Parshas Beshalach - Transforming Pharaoh

2:34 The question is, what does that mean? So the simple explanation is that Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants to reveal His awesomeness. Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants to reveal His majesty. And so Hakadosh Baruch Hu creates the world in order to reveal His awesomeness. But the problem with that approach is that in our world. There can never be the greatest possible revelation of Hakadosh Baruch Hu. That's exclusively for the spiritual worlds. Hakadosh Baruch Hu's Majesty can never be fully appreciated down here in this world. The Balatanya writes that in Oyla Mabah, even in Oyla Mabah, where we will have the greatest comprehension of Hakadosh Baruch Hu, we're still only going to know Ziv v'Haara. We're only going to know a little bit of our Kadosh Baruch Hu's awesomeness. So it can't be that when we say that our Kadosh Baruch Hu desires to have a dwelling place in the world down below, that it's in order to reveal Himself. That's not enough.

3:41 But maybe you'll say that when our Kadosh Baruch Hu reveals Himself down in this world So the awesomeness will be that all of existence will be nullified. To Hakadosh Baruch Hu That will be a greater level of an expression of His Majesty. In other words In Shamayim, for us to understand Hakadosh Baruch Hu in the spiritual supernal worlds, there will be a greater understanding. But down here in this world, when Hakadosh Baruch Hu comes into this world The entire world will be nullified before Hakadosh Baruch Hu. That will be a greater expression of His Majesty. But that too is not enough. What can this be compared to? It can be compared to three ideas in marriage. What we all want is for somebody else to know us. That would be like a Kadosh Baruch Hu trying to reveal himself to us. No matter how much you share yourself with somebody else, they can't know you.

4:51 Language will always fall short when we're trying to communicate who we are and what's important to us. It's never possible to fully communicate who we are. Even if we tell somebody what we're feeling, they can't know it like we know it inside of us. The best that a person can do in such a situation is to sit and listen and to do their best to draw from their own experiences. But to understand the depths of a person, that can never be. There's something very dangerous. About a second level Where somebody loses themselves in a marriage Where existence, so to speak, is nullified before Hakadosh Baruch Hu's presence. That's called codependency. If I can only participate in a relationship by losing myself to that relationship Then the relationship itself is fundamentally flawed. Why would Hakadosh Baruch Hu create the world only for the world to nullify itself before Hakadosh Baruch Hu?

5:51 That would be an awful relationship. If Hakadosh Baruch Hu desires to have a dira b'tachtonim, what that means is that Hakadosh Baruch Hu desires that there should be a tachton There should be a physical material world. And in that physical material world, it should remain a physical material world. So then, hadra kush leduchte, we're back to the original question. Hakadosh Baruch Hu desires a dira b'tachtonim. Why? It can't be to reveal Himself. Nobody will ever understand that Kadosh Baruch Hu, just like nobody will ever understand us. It can't be that the majesty of Hakadosh Baruch Hu is expressed through the nullification of the world. If that were the case, what is the value of existence? So it must be that the Tachlis Abriya is only fulfilled when the world remains a world. And yet the world undergoes a fundamental transformation. It remains a material world.

6:47 But it's broken down to the extent that it's completely godly in its nature A reality that none of us can truly comprehend. A physical world that doesn't remain at odds with godliness. Not something we can understand. This table right now, it doesn't proclaim that it has a creator. It's a physical table. That's what it is. But there will come a time when this table will be so broken down in terms of its physicality. Not that it will lose its physicality. But that it will become a vehicle. When somebody looks at a table, they'll see the Eibister. When somebody looks at a glass of water, they'll see the Eibister. They'll see the godliness in every single thing. Not to Chassar Shalom say the table is God, that's idolatrous. But to say that there's a Nitzotz of godliness in all things that animates it, that creates it. There's a Chayas to it. That every single thing in this world has a Nefesh that makes it what it is, and that we'll be able to see that.

7:43 That's ultimately what happens in Oyla Mabah. The Alter Rebbe and Tanya says that this is the difference between a tzaddik v'tovlo and a tzaddik v'ralo. A tzaddik v'ralo is somebody who has ra. That's why he's called ra lo. He still has ra. Of course, he'll never act on it. The ra is so small; it's so battle. It's battle b'shishim. It's battle b'maya. It's battle b'elef. The ra inside of the tzaddik v'ralo is so small that the tzaddik will never come to do an avera. But it's there. Masha'ine came the tzaddik v'tovlo. The tzaddik v'tovlo has destroyed all vestiges of ra within him. There's been a complete transformation. It's not just something that he was megaris from himself. It's a complete transformation of the mensch. And he hates anything that's ra. He doesn't understand the notion of an avera. That's the level of a tzaddik vetovla.

8:43 What happened to his ra? Where did it go? Within that ra, of the tzaddik v'ralo Within that ra There's an element of tov. This is the secret of Yiddishkeit, right here. This is the secret of Yiddishkeit. Nobody in the world knows this. You're the bearer of a tradition of thousands of years to teach you this idea. That within the greatest ra in the world, there's a nitzotz of tov. That what appears to be the biggest darkness in the world is concealing the greatest light within the ra. Within the tzaddik veralo, there's the capacity to transform that ra into tov because that's fundamentally what it is. It's fundamentally good. This is what happens in the times of Mashiach. The pasuk says, "Veshbati chayar ra mina aretz." Hakadosh Baruch Hu says, "I'm going to destroy all the animals in the world." What does that mean? There's going to be no more animals in the world. There's going to be no more bad animals. There's going to be no more predators.

9:42 So Apichasu says it says as follows: There'll still be lions. There'll still be tigers. But they won't be lions and tigers anymore. The natural aspect of an animal that's predatory, that seeks to harm another It won't exist in Oyelam Haba. It can't exist. The world will have undergone such a fundamental transformation that there'll be no space for anybody to hurt anybody else. Which is, of course Which is, of course, the hardest thing in the world for us. We don't want to be the way we are. We don't want to be the chayarah that we all have inside of us. Every one of us has an animal inside of ourselves that does things that we're not proud of. And we hurt people Not because we're bad, but because we have egos. Because there's an animal inside of all of us. Nobody means to do anything bad. I've never met a bad person in my life.

10:38 But we have a certain sense of space that we need to take up And Mameila, we end up pushing people out and we hurt people. In a certain sense, one could say that we're predatory. I was speaking recently with a young lady And she's married to a real bentira. And he's an amazing person. But they're in, they're in this parsha of the. Of the beginning of their marriage. My sister in law My sister in law is a real tzadikus. So I remember many years ago when we got married two weeks apart. My wife's brother, we got married two weeks apart. After we finished shabbat brachas, they got married. So I remember when we saw them in Shonarishona, they were living in Eretz Israel. We were living in America, and my wife said, "Has everything." And my sister-in-law said, "shana rishona" Sweet gehen im. Lachaim. And it's not like that for everybody.

11:47 In case you're getting nervous But for many To learn to live with another person That video. It's not about the nail you're holding in that video. You have homework. Don't watch it, but it's shmak video. It's a video about a woman who just wants to be validated because she has a headache and she has a giant nail coming out of her forehead. And the guy that she's speaking to is like, maybe you should just take the nail out. And she's like, Why do you have to solve my problems? I just want you to validate that I'm in pain. So I showed that video to a group of boys in Mivaser, and they were laughing. They said, 'Really, Rebbe? Is that what women want? They just want to be validated?' I said, 'Yes.' They said that's ridiculous, and then I showed the video to a group of girls.

12:36 And they said, "Does that guy not understand that the girl just wants to be validated?" And I said, "Yes." And they said, "That's ridiculous. How come the boys don't know that? Who's teaching the boys that?" I said, "I can't get involved. Nobody's bad. Nobody's bad. But we're chayus raus. We're just showing up to our relationships in the way that we know how. And we're doing our best, but we don't mean to push anybody away. We have this part of us that needs to be the way that we are, and it's hard for us to make space and to hold space for somebody who's not in the same place as us. It's it's a it's a daunting task. Probably the hardest lesson that I've learned in my life is that it's okay for everybody to show up the way that they are. It's no small thing to know that.

13:25 That a child shows up. A little eight-year-old, a nine-year-old, a ten-year-old is having a temper tantrum, and as a parent, our responsibility is to say That's not appropriate, but it is understandable. And a teenager comes home, and a teenager speaks in a certain way and behaves in a certain way, and bends the rules and pushes boundaries. As parents, it's our responsibility to say, 'I understand where you're coming from. I understand why you're doing that' And it's not okay, but I get it, and I can hold space for you. And then in marriage, you have a husband. He's going to come home and be in a certain way, and it's not because he's bad; it's because he's tired or exhausted or doesn't know what you're looking for. And it's hard to hold space for people like that Because there is our own yeshus, our own gaiva that tells us our own little paro inside of us that says that but it has to be my way And it has to be the way that I want you to show up because I am uncomfortable with the way that anybody else shows up.

14:19 And there is a need for another person to undergo a transformation, and we try to tell this person the way that you're doing it is not okay, and you need to transform. It's not true. Everybody's allowed to show up exactly the way they want to. The transformation that occurs, the breaking of that kli that creates the purity, is the breaking of the kli within ourselves. It's the breaking of our own gaiva. It's the transformation of our own ra that has within it that nitzotz of tov. That says I don't have to be the way that I am And that is the way redemption occurs. Redemption occurs when we change ourselves within the context of the relationships that are challenging to us. There's a young man right now, and he's very hurt. He's very hurt in his life, and it's not his fault. But anyone who says anything to him right now, he's like a burn victim. It doesn't matter what you say or how sweetly you say it.

15:28 He's like you're just touching a wound. Try to talk to him. It's just he's in so much pain. And in his pain, he says very inappropriate things. And so one Rebbe came to me to talk to me about him. I said I don't know how to talk to him. I come to him and I'm just saying. Please tell me how I can help you. And the boy is just He's lashing out. He's lashing out. So in conversation with this rabbi, I was very impressed with the rabbi because the rabbi wasn't focused at all. On this young man in the conversation with me. He didn't come into my office to say what can I do to help him because he won't tell me. The rabbi came into my office to say I have with you. There's stuff coming up for me. I'm being triggered when this boy speaks, and there's a part of me that just wants to shake him and say stop it.

16:20 And I know that I can't show up this way to that relationship. And in conversation, it was about a forty-five minute conversation with this rebbe. I was so impressed by him. The rebbe was talking about the journey that he's been on in Chinuch and how that journey has changed him and how much he has grown from the Talmud. And he knows this is what the rebbe was telling me. I know I'm going to grow from this Talmud the most. So impressed. I wish I could say that I always had that attitude or ever had that attitude. Such a growth-oriented mentality. That he's going through a process of breaking down his own gaiva, in the face of a young talmid who's just so hurt and saying these terrible things, but the Rebbe is holding and taking. It's the mark of a great man. I tell you, Maisa, the book just came out.

17:11 Chanina Hertzberg was the Rosh Yeshiva of South Shore Elementary School. Some of you know Rabbi Hertzberg. Grew up here in the neighborhood. So Rabbi Hertzberg was a very special person And I'll tell you a ma'ase that's not in the book. There was a little boy in the school who was—I don't know how to say this nicely. He was—he was pleasantly plump. What do we say? What are we allowed to say today? He was a pudgy little boy. I am saying you are not allowed to say these things anymore, but it's the truth. He's zafteg, whatever words you want to use to make yourself feel better. He was never tucked in. And the rule in South Shore is you have to be tucked in. And Rabbi Herzberg saw him in the hallways, and he said to him It's not like you have to tuck yourself in. This would meisim b'chol yom. You have to tuck yourself in.

18:06 The boy was an innocent, sweet little boy, but with a little bit of a mouth. A machutzuf. Rabbi Herzberg was not a small person himself. So this little boy looks up at Rabbi Hertzberg and he goes, "Rabbi, come on, you know how it is for us back guys. It's hard to stay tucked in." So Rabbi Hertzberg looked at this little boy and he said to him, "That's not the way we speak. That's not nice. Go tuck yourself in." " And then he got on the phone with the mother and he said,"I got to tell you the funniest line that you're ever seen." I thought about that many times over the course of my career. That he was just. He was there for the kids. He knew how to tell the boy that was inappropriate, but then also call the mother and say that was a great line. Special mechanchim that we have in our community.

19:03 People that have transformed themselves. You should know. It's not like it was natural. They were kids also. We sometimes look up to these people and we think they're malachai, they're malachai Hashem tzvaikus, and they are But they're also not right. They're also regular people. Shlomo Freifeld used to tell people that he grew up as Seymour Freifeld, like he was a normal kid, but then he became this revolution that's produced three more revolutions since him. That's why we go down to Mitzrayim. We go down to Mitzrayim to break the paro. It has to be destroyed lechalutan. It has to be a complete transformation. It has to be paro that sends us out of Mitzrayim. It can't just be the Rebbeinu Sholom taking us out. If it's the Rebbeinu Sholom taking us out, that's Hakadosh Baruch Hu revealing His awesomeness and His Majesty. It has to be Hakadosh Baruch Hu saying, "Look what I'm going to do. Paro is going to send you out. Paro is going to be megarish you from the land."

20:00 With all of the things that happen in the parsha, with all of Mechamis Amalek, with all of the man, and with Kriyas Yamsuf, everything pales in comparison to the moment when Paro himself says, "I'm done with this." That's the moment when the greatest Ra in the world reveals itself to be the greatest good. Dear chaver of mine is a recovering alcoholic Recovering drug addict. And when Rabbi Twersky, the Chassidic levracha, passed away, Rabbi Abraham Twersky passed away. He wrote a blog post about it. He had the opportunity to meet Rabbi Twersky in his life, and he was sharing a little bit about this great man. And so I reached out to him. Just to check in to see how he was doing. Lost somebody in your life that was close to you, and he said, "No, I wasn't so close to him. I only met him a couple of times." So I said, "Could you tell me something about?"

20:59 So he said, Rabbi Twersky was the first person to tell me that my addiction was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. So my whole life, everyone was telling me, "You're an addict" You're broken What you're doing is terrible. You're destroying your life and hurting people around you. Rabbi Twersky was the first person to tell me that I was the most spiritual person that he had met. But the spirituality was being covered up by this Mitzrayim type of existence where I was trying to fill myself with everything but Hakadosh Baruch Hu. Hakadosh Baruch Hu desires a dearer betachtonim because He wants every one of us to learn an invaluable lesson that here in this world, with all of the pain With all of the suffering With all of the tragedies Especially the ones we just had With all of these things, it has to be that the world will reveal itself to be good, even though it feels so wrong right now.

21:58 These are pictures of those animals giving out candy in the streets. There has to be a neat sort of godliness in those people. That has to reveal itself. The world has to get up and scream. How in the world could you celebrate the death of another person? Why don't we run away? We know The Chazal tell us that after the sixth plague. So the Shibud had ended. There was no more slavery. So why didn't we run away? So maybe you'll say we didn't run away Lamaisa we lived in Goshen Goshen was a fertile land. If there's no Shibud, say that there's no Shibud. We had yeshivas, we had schools, we had mikvos. Why should we leave? But first of all, that's not natural. If you go to Poland today or Germany today, there aren't that many Jews. If something tragic like that happens Even over the period of a couple of years, Klal Yisrael was smart enough to say, "Let's leave. It's time to move on."

23:13 And we know that all those Jews who were in Mitzrayim and didn't want to leave died in Makas Roishach. That's a shiur by itself. So when it finally comes time, it has to be that Paro throws us out of the land. Why didn't we want to leave on our own? My Rosh Yeshiva told us a maysa when I was little. I was maybe in my early twenties And our Rosh Yeshiva was a man who grew up in the concentration camps. He was a little boy hidden in the concentration camps. The Nazis didn't know about him. His parents snuck him into the concentration camp so they could take care of him. And they fed him whatever little scraps they had to keep him alive. But obviously it wasn't enough. He was very malnourished, and even as an adult, he only grew up to be five feet tall. He was a very small man in stature. He was great in many other ways. I remember when his son came to the base medresh for the first time.

24:16 I saw his son. I didn't know it was his son. He was learning with a guy who was about six foot three. So I asked one of the chaver in yeshiva. I said, "Who's the rashiiva learning with right now?" He wasn't part of the yeshiva And so he smiled and he said, "That's the rashiiva's son." Had the rashiiva come to have a son who was six foot three? He was barely five feet. Then they told me the story that he was malnourished in the Holocaust. Etzem, he was a person who would have grown to be six foot three. But if you don't feed a child for the formative years of their life, then they don't grow. So one time the rashiiva told us his story of everything that happened to him in the Holocaust. And he told us that after the Holocaust he went home. And his home was open. Whoever had been living there, they left. So he was in his home, and he remembers as a little boy that he was sitting in the window just like that.

25:06 And there was a yid walking down the street, and there was a Polish man walking down the street, and they were crossing each other, and the Polish man pulled out a gun, and he shot the yid and killed him right there in the street. This is after the war. And he just sat there. And he ran to say, they killed this Jew in the streets. The Yidden were so afraid that they let the body stay in the streets because they didn't want to go out and get the body because they didn't know if it was an ambush. They were waiting to see who was going to get the body. They waited until nightfall and then they got the body and buried it. This was after already the Holocaust. This was after officially the war had ended. The Yidden weren't smart enough to leave Mitzrayim. You have the opportunity to leave, run away. What do you need power to force you out for? So there's two levels of desire.

25:58 There's desire because I want to And there's desire because I'm compelled to. And there's a fundamental difference between these two things. I want to is very powerful. A person could say that will is the highest part of a person. B'chinav kaser, ratzon. It's l'malam itan v'das. But it's not as much as if a person is compelled to do something. Explain what I mean. A mother who's able to lift a car to save her child is not doing so because she wants to. She's doing so because she's compelled to. She can't imagine a life without that child. Her entire chayas is that child. So what gives her the capability to lift that car is not because she wants to lift the car. It's much bigger than want. It's if I don't lift this car, I'm losing a sense of myself. That's what a parent is. A parent is kolkuo for their children.

27:01 So a mother gets unbelievable strength. Klal Yisrael by Har Sinai said Naseh and Nishma, and then Hakadosh Baruch Hu came and He put the mountain over our head. Kafale em har kigigis and he said, 'Accept the Torah of im lav shamteik furascha.' "Accept the Torah, or right now I'll kill you." Tosus asks, "What do you mean?" But we already said natsa v'nishma. It's like if somebody says yes to you, and you say, 'You better say yes; I'll punch you in the face.' I just said yes to you. So apichasidos, the answer is because Hakadosh Baruch Hu was saying it's nice that you want to But just because you want to right now doesn't mean that you'll want to forever. You have to be compelled to do it. It has to be life or death. That there's no musug of a life without Torah. That there's no musug of a life without Hakadosh Baruch Hu. That's the only way to stay truly loyal.

27:54 This is why we get married. In today's day and age, we lost the concept of marriage in the secular world. Concept of marriage. They say, "What do I need to get married?" I'll live with you. And until it works out, we'll stay together. And if it doesn't work out, we could go our separate ways. What do we need to get married for? I have a chaver who thinks this way. Grew up here, right in the neighborhood. Very, very brilliant person. He's not an observant person. He's not connected to Hakadosh Baruch Hu. But he doesn't believe in the notion of marriage. He believes in the notion of having a relationship. What do I need to get married for? Marriage is such a religious concept. So I said to him, "What do you mean?" You're not really in a relationship if you could leave whenever you want.

28:46 So he goes, "What do you mean? You could get divorced. What's the difference?" Why does the person have to stand under a chuppah? Why do they have to give a ring? Why do they have to say 'Harei at mikudeshasli'? We had this fight a couple months ago. So I said to him, 'The Jewish version of marriage is not just a ceremony. It's not just a thing where we spend thousands of dollars and walk down the aisle and have a beautiful ceremony and have Simcha Leiner there. That's not what it is.' It's something much more profound than that. When a person stands under the chuppah, they're standing under Har Sinai. It's a testament to the person that you're standing with, saying, "I'm not marrying you because I want to. It's a Har Sinai." I'm marrying you because literally, there's no other choice. Without you, there is no life.

29:32 We're in this together. The only way that this marriage dissolves is if the marriage becomes abusive or immoral. But we're here together. This notion of loyalty is not exciting. These are not the words that we use in two thousand twenty-three. In two thousand twenty-three, we're supposed to tell people that it's going to be amazing, and you're going to love it, and it's going to be incredible. And that will be true a lot of the time. But it also won't be true. There'll be times where the greatest value in your marriage is consistency and showing up when you don't want to, and being loyal. And putting yourself out there, even when you've been hurt And even though it's hard to trust, somehow rebuilding that trust. These are the things that marriage is really made of. This is what Har Sinai is about. Part of the reason that so many teenagers today are struggling with their yiddishkeit is not because they're bad kids. It's because they grew up in an environment where everything needs to be awesome always. I'm not blaming technology for that. It's much bigger than that.

30:32 It's if we created an environment in our yeshivas and in our seminaries and our beis yachovs and our high schools everywhere. We created an environment where school is supposed to be fun. It used to be that kids hated school. That's the way it used to be. Used to be kids hated school, and you went to school because you had a responsibility to go to school, and you didn't like it, but you were taught that this is what you're supposed to do. And now we turn school into camp. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on student activities because the kids have to have an awesome time. And then when we hold the kids accountable, they wonder what we're doing. What do you mean? Who holds you accountable in camp? Because we don't teach them hard work, we don't teach them loyalty, we don't teach them grit, we don't teach them resilience. These words are not exciting. But I'll tell you an unbelievable thing: when you do teach these kids these words, they actually get excited about it.

31:19 When they come on NCSY Kol in the summer, and I have this conversation with the boys, and I say to them, "Yeah, you're having a good time, but are you learning?" And they say, "No." And I say, "Are you happy about that?" And they say, "No." Because who wants to feel like a fool? Nobody wants to open up a Gemara and feel like a fool. Nobody wants to open up a Gemara and not know how to read it, and not know how to translate, not know how to punctuate, not know how to vowelize. Inspiration is amazing, but at some point, inspiration needs to culminate in education. In order for it to be long lasting, it needs to be something that you have to shvitz over, that you have to break your teeth over. How many girls today are growing up with an education where they could really open up a remban and read it? It's very nice. It's very sweet to have the delicious shiurim, and it's amazing. And we should have them. It's important to have these types of experiences. But at some point, it has to culminate in something real.

32:11 I can't tell you. I was just in YU for Shabbos. I can't tell you how many guys, when I said this on Shabbos, were sitting there going, "Yeah, I almost feel like cheated." I had an amazing time. I played on the hockey team. I played on the basketball team. I went to Sarajevo. I went to this camp and that camp, and I had every Jewish experience. My parents paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for these experiences. And yes, it brought me here. But I'm an ama aretz, and I'm just starting to learn how to learn. There's something chaval about that. Many years ago, we made a decision as a community that we were going to bring in young rebbeim, vibrant rebbeim, exciting rebbeim, because we wanted the kids to be able to relate to their rebbeim. And that's great. But we also traded something that's very important in so doing. We lost the notion of having that sixty and seventy year old Rebbe who was totally irrelevant, who didn't understand the world you came from at all, but it was somebody that you looked up to.

33:04 I had the privilege when I was in seventh grade. I learned under. I was in seventh grade. What am I saying? You learn under anybody. I showed up to class. I had a Rebbe whose name was Reb Mordechai Finkelman. Have you heard of Reb Mordechai Finkelman? If you haven't heard of Reb Mordechai Finkelman, chiyuvi. Everybody here must learn who Reb Mordechai Finkelman is. He's the mashgiach of a yeshiva called Aruchayim in Queens. He's a tzaddik yisod olam. He's the most gentle, sweet, kind man you'll ever meet in your entire life. He davens like a malach. If you want to know what a malach looks like Go find Rabbi Finkelman. That's what a malach looks like. He was my seventh grade rabbi. It was in the time before he became Ashkiach, and we knew we knew it was like a joke in the yeshiva. Rabbi Finkelman teaches seventh grade. What in the world is Rabbi Finkelman doing teaching seventh grade in Darche? We understood that he could be a great mashgiach somewhere. We understood that he was literally a walking malach. I remember the eighth grade rabbi, Rabbi Grossman. He should be zaychad a refu shalema. He just called me that he's not well. He should have a refu shalema. Rabbi Grossman was also a tremendous hamachachem. He used to get down on the floor and he used to kiss the floor where Rabbi Finkelman davened.

34:10 I remember with my own eyes seeing it, going like, did that just happen? Rabbi Finkelman had no shayches to us. He was a walking malach. He would tell. We were not a well behaved bunch. So he would try to keep us calm by telling us stories of tzaddikim. So we learned we had a lot of stories. I don't know if we learned makos that year, but I just remember Yefinelman telling stories. But there was something about a seventh grader who sat in awe of his rebbe. That's what I was. I can't tell you anything I learned. I can't tell you a Tosafot that he said over. I can't tell you a Rashi. I can tell you nothing, but I sat in awe and in reverence of my rebbe. We lost that. And we needed to lose that because there were kids who were feeling very disconnected, and they needed that inspiration in order to bring them back.

34:58 But we have to push back this way because we don't teach kids about commitment. And that's a terrible thing because life is much more about commitment than it is about inspiration. You get older, and you realize that the biggest avoda in life is just to show up to things. Especially when you don't want to. The hallmark of a great marriage is not that you're always feeling it. But that you're always there, even when you're not feeling it. The hallmark of a great parent is to parent when you really don't want to parent. And I should remind you that not that long ago, you were teenagers, and your parents may not have always wanted to parent you. And you might think, what do you mean? My mother is designed to be my chauffeur. That's what she was. That's what she was there for. That woman at some point had a life. And it didn't revolve around you.

35:49 My daughter is getting married in three weeks. Thank you. And I'm watching this process. And it's a beautiful thing because you reap what you sow. And the decision that we made to move to Eretz Yisrael so many years ago I didn't know at the time. I wasn't. If I'm being honest, I didn't even really want to go. My wife made me go. I love to have this amazing Aliyah story where it was always my dream. I just wanted to marry her, and she wanted to move to Eretz Yisrael. So I was like, okay, I'll go there. My wife always said, it's a simple life in Eretz Yisrael. It's a simple life. And I just see these kids in my neighborhood that grew up with these concepts of hard work and commitment, and they didn't go to camp. They ran camps in the summer. They didn't. Nobody expects to go on yeshiva week in Eretz Yisrael. Benazmanim, we do Benazmanim. We like to do day trips up north on a tiul.

36:54 Imagine if I took a kid from the neighborhood and I said, 'Come, we're going for a tiul.' Why would you make him go on a death march? I don't want to. I want to walk on a mountain. We're just going to see like more sand. This is ridiculous. I understand where they're coming from because everything is incredible when you get out there. I have tayvos to do these things also. We've turned down Pesach programs for the last couple of years. I have a big tie to do a Pesach program, not because I want to do a Pesach program. I just want to be one of those circles in Mishbacha magazine. I'm talking about. I want my wife to do it also, but she'll just be a silhouette. She's in witness protection program. I know why I say these things. They're inappropriate. But we keep turning them down, mostly because my wife says two things. Number one, she's not sure they're kosher. And the other part is because she says, 'What do you want our kids to see?'

37:54 You want them to see that they're awesome because these programs are awesome. You pay a fortune; they're amazing. She's like, "You're gonna set that standard for the family? Like, is that what you want to set?" "I mean, no, but yeah. Like, I want to like I have a tayvor to do it. I have a tayvor to like see." I one time I never went on a Pesach program. My family wasn't into it, but I wanted to see one time what it was like, and I'll tell you a little secret. You know the Schnitzel guys. Everyone knows the Schnitzel guys. The guys that dance. So there's two of them. There were three of them. I was one of the original Schnitzel guys. It's true. It's true. Rabbi Bender told me I have a choice. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to stop doing that.

38:42 You should know, it's inside of me. You should know, I just like it's still there. It's that part of me that makes the inappropriate jokes. So I went once, Pesach, Yitzi and I went up to we did one of these Pesach programs for a day. And I just saw the tea room and I was like That's incredible. It was like a bar mitzvah, always. It wasn't a three-hour bar mitzvah. It was an always bar mitzvah, and they kept coming out with more and more. There must have been an army of people baking in the back of that hotel. And these programs, like these programs are awesome, but there's no sense of simplicity. There's no sense of doing a regular hard thing. Making Pesach is a beautiful thing. It's a hard thing. It's a beautiful thing. My kids grew up in a home where my wife celebrated cleaning for Pesach. That's a beautiful thing.

39:42 And I see my daughter now as she's taking these next steps in her life, and she's best Hashem going to marry this boy who's going to be learning for some time. And I feel privileged. I feel privileged to be able to do whatever I can to support. But my son-in-law Baruch Hashem is a good boy, and he said to me, Abba, when it comes time, don't worry, I'm going to step up. Cause you're 21. You got to figure it out. I'm sure you know exactly what's going to happen. But I just see that there's a sense of we're two people who are going to work hard and live simply and make this happen As opposed to Who's going to give me the next thing. There's a sense of commitment that a yid is supposed to have. We would do well to remove any sentence that trails off or ends with a function word. We would do well to raise our children with that. And even though you may have grown up in a generation that wasn't like that, I implore you to do things a little bit differently. The pendulum has to swing. Swing back a little bit this way, and it's okay to challenge kids, and it's okay for kids to fail.

40:47 It's really okay for kids to fail because they discover who they are. They learn to get back up. Had this conversation, Shaloshudis. A young man said to me, Shaloshudis, I spoke about makaschosha on Shabbos, and I spoke about how it's okay to live in the darkness sometimes, and it's okay to fall, and it's okay to feel alone because there's a light that a person finds in that darkness. And the boy came to me and he said, 'But what if you don't get up?' So I said to him, "I have deep faith that people get up." So he said, "I hate that answer." So I said, "I have deep faith that you will get up." So he said, "I hate that answer." So I said, we're clearly not talking about the same thing. So maybe we should revisit it, and maybe this week, Beis Hashem, I'll find some time for it. But he's clearly a person who's in a tremendous amount of pain right now, and he's in that darkness, and he doesn't believe that he's capable of getting up. And most people, I think, would probably give him some sort of inspirational shmooz to make him feel better. And I don't want to do that because if he, if I, if we get it in that artificial sense of feeling better, then he never learns how to get out of the darkness by himself. That's an important feature in life to have.

41:50 And so it has to be that Paro throws us out of Mitzrayim. If we only leave Mitzrayim because we want to, then when we want to go back, we will. That's what happened the entire time. Every time something bad happens in the Midbar, Dasan and Aviram come and say, 'Let's go back.' Because it's comfortable to live in slavery. You ever have that moment of inspiration where you're like, "That's it, I'm done with this. I'm not going back." Later that night, you go back and do the same thing. The commitment that we make, I'm going to start eating well. And then at three o'clock in the morning, you find yourself in the freezer looking for love. You ever have this? We've never experienced this. Be safe. I'm happy to be alone on this one. There's a level of dignity and majesty that comes with saying, "I'm compelled to do something. My life depends on it. I can't be in mitzrayim anymore."

42:41 That's what it means, bishalach. Paro sends us out. We're done. We're finished. If we want the geula, if we want to say that we're done with this It can't just be that we want to leave. I think we've already done. If you ask a Jew today, do you want to leave Eretz Yisrael? I think every one of us says that we want to leave. I don't think there's anybody that wants to be here anymore. Nobody finds this satisfying. We have all the things that we need, and nobody is happy with it. Right now, outside, I'm driving a red Tesla. Mamas, I do not belong in a red Tesla. It's I'm not like a red Tesla person. I just discovered this. They gave me in the rental car place. This is what they gave me. I'll be honest. I'm driving this car, and I feel like probably what it feels like to be cool. Have you driven a Tesla? It's got unbelievable pickup. I was flying down. Not the Van Wyck, because nobody ever flies down the Van Wyck, but after the Nassau Expressway area, I was flying. I felt like Kshmak, and I was like, I could get used to this. I could get used to not having a broken down Toyota from 2004. I could get used to it. I'm gonna go back to the rumbling of my car in Herzl. You know what? I was driving and I was like

44:00 I'd probably just get used to this and then need the next toy and the next toy. Nobody's. Where nobody, I don't even think people are chasing these things anymore. Because what are we gonna do with it already? My brother in law got off the train. Twenty One year ago, my brother-in-law came to Israel. He didn't flip. It didn't work for him in Israel. He wasn't super into it. He went to YU. He wasn't super into it. He got a job. He was dating a girl. He was driving a little red sports car, and he woke up one day and said, "I'm out. I'm miserable. I hate this." There's no talkless to my life. He quit his job, sold his car, dumped his girlfriend, and went to learn in our sammach in Eretz Yisrael. This is my much true story. Married his wife And he's been learning in Kylo for twenty years.

44:47 He lives in a two and a half bedroom apartment, four floors up in a Ramadashkol apartment with no elevator. And Kanai Nahara, eight kids in a two and a half bedroom apartment. And I said to him, how did you do that? How'd you do that? Because I knew him in high school. He was a meshugna. How'd you do that? I understand the guy who does it at eighteen, he's not smart enough to know what's coming next. So yeah, he makes a big decision. This guy already was out there. So he said, "I just realized, I can just spend my life chasing stuff. I don't do that." He said, "So once I realized that I don't really need anything, all of a sudden everything became an opportunity. I could do whatever I want. I was totally free." So it's like You might be brilliant. You might be absolutely brilliant. He doesn't like that I have a nicer apartment than he does. He doesn't care.

45:33 And he doesn't have a car, and his kotel is right by his house, and he walks back and forth to his kotel, and his wife is minahelad in a seminary, and that brings him whatever it brings in, and he's just fine. And I said to him, "You're gonna marry off kids. How are you gonna pay for the chassna?" He goes, "I don't know." I was like, "You not nervous about this?" He goes, "I don't have anything to be nervous about." I said, "What do you mean? I don't have anything to be nervous about? You're gonna have to pay for this." He goes, "I don't know. I'm out. Like he got off the train completely. I've never seen anything like it in my life. I'm like." I'm not sure if you're if he's an idiot or he's brilliant. I lost so many hours of sleep thinking about how I'm going to make this class. How is it going to work? And he's just like, I'm out. I'm finished. I'm not worrying about these things anymore. It'll be whatever it'll be. And he might be a genius.

46:15 Because he just said, I'm finished with this. I think a lot of people are finished with this. This is the reason that so many people are coming back to Yiddishkeit in a way that they're searching for the profundity and the depth and the meaning because they're tired of all of the toys that everyone's giving them. They're tired of all the experiences. We could say these things out loud now. The fact that we want to leave is not going to be enough. It has to be that Paro sends us out. It has to be that we reach a level of rock bottom where we say, "It's easier to live this life anymore." And with a heavy, heavy, heavy heart I think that we're getting there too. That the world is becoming such a distorted place. And it's our responsibility to hold on to Yiddishkeit now more than ever because the values in the world right now are so exceptionally crazy.

47:05 I can't speak any more than this because I'll get canceled. But just the Hamayven Yaven The values in the world right now are so absolutely absurd that even if I say the thing that I mean, people will go crazy. So I'm not allowed to say it. But you can figure out for yourself what I'm talking about. It has to be a level of compulsion that we realize it's not easy to live this life anymore. That Paro himself has broken, and that's the ultimate transformation that occurs in this world. We should talk bezeicha to that geula very soon. Good tovar klas.