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One of the things in this week's parsha that often gets overlooked because it's parsha Noah, so everybody spends their time talking about the teva. Everybody spends their time talking about Noah and whether he was a tzaddik or wasn't a tzaddik. So sometimes we fail to get to the second half of the parsha. Which is also a fascinating and important story. It's the story of the Dor Afloga. It's the story of Megdal Bavel. It's the story of a group of people that rebelled against God. And in their rebellion against God Hakadosh Baruch Hu babbled their language And they were dispersed throughout the entire world. It's a strange story if you think about it. It's not exactly clear what the context of the story is. It follows the story of Noah and the flood. So it's clearly on some level connected. The story of Migdal Bavel is in the same parsha; it's not in the next parsha, so it's clearly connected. Something about the flood creates the people of Bavel, and that's our first question: What's that relationship?
But then, as we begin to think about it, because we're people that are Not going to settle for the childish version of Torah. We want the adult version of Judaism. As we start to think about the story itself, it's a very strange story with a lot of moving parts that don't necessarily seem to fit together. What I mean to say is as follows: They clearly had some desire to rebel against Hashem. So what do they do? I would have thought that the rebellion against Hashem would have been the way that we rebel against Hashem today, namely, Hashem says to do one thing And we do something else. And what they chose to do And this is very strange What they chose to do is to build something. They chose to build something. I'm sure when you were growing up, you had this question: if they built a giant tower, then what?
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What would have happened? Nothing. Just because you build a really big tower doesn't mean that you're stronger than God. And in fact, today we see that we've built towers. I venture to say that the towers that we have today I venture to say that the towers we have today are still larger than the Tower of Babel. We're naturally capable of building enormous things. The twin towers were enormous. So what exactly is the rebellion against God here? What does that mean? They showed up and said, 'We're going to build a giant tower, rebelling against God.' What does one have to do with the other? Makes sense. That's our second question. And then our third question is also very strange. I'm sure, growing up, some of you read the little Medrash. And when you were growing up and you read the little Medrash, I'm pretty sure that this is the version of Judaism that you were taught.
They were building the tower. And then Hashem babbled their language. Remember this? And then they said "Pass me a hammer." And the other guy thought he said, "Hit him with a hammer." And so then he hit him on the head with a hammer. And then the other guy fell off the building. And so they weren't able to complete the construction of the tower because their language got babbled. Do you remember that? You remember reading that? Did you ever ask yourself I'm sure you did. I'm sure you're thoughtful people. I'm sure at some point, maybe not when you were the heifer in the back. I just want you to know, even though you're in the back, I could still see you. I could still see. My eyes see very far. I just want to. Maybe they can't hear me, but I hope you could still see me. Hi, welcome back. It's great to have you. We would love to have you. That's okay. There's still plenty of room if you want to join us.
Can I get the AC remote? Please? It's really hot. Sure. I don't know where the AC remote is. But you are more than welcome to have it. What in the world does if you start to think about it? What in the world does one have to do with the other? What is. It's so funny. As a rebbe, you compete with so many different things. I never knew. I've learned in my career that you compete with temperature more than anything. Once somebody is doing something with the masgun, it's like everyone has to pay attention. She put it on 19. That's too cold. She put it on 20. I know in the dorms these are very big issues. These create tremendous rifts. Girls have no capacity to be in the same room. She's always hot. I'm always cold. We need to unpack that. How does that feel for you? What's that like for you?
It's not as complicated for the guys. They just punch each other. It's a wonderful thing. The apologies are amazing, by the way. Whenever you see the guys apologize, you want to see. You want to hear what a guy's apology looks like? Are we ready for it? We good? That's the whole thing. With girls, it's like we really worked through it. We really like. We really spent some time unpacking it. I feel like she has a better appreciation of where I'm coming from. Honestly, I'm actually looking forward to seeing how this develops. With a guy I'm like, "You think you could be friends?" He says, "Yeah, maybe." I don't know. Back to our regularly scheduled story. If you think about it, it seems to make no sense. Why is that the punishment? If I was writing the Torah, I would have written the following story. The people chose to rebel against God. The people chose to build a giant tower, and God came and with thunder and lightning and earthquakes and volcanoes, He destroyed that tower. That would have been an appropriate story. That's the story we expected to hear, if you think about it, right?
The story about babbling their language so that they no longer—that's why it's called Babel. Babel comes from the Russian of Babel. He babbled their language. They all of a sudden spoke different languages. Correct, Babylonians. Why was that? Why is that an appropriate consequence for what they were doing? Girls know the difference between a punishment and a consequence. A punishment is when I need you to stop a particular behavior, so you need to have something negative happen to you so that you identify this as painful. A consequence is natural. For example, if my daughter stays out too late, and then she says, "I want to go out with my friends now." And I say, "Did you do your homework?" And she goes, "No, I didn't do my homework." I'm like, "Okay, well, you have to do your homework before you go out." But if I do my homework, by the time I'm finished with my homework, I won't have time. I go, "Sorry, you have to do your homework." Punishment or consequence? That's a consequence. I didn't do anything. She has a responsibility. I'm holding her accountable to fulfill that responsibility. It's not a punishment.
If she breaks curfew And I said to her, as a result of breaking curfew, you're supposed to be home at 11. Instead, you came home at 12. So now you have to do the dishes for the next week. Is that a punishment or a consequence? That's a punishment. Does God deal with punishments or consequences? Part of our lives, we grew up hearing that God punishes, right? But if you actually look at the mafarshim, you'll see that the mafarshim always work exceptionally hard to figure out how the punishment fits the crime, which means it's not actually a punishment. It's a natural consequence. So our final question is: Why does babbling their language? Why is that an appropriate consequence? For what they did, which is building Megdal Bavel. What about your spring? Maybe that's something else that a person undergoes certain things in their life. But even within that, the Gemara says that when a person goes through certain yisurin, they should be yafashev b'maisav. They should look at what's happening in their own life. So maybe that means it's a wake up call, or maybe it means there is a direct correlation. In general, the stories in the Torah are repeated with consequences.
We're doing questions then. The Torah very obviously says that Hashem punishes. Tell me where. Like the chet ego. Sure. What was the punishment for the chet ego? They had to drink something. They had to drink the mesota. Did you look at Rashi there? No. So at some point, maybe at some point. So when you go back and you look at the Rishonim, that would be a classic example of a consequence because they work through why the mesota was an appropriate consequence for the chet ego. And they work to show how the chay. That's what a consequence is. A consequence is always me the kineged me. But Hashem planned it. Now you're going to get into a much deeper conversation, which I'm not ready for. If Hashem always had knowledge that I was going to do it And it was always. Hashem Still did the punishment.
What does that mean? Set it up in a way that seems natural. I don't even know if. Meaning, I don't know if it seems natural as much as it's like. If you do X, Y occurs. That's a consequence. You think I did something so B happens, but really Hashem made B happen. That's complicated. That's not so obvious to me, but I'm with you. In other words, the point. I think we can both agree to this. If it's me that connected me, there's a punishment or a consequence. So we're on the same page. Could that be the first question? The first question was, what's the connection between the story of the flood and the story of Megdal Bavel? They're clearly not disparate. I don't know. I feel like the punishment is fitting because they were working together. They went against God, so now they can't work together. I'm with you. First of all, I love the fact that you're thinking.
It's always interesting to me when girls say when they offer a solution, they go, "I feel like." I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for. If you're looking for validation or empathy I want you to know that I'm with you on the journey of the discovery of this answer, and I can acknowledge that that's the way that you feel, and it makes sense given the experience that I had in my life and the experience that you are having in your life. Why that would be, I think you mean logically, and Be'ez Hashem we'll get there. But I just want to point out a small critique of your answer on a logical level, not on an emotional level. I will take it emotionally. That's not true. I'm with you. You'll definitely take it emotionally. I've been lied to before by your species. I know. I won't take it emotionally.
I've been studying you for years. I'm holding. I have five daughters. You're not going to get me. So I know how many bathrooms you need in your life. The answer is many, many, many bathrooms. It's true that they worked together to do something, but is that working together ancillary? What I mean to say is as follows: Let's say me and my boys got together and we decided to rob a store. So when we come to court What are we being held accountable for? For the fact that we came together, or the fact that we robbed the store? And here we seem to be that the dar al falaq was held accountable for their unity There was the aveyra. They're all still being punished for the crime. How? For one. I don't mean to be mezuzelin, and of course we have to take every medrash seriously. But I'm saying the dispersal, the no longer having one language. That's clearly indicative of something more. That seems to be disconnected from Megdal Bava.
B'seder. I want to try to get out an idea, but this is a pretty sophisticated idea. So I would just ask if you could lock in for the next six minutes while I get out this idea, because I think it's a really, really important idea. I think it's a life-changing idea, and I don't necessarily have it clearly defined, which might be part of the challenge of giving it over to you, and that's my fault. But I'd like to play around with this idea and see where it takes us. So I think it goes something like this: people who don't know where they come from. People who live in dread of what might happen to them, because they're not anchored firmly in the past. Have no capacity to deal with the vulnerability of life. Let's say it again. I want to make sure everybody gets this. Sounds something like this: A person who's anchored A person who comes from a strong sense of family And that family has a history.
And you know that family history, that story. So if you know that story, if you've been given the gift of knowing your story, of where you come from Then when you start to confront the vulnerabilities of life Life is all vulnerable. That's what life is. Life is just vulnerable. Absolutely. Life is. I wouldn't say it's terrifying, but there is certainly the nature of life is that life comes with bumps in the road. And there is no avoiding bumps in the road. And if you've seen people that have somehow avoided bumps in the road until now, and they're 18 years old, I just want you to know It will come for them too. Things in life are difficult. Making a parnasla can be difficult. Being a part of a community can be difficult. Having children, being married, these things are They're difficult because it's difficult for us to maintain our sense of self and our sense of dignity as we go through them. You have options in business to act appropriately, to act inappropriately, or dishonest. Showing up to a relationship, for example. This is a she'er I was just having with the Mevasser boys, literally 40 minutes ago.
And we're talking about in the she'er the challenge of allowing people to show up the way they are to our relationships. And so, we're talking about, I'll put it in your terms, let's say your husband comes home miserable every day. For months on end And how can you maintain your sense of self as somebody's literally coming home so depressed every single day? I can imagine it's very hard to live with those people. How do you allow you see it in the dorms all the time? You girls are all very different, and yet you have to live in this box with each other, and it's like a cruel experiment of seminaries and yeshivas. Let's see what happens if we take all these eighteen-year-olds and put them in there. And then let's see how they manage socially. That's a wild thing to think about. Now think about that, but with one man for the rest of your life.
Now you know why people have such enormous homes. We need to separate. It's like I could choose to live in the Five Towns in a shoebox, or I could choose to live in Texas in a mansion. There's a reason people go out of town. I need a wing of the house for myself. It's not an easy thing to show up to a relationship with children. Who are acting How do I say this? Probably because of the pain they're in, they're making real choices to abandon the family value. That's like we see that all the time. There are kids that go off the derech. They're in a tremendous amount of pain. How can you, as a mother Maintain your own sense of self and behave appropriately with that child when the child is doing things you've literally spent your life trying to inculcate in them not to do. So if it's a real value for you, let's say, to keep Shabbos, and now you see your son or daughter is not keeping Shabbos, do you imagine how painful that is? And you may have some serious emotions around that, and not allowing your emotions to spill out onto that child is really hard. Life is exceptionally difficult.
And there are and we could give a million examples. I gave you some, frankly, some of the easier ones. But what happens when someone gets sick? What happens when someone becomes chas v'shalom, paralyzed? And I have a—it's not exactly a relative, but I call him my cousin. The families are so close that I grew up thinking of them as my aunt and uncle, and their kids as my cousins. He was in a biking accident, and in the biking accident, he was wearing a helmet. But you know the helmet. You can't prevent everything, and unfortunately today he's a paraplegic. What happens when you're married to somebody? I can't imagine what his wife is going through. She married not just an able-bodied person, but a man. Like a real—he's Israeli. You know Israeli men? This is not like—I don't mean to say it like this, but these are not American men. These are like they have no choice but to be men. They grow up as men. This was a real man, and he was an athlete, and he was biking, and he was young. They were young. He was in his early twenties.
He hit a rock. Went into the tree. Helmet shattered, saved his life, lost his legs. He's in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. How do you as a wife manage that? How do you as a husband? How do you as a person manage that? Could you imagine one day you're an able-bodied person providing for your family becomes a completely different challenge when you're wheelchair-bound for the rest of your life? And Baruch Hashem, we as a community have awesome infrastructures. For people that are in crisis, if you need something in the Jewish community, we've got you covered. There's literally not a crisis that you can think of that we don't have something for you. But life is difficult. And what's the saving grace? What gives you the capacity? Again, this is the deep idea. What gives you the capacity to negotiate the vulnerabilities of life?
Very simple. Do you come from somewhere? That's a huge thing. We don't pay attention to it because for us, growing up in the Jewish community, probably for most of us—not for all of us—but for most of us, growing up in the Jewish community, your story is so present in your life that you probably don't even realize how much it grounds you in reality. For example How many here come from families who lost people in the Holocaust? How'd you know that? You know that because you grew up with those stories. It was the story of. You should know that when your grandmother or when your great grandmother was in the Holocaust, and only three of the children survived. And you know these stories. How many of you any Svardim in the room? How many of you are from the Svardi community? Where are you from? I'm from Baghdad.
You're not from the Five Towns. Your dad's from Iran. Your dad's from Iran, right? And you? Iran, also. And somebody else? Syria. Syria. And? Morocco and in Syria, which part of Syria—the Aleppo side or the other side? So you literally know where you're from. How many generations ago is that for you? Are your parents Syrian, or is that three generations ago? Do you realize that that's not obvious? That a girl knows exactly when her family left Syria. I bet you even know. I don't think I'm at risk of making a fool of myself because if you don't know it, it's okay to say. I bet you know a lot about the story of your family in Syria and how they got to where you are today. From Syria they went to Mexico on the other side, and then they came to New York. My father said they just came straight to New York.
Thank you for not making me feel like a fool. Are there stories that you know? Not really. Only about my grandmother and my grandfather that they never met. They just got married here. And they were like 15. Wait, wait. I want you to know Because I work in yeshivas and seminaries, that was a very interesting thing that just happened. Because in yeshiva, you say my parents got married at 15, and the guys would be like "All right, " you know. All the girls were like, "You mean I could have got married at 15?" I could have been married this whole time. Do you realize? I can't imagine you do. And this is the gift that I want to give you tonight. Do you realize how strong knowing that story makes you psychologically? I'm betting that without even realizing it, you'll give it over to your children.
And it'll have been four generations then. But you'll do it because unconsciously you're going to know. Knowing that we come from somewhere gives us the ability to handle life. I'm not alone. I'm not. I'm not like just waving in the wind over here. I'm not just one speck. My brother-in-law made a bar mitzvah last night. Thank you. I didn't do anything, but I appreciate the kind gesture. So his father-in-law came in from America. His father-in-law is a great guy. And he invited him appropriately to speak at the bar mitzvah. He spoke for less than 120 seconds. He said a very simple idea. But I was really listening because When older people speak, they speak with the wisdom of years. And his father-in-law was an elderly man. And his father-in-law just said to him, "I just want you to know, you're another link in the chain."
And it's such a classic bar mitzvah speech, right? Like every classic bar mitzvah is like, 'Oh, you're another link in the chain. You're another link in the chain.' But when you hear an elderly person say it, it means something different. Contextually, they're saying something. They're like, 'No.' You're actually a link in the chain, and when you're older and you look at it like that, you're like, that's really important. And it's not a gift that young people understand that they even have. Because it's like, what do you mean? Of course I am. Of course I come from somewhere. So you never take the time to unpack that there are people that don't come from somewhere. Could you imagine what that's like? You have such a strong sense of community. Every one of you, whether you appreciated the upbringing that you had or didn't, do you understand what it means to grow up in our community? The gift. There are drawbacks. Our community is far from perfect, but the gift of being in our community is that if you need something, if you need anything, like you, like my brother said this. I think this is a great way of saying it. If you can't get a job in the Jewish world, something has gone seriously wrong.
Because you grew up. I'll give you my family story. We davened in Young Israel Farakway. We davened in Yeshiva Bene Torah. We went to Camp. I went to Magen Av. We went to Haftor. I went to Darchei. I went to Simcha Day Camp. I went to Mivaseret. I went to Lander College for Men to exclude women. We have these things. Do you realize how many people I know? If I wanted to become an accountant, do you know how many accountants I know? If you can't get a job in an accounting firm and you're Jewish, it means you've created a really bad reputation for yourself. You know this. There's a strong sense of we come from somewhere. What if it was the opposite? What if there was a generation of people that grew up and they have no idea where they come from? What would it look like then, as they're facing the vicissitudes of life? As life goes up and down, as life is challenging, who do they reach out to? Who do they lean on? Especially today.
Because it used to be that people lived in communities. And today we've abandoned the notion of community for the notion of universalism. For example, what's a friend today? What's a friend? It's not an obvious thing anymore. I'll tell you what a friend looked like when I was a kid. I'm not here to bash technology. I don't even believe in that. But I want to share with you something. So went on trips in camp. Remember, you go on trips in camp. Anyone here from the Five Towns? Does Rivlab still exist? Rivleb was a bus company that broke down wherever you went. I don't think they exist anymore because it's evolution, survival of the fittest. Rivleb buses had no suspension. My kids growing up in Israel go on legitimate buses. They go on like the tour buses here. That's what kids go on. My kids don't know about yellow school buses with tattered green seats in them.
But when you're a little kid, what do you do? Especially if you're on a Rivlab bus with no suspension, when you get on the bus, you run to the back of the bus. And you see these little eight-year-old pitchers going to a Mets game, going over a speed bump, and these kids are flying, and it's like a thing, who's gonna fly the most? And what does it sound like on a bus? On a bus, it's loud. It's supposed to be loud, and it's like that's a great time. And the truth of the matter is, if you're going to a Mets game In the summer, sitting in the nosebleed section, because the camp is getting you like the two dollar Cheap seats. You're like a thousand feet up, and the players are like little specks. And it's also the Mets, so you know they're not going to be good. I'm a Yankee fan. I'm not sorry at all. I'm a Yankee fan.
The I'll be honest with you, I know nothing about baseball anymore. But in theory, I'm a Yankee fan because many years ago I was a Yankee fan. The best part of the trip is the bus. And today, I'm sure it's not here in Tomer Devora. But today You just went on a tuiel, I understand. I'm sure it was awesome on the bus. I'm sure it was awesome. Sincerely, but today buses are quiet. Today you get on a bus and you plug in. Especially those guys have the thug headphones, cover the entire side of their like. It's not just their ears. You see there's pieces, they're listening through their jaw and through their chin. They're wearing these giant headphones. And it's silent on a bus. It's silent on a bus. You're plugged in. You're like universal. Like you could talk to anybody in the world, but where's your sense of community?
By the way, my favorite thing is we do a tayul in mevaseret, a no phone tayul, a two day no phone tayul. It's amazing. It's amazing because the bus is loud, and the guys are acting like idiots. No And it's amazing because that's what they're supposed to do. But when you're just plugging in and watching your thing, you see people, four people in a room today because they have nothing to do with each other. That is terrifying. That's a terrifying thing. That four people could be in a room and they could have nothing to do with each other. There's no sense of community. There's no sense of belonging. That's a terrible thing. If you have that, here's the key word. If you have no sense of belonging, what you have is fear, and what you need is control. That is very dangerous because we do not control. We could try to control, but we do not control. Imagine being the parent of a child who's going off the derech.
But living in fear? Imagine you're the parent And you're living in fear. If every time you're in a state of fear, you naturally desire control, what will you do to that child? I guarantee you, it's not going to be good parenting. Here's the difference between control and parenting. Your 16-year-old daughter, your 17-year-old daughter is making choices that you think are deleterious to their growth. You think they're making bad choices, but they're 17. What are you going to do? You can take away their keys. You can take away the keys to their car. You're going to say, if you don't start keeping Shabbos, you're not getting a car. You can take away your phone. You're not going to be. You're going to be grounded. What will that help? That's a parent who's trying to control the child. Is that child going to say I appreciate and value the Judaism that my parents have given me.
Of course not. Why would a parent do that? And there are parents that do that, and I don't blame them. They're living in a state of fear. So what they're trying to do is control. But if you weren't in a state of fear, what you might want to do is something like this. You might want to say, right now, what my kid needs more than anything is that they need to understand that no matter what choices they make, even if I disagree with those choices, I can let them know that I disagree with those choices, and I can still tell them that they belong to this family no matter what. That's good parenting. But you realize what an abundance mentality it takes to tell a child that if your child is going off the derech and you've literally spent your whole life trying to get this kid to make the choice to be Orthodox, to keep Shabbos, to keep kosher, and now the kid is saying, 'I don't want to do that.'
That can be a terrifying choice. So you have to be able to say, "I have enough in the tank to be able to show up correctly, appropriately, in the way that this kid needs me to show up." Not from a place of fear and control, but from an abundance mentality that I'm capable of handling this situation and giving that child what they actually need. Does that make sense? Yeah. With this in mind Let's go back to the story of Migdal Bavel. Put yourself in their shoes for a second. Where did they come from? What was the story they grew up with? Their great, great, great grandfather took ten children. Was the only survivor in the entire world Meaning everything was wiped out. The Holocaust pales in comparison. The Earth itself was undone. That's the story they grew up with. In other words, they had no sense of history. Their only history, their only link back to the millions of people that lived in that time.
Was through Noah. Do you realize how cut off these people were? The connection between the story of the flood and the story of Megdal Bavel should be obvious to you now. These people had no sense of history. They were cut off. Who was Adamarishon? Who was Enosh? Who was Cham? Who were these? They were very limited. They were cut off from the millions of people that came before them. When you're cut off, you come to the world from a place of fear. Fear means control. If you are not in control of God, what are you in control of? Yourself. You're in control of yourself, and what do you need to do? You need to build big things. Things that last. Because if you're a person who grew up, this is part of the challenge that so many of us have had bad Holocaust education. Used to be when I was growing up. I think they stopped doing this, but it used to be when I was growing up. That they would teach children You have to have kids to replace the six million.
That was literally a thing that was said to us And it was like When I got older, I was like, we should have children because we should have children We shouldn't have children from a place of trauma. That's not a great idea. And it's true that we lost six million Jews, and it's true that we should be educated about that, and the world should be educated so that these things don't happen again. When people like Kanye West get up and say, "I'm going Death Con three," it's ridiculous because he has bipolar disorder, and I'm not sure why the world cares about somebody who's clearly saying things that are coming from a mental illness. But at the same time, it's not shocking that right after he said that People on the 405 in Los Angeles started hanging anti-Semitic signs off of bridges in Los Angeles because words matter, and we need to have Holocaust education.
The education needs to be that these things happened and we survived and we're okay and we're growing, but when you tell people you come from a place that everything was lost, that's terrifying to a person. That's terror. It's where do I come from? If the story of your upbringing is only traumatic, that means that you're disconnected in a certain sense. The appropriate thing to do is to tell the stories. And girls, where do we see this in the Torah? Where do we see that there's a traumatic event? We have to tell the story. It's the Pesach Seder every year. There was a traumatic event. What's Judaism's response to the traumatic event? Because the Holocaust pales in comparison to Yitzhak Mitzrayim. The Holocaust was just a couple of years. Yitzhak Mitzrayim was 210. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Hundreds of millions of Jews died in Mitzrayim, according to the Midrash. It's a serious business. How we talk about trauma is a very real thing.
But we have to talk about it because we have to be—we have to give it language. That's the key word here. We have to be able to say this what happened. Because when we give it context, when we give it language, we could give a person a sense of you come from somewhere. So now listen to this idea, because this is a blowaway idea, it's a mind-boggling idea. And we'll finish with this. These people were born. To a story that everything was lost, they lived with tremendous fear. They said, 'How can we last?' How can we last? Let's build something that will last. What they built? Megdal Bavel. They said, "Let's build something that will never fade away. Let's build something that has unbelievable powers. We'll leave a legacy for ourselves." They didn't get punished for that. That was an understandable response. That's why Hakadosh Baruch Hu never responded to Megdal Bavel. Megdal Bavel was Megdal Bavel.
But let's talk about something else that happened, and this is relevant to every single person here. There's something that happens when we live in a place of fear. This is very relevant to our community. Conformity. If we're growing up, if we're raising our children, listen carefully. If we're raising our children and we're terrified that they're going to go off the derech Then the way that we raise them is not as individuals, but we tell them everything is about conforming to community standards. Don't be yourself; conform to community standards because we're terrified of what a unique choice might look like.
So you all have to do the same exact thing. You have to go to the same elementary school. You have to go to the same high school. You have to go to the same seminary in Israel. You have to have the same job. You have to be a nurse. You have to be a speech therapist, a physical therapist, an occupational therapist, maybe an actual therapist. But that's only for a certain type of person, right? But as long as it involves the word therapy, you're okay. You can be a water therapist. You can be an art therapist. You can be a hydrotherapist. Whatever it is, today everything is a therapy. We have breathing therapy. We have talk therapy. Any type of therapy that we have today, you could do it. But you may have to have the same job. But if a girl will go out and she'll do something different, now all of a sudden it's like. But what's that going to look like on your shidduch resume? We're going to have to answer questions. They'll start to go, well, she really wanted to work in finance, and as a result, she got this really great job. So her parents are like okay We'll just tell people that she wants to support a husband in Kolle. That'll be our way of keeping her in.
But that's terrible. That's terrible. The conformity that's happening in our community is not coming from a place of strength. It's coming from a place of fear. There's no, there's nothing wrong with saying I want to be a part of a community. But if being a part of a community means that you can't think the way that you want to think, that you can't speak the way that you feel is right, that means that we've lost our sense of being. We've lost our sense of individuality. That's a horrific thing. That comes from a place of fear and control. That's what they were punished for. That was the consequence. The consequence was everybody in Bavel needed to speak exactly the same. Everybody needed to be involved in the same exact project. Everybody worked on Migdal Bavel. Everybody spoke the same language. God said, 'The biggest challenge of what we're going through right now, because you come from this place of fear, that's understandable. But you've destroyed the generation by doing that. So I'm going to give you a gift. It's a consequence, but it's a gift.'
The gift is I'm going to spread you out through the entire world, and every one of you is going to speak a unique language. You're not going to be able to work together. Why? Because now you're going to have to learn how to appreciate the differences between all these different types of people, and then you could work together. But if you lose yourself to work together, then you've lost everything. It's like the famous marshal. You girls know the marshal of porcupines in the winter. Porcupines in the winter will die if they're alone because it's too cold. So they need to huddle up close together in order to survive. They'll kill each other. They don't have the mass of a bear. So they have to be close but not too close. And so porcupines have this amazing sense that they can be right next to each other without pricking each other. And if you see a herd of porcupines in the winter, they're very close but they don't kill each other. It's the same thing when it comes to relationships. There are husbands and wives that lose themselves to the other person in the relationship. Did you know that? It's called codependence.
There are people that literally lose their sense of dignity, their sense of individuality, their personality to be with another person. That's horrific. That's a terrible thing. And so God gives us the most amazing gift. He says, 'Go off, become your own people, speak your own unique language. Do not live in fear of destruction.' Because if you live in fear of destruction, and this is again that Holocaust challenge for our generation, you're not going to raise healthy children. You're not going to raise people to be themselves. I was at a sholm zacher this Friday night. It was a very big rashi shiva at the sholm zacher. And he said something very powerful. He said, "If you want your children to have a sense of vitality" If you want your children to have a sense of excitement and enthusiasm for life Give them space Allow them to become themselves.
My wife's rebbe, Rav Nachman Bolman, Zecharzadik Lavracha, whom my daughter is named after. He used to say to the girls in my wife's seminary when she was growing up that he would tell the educators, "Don't clip their wings." Don't clip their wings. These girls will fly. Girls, you're going to grow a tremendous amount this year. You will. But there's two types of growth. There's growth that comes from a place of fear, and there's growth that comes from a place of self. The growth that comes from a place of fear is always rigid. It's always like, I'm not enough, so I need to be this. The growth that comes from a place of self is always exciting. It's alive. What will you be? What will you be in a couple of years? You could be anything right now. All you are is clay. You could do anything you want with that. You're unbound by anything in life.
If you weren't afraid to fail, and if you weren't afraid to be yourself, what would you be? Imagine how exciting it would be if you became that. Imagine how alive you would be. The story of Megdal Bavel teaches us that Hashem wants us to be individuals. He wants us to be a part of this wonderful community, but more than anything, He wants us to be ourselves, and we have to learn how to do that. It's not so easy.
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