New Video! Earthquakes, Elenin and the Land of Israel

My first YouTube video:



Please like this video and comment on Youtube if you feel so inclined (so far there are far too many anti-Israel comments)!

Some pearls of wisdom from Rebbetzin Jungreis

I had the pleasure of hearing Rebbetzin Jungreis speak on Shabbos and wanted to share with you a few pearls of wisdom from her talk:

• The most important thing to look for in a marriage partner is a good heart. All other qualities (intelligence, sense of humor, financial situation, physical appearance, commonalities) can be either built-up or h"v corrupted by a good heart or a bad heart. 

• In order to truly take in advice we need to cultivate a lev shomea. When Shlomo HaMelech was granted one wish from an angel, he asked for a listening heart. Most people listen with their ears; listening with your heart means that the advice or Torah will truly integrate with your personality and start to materialize. 

• The answer of the Jewish people to all that has befallen us is rising up again and building bayit ne'eman b'Yisrael - raising a Jewish home. When praying for a soulmate, one should not seek to address merely their own loneliness, but rather one should pray to Hashem to have the opportunity to raise children and grandchildren who will be steeped in Torah and mitzvot. (On this note, Rebbetzin Jungreis speaks of children and grandchildren broadly and spoke to the whole audience as her grandchildren).

• How often do we walk around Yerushalayim, crying out of the beauty and amazement that we are here, back in our land in great numbers? The rise of the state of Israel is the fulfillment of the prophecies of all the sages, and we are on the path towards our ultimate redemption, may it come speedily in our days.  

 

The Tikkun of the Heart and Rav Ginsburgh Shlita

  

For the refuah shlema for HaRav Yitzchak Feivish Ginsburgh ben Brainah Malka Shlita who suffered a mild cardiac arrest this week during a speaking tour in Spain. The Rav is now out of the hospital and feeling better and will return to Eretz Yisrael next week. Before Shabbat the Rav said that the idea of Parshas Shlach is to explore הארץ (the land) which in Yiddish also means 'heart' (dos 'hartz'). His student further directed those interested in the Tikkun of the Heart to read Likkutei Torah of the Alter Rebbe on this week's Torah portion. 

This shall be fringes for you, and when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord to perform them, and you shall not wander after your hearts and after your eyes after which you are going astray.
(Numbers 15, 39)

The Alter Rebbe explains (my translation):

To understand the matter of the heart: When thought emerges from the mind, it comes suddenly. When thought is still in the mind, it is so obscure and concealed that even the person himself cannot grasp it. But when it begins to emanate from the mind, right before it is revealed, it becomes very excited from its imminent revelation. The heart is the existence of a thing, because when something takes root firmly in the heart, it will never depart from there. Not so the case when the thought is only in the mind--it can depart from him suddenly. The heart is rooted in the physical passions because she is closer to the body. Therefore, even if a person grasps with his mind that he must cleave himself to God with all his soul, and that this is the purpose of everything, nonetheless, the heart can still lead him after his bodily desires, as the our sages said '[the eyes see] and the heart desires'. Therefore a person must be keen to fight the battle of the mind and the heart, to turn the heart as well, using the full strength of his mind's grasping of God's greatness, until the heart too will desire to cleave to Him.

This is the meaning of the two levels, tzaddik and chasid. A tzaddik is the one about whom it says 'Who is strong? He who conquers his inclination,' that one must always fight his battle, and be called a tzaddik. Not so the case of one who makes a practice of contemplating [God's greatness] so strongly that the thing is rooted in the heart too, such that he is completely surrendered by nature, and will not under any circumstances move from there. This one is called a chasid.

Measure for measure

A generation after the Arizal, the Jerusalem Kabbalist Rabbi Nathan Shapira wrote the book Tuv Ha'aretz on the supreme value of the land of Israel according to the Arizal and the Zohar. Rabbi Shapira himself made aliyah from Krakow, but spent the end of his life on shlichus in Italy. In another sefer, Emek HaMelech, Rabbi Shapira wrotes that "were it not for the prayers of the people of Jerusalem who pray at the Kotel in tears and supplication, these are the perushim and the great chasidim, the world would not exist G-d forbid, and for them it says Mount Zion will be a refuge, these are the Jews who live there and occupy themselves with the world to come." (Emek HaMelech p. 116c)

In one passage in Tuv Ha'aretz, Rabbi Nathan writes a bold critique of the rich stratum of his people living in the diaspora, extolling the special status of living in the land of Israel before Mashiach (my best translation):

Know that a tradition is in our hands that on the day when Mashiach will come with the ingathering of the exiles to the land of Israel, on that very day there will be seven thousand of the children of Israel, and on that very day the dead of the Land will live, and on that very day the walls of fire in Jerusalem will depart...and on that very day the dead of of the Land of Israel will return in the time of their life (b'et chiyutam) [and become] a new spiritual being, and the seven thousand who are alive will all become a new being (bria chadasha), a spiritual body, like the body of the primordial human who sinned and like the body of Moshe Rabbeinu, and all will hover in the air and soar like eagles, and all this before the eyes of the ingathered exiles.

And when the ingathered exiles see that their brothers have become a new being and hover in the air to go and dwell in the lower Garden of Eden to learn Torah from His mouth, blessed be He, then the ingathered exiles will fell a tremor in their hearts and feel great anguish and will ֿbecome incensed with the King Mashiach and will say: For are not we children of Israel like them? From where did they merit to become spiritual in body and soul and not us?

And the King Mashiach will say: It is already well-known that all the attributes of the Holy Blessed one [operate according to the principle of] measure for measure. Those who lived outside of the Land of Israel and made an effort to come to the Land so as to merit a pure soul, who did not take refuge in their wealth nor in their physical body, who came by sea and by land and did not fear to drown in the sea or become captive to harsh masters, in return for treating their spirit and their soul as essential, and not their body and their money, for this they returned as spiritual, measure for measure. 

Yet you, who could have come to the Land like them, but neglected to come because of love of money (chemdat mamon), who worried for your wealth and your body, treating them as essential, and your soul and spirit as marginal, for this, in the same way, you have remained physical, measure for measure...

And for the money that you desired hereby God blessed be He will give you money...and they who did not worry themselves over their body and their money, but over their spirit alone, God will make them into a new being, and usher them into the lower Garden of Eden.

Rectifying the sin of the spies

Mountains around Jerusalem

This post is my own commentary on some of the passages brought in Rav Kook Torah on the Parsha, a weekly teaching assembled and translated by Rabbi Chanan Morrison.

In 1908, Rav Kook wrote that we still suffer from the sin of the spies today, and that in our hands lies the opportunity to rectify the spies' error and enter the land of Israel with all our gusto. 

The glory of the land of Israel can be hidden at times; it is our job to clear away the clutter and announce to ourselves and others the boundless light that lies in Eretz Yisrael's beauty and holiness. A hidden paradise on earth has been bequeathed to us, each generation since 1948 more than the one before it, b"H. Rav Kook emphasized not only the physical beauty apparent in the Land, but also the unique air of Israel (avira d'eretz yisrael) that from time immemorial was the raw material of prophecy:

The quality of delightful holiness that Torah scholars seeking the holy may find in the Land of Israel does not exist at all outside the Land. I myself can attest to this unique quality, to a degree commensurate with my small worth. (Igrot HaRe'iyah, vol. I, pp. 112-113)

How many of us deliberate (including myself) the pros and cons of living in Israel, as if a decision pertaining to the most delicate levels of the soul can be approached like a business deal? Well, you get a year of aliyah payments, free tuition, free health care and a discount on property tax. On the other hand, you have to buy all new furniture, deal with heap-loads of bureaucracy, lower your standards for your first job or two, and get through an August. But can you really approach the question of aliyah like this (I ask myself)? Can you really approach love like this? How silly would it sound if you overheard a conversation weighing marriage over such considerations? How humiliating to a heart testifying to true love! 

The truth is, love is a creative force - the love of the Jewish people for Israel is an integral part of the land's holiness. According to Rabbi Judah HaLevi, the Jewish people, the commandments, the land of Israel, the building of the Temple and the Hebrew language are all parts of a well-oiled machine which when assembled properly over millenia of Jewish history, produces prophecy - prophecy in the sense of the return of the living, Divine presence to the hearts and minds of the Jewish people, through their writings, their art, their blogs and their prayers, their Torah and their love for one another. Without any one of these components, the machine cannot work. The land is barren without its people, and the people are homeless without their land. 

It is told that once a Jewish tourist shared with the Rav his calculation of the albeit very real pros and cons of moving to Israel, concluding in the end that it was not worthwhile. In his characteristic non-confrontational but bold and thought-provoking response, the Rav responded:

Before the Israelites entered the Land in the time of Moses, they first needed to kill Sichon, the king of Heshbon. This teaches us that one should come to the Land of Israel bli heshbon - without making calculations.

An from where does our love for Eretz Yisrael spring? It is irreducible to explanation, because explanation is based on things that you can define and limit, and the holiness of Eretz Yisrael originates in the place from where the limits themselves originate...And yet even so, how can such love be expressed, to others, and to the object of affection? Through action. The secret of teshuva, expressed most extensively in the writings of the first Chabad Rebbe, Reb Schenur Zalman of Liadi, is that physical acts - in the form of mitzvot - involving the body and objects and senses of the physical world - can be vessels for the most sublime of sensitivities of the human soul and of the supernal realms - those that evade our mental thought processes and linguistic capacities. Those who come to Israel and can do nothing but let their knees fall in thanksgiving and adoration for the land upon which the soles of their feet can step, know how such a process of rectification begins:

The Talmud records that Rabbi Abba would demonstrate his great love for the Land of Israel by kissing the rocks of Acre (Ketubot 112a) as he returned to the Land. What was so special about these rocks that Rabbi Abba would kiss them?

Rav Kook explained that if Rabbi Abba had kissed the soil of Eretz Yisrael, we would understand that his love for the Land was due to the special mitzvot that are fulfilled with its fruit - tithes, first fruits, the sabbatical year, and so on. The soil, which produces fruit, signifies the importance and holiness of the Land through the mitzvot ha-teluyot ba'aretz.

But Rabbi Abba's love for the Land was not dependent on any external factors - not even its special mitzvot (see Avot 5:16; Orot p. 9). Rabbi Abba cherished the intrinsic holiness of Eretz Yisrael. He recognized that the special qualities of the Land – such as its receptivity to prophecy and enlightenment - go far beyond the holiness of those mitzvot connected to agriculture. Therefore, he made a point of kissing its barren rocks and stones. 

May each and every soul and body of the Jewish people be rounded up speedily to reunite and congregate in the land that is our inheritance from our holy fathers and mothers, and may we soon sing a new song in Jerusalem to the living God, whose love and justice will be apparent for all to see and contemplate like water fills the seas!