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Parshas Bamidbar We have the counting of Klal Yisrael. In general, what ages did they count from? Very good, from twenty to sixty. However, the pasuk tells us, "Aches Matelevi lo tifkod ve'Esro Hashem lo tisa b'toch bnei Yisrael." Shevet Levi was not counted with everybody else. Now it's interesting because when Shavuot Levi is counted, they're not counted from the ages of 20 to 60. Shavuot Levi is counted from 30 days old and above. And what's interesting when you look at the actual numbers is that you would imagine that if everybody else is being counted from 20 to 60 and Shevet Levi is being counted from 30 days old, we would have expected that Shevet Levi's numbers would be significantly larger than everybody else. What's interesting is that the total number in the Torah is only twenty-two thousand. So twenty-two thousand means that Shevet Levi was very small.
Not only that, the Levim who were actually capable of doing the avodah in the Mishkan from the ages of thirty to fifty, there were only eight thousand five hundred of them. So Shavat Levi, we would have expected them to be the most, and in fact, they're very, very small. The Remban raises this question that even though there's a much broader counting range, they are significantly smaller than all the other Shvatim. The Remban explains because the pasuk tells us in Mitzrayim, the more they afflicted them. The more that they multiplied, and what do Chazal say? How many births did they have at one time? Six. Very good. Shavat Levi was not part of the Shebut of Mitzrayim, since Shavat Levi was not being oppressed. The Ramban says, therefore, they didn't have six births at once. Makes sense that now in the Midbar when they're doing the census for Klal Yisrael. Since Shavat Levi didn't have six children at once, the Ramban explains. It makes sense why they're significantly smaller than everybody else.
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The question for us is two things. Number one So what is this meant to teach us? So the Torah is telling us that Shavat Levi was significantly smaller because they wouldn't, they weren't part of the Shebub in Mitzrayim. Since they weren't part of the Shebub in Mitzrayim, they didn't have six children at once. Great. But anything that the Torah tells us, it tells us in order for us to shteig. So what's the lesson here that we're supposed to learn from in order to shteig? The second question is why isn't Shevet Levi counted along with everybody else? As the pasuk specifically tells us, they're not counted with everybody else. They're counted individually. The obvious question is why. Rashi addresses that question, and Rashi says, "Kedaihu ligyon shemelach lios nimne lavado." It makes sense that since Shevet Levi is considered the legion of the king, they have a special role in the service of the Mishkan, so they're counted separately.
So that answers the question of why they're counted separately, but it doesn't answer a different question. Look at the pasuk. Aches Matei Levi low tifkod, so they shouldn't be counted with everybody else. That we understand. Why aren't they counted with everybody else? Because they have a special designation. They serve at Kadosh Baruch Hu in the Mishkan. They have a special. They're special legion to the King. But then the pasuk says, "Vesrosam lo tisa." What do those words mean? And you shall not what? Vesrosam their heads lo tisa. You shall not uplift. So it's a form of counting. But it's interesting. It's not just enough to say count them separately. It's not only the counting that has to happen separately. It's also this other type of counting. Ve'es rosham lo tisa. Don't lift up their heads. Why specifically does the Torah use this double lashon of don't do this and don't do that? The point is they're separate and distinct.
Then the pasuk should just say aches matay levi lo tefkod betoch bnei yisrael. Don't count them with everybody else. So it sounds like there's something here about Shevet Levi that specifically not only do we not count them, we don't lift up their heads, whatever that means. We don't do that either. Because they're the legion of the king. They don't get that. I want to share with you what I think is a pretty profound idea. It goes something like this: There's two types of growth. And. On some level, we all go through both of them, but some people go through one growth more than the other. The first type of growth is what we'll call natural growth. Natural growth means, in general, life is good. In general, my life is calm. And because things are basically good in my life The development of a person is gradual. It's slow. It's normal. It's beautiful. There's no like. There's no pressure.
There's nothing pressurized about your growth. Halavai, we should all be zocher to such a life. That's one type of growth. And when life is smooth The growth is natural and organic. Why? Because I'm living from the dimension of my ordinary self. There's no need for me to go deeper. I don't need to go deeper. Life is working, and my ordinary self is showing up to life. I'm growing from there. That's one type of growth. Then there's another type of growth. We're going to call this growth the growth of redemption. Redemptive growth. Redemptive growth happens when life becomes very narrow. When there's a tremendous amount of pressure There's a tremendous amount of pain. The things that we're going through are very, very hard. And in that space The reason why growth happens is because my ordinary self is not enough to get me through. If I continue to live life the way I ordinarily did, I'll never be able to survive this moment.
Since the old tools that I have in my tool bag are not enough, my surface self is not capable of managing the situation that I'm in. I'm forced to reach deeper into myself. And what happens when I reach deeper into myself? I discovered a set of skills that I did not know I had. And if I didn't go through this pressure and my life didn't become narrow, I never would have discovered that these tools exist to begin with. You ever see people like this? They're one way until they go through something, and then they come out on the other end and they're almost unrecognizable. Like the person that they were It's like bears no resemblance to the person they are. Why did that happen? It happened because they had to shed their old skin, because their ordinary self was not capable of getting them through that very difficult condition that they found themselves in.
So they have to let go. Not that they're letting go of their personality; they're still themselves. But they have a whole new personality that they draw strength from. Now we think And this is wrong. We think that when a person goes through this Now it's like they became a new person. And that's not true. It's not that they became a new person. It's that they were forced to discover something that was always true about themselves. But they never knew that it was true about themselves. Because life was working, they could draw from their ordinary self. They had no reason to discover things about themselves. An interesting way of thinking about it is like this: What came first? Was it because Klal Yisrael was in Mitzrayim that we developed this superhuman strength of surviving under the most horrific conditions? That's one way of thinking about it. Or did we always have the strength to survive these horrific conditions, but we never needed to draw from the wellspring of that strength because we had not yet faced those horrific conditions?
Do you hear the deeper way of understanding it? In there's a phrase Netzach Yisrael Lo Yishakar. The Jewish people are forever eternal. It will never be undone. In Mitzrayim, did we learn in Mitzrayim how to be eternal, or did Mitzrayim reveal the fact that we were always eternal? I might never have known how indestructible I was until I went through the Gehenna of destruction, and it turns out I'm capable of getting to the other side. So we say a neshama is infinite. It's not that your neshama is infinite because you went through pain. Pain reveals that your neshama is infinitely bigger than the pain that you're going through. And so what happens is that when a person goes through something very difficult, lo aleinu, we're not asking for it. But when a person goes through something very difficult, it's not that they become somebody new.
Is that the person that was buried underneath now becomes revealed? One of my closest friends in the world has gone through a tremendous amount of pain in his life. I don't want to get into the details because it's public, and I'm not again, even though his life is very public, and I don't think he would mind me sharing. There's no need for me to share, but I can promise you that the things that he's gone through in his life are significantly more challenging than what 99.9% of us went through in our lives, and I can say that confidently without knowing what everybody in this room went through. But suffice it to say that he lost both of his parents, illness runs in his family, crazy stuff that none of us should ever go through. He told me many times that within 60 seconds of meeting a person, he can tell right away if they've ever been through Gehenna.
You can tell. If you haven't gone through Gehenna, you won't be able to see the signs. But if you've gone through something really difficult It changes you so much. This is what he said. It draws out that inner strength to such a degree that you can recognize the battle-hardened lines in somebody else's face. And he says you can see it because if you're a person who had to reach down into yourself. And draw out that deeper dimension. It leaves an imprint on you. And he said, I can tell right away from speaking to you. Right away. I'm speaking 60 seconds. You can tell right away. It's almost like you can tell right away if somebody's in therapy. Talking about they just use therapeutic language. Like no, a 10 year old is like, can you hold space for me? Saying it's not like the way a 10 year old speaks. But if you have a 16 year old girl who's like I guess what I'm looking for is somebody.
To really just be a witness to what I'm going through as I journey through this becoming. Why do you know that? It's because you went to therapy. If you didn't go to therapy, you might not recognize that type of language. It's the same thing; it leaves an imprint on you. If you're a person who had to almost like flipping yourself inside out, like there's this ordinary self, and we all go through life with that ordinary self, which is beautiful and it's great. And then there are people that they've had to tear off the outer trimmings of that ordinary self to reveal their truest self. What the interesting thing about Paro is? There's only one thing that Paro can't control. Paro finds himself in like a Chinese finger trap. You know what a Chinese finger trap is? A Chinese finger trap is when you have it on two fingers. The harder you pull, the more you get stuck. The secret of getting out of a Chinese finger trap is you actually have to let go, which is a very deep Torah by itself.
But there's one thing that Paro can't control, and what can't he control? He can't control the neshama of a yid. That's the one thing that's not in Paro's control. Because even when he says, "I'm going to destroy the neshama of a yid," and I'm going to persecute them so mercilessly that they're going to lose all sense of hope and all sense of dignity. What happens in Mitzrayim? Not only does that life force not disappear, but it actually reveals a level of greatness that could only be revealed through Paro's persecution. So Paro stuck. He feels like he has to persecute Klal Yisrael because they remain a threat to him. On the other hand, every time he tries to persecute Klal Yisrael, they become even greater. And this is the secret. A lot of people say pain makes us great. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. If Chassvah Shalom, somebody goes through a tragedy and they're very young. Then they almost immediately say this line. They go, "Yeah, it's very hard that I went through this, but it made me the person that I am today." It's like, no That's not the way that works. It's not like you went through this tragedy a month ago or even six months ago, and you get to say, "It made me the person that I am today." That title of "It made me the person that I am today" is a huge
Unbelievable achievement. That requires years of work. If you went through something, you have to really sit in that and process it and go through it and understand it and become through that. That's a title that you have to earn. It's not necessarily true that pain makes us great, which is why none of us want pain for ourselves. What is true is that pain has the ability to reveal. That we are connected has the ability. Pain has the ability to reveal that we're connected to something greater than our pain. So the pain could crush us But it doesn't. Why doesn't the pain crush us? Again, if we choose for the pain not to crush us, because we were larger than the pain that we were facing, and we didn't know it until we faced that pain. Does that make sense? It's the same. You are always greater than your pain, but whether or not you actually achieve that.
That's anybody's choice. And so, this is what happens to Klali Yisrael in Mitzrayim. Hashem reveals a level of explosiveness that could only have been revealed through the suffering of Mitzrayim. Listen to the words: Kaasher Ya Anu Oso. Cain, Yirba, the Cain Yifrots. Why did they have six children at once? Why was everybody in Klal Yisrael being persecuted unbelievably? When we were growing up, how did we think about it? We thought about it like we were being unbelievably persecuted. There was a miracle that Klal Yisrael had six births at once. So we think of it as two different movements. But what's the Remban revealing to us? The Remban is revealing to us. And this Ramban is gorgeous. If you understand the depth of this Ramban, what is the Ramban saying? It was because of the persecution that they had six births at once. There was the explosiveness. They were literally giving birth. Giving birth here could be understood not just physically but metaphorically also. Those that were going through the suffering of Mitzrayim and the suffering of Mitzrayim was unbelievable. If you read the Midrashim, it'll be clear to you that the worst day of the Holocaust was still much better than the best day in Eretz Yisrael. Eretz Yisrael was a place of psychological torture, emotional torture, physical torture. It was a horrific place.
And because they were doing that to them, they had six children. The explosive birth that took place in Kibbutz Yisrael was not alongside the pain they went through. It was because of the pain they went through. Shavat Levi never went through that pain. So now here we are in the midbar And Kallah Yisrael is being counted. Their numbers are significantly smaller, even though we count them from thirty days and up. They're only twenty-two thousand people. Why is Shavat Levi so small? What is the Rebbe telling us? Because they never went through the pain of Mitzrayim. And because they didn't go through the pain of Mitzrayim, they didn't have the same explosive birth. Does that start to make sense? Isn't it amazing how one random pasuk gives us such an unbelievable depth of psychological insight? When a person learns Torah, you have to know. Every word, every letter of Torah is so precious. It reveals to us something about the way that we're meant to live our lives. The fact that Shevet Levi was smaller—it's not just random. What's the Torah teaching us? Shevet Levi was smaller because they lived on the plane of the ordinary, and they were never forced to reach those truer dimensions of who they really were and access those strengths to become the explosive birth that everybody else had.
That is the first move of tonight's year. So far so good. Let's go a little bit deeper now. That's one way of looking at Shavuot Levi. There is, however, another way of looking at Shavuot Levi, and this comes from a—let's say another question that we have to ask ourselves. If you can only get. To that explosive birth through the pain, what's the next obvious question that we should ask? So then, why didn't Shavit Levi get it? Why is Shavit Levi left out? If this pain, which is terrible, lo alenu, none of us want it, but if it's the way that we reach into deeper dimensions of ourselves in order to reveal our true nature, where now we have access to these unbelievable strengths, why did Shavit Levi get left out? So for this, we have to understand. That up until now the way I framed it was there's your ordinary self and then there's this deeper truer self that can only emerge when you know life becomes difficult. But maybe there's another way to look at Shavit Levi here as well.
There's something called your yichida shevenefesh. Have you ever heard of that phrase, the yichida of the nefesh? This is anyone here, Labavitch? So if you're labavish, then you needed to have heard of this. The yichidush abenefesh is what they call in Chasidus your pintel yid. If your name is on the back of a chayenu, you must know the word yichidush abenefesh. The pintel yid. What does it mean? A pintel yid. A pintel yid is the part of your soul. It's the quintessence of your soul. It's the deepest dimension of your soul. It's the part that could never be destroyed. Not only is it the part that could never be destroyed, it's the part that remains unaffected even when destruction is happening all around you. A deeper way of looking at Shavit Levi is not that Shavit Levi is your ordinary self, and then everybody else went through the deeper things.
It's even more than that. Shavit Levi represents the deepest dimension of the Jewish soul. The part that is absolutely pure, the part that is always calm, never broken, when everything else in your life is falling apart, it's that yichidush abenefesh that remains absolutely whole. The belief in this—if you understand what I'm saying right now—the belief in this—it's really everything. It's really everything. L'mashal. Let's say a person went through something ridiculously hard in their lives. How do you know that they can recover? How do you know that they can recover? Everything in their life appears to be broken. Terrible things happen to them. If you're in a therapist's office, where does the therapist have the chutzpah? Where does the therapist have the temerity to think about this person that they can rebuild their lives? How do you know that they can be rebuilt? Maybe they're so far gone, maybe they're so broken that nothing could ever save this person.
After the trauma that they went through, it's not possible for them to rebuild. Because they went to therapy, they obviously want it. That's a very therapeutic answer. If they walked in the door, at least they did. Maybe their mother pulled them through the door. I'll ask the question a little bit differently. Maybe it'll make a little bit more sense this way. Though I happen to like that answer very much. Spoken as some. I won't say that. The. It's okay. Everyone can gain from it, and I admire the courage. Let me phrase it a little bit differently. Maybe it'll make more sense this way. As sensitive But something I want to try to definitely answer That you only get those amounts of challenges. Correct, but even that needs to be understood because let's say I feel what I got is beyond my capacity. Are they Jewish? Let's say. So that the Ben-Zvi. So that's the answer to the question. I'm building up the question. You gotta let me build up the question. You gotta let me cook.
It's part of my fora. For those of you that are not cool enough to know what that means, that's called from aura. In the Benot Torah Institute, we for a farm. What was the other word we used? Frizz. We got from Riz. We got frizz. We got frizz. But say that. Let's not lose ourselves to the brain rot. So now it goes like this. After the Holocaust, doesn't it take a tremendous amount of chutzpah to think I can rebuild from the ashes? You lost everything. It is a tremendous amount of chutzpah. Think about it. Chutzpah! Unbelievable chutzpah! Unbelievable, because think about let's think about this. Forget the fact that six million were killed. That is an astronomical number that we don't even begin to understand. Six million is so inconceivable. Hasidic rebbe's who lost their wives, lost their children, lost their entire communities came to America and had barely a minion of Hasidim, and somehow today they build Satmar and Nuskever and Lubavitch. What the Friedeckereba went through—he lost half his Hasidim in Russia who couldn't get out, and then he went from place to place until he went to America. How he got to America in the 1940s was a miraculous thing.
He came here with kumat nothing. It's unbelievable. How do you have the chutzpah to be able to say we're going to build yeshivas and we're going to build shuls and we're going to build mikvaos and we're going to build gemachim? Where do you get the chutzpah to say I'm going to be able to do this? People don't. There's a thing in boxing. At some point, you just don't get off of the mat anymore. If you're fighting someone who's significantly larger than you, if you're fighting—back in the day, his name was Mike Tyson, was like the best boxer. If you're fighting Mike Tyson, I can't imagine what it must have been like to be punched by that behemoth. And he manages, and you're like, you hit the mat. At some point, the guy in the corner is going, "Stay down." There's a thing called "stay down." The Holocaust was beyond the punch. Where did they get the chutzpah to say we could rebuild this thing? We're sitting here today in Yerushalayim on Lail Yom Yerushalayim, and we're sitting there as if it's normal that we're in Yerushalayim. It's not normal that we're here. Nothing about this is normal. That Klal Yisrael, after thousands of years of not being able to live in this land, was able to come back.
Within a relatively short period of time, we were able to get back most of Jerusalem. Do you girls realize you're living here in Ramat Shkl? You are the impediment to peace that you read about in CNN. This is over the green line. That's what Mishmar Gvul is. This was a neighborhood that wasn't Jewish for many years. This is beyond me. Miraculous. It's an unbelievable thing. And we sit here as if it's nothing because we don't pay attention to history. We didn't pay attention in history class. We don't realize that we're living on the shoulders of giants. But this was an unbelievable thing that Yidden came to Eretz Yisrael and they said, even though this land was a swamp land. There's a lot of revisionist history. It's like they stole our golden green pastures. Girls, you ever look at this country? It was swamps, it was desert. You remember when you went to Elat this year and you drove down south and it's just desert for miles and miles. That flat stretch of land where every once in a while you'll see some farm and then you just keep going and there's nothing and then there's a gas station and nothing for a straight hour. That was this entire country. Go look at pictures of Mayron in the 20s and 30s.
There was just like people like going up the hill, the Kotel, like it was the wall was there, but like it wasn't like the plaza built out like it is today. It's unbelievable what we're living through. And we came, and settlers had malaria and died building this country. And in 1948, who fought, by the way, who's who is the great Israeli, mighty Israeli army in 1948 that was able to conquer this country? Bunch of Holocaust survivors. A bunch of Holocaust survivors. They gave them guns. These people didn't know how to fight. They were three years removed from the Holocaust. They had lived through DP camps. Half of them came illegally into this country. Getting through the British Mandate, and they literally were handed these illegal old guns that they had gotten into the country. They said, 'Just go straight.' The whole thing was an unbelievable miracle. But how do you have the chutzpah? If somebody hands you a gun, they said, 'Yalla' We would go, 'No, right? Not doing that.' But these people did.
There's something about the quintessence of Klal Yisrael that it knows it won't be destroyed. It can't be destroyed. It's not possible to destroy it. Shevet Levi represents the part of ourselves, not the part that's ordinary. It's the part of ourselves that's underneath, that's always fine, never destructed, never destroyed. It's indestructible. It's always calm in the face of chaos. It's the part of you that's always okay. That's the real reason I think that a therapist has the capacity to sit with a client and believe that they're okay. How could you believe they're okay when they're going through all the things that they went through? The answer is not every part of them went through it. The self, if you want to use IFS language, remains intact and it's never been broken. So there's this part of you that's absolutely true and it never gets bigger, but it also never gets smaller.
It's an interesting thing. Shevet Levi didn't go through Shibud Mitzrayim, not because Hakadosh Baruch Hu was holding Shevet Levi back from growing. Shevet Levi never went through Shibud Mitzrayim because Shevet Levi can't go through the Shibud Mitzrayim. Even if Shevet Levi was in the Shibud Mitzrayim, they wouldn't have been in the Shibud Mitzrayim because they would have remained above the fray. Nothing would have impacted them. It's the quintessence of the Jewish soul that doesn't get destroyed. As Memela, we learn something unbelievable. It's true; the rest of Klal Yisrael grew tremendously. That's why they had these big numbers. Shevet Levi doesn't participate not because Chassidim, Hakadosh Baruch Hu, is holding them back from growth. It's not shy to growth. It doesn't get bigger. It also doesn't get smaller. It's just you. It's the truest version of you that remains true when everything else in your life isn't going well.
So now let's go back to the pasuk. Girls, what did Rashi tell us? Shevet Levi doesn't get counted with anybody else. Why? Because they are the legion of the king. They're designated for a special service in the Mishkan. They have a special role. What does that mean? It means that if a person counts Shevet Levi with everybody else, what are they really saying? It's really saying. I don't have a part of me that's Shavit Levi. I don't have a part of me that's different. All of this is exactly the same. The outside parts, the inside parts—it's all just different parts of myself. But it would be to deny that you have a piece of you that's larger than all the pain that you go through. So Shavit Levi can't be counted with everybody else. Shavit Levi gets counted separately. It's like there's the quintessential you, and then there's these parts that grow. But you have to know that that's not exactly the same thing.
But then comes along the pasuk and says an unbelievable thing: you can't count Shavat Levy with everybody else. It's not only that you can't count them; you can't lift up their heads. What does that mean? What does it mean to lift up somebody's head when somebody goes through something and they're in that broken state? What's the gift that we can give them? The gift that we can give them, as we can tell them You matter to us. That's the single greatest gift that you can give somebody who's going through a real tragedy in their life. You can just remind them over and over again that you matter to me. And you lift up their head by saying you count. That's why we use that word, like you count. Count doesn't just mean like I counted you one, two, three, four. If you count somebody, what are you saying? You matter.
So there's two types of counting. There's the counting of one, two, three, four. I want to know how many people are here. But there's another type of counting, which is I want to know if you're here. That's the lifting up their heads. It's not enough just to tell someone you counted like one, two, three, four. It has to be a counting that tells you you're valued. Shavat Levi doesn't need that. One second. Let me just finish it. Shavat Levi doesn't need that. Why not? Because Shavut Levi never had a state where they thought they didn't matter. So the Torah has to tell us: for all of the people that have gone through something terrible, that have reached into the depths of their being to reveal a truer dimension, what's your job? Your job is to let them know as they're going through this, you count. That's the rehab. The rehab is after everything. You matter.
Shavuot Levi, you're not counted with everybody else. You're distinct. You're the quintessence of the Jewish soul. You never were taken down, so you have to be counted separately. But not only do you have to be counted separately, we can't lift you up in the same way because to lift you up would imply that at some point you were down. So what's the type of counting that we give Shavuot Levi? It's a different type of counting. This is the counting of called. I'm summoning you into service. And that's the highest level. We'll finish with this. It goes like this: One type of counting is you matter to me. But there's an even deeper type of counting, which is the part of you that remains beyond destruction. That is the part of you that I'm calling upon to be. To play a specific, unique role in this world.
So that. Purity that you have. Remember, every day in davening we say, "Alokai neshama shanasa to bitaorih." What does that mean? The soul that you gave me is pure, Rabbi. How could you say the soul that you gave me is pure? Don't you know where I was last night? It's far from pure. I mean to say it like that. If people took it the wrong way, I was—I don't mean it like that. A person could say, in my life, do you know what I've been through? How could you say that I'm pure? What's the answer? There was a part of you that was always pure. There was a part of you that was never undignified. The problem that you have is that you think that you were in a state where you lost yourself. That's the biggest avera in the world. It is not the avera. The biggest avera in the world is after the avera, thinking that we actually broke ourselves. So the part of us that remains pure, that quintessential soul, what is that? That's the part ultimately summoned into service. That's the part from which we serve Hashem at the highest level.
Last question. Can you? That's what we say every day in Modani. Not for chizuk like it's something not true to be mechazek you. When we say in Modani, Raba Emuna Secha, greatest Hashem's faith in you. That's what that means is two types of counting. Number one, clearly you matter to Hashem, and number two. The quintessence of who you are is being summoned into Hashem's service. That part of you that's pure is shyach to the avodas hamishkan. So of course, am I going to serve Hashem from the parts of me that have expanded? Of course I am. Those are the parts that are on fire. That's all the lebedik, exciting growth. And I came to Eretz Yisrael over the year, and I stopped doing this, and I started doing that, and I'm trying to work on this. That's all the exciting stuff. But what about the quintessential me? That quintessential you is what makes you shyach to go into the mishkan. And so, in the end, it's both parts of us that have grown. That have grown in a certain way. One part of us has grown because the part of us that went through stuff grew tremendously. And the other part is the access to our truest self, which is what makes us capable of growing into someone who could be summoned into service. To be summoned into service of something greater than yourself is the single greatest thing you could do in your life. Girls, have a beautiful Shabbos.
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