Chanukah - The Beauty of Hod: Substance over Surface

1:56 Is a goyin aylam. He's a tremendous mal hashkafa, and certainly a hashkafa that's speaking very much to our generation. So I want to share with you a Torah from Rav Lapianski today. The pasuk in Shir Hashirim says, "Hadu doim nashnu reach va'al pisachenu kol megadim chadashim gam yishenim doydi tafanti lach." The mandrakes, the dudaim. We're familiar with the dudaim from the story of. The dudaim have released their scent. They're giving off their scent, and at our doorsteps are to be found delicacies, freshly picked and long stored, and I have kept my beloved for you. That's what the pasuk in Shir Hashirim says. The medrash, fascinating medrash on this pasuk, says the dudaim are a reference to Ruven, as you all just pointed out a moment ago.

2:52 What does it mean that the Dudaim are nusnu reyach? What does it mean that the Dudaim are now giving off their scent? The Medrash says this is the heroism of Reuven, who saved Yosef HaTzaddik from being killed and instead had him thrown into the bar, where he intended on saving his life. And what are the delicacies that are on our doorstep? That's Chanukah. That's what the Medrash says. It's a very strange medrash because usually when a medrash tells us the deeper inner nature of things, usually it all goes together. But here we have the dudaim as a reference to Reuven, the specific reference of Reuven rescuing Yosef HaTzaddik from nearly being killed by the Shvatim, and out of nowhere seems to come the idea of Hanukkah, which Lachora has nothing to do with Reuven at all.

3:49 So that's our first question: What does Ruvain and Chanukah have to do with each other? Specifically, the heroism of Ruvain saving Yosef Hatzadik. The second question, which, as we'll soon see, goes together with the first question, is: We know that different than other Yom Tovim, where we have a chiyuv of hallel, specifically on Chanukah, we have a chiyuv not just of hallel, but la Hodos u'hallel. What does la Hodos mean? To give praise. La Hodos is some sort of gratitude that goes along with the shavach that we give to our Kadosh Baruch Hu. What is the nature of la Hodos Ulahalo? That's our second question. A third question, which is really going to begin our conversation, is what is the nature of Yofi, and what is the nature of Hod? Yofi we understand means beauty.

4:45 That's I think obvious to everybody. Though we're going to explore the nature of beauty in a moment. The shali is what is hoed. So hoed is classically translated as glory, but the problem is what does that mean? Certain words in Judaism that when you say them, you don't exactly know what they mean. A chaver of mine many years ago was giving bar mitzvah lessons, and a very wealthy man wanted his son not just to lay the parsha, not just to lay in the haftorah, but he also wanted him to be the bal musaf. Not only did he want him to lay in the parsha, he wanted him to know what the parsha actually said. He wanted him to know the translation of all the words, what the haftorah actually said, and he wanted him to learn the English translation of all of musaf. So this kid started by mitzvah lessons, and it was like, okay, so I'm going to have to figure out how to fix this. But I think that's fine.

5:43 So towards the end of his time learning his bar mitzvah lessons, he said to the bar mitzvah teacher, this Rebbe, this friend of mine. They were in the middle of learning musaf, and the kid, a very sheepish, beautiful twelve-year-old kid, looked at this Rebbe and said, "Can I ask you a question?" So Rebbe said, "Sure." He said, "I know 'Amein' means 'Kong,' but what does it really mean?" There are certain words you know that we say that we don't know what they mean. This kid grew up his whole life thinking "amein" means "kong." For those of you that didn't get the joke, "kong" stands for congregation. You've seen it in your art scroll interlinear siddurim. What does "glory" mean? What does "hod" mean? So the Mitzud Sion says that "hod" means a type of beauty that inspires a feeling of awe.

6:35 So it's a certain type of beauty. It's not exactly yofi. There's yofi. That's what we're going to call classic beauty or true beauty. And then there's this thing called hoed, which is some sort of awe-inspiring beauty. What exactly is the nature of awesomeness and beauty? How do they go together? What does it mean to be awe-inspired or to have some measure of fear because you've seen beauty? Rupiansky explains as follows. Very beautiful explanation. He says the world is made up of two things, what we'll call the surface and the substance. The surface of our world is an external physical material surface. That's the surface of our world, but it is not the substance of our world. We're living in a time.

7:33 Where people confuse surface and substance, they think that the surface, the material nature of our world, is also the substance of our world. It's what our world is made up of. This is the challenge of living in a scientific generation. In a scientific generation, everything becomes measured on a physical level. But of course, it's not true. It's not true that the world is a physical place, and we know this. We live in a world where everything we want to like reduce it down to its scientific definition. I'll give you an example of this. What is an emotion? Is an emotion just a chemical reaction to an experience? Is that all it is? If somebody were to get down on one knee and propose to you, very good, excellent. It's 9:40 in the morning. If it was like 12 o'clock in the afternoon, the Amin would have been thunderous.

8:32 A little bit more coffee, and we would have had girls going, "I'm getting married this afternoon." Somebody gets down on one knee and says to you, "Please marry me." Nobody makes me secrete serotonin like you. What's wrong with that? Is he not describing what's actually happening on a chemical level? When I'm with you, the oxytocin that I secrete in my brain makes me wild. It doesn't work because while the world appears to be surface oriented, there's something different in the substance of the world. The surface and the substance are not the same thing. The surface is material. The surface is measurable, but the substance of our world is spiritual. And if a person fails to see the spiritual inner nature of things, the actual substance.

9:28 It means they don't understand the core of what a person is. We're not protoplasm talking to protoplasm. That's not what we are. There's a soul inside of everything, not only inside of ourselves, but inside of the entire world. There's a spirituality that's natural to existence, and the material world is what gives the ability for the spiritual to express itself. The famous line is that we are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We're spiritual beings on a human journey. That's who we are. We're spiritual beings. That definition means everything, by the way. In the scientific world, we call somebody a Homo sapien. Homo means that we're like everything else, like homogenous. We're like everything else. It means we're like every other animal in the world. Sapien means that we're the most intelligent of all the animals. That's the way science has defined us. We're Homo sapiens. We're not going to be around forever. We're going to die. We're going to have to find another way to live. We need to learn to accept that some things are not going to be perfect. We need to make sure that people know how to handle this. We need to find a way to get more people involved. I think we should focus on the problem at hand.

10:25 To that concept, we are not just intelligent animals. We have a spiritual substance that's living in this material existence. That's why all the vessels in the Mishkan were made with wood on the inside and gold on the outside. It was meant to convey the idea that there's an inner nature of things, a substance that's far deeper than the material surface level of what everything is in this world. What is beauty? Beauty, true beauty, as we'll see in a moment, is when the surface and the substance are well aligned. So we'll start off talking about false beauty because this is something that's very present in our world today. False beauty is when the surface of something is stunning, but the inner nature, the substance of it, does not live up to the attraction of the surface.

11:25 So it's like I don't know if you've ever tasted bad watermelon. Ever have like bad water? You know I'm talking about like bad. In Israel we have, Baruch Hashem we have the most. I don't want to be like over on the Chet Meraglim, like especially in the King's Palace. But in Israel we have amazing fruit in the summer. It's delicious. But you know there's always that period in the beginning of the summer where there's like a two-week period where they put out the watermelons, but it's not quite there yet. And by the way, nobody knows how to pick a watermelon. Like if you see people in the store, you know they're like holding against their ear, and they're like tapping it. Like nobody knows how to choose a watermelon. There's a period where they're good. There's a period where they're not good. So you look at it on the outside. It looks like a green, delicious watermelon. You open it up, and it's like light pink on the inside. And you do that thing because nobody's going to return a watermelon. Because that's an awkward exchange. How do you walk back into a store and go? Didn't live up to my standards. It's like doesn't work. So you try it. You try, and it's awful.

12:22 It's awful. An unripe watermelon is awful. It's false beauty. It looked good on the outside. It had the right shape. It had the right coloring, but on the inside, it was lacking beauty. That's the false beauty that's being advertised today. I'll share with you. My father was in advertising, and he was very successful. Baruch Hashem. Probably the shows that a lot of you have not seen on television belonged to my father. They were my father's company. Shows like Friends and Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond and Jeopardy and Oprah and Ellen. None of you have heard of these shows, I'm sure. The Office. I could go on, but these shows that you didn't see were all under my father's organization. It was an organization called the SNTA. My father once told me, "I can sell anything once. I can tell you about it. I can get you to buy it."

13:21 But if the substance, if the actual product itself is not good, nobody's going to buy it twice. It's not really something that you want to be engaged in. True beauty is when you meet somebody and the outside and the inside match. You see their beauty on the outside, and when you get to know them, the closer you get to them, the more you're like, 'Wow, look at this person.' That's the most unbelievable thing in the world. It sometimes happens when we meet our heroes. So the beauty on the outside is amazing. You see them; they're big, tummy, they're chachamim. They appear to be very righteous individuals. The closer you get, you see the humanity, the parts that are less beautiful, and somehow the feeling of attraction wanes. So that's beauty and false beauty. But there is an even deeper level, and that's really the subject of today's she'er. What happens when the outside is not beautiful, but the inside is stunning? What happens when the vessel, when the surface, does not appear to be beautiful, but the inside is so exceptionally bright? It's so bright that the container cannot contain it. It's so beautiful that there's no way that the physical surface could ever express that level of beauty.

14:50 That is called hoed. Hoed is a very specific type of beauty. It's not beautiful. It's beauty on the inside, and the beauty is so great on the inside that there's no way that the outside could possibly reflect it. This is like sometimes if you meet somebody, and I'm not speaking physically here, but I'm going to use a physical metaphor. If you meet somebody that externally is not so beautiful. But then, when you meet them and you get to know them and you spend time with them, you say, 'That's the most beautiful person in the world.' In fact, the beauty is so deep that sometimes the outside even becomes a little bit more attractive. This happens very often in yeshiva. Would you like to hear what it sounds like? You don't want to hear, yeah? Trust me, it's good. It's bad. It's terrible. It's amazing. A boy sits down with me and he tells me, 'Rebbe, do you believe in platonic relationships?'

15:46 I asked him for a friend. You believe in platonic relationships? I said, "What are we talking about here?" He goes, "No, it's just like a rebbe who's giving a shiur on platonic relationships." And I know I have this friend. I've been friends with her my whole life. Rebbe, nothing would ever happen. Yes, she's like my sister. She's very kind and nice. Okay, but you know, like, I think the main thing is that I don't want to be mean. Yeah, so I think that's fine. She's like my sister. She's my sister. You understand? We're family friends. Like my mother. Like her mother is my aunt. You know this guy I'm describing? Yeah. By the way, thank you for the 50% of you that were just honest. It was very, it was very nice of you. It was very kind. You could have just pretended. You would have given yourself away anyway. But the 50% of you that lied, I just want you to know I see you. Yeah. So the 50% of you that were honest, I'm speaking to you. So you know that guy. You would nothing would ever happen with him. His family come out, right? And then they always have this line. He would Rabbi Tzvi, and also like I'm trying to say this nicely, but like she's not attractive. Like nothing would ever happen. Six months later, inevitably the guy walks back into the office, sits down sheepishly, and goes, "Remember that girl that I was telling you about? Yeah."

16:44 I don't know what happened. I said I thought it was. I thought she was your family. He goes, Yeah, I know it's a little weird, but I thought you told me she wasn't attractive. I know, but I don't know what happened. All of a sudden she's Ross. For those, it's like all of a sudden she became this. What happened? What changed? The answer is the beauty you at first didn't see. It wasn't the pshat that it wasn't there. The container wasn't reflecting the inner nature of that beauty. You understand? The closer you get to somebody who has hoed, the more you discover their intrinsic beauty. The more you start to say, "Whoa, this is what I didn't see on the surface." It's interesting to see.

17:41 The way that different people relate to different people, you'll see this. Be'ez Hashem, when you start shaduchim, nobody ever says it out loud. Everyone kind of looks. Who did they marry? Everyone wants to see who did they marry. Not just the type of person, but also who did they marry. Many years ago, we had a boy in yeshiva, and he came to me, and he said to me, "I met the girl I'm going to marry last night. Met the girl. First date. I know. I'm done." I said, "Wow, that's amazing. I was learning in Kotel at the time." I said, that's great. I'm so happy. Certain guys, certain times, like when you're in yeshiva and you want to speak about shiurim, you don't always want to speak to the rabbis. You find an older koyel guy who's very wise. At 23, he's holding the entire world. So I was that guy, 23 years old. I knew everything in the world that needed to be known. So guys would come talk to me, and I would give them, of course, sage advice. So this guy came to me. I said, I met the girl. I'm going to marry last night. I said, that's awesome. So tell me about it. I said, we went out. We had a great time. Best time ever. The chemistry was amazing.

18:40 I said hashkafically, is it the same? He goes spot on. Everything that I'm looking for, she has. It was unbelievable. I said, really, and you knew all that on the first date? He's like, it was incredible. Now I have a mesora from my rebbe. My rebbe used to ask us, and this was one of the most uncomfortable things about being a talmid of my rebbe. When we were getting ready to get engaged, or right before that, we came to my rebbe to talk about it with him. So my rebbe used to say to us, is she attractive? You have to understand, my Rabbi Kalinahar is 97 years old now. When I had him, he was in his 70s. I don't know if you can imagine what it's like to be a young man in yeshiva talking to your venerated rosh yeshiva, and he goes, "Is she attractive?" What are you supposed to say? Like, "Yeah, Rabbi, she's very gorgeous." You know, like there's no right answer to that question. But I had this mesora from my Rabbi. I said, "And do you find her attractive?" And he said to me, "She's drop dead gorgeous." I said, "That's amazing. Who set you up?"

19:35 So he said, "This Rebbe in yeshiva set me up." I said, "That's awesome. I'm so happy for you." This Rebbe is known for setting people up. He sets everybody up. Later that day in the beis medrash, the Rebbe was walking by me, and I said to him, "I heard you made another shidduch." He said, "Yeah, the first day was amazing." He said, "He's done." She said, "She's done." Like they're gonna get engaged in like a week. It's gonna be one of these crazy stories. I said, "Rebbe," he told me, "She's drop dead gorgeous." He grabbed me by the arm, tight. He pulled me out of the beis medrash. He said to me, "This is the ugliest girl I've ever met in my entire life." I said, "What are you talking about? What are you talking? It can't be, it can't be." He said, "This girl is so unattractive. I was afraid to set him up. I was afraid he would leave my shir, like he wouldn't want to have anything to do with me." I said, "Why? What made you set him up?" He said, "My wife made me do it." You have to understand.

20:31 This is a true story. You can't make any of this up. You have to understand when I'm in Kotel, I don't have time to be running. When you're at that stage of life, you're like lechayim's and vorts and weddings. You'll never have any time to learn. So I had a policy: if you invited me to the wedding, I came to the wedding. If the vort was close by, I come to the vort. I can't go to every lechayim. Otherwise, you don't learn. There's 200 guys in yeshiva. You're never going to get to learn. But this guy, I had to go to the lechayim. I had to go. I needed to see for myself. Was she drop dead gorgeous or drop dead? It didn't make any sense. Told you, just like Mrs. Bloomer. So you know, like the Chassan and Kala's parents are like standing outside when the car pulls up. Like they're coming, they're coming. I was right behind.

21:31 And it was in that moment that I learned it's takah true. This no. You don't know which side is true. It could have been either way. And the emas is for him. I don't know what his experience was of her. And everyone experiences people differently. Some people they're objectively there's like an objective yofi to them. But some people when you meet them the hoed is so powerful that you stand almost in awe of them, not because they're physically, not because the surface is attractive, but because there's so much attraction, there's so much beauty, there's so much profundity, there's so much depth to it that when you stand in front of it, you're like you're inspired by it. That's a whole different level of beauty. It's not the beauty of magazine covers. It's the beauty of real people.

22:28 That's why, as you get older, it's interesting. You start to wonder how an eighty-five-year-old couple sees each other. And the answer is, God willing, if they've been living together and building a life together for fifty, sixty years, they're not talking about yofi anymore. They're talking about hod. We're talking about people that spend a lifetime seeing the beauty, not skin deep, not on the surface, but in the substance of each other. One time, I was in my rabbi's kitchen. My rabbi lived in a small apartment in Borough Park, and he had on his refrigerator, he had like they have those magnet pictures of by the weddings.

23:14 So my Rebbe Kenai Nahara had, I think, eight children, and each one of his eight children had many children of their own, and those children have had children of their own. If you just, at some point, if you just invite like immediate family to the wedding, you're talking about like 200 people. That's why it's funny with all these takanas that they make. It doesn't work in certain yeshivish circles because there's 200 people without any guests. So there was this wide, like wide fish lens picture of like my Rebbe's entire family on the fridge, and I made some sort of comment, and I said, Rebbe. It looks more like a tribe than a family. Like it's just an enormous amount of people. And my Rebbe responded something from. He said like, Baruch Hashem. And the Rebbez and my Rebbe's wife, my Rebbe's wife, she was a social worker. She was an exceptionally psychologically astute person. My Rebbe was the ultimate intellectual, and she was like the ultimate emotional. It was like a fascinating marriage. One time, I was in my Rebbe's living room.

24:09 And he has two pictures in his living room. One is like a dark forest, and the other is like a spring meadow. And I was sitting with him in his living room, and he pointed to these two pictures, and he said, "Mordechai, you see these two pictures?" I said, "Yes." And he pointed to the dark forest, and he said, "That's me." And he pointed to the spring meadow, and said, "And that's my wife." I said, "Okay." I didn't know what to say back. So we're sitting at the kitchen, and Mordechai said, "Yeah, Baruch Hashem." And the Rebbitzin sat down, and she looked at him. They were talking about something else. Okay, so they were sitting there, and she looked at him and she said. And all from a couple of kids that had no idea what they were doing, and it was like this moment where I just wanted to jump out the window of their apartment because I'm not in seminary, so I don't go like, when they do that. But it was so uncomfortable because the beauty of that moment was something so deep. It was so much more profound than the childish notion of a sixteen-year-old walking down Central Avenue, looking at somebody and going, 'She's pretty,' you know, like it's that's hoed. The container is it cannot possibly express the greatness of that inner beauty. That's hoed. The difference between Klal Yisrael and Yavon is Yavon has beauty. Yafda Elokim liyefas.

25:32 So Yavan has beauty, but what type of beauty does Yavan have? Yavan does not have the substance of beauty. They have the surface of beauty. They don't have the substance. They don't have the inner essence of beauty. In contrast, the pasuk in Daniel describes Klal Yisrael as vahodi nehepach. When Klal Yisrael was destroyed, they were called the hodi. We were called the hode of Hashem. The hode, the splendor. The beauty, the inner beauty, the true beauty, the beauty of depth. That's why Moshe Rabenu had carne hode. When Moshe Rabenu came down from Har Sinai, he had glory radiating from his face. He had to cover his face with a veil because the inner beauty that he had achieved by Har Sinai could not possibly be contained in his person. This is the beauty of a yid. That's why you see children, Jewish children.

26:26 When they're innocent, when they're young, they're the most stunning creatures in the world. You ever see these little ones? Every Jewish child is beautiful. I'll just tell you for me personally. I happen to think there's something exceptionally beautiful about little Hasidic children running in the street. Like the innocence. They've never been exposed to anything. They're just running around with their curly little pears, which happens to be culturally amazing to me. Like a six-year-old is like I picture a six-year-old in his apartment, and he has a sister who's in there with her curling iron, twirling his hair, and he's running in the street, and he's like bouncing little, like and he's wearing that little capel, like that little hat that they have, and it's the most stunning. It's not the way I'm raising my children, but also because I have girls, but I have one son, but I didn't raise him like that. But there's something exquisite. There's something so deep. You meet these children, and you say there's something. It's not physical. There's something.

27:21 Deeper. That's so majestic. It's so inspiring. When we see it, we can't help but be inspired by it. What's the difference in Yiddishkeit? Not in the Gausha world. Not in Yavan. What's the difference in Yiddishkeit between Yofi and Hod? So this is the difference between the tzaddik and the bal tshuva. Racheli Menu is described as Yifas Mara Yifas. How are Racheli Menu? She has true blood. Rachel Imenu has the beauty of she was physically the surface was stunning, and the substance was stunning, and it was an amazing experience to be in the presence of Rachel Imenu. Rachel Imenu represents the paradigmatic tzaddik. That's why her child is Yosef HaTzaddik, who's also described as being very beautiful. That all the women of Mitzrayim were throwing everything that they had because they just wanted to marry Yosef HaTzaddik. That tzaddik, his outside is stunning. He's never done anything wrong.

28:16 He's a special person, and the inside is stunning. When you meet him, it's true and it's glorious to behold. So Shaul is described as being head and shoulders above everybody else in Klal Yisrael. Shaul Melach was a very beautiful person. He stood head and shoulders above the rest. That's Yofi. But there's something amazing about a b'chuvah, something that we're really discovering in our generation. The b'chuvah, the outside is not so good. It's not so good the outside of the bal tshuva, because when you look on a surface level, you see the averim. But when you see somebody who's going through the process of tshuva, and we see this every year in Eretz Yisrael for sure, as eighteen and nineteen year old young men and young women come and they're in the process of discovering their truest essence, and they're in the process of going through a real tshuva. And on the outside, yes, the guy comes to his rebbe or the girl comes to her mechanechad or her ra'kezad or whoever it is that she's speaking to.

29:13 And on the outside, she says, "Here's the thing I did that I'm not so proud of." So the container perhaps has been impacted in some way, but there's a beauty. There's a beauty of watching the process unfold as the inner essence of a person, the inner substance of a person, starts to rise and it explodes out of the container in a way that the container cannot contain it. It's too large for the container. We see in yeshiva sometimes that a boy comes. I'm thinking of a very specific boy. He's an amazing person. He actually just got married. He's an amazing guy. When he was in yeshiva, this guy did not show up to yeshiva for the first month of yeshiva. We didn't see him. And I remember in the first month of yeshiva, as chatay any maskerayom, I judged him too quickly. I shouldn't have judged him at all. But I remember that I said in the first month of yeshiva, I said I think he chose. Isn't that a sirenet? To say there with all the azakot. Did you have azakot here in? Not as many as in Beit Shemesh. In Beit Shemesh it was like.

30:12 At two o'clock in the morning, I want you to know I've never hated anybody in my life, but those Yemenites gotta go. I made a chasna last week. Thank you so much, Meretzah Shembayu. Amin. Much better, excellent. The night before the chasna, the night before the chasna, they attacked us. I have a wedding tomorrow. Come on, it's not nice. It was this guy in yeshiva. For the first month, the yeshiva didn't show up. The yeshiva, I judged him too quickly. I said to the rosh yeshiva, I said, I think he chose the wrong yeshiva. He's not, he's not ready for what we're doing. In an amazing moment, shortly after shlichus, his parents asked him, How are you doing in yeshiva? And he said, Great, I love it here. And they said, you're going to your shiurim, you're going to minyanim. He said, I'm doing everything. And he felt so badly about lying to his parents.

31:07 And he had this epiphany, what did I just do? I just told my parents I'm wasting their money. I told him I'm coming to yeshiva, I'm coming to nothing. He said I shouldn't do that. He started coming to yeshiva. He started coming every day, shacharit, mincha, maariv, three starim a day, then four starim a day, then five starim a day. Then I had to start kicking him out of the beis medrash. You're going too fast. He was learning like mesechtas balpeh. It was the most unbelievable. He became a massive tamcham, enormous tamcham. Today he's learning in a super chashuv yeshiva. Watching him go through that process was one of the most inspiring things because on the outside it didn't look good, but the inside was bursting. It was bursting to come out of him, and we see this in our generation. We see kids that on the outside they're behaving in such a way the outside looks grotesque, the outside mamish does not look good. But you speak to these kids one on one, you get to see their hoed, you get to see the inner beauty of these kids. They're amazing. I was just in America for.

32:06 I was just in America for yeshiva and for a couple of speaking gigs, and I met up with a chaver right before I went to the airport, and we went out to Central Avenue to a new restaurant called Smash House. Any of you from the Five Towns? Smash House, not bad. This was Wachtov, all of Ashdod used to be. So I grew up on Wachtov, so for me it was a painful experience. There were a group of 25-30 kids walking down Central Avenue, screaming their heads off. Half of them weren't wearing yarmulkes. The behavior on the outside was so not what we would want bnei Torah to look like. And they came into Smash House. I'll be honest, I was judging them. Again, naturally, we judge people. I was sitting there thinking, what is going on over here? And we walked. They walked into Smash House, and there was a Rebbe there waiting for them. And I'm sitting there having lunch with my friend, and I'm on the way to the airport.

33:02 Just a quick lunch, because that's what you want to eat right before you get on a flight. You want to eat a double smash cheeseburger. But the kosher vegan cheese, just for those who are judging. And the same boys who a moment ago were running down the street, screaming like Vildechayas, not wearing yarmulke, because they were all cradled around this Rebbe, and they were—I don't know who this Rebbe was. I don't know. Maybe it's like some Gilgal of Rav Kalish in the Five Towns. I don't know what it was. But like they were sitting around him, drinking from his words. All of a sudden, the same boys who a moment ago were screaming in the street—they were sitting by their rebbe, and they were just like this: 'Like that's our rebbe, and we're sitting and having lunch with him.'And there was something so profound about this moment, which is why I'm here. This is the bechina of Leah. Leah, she has been described not as pretty as Rachel. On the she's not pretty on the outside like Rachel.

34:01 But the inside, that's where her beauty is. That's why she's described as having weak eyes. You know, the eyes are the window to the soul. If you want to see what's going on in someone's mind, you have to look at their face. But if you want to see what's going on in their heart, you have to look at their eyes. Pay very careful attention to their eyes. You'll see if you look at somebody's eyes, you'll see kindness in their eyes. You see warmth and love and generosity in people's eyes. Leah, at the outside, it wasn't like Rachel Imena, but if you looked in her eyes, you saw the beauty that was in there. That's why, in contrast to Shaul Melech, who stands head and shoulders above the rest of Chal Yisrael, David Melech—sorry, David Melech—who comes from Leia, David Melech—who comes from Yehuda, he's not obviously a king. He's described as the small son of Yishai. He doesn't stand head and shoulders above everybody else. It's not even obvious that he's not a Mamzer. But there's a beauty to David Melech. There's a certain hoed to David Melech. It's the hoed of the Bais Shuva. This is Reuven.

35:00 This is Reuven. Reuven is the ultimate expression of the Hod of the internal being much greater than the external. If you look around, it's very few people have kind things to say about Reuven. Whenever you read the Sfarim, it's always like how Reuven failed and how Yehuda ultimately did better than Reuven and Reuven lost the B'chhar. It was an unbelievable thing that Reuven did, because Reuven was the b'chor of Yaakov Avinu, and Yosef Patadik was his rival. Yosef was the b'chor of Rachel. He was the b'chor of Leah. There was a rivalry there. Maybe it wasn't the best thing that he had him thrown in the pit as opposed to being killed. But you understand the godless of Reuven to be able to have hodaah, to be able to have an admission.

35:54 That yes, Yosef HaTzaddik is worthy of being kept alive because he too is considered a b'chhar. That's Reuven's hoed. That's why Reuven is identified with the Dudaim. He's identified with the Dudaim because the Dudaim take something and they make more. It says takes a woman who's infertile and it makes her more fertile. It takes the inside and it brings it out into reality. And itaka worked. Because those dudaim were given to Rachel Imenu, and that's how Yosef HaTzaddik was born. The idea that somebody can rise above themselves and be greater than they are—that's the episode of Reuven. So when Reuven came to that moment and he sees that they passk in Yosef HaTzaddik for Misa, and in that moment he closes his eyes and he looks inside of himself and he finds a strength that even he didn't know he had.

36:49 And he said, "No, we're not going to do this. We're not going to kill him. We're going to save his life. We're going to say that he too is worthy." That's an unbelievable moment. That's what going back to that first part, Hadudan Nusle Rech. In that moment, the scent was given off from the mandrakes. At that moment, Ruvain self-actualized by not considering himself first, by not looking at the surface of things, but going deep into the substance. He self-actualized in a way that would otherwise not have been possible. This is the essence of all of Yiddishkeit. A person can live on a surface level when we do our mitzvos. We can do our mitzvos. We can perform our mitzvos. There are people that live this way. There are surface performers of mitzvos. They check all the boxes. We call them. You'll forgive me for saying this. We call them good girls. Good girls means that they have exactly the right resume. They went to the right high school.

37:45 Whether they went to the right seminary, they're going to do exactly the right thing next. My daughter says they're typical. They do exactly the right thing. They're resume building their entire life. There are boys like this also. They go to exactly the right high schools, exactly the right yeshivas in Eretz Yisrael. They do exactly what they're supposed to do next. They're on a program. They're on a plan. Then there are people that they refuse to live that way, and not because there's anything wrong with checking the boxes, but because they don't want to be checking the boxes people. They want to live in a way that's much larger than themselves. They know something about themselves that nobody else knows. They have a great secret about themselves that they're waiting to explode onto the scene. That they reach they live from a place that's not themselves. It's deeper than themselves, and as a result, they're greater than they ever could be ordinarily. That's why sometimes you see these guys in yeshiva. I'm sure you've seen them. Sometimes you see these guys in yeshiva.

38:40 That alpiderech ateva they should only be able to reach. Let's say we're going to be silly about it. Let's say on a scale of one to ten, alpiderech ateva they should only be able to reach a level seven. Intellectually, they're not the most brilliant guys in the world, but they live from this place of hoed where there's just so much more inside of them, and they're able to achieve far more than you ever thought. That's why sometimes it's almost like miraculous. I don't want to tell too many details about the story, and the hour is already a bit late, and I want to get to the main point. But in my high school class, we had two boys. We had many more boys than this that were expelled, but we had two boys in specific that were expelled from my high school class. They were the biggest mishagayim you could possibly imagine. They were absolutely insane. Four years of high school. I don't know what they were doing, but it was crazy. I don't know if there was a sober moment. Four years. The guys were mamish out of their minds.

39:37 One of them went to a yeshiva called Nevei. The other went to a different yeshiva. He was expelled before he even got to yeshiva. It doesn't even matter what the details were, but he was expelled in the airport. Just to give you a sense of how crazy these kids were, he ended up in Nevei too. Both of these guys today from my high school class are by far the biggest Talmidei Chachamim. By far, it's not even close. There's a girl. There's a girl here, Leah Rothman. Who's Leah Rothman? You're Leah Rothman. I want you to know your father asked me to embarrass you, Berabim. And I know your father for 31 years now, so please forgive me for doing this. I have to pay an old debt to Nash Rothman, But you should know. Ask your father if you think I'm not telling you the truth. Ask your father. I won't say the names, but just say the two craziest kids. Your father was friends with them actually. But your father was always a good boy. He I think your father liked like watching them from a distance. You know what I'm saying? Like he liked going like this. Like it was that type of friendship.

40:36 But ask your father if I'm exaggerating. These guys were by far the most psychotic guys in my class. They're the biggest Hamid Echachamim, and it's not even close. There was a secret that these guys had. You should know. I was in my head. You think I've been giving share? I've been trying to figure out how to embarrass him for the last forty-five minutes. These guys had a secret inside of them. They were so much bigger than anybody gave them credit for. There was so much depth. Alpiteva again—they're both bright guys. But Alpiteva like this—one of these guys—if you say his name in Yerushalayim today, people go like, 'Whoa!' I had a rebbe who applied to be a rebbe in Mevaseret. And I said, where did you learn? And he said, I'm very close with this Rosh Kodesh. I was like, That's that guy. He was that guy that was thrown out, like in tenth grade, that psychotic guy. And it's like a badge of honor. I learned in his kodesh. I was like, good for you. It's amazing. There's something unbelievable about the hoda of a Jew. You look at them, and they're just there's something they're waiting to explode onto the scene. This what Yovan has no clue about, and this sadly.

41:53 The culture that has crept its way in, and I told you in the beginning I was going to say something not so nice. I don't mean Chassidut to be motzi lazman Kalla Yisrael, but we have an obligation to sensitize ourselves to something. I've noticed, and there's been a lot of conversations in the Jewish world in the last couple years about this. But there's been a certain assimilation of surface over substance that's come into our community. It's not a Jewish value in any sense whatsoever. And it manifests itself in a million different ways, and I don't want to give too many specifics because I don't want to say nasty things. But I think we have a responsibility to speak a little bit about the materialistic culture that's pervaded our community. It used to be that we didn't have a problem of people going into chinuch. We didn't have a problem of getting guys and girls to go into chinuch because people wanted to go into chinuch. They wanted to do meaningful things with their lives. And going into chinuch, yes, it meant being not so wealthy.

42:49 But it meant having a great life. It meant you did something meaningful with your time. And today, it's difficult. It's difficult for us to get guys and girls to go into chinuch. There's a real—I don't want to call it a crisis because everything in our community is a crisis—and then they write articles about it, the shidduch crisis, this crisis, that crisis. But there is kima something right beneath the crisis, whatever that word is. People that push up don't go into chinuch anymore because how could I afford to live? I have to make three hundred fifty thousand dollars to be poor before taxes in our community. So you have to become some sort of therapist, a speech therapist, an occupational therapist, a physical therapist, an art therapist, a hydrotherapist, an actual therapist, a social worker. Chas v'shalom. Like it's you have to have a parnasa. The wife has to lifachopi making a hundred thousand dollars a year because otherwise, how are we going to have our stuff? And the boys, if a boy mentions Chas v'shalom that he wants to go into chinuch, his parents go, "Come on, get real. Kassaf minolam. Where's you? Where are you going to get your money from?" But who decided?

43:48 That this is the standard that we have to live at. When did it happen that camps are ten to fifteen thousand dollars a summer? How did we arrive at this place where again there's something beautiful about having beautiful yeshivas and beautiful high schools and beautiful shuls. But I don't know what would be so bad if we had the old school shuls that weren't so nice, but people davened with real erlichkeit. I'm not sure that we're better off for having the palaces that we're having. Are we not just raising the bar in terms of our materialism? Again, I'm saying this not because I think anybody's going to listen to me, but just to sensitise us to these things. There's this concept today. The concept never existed when I was a kid, and I have no idea how we got here. And honestly, I think it's disgusting. And I know that one of the rabbanim spoke out against it in the Aguda convention. The notion of shidduch pictures. What are we talking about here? As if you could look at a picture and see the yofi of somebody. First of all, you can't see yofi in a picture.

44:44 And second of all, even if you could see Yofi in a picture, you certainly can't see Hode. You meet someone, you talk to them, you see their depth, you see their realness, and you feel connected to them. And then you realize the container was so shallow it could never have contained the true beauty of this person. But if you don't have a shidduch picture, some people say, I'm not going to date her because I didn't see a picture. This is a very materialistic, surface way of seeing the world, and it is not a Jewish value. And it's our responsibility to stand up and say, "I will not participate in these things any longer. I want to live simply." I can't tell you how many boys today are telling me, "I would like to live in Eretz Yisrael or in a simple way. I would like to live out of town." I think we're on the verge of seeing Cleveland explode. With the amount of anyone here from Cleveland, you're from Cleveland. Cleveland is a wonderful, beautiful place. I just had the opportunity to go to Cleveland this past year. I was driving in Cleveland. It's gorgeous. I was talking to a chaver of mine, Menachem Tenenbaum.

45:42 Rabbi T, I was talking to him, and he was saying like you could work in NCSY, and because of the voucher system that they have there, and because people live on less, it's a wonderful community. I can't tell you how many people are telling me I'm moving to Cleveland. And Baruch Hashem. Again, I'm not Chas Chum saying anything negative about any of the other communities, but we have to ask ourselves, when did the Yofi of Greece become the Yofi of Klagetstrom? How could it possibly be that in Mishpacha magazine and in Ami magazine, there's more ads for Pesach programs than there are articles? When did we arrive at this moment? How did it become that there's fifty thousand, sixty thousand, seventy thousand dollars being spent on Pesach because we don't want to clean for Pesach? There's something beautiful about cleaning your house for Pesach. There's something amazing about sitting at your own seder at your own table.

46:33 We lost our minds. We lost our sanity when it came to these things. We're living, and again, and we're seeing, as I said, we're seeing an explosion of kids that want to live with substance and they don't want to live with surface. But we're also seeing that in our community, perhaps we veered a little bit too much to the side of materialism, which is not a Jewish value and it's certainly not a Hanukkah value. K'day la Hodos ulahalom, a yid lives with a notion of hoda of gratitude. Like Leah said, Kinasati Yosimichalki. That's why she named him Yehuda, because she said this container it got even more than I thought it could. There was so much in this I didn't even know that I could have another child. A yid stands up by Chanukah and we recognize the hope, we recognize the deeper beauty of this world. And then we give halal to Hakadosh Baruch Hu. Then we give thanks to Hakadosh Baruch Hu. We give thanks to Hakadosh Baruch Hu because on Chanukah we see deeper than just the surface. We see the actual substance itself.

47:30 This is why Chanukah has no source in the Torah, has no source in Mishnahs. It almost comes from nowhere. It was buried so deep underneath, and then it explodes onto the scene. That's why Yidden all over the place keep Chanukah. I have no religious relatives. My mother and father are both Baalei Teshuvah. My mother's sister also became from. So on her side we have more. But none of the cousins became from. Even one cousin became from. But he became from his children or not? Certainly, on my father's side, nobody came became from. But everybody lights their Hanukkah menorah. How is it that Yidn all over the place more than any other yom tov? Yidn identify with Hanukkah, and it's not just because of the happy holiday season. It's not because they got their tree. We need to have something also. There's something about a yid lighting a menorah. That's why all the Lubavitchers going out and lighting those giant menorahs. And look how many people come. It's an amazing thing. A yid is attracted to Hanukkah from where?

48:22 From a place that we can't even describe, it's so deep. The beauty of a yid is so deep, and it explodes onto the scene. But you can't see a yid in a surface way. You have to be able to see even deeper. That's why Rabb Mead Mati, that's why the Makabeim, and specifically Yehuda Hamakabeim from Elution of Hode, the Makabeim were able to say, on a surface level, we would never ever win. But on a substance level, of course, we're going to win. That's why one parchment on a surface level, one parchment cannot be enough to light for eight days. But on a substance level, one parchment could mamish illuminate the entire world for eight days, and not just for those eight days. But think about how many thousands of years we've been lighting menorah for. So I want to give us a bracha. I bless myself with this also. That we should be zeicha to live in a Hanukkah takeaway the entire year.

49:15 That we should be zayicha to live not on a surface level, not in our yiddishkeit, not just performing mitzvos, but actually reaching deep inside of ourselves, transcending above what we think we're naturally capable of, and becoming more, becoming on fire with our yiddishkeit. That's why yidden come to Eretz Yisrael. I saw somebody recently posted this terrible thing. They said, "What's the purpose of going to seminary? Let's just get these girls working already. What's the purpose of going to seminary? Whatever they needed to learn in Eretz Yisrael, they should have already learned it in high school. Like, what's the purpose of going to Eretz Yisrael for the year?" And I didn't respond because it's not my way to respond publicly. But I wanted to say to this person, do you know what happens here in Eretz Yisrael? You know what happens in seminaries like Michalas, seminaries all over the country. Girls come back and they're on fire with their Yiddishkeit because they're not just performing in a surface level way. Because they're not leading surface level lives. Because we're not surface level people. There's nobody in this room that's a surface level person. There's nobody in this room that just sits there and goes, "That's pretty."

50:09 We want something deeper. We want something more. We want depth and profundity in our relationships. We should be zeichet to that in every aspect of our lives, not only in our yedeshkeit, in terms of the basic medrash, in terms of our tefila, in terms of our chesed, in terms of our limudat yira, but also in our homes, the way we raise our children, the way we see our spouses, the way we see each other as a community. We should be zeichet to see the hode, the splendor of every single year. Afreilich in Chanukah, lichtig Chanukah.