Parshas Bamidbar - Cutting the Torah Down to Size

2:15 To write a sefer Torah is an arduous task, and so we have to pay a sefer. They got together and collected money. And one woman of the town She decided she was a seamstress. She decided to make the mantle. He's not a mantelist. He wanted to make the covering for the cipher tyre. So comes the day of the Achnas Cipher tyre. And has anyone here ever been to Achnas Cipher tyre? You write the letters, and the cipher holds your hand because he doesn't want you to mess it up. And they finish the last nice, givaldik. Finish the last letter of a tyre. Everyone's singing tyreas Hashem temima. And now it's time for the achnas sefer Torah. They didn't have the nanach trucks back in the day. They actually had to sing And the woman comes and she brings her mantle. And they put the mantle on the sefer Torah. And what's the problem? She made it and it was gorgeous.

3:07 But it came up just short. She didn't make it long enough. They're tugging at it and trying to pull the fabric to get it longer. And it's not working. And the woman is so embarrassed, so she blurts out her idea. She says, "Maybe you could cut off the bottom of the Sefer Torah to fit the covering." " And it's just a machel. Nobody would ever say that. We wouldn't say that, but we do it all the time. Because we often think about Here's the Torah, and here's what the Torah demands of us. But then, here's me And am I willing to adjust in my life Right? Or am I going to cut the Torah down to size so that the Torah will fit my life? And that's a fundamental question. Imagine when the Rebbe was saying this in the seventy s. We were living in a time today. Klal Yisrael has come a very, very long way.

4:02 Baruch Hashem, the Orthodox community has flourished in untold ways. And you guys don't even realize the amount of people and what's going on in the Orthodox community today in general. First of all, so many shapes and sizes and stripes and colors. Baruch Hashem, every community is flourishing. Every community. There's not a community in the Orthodox community that's not flourishing, and there's so many different beautiful ways of serving Hakadosh Baruch Hu within that community. The question is Are we willing to engage the world in the way that the Torah puts as our lens, and then say that's my baseline, and then my life has to adapt to that O viceversa. So I come from a yeshiva. Called Yeshiva Bnei Torah And it's a yeshiva that I have tremendous respect for Have tremendous admiration for their rashi yeshiva. And even though I decided in my life not to join the yeshiva, it is the yeshiva that I grew up in. It's the yeshiva where my family davened.

5:05 And the Rashi yeshiva was our family rav. His name was Rabbi Chay And a lot of people when I was growing up would make fun of me and call me what's called a chayi. You're chayi. Did you wear one of those? I didn't wear the funny colored hat. Did you wear those cloth yarmulkes? If I was wearing a yarmulke, it was good. Actually, the yarmulke that I had growing up was a bullseye. I had a girl make me a bullseye yarmulke because there was a Far Side comic. How Birds See the World And there were bullseyes on people's heads. I thought that was funny. I thought that was a funny comic, so I thought if I was gonna wear a yarmulke, that'd be a good yarmulke to wear. But I used to go here shir from Rabbi Chait. I was very young. I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old when I first started. But certainly when I was fourteen, fifteen or sixteen years old, I used to go here and give shir. And he was exceptionally intellectual, and he used to sit there smoking his pipe. And there was a group of people around him, and they would just sit there and they were really focused. The guys were really learning.

6:12 What I admired so much about the yeshiva was who were the guys in the yeshiva. There were the younger guys, the nineteen, twenty-one year old guys. And then there were the guys who were in their late twenties. But there were guys in the yeshiva that were in their forties and fifties, and they had never left. But they weren't kylal guys. They weren't kylal guys. Who were they? So I'll tell you their names. Their names were people like Mark Solomon. Mark Solomon is a very smart man. Really, a tremendous talmudachem, a real lamdan. And Mark Solomon is a washing machine, dryer, refrigerator repairman. A job that one would not associate with having tremendous dignity. But Mark Solomon decided that's what he wanted to do with his life. I'll tell you why in a minute. Leslie Unger Smart guy. Leslie Unger is a home maintenance repairman. Alex Bernstein's father The Berstins His father is a dry cleaner.

7:25 He has a dry cleaning service. He doesn't even own a dry cleaner. He has a dry cleaner's service. He's a car that picks up people's dry cleaning and brings it somewhere far out of the five towns, and then brings it back. So I grew up with all these guys. Now I come from a family of two balei chova. My mother and my father are both not from growing up, and they both made tremendous sacrifices to raise me in an Orthodox community, which I appreciate. My father never had the opportunity to go to yeshiva. So these people were my role models in learning. Why did they have jobs that were so not dignified, and there were so many of them like that? The answer is Because one day Rabbi Chait was giving shir And he was talking about the Rambam. And the Rambam says that a person should work three hours a day and learn nine hours a day. And Rabbi Chayyim was giving pshat in that Rambam. What did the Rambam mean? Was that an exact prescription? What if a person needs to work four hours a day?

8:17 Then he said a person should have a job where they can make their own hours so that they can learn a morning seder every single day and learn be'ian for the rest of their life. And then he said Like a podiatrist. That was all he did. He said, "Like a podiatrist" And half the yeshiva became podiatrists. True story. Rabbi Friedman from Rambam is a podiatrist. Rabbi Har is a podiatrist. Doctor Isseroff is a podiatrist. All was because Rabbi Chait one day said, "Like a podiatrist." But growing up, I had so much admiration for these guys because these guys were the real deal. They weren't sitting and learning in kol But they had been learning morning seder by their rebbe for twenty some odd years at the time. And think about how long has it been? These guys have been learning from him forever. They were willing to cut their life down to size to fit their values, and not the opposite. And that's what I admired.

9:17 People make a mistake. I think they think that communities are a monolith. And so we use terminology, and it's terrible. We have to stop doing this. Terminology like the Charedi community, the Hasidic community The Modern Orthodox community. There is no Hasidic Charedi or Modern Orthodox community. They just don't exist. Because if you actually spend the time to study the communities, you'll find that they're so broad, and there's so many different types of people, and there's so many different streams of thinking. And we should be more complex, in my opinion, when we talk about communities. Because first of all, being motzi lasan khalisrom, but second of all, it's so not true. People say horrible things. In the modern Orthodox community, people aren't, and I'm like, wait a second. I know so many people in the modern Orthodox community that have cut their life down to size to fit the Torah, and not vice versa.

10:18 And that's something beautiful. And I know people in the Charedi community that have not. And it's not. The community, but we should be sensitive. Here is why I think it ties into Jeremy and here is why I think it ties into the Sion. We should be sensitive to our own biases and our own egos that won't allow us to do what we know to be true. We say, 'I am not cutting my life down to fit the Rebbeinu Shalom's life.' I am going to cut Rebbeinu Shalom's life down to fit mine. And I'll tell you something: the most controversial share I gave this year, the time that I felt like I had the most negative reactions, was when I gave a sheer and sophisticated faith and I said, 'Your life doesn't belong to you. What do we want? Free choice? It doesn't belong to you.' Neshama is a gift that you get every single day. In Moda Ani, we affirm the consciousness that we were given this gift. It's his mission. We live in this autonomous state where it's my life, but it's not.

11:15 It's not your life. The question is, do you have the authenticity to say? Here are the sacrifices that I think I need to make in order to lead the best Torah observant life that Hashem wants me to lead, and that is different for every single person in this room. Jeremy Koski is a person who strives for authenticity. And he's made sacrifices this year to determine what's the best version of himself and which parts of himself he needed to. Advance and which parts of himself he needed to leave behind in order to become the best version of himself that Hakadosh Baruch Hu would get nachas from. Jeremy and I were having a conversation earlier today, and I won't share the details of the conversation. But we were talking about the value of Gemara Be'Yam. And the thing that I said to Jeremy, and I think it's something that's important to say to all of you, is so many of us find our signature strengths in our lives, and sometimes that means we find our signature strengths in areas of the Torah. Some people will get into Mishnayos, and some people will get into Gemara, and some people will get into Chassidus, and some people will get into Riff Cook, and some people will get into Rassalvechik, and some people will get into the Lebavitcher Rebbe. Everybody's going to find something because they're searching within themselves.

12:31 That's one part But then there's the other part. And the other part is okay. What's my obligation, right? Not just what feels good to myself, but what's the external obligation? And when people say to me things like, "I'm not a Gemara guy" Why is that really fundamentally any different than saying I'm not a davening guy It's at the end of the day, it's all the Eibushdor's Torah, and it's our job to figure out what sacrifices we need to make in order to fit into that vision. And so I think it's appropriate. To say about Jeremy, who's making another siyum That he's doing both. On the one hand, he found the signature strength, Rebbe. I like learning mishnayos. Kol hakavod And at the same time Challenge yourself. So there are aspects of Torah that I haven't prioritized, and I need to start prioritizing those things in my life because it's real. I want to share with you something.

13:36 I have here a WhatsApp group from the Rambam Misifta. This year is Rambam class of nineteen ninety eight. That's what it says at the top of this WhatsApp group. Nineteen ninety eight is twenty plus years ago now. That's when I graduated from high school. And here is a picture of one of my closest friends from high school. Some of you may know him. His name is Elliot Steinmetz. Elliot Steinmetz is a coach at YU. And a picture of his son. His son is about a head and a foot taller. Is a foot a head taller than him? So he posts this picture. On our group And he writes,"Sigh. And then one guy writes, "What do you feed him?" And he writes back, "A lot." And he goes, "It's almost like he's an actual adult. Very sobering." It's nuts, and I think I'm shrinking too. How old is he?

14:34 Fifteen, tenth grade Somebody else Posts the picture Yehuda Lazar. Son's gonna go to Rambam next year. Where we went. Goes on and on Crazy, nuts, and is a really good ball player. Next year at Rambam Wow, you guys make him big. My students are tiny by comparison. Literally sitting down with my retirement planner this week, realizing that's a reality on the horizon. Scary. Then it turned into somebody's moving down south and they have an illegal gun collection. The important part is this: I blinked. I blinked And I graduated from high school. And I blinked again And I have a sixteen-year-old daughter. I blinked. It was fast. It was so fast. She was just a little baby born yesterday. I was just a kid in Mevaseret. Just yesterday, I remember getting off the bus and schlepping my bags across to Alagova. Where I lived. I remember sitting down and listening to Rav Yedidya Shmuz on Pachim Ketanim.

15:48 I remember of Isaacson sitting in the base mezzaj when he was just a meshev. I made Aliyah yesterday. It's the craziest thing. I picked up my whole family from America and moved. I remember walking down the stairs for the first time in so many years, coming back to Mevaseret. I remember it was yesterday when I got a phone call from Eliyahu Friedman and he said, "You should hire this guy, Rav David Lovi. He's amazing." I knew that Eliyahu and Rav David were very close friends. Should hire him. Let's get Rav Lovi on board. It was at the roof when I got that phone call. It was just yesterday. It was just yesterday when I got a phone call from David Steinertz. My brother Daniel is available. You should hire Steinertz. It was just yesterday that I went to Sfat and got Rav Glanz out of his mansion in Sfat and said, "Come do important work with us in Mivets." Do you know how fast time goes? It's flying, boys. It's flying, and you don't even realize it.

16:35 Remember, in the beginning of the year, when I said to you, "The days are long, but the year is short." " And now we're here. Historical hypotheticals. Historical hypotheticals. And the Torah that's being learned in our beis medrash literally almost burnt down the vassar today. How gishmak is that? I knew it wasn't going to destroy the fire. The kedusha doesn't burn. I don't know what happened over there in that school, but Rabbi Sa If you don't challenge yourself If you don't set yourself up now for the future, you'll blink and you'll be setting up your retirement plans. I'm going to blink again. It's going to be 20 years from now. I blinked, and it was 20 years. I'm going to blink again. It's going to be 20 years. The only shaila is how are you challenging yourself to become the best version of yourself, the one that the avisher gets the most nachas from. What's the uncomfortable decision that you have to make in your life to be able to say, 'This me. This the best version of myself.' If you lean into the discomfort of the work and you choose to be that guy, I promise you, you'll be happy. Because I saw the people that kept taking the easier way out in their lives. Chaval, they missed it. They might have missed it. Life is what happens when you're not paying attention. So pay attention.