Chukas - When the Well Runs Dry: Water, Loss and the Power of Words

1:58 Where were you? Where were you when you were in Mitzrayim? You were in Gehenna. If you look at the Medrash Echazal, it's clear that the worst days of the Holocaust were better than the best days of Mitzrayim. The punishment in Mitzrayim was so exceptionally cruel. Talking about baking children into bricks, the psychological torture, the emotional torture, the spiritual torture. How could Chlajuslaw have complained like, this is the evil place and that was good? We can't imagine anybody who was in Auschwitz saying Halavai I would go back to Auschwitz. It's not like it's a crazy thing to say. And then we know that Moshe Rabenu is told by our Kadosh Baruch Hu to speak to the rock and the rock will provide water, and instead Moshe Rabenu hits the rock. Fine, and the famous Kasha of.

2:51 Last time in Rephidim, when Klal Yisrael were complaining that they didn't have water, what did Hakadosh Baruch Hu say that time? Hit the rock. Therefore, there he told him hit the rock. Today he tells him strike. He tells him speak to the rock. So what shift? So we have a lot of questions in front of us. I want to share with you a pretty important idea, but basically it goes like this. Have you heard of Irving Yalom? You guys ever heard of Irving Yalom? Irving Yalom is a very famous therapist. One of Irving Yalom's ideas was basically most people have an unprocessed fear of death. That we're basically all walking around with this, like a death awareness, but we don't actually like think about it. But it's there underneath the surface. And what he said, which was very interesting, is basically to the degree that you live.

3:48 A healthy, productive, good life, you don't actually like encounter your death. But to the degree that a person is basically wasting away their life, this death consciousness comes up and overtakes them, and it results in all this maladaptive behavior. What he said, which was very interesting, he said there are certain times in a person's life where they have what he calls awakening experiences. An awakening experience, and I know I've had a couple in my life. An awakening experience is sometimes the loss of a loved one, a serious illness. It doesn't have to be, by the way, a serious illness in your life, but just in general to encounter a serious illness. If a person goes through a major trauma, milestone birthdays. I remember when I was 40 years old, I came to the hakara.

4:39 A person lives till about 80 years old, right? David Aron says, right? And begvurah shmonu mshana, I'm halfway done, and there's no backsies. You think when you're a teenager you're immortal, but say that and you basically are, right? Most people do fine. At some point you're in your 20s and you're like, I'm still doing okay. Some of you're in your 30s, it's like creeping up, but you're not paying attention to it. I hit 40 years old and I was like, my life's half over. And I can't undo it. And it was—it shook me to the core. It's a normal thing that happens. The death of Miriam, I would like to suggest, was an awakening experience for Klal Yisrael. With Miriam, and we'll see why in a moment, with Miriam, something fundamental shifted. And the complaint—it's interesting—the complaint is about water.

5:34 But what's really happening underneath the surface is the loss of Miriam was so profound that they didn't actually grieve for Miriam. Instead, they acted out what was not happening. In other words, underneath the surface, Miriam's death had such a profound impact on them. But the way it expresses itself in the real world is we're terrified that we're not going to have water. With this in mind, you can start to already see things start to make sense because it's like, wait a second, Mitzrayim was a good place, the Midbar is the evil place. That's not a rational thing that they're saying, but the point is that when something is not rational, it's usually indicative that there's something else going on underneath the surface. In other words, if Klal Yisrael was thinking rationally, then what would they have said? They would have said like this. There was a time already in the past where we didn't have water.

6:30 What did we do in that time when we didn't have water? Hakadosh Baruch Hu said, 'Hit the rock.' The miracle is—it's possible for the miracle to occur. If they were rational, they would have said, 'We've survived miraculously through this entire time in the midbar so far. Why are they having now this extreme reaction and one that's totally incoherent? Brought us to a midbar, nothing could be planted here. There's no water. You took us out of Mitzrayim. Why'd you bother doing that? I wish I would have died already. Now I'm going to die of thirst.' This extreme reaction tells us that there's something else that's going on underneath the surface. What was going on underneath the surface? Perhaps what we could suggest is as follows: the nature of what Miriam provided for us was not just water; it expressed itself in water. But the nature of what Miriam meant to Klal Yisrael was she was like the mother of Klal Yisrael.

7:28 In other words, there's a certain container that we grow up with, and we often don't pay attention to the container. When you become an adult and you realize you're the container, you'll get very frustrated at your children for not realizing that you're the container through which they live their lives. It's everything, right? For example, a father might be very proud that he provides financial security for his family, and you, the children, live because of the largess of the father. The father goes to work. He kills himself and goes out every morning. If you're to be a balabas today, you're a hero. To be a balabas, you're a hero. A guy who wakes up early in the morning and goes to daven and goes to learn, then takes a train to the city and works for ten hours and then stops. The only break he has in his day is to daven mincha, and then at night he comes home and davenes ma'ariv. He has maybe a night seder and spends some time with the kids doing homework, spends some time with his wife.

8:27 And he's got to get to sleep at a decent time because he's got to be up by five thirty the next morning to do it all over again. That's a real Evid Hashem. And when your kid is chutzpahdik to you, you're like, you won't because you're good, healthy young men, but you might have an urge, this primal urge, to wring his neck. Because it's like, are you serious? Do you realize that all the clothing you wear, do you realize that all the food you eat, all the vacations we take, the camps that you go to, the education that I provide you with, all of this happens because I'm the container for you. That's a very masculine type of container. There's another type of container that we grow up with, and that's the container of our mothers. Shema mei musaravicha v'al tita shteira simecha. What does that mean? What's the teira of imecha? The teira of imecha is as follows. The beauty of being a mother.

9:24 Is the container a place where the child feels held? That's the difference between a father and a mother. Musaravicha, the father is there to give you musar. He sets a certain path. This is the path that we're on. These are the boundaries. There's a certain being held by the mother. We call it being loved into being. That a person can know. Rav Matzio Salomon Zeichatzal of Lakewood used to speak about that. The worst thing that could happen when a kid comes in the home is when a parent goes, "How was school today?" School's over. Let the kid come into the house. Don't drill the kid about school. The kid already wanted to run away from school. And then what happens? The mother goes, "What do you have for homework tonight?" And that's the worst because now your mother turns into your teacher, and that's the last thing you want her to be. You don't want her to be your teacher.

10:19 And this is, when the parents are getting all this homework that they have to do with the kids, the parents are frustrated because they're exhausted. It ends up being very combative. Big advice that people get when they're raising children is hire someone to learn with your son. Don't learn with your son. Hire someone to learn with your son. Because if you actually encounter how little your son knows, and then you start to go into this rant, have you heard this rant from your parents? Don't say yes. Have you heard this? This is what I'm dropping thirty thousand dollars a year for. And now the kid is like, oh my god, I have to prepare to learn with my father. And why is it that my father is so disappointed in me, and I have to deal with all that trauma. A child who walks in the home should walk in, and the best question is not how was your day, not how was school, not what do you have for homework. It's how are you? A child is meant to walk into the home.

11:13 And that the home is a place of unbelievable safety. I was privy to a conversation many years ago with a very choshev a rashi shiva that he I was driving him. When the phone is on too loud and you can hear the other end of the conversation. This happens with elderly people even more because they can't hear. So you're in that awkward position where I was driving him, but his son called and I can hear the entire conversation. He gets on the phone, and the phone is on too loud. And he goes, "Tah, I just want to let you know that you're gonna get a phone call from my rasha shiva. I'm getting suspended." And I'm thinking to myself, this is so awkward. Like, I don't want to be in the car right now. Like, you know, in the movies, you barrel roll out of the car. Except I'm driving. It's not a good idea. But like, I don't want to hear this. But there's like, it's impossible for me not to hear. So I'm like in the conversation.

12:12 And the first question that Rashiya asked his son was, 'Are you okay? How are you doing?' I was like, 'I don't know if my I love my dad. My dad's amazing. I'm not Chassidish. I'm not saying anything negative about my father. But I'm like, I don't know if that would have been my dad's reaction. My dad would have been like, 'You're an idiot. Why am I wasting thirty thousand dollars? I'm sending you to public school. You don't know how to like.' The first Rabbi Saffers here could probably attest to the fact that my father might have had that reaction. My parents. Rabbi Sapper, you were perhaps better at doing what you did than I was at doing what I did. But there's no doubt. Also, the rebbeim that I had in my day, but then the rebbeim you had. I had wonderful. So they, it was very easy to show why we did what we did. I had very good rebbeim, so it was my behavior that was fundamentally irrational. But I was shocked. I was shocked.

13:12 And the father, the entire time, was like really almost like saying it'll be okay and whatever it is we're in it together. And I was in a spall from this. It was a real sense of safety that the kid had when he was going through something very hard. That's it happens to be in this case. I was it was the father but I think in general that's what it means. The container of the mother that the mother fundamentally provides that. Baseline level of safety or what we'll call for the purposes of this shmu es water. In other words Klal Yisrael would have had water in the desert no matter what. Obviously Hashem Baruch Hu is going to take care of us even in refidim. Hashem Baruch Hu said "Hit the rock; there'll be water that'll come out." The problem was never water. What's the pshat in the suchos of Miriam? Klal Yisrael had the be'er Miriam that was coming along with them. What's the pshat in that? The pshat is it was symbolic of who Miriam was to us as a nation.

14:11 She was our mother, and we had this awakening experience when Miriam passed away. All of a sudden the container is gone. That's what happens when you lose somebody you love. For me, my grandmother was the second mother. When she passed away, there was like a real crisis in my life. I was like, wait a second, how is it possible to continue on? Without this person loving me in an active way, I can't speak to her anymore. I can't go visit her in New Jersey when I go into America. That's a crazy thing. So in the absence of Miriam Hanaviyah, Klal Yisrael has like this almost primal, infantile type of terror. What's going to be with us? And that's why they begin to act so irrationally. It's not just that the water is gone, because if the water is gone, say it, the water is gone.

15:06 But they have so much of a bigger reaction than the water because they lost that sense of a mother. With this in mind, we can now start to understand what precisely is Hakadosh Baruch Hu telling Moshe Rabenu when he says to him, "Speak to the rock." Previously, he told him to hit the rock. We can get into exactly why that is, why it was previously. He was told to hit the rock, and now he was told to speak to the rock. But before we separate those two things for a second, let's just analyze exactly what Moshe Rabbeinu is being told by our Kodesh Baruch Hu. When a person is acting out of this primal type of terror, the thing that they need to develop is language. The thing they need to develop is language. Doctor Palkowitz is a very famous therapist. Doctor Palkowitz has a line.

16:00 If you want to leave Mitzrayim, you have to be yotzei the mitzvah of Magid every year. We see ourselves as leaving Mitzrayim. There's a vision. I'm going to leave the restriction and the constriction of my life. How does a person do that? The answer is, I have to give language to my experience. And what most of us don't realize is that what's happening underneath the surface. It's unprocessed. It's unmentalized. It's a fascinating thing. If you actually ask people just to articulate, just ask them like, "What's actually going on inside of you?" You'll notice most people, at least at first, they have a very hard time articulating their inner experience. Why is that? It's happening inside of us. Why is it like you can have something happening inside of you, but you don't necessarily have the ability to give it language and bring it out into reality? The answer is because you might have an intuition of what's happening inside.

16:51 But until you actually give it language, until you go the rock of your life, so to speak, until you go those places that are like hard, and you have no capacity to express what's going on, and that's why when really difficult things happen, and sometimes just the work in therapy is just to have a space to talk it out. It's a very special thing, just to have the opportunity in your life where somebody can ask you a question. Because that's a lot of what therapy is. It's somebody who asks you a question, and that's like them sort of paving the road for you to walk. And so, if any of you had the opportunity to speak to Richards over the last two years, you'll notice that basically what he does is in a thoughtful way, but he'll just ask you a question and go something like, "What was it like to go through that?" And you'll notice that when people respond, they often have to hit pause and they go.

17:41 It was really hard, and then you know, like he'll say. And if you drill down underneath the word hard, what will you find? And someone will go, I was really lonely. Right? And all of a sudden, just by giving it language, things start to flow. And this is the big secret: those things that appear to be the hardest things in your life actually become the source of what sustains you. There's a brilliant symbology here that the Torah is giving us. In a place where Klal Yisrael was acting from this primal infantile terror, the container of their lives, their Miriam Hanavi, was no longer present, and now they're just like acting out completely. Hakadosh Baruch Hu is telling something to Moshe Rabbeinu that's absolutely brilliant. He's saying this is the opportunity to role model for them how a person not only survives, but these seminal terror events actually become a place that you live from. It's actually what sustains you.

18:36 And it happens to be a very interesting thing. If you think, you don't even need to think so deeply about this to understand the truth. But if you think really deeply about it, you'll see that it's very true. It's actually the hardest moments that we have in our life that, in the end, if you actually do the work, they become the thing that you draw from the most in your lives. Think about the things that you went through already that were hard in your life, and that you actually worked through them. You'll notice all of those things actually become like the lessons you draw from. Like five years later, ten years later, twenty years later, you'll be like, 'Yeah, I remember when I went through that. It really changed me. I learned so much from that. Actually, I discovered the deepest truths about myself in my hardest moments.' But here's the thing: it only works if you're willing to stare at it unflinchingly, let it hit you like a truck. You have to really go through it and then actually give language to what that experience is. Most of us don't do that. Most of us numb the pain.

19:34 Most of us turn away, we make a million different excuses. It's like that 16 year old kid that goes through something exceptionally hard, and three months later they go, yeah, but it made me the person that I am, and it's like sweetie, I love you, but that's not the way that works. Three months is not going to make you do me a favor, do 10 years. Then you could talk about that it made you the person that you are. Sometimes even the idea that a kid will say, like it made me the person that I am so quickly, is the attempt to basically not stare at it. And it's like I don't want to look at this. I'll just say, yeah, it made me who I am. Stare at it. Really feel the intense pain of what you're going through. Acknowledge that there was the loss of something massive in your life, and give language to it. And that's I think that this is what Hakadosh Baruch Hu is telling Moshe Rabbeinu.

20:28 Now Moshe Rabbeinu does the exact opposite. Moshe Rabbeinu hits the rock, and why is this such a failure? What's Moshe Rabbeinu communicating to Klal Yisrael by hitting the rock? He was told to hit the rock last time. The answer is like this: Chazal say it was okay to hit the rock when they were in Refidim because that was their state of youth. They were an undeveloped nation. They had just come out of Mitzrayim. In that state, they were basically like these terrified children, and they said, 'We don't know where we're going to have any water from.' Hakadosh Baruch Hu's message to them was, 'Their strength here—you can hit this, and water will flow from it.' There was a sense of like, Hakadosh Baruch Hu is taking care of us, like the might of Hakadosh Baruch Hu. That's like when you're a little kid. This is, I think, a good martial for it. Where you go, my daddy's stronger than your daddy.

21:25 What's the need, Micha? That was tough. What's the need? What's the need for us to say my father's stronger than your father? Why is it like we need to look at our father and say he's strong? Because that's a very childish way of looking at it. It's like I'm protected by the strength of my father. So Moshe Rabbeinu standing and hitting the rock in a young state, we were very much in a place where that was the appropriate psychological response, but. At this point in our career, in the gestation of Kallahisar, on the development of Kallahisar, we're in a completely different space now. The space was speak to it, process it, understand that life is within this tough place. And by hitting the rock, Moshe Rabenu actually deals with them in exactly the wrong way. Why? Because he's actually dealing with them as children. And when you deal with someone in an adult stage, like a child What you inadvertently communicate to them is you're not capable. This would be maybe a good example of it. There's a big misconception about the relationship between a rebbe and a talmid, and I think the misconception is not only on the part of the talmidim. I think it's also sometimes on the part of the rebbeim. I was very lucky; my rebbe never did this with me.

22:53 A boy, a young man, will come to his rebbe, and his rebbe will tell him what to do. You should know that is. I'm not sure it's appropriate even for children, but for children it's more appropriate. A kid doesn't necessarily know how to behave in the world, so a rebbe comes and says, 'This is the way you ought to behave.' If you come to a rebbe and you say, 'I don't know what to do,' and the rebbe says, 'Do this,' you should know that the rebbe has disempowered you. Because basically, what the Rebbe is communicating to you is you're not capable of making difficult decisions. I remember when I was about to move to Eretz Yisrael, so I had a job offer to stay in the Five Towns. It was a pretty serious job offer, and my wife was devastated when we got the job offer because she really wanted to move to Eretz Yisrael, but it was a real shil. It was a serious job offer.

23:50 Pretend that I didn't have a shilah would have been silly. So I did what many young men would do, and I went to my rebbeim to speak about it. It's interesting to see the way that different rebbeim dealt with it. When I went to Efrainis, my rebbe said to me, 'What I can help you do here is formulate the question, but I can't tell you what to do. It's too big, and you have to own this decision.' And in my she told me to do depending on my decision. What was that? Your rebbe told you what to do? Never. By the way, I want you to know. So I said that to him in the conversation. I said to rebbe, I wish you would just tell me what to do. And he said to me, since I'm not going to deal with the negative impact of the decision, it needs to be yours. Because every decision has positive and negative impact. But when a young man comes to a rebbe and the rebbe like paskins it up, that's telling. It's implicitly, without saying it, it's implicitly telling the Talmud.

24:47 You're not capable of making decisions, and if you make a bad decision, you're not capable of recovering. Inadvertently, a well-intentioned rebbe from a young talmud who perhaps doesn't have enough faith in himself to be able to cultivate his own intuition to know what to do is cutting off his legs. Now you say, what does that mean? I should never go to a rebbe for advice. If a Talmud comes to me and he says to me, imagine you have a shalal guy shows up in the beginning of the year and he comes in and he goes, Rav Berg, how do I get to Yerushalayim from Yeshiva? It would be very foolish for me to say to him, how do you get from Yeshiva to Yerushalayim? How do you think you do that? And the kid's gonna walk out of my office and just ask Rabbi Zer. Because Rabbi Zer's gonna give him a straight answer. Just take the bus, right outside Yeshiva, yeah? And he'll probably come along with like a whole shmoos of like.

25:41 I understand that guys can't push it like get on a bus. It's like a whole like a. The reason why that's intelligent is because it's information deficit, right? If a guy comes to a rebbe and a rebbe says, "Let me share with you some things I've learned along the way for you to consider," that's valuable. But when a rebbe says, "Do this," he's cutting off the talmud's legs. You know why children learn how to walk? Because their parents, after they fell for the first time, didn't come to them and go, "Maybe walking isn't for you." That's why children learn how to walk. But if every time you make a mistake, a rebbe comes to you and goes, "See, this what," sorry, I didn't mean to hit you. I mean obviously I meant to hit you. I didn't mean to hit you. I'll be alright. You'll be okay. It's true. You'll survive the fall. The if a rebbe comes to you and he says, "See, this why you have to have das Torah and this why you have to go for etza and there's like, it's okay."

26:38 It was just a bad decision, and I got news for you boys. You know how your rebbeim learned how to make decisions? They made bad decisions and learned from them. There's nothing wrong with going through the process of actually telling somebody, like you're an adult now and you can make your own decisions. I want you to know one of the worst decisions I ever made in my entire life. I had a major shilu. What to do? I went to a rebbe to speak about it. I went to. I chose the wrong rebbe. And I should have just gone through a process. I went to this rabbi for a particular reason, and I'll never forget. He said to me, "Goes, you're just being anxious." And like this is the decision you should make. And I was young, so I listened to him, and it was one of the worst decisions I had ever made on two levels. One, the negative impact of the decision was massive, and number two, like I thought, like I wasn't capable of making this decision. Had the rabbi been a little bit more psychologically savvy, he would have said to me, "Okay, let's talk it through."

27:35 What does it mean to make this decision? What do you think might happen? What are you afraid of? Let's process it. That's valuable. When Moshe Rabbeinu hits the rock, he's inadvertently telling them, "You guys haven't changed even a little bit. You're the same kids that came out of Mitzrayim. You're just as incapable today as you were all those years ago in Refidim." And inadvertently, Moshe Rabbeinu is telling them, "Like you're not okay with the loss of Miriam. You're not okay." And so when he hits the rock. He's communicating to Klal Yisrael, and this is a failure in leadership. Again, obviously, it goes without saying when we're talking about tzaddikim, it's kechuta sayra. I assume you guys are mature enough to know that any criticism of any of the avos is obviously only to be understood for us and not Chasam Sholom truly about them. But for us, we have to know that what the design of leadership is meant to be is that it's meant to empower us. It's meant to tell you you're a big enough person at this stage of your life to go out into the world and fail, and if you make the wrong decision that's okay, and especially in moments of crisis, a Rebbe has to have unbelievable amounts of patience to allow somebody to work through something. Very often.

29:02 Talmidim will see a fellow Talmud who's struggling and they might ask the following question: "I go, I don't understand. Why is the yeshiva not just like calling this guy in and giving it to him straight and let's go, come on, you got to start?" And it's like maybe because mature, thoughtful rebbeim play a very long game and maybe they're okay with that Talmud falling down a million times because they know that it's part of a process. And sometimes in our well-intentioned way when we see one of our friends struggling we might go over to him and try to pick him up and come on, let's go. And it's like what's your need for him to be up right now? Maybe it's okay for him to be down. Maybe he's learning from being down. Maybe allow him to process. And maybe that time and maybe it's going to be six months and maybe it's going to be a year and maybe it's going to be five years. But the question is do we have enough patience with ourselves?

30:00 To trust ourselves to actually work things through. Do we have enough patience with our friends, right, with the people that we love, to allow them? I don't need to hit the rock. I don't need to get performance, right? Just because I can get performance doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea. You've not necessarily set someone up for long-term success because you hit the rock, especially if what the rock required in those moments was tenderness, and it's more often than not true. It's more often true than not that. It's much more difficult to be tender in critical moments because you want to just like cut to the chase, and it looks good on the outside. But I want to tell you, in the long term, if you try to force performance, if you try to hit the rock when people are going through things, the long-term snapback is really devastating. That's the type of thing that ten years later, twenty years later, the guy goes, "Man, I wish somebody would have just given me the space to actually like fall apart." Because if you really hold that on the inside that a person is strong enough to go through anything, then you trust that in the long term it's okay to fall apart. It's okay to fall apart because they're not going to lose themselves. Sometimes we find ourselves when we're going through crisis and we fall apart.