima; their God hates promiscuity, hates immorality. Even the Rasha knew this. He says to Balak in Parashat Balak, "Listen, no chance that Hashem is gonna let me curse them, but they can curse themselves. How? Make them immoral, make them promiscuous. Send your girls over there with miniskirts and see what happens if they fall." individually they'll fall as a nation, and that's exactly what happened. The prophet Isaiah describes the entire nation as a harlot. This is a horrible description. You can say we're a shame, you can say we're lazy, you can say a lot of things. Why'd you pick the worst type?

22:13Calling us a harlot means you're calling us something that Hashem detests, that He hates. But after he says we've become a harlot, he says she used to be full of justice and righteousness. But now they're murderers. He says, don't think that she was always this harlot; she used to be righteous, she used to be a tzaddeket. She's a murderer now. She walks in the street; every guy looks at her and thinks about what he wants and what he has. He goes away, sees, and starts murdering neshamot without seeing what's happening. And he says this is the entire nation that has become like this. Chachamim say, why is he describing it that way? Because the prophet Yeshayahu saw Am Yisrael... During their sins, he saw Am Yisrael become troublemakers. He saw them making their sins. He saw them going against Hashem Yitbarach. Instead of appreciating the Beit HaMikdash, they took it to their heads and became arrogant because of it and

23:38they figured, "Listen, we have this Beit HaMikdash. It's like a speed dial with Hashem. All I gotta do is press one, I get to Hashem. Finished. So what happens? Okay, so I'll sin with this girl one time. I'll go tomorrow, make a korban, and I'm finished. What's the problem? The problem is You're not allowed to do such a thing. As we learned in the Mishnah, someone who says, "I'm going to sin and then I'll do teshuva. I'm going to sin and then I'll do teshuva." This is one of the conditions that the Rambam writes in Hilchot Teshuva that is... Such a horrible sin to do such a thing, to act in such a way, to act so arrogantly, to say, "I'm going to sin but then do teshuva," that Hashem says, "I don't want your teshuva." This is one of the 24 conditions the Rambam writes in Hilchot Teshuva that I don't want their teshuva. Please, somebody can tell them to be quiet.

24:54Somebody says, "I'm going to sin and then do teshuva." In essence, he makes a joke of the entire system. He makes a joke of Hashem. He makes a joke of His Torah. He makes a joke of the Beit HaMikdash. And the problem with such behavior is, when one person does it, okay, so hopefully he does teshuva at some point, we lose one... We lose him and his family. It's a big deal, but it's not the entire nation. The prophet Isaiah is telling us everyone became like this. Rav Shimshon Pincus, a"h, explains this in a slightly different way. He says in the generation of the Beit HaMikdash, became so accustomed to sin, they didn't really think they were sinning. So a person, for example, would wake up on Shabbat morning, forget it's Shabbat, and then go tell his investment guy, "Listen, go buy me this land." The non-Jewish investment guy goes somewhere else and buys some land.

26:26As soon as the guy leaves, the non-Jew goes and leaves with his money. He realizes, "Oh, it's Shabbat. I'm not allowed to do investments on Shabbat." It's like he just bought stocks on Shabbat. The stock market is not open on Shabbat, so it's like he bought something on Shabbat. He realizes, "I'm not allowed to do that on Shabbat." So he goes to his rabbi, he says, "I can't believe it. I woke up today, and I was only thinking about business instead of thinking about Shabbat. I called my broker to make an investment for me, and by the time I realized it was Shabbat, he had already bought it. So what do I do?" So, what is the rabbi going to say? He says, "Listen, it's a shogeg. If you did it on purpose, it would be a different story, but you did it accidentally. Since it was a shogeg, you didn't realize it was Shabbat." Then you have to bring a korban chatat. You have to bring a korban to the Beit HaMikdash. Okay. The guy said, okay, korban, $10,000. What can I do? It's, you do the crime, you pay the time. But then by the end of Shabbat, his broker calls him.

27:38And he says, "Listen, you must have Ruach HaKodesh." Why? He goes, "What you just bought, the government just called me. They say they want to buy it." I said, "Hey, it's ours." "Yeah, yeah, we want to buy it. How much? A hundred times what you paid for it this morning. A hundred times. You bought it for $50,000? They want to pay you $5 million for it." The guy's in his suit. He's happy. He's on the way home. He's driving a little more leaned back now. He's like, wow, what a mistake I made, but siyata dishmaya. He's like, I made this mistake, siyata dishmaya helped me make this mistake. Hashem helped me violate Shabbat. Why? Look how much money He gave me. Look how much money He gave me for even my mistakes. I call this good mazal. So the guy is driving home. Why is he so happy with himself? The next day he brings a korban. He gives a big donation to the Beit HaMikdash. Yeah, maybe you guys should fix this place up a little bit. You know what? This korban, let me give you a better one. Give me the biggest cow you have. Give me one the size of a dinosaur. Give me a Re'em. Why? The guy feels good about himself. Did you do teshuva?

28:55Meaning that he missed the whole point. The whole point of the korban was missed. Hashem says, what do you think? I need these korbanot? What, do I eat them? Even if I were hungry, I wouldn't tell you, He tells the prophet. Even if I ate the korbanot, I wouldn't tell you. Meaning, what do you think I do with these korbanot? It's for you. So if you brought a korban and you still didn't do teshuva, you missed the whole point. This, Rabotai, is us. It happened 2,000 years ago, but it's still us today. Why? Because after the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, the Prophet says, We'll let the train stop. Pass. The Prophet says that our korbanot long train.

30:20carrying all of our sins, giving them to Edom so we could do teshuva b'ezrat Hashem. It has to be carrying our sins; look how long this train is. Ten minutes just to pass. So the korbanot, rabotai, the korbanot is us. Why? Hashem says to the Prophet, Haggai, I believe in chapter 14, verse 14, says that korbanot—we can't do korbanot after the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash. No more korbanot. So how are we going to do teshuva? I made a sin by accident, not on purpose. And even if you did it on purpose, now, Baruch Hashem, Hashem doesn't judge us right away. He gives us some time to do teshuva. What are we going to do? He says, "I give you prayers." I give you prayers. You do Amidah three times a day. You do your prayers every day. You talk to Hashem. That's your teshuva. Your teshuva is like you brought parim. Parim is a big show, a big bull, a big cow. Chazal say, how come parim, how come it's not like a yonah? How come it's not like a dove or something? He says, if it's words, just pick the best one. It doesn't cost us anything.

31:44If it's gonna cost us something, maybe we could only afford a yonah, we can only afford a dove. But if it's words, we can afford the most expensive one. Why? It's the best korban. He says, your prayer is supposed to be the best korban. Your prayer is supposed to be the best korban. Meaning, you made some sin, whatever the sin was, there's no such thing as a chassid that doesn't sin. Everyone sins. You made some sin by accident. You didn't do it on purpose, you opened a nightclub. You know you're gonna sin if you open a nightclub. You made a sin by accident. ...medicine. Said something you shouldn't have said, looked at something you shouldn't have looked at. There's plenty of sins. When Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel had a debate, they said, "Is it better off for a person to come to this world or not?" They said, "Better off he didn't come to the world." Why? He has more opportunities to make sins than to make mitzvot. But since he's already in this world, it's good that he's here. Why? He can do mitzvot...

32:47a person made sins. Hashem says, "I give you, I don't have a Beit HaMikdash; you guys destroyed it. But I'll still give you an opportunity to do teshuvah through your prayer. You pray to me with full kavanah; that's your korban." So what happens if we go and we call it a Beit Knesset, and instead of praying, we're chit-chatting? So what do you think of the stock market? So what do you think of this girl? What do you think of my shidduch? What do you think of my kids? What do you think of the ceiling here? What do you think? Do you think we should redo it? Do you think we shouldn't redo it? What do you think of the sky? Do you see the painting of the sky? It looks good. What do you think of this chidush that I have? Torah, D'var Torah. What do you think of this chidush? I have a chidush. What are chidushim? The chidushim of Moshe Rabbeinu came from Shamayim. Tonight's chidush. What are you doing in the middle of tefillah? What do you think about that? What kind of korban is that? That's a korban ba'al mum. What's a korban ba'al mum? Korban ba'al mum means he has some type of imperfection. He has, like, an ear missing. He's blind in one eye. His tail got chopped off.

34:04Somebody tried catching him with a spear one time for a joke, and he made a nice mark, a nice scar on him. That's the korban. It's a ba'al mum. The sages explained to us that before the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, Hashem says, it wasn't that we stopped bringing the korbanot, the sacrifices. We continued bringing them. We'll continue bringing them. So what was the problem? So how could everybody be a sinner? If every time you bring korban, you did teshuva. So why did you destroy the Beit HaMikdash? That was a question I always had. If everybody was tzaddikim, they brought a korban, imagine. You made a sin, whatever the sin was. You drove on Shabbat by accident. You forgot it's Shabbat. You thought it's Sunday. I don't know, you slept for three days like one of these college students. You wake up to do the door. Okay, now go bring a korban. You said, "Abba has a lot of money. Abba, wire me 15,000. I got a better korban." Okay, Abba sends the money. I brought the korban to the Beit HaMikdash. Okay, I don't know, I mean, oh gosh, I'm finished. No. Everybody did this. So why did you destroy the Beit HaMikdash? Destroy the Beit HaMikdash about... I... I...

35:25Because the korban was a ba'al mum. Everyone started bringing korbanot that were deformed. They became so arrogant, such bad middot that they had, that everyone became resha'im in that regard. Everyone became arrogant to such an extent that they said, "Listen, we have Beit HaMikdash. Just bring a ba'al mum korban." They didn't pay attention to the korban. To such an extent that the people who actually raised the cows and the sheep and all the animals, as soon as they saw a cow born with a missing eye or missing tail or missing legs, they said, "Oh, we have a korban." They designated those to be the korban. Who else did this in history? Go back. Go back to Sefer Bereshit. Who else did this? Kayin. Kayin. Kayin brought korbanot to Hashem, and Hashem says, "Not interested. No, thank you. Keep it to yourself." Why? "Where did you bring me? Rotten fruit with mold on them. What do you think, I'm going to eat them? Don't bring anything to me. Do me a favor, don't bring korbanot."

36:36If you want, you can do teshuva. Do teshuva. You should do teshuva. Why? If you do teshuva now, it's good. Why? Because if you give the Yetzer Hara a little opening, he's going to take over the entire building. Take over the entire building. Am Yisrael forgot this verse. Am Yisrael started looking at different korbanot that were missing tails and eyes and legs and having all types of scars and said, "Oh, it's a good korban." Sometimes our tefillot are worse than those korbanot. Sometimes there's so much talking in shul that even if you put two beautiful signs on them and you make it a plaster on an entire building, still people are like, "Oh, yeah, it's for other people. It's for somebody else, not me." I'm saying a chiddush. i'm saying that's why I'm allowed to talk. Sometimes a person gets to such an extent of arrogance that he doesn't see. A person does not see the obligation in himself, the deficit in himself.

37:57When I first read this, I said, "Oh, that's a rasha." Of course, he doesn't see he's a Lavan. Remember I told you guys the chiddush about Lavan a few weeks ago in Hollywood? In the generation of the Beit HaMikdash, everyone at some point was a tzaddik. Everyone kept Shabbat, everyone kept taharat mishpacha. Non-kosher was not even available. Everybody ate kosher. Everybody did mitzvot. So how did we lose? How did we lose the Beit HaMikdash? How did we lose the Beit HaMikdash? We lost it because of bad middot, starting with arrogance. A person can get to such an arrogant state of mind that he turns the sins into mitzvot and the mitzvot into a sin. He talks in shul. He says, no, no, no, I'm saying a chiddush. I'm saying a chiddush, so it's allowed. Who says it's allowed? Show me a source in the Torah that says you're allowed to talk in the middle of tefillah with your chiddush or with anything. Show me one. I'll give you $100,000. Show me one chiddush in the Torah that says you're allowed to say a chiddush in the middle of tefillah. Show me one. Of course, most people that are talking in shul are not saying chiddushim. Because if you actually had a chiddush in your head, you wouldn't be talking in shul.

39:17What do you have? You have something that you read that Rashi said, but you're claiming it as yours. You put your name on it. You erased Rashi's name, and you're claiming it as yours. Why? If you're talking in shul, there's no way in the world Hashem is going to give you a chiddush. He's not going to allow the same mouth that desecrates His little bit of mikdash to say a chiddush. It's not possible. It goes against nature. So somebody said your chiddush. That's not a chiddush. So we turn our sins into mitzvot. Sometimes somebody says, "Listen, I got to warn you." Why? "Don't go to this class. Don't go to this rabbi." Why? "I don't know. He's, I don't know, something about him." What? What's wrong? Did he say something against the Torah? "No, no, I don't know if he said anything, but something about him. Don't go. I'm warning you. I'm trying to do you a favor." Like you're doing the guy a favor. mitzvah. Why? You know, it says, don't put an obstacle in front of a blind man. You don't know what you're dealing with. Maybe you should go to a different class. Go to a different class. Which one? The one that motivates you. To motivate to what? Motivate you to go make money. Motivate you to date girls without marriage. Motivate you to do all the things against Hashem. No?

40:37I think you do a mitzvah. Why you say Lashon Hara about somebody? Motzi Shem Ra about somebody? For what reason? For no reason. When the Chachamim say it was Sinat Chinam that destroyed the second Beit HaMikdash, this is the general topic. It doesn't mean that that's the only sin that was made. Meaning every sin is like the Ten Commandments. Each one of the Ten Commandments is a mitzvah, but it's a category and then there are subcategories. Meaning when Hashem says, "I am your God who took you out of Egypt," He's talking about Chilul Hashem. He's talking about honoring Hashem, and so on and so forth. It's a subcategory that falls into it. Some of the Chachamim say that all 613 commandments come from the Ten Commandments. It breaks off into 613. The point being is that when it says Sinat Chinam, it doesn't literally mean that only Sinat Chinam was committed. It means also that there are other things such as Lashon Hara. Lashon Hara... being a major sin in Judaism to such an extent that the Chafetz Chaim dedicated his life to publicize it. But when he came to Rav Avigdor Godzinsky, and he told him, why don't you tell people about Lashon Hara? He goes, I tell them, I tell them. He goes, no, but why don't you explain to them? Maybe they don't understand that saying Lashon Hara about somebody is like eating pig. Same thing.

42:02Rav Avigdor Godzinsky says, "I agree with you. It's even worse." He goes, "Okay, so tell them because the problem is if I tell them it's as well. It's as bad as eating pig that's not eating pig. Meaning we're so far away from the truth. We don't even realize that Lashon Hara is a bad thing. So we try and say, no, no, I'm doing you a favor. What favor? I'm telling you don't go to the shiur, don't watch this, don't do this, don't do that. Why? For what purpose? The purpose is that Lashon Hara comes from pure evil and..." There's no other place that it comes from. It's not a ta'ava. If, let's say, for example, mechila mikvodchem, but somebody, a guy has a desire for a woman, and he goes and he does, makes a big sin. It's a desire. It's a desire that he has. As soon as he's finished with his desire, it's finished. If a guy is hungry, eats, Too much. It's too little point as he eats a desire. It's a physical desire. There are certain things that are actual desires. Your body has a desire for those things. But Lashon Hara, it's not one of them. You get no physical pleasure whatsoever from Lashon Hara. Nothing comes out of it other than seeing your

43:25enemy, friend, frenemy, whatever you want to call this person. They should know about the fall. That's it. Nothing good comes out of it, nothing. This is why Hashem considers it pure evil. And when the nation of Israel got to such a point that your average Joe is Your average Moshe, your average Tzvika, your average person was on a regular basis saying Lashon Hara. He says, "Finished. Finished. Can't fix this. Can't fix the murdering each other in the streets." Not like the generation before; they were actually literally murdering. No, no, they're murdering with their mouth. It's much worse. Why? One guy you murder, you kill him. Okay, one guy died. you're murdering the guy and his family and his grandparents and his descendants. Why? Because you're saying that he did something that he never did, or even if you're saying something that he actually did. But you don't want everybody else to know it.

44:36Now his kids are going to get thrown out of yeshiva, and his wife is going to be frowned upon. No one wants to talk to her anymore. And now, all of a sudden, they're the black sheep. Now, all of a sudden, no one wants to invite them for Shabbat. Now, all of a sudden, no one wants to invite them for any seudot. Now, there are no, no, no, don’t come to the beit knesset. Why? We're packed. We're packed. We're packed here. We don't have room. We're packed. We have Ashkenazi Mussar. Oh, I'm Ashkenazi! No, no, we have Sephardi. Sephardi, that's what I meant. I meant Sephardi. No, but I'm hearing them, Ashkenazi. No, no, no. You're not hearing well. You're not hearing. Please, please, sir. Sir, last week it was rabbi. Sir, please. What happened? Sinat Chinam. Sinat Chinam starts Lashon Hara. But how does it start when someone thinks that they're making a mitzvah? Lashon hara starts with a mitzvah. Mitzvah from him, from Satan. Satan also has mitzvot. Satan also has mitzvot. Lashon hara is one of them. Zeh l'umat zeh bara Elokim. Hashem Yitbarach has His throne of glory. He also made a throne of glory for Satan himself. Satan also has mitzvot.

45:50When a person commits a sin, it's like he's bringing a korban to the Satan. When a person performs a mitzvah for Hashem, but he doesn't feel like doing it, he's doing it because he wants to tell people he's a tzaddik. "You see, I went to Netz today. You see? Did you go to Netz? Did you even go to minyan? Are you Jewish? You don't go to Netz? What kind of Jew are you?" I went to Netz. I was there. You were sleeping. No, I was there. What are you talking about, sleeping? I was so close to Hashem. I closed my eyes. You go to Netz because you want to publicize that you went to Netz. In Reishit Chochmah, there's a very scary story. There are a lot of scary stories in Reishit Chochmah. One of them says there's a woman who's a tzaddeket. Kisah, Kisui Rosh, all the good things—Tzniut. Read Tehillim every day. Baruch Hashem. Lots of mitzvot. The Reishit Chochmah says that the wheel, the wheel that turns

47:14of Gehinnom was connected to her ear. She was using the power of her ear, meaning she was such a big sinner. So the guy said at the same time, the sinner is judged as a sinner. That all of Gehinnom was on her ear waiting for why. They asked, "What's happening? She did all of those mitzvot to tell people she's doing mitzvot. She fasted to tell people she's fasting. Oh, you're eating today? Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm fasting. Why are you fasting? Yeah, but I'm already, you know..." When you get to my level, you have to fast extra. You have a few fasts. I have, you know, 30, 40—half the year I'm fasting. I'm fasting from Israel. I'm fasting, I'm fasting from Israel. She was fasting from Israel and telling the public about it. Hashem says, "All of those mitzvot went to the Satan, every single one of them. It's not a mitzvah. It's a korban for the Satan."

48:36So we see here that lashon hara is one of those mitzvot for the Satan. It starts as a mitzvah. People that go say lashon hara, for the most part, if they're somewhat religious, if they're connected to Hashem at all, they don't go out and say lashon hara just to destroy somebody. Usually, it's because they're trying to protect somebody. Usually, because they're trying to help someone, it's because of this; they have a rationale, and the Satan gives them five and a half thousand different excuses of why they're doing this mitzvah. No, no, you shouldn't go, you shouldn't go. Why? You know, once in a while he makes a mistake. Well, I don't know, but once in a while, it must be. Yeah, once in a while, every human makes a mistake. He doesn't say that part. So, it starts sort of for the mitzvah, and Hashem says, "Oh, thank you for bringing my enemy a command." Am Yisrael got to such a level that they turned their mitzvot into aveirot and the aveirot into mitzvot. The sins were turned into mitzvot and the mitzvot turned into sins. All the mitzvot they did brought a korban, but the korban was a ba'al mum.

50:01The korban was missing an ear. In the book of Eicha, it's the third time we hear the word Eicha. The third time. Moshe Rabbeinu said it at our amazing status, telling Hashem, look how great they are. In this week's parasha that we just passed, Sefer Devarim, he says to Am Yisrael, "You're so great. May Hashem bless you a thousandfold." He loves Am Yisrael. He says, "You're so great. May Hashem bless you a thousandfold." Before he starts the rebuke, he gives them a blessing. But he says, "Listen, by the way, you're troublemakers. Stay out of trouble." In the time of Isaiah, we got into a lot of trouble; we started making sins. And you fast-forward to the prophet Jeremiah and... Jeremiah says the last Eicha: Eicha yashva badad, ha'ir rabati am - Oh, how she sits in solitude, the city that was great with people has become like a widow. The prophet Jeremiah says, I'm already after the fact. I saw them sin, and I saw Hashem's wrath. I saw what happens as a result of sin; at some point, it catches up to you.

51:25We got so arrogant that we thought it's not such a big deal. Hashem disagreed. And we see here that some of the kinuyim, some of the descriptions, the adjectives that he uses for Am Yisrael, are very harsh. He says in verse 8, in Perek Aleph, Jerusalem sinned greatly; she has therefore become like niddah. What's like niddah? What does that have to do with Jerusalem being like niddah? Everyone knows that when a husband and wife have the time of the month where the wife is niddah, the husband is not even allowed to touch her finger. Not to sit in the same bed... Not allowed to be intimate, not allowed to eat from the same plate, not allowed to pass each other a cup, plate, spoon, nothing. Not even your child. The Gemara says there was one time a Talmid Chacham that died early, a young guy.

52:42And the wife came to the Beit Midrash and she said, "No, how do you explain this? How do you explain that this righteous husband of mine died so early? Hashem says the Torah is going to protect him." None of the chachamim had an answer. "Listen, he really was a tzaddik. He was a chacham. He learned Torah all day. He was good. He was this. He was that. I don't know why Hashem killed him." We don't know. We're sorry, ma'am. We're sorry. So she went from place to place crying. What kind of crying? Why? She lost her husband. She cried so much that she had the merit to see Eliyahu HaNavi. Eliyahu HaNavi came. Eliyahu HaNavi came to the Beit Midrash. At the same time, she came. And she says, no, how do you explain that my husband died? He was a tzaddik. He says he will learn Torah every day. Learn Torah every day. He prayed. He prayed. He did this, he did that. Went over the laws. Good. He goes, what about when you were nidda? Oh, he goes, chas v'shalom, he would never touch me. He would never touch me. He goes, nidda. He goes, what about, where would he sleep? Where would he sleep? He goes, oh, he slept in my bed. Slept in my bed, but we put something between us, so chas v'shalom, he never touched me though.

54:06But we put something between us. Eliyahu HaNavi says Baruch Hashem that he killed them. Baruch Hashem that he killed them. Why? He didn't touch them. The sin itself is touching. The sin itself is touching. So how come Eliyahu HaNavi, who knows Cheshbonot Shamayim, knows the accounting of Shamayim, what's happening in the heavens, why is he saying Baruch Hashem he killed them? Why? He says, how did he get to such a horrible middah of arrogance that he thought he could survive the night without touching the love of his life? He's going to be right next to her and not touch her. How? That's a horrible middah. That animal in the middle of the street is better than him. So, Taharat HaMishpacha is not just going to the mikveh. Taharat HaMishpacha is spending part of the month being separated and spending the time talking. It's not being separated like she's in a different house and you're in a different house, or you go away for half a month. No, you spend time together; you just can't touch. It's time to connect spiritually, not physically.

55:35Is one of the secrets of the Jewish marriage? And why do you rarely see, especially when you compare it to the secular world, you rarely see divorces? The divorces that you see in the religious world are of people that were like half-religious and... It's not a normal thing. It happens. It's one of the mitzvot in the Torah. Obviously, if there's a get in the Torah, obviously it happens. But it's very rare, especially when you compare it to the 90 percent divorce rate in the Western world. One rabbi came to Rav Nishimi again, he told him, "Listen, I'm closing down my... Closing down my office. Why? What happened? Nobody's getting married? He goes, "No, no, people are getting married. It's just not worth it." "Why?" "I'm starting something new. I'm starting a new place to start a whole foot — divorce parties. Because more people are getting divorced than getting married. That's why I give them my business card when they get married." "Why do you give them your business card?" "Because they get divorced a week later. They need to know where to call. It's a joke, but it's real."

56:47Today's world without Torah—there's no chance your marriage is gonna survive, especially in our generation. We're not from the previous generation where divorce was frowned upon, even if you weren't religious. In previous generations, people simply didn't get divorced, at least not commonly, because no one wanted to have that bad name, that bad family name. They have to deal with it, but even if you see, let's say, for example, the Clintons and The guy who used to be the president cheated on his wife—the whole world knows about it—but they're still married to this day. Why? They come from a different generation. They have shame and a lot of other sins that they have to deal with. The fact that there are a lot of people dying every other day is a different story of its own. But the point being is that even after everything that happened to Clinton, and he got caught doing all the things that he did, she didn't divorce him. They come from a generation where divorce wasn't something common. They knew that it would have consequences. We're not in that generation. Today, you have reports of certain people, especially celebrities, who get married for one day. I remember maybe 20 years ago, there was a celebrity who got married for 24 hours.

58:05She got married for 24 hours. I know in the last 20 years, it's been more than one time that other people did the same thing. People get married, all lovebirds. They love each other. They have the newspapers and the magazines, and everything talks about them. Yeah, they love each other. Wow. Three weeks later, they're done. Three months later, they're done. Two years later, they're done. Oh, look, they adopted eight kids together. Wow, look, it's so amazing. They're such good people. Oh, divorce. What happened? What's going to happen to the kids? Who keeps the kids that are not yours or hers? Miskinim, the kids, you were better off leaving them in an orphanage. In the Torah world, Baruch Hashem, if you listen to the instructions of the Torah, divorce is not an option. Why? You don't want it. You don't want to get divorced because you're happy in your marriage. Because you're doing what the Torah says. You treat your wife like you're supposed to treat her. You talk to her like she's Kodesh Kodashim. She talks to you like you're Kodesh Kodashim.

59:07According to halakha, when the husband comes into the house, the wife is supposed to stand. Same thing when the wife comes into the house. She's sitting, she's supposed to stand. So what does that mean if she's on the phone with her friends? She's supposed to say, "Oh, honey, one second, one second, one second." No. According to halakha, it's the same. She ate pig. She said "one second" to her husband, she's on the phone with her friend, her girlfriend. Talking about the mall and talking about the kosher food and non-kosher food and what restaurant they're going to go to. And she says to her husband, who just came from work or from Beit Midrash or whatever, "One second." She ate pig. Same thing. Why? The king just walked into the house. What are you doing? Telling him "one second." Who’s the king? Who? Who? Your husband. He's the king of the house. Meaning, if we treat each other like the Torah says we should treat each other, you're a king, she's a queen, we're so happy. The kids, they look at Abba the way Ima looks at Abba.

1:00:12If the kids see that Abba is a king, they say, "Abba, please, Abba, please." Why? Because Abba is the king. If the kids see Ima is the queen, they say, "Ima, please, Ima, please." Why? Because Ima is the queen. But if Abba yells at Ima and he treats her like some shem yachem, then what are the kids going to do? They're going to follow suit. Anytime you see kids disrespecting the mother, it's because Abba started it. The husband started disrespecting the mom and therefore the kids saw it's allowed. One time the Chazon Ish was in the Beit Knesset and he saw one of the people in the Kehillah get upset at his kid and hit him. He saw him talking in the middle of Rosh Hashanah and he slapped him in the back of the head. The Chazon Ish comes over to the guy and he says all you did was... Teach your son that you're allowed to hit when you get angry. You didn't teach him not to talk. You didn't teach your kid not to talk in shul. You taught him that when you get angry, you're allowed to hit the kid. All you're teaching them is violence. So, how do we discipline them? How do we discipline them? This is what we're going to talk about tonight also.

1:01:33The point, rabotai, is that it all starts with telling the truth. Telling the truth to ourselves, telling the truth to each other. In the generation of Yirmiyahu, Yirmiyahu is telling us the truth and nothing but the truth. Look what happened. We got to such a detestable level of sins that we were treated as if we were niddah. Hashem did not want to touch us. Ami said, "cover." You know, neither say that obviously is like an analogy. It's like a wife to Hashem, niddah. He doesn't want to touch us. Why? We're making sins, we touch somebody else, we did somebody else. We were in niddah. The same Yirmiyahu tells us that I saw this. It's not that I heard it, I saw it. The man who has seen affliction, I saw it with my own eyes, chapter 3, verse 1. Then we continue. We go to chapter 4, and we read what, in my opinion, is the most disturbing verse in the entire Megillah. This is not the first time it's mentioned.

1:02:59in this Megillah. It's also not the first time it's mentioned in the Torah. It's mentioned in several places. But today, we're going to talk about a little bit of a different insight. We've talked about it in the past, but I heard this from Rabbi Efraim, and it's even more relevant to us today than it's ever been before. Initially, you're gonna have a hard time understanding why it's relevant, and But if you understand what I'm saying in the beginning, you may want to vomit. But nonetheless, if you just hold on to your seats, you'll understand why it's more relevant to us today than it's ever been before. In chapter 4, it says, it says,

1:04:03Chapter 4 verse 9 and 10, it says: more fortunate were the victims of the sword than the victims of the famine. For they pine away, stricken, lacking the fruits of the fields. So in verse 9, Jeremiah says, he's telling us what happened during the destruction of Beit HaMikdash. Why were the talmidim of Rebbe HaKadosh crying hysterically when he would start telling them what happened? Why were they crying? First, he says the people that died by the swords of the Romans, the Greeks, the Edom—the people that died with the sword—they were fortunate. They were much more fortunate. Why? How is it fortunate to be killed, chopped? Yeah, somebody chops off your head. How is that a fortunate thing? Somebody kills you and chops you into little pieces, makes you into shish kebab. How is that fortunate? Jeremiah, please tell us how this is. You tell me this is Mazal Tov. He's saying this is both Hashem. You got killed with the sword. How is this mazal tov? How? He continues, "Hands of the compassionate women have boiled their own children. They became their food when the daughters of my people were shattered," he says.

1:05:31It's fortunate that the people died by the sword because if they didn't die by the sword, they would have survived to live through the famine and the drought to such an extent of hunger that the merciful, the compassionate, the righteous women boiled their own children and ate them. Now any mother immediately wants to vomit when she hears this. Any father also. But this is not the first time it's written in the Torah. It's also not the last time that it happened. In the book of, in Parashat Bechukotai and Parashat Ki Tavo, in both of those places, Hashem says that there are certain levels of punishment. If you continue sinning, the punishment will continue getting worse. He says, "What does it mean?" It means you're treating Me with casualness. You treat Me like I'm one of your friends. You can do whatever you want. How are you? Like Hashem is your boy.

1:07:00You treat Hashem like He's one of your boys. And you forget that the mitzvah of Yirat Shamayim in Sefer HaRambam is the fourth mitzvah in the entire Torah. Without Yirat Shamayim, you have no connection whatsoever to Hashem. You're treating Hashem like He's one of your friends. You forget that He's your God, that He's your King. Treat Him with casualness and you continue making a sin thinking, ah, no big deal. He'll forgive me. Nah, He loves me. No, it's this. Nah, it's okay. You know what kind of connection I have with Hashem? You know what kind of connection I have with Hashem? It's like Moshe Rabbeinu, if Moshe Rabbeinu was next to me, Hashem would talk to me first. You know what kind of connection I have with Hashem? He loves me, of course. I'm His son. My son, look, it says in the Torah, "Banim, banim, I'm one of the banim." Why? What are you talking about? You forget that He's your God too. If you went with Me with casualness, I will go with you with even more casualness. What's even more casualness? What's an example of even more casualness? You have a surgery. You wake up from the surgery. The morphine doesn't work.

1:08:19The painkillers don't work. You're dying in pain. You don't know what's happening. Why is there pain? The doctors don't know what's happening. "Please give me more morphine. Please give me more painkillers." It doesn't work. Why? Because you went with Me with casualness. So I'm also casual about your pain. Ha! What do you think about that? It hurts? Okay, so now you'll pray to Me a little harder. Now you're not going to treat Me like I'm one of your friends. Rabbotai, Hashem says that in the fifth level of punishment, Am Yisrael will get to such a horrible level that He will bring famine to the world to such an extent that we will eat our own children. This is written in the Torah multiple times, and it happened multiple times. One of the times that it happened...

1:09:20was during Megillat Eicha, during the Churban Beit HaMikdash. People were starving to such an extent. They shut us in Yerushalayim, didn't let anyone in, didn't let anyone out. So that means whatever food you had, once you ran out of it, it was finished. There were the modern-day Zionists of that day called Giborim. He believed, said, "Listen, you guys are not united enough. We need to be strong. We need to do this. We need to do that. Oh, you don't want to listen to us?" They burned all the food. So now, not only were we locked in, but whatever food we had, they burned it anyway. So now people were starving, going in the middle of the street, they didn't have anything to eat. Eventually, it got to such a level of starvation that literally people ate their own children. This happened. It also happened in the Holocaust. In multiple stories and multiple books, it talks about it. One of them, a rabbi wrote, says, "The worst part of the Holocaust for me was when I saw that the verse in Parashat Bechukotai came true: 'And you will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters you will eat.' When I saw that verse come true..."

1:10:47to me that was the worst part. And the story goes that one day the evil Nazis enslaved us and made us work overnight. No break, no water, no sitting, nothing. People died on the job. After two days of hard labor they let them go back to the camp and on the way back to the camp Sorted as a big pot being boiled, and a Nazi soldier is turning it, mixing it. For the first time in years, they smelled the smell of meat. All those years in the concentration camp, they never ate meat and bad bread, spoiled bread, spoiled vegetables, spoiled stuff. Meat, absolutely not. But now they smelled the aroma of meat, and they thought maybe this is a reward in their desperation. Maybe this is a reward for the hard labor they put us through. So they started running towards the pot and

1:12:08And as soon as they arrived at the pot, they started grabbing whatever they could. They started eating. They haven't eaten in a few days. They almost died on the job. They haven't eaten meat at all in years. Each one of them is Shema Hashem. You see some of the pictures, some of the movies of the Holocaust. If you don't cry, you're not human. Forget about whether you're Jewish or not. If you're simply a human being, you start crying seeing the people, how they look, Shema Hashem. He started eating the meat until somebody ran out of the barracks and said, "No, it's your kids." The rabbi writes in his story, he writes in his book, he says, "When I saw this, I knew we hit bottom. I knew that the parashat Bechukotai, parashat Bechukotai, parashat Ki Tavo, came true." Again, A Lover Shalom also says that he met one of the Holocaust survivors. And the Holocaust survivor says, "You don't know the worst of it. All the movies are not going to show you that." He says, "What's the worst of it?" He said, "The worst of it is that many people were waiting for the others to die. Why would one of you wait for the other guy to die?" He says, "You wait for each other to die so you can eat their liver. We were so hungry, we were just waiting for each other to die so we could eat the liver."

1:13:36Kabutai, Hashem is not our friend. He's our God. But how did we get to this mess? What's another way to look at this horrible, awful thing? Because realistically, who can connect to this? Most people are reading this. Some people walk out. Some people turn off. Some people say, that's too much. This guy is like a scary movie. Like I'm making it up. Like it's not written in the Torah no less than six times. It's just in Eicha, it's written a few times. So why? What else can we learn from this? How can we relate to this? Baruch Hashem, we don't live in such a world. I don't think anyone here is hungry other than just today. But no one's as hungry when they're thinking of me as a burger. The thing is though, how can we relate to this? Another peshat is the following.

1:14:40It says, why does it say that the hands of these women that ate their children were compassionate? They were rachmaniyot, they were compassionate, they were merciful people. What is it? How does it even... like, was that doing anything? Whether they were nice or not nice, righteous or not righteous, what difference does it make? At the end, whatever happened, happened. He and the Chachamim are trying to teach us something else. David HaMelech, alav haShalom, is known that he is the one that the Mashiach Tzidkenu is going to come from. Mashiach Tzidkenu is coming from David HaMelech all the way from the tribe of Yehuda.

1:15:41But David HaMelech had a son named Avshalom. Avshalom was a wayward child, a wayward child who tried to kill David. The Torah asks, how come Avshalom tried to kill David? David was a tzaddik. The Torah says... Because Avshalom never saw a day where his father made him sad. Avshalom never saw a day that his father made him sad. Why would you want his father to make him sad? This should be the opposite. If Avshalom never saw a day that David made him sad,

1:16:43Meaning he always made him happy. It should be the opposite. It should be Avshalom saying, "Thank you very much, Abba, you gave me everything I wanted. I love you." No, the opposite. Because he never told him no, Avshalom turned into a Hitler. From here, we learn about chinuch. From here, we learn about disciplining and child rearing, that telling your child yes all the time... It's a sin. It's not a mitzvah. These women that were compassionate, they killed their own sons. Why? Their compassion killed their kids. They never told their kids no. They never told their kids no, so the kids turned into little Hitlers. I was now said that if any parent that teaches their kid that they're friends to treat the father to treat the mom like we're friends who are friendly, that's how they raise them from the time they're little kids until they grow up. You'll see how the little kid turns from being really, really cute to a really, really big Hitler. Why? Because a child needs to be told no, a child needs to be told what to do and

1:18:08These parents that don't want to tell their kids "no" and don't want to rear their kids, don't want to tell their kids what is allowed and what is not allowed. They are doing it because they love their kids. They are not doing it because they don't love their kids. They love their kids. They want to give them everything, including what’s not good for them. So sometimes when you tell a parent, "Listen, it's it's... Nine o'clock at night. Where's your daughter going at nine o'clock at night? Oh, she's going to her friend's house. They're having a party. Having a party at her friend's house? Yeah, but it's nine o'clock at night. She still lives in your house. She's 13, 14, 15 years old. You're letting her out at nine o'clock at night? She's still a kid. No, what, she's gonna be different from the rest of her friends? She can be different. All of her friends are there. So if all her friends were jumping off a bridge, you’d let your daughter jump off the bridge too? This is harder to do. It's easy to say, though. But the point is that a lot of these parents, which is the average parent today, they’re not doing it because they hate their kids.

1:19:20They're doing it because they love their kids and they want their kids to be happy. They want their kids to play with friends. They want their kids to, you know, succeed in life, so they figure that if the kid is happy and they give him everything he wants, that means that the kid will reciprocate and give back happiness. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. There's a lot more discipline that goes into raising kids than simply giving them everything they want. A family came to the Admor of Gur one time and told him, "We don't understand our father. He keeps this, he keeps that, but every other week there's a new surgery. They keep cutting him up, they keep taking this, and the doctors don't understand."

1:20:21Why is he so sick? Why is he so sick? So Admor MiGur starts asking him questions. He says, keeps Taharat Mishpacha? Keeps. Shabbat? Keeps. Learns? Keeps. This, this, checklist, check, check, check, check, check, everything check. So why is he still sick? He says, on your Shulchan Shabbat, he builds them up first, not because he doesn't know. Admor MiGur knew exactly what was going on. But he gives them all the things they're doing so they don't think, oh, it's something else. Because what if somebody comes with a complaint to Hashem? Why? Because they think they're tzaddikim. Why do you complain to Hashem? Because you think you're a tzaddik. You're not complaining to Hashem because you're a rasha and you want more. No, a rasha does not complain to Hashem. You think you're a tzaddik, and you come to Hashem, "Hashem, I put on tefillin today for 37 seconds. I did kriyat shema for 12 seconds. I read one verse on the subway. I ate kosher because somebody gave it to me." You know, all the little tiny half-bits of what we do, we make it like it's a Ma'amad Har Sinai.

1:21:27So that moment, go ask them about all the mitzvot they do: learn Torah, Torah Mishpacha, Shabbat, everything—check. Okay, he says, okay, on your Shulchan Shabbat, on your dinner table on Shabbat, Friday night, after you eat, do you talk about people? She said, "Yeah, yeah, of course, Kvoda Rav, it's actually his favorite thing to do." It's his favorite, it's Abba's favorite thing to do. So that Mor MiGur says, when you stop ripping people apart, Hashem will stop ripping you apart. On your Shulchan Shabbat, instead of saying Divrei Torah, talking about Moshe Rabbeinu, Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, Hashem Yitbarach, all of the wonderful, amazing creations, the Creator Himself,

1:22:27Talking about how you're ripping apart people. "Oh, you know him? Yeah, he bought that house, he must be a thief. Oh, you know her? Yeah, you see that dress? She works, not modest. Absolutely. She's a prutza. And this one and that one." Now, when you talk about everybody else on Shulchan Shabbat, Hashem is telling you, "Stop ripping my children apart, and I'll stop ripping you apart." Now the kids that came to the Admor MiGur, did they think there was anything wrong with what they were doing? No. Mitzvah. Why? Abba did it. Abba did it. Abba was the one that started the conversation. It was one of his hana'ot. It was one of his enjoyments. Shabbat Kodesh, we could talk about the whole neighborhood. You know what kind of scoop I have for you guys? This guy did this, this guy did that. At the store, I saw these two. Everybody gets rid of that. Divrei Torah. Instead of Divrei Torah, they bring Divrei Shechuna. They're bringing the thing of the shul now. What's happening in the neighborhood. You see what he did, you see what she did. You see who got divorced. Oh, you didn't hear. Oh, let me tell you what happened. He actually told me, he didn't tell anybody else. He told me, but don't tell anybody he told me. Lashon Hara with no end, Lashon Hara with no end, surreptitious with no end, surreptitious with no end. You know how hard it is to stop saying Lashon Hara.

1:23:55It's so hard to stop saying Lashon Hara, because why? We get so used to, excuse me, so used to saying Lashon Hara, that if you don't say Lashon Hara, it's like, what am I going to talk about? What else am I going to talk about? If I'm not going to talk about her, and I can't talk about him, and I can't talk about them, and I can't talk about, what am I going to talk about? It forces you to learn Torah. Why? There's nothing else to talk about. If you can't talk about people regardless of whether it's true or not, Lashon Hara is true, by the way. People say, no, no, but why I said it's true. Exactly. That's Lashon Hara. If it's not true, it's Rechilut. It's a different sin. Lashon Hara is true. So it's hard. It's hard to stop saying Lashon Hara. Why? Because Adam...

1:24:56A person is evil inside. A person has a yetzer hara, and the yetzer hara, Moshe Rabbeinu gave him the name Ra. The Gemara says the yetzer hara has seven names. Moshe Rabbeinu gave him a name. Each one of the sages gave him a name. Moshe Rabbeinu gave the yetzer hara a name. What's the name? Ra, evil. And where is this evil? Inside us. Lashon hara is exactly what it means: evil tongue. Why? There is no physical pleasure whatsoever that you are fulfilling by saying lashon hara. There's nothing good that will ever come out of your lashon hara, nothing good, nothing. All you're doing is evil. And if you do it in front of your children, what you're doing is you're teaching them That ra is tov. You're teaching them that evil is good. Because if the children see the parents say lashon hara, what are they going to think? It's good. Why? There's no way that any child will look at their parents, especially when they're little kids, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old. They look at Abba, they look at Ima, they're their role models. They're not going to say, no, my Abba is terrible, my Ima is terrible. No, they think Abba and Ima are like superheroes.

1:26:25So there's no way in the world that they're gonna see their parents as doing something bad. So when they see Abba and Ima saying lashon hara, they're going to think this is a mitzvah. And they're gonna do it too. And you're raising them in a way where they think that saying lashon hara is a mitzvah. You're destroying them from within. Why? Why does it all start? This all starts because of the compassion that some parents have for their kids to such an extent. Guys, please, you're bothering me, both of you. Both of you, please, please get out. And if you want to come back in, join us in the class. Now we learn matters. Parents that have compassion for their kids and they befriend their children, and they involve the kids in their conversations. A little kid, 10, 11, 12 years old, sits down with Abba and Ima and some friends that are over,

1:27:51And they see everybody talking. What are they talking about? Sometimes they're talking Divrei Torah, sometimes not so much. They talk about what he did and what she did and what the guy down the street did and what his boss did. So the kid is just open because they have compassion for the kid. They want to involve him in the conversation, sit with the adults. So the kid hears everybody else's conversation. Everybody else is what's happening here and what's happening elsewhere. He thinks it's a mitzvah. It's a mitzvah to talk Lashon Hara. Sometimes this befriending of children gets so out of hand that the kids really treat their parents like their friends. There's no yirat whatsoever. There's no fear whatsoever of the mom. There's no fear whatsoever of the dad. And I'm talking about under normal conditions, not if the parents are really sociopaths of some kind.

1:29:06or they're just people that are wicked. If your parents tell you to violate Shabbat or violate anything in the Torah, you're not allowed to listen to them. You're not allowed to honor your parents before you honor Hashem. That's why it says in the Torah that you have to honor your mom and dad. Ani Hashem, I am God. Why does it mention I am God? Because remember, the mitzvah of honoring your parents... valid so long as you remember, I'm God. It's valid so long as you realize that you're not allowed to desecrate My name for their honor. Sometimes the children get so friendly with their parents that they forget that they're their parents. And the story of almost 200 years ago...

1:30:09Rav Yosef Ba'avad saw that there were two people in the kehillah arguing, a father and a son. The father said something the son didn't like. The son said something to the father the father didn't like. going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to the extent that the son gets so amped up, so angry, that he curses the father. The father is in shock because, even though they've had arguments and they've argued before, apparently this was a line that he never crossed before and He couldn't believe that his son just cursed him. He didn't know how to respond. But the Rebbe of Yosef saw this in shock and said, "How could it be that a son curses the father and lives?"

1:31:35It says in the Torah in Parashat Mishpatim that a child who curses their parents shall die. When he finished that verse, the kid died. He finished the verse, and the son fell and died. This wasn't 5,000 years ago; it was 200 years ago. Not a day passes that you don't hear from somebody that they're having problems with their kids. And the kid is treating the parents like they're friends. "I don't want to hear from you, Dad. Don't call me anymore." And he hangs up on the dad. There was even a story one time that I'm aware of firsthand of somebody that we knew, where the problem was so severe that the son... started hitting the mom on a regular basis. You would see the mom walking around with black eyes. The mother, maybe of eight or nine kids, would walk around with black eyes. In the beginning, we thought it's the father, the husband, who is beating her up. Now

1:32:53confronted them, like, "What's going on? What's the matter?" "No, nothing, nothing now. I'm sorry you got to see it." "I'm so... what... what are you doing it?" "No, it's not me because let me know what somebody who was a stranger..." The rabbi said, "What's happening? Every other day, there's a black eye. In the beginning, you covered, you know, he cuffed her or she fell or he did all of that, but every other day there's something else. What's happening?" The son, the firstborn son... then a little more it... Raising a kid without telling him what to do. You're not doing him any favors. You're not doing her any favors. There was one time, Rav Elyashiv, zt"l, was going on a bus. And this secular woman was with her son, and she told him they got on at the same stop and... She told her son, "Run, run, run past the old man. Catch the seat before he sits down." Now, the entire bus saw this. Who is the old man? Rav Yagen. The kid runs past Rav Yagen and catches the seat. Ha ha. The mom comes over, picks up the kid, and the kid sits on her lap. Everybody's like, "Give it..."

1:34:16kavod is an older man. He's a rabbi or whatever. Come on, kavod. What is this? Rav Yagen says to them, "No, please don't say anything. He'll punish her plenty in her life." Who's gonna punish her? He wasn't talking about Hashem. He's talking about the kid. She raises him like this. She raised him like this to go, to teach him to run past the old man to catch the seat. That's how she raises him. Don't worry, he will punish her in her life. The little kid's gonna punish her in her life when he treats her the same. There’s a story that came out recently. An old woman, I think she was maybe 94 years old in Israel, killed her son and a gun killed her son. Why would an old woman kill her son? She said, "He wants to send me to a nursing home and end my life, so I killed him first. He wants to end my life, so I killed him first."

1:35:38...was a story about a young boy, a little troublemaker. One time, he decided to go to the market and steal an egg. He came home with the egg, and his mom was so happy. "Wow! Where did you get this egg? Providing for yourself already at such a young age?" The kid was so excited, the next day he stole a cow. Wow! Kol ha'kavod! She'koach, you're helping the family out! And the kid grew up and became a thief. Little by little, stealing eggs, stealing cows, stealing pebbles, stealing this, stealing that, whatever he can get his hands on. Everywhere he goes, he doesn't let you dine. Everywhere he goes, he has his hands. He washes his hands with other people's stuff. One day, he says, why am I wasting all my time stealing this little chump change? Let me go to the king. Go into his safe. Take one makkah, one shot over here. We're finished. The whole family is lounging, relaxing. Everything's good. We're on vacation.

1:37:04So that's what he did. He went to the king's palace. He went into the safe, and on the way out, as his luck would have it, all of the king's guards were waiting for him. What's the judgment? Death penalty. There's no trial. There's no jail sentence. There's no "we're gonna spend $100,000 a year on you just to keep you behind bars." You're going to jail. How long? Seconds. "Why?" "Oh, it's a great sentence." "Yeah, we're gonna kill you." Two or three seconds later, "Can I have a last wish?" "Okay, yeah, what's your last wish?" "I want to talk to my mom." "Okay, it sounds like a reasonable last wish." They go to the boy's house. "Tell her, 'Ma'am, your son's a thief. We're gonna kill him, but his last wish is to talk to you.' The mom is crying hysterically on the way there. Crocodile tears on the way there. You have a sea following her, like Miriam in the desert had a river. All of Am Yisrael, the mother has a river following her. Why? Her son is going to get killed—a little thief son. He's going to get killed by the king. She arrives, she sees her son, and says, "Ima, Ima, come closer." She's thinking maybe he's got a plan or something. He comes closer to her ear and...

1:38:31And bites her ear off. Hurts just to hear it, doesn't it? She says, "Were you crazy? What's the matter with you? What is the matter with you? Why are you doing this to your mother?" And he says, "That's for listening to me stealing an egg and saying kol hakavod and never telling me no. Why are you doing that? You don't know what you're doing, little boy." for never telling me no, because look what happened to me now. So now you're going to remember. Kids don't only need parents to tell them what to do; they want it. They want parents to tell them what to do. they know deep down inside they don't know what they're doing, even though every little teenager is going through the teenage years. That's really annoying. But the reality is they know deep down inside they have no idea what they're talking about. They feel like they want to project like they know everything, but in reality, they have no idea what they're talking about. But if the parent gives them direction—you should do this, you should do this, you should do this, you do this—at the end of it all

1:39:57The parent raised them that way and gave them guidance. They know they can rely on it. "For 15 years, you told me what to do. It worked so far. It worked so far. I'll continue." But the kids that are never told what to do, and then one day they turn 15 and all of a sudden Abba or Ima decide, "No, no, you can't go." Who are you to tell me? For 15 years, you didn't tell me what to do, and now you're gonna tell me I... Welcome. Who are you to tell me? You're my roommate. You're not my dad. You're not my mom. You're my roommate. You live with me. You didn't tell me what to do. A mom and dad tell kids what to do because the kid does not know what's good for them. I know that my little kids want to do all the dangerous things in the world. Lovato is a year and a half old. He wants to jump off the highest thing possible. He likes to climb the bed. He wants to jump off. Why? He doesn't know what's going to happen if he actually falls off. There's a little bucket that we put toys in. So he takes the bucket, takes all the toys out, turns it upside down, climbs on top of it, and starts jumping on it, not realizing that he could, chas v'shalom, fall until his mom catches him like a superhero and

1:41:20But he doesn't realize that he's a year and a half old. What does he know? It doesn't change much even if he had ten years. They still don't know what they're talking about. They still don't know what they're doing. And if you, the parents, are not going to tell them, then eventually they're going to fall. The question is, how far are they going to fall? Sometimes the fall is too painful. But even worse, sometimes the fall is caused by the parents. Some of these parents are so far away from Hashem, in reality, that they actually buy the kids immodest clothes. You see certain parents go to the store and buy their own daughters clothes to make them look prutzot, to make them look immodest. They buy the little 12, 13-year-old girl a bikini. They buy the 12-year-old girl a tank top and shorts. Oh, this looks good on you. What? She's naked. What's good? If she walked around with underwear or she walks around with the shorts, it's the same thing.

1:42:37She walks around with a bikini. She walks around with underwear. It's the same thing. Why do you say this looks good? The Yetzer Hara doesn't make you think like that. The Yetzer Hara says, no, this looks good. Look, everybody else looks like that. Everybody else is walking around with underwear. Mitzvah. You look like everybody else. It's a minhag hamakom. You start finding sources in the Torah. It's the minhag of the place. Everybody else is naked. You should be naked too, no? The Yetzer Hara makes us so stupid that we don't realize that we're stupid. The book Ahavat Chaim has some very, very extraordinary stories. Some are very scary. I told this story maybe two, three years ago in a shiur, and I think one of the people that heard it had nightmares. But I know for sure that he'll never dress his daughter immodestly after hearing that story. So it's worth saying it again.

1:43:42The reality is that all of these scary events that happen to Am Yisrael, whether it's the Churban Beit HaMikdash, or it's the promises that Hashem told us of what's going to happen if we don't do teshuva, or some of the things that happened to our grandparents during the Holocaust, all of these horrible things, Hashem is trying to scare us because that's how He's going to cause us to do teshuva. But the Sefer Ahavat Chaim says that a few hundred years ago, there were three merchants. They were traveling on the way home, and there was a certain wooded area that they had to go through. As they went deeper and deeper into the woods, they started hearing screaming, and And they went closer and closer to the screams, and they saw this little house. They got closer to the house, and a woman came out of the house, waved to them, and told them to come. So they started running. They grabbed whatever weapons they had on them—knives, a spear of some kind, a piece of metal, whatever they could. They thought something was happening here.

1:45:04The woman went inside. They ran in there, and then they said to themselves before they got in, they saw through the window the same woman who said "come" had a huge pot of water on top of a fire, so it was all boiling. In there, she had clothes, and she would take the boiling clothes out of the boiling pot and... put it on her 13-year-old daughter, and she's screaming, and the daughter is screaming to the point where her skin is literally peeling off. The three men were so scared of what they just saw. They ran away. They ran away. They couldn't deal with it. They couldn't go inside. They didn't know what was just happening. This was like a horror movie that came to real life. And they all ran away. They ran away. They left their stuff. They got out of the woods as soon as possible. They continued running until they got to their rabbi. They got to the rabbi and they talked about it. "We have to go to the woods. We have to go see just what's happening." Everybody came. Everybody got their weapons. Everybody got ready. They went. Nothing. There's no house and...

1:46:29House? Nothing. Not that there's a house and it's empty. There's no house. It's here. It is here. So where is it? Because you three had the merit to see a piece of Olam HaBa in it. You three had the merit to see what happens to a woman who dressed her daughter immodestly and... There was a woman that lived here that dressed her daughter immodestly when she was a teenager, 13-14 years old. So her punishment for her and her daughter was that you three had the merit to tell us about it and see it. You want to believe the story, you don't want to believe it, your problem. The point is, rabotai... that these stories were written by people who were geniuses, holy of holies. They weren't written by some fiction novelist like Stephen King.

1:48:14The Sifrei HaKodesh say things that are hard to say. Because some of these things can make a person give up. If they haven't started doing teshuva seriously, it's hard to say it. But it needs to be said. These stories that are hard to hear, whether it's the mom that had her ear bit off, or the three men that we just talked about that saw this mom with her daughter, and so on and so forth, all of these things need to be said. One of the most difficult things that I ever heard was that there's actually a din in Shamayim where every Rosh Hashanah, the Gemara in Masechet Rosh Hashanah says that every year the Book of the Living and the Book of the Dead, opened. And the question is, why open the Book of the Living? We know why: because the living continue to do mitzvot and they continue to do aveirot. If you do mitzvot, you get rewarded; if you do aveirot, you get punished. Why the Book of the Dead? Why is the Book of the Dead opened? The Book of the Dead is opened because the people that have left this world are

1:49:35Also left something with them here. Something remained after them. If the person is a talmid chacham and he left a lot of Torah in this world, then every year somebody reads his books, every day somebody learns his Torah. Hashem rewards him a handsome reward with no end. On the other hand... a person that leaves wayward children, a person who does not discipline their kids, and their kids go off the derech. Or they're never under their parents' guidance. The father or the mother teaches the kids that it's perfectly fine to be secular. He leaves the world, the kids stay secular. They marry goyot. They marry goyim, they act like goyim, they forget that Judaism is even something that's connected to them and...

1:50:35Parents get punished even after they leave this world. Now, the scariest thing I've ever heard is what happens to a person that already went to Gan Eden. The person already learned Torah, did mitzvot, and goes to Gan Eden. But then his kid, whom he left in this world religious, starts a new website against rabbis he doesn't like, and... The kid starts to steal. The kid starts to do certain things. On Rosh Hashanah, they open the book and they see, where did this kid learn these horrible middot? Did he learn to say lashon hara on shulchan Shabbat with Abba and Ima? Did he learn to say lashon hara because that's what he heard Abba do at work? Did he learn to lie because Abba always told them, "Whenever someone calls and I don't feel like talking to them, tell them I'm not home"? So Abba taught him how to lie? Did he learn to steal because Abba never paid back his loans? He would borrow money from people right before he declared bankruptcy. He borrowed money against the credit card in the bank because they're just banks, it's just a bunch of goyim, so you're allowed to steal from them according to his perverted Torah?

1:51:57So the kid became a thief of his own. He started a Ponzi scheme. But he made sure everybody's going. In Shamayim, when they see that the child became a wayward child because of the perverted teachings of the father, they take the father out of Gan Eden and put him in Gehinom. Meaning, rabotai, that life only begins after this life. Arriving at Gan Eden does not end at Gan Eden. You get sechar for the mitzvot. You get punished for the aveirot. But what if the aveirah hasn't been made yet? What if the sin hasn't been made yet? When it's made, if it's made, you'll get punished at that point. Yeah, but I died already. No, you died here. You're very much alive, meaning that a parent who wants to do good for themselves, forget just the kids, good for themselves in Olam HaBa, must dedicate their time to raising their kids and making sure that they actually have good middot. Why? Because you're going to have to pay for it anyway, and...

1:53:16They learn how to steal in your house. They learn how to scream and yell at people with no respect in your house. Who do you think is going to pay for it? It's not just them; you're a partner to the crime. This, Rabotai, is one of the most important things we need to learn today. Because Hashem tells us, "Don't harm My Messiahs, don't harm My prophets." What do you mean? The Mashiach is a prophet. So why are you mentioning it twice in the same verse, and we say it in our tefillah every day? "Don't harm My Mashiachs. Don't harm My prophets." The Mashiach is a prophet. The Gemara in Masechet Shabbat says the Mashiach is the children. Every kid can be Mashiach. Even you. Every kid can be Mashiach. You have no idea if you're a descendant of David HaMelech or not. If you are, you could be Mashiach. If you're a kindergarten teacher, if you're a first, second, third, fourth, or fifth-grade teacher, you should know before you lose your temper on these little kids, because they're a little annoying, because they did something in their pants that you don't feel like cleaning up, you should know they may be Mashiach.

1:54:41Before you lose your temper on them, and hit them when you're not allowed to, and yell at them when you're not allowed to, and insult them when you're not allowed to, and do something that's damaging to them, you should know they may be Mashiach. Before the mom gets angry at the kid and tells him, "Go to your room and don't come out until I feel like it," instead of actually educating the kid to tell him why it's wrong and why it's right and so on and so forth, you should remember, he may be Mashiach. he may be Mashiach, and every time we think about Mashiach, we're supposed to think that when Mashiach Tzidkenu comes, we're gonna see our sins on him. The Mashiach, the soul of Mashiach, is very alive and well in every generation. And every single day, the Sifrei HaKadoshim tell us that Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov come to the soul of Mashiach and they beg him to continue. Please continue doing what you're doing.

1:55:42Please continue taking on the sins of Am Yisrael. Please continue, and every day another sin that you and I do, another scab shows up on his skin, another damage on his skin. So the biggest busha that each one of us will have is when we see Mashiach, if we have the merit. We're also gonna see what damage we caused him, what busha vecherpa it's gonna be if we're the ones that actually caused it with our own hands. If you're the teacher, if you're the parent that didn't feel like disciplining the kid, and the kid ends up being Mashiach, I'm not telling you to start losing your minds and be like some of these people that tell me that. One woman told me that she's Mashiach and her son is Mashiach Ben Yosef. She's Mashiach Ben David. I'm not telling you to act crazy. I'm talking about, figuratively speaking, to understand that each one of your kids has the ultimate potential. Whether they are Mashiach or not, that's only decided by Hashem.

1:56:42Not if they're cute, but decided based on what Hashem decides. The key to understand is that when you are educating your kid, think: is this something that I can live with for eternity? What I just told them, what I just showed him, what I just put on her clothes, what I just told them, what I just taught her—can I live with this for eternity if Mashiach was here watching us? Is this outfit... Good outfit for her to wear to meet him. If the Mashiach was here to judge us, is this a good outfit for him to wear to meet Mashiach? Some people show up to the Beit Knesset like they're showing up to the beach. I don't know what book they learned this from, but I'm sure it's from their parents. They come with tank tops and short pants and... Have no idea where they learned this from as far as a book, but I know it's definitely from their parents. Their parents had no honor for the Beit HaMikdash, and neither do they. A Beit Knesset is a small Beit HaMikdash. You're not supposed to go to a Beit HaMikdash with shorts and a t-shirt. I'm not telling you that you have to show up with a three-piece suit, but there's a very, very big gap between the two. I

1:58:08choose wisely. Mashiach may show up. Hashem is already here even more so. But what we have to understand is that when we don't think about these things, it's not because it's far from us. It's because we're so arrogant in our own deeds that We can't even consider. We can't even fathom that we are sinning. Now, one of the most famous stories that all of you have heard is one of the reasons why Hashem decided, "That's it, I've had it," figuratively speaking. I'm going to destroy Beit HaMikdash is the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza.

1:59:09The story goes that there was a certain person whose friend was Bar Kamtza and his enemy was Kamtza. He had a party and invited everyone, but his servant made a mistake and went and invited his enemy, Kamtza, instead of inviting his friend, Bar Kamtza. enemy, Kamtza, instead of inviting his friend, Bar Kamtza. So Kamtza attended the party and the Baal HaBayit sees his enemy Kamtza there and says, "What are you doing here? What are you doing here? Who invited you?" Kamtza responds, "Who invited me? You invited me. You sent your servant, your chauffeur, your guy, your employee to come invite me personally." Thank you very much. Did I invite you? I didn't invite you. I would never invite you. Get out. What? Get out. You're embarrassing me in front of everyone. Someone who embarrasses another person in public has no share in the World to Come. Don't embarrass me. No, it was a mistake, just a mistake. Fine, but let me stay. Get out. Now.

2:00:34Please, please, I'll pay for my meal. You won't even have to pay for me. Get out. Please, please, I'll pay for the whole event. I'll pay for the whole event, the whole party, $15,000, $25,000, $30,000. I'll pay for the whole thing. Just don't embarrass me. People are looking. My kavod's at stake. My family's kavod is at stake. He says, I'm waiting for you to leave. Now, what is he going to do? The poor guy Kamsa gets up in his shame, walks out, and he sees that the rabbis that were there and the people that were there are watching him leave. They have seen this shame, this embarrassment, this busha v'cherpa, and he says, "No one said a thing. No one came to defend me."

2:01:37I'll take revenge on all of them. He goes to the Roman Empire and he requests a meeting with the Caesar. Always happy to hear bad news about the Jews, the Caesar welcomes him with open arms and says, "What do you want?" He says, "Listen, these Jewish people, they're stabbing you in the back." Are they crazy with it? What do you mean? It's not in my back because look, they won't even take your korban. You want to bring out their big thing? They gave you honor, they said yeah, they like you, they like you, they like you. But just to make sure to protect their Beit HaMikdash. But in reality, they hate you. Why do you think they hate me? Because go check, go bring them a korban. Go bring them a korban. They won't even accept your korban. They won't even accept your korban.

2:02:39He says, of course they're gonna accept it. He goes, they're not gonna accept it. I'll prove it to you. Give it to me. I'll be the messenger. I'll bring the korban. I'll show it to you. He says, go. He gives them a nice sheep. Go. He travels to Yerushalayim, but on the way there, he takes a knife and he chops off the sheep's lip. So it becomes a ba'al mum. It becomes a sheep that's not acceptable for korban. He brings them all. This is in the honor of the Caesar of Rome. The rabbis over there say, "Oh, sorry, I don't know. We are not allowed to accept the korban from anyone if it has some type of deformity. Not that it's from him. You are allowed to actually accept the korban from a non-Jew as long as he's giving a korban to our God, not his false god." But if it has some type of deformity, if he's missing an eye or a leg, or he has some type of scar, and so on, you're not allowed to accept it. So Bar Kamtza, who was looking to take revenge against Am Yisrael, made the sheep deformed.

2:04:03made him unacceptable. He goes back to the Caesar and says, "See, I told you they hate you. I told you they're going against you." And the Roman Caesar decides, "Ah, they want to go against me. I'm going to destroy all of them." And that was the straw that broke the camel's back. Now, this is a very well-known story, with the exception of me messing up the names because they’re very similar: Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. Everything I just said is what's written in Gemara Masechet Gittin, page 55a and b. But then there's a chiddush. Rabbi Ephraim says, chiddush means insight, like a new insight. Rabbi Ephraim says, the Torah says, that the Beit HaMikdash was destroyed because of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. Why? The fact that Bar Kamtza got embarrassed, got embarrassed, and then he decided he was so selfish, he decided to destroy all of Am Yisrael, make all of Am Yisrael suffer because he got embarrassed.

2:05:26can relate sometimes why it's really annoying when somebody embarrasses you. You want to take revenge, but you're not really taking into account who else is going to suffer. All of us get like this. We get so angry. Ah! He embarrassed me! The heck with everyone! Why the heck with everyone? It's just him who damaged you. He did it to you, not everyone. It's not their fault. In this case, it's more than one person. It's a bunch of people that attended the party. They all offended him, and And Bar Kamtza took revenge, but he didn't realize—or perhaps he did realize—that in essence, his action was going to damage all of Am Yisrael, people that were not involved, people that didn't even know it happened. He took the state of victimhood that he was in and he took it too far. He became the vessel of evil. But that's understandable, Bar Kamtza. You could say he's a victim or he's not a victim. What he did at the end, he's a rasha. What he did at the end, he's a rasha. Even though he originally started as the victim, he was invited to a party that he really wasn't invited to. And then he got embarrassed publicly. Fine, he's righteous over there. But how he reacted to it, he's a rasha. All of us agree. But what does Kamtza have anything to do with it?

2:06:55It says that the Churban Beit HaMikdash was because of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. Kamtza didn't do anything. Kamtza was not even in the story. He didn't show up to the party. The invitation went to Bar Kamtza. So what does Kamtza have to do with it? Rav Efraim gives a chiddush of chiddushim. He says Kamtza is the father. Bar Kamtza is the son. "Bar" in the Gemara. Bar in the language of the Gemara means "son of." Bar Kamtza means "son of Kamtza," meaning this was a father and son. The father was liked. I'm sorry, the son was hated. The father was invited, but accidentally the son showed up. He embarrassed the son, and... The son went crazy. So what is the father at fault? The father's at fault for educating his kid to react like this. The father's at fault for educating his kid with nothing, with bad middot. He never told him, "Listen, somebody embarrassed you, relax. You could talk to him privately. You could cool off. You could do a lot of other things. You don't have to destroy the whole world because you got embarrassed." That's why it's Kamtza and Bar Kamtza.

2:08:22That's why it's Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. That's why it's relevant to us. We could either be Kamtza, we could be Bar Kamtza. The question is, how are our little Kamtza's gonna grow up? Our little kids, we raised them, we brought them to the world, what are we gonna do with them? Now, one of the things that we always try to do is we try to emulate the ways of the tzaddikim. ways of the tzaddikim. We know these are things that work because you can see the totza'ot, you can see the outcomes. Now, the Rebbetzin of R' Itzikel Safrin, Rebbetzin Hinda, wanted to make sure that her kids learn to appreciate something they've never seen before.

2:09:23I'm sure many people are gonna say this is extreme. I'm sure that if this was done knowingly in today's world, they would call the place where they take children away 'Child Services.' They treat everyone like a criminal, even when you're innocent. So, the Rebbetzin Hinda, she wanted to make sure that her babies understand the value of Beit HaMikdash. And there's a moment that Hashem cries over Beit HaMikdash. It's His home. So every day, there's something that we do as Jews, or you should do, it's called Tikkun Chatzot. In the middle of the night, after midnight Depending on the Jewish midnight, it's not exactly always the same midnight as the goyim. It changes around the year. You should get the application called MyZmanim or MyZman, something like that. And there are other applications that tell you exactly the times of Jewish hours. In the middle of the night, you're supposed to do Tikkun Chatzot. You're supposed to read these certain prayers, these certain Tehillim (Psalms).

2:10:53Part of the reason is to commemorate the damage that's happened over the last 2,000 years that we don't have the Beit HaMikdash. We don't have the ability to bring a korban, to do complete teshuvah. We don't have the ability to show up there and just by the holiness of the Beit HaMikdash, you do teshuvah on the spot. If you didn't do teshuvah just by looking at the Beit HaMikdash, you get closer and you hear the voice, the voice of the Leviim. They would sing, and it would break your heart. If that wasn't enough, by the time he brought the korban closer to the Mishkan over there, the whole act of what just happened made you do teshuvah. If that's not enough, you saw the actual cow get slaughtered and realized, "Oh, I'm the one that's supposed to be slaughtered, not the cow." He did teshuvah, meaning no one went into the Beit HaMikdash and didn't do teshuvah. We don't have it anymore. We don't have it anymore. We don't have it anymore. We don't have fire coming down every day in the image of a lion. Fire from heaven would come down in the image of a lion. A huge, giant lion the size of a city block would come down every day. We used to see it every day. We don't have it anymore. We don't have it anymore. So every day we're supposed to cry about it, really.

2:12:12Every day, we are supposed to cry for the Beit HaMikdash, but Rabbanit Hinda says that even babies need to know it from the beginning. So every night at midnight, she would take our babies out of the crib, put them on the floor, and let them cry. It would cry and cry for a few minutes, and she picked him up and put him back in the crib, and loved him and kissed him and so on, and let him go to sleep. Why? Hashem is crying, you should cry too. Hashem should know that His children are crying too. Who? Little babies. They haven't sinned yet. Little babies that haven't sinned yet are crying. Why are they crying? They're crying like Hashem is crying at the same time.

2:13:12I'm sure if somebody knew about this in today's world, they would call child services. "Oh, what is she doing to her kids? She doesn't know what she's doing." Well, every one of her kids became a tzaddik or tzaddekes. Why? Because they were brought up with Yirat Shamayim. They were brought up with a connection to Hashem. They were brought up understanding that there's something above them. The painful month of the exile is called Av, which means "father." It also teaches that the primary anguish of the exile is not the physical suffering, but the psychological pain of a wayward child rejected by his loving father, his beloved father. When a person gets to such an extent that he becomes a wayward child, he becomes a bad kid and... Father doesn't want to talk to him anymore. His father doesn't want to hang out with him anymore. His father doesn't want to buy him anything anymore. He wants to disassociate with him. That's a really terrible stage because, in the end, every normal father loves his kid. So if you've gotten to such a point where the father doesn't want to be associated with you, that's a horrible stage to be in. But the big difference here is...

2:14:43We are both the father and the child. We're the father to our kids, but the children to Hashem. If you went to Beit Knesset today or yesterday and you didn't cry, that means you still don't have an idea of what it means to have a Beit HaMikdash. That means you still don't have an idea of what it means to be close to Hashem. It means you still have no idea. What we actually lost means you have work to do. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, just that you have work to do. You have to work on your relationship this year. You have to work on your relationship to understand: What does it mean, Beit HaMikdash? What does it mean to be close to Hashem? And don't be like one of these guys that I saw in a Beit Knesset today who saw another person crying and said, "It's not so bad, relax." One of the tzaddikim was crying in the Beit Knesset, and another imbecile says to him after he stops crying, "Hey, relax, why are you crying so much?" Why? Because he was busy talking in the back the whole time, playing on his phone, and talking with the other guys. He has no idea why he's even in the Beit Knesset. He's only showing up because the rest of his friends are there. The fact that he's wearing tzitzit and a kippah means zero.

2:16:09means nothing, and that's why Hashem tells us through the prophets, "I care less about whether you're eating or not." Your fast, the fact that you're all hungry and thirsty right now, is meaningless unless your heart is improving. The point of less food is not because Hashem cares about your diet. He's trying to take your mind away from the physicality we consume ourselves with every two minutes. We have a drink every two minutes; we have a bite to eat every two minutes. We're connected to something physical, to something material. He says disconnect from the material. Disconnect from the candy, the gummy bears, the pizza, the burgers, and all this. Disconnect from water. Why? Think about Me for a second. Give Me one day. Why can't we think about You and eat a burger at the same time? Yes, but usually, you don't. You're too busy thinking about the burger. That's why everybody has kavana now when they eat the burger and the pizza. But very few actually have kavana when they do Birkat Hamazon. Very few have kavana when they do Birkat Hamazon. They always look, do I have, is this really bread that I just ate? I think it's mezonot. It was kind of sweet.

2:17:33It was kind of sweet. I think it was mezonot. No, do I still have to do the Birkat Hamazon? It's really long. I'm in a hurry. You weren't in a hurry eating for three hours, but you're in a hurry not to bless Hashem. This is the stuff we have to actually work on. Why? Because every generation in which the Beit HaMikdash is not built is counted as if they destroyed it themselves. The painful month of Av is symbolic of the fact that we're far away from Hashem. No matter what you think. No matter what your rabbi tells you. If we don't have the Beit HaMikdash, we're not close enough to Hashem. We're not close enough to Hashem.

2:18:37Why was the First Temple destroyed? Because in this period there were three cardinal sins: idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed. As I mentioned to you before, these are three categories. But the actual sins were subcategories of it. As the Gemara in Masechet Shabbat says, the Beit HaMikdash was only destroyed because of Chilul Shabbat. Wait a minute, didn't you just say it was destroyed because of idolatry, because of immorality, because of bloodshed? It doesn't say anything about Shabbat. It says yes, idolatry and Chilul Shabbat, same thing. Violating Shabbat, driving on Shabbat, watching movies on Shabbat, smoking cigarettes on Shabbat, playing with your phone on Shabbat—those are all things that are considered Chilul Shabbat. In the eyes of Hashem, according to His Torah and according to the Rambam in Hilchot Shabbat, Chapter 30, the last Halacha, these actions are considered 100% idol worship.

2:19:58in all 12 places that it's mentioned in the Chumash that Hashem gives the death penalty for Mechalel Shabbat, He also says the same thing for an idol worshiper either the verse before it or the verse after it. They're always connected like brother and sister. Chilul Shabbat and idolatry are always connected like brother and sister. Why? In the eyes of Hashem, it's the same thing. The reason why is because there were no witnesses to see Hashem create the world. No one was there, only Him. The Gemara in Masechet Chagigah, page 12a, says that Hashem initially was the only thing that was actually in existence. There was nothing before Him, there's nothing after Him. And He had to minimize Himself in order to make room for other creations. So He minimized Himself, made a dot, and allowed that dot to expand. In essence, this Gemara in Masechet Chagigah, written almost 2,000 years ago, is describing the initial stages of the Big Bang. Only here, it's not a theory; here, it's a fact. What's the difference between the two? Here, in our Torah, the Big Bang was created by Hashem.

2:21:19It was always also stopped by Hashem as the expansion was a rapid expansion and not a fast expansion like the scientists think. That same expansion was also stopped as the Gemara says that Hashem roared like a lion and His creation was so scared it stopped and That's where He got the name El Shaddai, the God that said "die." "Die" means "stop." The God that said "stop"—what did He say "stop" to? He said "stop" to His creation from expanding. The scientists still believe that it's continuing to expand. Why do they say it's continuing to expand? Because, number one, you can't prove it, and number two... complements their original theory, which is that everything started from nothing. Why do the atheists, or today their politically correct word is to call them scientists, insist on the world starting from nothing? They have a different God.

2:22:43The atheists have a god. Every atheist has a god. It's called arrogance. It's called themselves. Somebody has to be the master of something. If you don't believe that the Master of the Universe is your master, that means that you believe you're the master. Every atheist has a god; it's called arrogance. It's called pride. It's called themselves, and... This was the sin of Bar Kamtza. Bar Kamtza could not take it that someone embarrassed him. I can tell you from experience, it's very hard to be embarrassed. It's very annoying, it's very painful, but to go and destroy the entire nation for it means you have other problems. It has nothing to do with the embarrassment; that means you actually deserved it. The atheist does not want Hashem to tell him what to do. So what does he do? He says Hashem doesn't exist.

2:23:44he doesn't exist, which means he can't tell me what to do. So where did everything come from? Ah, we don't need to have an answer for that. A long time ago, we explained it with a lot of time. So that atheist will violate Shabbat on a regular basis with pride, will drive in front of the big Knesset, will tell his friends that he's driving on Shabbat, will go to the movies, and will do all types of things without a care in the world, and... Very few people are going to tell him that, by the way, you Jewish atheist, you're the same thing as an idol worshiper, and you'll be judged as an idol worshiper. And maybe if you tell them that, there's a small chance they'll reconsider their idolatry. And maybe they'll do teshuva. After all, they still have the soul of a Jew; they could still do teshuva. But if you don't tell them and rather you tell them or tell yourselves that they're all tinokot shenishbu... they're all captured babies, and they're all victims of society, and we're allowed to sin because there's sin around us. Like people tell me, "You know, listen, I understand it's written in the Torah not to waste seed and so on, but listen, today every girl is walking around naked. Does God really still expect us not to waste seed?"

2:25:05What do you mean, does God still expect you? What did He say in the Torah? "I'm only writing this Torah for the generation of Moshe Rabbeinu, the end"? Did He write "the end" at the end of the book? "Love Hashem, please buy it at Barnes and Noble for $19.99, on sale for $15 between this date and that date"? Where did He say in the Torah that the mitzvot are only relevant at the time of Moshe Rabbeinu? If it's written in the Torah, it's relevant for eternity. it's modesty or it's wasting seed or it's Shabbat or it's anything. If you can do it, you're obligated to do it. If you can't do it, you can't do it. But not "can't do it" because you don't feel like it or because it's hard for you—can't do it because it's not possible. For example, you cannot bring a korban to the Beit HaMikdash because there's no Beit HaMikdash. That's what it means by "Anus." So we see here that the Prophet Jeremiah explains to us that there were three major sins. The Gemara explains to us that there were three major sins at the time of the Beit HaMikdash, and these were Chilul Shabbat, idolatry, and immorality. If you look at the Prophet Jeremiah, chapter 17, verses 19 to 27...

2:26:33It actually shows the proof of what the Gemara used in Masechet Shabbat that Hashem said: "Hear the words of Hashem, O kings of Yehuda and all of Yehuda and all of the inhabitants of Yerushalayim who enter through these gates. Thus said Hashem: Beware for your souls. Do not carry a burden on Shabbat to bring into the gates of Yerushalayim." And do not bring a burden out from your houses on Shabbat. You shall not do any manner of work. Sanctify the Shabbat day as I commanded your forefathers. But they did not listen and did not incline their ear. They stiffened their neck in order not to hear, in order not to accept rebuke. Rabbis came to tell them to keep Shabbat, keep Shabbat, keep Shabbat. They didn't feel like hearing it. So what do they do? Is that he keeps coming back? So what do we do? Don't invite him to the shul anymore? But he still comes. Okay, say something about him so nobody else invites him. Make sure everybody thinks he's a wicked person. Everybody thinks he doesn't know what he's talking about. Shut off the door so nobody invites him.

2:27:46It shall be that if you truly listen to me, the word of Hashem, not to bring a burden into the gates of the city on the Shabbat and to sanctify the Shabbat, not to do any manner of work on it, then kings and princes who sit upon the throne of David will enter the gates of the city. Riding chariots and horses, they and their officers and men of Yehudah, and the inhabitants of Yerushalayim. And the city will be inhabited forever. In essence, he's telling us here that if Am Yisrael keeps Shabbat, Mashiach will come. How long? Forever. And the people will come from the cities of Yehudah and... from the environs of Yerushalayim, from the land of Binyamin, from the lowland, from the mountains, from the south, bringing burnt offerings, peace offerings, meal offerings, frankincense—that's the ketoret—and bringing thanksgiving offerings to the Temple of Hashem, Beit HaMikdash. So up to here, we see there's clear instruction from the Prophet and

2:28:55Many, many years after Moshe telling us that Chilul Shabbat is very much alive and well, if you do it, we lose everything. If we keep Shabbat, we gain everything. And if that's not enough, the last verse says it literally: But if you do not listen to me... sanctify the Shabbat and not carry a burden and enter the gates of Yerushalayim on Shabbat day. Then I shall set fire to its gates, which will consume the palaces of Yerushalayim and not be extinguished. Hashem says that if you don't stop carrying things on Shabbat outside of any eruv, if you don't stop desecrating Shabbat, I will start a fire in the Beit HaMikdash that will never end. I'll destroy it. Until when? Until you do teshuva. Until Am Yisrael does teshuva and starts keeping Shabbat. Not for one day a year. Every week. That's why it's not just idolatry. It's Chilul Shabbat. So when you tell most people, yeah, Beit HaMikdash, the first one, it was destroyed for idolatry. Yeah, how many Jews actually worship idols right now? First of all, news to you, many.

2:30:17...comes in the form of money. When you work for your job more than you work for Hashem, it's a form of idolatry. Second of all, violating Shabbat is also a form of idolatry. Gilui arayot shefichut damim—these are sins. These are immorality and murder. Both of these sins fall under... have one common denominator. They both end up murdering somebody. Shefichut damim and gilui arayot—murdering souls. Immorality is murdering souls that perhaps didn't come to this world. Shefichut damim is the same thing. When you waste seed, when a man wastes seed, he's destroying a neshama. He's destroying many, many neshamos. Immorality is also forbidden for women. The Vilna Gaon says that when a woman also does the same ugly deed as men do, she's also creating demons, and she's also creating a barrier between her and Hashem. That makes it very, very hard for her to do teshuva. You wonder sometimes why certain people find it just hard to do teshuva and

2:31:43The guy just can't do it. He just has to eat one sandwich with some pork and cheese on it, or bacon and cheese, or whatever disgusting animal they call it. He has a hard time. He has to eat something not kosher. Okay, I'll do teshuva, but I'll still steal in my business. Okay, I'll do teshuva, but still drive on Shabbat. Okay, I'll do teshuva, but I'll still... He just can't get himself to do teshuva. I'm not talking about going one step at a time. Of course, no one's going to start becoming Moshe Rabbeinu overnight. It takes time. In the beginning, you start with, let's say, Shabbat. A week later, you realize you're not really doing Shabbat as well as you're supposed to, so you add more things to Shabbat. A little later, you start feeling it; a little later, you start a shiur Torah; you start learning, and so on and so forth. I'm not saying you start becoming Moshe Rabbeinu and do all the 613 mitzvot overnight. I'm talking about people that literally, for 20 years, have been going to lectures. For 10 years, they've been going to lectures. Nothing has changed. They have a kippah. They don't have a kippah. They have tzitzit. They don't have tzitzit. It doesn't make a difference. They still stay the same pere adam. Still the same animal they started 20 years ago. Nothing changed. They just have a kippah on. Why? The reason for many of them is because they still have never done teshuva on some big things. One of those big things is wasting seed. For women, obviously, it's not seed. It's an egg, but it's the same act.

2:33:08The point being, rabotai, is when a person does such a thing, they are destroying one of the foundational spiritual connections in the image of a rope between them, their neshama, and Hashem Yitbarach Himself. There's actually, there's like a rope, I don't know what you want to call it, some type of rope that connects you to the spiritual world. When you waste seed, whether male or female, you're destroying that rope. So until you start healing it, until you stop making that sin and re-destroying it over and over again, you're not going to be able to do full teshuva on other things. You're not going to be able to do full teshuva on learning, or on kosher, or on taharat hamishpacha, or on your middot, or on other things. Why? Because there are so many demons surrounding you on a regular basis from the sins that you're creating, that they're going to influence you to do what they want.

2:34:10You may think you're in charge, but in reality, there are quite a few others. There are a lot more of them than there are of you. And the amount of mitzvot that you're making is not producing enough angels to beat them. That's why you're going to see sometimes women that do teshuva; they put the kisui rosh on, but sometimes they have a miniskirt. Or their clothes are so tight you can't tell the difference if it's skin or not. It just has a different color. It's like, ah, maybe she's blue. Maybe she's green. I don't know, so tight it might as well be skin. But she considers herself righteous. It's as if she's Moshe Rabbeinu and Tzipora; that's how they were at Mount Sinai. They were hanging out like this with the same, you know, tight dress. Why? She doesn't see anything wrong with herself. She doesn't see there's anything wrong with this. Sometimes you see a woman wearing a skirt and a shirt, and you're telling her honestly, "You should wear pants." It's more modest. The pants are more modest than the short skirt. So when you make such a sin that's caused by immorality, it's very hard to do teshuva. It's actually, if you remember from the shiur we did on Pirkei Avot, the Rambam says that a person that becomes a

2:35:32person that causes other people to sin, like a modest woman who causes other people to sin, has a much more difficult time doing teshuva than a person that doesn't cause other people to sin. Why? Because to do teshuva for other people's sins is much more difficult. So here, the prophet Jeremiah literally tells us what the Gemara told us, which is: It's not just literally idolatry. There's Shabbat. Shabbat is idolatry. it's not literally just immorality. There are subcategories to it. So the Gemara Masechet Nedarim says that the Holy One, blessed is He, said that the reason why He destroyed the Beit HaMikdash was because

2:36:32They didn't make, the chachamim did not make a blessing before studying the Torah. First of all, what kind of chacham doesn't do a blessing before he studies Torah? Every day you wake up in the morning, you say, "Thank you Hashem for bringing my neshama back." Then you do Birkot HaShachar. Part of Birkot HaShachar, the morning blessings, is to do Birkot HaTorah. So what kind of chacham doesn't do a blessing for the Torah? So the Gemara explains it's not that they literally did not do the blessing; they did. But since Hashem knows their heart, He knows they didn't mean it. There's no kavanah because He saw... Really, they do not have kavanah, or they're skipping the blessing. Why? Because they do not see the Torah as a blessing. They see it as a chore. Like this guy that I told you about the other day, Shapiro, Shapiro, whatever his name is—Ben Shapiro. He had an interview...

2:38:00a debate supposed to be a debate or a sit-down with a Christian. The topic was supposed to be "What's the difference between Christianity and Judaism?" and Shapiro, with the little kippah on, is supposed to be the representative of Am Yisrael. So you would think that he would start off the conversation with, "Yeah, well, a difference between Judaism and Christianity is that Judaism forbids idolatry." Your religion is 100% idolatry. That's how the conversation is supposed to start and end. But now, the whole time he is trying to, like, find the common denominator between the two. He sounds more like a Christian than the Christian guy. And at some point during this chilul Hashem, he said, "Yeah, you know, us Jews, we have a lot of crap to do." He calls the mitzvot "crap." Mechila mikvodchem, but that's the words he used.

2:39:03have no idea what kind of gehinom they're preparing for him if he doesn't do teshuva for such a chilul Hashem. Because there's more than a handful of people that have reached out to me alone. I'm sure to other rabbis and other people that believe he's a somebody. They believe that he is the representation of Am Yisrael today. Why? Because he has a kippa on and he talks about politics. He even said during the same interview that he believes that the Mashiach is gonna be a politician and obviously at that point anyone that has any sense to them should realize this guy has absolutely no idea what he's talking about when it comes to religion, when it comes to Judaism, when it comes to anything really relevant to Hashem. The fact that he's wearing a kippa means absolutely nothing and today you cannot tell who's even Jewish based on looks. Every beit knesset, every beit knesset I have a story where there's at least one guy that looks more religious than everybody else, and he's not even Jewish, and

2:40:08There's one place in Miami, or somebody told me this already three years ago. There's a guy in beit knesset that every time they are counting a minyan, the rabbi says, "Don't count him. Don't count him." No one ever knew why. It's like, "Why? I see why he's about. Is this like what's right with him? What's wrong with him? What's wrong with him? He's coming to shul already for seven years for the love." Tell us. So he's not Jewish. What do you mean? He's a chassid. He looks like he just came from 770. Get the teeth hanging out. He's got the hat, black and white; the beard is nice. What's the matter? He's not Jewish. So why does he look like that? Oh, he looks like that because he wants to be Jewish. Okay, so how come he doesn't become Jewish? Oh, because his wife is a Christian missionary. He comes to us for Shabbat. He rents an apartment or he sits by somebody's house every Shabbat and on Sunday, he goes to church with her. And they continue letting him go to the Beit Knesset, to the Chabad. Why? Have no idea? Ask them. Every Beit Knesset has one of those. You cannot tell anything by looks. Nothing. Hashem says that was one of the reasons why I destroyed the Beit Hamikdash. Looks were deceiving. So it's in your heart. You didn't bless my Torah because you didn't see it as a blessing. You saw it as a chore.

2:41:29You saw it as nothing. You saw it as a chore. You see My Torah as a chore? I'll show you a chore. I'll give you some chores. You go work for the Babylonians. Go work for Saddam Hussein. Go work. I'll give you some chores. A Jew must understand. You came to this world to be a slave, a servant. Slave, servant, it means the same thing. Servant sounds nicer, but it means the same thing. You're either going to be a servant of Hashem or of the Egyptians. You're either going to be a servant of Hashem or the Babylonians. You're either going to be a servant of Hashem or the Nazis. You have to be a servant because that's what you were created for. You don't want to be one? No problem. You'll be one whether you like it or not. Just not for Hashem, for someone else.

2:42:44Power of Torah to impact a student. The Chachamim explain is equal to the amount of energy and enthusiasm that the student will invest in his studies. A person that studies passively, with indifference, reads like it's on the side. He has the book and sitting with his friends here, the books here. He's laying out. Yeah, so what do you think? Yeah? Yeah, okay? Oh, yeah, so what do you think of that? Okay, every sentence, every commentary, they have another conversation that goes back and forth. You see people in a beit midrash for three hours. They study for three minutes. That kind of Torah is lifeless. It's not gonna affect them. You could feel like you study. You could tell your wife you go to beit midrash every day for three hours and You could even tell Hashem, "I go to the Beit Midrash for three hours." But in Shamayim, when you finally see their response, both your wife, that her neshama goes up to Shamayim, and Hashem, say, "Liar!"

2:43:55You were there for three hours, but you didn't study for three hours; you studied for three minutes. Why? Look at how much conversation you had, and then you ate Skittles, and then you ate the Snickers, and you had coffee, and you went to the bathroom, and you smoked a cigarette, and there was another conversation, and a conversation within a conversation, and you had to pull up at the conversation, and all the conversation, and then at the end you said, "Rabbi Chanina." What Rabbi Chanina? Rabbi Chanina wants no part of you. Rabbi Chanina wants no part of you. You didn't study Torah. So, learning with no enthusiasm, the Torah remains lifeless. It's facts, it's figures, it's laws. You're going to know all those things. You're going to know some laws, some halachot. A lot of people know halachot. All you got to do is remember it. Not allowed to carry on Shabbat, done, check. Not allowed to do borer, check. Not allowed this, not allowed that. Not allowed this, not allowed that. Check, check, check, check, check, check, check.

2:44:56But then one day somebody says, "Listen, do me a favor. Bring me my hat from your house." "No, I'm sorry, man. My house is outside the Eruv." "Yeah, but it's my hat, man. Do me a favor." "No, I'm your boy. Do me a favor. It's my hat." "Okay, okay, I'll bring it." What do you mean? You're going to violate Shabbat for your friend's hat? Why? You learned the rule that you're not allowed to bring it. You told him, "Listen, I'm not allowed." But he told you, "Come on, you're my boy, you're my friend. Do me a favor." "Oh, okay, fine." Because your Torah is lifeless. There's no Yirat Shamayim. You know the rules, but there's no Yirat Shamayim. There's no fear of Hashem. You don't really believe it. It's just something to do when convenient. It's convenient? I'll do it. It's like women who are modest all year round except when they go to a wedding. She covers her hair like she just came from Mount Sinai for the wedding. Who is she? Where did she go? She didn't come to the wedding? Wow, I can't believe she didn't come to our daughter's wedding. No, she's right next to you. Who? That lady with the single lady? No, that's her mom. What do you mean it's her mom? She doesn't care about her hair? No, it's a wig. That's a wig? Looks real. Oh, it is real. It's actually real hair from India.

2:46:17She's modest all the way until the wedding. How come you're not wearing the kisui rosh for the wedding? Oh, people don't like it. People don't like it? Oh, she's embarrassed of people. She's not embarrassed of Hashem though. You're embarrassed of the Shechinah. Not the Shechinah. Shechinah is the neighbor. Shechinah is Hashem. Why? Because you learned Torah. Without any energy, without any enthusiasm, you didn't delve into the things to try to figure out what does Hashem really want me to do? What does He really want me to do? Does He really want me to look like this? Does He really want me to just chitchat and do nothing with my life? Does He really want me to just focus on business my whole life? Does He really want me to focus on just all the other mundane? Is that why He brought me to the world? Does He really want me to be arrogant? Does He really want me to yell at people in public? Does He really want me to be cheap? Does He really want me to be all these other terrible things that we are, and everyone knows we're not supposed to be?

2:47:20Is this the best version of me? Is that what He expects of me? That's what we're supposed to ask ourselves. But if your Torah has no enthusiasm, has no energy, you're going to learn the facts, you're going to learn the figures, you're going to learn the laws and the lessons, but the lackadaisical student of the Torah will remain a limp, lifeless mute. And when push comes to shove, he'll break and... And that's why Reish Lakish in the Gemara says that a person who wants to inherit Torah must sacrifice his life for Torah. What does he mean by sacrificing his life? I don't have to sacrifice. I'm sitting over here, standing over here, you guys all listening, learning, whatever. No one's sacrificing his life. Yes. Sacrificing your life means that you have to dedicate all of your time, energy, all of your wisdom, all of yourself to learning Torah, even if it makes you uncomfortable. When you learn Torah, you have to push yourself. Don't read it like you're reading a book for enjoyment. Read it like this is an instruction to save your life.

2:48:33You have to be a Mosser Nefesh. You have to be willing to sacrifice your life for Hashem. Why? Because that life you're sacrificing is the life you're going to give to your Torah. And if you give the Torah life, it'll give you life back. But if you give the Torah nothing, it'll give you nothing back. And that's why the Gemara says the Torah is sam chayim, sam mavet. It's either the portion of life or the portion of death. You give it life, it'll give you life back. You give it nothing, you have death back. That's why Reish Lakish gives us the chiddush of all chiddushim and he says there's no such thing as being off the derech. There's no such thing as someone went off the derech. He never was. No one goes off the derech. He never was on the derech. His Torah never had life. He just learned it because somebody told him to do it. He just opened the book because he didn't want to fail the class, not because he believed it, not because he put any effort into it. You notice every single one of the people that goes off the derech always had these issues. They always didn't really want to do it. They always had these little misbeliefs. They always had questions but never really cared enough to look for the answers.

2:49:50No one goes off the derech, rabotai. It's either you're on it or you never were. It's either he sacrificed his neshama to go search for the truth, or he's just grinding water. Because if a Jew understood how much is actually on the line for his Torah, the average person, I'm not even talking about a Talmid Chacham. I'm not even talking about a Rabbi or a speaker or Mezakeh HaRabim or anything. I'm talking about an average Jew. You watching, you at home, you here. You that just started learning yesterday. You that may be starting to learn tomorrow. There's a verse in the Torah, in the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah says to us what Hashem tells him. Hashem tells Jeremiah, "If not for My covenant, called the Torah, day and night, the rules of the world will cease to exist." Literally, Hashem is telling Jeremiah...

2:51:10If it's not for a person out there in the world learning Torah at any moment, 24 hours a day, the rules that are instilled in the world, such as gravity, the gases, and the elements, and pretty much the entire makeup of the universe, will cease to exist. What is this like? This is like the atom and... Scientists in recent generations discovered that everything in the world is made up of atoms. It's all energy. And the atom really has just a couple of parts: the electron, the neutron, and the proton. And it's in essence for us non-scientifically minded people... to explain the analogy in a very simple way. Just imagine one ball that is really small and another ball that's really big rotating around it really, really fast. So fast that it looks like it's a solid object. Similar to how when you see a fan

2:52:33fan in the ceiling fan or fan of your air conditioning system. When it spins really fast and you look at it, it looks like there's a single blade. But if you stop it, you press the stop button, you'll see that there could be three, four, five, six, or seven blades. So how come you couldn't see all of the blades when it was going really fast? Because, in essence, it went really fast This, in essence, explains why everything looks like it's solid. You're touching it, it's solid. The table is solid. You are solid. The walls are solid. The buildings are solid. Everything is solid, even though it's all made up of these electrons and these atoms and so on. It's because the two particles are spinning really, really fast. And the space between them, which is 99.9% of the atom, is pure space, it's empty space, is not exposed because the atoms are spinning so fast. Recent science, even more recent science, says that even the nucleus within the actual atom itself is also 99% empty space. From there we learn that most of the makeup of the universe is completely empty space. And that explains this verse that Yirmiyahu told us.

2:53:51That if not for my covenant of learning Torah being fulfilled in the world 24 hours a day, the rules of the world will cease to exist. We see exactly how Hashem will destroy the world if people don't learn Torah 24 hours a day. How? He would simply stop the atoms from spinning, just for a second. Not even for an hour, not for a minute, not even for 10 seconds. Simply one second, all of the atoms in the universe will stop spinning. Why? Because in that one second that they stop spinning, the empty space will be exposed, and that would mean everything would simply disappear. No explosions, no war, no famine, no nothing. The empty space will simply disappear, and... So an average Jew that just started today to do teshuva or just started last week or just started last year or already is frum from birth, but really needs some more chizuk, should look in the mirror and understand: The world could literally exist because of me reading a verse from the Torah. So the next time you learn Torah, understand you are special.

2:55:19You are a big deal. Why? The world could be standing simply because of the verse you just read, the ma'amar you just read, the lecture you just heard. It's a big deal to learn Torah. A much bigger deal than you'll ever achieve in business. A much bigger deal than you'll ever achieve in anything else. Even more so if you educate your children to be that way, because now you have soldiers. You have little tzaddikot and tzaddikim that are doing the will of Hashem 24 hours a day. So now you have a whole family of people learning Torah and then teaching Torah to their kids, to their friends, to their neighbors, and so on and so forth. You become a nation within a nation. There's no bigger deal than that. But unfortunately, spiritual laziness is also one of the reasons that Hashem destroyed the Beit HaMikdash. As Shlomo HaMelech says...

2:56:21If you slackened, then on the day of adversity, your strength will be feeble. Meaning that whoever slackens their effort in the study of Torah will find that he has no strength when he's confronted by other adversity. As the prophet Jeremiah says, "They fled without strength from the pursuer." So if you learn your Torah as if it's a chore, you don't feel like it, you don't have energy for it, it's too tough, it's too this, it's too that, and you're one of those people that learns Torah like you're half dead. You know, I want to learn Torah, yeah, right before I go to sleep. Five minutes before I go to sleep, like you're doing God a favor. You'll see that all of a sudden your energy will also disappear when you want to work. When you have a problem, when you have other things, why? Because all of your koach is spiritual, all of your strength is spiritual, and Hashem will use that koach if you owe your koach. If you're spending it on things that are against Me, I'll simply take it away and...

2:57:31So at least if you don't have, I could actually have, I could fight for you in Shamayim as a lawyer for you. Why? Say, listen, when he studied My Torah, he didn't have any strength. But look, he didn't have any strength when he was actually going out with girls either. He didn't have any strength when he was going to work either. He didn't have any strength when he was making money either. She didn't have strength anywhere. So Hashem said, I'll fight for you. I'll fight for you. Why would Hashem do such a thing for us if we're going against Him? Because that's the midah of Hashem. That is the perfect characteristic of Hashem Yitbarach. In the Gemara in Masechet Yevamot, page 78b, the Or Yisrael mentioned this Gemara as one of the Gemarot that could change a life to either make you into a Kodesh Kodashim or you could continue living a delusion thinking that you are. A certain chacham came to the Or Yisrael, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, And they had a discussion. After they finished the discussion, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter walked him out, and he continued following him out. And he said to him, "Where are you going?" He said, "Oh, I'm going to pay this rabbi back some money. I have to give him some money." He says, "For the rabbi?"

2:58:54You don't have to do it. You're a Gadol HaDor. You could send one of your people to go do it. He goes, no. My Torah says that it's an obligation for me to go give him his money. So the other Chacham says, Kevod HaRav, if it was said in the Torah, I would also know it. If this is one of the 613 mitzvot, Baruch Hashem, I would know it too. Where is it? So the Admor, Rav Yisrael Salanter says, maybe your Gemara is different than mine. his humility says, "Maybe you have a different copy and missed this verse. You know, certain things the, uh, evil Christians force us to erase certain parts of the Gemara. Any time it mentions anything in regards to Christianity and its idolatry and so on and so forth, they force us to erase it. It's called censura. Still, we still have the original copies, but you'll see, for example, in ArtScroll..." When you see the translation in the Gemara, Masechet Sotah, Avodah Zarah, Sanhedrin, Gittin, and I think in a few other places, when it mentions the whole issue that happened with JC Penny, it doesn't mention his name. It doesn't mention his name. In the original Gemara, it mentioned his name. The point being is that Rabbi Yisrael Salanter says to him, "No, it says in my Gemara that I have to go bring it to him." He says, "Where?"

3:00:18You see in the Gemara, Masechet Yevamot, page 78b, it says that at the time of David HaMelech, there was famine. People were starving. No food. Imagine, it's not that you are not eating because you're doing a mitzvah. Imagine you're not eating because you simply can't. You go into the fridge—empty. You go to the store—empty, out of business. You go to another store—empty. You go into the field—no animals, nothing, zero. Imagine. At the time of David HaMelech, there was famine for three years. David HaMelech, in his significance, was able to talk to Hashem. And he talked to Hashem and he asked, "Hashem, why?" Why are you doing this? Why are you starving your people? And Hashem responded to him. We talk to Hashem all the time. He doesn't always respond. David HaMelech responded. He said, David, my dear son, I'm doing it because when Shaul HaMelech died, when Shaul HaMelech died before you, the king before you, Shaul HaMelech, they didn't mourn him. They didn't mourn him well enough.

3:01:43Now you punish him. Oh, it's not just that. It's also because Shaul killed the Gibeonim. He went, he got ruach shtut in his mind. He went and killed a bunch of Gibeonim. Oh, they went to Givon and started killing people—all the Kohanim. Kind of murder tzaddikim. He killed tzaddikim. Wait, wait, hold on a second. Why are you mentioning we didn't mourn him because he was a tzaddik and give him the respect that we owe him, and then at the same token, in the same verse, at the same time, you're mentioning, wait a minute, I'm punishing you also because Shaul, the same tzaddik that we didn't mourn, killed a bunch of tzaddikim. It's either this one or this one. It's either this one or this one, no? He says, this is the midah of Hashem. This is the character trait of Hashem. This is what makes Hashem, Hashem. Even when He punishes you, before He punishes, He says, "What are the good things he did? What are the good things that he did? Oh wait, he killed a bunch of people. Yeah, he killed. Okay, fine. He killed a bunch of people. What are the good things he did? He did this, he did this, he did this." So He said, "I'm gonna punish because he killed a bunch of tzaddikim. He killed them. But then when I looked at what he did, I also said he's a tzaddik."

3:03:02Shaul was Kodesh Kodashim. Shaul Esther came from him. Shaul was Kodesh. So yes, he did something foolish and he made a mistake and he killed people and so on. But when I looked at all of his actions, he's still a tzaddik and he's a tzaddik and he died. You didn't warn him. That's why I punish you. Rabbi Yisrael M'Salan says that's why I have to go give this rabbi money. Why? Because I'm about to sue him. Because he did something wrong. But I have to fulfill the mitzvah that Hashem tells us to be like Hashem. So before I punish this rabbi, I have to look at the good things that he did. And I think about this rabbi. Yeah, he did some bad things. But he's a Talmid Chacham. He knows some Torah. He did some good things. So I have to give him the honor that a Talmid Chacham deserves. I have to give him the money myself. That's the midah of Ish Elokim. That is the character trait of a person who understands Hashem, who understands what Hashem wants from us. It's better said: to understand what Hashem wants from us. It's not just about yelling and screaming. It's not just about faking our relationship with Hashem, thinking we know what we don't know, but actually trying to look and understand the books to the extent of seeing what does Hashem do. What did He do here? Oh, I want to do that.

3:04:32What did Hashem do? Oh, He did that? Well, that's really hard. I want to do that. Now, one of the most difficult things that I've seen in the entire Torah is how to deal with people that talk about you. Because even the Chachamim, even the Chachamim said themselves that when someone says Lashon Hara about you, you take it to heart. Naturally. You're a human being. You'll take it to heart. It's very hard. But what did Hashem do? Unfortunately, there are Resha'im in the world that say Lashon Hara about Hashem every day. The first sin in creation was Lashon Hara against Hashem. By the serpent, by the snake. The snake came to Chava. He says to Chava, What? Why don't you eat from the Tree of Knowledge? Oh, Hashem said don't eat. Don't eat from this tree. No, Hashem just doesn't want you to be like Him. He's scared of you. He's scared you're going to be like Him and you're going to live like Him. You're going to know like Him. You're going to do like Him. You're going to be another god. He's scared of you. And that's why when Hashem, in Sefer Bereishit...

3:06:00When it came time for punishment, Hashem came to Adam HaRishon. He says, what did you do? Adam says, it's her fault, it's the wife you gave me. Instead of saying, Hashem, I'm sorry I did it, he blames Hashem. You gave me the wife. If you didn't give me the wife, it would be better. I wouldn't have done the sin. He blames the wife. He goes to Chava, Chava, what did you do? She says, it's the snake. You saw the whole thing, Hashem, it's the snake. When He goes to the snake, He doesn't say, "What'd you do?" Look at the verse. What did He say? "You're cursed." Why didn't He say, "What'd you do?" He asked Adam, "What'd you do?" He knew what Adam did. He asked Chava, "What'd you do?" He knew what Chava did. But He didn't ask the snake. Why didn't He ask the snake? Why? Because the snake had an excuse. The snake is the only one that had an excuse for what he did. What was the excuse? "I did my job."

3:07:02My job was to give them a test. You put me in the world to give them a test. That's my job. Okay, I took it too far, and I lied about You. I said Lashon Hara about You. To do the job, I cheated a little bit. I cheated. So Hashem says, that's why you are cursed. Because, number one, you have an excuse for doing your job, but you're still cursed. Why? Because you took it too far. I didn't tell you to do that. I didn't tell you to say lashon hara about Me. Because lashon hara is pure evil. There's no physical benefit whatsoever from lashon hara. But what happens with all the lashon hara that people say about Hashem every day? Hashem sits quiet. Hashem does not punish us for all the lashon hara we say about Him. All the complaints we bring to Hashem: "Hashem, why did you do this to me? Why did You give him the car and not me? Why did You give him the house and not me? Why did You give him a zivug and not me? Why did You give this? Why did You give that?" All this is complaints to Hashem. Now, if you're just talking to Hashem, that's one thing. But then you start telling other people: "Yeah, you know, Hashem gave him and not me. I don't know, I don't know." That's lashon hara. That's lashon hara against Hashem. Hashem sits quiet.

3:08:20Why? He wants to teach us what to do. In Reshit Chochmah, in Sha'ar HaAnavah, Perek Shlishi, it says one of the most extraordinary things that I've ever seen. If any one of us had any merits to such an extent that Eliyahu HaNavi would come to us, most likely, we'd make sure that anywhere we go, we'd say, make sure you put posters everywhere, say, Tzadik BaLa'ir. Why? Eliyahu HaNavi came to me. I'm not a regular person anymore. Like this one guy. Says Rabbi Ephraim, he says, listen, I'm not a simple person. I'm not a simple person. I'm somebody. So the Reshit Chochmah says, so someone that wants Eliyahu HaNavi to have

3:09:47The potential to have Eliyahu HaNavi be shown to him, first and foremost, there's one thing he needs to know: that he cannot be a kapdan. Meaning, if somebody does something bad to you and then comes and says, "I'm sorry," accept it. Why? Because Hashem accepts it. Menashe made every sin known to man. Whether it's immorality, incest, idolatry, every sin known to man. When the push came to shove, he did teshuva, Hashem accepted it. And that's why the Sefarim HaKedoshim say that Menashe is the king in the place of Baalei Teshuva. So if Hashem accepted the biggest rasha in history, somebody that violated something and did something to you, and he says, "I'm sorry," accept it. No problem. If he doesn't say, "I'm sorry," then obviously he's not sorry. And don't be one of these people who says, "No, he means it, but he didn't say it," because that's bad parenting. If your child did something bad,

3:11:11You have to teach them how to say "I'm sorry." Now, obviously, when they're one, two, or three years old, they still don't understand the significance of "sorry," so there's more leniency there. But if they're already six, seven, or eight years old and they don't want to say "I'm sorry," you cannot forgive them until they do. In your heart, you can forgive them, but you can't just say "Oh, everything's okay" if they don't say "I'm sorry." Why? Because you have to teach your child how to say "I'm sorry." It's one of the most important things in your life. To such an extent that the Zohar HaKadosh says that if Adam HaRishon would have simply said, "I'm sorry" to Hashem, instead of saying, "No, no, it's the wife that You gave me," if he would have simply said, "I'm sorry," Hashem would have said, "Oh, I'm sorry? Okay. Good. You don't get punished. You stay in Gan Eden. One word. I'm sorry. That's it." If you're a New Yorker, you combine the two words. I'm sorry. You want to stay in Gan Eden. You don't say I'm sorry? Okay, get out. Go work. Your kids will suffer. The descendants will suffer. Everybody suffers. Why? You didn't say I'm sorry. You didn't say I'm sorry. So to say I'm sorry is very important. It's the beginning of teshuva. You have to say to Hashem, I'm sorry. Not Hashem, I want. He knows you want. But He doesn't know if you're sorry. Until you say it.

3:12:40So if a person comes to you and he says, "I'm sorry," accept it. But what about situations where you're just surrounded by neshamaot? People like to have fun at your cheshbon, at your expense. They like to make fun of you. They like to say lashon hara about you. They like to do all types of things to speak against you. To expect all of those people to say, "I'm sorry," you're better off expecting Yam Suf to be split apart privately for you. It's not happening. Why? Mashiach hasn't arrived. So unless you're the Mashiach, it's not happening. The whole kehillah is not changing. The whole world is not changing. Hashem is doing it for a reason. He's making you the korban. He's making you the sacrifice of other people's lashon hara for a reason. Now it's not only kaparat avonot; Hashem does not do things only to punish you. Everything has to be good. But how could people making fun of you be any good? The same Reshit Chochmah, Sha'ar HaAnavah, continues later on at the end of that paragraph and says the following: "Sh'amar lo rabo, ha-Rav Yosef Gikatilla, alav ha-shalom,"

3:14:05for the person who will take to heart to fix his ways and to strengthen his actions in his path, and the one who will pursue humility In order to become complete, complete with Hashem, to be shalem, one of the names for Hashem is Shalom. Shalom comes from shalem, to be complete. Our mitzvot are supposed to be complete. So how does he get there? In order for him to get to the level of completion, he must become the person that people embarrass and not the person that embarrasses others. When he hears people making fun of him, he doesn't respond.

3:15:18He says, if he gets to such a level of shleimut, of completion, where he's worked on all of his middot, he's become truly humble, and now he wants to get to the ultimate level of humility and completion, then anytime he hears things about himself, he will not respond. Anytime there's bad things about him, he won't react. But what does it mean to not react? Not reacting means he doesn't see anything wrong with it. It's as if it didn't happen. He still acts towards everybody as if they're his friends. "How are you?" "Yeah, but he just made fun of you five minutes ago." "Yeah, yeah." "No, he didn't make fun of me." "No, no, he made fun of you right now, five minutes ago." "No, it's a mistake. Mistake." It's a different world, Rabotai. But what happens if you do this? This is a different world. This is a person that literally is so connected to Hashem. He says, if they spoke about me, that means I deserve it. That means Hashem has spoken about me. That means Hashem is saying it and He wants me to hear it. So there's nothing, they're just doing their job. Just like the snake. The snake is doing its job.

3:16:31You didn't see a maamar that Adam HaRishon wrote hate letters to the snake. "I hate you. Look what you did to me. I can't believe I'm gonna kill you next time I see you." He didn't write it. He didn't get mad at him. Why? He knew that was his job. He knew that was his job. When you understand that your surroundings are just doing their job that Hashem is pointing them there. He says, You will get to a level that you'll be aluv ve'lo ya'alov. They'll make fun of you. You'll be the embarrassed one, but you won't embarrass others. You'll hear them. You'll actually hear them say it, but you won't respond. If you do all of this, immediately, the Shekhinah will rest on top of you. And you will not need to learn from flesh and blood. Why? Hashem will become your chavruta. Hashem will become your chavruta. Why? You're so close to Him at that level, He's your chavruta. No one else can teach you. You won't have to come to my shiurim, I love. But this, rabotai, the deeper you think about it, the further it is from us. But the reason why I'm mentioning it to you is because that's what you have to shoot for. Shleimut.

3:17:57I told you, if you do XYZ, you can get a billion dollars. Every single one of you will run out and say, "I'm gonna do XYZ. Why? He gave me instructions to go make a billion dollars." The Reshit Chochmah is telling you, if you want infinite dollars, infinite mitzvot, infinite connection to Hashem, do this: work on your middot, fix them, become shalem, and don't say, "Oh yeah, I'm humble." If you say you're humble, you're not humble. The guy that says he's humble, he's not humble. The reality is that you cannot reach humility or any part of significance in regards to connection with Hashem without an enormous amount of Torah and fixing all of your other character traits. You cannot be cheap. You cannot be arrogant. You cannot be an angry gremlin. You cannot be all of these arrogant middot that people have. That's called Adam. That is your whole purpose in this world. That is the job that we have in this world, to become close to Hashem. Now, why is this so important? Because education of what I starts at home, it starts with you, the parents. If you do it, your kids will do it. If you don't do it, your kids are not going to do it. I

3:19:16gave a shiur at a certain place with a bunch of teenagers, and at the end of the shiur, some of the kids came up to me and asked some questions. One of the kids, who looked religious at least by appearance, said to me: "Yes, so based on everything you're saying, the only way to make money is if you do it, uh, like slow and legit?" So I was a little dumbfounded and I said, "Yes, the only way to make money is slow and legit." Yes, I repeated his question because I didn't know what he was asking. He's like, "Wow, that takes a long time." I said, "What do you propose? What do you mean?" He goes, "Yeah, I don't really care what happens to the customer. If he wants to buy something from me, if I'm selling it to him, what do I care what happens to him after?" I'm like, "Oh, so you want to be like Hitler? You want to be a drug dealer? You want to sell him drugs? He's going to die." But it's not your fault. It's like, yeah. Like he thought I was agreeing with him. Like, oh, you're Hitler. He goes, no, no, no, not Hitler. I'm like, yeah, you're Hitler. You're Hitler. You're a gangster. We'll keep on. He goes, no, I don't mean to be a gangster. I'm just saying he wanted it. I happen to have it. So I'm selling it to him. What's the problem? No, I'm supplying demand. What's the problem? This was supposedly a religious kid.

3:20:35Why? Why did the kid get to such a low level? Why? Because when he goes home, he doesn't hear about Moshe Rabbeinu. When he goes home, he doesn't hear about Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov. He hears about Rabbi Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin. He hears about money. He hears that money is God on Shabbat. talk about money on Shabbat, they talk about work on Shabbat, and even during the time when there's a break between the yeshiva sessions, you know, there's bein hazmanim. There's bein hazmanim. The kids study all year, they go home, and he wants to relax a little bit. So, how about we go away? Can we go to the park? Can we go, I don't know, canoeing or something? Can we just go mountain biking or something? Something! I've been studying all year. But no, it's a lot of money. Just go to a local park and play some basketball. Daba's too cheap to take his kids to the park to go for a little break. So, when the kid comes back to yeshiva, he hears the stories of all the other yeshiva kids. One guy went canoeing, another one went bike riding, and everyone went somewhere except him. Why didn't he go? Because his father says, "Oh, it's too expensive. It's too expensive. It's too expensive." So, what does the kid learn?

3:21:58The kid learns, ah, it's not too expensive because all my other friends, their fathers didn't say it's too expensive. So what does it mean? It means my father is cheap. So what am I going to do? I'm going to leave this yeshiva, make a lot of money, and give my kids what my father didn't want to give me. He turns the mitzvah into an aveirah. The kid thinks that money, since the father is either too cheap or always talks about money, is God. That's where there's a certain place that invites me, and I tell them, no, I don't want to go. There's one place. All the other places, if they invite me, I go. There's one place I tell them I don't want to go. I'm not coming. Why? Because I know in reality, the guy that actually invites me thinks I'm entertainment for his kids. He has horrible middot, but he wants me to fix his two kids. So when I go and give a lecture over there, I see that the whole time it is two kids that look like they're not Jewish at all. And I see him looking at them, looking at them, and I see he's the problem, not them. Them I can fix, him no. He's a lost cause, so I don't go. Why? It's a waste of time. It's a waste of time. I have to fix him first. I love giving lectures to kids. I see pure souls. I see people. That's the future. They haven't been tainted with sins like the rest of us.

3:23:23You give me a thousand kids, all of them do teshuva tomorrow. Or in a week, or in a month, but they do teshuva. Why? They're all pure souls. They want to do something good. Which means that all of these bad kids, it's not bad neshamot, it's bad parents. It's bad parents. It's parents that tell them, listen, go to the beach with the rest of your friends on Shabbat. It's no big deal, enjoy. It's go to the casino, go hang out with your friends, have fun. Here's 500 bucks, here, enjoy. I love you. Go do this. Go do this. Just get out of my house. I could do what I really want to do. Just get out of my house. All of these parents that kick their kids out, just get out of my house. Go do something. Go, go, go, go, go. Or when they're actually next to them, they don't even pay attention to them. They're on the phone, or they're talking about money, or they're talking to their company, or they have Leil HaSeder, and instead of teaching their kids what happened in Yetziat Mitzrayim, they pay attention to their guests. Instead of telling their kids, "Look, children, the biggest mitzvah of Pesach is to teach your kids what happened in Egypt," you invite the whole block to your house, thinking you're Moshe Rabbeinu or Avraham Avinu together, inviting everybody, so you want to entertain the whole community. And you forgot about your kids. You didn't fulfill the mitzvah of Pesach. You go up to the Shamayim and it says you are Mechalel Pesach. Why? Your kids are ignorant. They don't know what Pesach is about.

3:24:51Because you want to show off to the whole neighborhood how big your house is. It's all bad parenting. It's all bad parenting. A couple came to the Steipler Gaon and they said, "What do we need to know about raising kids?" He said, "You're too late." "No, no, no, we don't have any kids yet. We don't have any kids." He said, "Yeah, you're late. You're late." They asked, "Why late? We don't have kids. How can we be late?" He replied, "You have to fix yourself first. You have to fix yourself first. Why? Because if you do it, your kids are going to do it." These little messiahs, they can do it. Why? They have a pure neshama. It hasn't been taken by sin yet. But if you teach your kids that money is so important that it's more important than anything else, more important than Torah, what do you think the kid's going to want? He's going to want money. If you teach your kid that you're allowed to scream at ima or abba and treat them like a friend, treat them like an enemy, what do you think they're going to do? They're going to scream and treat ima and abba like they're strangers, like they're enemies.

3:25:51It's time for us to do teshuva. If it's not for ourselves, it's for our kids. And please, do your kids a favor. If you're not gonna do teshuva, don't have them. Don't have kids. Don't have kids. If you're not gonna do teshuva, don't have kids. Why? You're ruining them anyway. If you plan on sending your kids to public school, don't have kids. It's better off that a Jewish kid dies and not goes to public school. Because all he's gonna learn in public school is that he came from an ape. That there's no God. And the best case scenario, his girlfriend is Christian and it's okay for a Jew to be with a Christian. The best case scenario, meaning Neveila treifa and something in between. It doesn't get, Rabotai, if you're not gonna do teshuva, don't have kids. Because they're pure. Why are you gonna ruin them? On the other hand, if we do teshuva...

3:27:04If we help ourselves do teshuva, then it becomes much easier to help Am Yisrael do teshuva. Then it becomes much easier to teach our neighbors, our friends, our children, and everybody else to do teshuva. Why? Because then they see the product. It's not just words anymore. They see, oh wow, since this guy did teshuva 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago, he really changed. He's much calmer. He's much nicer. He's much more generous. He's much more this. He's much more that. All the good things. Wow, what's the secret? No secret. You have it too. It's available. It's called Torah. No secret. Let the actions do the talking. Let the actions do the talking. But again, like I said, it's all about middot. Middot is what built the Beit HaMikdash. Middot is what destroyed it. we have an opportunity to build it. And the last thing we're going to say is the following: It's known that Hashem gave us a gift called memory and memory loss. Forgetfulness is a gift from Hashem because if we forget something that's terrible, it's to our benefit.

3:28:27So, for example, if somebody dies, and we remember it every day of our life, it's a nightmare. If something bad happened to us, and we remember it every day of our life, which some people have this disease, it's a nightmare, it's a nightmare of a life. But if we forget it, it's a chesed, it's a kindness from Hashem. So when... The shevatim came to Yaakov Avinu and they told him, Yosef HaTzadik, your son is gone, he died. Yaakov immediately went into mourning and cried and mourned over Yosef day and night. But the Torah says that after a year... Mourning did not stop like it would normally stop for an average human being. The average human being is supposed to stop mourning the death of a loved one after a year. Not because they don't like the person anymore, but simply because Hashem gave them a gift to forget that pain to the same magnitude that it was originally. What is it like if you, for example,

3:29:42had a difficult medical experience, or you broke a leg, or you got, you know, cut somewhere. Initially, the pain is enormous. Later on, it's not as painful. It's painful, but not as it was when you first got hurt. But after a year, Yaakov didn't forget. In fact, after 22 years, he didn't forget. 22 years he mourned as if he had just found out that his son died. Because we find out that the whole time Yosef was alive, the neshama of Yaakov was never able to let go. In reality, he was finding out that Yosef died every day because he never really died. You can't let go of something that didn't go. This is why we mourn the Beit HaMikdash still now. On one hand, you're saying that the Beit HaMikdash was destroyed 2,000 years ago, 1950 years ago. But yet we're expected to mourn it every year. In fact, we're expected to mourn it every day. How can we mourn something if it's already been gone for more than a year? How can we mourn something that, in fact, has been gone for more than 1950 years?

3:31:10We mourn it because the same Torah that says the Beit HaMikdash was destroyed 1950 years ago also says that the Beit HaMikdash, the third one, is alive and well and is sitting in Shamayim and waiting for Mashiach Tzidkeinu to arrive and is still alive and waiting for us to do teshuva. We cry because the actual Beit HaMikdash is still here. We just have to earn it. We mourn it because it never left. It's still here. It's in Shamayim. It will arrive as the Gemara in Masechet Rosh Hashanah says; it will arrive in one piece. There's nothing for you to build. You're mourning because it's still here, meaning all you have to do is, please, teshuva. And as long as you refuse to do teshuva, You'll continue feeling this mourning, feeling the sorrow, and crying and sitting on the floor, having to live in this forsaken world, suffering through the anguish and pain of this world. Why? Why continue torturing your neshama? Simply do teshuva, shuvu banim, come back to Hashem, just come back. Why? It's for your own benefit.

3:32:30It's for your own benefit. Be'ezrat Hashem, this will give us a little chizuk, not only for today but also for the rest of the year to do teshuva, to influence others to do teshuva. And Be'ezrat Hashem, find out next year that Mashiach Tzidkenu, just as the Nevi'im and the Chachamim said, Mashiach Tzidkenu was actually born on Tisha B'Av. Mashiach Tzidkenu was born on Tisha B'Av and will also yig'al otanu be-Tisha B'Av. Baruch Adonai le'olam. Amen ve-amen.