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Okay, What a tremendous fuss to be back here in MMY And to be the first shirorayach. We'll get there. We'll get there. The to be the first shirorayach is a very special privilege. Hashem, I think it's a couple of years in a row now that I've been invited to come speak with the girls. I want about what I'm about to say. I hope is like Like a big word. I hope it'll be meaningful for you, and I hope it'll be meaningful for me too. I hope it's not going to be just another year. The topic that I want to speak about is of course going to be Elul, but in a larger sense, the topic that I want to speak about is really about this year. And if I can help you frame, I'm sure you've had a lot of introductory shiurim. Over the past week, to talk about what we want to gain out of this year, but perhaps using this as an opportunity to frame for ourselves what we really want to accomplish this year. What would be something unique that we could walk away from this year in MMY and say that was a year unlike any other?
There's a famous muscle in El that everyone talks about. It's a muscle. At this point, people are so accustomed to this mussel that they think it's a Meimor Chazal. They think it's a Medrash or a Gemara. It's a mussel from the Alter Rebbe, from the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, from the Balatanya. And it's the mussel of the King in the Field. I'm sure everybody knows the mussel, but just to repeat the mussel very quickly so that we are all familiar with it The Alter Rebbe asks the question: Why are the Yud Gimel Midos revealed during Elul? Said they're obviously a very lofty thing, so they should be revealed on Yom Kippur. So he says you can compare it to a king. Who before he arrives in his castle is accessible to everybody. He goes out into the field and is friendly with everybody. And then the king proceeds to the city, and everyone follows him into the city. But once he enters the palace, people need permission to enter.
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And it's actually not clear what the Alter Rebbe meant in this mashal. It's been used as this sort of very friendly, warm thing that an Elul Hakadosh Baruch Hu comes out to the field to greet us. There's a certain sense of intimacy, of camaraderie, a sense of kinship that we have with the Rebbeinu Shlomo in this time. But it's still unclear what the Alter Rebbe meant. If you think about it deeply Why does the King come out to the field? What prompts this royal stroll out into the field? Why should we have easier access in this time? Why don't we have to make an appointment with the king? It's the way that we would normally assume. One can't just approach the king in this time. There seems to be this sense of approachability. Why did all that occur? The Alter Rebbe doesn't expressly say what he means, and so it's up to us to try to delve a little bit deeper into this mashal.
A second question that I want to ask, which is also a very basic question. Is tshuva something organic inorganic? What I mean to say is Is tshuva something that exists outside of ourselves, something that we're meant to become Or is tshuva a return to our original state, a restoration of factory settings? And I think for so many of us The feeling in general when it comes to our yiddishkeit is that yiddishkeit is this external type of thing. It's it's a it's a very powerful and profound question if you think deeply about it, because let's say for example Is davening foreign to us or is davening organic to us? And for many of us, and I know this is especially true for guys who are going to Minyan three times a day, there's a certain sense And I hesitate to use this word, there's a certain sense of schleppiness that exists when it comes to davening. Do you know what I mean when I say schleppiness?
It's like a sense of having to do something that's not me. I have to wake up at a certain time. I have to go to shul. I have to open up a seder, and I have to say not just because they're the same words every day, but because the words don't actually mean so much to me on a personal level. It's very hard to make them feel organic. It's like I'm saying somebody else's words. Does that resonate with you? Do you have had that experience before that you're just kind of like. Doing, I know for girls it's not this. I know for girls it's this. I don't really understand why this is your move. I don't understand the whole clutching the elbow. You see, the boys, as they get firmer, it becomes this Like exercise, a gym type of experience where it's a very intense type of thing. For the girls, it just seems to be a firmer grasp on the elbow.
And a more heavily face-planted situation in the sitter. I once dated a girl. I could tell she was very frum, because her sitter was full of makeup. And you could tell the tears that were shed, the makeup that was embedded, was a very beautiful sitter. It was like I'm not making fun of it. Just you know, like it's. I never had a sitter with color in it. But you find yourself saying the words, and they're somebody else's words. It's like a pretty reasonable experience. And people like, maybe if you translated the words, then it would be better. You ever hear that? Maybe if you knew what you were saying, it would be better. And then you tried that, and it didn't work. You're trying to figure out what 'sala' means. You know I'm talking about. Nobody knows what that means. Many years ago, there was a young man. Who was getting bar mitzvah? His father had this very beautiful This very beautiful request. He didn't just want his son to learn how to lene, he wanted his son to learn how to daven for the amud, which is such a beautiful thing.
So he hired a bar mitzvah teacher who would teach him not only to lene but also to daven for the amud. He hired a friend of mine. And not only that, his father was a very frum man. He wanted his son to learn how to lene, how to daven for the amud, but also to know what he was saying. So he wanted him to teach him the parsha that he was laning, which is very beautiful because most boys. My bar mitzvah parsha was Lech Lecha. I remember when I was 18 years old and I came to the vassar and I was like, "That's such a cool parsha that I laned." You know the words, but you don't know what you're saying at all. I was like, "Oh, that story was in my bar mitzvah parsha." You don't know because you just know the tune, you know the trope. So this father hired him to know the actual parsha and even to know musaf because he was going to be davening musaf for the omer after he lanes. A very ambitious father.
He wanted him to know what Musaf was all about. So the kid Twelve years old, such a beautiful kid, such an honest kid. He was learning the translation of davening. And he said to my friend "Can I ask you a question?" He said, "Sure." He goes I know 'Amein' means 'Kong,' but what does it really mean? Isn't that the most beautiful question? Because he was really, he was a twelve-year-old boy. He was trying to have kavana "Okay, kong, " you know. But you even if you know what hamein means, and even if you've read that book, just one word, like still, it so it doesn't feel necessarily natural to you, no. In fact I hesitate to say what I'm about to say, but it could be like this with anything. It could become. Our learning chas v'shalom becomes an intellectual pursuit. It doesn't necessarily feel like they're my stories that I'm learning.
And there's almost this sense, if I'm being honest with you, of almost like sometimes they're trying to pull out a lesson from the story to make it relevant. You hear that word a lot in the field of education. You have to make it relevant. If you have to make something relevant, doesn't that by its definition mean that it's something not relevant? That it's something external. You always have this conversation when it comes to the boys learning Gemara. Boys have this fascination with saying how Gemara is not relevant to them. And they, for some reason, always use this example. They say, "I don't have one ox, let alone many oxen, that I need to be worried about what my oxen will gore, and I'll probably never use the word gore again if I don't ever learn Babbakama." So why am I learning baba kama? I don't have friends who have oxen. And then you have some rebbe goes, but you have a car, and what if your car hits another car? And the boy goes, then I'll call the police.
There's a sense that the rebbe is trying to make it relevant. And the boy is asking, I think quite naturally Is this organic? Is this me? And the word tshuva. Of course, tshuva means returning to Hashem, doesn't mean repentance. We have all these bad English words that are not actually capturing the translation of what we mean to say. But there's this word tshuva, which means of course return to God. Of course, it means return to Klal Yisrael. But tshuva, on a deeper level, the Alter Rebbe speaks out in many places, and many of the Baly Chasidus and Bnei Yisrael speak about this idea, but they are not sure how to proceed. So I think it's important for us to talk about this now. And if that's the case then We should want to do it more. We should. There shouldn't be this. I don't know what the right word is, and I'm hesitant to use the wrong word. Maybe you'll fill in the blank for yourself.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a trepidation. Of course, there's a natural feeling of being overwhelmed by the sense of judgment that exists. But it should be almost like a natural type of experience. I'll give you an example of what I mean. I don't know if you girls have ever done this. I do this in a constant state of starting again to diet. Are you familiar with this thing? You start again to diet. People always say it's not a diet; it's a lifestyle. Sure. So if it was a lifestyle, I wouldn't be dieting. There's this sense of that when you lose weight again. I don't do this. I'm sure you girls have had this experience. I try not to eat the food that my food eats. So I try not to eat salads and things like that. You've eaten these foods. If you eat these foods, you actually feel much better.
You feel gross after you have a tremendous meal. You feel like you want to roll. Nobody walks away from a big meal going, I just feel great. You walk away from a huge meal and you're like I'm like up to here. It doesn't. I know. I know that your half of the species has emotions that my half doesn't have. I've been studying your gender for many years now. And I know that you girls have feelings around food. Girls will wake up in the morning and go, "I feel like today is a yogurt day." I just want you to know that I've never described the feeling as yogurt. I don't have that. I don't have that experience. What men have is eating our feelings. You understand? It's a completely different experience. It's why, to me, burger is our love. I need a lot of love. It's like a thing.
Where was I? So When you eat well and exercise, you have this feeling that you're like, this feels right. This feels good. You have that, and then you start wondering, I wish I would have done this six months ago, because then I'd feel great. And I have this line whenever I do it, which is obviously often. Because you know, yin yang rebound type of thing. Nothing tastes as good as feeling good feels. You know what I mean by that? It just feels right. It feels organic. It's the way that the body is supposed to go. There's no hamburger as delicious as waking up in the morning and not still being in a food coma from the night before. Does that make sense? So that's what organic looks like. If tshuva is organic, if tshuva is who we really are, if it's a restoration to factory settings, if it's wiping everything clean, then there should be almost this natural desire to chase after it We should want to feel that way all the time. We should be in a constant state of tshuva.
So why doesn't that happen? Where did we lose ourselves? That's the question I want to ask. I want to share with you the saddest day of the year for me. And it doesn't happen every year. It only happens in particular years. I'm watching it happen now again. It hasn't been like a specific day yet. But I'll share with you what it looked like for my nine-year-old, and then I'll share with you what I'm going through with my six-year-old. My nine-year-old daughter, her name is Miriam. She is the sweetest little, just mush. There's not a word for her. She's just happiness. She's just like a protoplasm mass of happiness. It's the most beautiful thing to see. You wake, she wakes up in the morning with a smile that's from ear to ear. She's just like—I, I, whatever. Obviously, I like her a little bit. You can tell, right? She's a good girl.
The saddest day of the year is when she goes to first grade and she comes home and she says Abba, I don't want a unicorn napsack anymore because unicorns are for babies. Do you realize why that's exceptionally sad? Because Miriam loves unicorns. She spent the first five years of her life loving unicorns, and because I'm a father who's obsessed with his daughter, I love to give my daughter unicorn things. So her room is just this mess of unicorn stickers and unicorn watches and unicorn wallets and anything that has a unicorn that I see whenever I'm traveling. And so if I'm in amazing savings, you'll learn this if you're. Anyone here from the Five Towns, or any place that has an amazing savings? I live in the Five Towns, so that's the way I think. The Five Towns has an amazing savings, and there's probably one in Muncie too. But I live in this egocentric Five Towns type of mentality, and I grew up in Lawrence, so that means I think I'm better than all of you. It's just the way I grew up. I'm genetically modified to believe that.
I'm working on hitting those factory settings back to square one, so I could be a normal person. Sometimes you say it, and then afterwards you're wondering why I just said that—it had no relevance to the shi or to anyone or to anything. I'm just being real with where I am right now in my life in this moment. I'll pass it off as mindfulness. So you go to amazing savings, and you're like, okay, so I got to bring something back for the kids. So you walk down that aisle, and there's like the and you're just like on the lookout for a unicorn. You're like, I'm going to be like, no, no, no, no, I don't want to do this. It's not worth it. But then you see like a unicorn thing, and because it's all like three dollars and forty-nine cents. You're like, I'll get ten of them, and now I'll have unicorn presents throughout the entire year, and every night of Chanukah is going to be unicorn. And then she comes home and she says, and it's a devastating day as a father to watch.
Unicorns are for babies. Why is she saying that? She's saying that because what she's willing to do Which I understand and it makes sense What she's willing to do is sublimate her desires in order to be part of the group. And that is devastating, because what you're watching is as a parent You're watching children lose themselves Because they need to be part of something larger than that. In other words, there's a vulnerability that exists in the room right now. I'm going to call it out. I'm sure many of you have been experiencing it. I don't know if you've articulated it. I can show you what it looks like for the guys. If you want to see the emotional articulation of what it looks like for the guys in the vassaret as they arrive when they're experiencing this, you want to see it. How you doing? They go Good.
That's the whole emotional articulation of all of the vulnerability of coming to Eric's show for the first time, and for the other guys, it's how you doing? It's like Justin. That's the whole conversation. There's no like, sitting down and unpacking what you're going through. It comes out in a couple of weeks from now. More comfortable. Then they start to talk about it. I'm sure for you girls, it's been a little bit more. Articulated and verbose, but I'd like to share the vulnerability that's in the room right now. You did it on the plane. I'm sure you already did it in JFK, where you're coming from, because I'm sure you come again from the Five Downs. So when you got into the airport, remember you were doing this. Remember you were looking around and going, 'Do I fit here?' Wow, that was cool. I just want to share with you what you look like for a second. A lot of you went like this.
And I don't want to give myself up, but I'm also going to look. It was a tremendous thing. You're looking around and you're going, So I'm in MMY, but do I fit? Does she fit? Would I be friends with her? I don't know if I vibe with her, right? There's that like quiet judgmentalism that exists, a certain safety that exists within, but I'm coming with a group of friends, and then there's that girl that's coming from out of town, T neck, right? And she's And she's like, maybe doesn't have, but she's actually a really nice person because she didn't grow up with a ton of people. Like somewhere far away. Where are you from? Canada is the farthest away. Did you come with? Are you Shnallif? Did you come with anybody? You went on the group. Did you come with a friend? Right. So there was. There's a certain feeling. I appreciate the vulnerability. Thank you for the response. There's a certain feeling of aloneness that you have, right? As you're coming by yourself And you're wondering.
And how many girls in this room? The answer is everybody. So you don't have to raise your hand. How many girls in this room are putting on a version of their best self right now? We'll call it 很好, right? Putting on it, or perhaps the most acceptable self would be more true, but we'll call it the best self. How many girls in the room are putting on a version of their best self so that they can be part of the group? I think the key here is that we need to make sure that all of these things are included in the final output. Again, you don't have to say that you're raising your hand or not. It was amazing to watch the awkward smiles in the room right now. This is a very beautiful thing for those who shared. Thank you. Thank you very much for sharing. I feel privileged to be on your journey for a couple of minutes. There's a vulnerability in actually being yourself. There's a vulnerability, and here's the key word: there's a vulnerability in desire.
What's the vulnerability if you want something? You might not fit in. If you want something different than what other people want You might not get what you want. If you desire something, how many people have said to me over the course of the years, "I don't want to dive in because I'm not going to get it anyway. If I'm going to get it, I'm going to get it either way." But I don't want to put myself out there. To want something, to have hopes and expectations and yearnings, is a very big deal because it means you're uniquely you. That's part of the reason we dive in every day to actually tap into your desire. So what we do, and this is so sad, it's tragic almost. What we do is we create these very low-level desires for ourselves that are like cheap thrills. But they're easy to get.
You could work hard, but they're still easy to get. And so here's what it looks like. You ready for it? The cheap thrill, easy desire is things. Anyone can amass things. All you need is money to amass things. You know the path to money. You're Jewish. You know the path. I mean that sincerely. I don't mean it as an anti-Semitic thing. I mean it sincerely. We know how to get jobs, and I'll tell you why we know how to get jobs. Because you girls grew up in elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, camps. You're now here at MMY. You're going to be working with the product team, right? So they have a new product launch coming up, and they want to do a demo of the product. And then there's some other stuff about the company. But yeah, I think that's all. That could put your resume in, if you want to become a speech therapist, an occupational therapist, a physical therapist, a hydrotherapist, an art therapist, a music therapist, an actual therapist. Any of the jobs that they tell you to become in that tiny little box that we call a coffin. Any Any of those Any.
My ADHD kicked in about twenty minutes ago. If you couldn't tell. If you want to get one of those jobs, you know somebody who's in the field. That's what you're going to say. You're going to go like, 'Do you know anyone who could put in a resume for me?' It's not hard to access things. You just need money, and you know the pathway to money. If you just follow the same path as everybody else, you're going to make your X amount of money to get your X amount of stuff. But everybody in this room knows naturally and organically, and I don't need to convince you or inspire you of this. Everybody in this room knows that. Things really mean very, very little to us if we don't have actual meaning behind those things. So I'll give you an example of what that looks like. And this is a difficult example.
There's a woman on my block. It was Baruch Hashem, it has a happy ending, but it was a tragic story for many years. For 20 years, she and her husband could not have children. Now, I don't know where you all are from, but if you live in Ramat Bechemesh and you don't have children and you're a woman, that is an exceptionally lonely experience, because women in my neighborhood hang out in the parks with their children. That's where they are. So if you are someone who can't have children and you go to the park That's like I don't know how to describe it. That's like being stabbed in the heart every single time you go to the park. So of course this woman wouldn't go to the park because it's too difficult. But then you end up just being home. It's a very lonely type of experience. In my neighborhood, the way that they built the houses is they built these enormous houses and they split them into four.
So because she and her husband couldn't have children, there was somebody who, when they were building the houses, said, "I want not one quarter of a house, but I want one quarter and then the next half of the next quarter." And the builder wasn't sure if they were going to be able to sell that type of property because who's going to want a quarter? Of a building of an apartment, but this person took it, because what does she and her husband actually need? She's a ganenet. She's an awesome ganenet. I sent my kids to her. She's this amazing ganenet because all of the love that she has, she gives towards these kids. For twenty years, she couldn't have children. In a miraculous story, it doesn't matter the details. I'll just tell you very quickly. It's totally tangential.
A person in my block was very, very close with Rav Chaim Kanievsky, Zeichut Zadik Mavracha. He took them to Rav Chaim Kanievsky. Rav Chaim Kanievsky said, 'Build a mikvah; it should be a chus for you.' They have money because they never had to spend their money on anything. They built a mikvah, and Baruch Hashem, it's a crazy story. I'm not this type of guy; I don't always do. And then nine months and a day later, but it happens to be that in this case, less than a year later, she gave birth to her daughter, and it was the craziest simcha when she came home from the hospital. Everybody in my neighborhood
Meaning everybody in the three, four blocks surrounding where she lived, came outside. Music was blasting, balloons, people were singing and dancing with her husband as he got out of the car. The videos went viral. The story goes that when I was a kid, my father had this friend who was a rabbi, and he told me this story about a man who had a very large family. The story went viral online because of Chaim's bracha. It was a crazy story, but we think we went crazy for this little girl. And I have to share with you that every single time now I see this father walking with his little girl, or the mother walking with her little girl, I get a big smile on my face. It's like, wow, that story had a happy ending because it was a tragic story for so many years. Why was it such a tragic story? Because who wants to come home to an empty house? Because who doesn't want to have to deal with With all the challenging parts, like there's beauty to being woken up at three o'clock in the morning by a crying child, and putting them back to sleep. I'm not saying it's not stressful, and I'm not saying that you don't get to be exhausted. But there's something exceptionally
Amazing about having to deal with the difficulties of raising children. You're blessed to be able to go through hard times. I'll share with you something I share with my talmidim all the time. I tell them I love you guys. But if any one of you pukes on me Our relationship is over. I'm never going to speak to you again. That's the end of our relationship. I have a friend who puked on another one of our friends twice. Twice there was. I grew up. There's a place close to my house, not so close to my house, but a place that all the camps went called Adventureland. Anyone here know Adventureland? Oh my gosh, Adventureland, right? So Adventureland has this ride called the Gravitron. The Gravitron spins really fast, and you're going, you're like on the wall, and it pushes you up. And so if you're sick, if you eat too much food before you go on the Gravitron, and you get sick, so you'll throw up, but then it hits the guy right next to you because the ride is spinning really fast. So when I was a kid, Sorli threw up on Yitzi.
And that was awesome. As a kid, I was kind of like, "Oh, that's terrible, man." But in my heart, I was like, "That's amazing. That's the funniest thing that I've ever seen." One time, I came home for Shabbos. I was in my shul for Shabbos, and my friends came running over to me Shabbos morning. You're not going to believe it. Sorli threw up on Yitzi again. He was in the halv choir, and they sing by the halv dinner. I don't know if they still do that, and he was sick and he had stage fright. He got up there and he just was so nervous and he threw up on the kid in front of him, which was the same kid. He threw up on him twice. That's a terrible story. I would not be your friend if you threw up on me once or twice. You've got to go, man. That's the end of your life. We're finished. We don't have anything left to say to each other. My son, when he was just a couple of months old, I have a six-year-old son
And I'm watching him go through this now because now he's in first grade and he's a big boy now. But you watch as they adapt to this social world that they're in, and they leave behind their natural self. It's very painful to watch. My son, when he was a very little boy, maybe he was six months old. My wife said, 'Could you go feed the baby?' I don't know how to feed a child. I don't know what I'm doing. So she gave me a bottle. I sat down in the rocking chair, and you're supposed to rock. You're supposed to rock slowly if you're feeding a child. Did you know that? Familiar with this? You know this. Where were you? Five and a half years ago, I'm rocking the baby and trying to get the baby to sleep, and eventually he falls asleep. Delicious little. I have five girls and one son. Which is amazing. People in the streets, when I had my son, were coming over and saying, "You did it!" I was like, "I have five healthy children before this. What's wrong with you?" But I was also excited to have a baby boy, and then I put him on my shoulder because I know that you're supposed to burp them. Again, I'll give you this pro tip: burp them very lightly.
Nobody told me that. So I'm sitting there with this beautiful little boy, love of my life, apple of my eye. I finally have a son, and I'm rocking him pretty fast. And all of a sudden I hear the worst sound that a father can hear, and it's not loud because he's a tiny six-month-old little boy. You want to know what it sounds like? It goes like this, right? And then you feel the warmth. This is why I love speaking for seminaries. When I do this same shtick in front of the guys, they're like, "Yeah, that's gross." And you feel the warmth running down your neck. I called out for my teenage daughters. I was like, "Somebody come take this child." Because in that moment, I learned why Israelis have bars, sara gim, on the windows. It's not to keep robbers from coming in. It's to keep us from throwing children out.
Now I love my son and I cleaned myself off. I still have a relationship with my son, and I get to tell that story. It might seem to you like just a funny story of Berg trying to get some cheap laughs from saying something about El, but he's got to keep it a little light because we just got here for a week, and it's the first year of Rav because he's using us. I'm telling you something real for me. Also, the other thing is that there's beauty in telling that story because for me, it's a touchstone memory. I'm never going to forget when Mikey told me he had to go to the hospital. You don't forget those things. You don't forget when you bring your first kid home from the hospital and she's like spitting up, and you're like, that's so cute, she's spitting up, right? There's something beautiful about the stuff that fills our life that's not things. The things are only there to serve the meaning.
We know that. We know that. We know, and here's again, I'm going to push the envelope a little bit. We know that everybody in this room doesn't want connection. You might say that you want connection, but that's only because you don't allow yourself to have the desire for something bigger. What you really desire is belonging. Everybody in this room has a connection. But connection is cheap. Connection is like we know each other. Connection is hi bye. Connection is we were all coming back, so we were all sitting on the same section of the bus. Belonging is vulnerability. Belonging is telling you, hey, I'm going through something. And can you hold that with me? And a non-judgmental way, and just allow me to be who I am. Belonging is, in my worst moments, will you still think that I'm lovable? Am I still acceptable? Am I still somebody that you can look at with beautiful eyes and not chas v'shalom say that I'm something less than? Because I admitted to you that I did something that I'm not proud of.
Every one of us in this room desires belonging in such a deep way. But the problem is that we don't allow ourselves to even use that word, so we use cheap words like connection. Our terminology needs to become, our language needs to become infinitely more sophisticated if we're going to access what we truly desire. And if you want to know what you truly desire, just keep pushing the envelope. So if somebody says to you, if you're on a date and you say to a guy, "What do you want to do?" and he says, "I want to be an accountant," and you say, "Why?" and he says, "Because accounting is a steady job." So that he doesn't want to be an accountant and he doesn't want a steady job. What he wants is safety for his family, probably. He wants a sense of stability. And if you dig a little deeper, you might find out why he wants that stability. Maybe he didn't grow up with that stability, and maybe it's really important to him to take a stable job.
And that's something he deeply desires. He doesn't desire to be an accountant. No dentist after 120 years is going to want their tombstone to be a tooth. Nobody's going to be like. Here lies the dentist. He applied Novocaine so well. Nobody wants that. We're not here on this earth. I'm not knocking dentists. I went to dentists my whole life. It's an amazing thing. My orthodontist must have loved my parents. I had the worst teeth in the world. My parents must have spent thirty thousand dollars correcting my teeth, and I thank them every day for it. I don't ever, but I should. I should be exceptionally grateful for all that my parents have done for me. I'm not knocking any profession, but everybody knows that whatever profession you're in, you're in the service of something greater. If you ask a dentist why he loves being a dentist, he might tell you something about allowing people to smile with their whole face and not being embarrassed of the teeth they have inside them.
In other words, there's a meaning, there's a depth to it, but you have to allow yourself to get there. You have to keep pushing the envelope to get to that desire. We lost that desire somewhere along the way. Here's the crazy news And it sounds strange But your job on some level this year—and this is why you came to Eretz Yisrael—you could have learned Torah anywhere in the world. You've been learning Torah in America or Canada. Sorry, you've been learning Torah somewhere outside of Eretz Yisrael. I imagine for most of you, your entire life. Why did you come to Israel this year to learn? The answer is because this is, and this might sound strange to you, the organic place that a Jew belongs. This is not. I'm not here to push any agenda. I'm just sharing with you that the Kotel is not Cinderella's castle. Kever Rachel is not the teacups. It's not a small world after all. In Chavrone, this is not a place that you visit. This is not Disney World or Disneyland, depending on where you're going for Pesach. This is your home. This actually is your home. A Jew who returns to Eretz Yisrael feels, in an organic sense, some sort of natural kinship with the land.
It's not a place that you come for your bar or bat mitzvah only. This is what it means to be you. And that might not feel so natural to you because we've been living in exile for so long that we don't even know what it looks like to be natural anymore The muscle with this for this would be like if you're a healthy person and you have a salad, you feel good And if you have a massive bowl of pasta, one of those giant ones. You went out to somewhere in Mamilla, enormous bowls of pasta But with that heavy Israeli cheese on it. You clearly know what I'm talking about. Did you have that this week? You're okay. So I understood. I watched the faces in the room. Thank you for being a friend. So people who are healthy, at the end of that meal they feel gross. People like me, at the end of that meal, they go that was good. The difference is if you're healthy.
Then healthy food feels good, and if you're unhealthy, then unhealthy food feels good. The reason I'm saying is, the question is, why are we disconnected from our Judaism? It's not because Judaism is inorganic. It's because somewhere along the way we lost ourselves. We lost our connection to davening. That's a crazy thing. As a kid, do you know that children naturally daven? I don't mean like children naturally daven from a sitter. I'm like if you talk to a child about the things that are involved in davening, they'll tell you. For example, and I don't mean to minimize davening and limit it to bakasha. But if you tell a child, like a little kid, like a four-year-old or a five-year-old, you ask them what they want, they'll tell you without hesitation. They're not worried about the vulnerability of asking. How many of us in this room feel uncomfortable asking people? It's the number one thing that I deal with. Can you say to them that this is what you want? They just feel so uncomfortable asking. Why are we uncomfortable asking? What is wrong with asking?
Seriously, have you thought about that? What's the danger in asking that somebody's going to say no? Then what? Then you're at where you're at right now. What's wrong with saying I have something that I want. The answer is we learned to be disconnected from our desires. Children don't need to dive in from a sitter because if you ask them what they want, they'll tell you. It's the most amazing thing. You don't need to teach a child to be grateful because children are naturally grateful. I'll share with you an amazing story. This was a couple of months ago. I don't know if you know what was happening in Israel. A couple of months ago, there were rocket attacks here in Israel, and it's very unusual that there'll be a siren in Beit Shemesh. But there was, and my daughter, who was eight years old at the time, was just coming home from school. She ran into the house, and we all ran into the mamad together. It was my six-year-old son's birthday, so he rushed into the mamad, and afterwards he sat down. He sat down with my nine-year-old daughter, and they made a list of all the thank yous that he wanted to express.
Because he knew that it was a very dangerous day because there was a rocket, and he wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you to his family. So he said thank you to my new son-in-law. For being a role model for him. He said thank you to my daughter for marrying him, which my daughter didn't appreciate so much. She really loved him a lot. She said thank you to each one of us. She said thank you to my daughter Shira, who was the one who rushed him into the mamad for saving his life. Which type of trauma is that kid going through? He's six, and he's like, thank you for saving my life. Whatever. That's why we pay for therapy. Nobody needed to tell my son to be grateful because children are naturally grateful. But as you get older, gratitude is vulnerable, right? Because if I say thank you to somebody now, I feel like I'm indebted to them.
So we shrink from our truest self. What Judaism is, in general, and tshuva in specific, is a return to the way that we always were. It's a return to being a child again. Who amongst us doesn't want to feel like a child again? Remember that? Remember how awesome it was to be a kid? It was amazing, right? Wasn't amazing. I'm not talking about when you were a teenager. That's already a very complicated time. I'm talking about when you were young. Do you remember running? Not running because you were working out and trying to stay in shape. I'm talking about just running because you had somewhere that you wanted to get to fast, not to catch a bus. You ran because you just ran. You know what I'm talking about? Like that very natural, I'm going somewhere. Like Forrest Gump, I was running, just going. When's the last time you just ran with reckless abandon? When's the last time you just Chilled out like a kid playing with Legos.
I used to be able to say playing with Barbie, but apparently it became a whole thing now. So I'm not allowed to say that anymore. Do you remember that? Like, do you remember just sitting and not having to worry about social anxiety? That's what it's supposed to be. It's returning to our truest self. So listen again to what the Alter Rebbe says. Tshuva is organic, but the problem is we've lost ourselves. So listen very carefully to what the Alter Rebbe's mashal was. He said you are not going to go to the king's palace. Because you've become distant from the king. And the king, in this sense, is you. You've become distant from God, and God and self are very close together. So you've become, in a certain sense, distant from yourself. If you want to do tshuva, here's the gift that Hakadosh Baruch Hu gives you. Hashem says, "I'll remind you what it's like to be in my presence. You don't have to earn it."
I'll come to you. If you're in the field, you'll be there anyway. That's our job. This L. Is just to step out of our old way of being and just taking in the lights of L. Just to be able to close our eyes and again say, who do I really want to be? And just to remind ourselves, it's like that diet. It's like an alcoholic who has forgotten how great it is to be sober. You see these people after they're sober. They're just like I just could think again. That drink was destroying your life. So it's detox. Elul is a detox center. It's just a taste of normalcy. We're living in an insane asylum. The world has lost its mind. So this is just a return to sanity. It's a taste of sanity. Hakadosh Baruch Hu says here. I'll show you what it's like to be in contact with me. Is that not why every one of you are here?
Every one of us is here because we're searching not just for an intellectual depth in our Judaism, which Judaism, which I know you'll get an M. M. Y. But that's not enough. You know that it's not enough. You're here because you want to be able to daven with passion. You want your Shabbos to be inspired so that you could pass it on to the next generation, not just to be able to say a sophisticated Dvar Torah at the Shabbos table or to learn a Ramban, but you want the Ramban to feel like it's your Ramban, not that you have to extract some message from it. So this is the gift of the beginning of our year. The gift of the beginning of our year is a taste. Then, when it comes time for Yom Kippur, we could pay the entrance. Then we could say yes. But in the beginning, we're so distant from ourselves that we need someone to remind us of what it feels like. I want to finish with this, and I'll do the actual finishing, Rabbi thing—not where it takes ten minutes to finish. You ready for this?
I'd like to ask you to do the following exercise. If you don't, you don't. But I'd like to ask you to do the following exercise at some point over the course of the next couple of days. Okay, so I think the key thing here is that you need to have a list of things that you want from this year. And if you made a list already, I'm asking you to do a new one. And I'll explain to you the difference between this list and the old one. The old one might have been really important goals, and I'm not saying Chassidus to get rid of those goals. But I want you to ask yourself: Is why you want those goals? What would it look like to lean into those desires? And to discover the desires that are behind those desires, and then to discover the desires that are behind those desires, and to really get in touch with the pain of not having had those desires met for so long.
What would it look like if you could look at that initial list that you made and said, "I want to get better at this. I want to have more of this. I want to have a little bit less of that." You look at that list and you say to yourself, "Why do I want those things?" And you might find some uncomfortable answers in there. You might say, "Actually, I think that's one of those things that people put upon me." Because there's thing. If we're being honest with ourselves, there's thing that we have in our head that you're going to come back in a couple of months. It's not that long that you're going to go back to America. Maybe you'll go back for Pesach. And you're going to get judged by the Jewish community. You know that because you judged the girls from last year. So just get on board. Somebody's going to do it to you. There's going to be this evaluation thing, and it's very subtle. It's very critical.
I think she did really well. That's the word they use. It is an exceptionally despicable and disgusting, judgmental phrase. It's like who did well, right? There's who did well and who wasted their year. There's nothing in between. There's no appreciation of the process. There's no appreciation of the mess, right? But there's this thing, this image that you're told you're an MMY girl. You have to become this, right? To do well, to be said that you're somebody who did well. What if you threw that out? Or what if you said, maybe some of those things I wanted were because I was trying to do well? What if you actually got in touch with the person that you are? What would happen? It would be amazing. The gift you could give yourself is authenticity And at the core, that's what all of us want this year. So I want to bless us all this year. I want to bless myself.
I want to bless all of us together. That it should be a year of authenticity. That it should be a year that, in just a short amount of time, when we're sitting here by Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur, we're not just hearing the chauffeur blow and it's like, I got to do more mitzvos, I got to do less averos, but it's the clarion call to wake us up to become the people that we know we have inside of us.
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