Purim - Discovering Our Light Within The Darkness

1:46 Like, who Who do we think we really are? That's a question I hope will open up from today. Do I really know who I am? Why Hashem brought me here? How precious and special my uniqueness is here, and that there'll never be another one of me. It's not arrogant. It's taking responsibility because there'll never be another one of you. So that's what I got from you, Avi Berg, and you'll see for yourself. Without further ado, Avi Berg. Thank you so much. It's always wonderful to be here on the Chizuk Mission. It's specifically not so wonderful to speak after Gav. Usually he gets everybody riled up, all the ADHD in the room. So I walked in and Gav said to me, he goes, 'You want to know what I spoke about?' I said, 'No.' He goes, 'Let me tell you what I spoke about.' And then he told me that we spoke about kima the same thing. There's always the challenge of going second because you don't coordinate with the person before you, but it turns out it's not really the same thing. And I hope that even though some of the things will overlap, I hope that it'll be particularly meaningful.

2:54 I want to start off just by asking four very simple questions. Questions I imagine you're familiar with, but it's good to chazar, especially as we're holding now a week and a half from Purim. The first three are halachic, and the last one is more of a hashgachic question. La Gemara ci dice: hakireh hamegilu lemafreya lo yatsa. No. Don't go. It's perfect. Ma Mishnah. You want to take him? You can't. Or her? But the Hakare Hamegillah Ma Freil Lo Yatsa. If somebody reads the Megillah backwards, out of order. If you skip around in the Megillah, you're not Yotzei. Every Halacha tells us something fundamental about the nature of what we're doing. The rules of the game are not by accident. The rules of the game tell you something about the nature of the game. So when Chazal tell us that you're not allowed to read the Megillah out of order, it means there's something that we need to understand about reading the Megillah in order. That's one halacha that we need to examine.

3:57 There's a second halacha. Before they read the Megillah, you ever see them folding it up to make sure that it's in that pile? It's in a pile. It's all folded up. And then at the very end, they roll the Megillah back up and then they make the bracha. So the second question is, why do they need to roll the Megillah back up before they make the bracha? It sounds like that's an integral part of the process. It's not just reading the Megillah in order. It's not just getting it ready. You have to roll the Megillah back up before you can make the bracha of Harav Es Rivenu, which brings us to the third question: that Harav Es Rivenu is different than in the beginning, different than the first bracha of Shachiyanu V'Kiyamanu V'Yiyanu Las Manaseh. So asanisim lavoceino bayamim mahem bazmanaze, which is in the past tense.

4:46 Haraves riveinu is in the future tense. So it's almost like if you're following, it's almost like we read the Megillah in order. Then we roll it back up. We go back to the beginning, and now we're making a bracha for the future. The shaila is, what is this? All these halachos seem tied together. What is the inner meaning of these three halachos? The final question before we get started. Is everybody knows that the Gemara asks Esther menatire minayin. Where do we find Esther in the Torah? The Gemara says Hanaychi Hester astar panah beyomahu. The double option of Hester, the double option of hidden, is where we find Esther Amalke in the Torah. The shaila is, what is the inner meaning of that? Is it critical? I know the Ramban says that everybody has a pasuk in the Torah that's them that specifically alludes to their particular mission. But it seems to be the Gemara is putting a specific dageish on Esther Amalca that we have to find the source for her in the Torah, and that specifically that source is a double lashon of Hester. It's not enough that it says it once, but it says it twice. What's the inner meaning of this? Those are the four questions.

5:55 I want to say a very small thing that we are all at a disadvantage. Everyone in this room is at a disadvantage. My real passion in life is teaching public school kids. It's my real passion. I enjoy working with Orthodox people. I spend 11 months of the year working with Orthodox people. My favorite time of year is working with TJJ in the summer. TJJ is a group of public school kids that come in to Eretz Yisrael for the summer. I'm privileged to have a position in NCSY in the summer, and I go around speaking to the different TJJ buses that are here, and I usually get to spend a Shabbos or two with these kids. It's awesome. It's inspiring because I get to see kids who are literally taking their first steps into Yiddishkeit and understanding who Hashem is in their life. But it's even more amazing because they ask such beautifully basic questions. Talking about how we're so familiar with the stories of Chumash and Tanach that we don't even think of the basic questions anymore. If you want to speak to an audience like this, I assume all of you live in Ramat Hashkol on Paran, or I don't know exactly where you live, but somewhere in that vicinity.

7:05 So you grew up with this. You went to seminary. You went to high school. You went to Beis Yako. Wherever you went in your life, you know these stories so well that in order to give a shiur to an audience like this, sometimes you need to find the most hidden medrash that nobody ever heard of, and then spend 45 minutes unpacking that medrash just because you have to say something new. It's not like that with the public school kids. They'll literally ask you Basic questions. Who was Abraham before Lech Lecha? Why did Hashem choose him? You really have to go back to basics with these kids, and it's an amazing thing. I want to highlight a part of the Purim story that every one of us knows, but we don't pay attention to because we're so familiar with the story. This was the first time in history that every single Jew was threatened with death.

7:54 Had never been before. We're not used to thinking of it that way because we think, 'What was the first time Klal Yisrael was threatened?' I think Mitzrayim, probably right. Not everybody in Mitzrayim was subject to the Shibud, let alone was everybody suffering. This was the first time in history that all of Klal Yisrael was under threat of extinction from a dictator that had the capacity to do so. And not only was every single Jew under the threat of extinction. Not only was the army going to search out every single Jew to kill, but Haman empowered every single person, every single Persian, every single person in 127 medinas to go kill whatever Jews they found. That's an incredible thing to think about. Imagine like Kaviyachol. Obviously, it's not on the same level, Baruch Hashem. Imagine Hamas has their fighters. They have their people that they train, but on October 7th, they didn't send fighters through the wall. They said anybody is empowered. Just go, kill yidden wherever you see them.

8:58 In fact, I had the opportunity last year Shortly after October seventh, I was somewhere for Shabbos. Tomer Devora, and there was a whole group of mechanchot that came for Shabbos with their husbands. So when you're a husband, even though I work in Tomer Dvar, I was there B'Torah's husband. I wasn't speaking at all. I wasn't doing anything over Shabbos. So all the husbands hang out. It's like a little men's club in the back. Noticing all the interesting things that happen in seminary, different than in yeshivas. Like I don't know if you know this, but in yeshivas, when someone gives a Dvar Torah at the end, he sits down and that's it. In seminaries, when a girl gives a Dvar Torah, it's like the whole seminary needs to hug her. And then every girl needs to go over and tell her that was the best Dvar Torah I ever gave, like I ever saw anyone give, even though it was read directly from Heschel. It was like a.

9:48 So I'm sitting with all the chaver over there And it turns out that one of the guys is a trauma therapist. And he said that he quit his job basically. He had a practice. He quit his job, and all he's doing now is working with trauma victims from October seventh. This was in November, so it's about a month after October 7th, and all he's doing is working with trauma victims. And he told me that he said more or less everybody's doing okay, except one guy is a pusher, not okay, and he doesn't know what the recovery is going to be like. He said this guy got a knock on his door on the morning of October 7th from his neighbor. The cousins came through the fence. We had to go. The guy had a pickup truck. He was sitting in the front seat, meaning the driver. The neighbor was sitting in the front seat with his gun out the window, driving and shooting terrorists that were coming through the fence. This guy, who can't recover, had a machine gun and was standing on the back of the truck, literally just taking out whatever terrorists he could.

10:53 And he saw a 12-year-old boy. He saw a 12-year-old boy come through the fence And his training kicked in, and he immediately recognized this kid as a threat. But what do you do in that moment? You're a yid. You have a natural sensitivity. You don't want to chas v'shalom hurt anyone in the world. And so he hesitated, and then he saw the kid raise his gun, and he had no choice, and he took this 12-year-old kid's life. And he can't recover, because he's such a sensitive, sweet, wonderful person that's trained that habala hargach hakolim lahargol that if you have to do it, you have to do. You take a life, but he pasha can't recover. He pasha can't, and rightfully so. If he could recover, if it was normal for him, that would be something very sad. But imagine a 12-year-old kid coming through the fence. That was in a very one day for a couple of hours, an enormous tragedy.

11:44 We shudder to think what would have been on Purim of that year had the whole story not happened. It would not have just been the army. It wouldn't have just been the trained soldiers that came to root out every single Jew. It would have been the elderly. It would have been the young. It would have been men, women. It would have been everybody. So this was not just a threat of extinction that was unparalleled. It was a threat of extinction that was eminently capable of happening. And let's do one more. Put yourself in the shoes of a yid living in that time. What was your feeling that you had a minute before the decree came out? I think again for us we can think about it very much like October seventh. We went to sleep the night before. We had a beautiful Simchas Torah. Everything was fine. Did anybody expect what would be the next morning?

12:36 Keheref ayin. We woke up in the morning. For those of you that were in the country, we woke up in the morning. The sirens went off. Initially, we thought it was rocket attacks. We didn't know that people came through the fence. The word spread slowly. Nobody really thought like this was coming. We had a person who worked in our yeshiva at the time. Who was a soldier? He was on Miluim. And he wasn't turning on his phone because he said, "I don't know if they're going to call me up to fight." He said, "The rumors that I'm hearing are that terrorists are coming into the country. I want to be here in the yeshiva because if Chassvah Shalom the boys need protecting, I want to stand at the mishmar. I want to stand at the gate of the yeshiva to protect everybody coming through." That's an unbelievable thing to think about. The night before we were dancing Simchas Torah, we were fine. Keharef Ayn, our entire world changed for the last year and a half. What have we thought about? What have we been davening about? There was a day, October sixth. We were fine on October sixth.

13:31 If you ask the Jew in Persia How's everything going? The day before the decree came out, he said, "Gevaldik." Did you know we just went to the Sud of Achashverosh? We were just in the White House. We just met with Trump. We just had this whole thing. It was unbelievable. We sent a delegation. We have people that are involved in politics. We have A-PAC and my PAC and all the different PACs. What do you mean? We're fine. Did we know behind the scenes that Haman of Russia was working out all of these things to eviscerate Kalayisar on every level? We had no idea. A Jew woke up the next day and he finds out there's a decree going through everywhere that we are going to be destroyed in every corner of the universe. On a national level, the story of Purim is the story of vulnerability. Every Jew felt it. Every single Jew, without exception. They had the opportunity to convert and be fine. Not one Jew did. They lived for that entire year with the vulnerability of I could die because of the choice that I made to remain a yid.

14:34 But that's what it was like. That's what it was like. There was no Israeli army. There was no people coming into the White House to negotiate hostage deals. This was Nimnu Vegamru. It was over. So on a national level, the story of Purim is the story of vulnerability. But I want to talk on a human level for us, just for a moment. I apologize. I'm looking on my phone. I didn't have the opportunity to print the sheet last night. I am paying attention. I'm not just on my phone. I want to talk. If it's true on a national level, then I also want to speak on a personal level. Let's talk about Esther Amalke for a second. Again, let's talk about her in a very simple way. No fancy mamari chazal. Just a very simple story of a girl that I think every one of us can identify with. The first aspect of the story is that this is an orphaned girl. Chazal tell us what it means to be an orphan. What does it mean to be an orphan?

15:23 That if something happens to an orphan, what's the psychology of the orphan? You wouldn't have done this to me if I had parents. You wouldn't have done this to me if I had a father. You wouldn't have done this to me if I had a mother. That's why we have to be so careful. If somebody's orphaned, we have to treat them with the greatest possible respect. We have to bend over backwards to make sure that we don't hurt them in any way. Because it's not just the pain that we're causing them; it's the pain that we can't possibly understand that we're causing them. To begin with, this is a story of an orphaned girl. That by itself makes her a tragic figure. She's subject to the whims of whatever things happen in life because she doesn't have anyone to protect her. Take a moment to yourself right now. Be makatov to the fact if you had parents growing up. Take a second to be makatov. You had people who loved you, who you knew had your back.

16:14 There's a difference between people that live life with a safety net and people that don't. If you lived life with a safety net, if you knew that no matter what you could go back home and you'd have a place to go, that's a game changer. Especially now, I assume Beis Hashem that you all have children or you're growing families. Beis Hashem, do you know the gift you're giving your kid? We have your right. This child is being fed right now. It's not obvious. A child grows up knowing if I cry, my needs will be taken care of. That's how we grow into healthy adults. We have people in our lives. This is a girl who had nothing. This is a girl who had nothing. That's the first thing we know about her. The second thing we know about her is that she's a Jewess in the palace of Achashverosh. But can she tell anyone her identity? She's hidden. She's a hidden figure. She's behind the scenes. Nobody knows exactly who she is. She's a person who appeared out of nowhere. That's also a big tire for us.

17:11 How many of us feel? The answer is everybody. So you don't have to raise your hand. How many of us feel hidden in our lives? The greatest gift that we have is to be known. That's what we want. Every one of us wants to have a deep sense of belonging. We want to be able to share our full self with somebody else. That's why marriage is so difficult. Because when we marry somebody, what are we really looking for? We're looking for somebody who could know us. Through and through, intimacy is into me. You see, I'm sure you've heard that before. The idea that I'm going to marry somebody and there I'm going to be able to be my full self with them. Every shalom bias issue comes down to, on some level, I can't be myself with you. I can't share this thing with you. I'm afraid of how you're going to react, or you won't share yourself with me, and it feels deeply uncomfortable because I have a sixth sense that there's something you're not being in this marriage.

18:02 It's an unbelievable thing. To be a hidden Jewess in the palace means the thing that makes me, which is to be a Yid, I can't tell anyone. So she's an orphan, and her core essence is totally hidden. Then there's another aspect of this: who was Esther Amalke married to? She was married to Mordechai. So not only is she hiding the core parts of herself, but the person who could know her is all the way on the outskirts. And instead of being married to Mordechai, who she now married to, she's married to Achashverosh. And I think just for a second to take a step back to ask ourselves, who is Achashverosh? This is not a refined personality. This is not like it used to be in politics. Supposedly, this is what my grandparents told me. It used to be that there was a sense of dignity in the White House. It used to be that presidents of other countries didn't come to sit down in the Oval Office and then in front of the press get destroyed. By the way, I think it's wild to see the lack of dignity in the White House. Not just now in the last four years and in the four years before that. But the truth of the matter is, since the 90s, it's difficult to remember that there used to be dignity in the White House.

19:16 But there was a time where to be a politician meant to be a dignified person. Achashverosh was the farthest thing in the world from a dignified person. And Esther, we're not going to speak. We're going to speak Balashanaki. I'm not going to say anything out loud, but we all know what I'm talking about. Esther was Achashverosh's companion in the most inappropriate of ways. She had to be. The Gemara says Karkaolam. She had to lie totally still. This is who Esther Amalca was. So an orphan who hides her core identity, separated from the one person in the world who truly knows her, to be used by a Mushchas, and in order for her to retain her dignity, her sanctity, she lies there. That is the most cruel and unusual type of life that any of us could imagine. Again, we think Purim, gishmak, the shalach manos, how beautiful it'll be. I'm sure all of your husbands will drink only appropriately. Bezos Hashem, they'll go to sleep for a little bit. I hope that your husband's friends, when they come over, will also only be appropriate, because of course everybody in this room is in Yerushalayim Yerakodesh, only to serve Hashem in the most appropriate of ways. I know I'm laying it on a little bit thick, but it is an important message that you should relate to your husbands.

20:28 I'm sure that'll go over very well. You could blame me. This is a tragic story. If we took a moment to step back and were public school kids hearing this story for the first time, this is a story that involves unimaginable, unbearable amounts of pain. And then what happens at the climax of the story? Mordechai goes in, and he goes into Esther Amalch, and he says, "You have to go to Achashverosh." You have to be the one to save Klal Yisrael. He says, "Umi odieam lees kazo." He got the lamalchus. Who knows? Maybe this whole story was for this moment. And she says, eventually she relents, and we know that as she's going, she says, "Kasher avaditi, avaditi." I'm going to be totally lost. I'm going to be totally lost. Kayli, lama azavtani. My God, you have totally forsaken me. The double lashon of Kayli, Kayli.

21:30 The Gemara tells us that in those moments, as Esther Amalke is walking to Achashverosh, the shchina departed from her. Esther Amalke was a tremendous tzedekes. She had an intuition, like many women, that Hashem is with me in my life. In those moments, as she's now willingly going to the king, about to lose her dignity. For the first time, she's going to go willingly. She's going to lose her husband. She loses her relationship with Hashem. At the climax of the story, she loses everything. She's going against the law. She could be killed. Esther Amalca loses everything. Not only does she have to hide herself, she takes herself. She loses the presence of the Shechina in her life. This is an unimaginable story. What's the pshat here? On a national level, on a personal level, it seems like the vulnerability of this story is the highest level of vulnerability possible.

22:18 So I want to share with you something personal for me, and then I'll share with you a more general story. I want to share with you something that I think is important. Eleven years ago A week before Shavuos, eleven years ago, a week before Shavuos I was again. I don't have to get into all the details of the story, but I was rushed to the hospital on Shabbos morning. It was. Three days before Shavuos, three or four days before Shavuos, I was rushed to the hospital on Shabbos morning because my doctor thought that I had appendicitis. You have to go to the hospital, have surgery, and have your appendix out. I was convinced that I did not need to have my appendix out. In fact, I had been feeling pain since Thursday morning, and I said, "I just have a stomachache. I'm fine. I don't want to miss Yeshiva. I'm busy." So Shabbos morning, when I got examined in shul by my doctor, who's a tzaddik, his name is Dr. Shemy Goldberg. He's an amazing doctor. So Shabbos morning, he said you have to go to the hospital. I said Shemy, I'm not going to the hospital. I don't have appendicitis. This is ridiculous. He went and he got the rav of the shul, of Margolis, came and he said to me, Mordechai, the halacha is if the doctor says you have to go to the hospital, you have to go to the hospital.

23:30 I said Rebbe, I love Shemy. I'm glad he's a doctor. I'm not going to be mechallel Shabbos because Shemy said so. He's wrong. I don't have appendicitis. So the rav said to me, Mordechai, go to the hospital. I said, okay. I walked home. It couldn't have been that urgent. It's not like they called Hatsala to the shul. I walked home. I walked in the house. My wife looked at me. She goes, "What are you doing here?" I said, "This is going to sound funny, but I have to go to the hospital because I have a stomachache." This is not exactly like a heroic reason to go to the hospital. It's not like I did something amazing. I picked up the phone on Shabbos. I felt like a fool. I picked up the phone on Shabbos. For those of you who know Brian Regan, you know the comedian Brian Regan. He's an amazing comedian. Three or four of you just now admitted it with your eyes. I appreciate you, but for everybody else, you can lie. And he has a bit, and he says it's the most pathetic thing in the world to call an ambulance for yourself.

24:15 Could you come pick me up? I don't feel so good, right? So I literally picked up the phone on Shabbos morning, and because I was so uncomfortable being mechal Shabbos, I started doing the Brian Regan bit. You know, I'm like, it's Hatzalah Beit Shemesh. Everybody speaks English. I'm like, you come pick me up. I don't feel so good. They sent an ambulance. It's Armat Beit Shemesh. It's a bungalow colony. All the little kids are sticking their head out the window. Why is Berg going to the hospital on Shabbos? I said to my kids, I said I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back tonight. This is ridiculous. I'm fine. My kids said, okay, we'll have Shabbos lunch by ourselves. It wasn't a big deal. When I got to the hospital, I was in such excruciating pain. And the doctor in the hospital said to me, "You have appendicitis. You need to have surgery right now." And I said to the doctor, "I don't have appendicitis." And you're not doing surgery on me. I have a stomach ache. This is ridiculous. I'm not. I'm not doing this. So the doctor went and got the head doctor of the ER and had a Hankeram, and he said to me, 'He goes, I understand you're refusing surgery. I'm not refusing surgery. This is ridiculous. I don't have appendicitis.'

25:11 So the doctor said, "If we do a CT scan" It'll tell us 95% if you have appendicitis. Will you agree to do the surgery if the CT scan tells us that you have appendicitis?" I said, "Sure, no problem. You got a deal, because I know that the scan is going to come back and it's not going to be a problem." So I drink the horrible liquid. Have you ever had the CT scans? The worst thing in the world. It's like drinking poison, and I drink this whatever terrible thing, and then like forty five minutes later, he comes back to me. He goes, "You one hundred percent have appendicitis. You need to have surgery right now." And I turn to the doctor and I said I one hundred percent do not have appendicitis. I'm not having surgery. In fact, I feel completely better. And that's when I saw a look of concern go over the doctor's face. He said, 'What do you mean you feel better?' I said I'm fine. All the pain that I was feeling is gone. See, I'm better.

26:03 I did not know that when you have appendicitis, what that means is you have that tiny little appendix. Something gets blocked in the appendix. You have poison that builds up in your appendix. The reason you're in pain if you have appendicitis is because your appendix gets enlarged. It's filling up with poison, and when it ruptures, you feel better. But all the poison that's been building up for the 72 hours now goes all over your body, and Chas v'Shalom, you could go into septic shock and you could die. I didn't know that, Baruch Hashem. I was in the hospital, so I said I feel better. He goes, What do you mean you feel better? He starts doing these. Does it hurt when I do this? I said, Nope. I'm thinking I'm winning. I'm thinking like this is awesome. I'm not going to have surgery. Does it hurt me to do this? Nope. Stand on your tippy toes, fall down. Does it hurt me to do that? It's fine. He's like, Okay, you're very sick, and they put me on the IV, and it's like a whole thing. And I started running like 103 fever, and then I started running like 105 fever. But because I didn't have surgery, they didn't know exactly where to put me, so they put me in the ears.

27:03 Nose, and throat division of Hadassah in Kiram. If you've experienced Israeli medicine, you know it's like, you have an appendix; they have ears, nose, throat; just go to that wing. And I was there for a week, sitting with the IV and doing nothing for an entire week. And Motzei Shabbos, the following week. The same doctor who admitted me in the ER comes back and he's doing his rounds, and he says, "How you doing?" I'm like, "Actually, not so good. I kind of feel like the same pain that I felt the first time when I came in. I feel like it's happening again." And he looked at me and he goes, 'Well, that's because you're getting worse.' Israeli bedside manner is not exactly. So I looked at him. I'm like, "Well, isn't it your job to make me better?" He goes, "Yeah, for sure." So I said, "What are we gonna do?" He said, "I do not know." I said, "Well, this is very comforting." The next thing I knew, the next morning they put me in the ICU.

27:54 So just giving you a pro tip, if you're ever in the hospital here, you'll know you're in the ICU because the nurses are very different. In the ears, nose, and throat wing, we have these wonderful sparti nurses. I'm talking about that very gentle sparti nurse, like when she has to take an IV, she goes 'neshamad' that I hurt you. Very sweet, very gentle. When you go to the ICU, you have the Russian nurses, like jabbing you in the. Stay still. They were yelling at me, so I knew this was serious business. And the doctor comes in and he says to me, We think you have a cyst that developed around some of the poison, that's why you're in pain, and we have to find a really arrogant professor to drain the cyst. So I was like, first of all, if you don't know, a professor in Israel is higher than a doctor, and so we have to find a really arrogant professor because what they're going to do is they're going to take a giant needle, stick it into your stomach and draw out the poison from your stomach.

28:52 So they said, "But we're looking for somebody to do it. It has to be somebody who really feels confident in what they're doing." An hour later, they said, "We got somebody." A doctor came up, an English speaker from the Five Towns. I was like, "Perfect, arrogant professor. I'm from the Five Towns. I know exactly who this guy is." And we did the procedure, the craziest thing ever. You feel the puncture. They pull out the poison. You feel it being sucked from your body. It's the craziest thing. They said, "Now you're going to start to feel better." I did not start to feel better. For an entire week, I was in the ICU. And now we're two weeks in the hospital. I don't know what I was still running a fever. I hadn't eaten for two straight weeks. They had me on some for the entire time. And one morning, Dr. El Mogi comes in. El Mogi was my favorite doctor. He was the head of the Machlaka. And Dr. El Mogi comes in. Hadassah in Kerem is a teaching hospital.

29:41 And so what they do is they come. They make a horseshoe around you. You know where all the students are there. And they're talking over me. I don't really care. I'm pretty wiped out anyway. I'm not listening to anything they're saying. This was Mais and B'chol Yom. In the ICU, they wake you up. I'm not sure why this policy, but they wake you up at four o'clock in the morning to take your temperature. This is a very important part of Israeli medicine. They need to take your temperature at four o'clock in the morning because they need to get all the diagnostics in so that when they do their rounds, they have everything in front of them. So one morning, I'm not paying attention as usual. And they're sitting there talking over me, and they're saying everything. And then all of a sudden, I hear Almogi say 'cancer.' So I started paying attention. I said, 'What did you just say?' He said, 'We'll tell you later.' I said, 'No, don't tell me later. Tell me now, because if you say cancer, you don't get to tell me later. That's the way cancer works. That's the word that you have to tell me right now.' And he said, 'No, we'll tell you later. We're going to come back.' And they started to walk away.

30:34 Bear in mind at this point, I haven't eaten for two weeks. I've barely left the bed. They started me on an exercise routine because they said otherwise your muscles are going to atrophy. So every day I would have to walk from the ICU to the other end of the hospital, meaning down the hall and back. It would take me—I was so weak—it took me about 45 minutes to walk from one end of the hospital to the other. Then I'd have to rest there for about an hour just to recuperate my strength, and then I'd have to walk 45 minutes back. Then I'd pass out for about five hours. I was not in a position to chase Almogi down the hall as he's doing his rounds. But that's exactly what I did. I got up and I'm slowly walking, going, "Hey, come back here!"

31:15 And I can't. I can't run very fast, and they're much faster than me. They're healthy men, doctors making their rounds in the hospital. Almogi sees that I'm not giving up, that I'm chasing him, and says, 'You got to explain this cancer thing to me.' So he sends one of the doctors. The irony is that the doctor he sent was the doctor that admitted me the first time, and then the doctor that put me in the ICU a week later. That doctor comes back and he says, 'You really need to go back to bed. This is not okay what you're doing. We're going to come back.' And he escorts me, and there's not much I can do about it. He escorts me back to the ICU and he puts me back in the bed. Finally, about an hour later, they finish their rounds. And Almogi comes in, and he's got one or two other doctors with him. And he said, "Look, we have to consider the possibility that this is not appendicitis" Because if it was appendicitis, you should have been responding to treatment. You've been on two weeks of 24/7 antibiotics.

32:05 And serious antibiotics. In fact, the antibiotics were so strong that they had to give me the anti-nausea medication that they give to people going through chemotherapy. Because it was just ravaging my body, there was so much medication going through my body that basically I was just throwing up all the medicine. We have to consider the possibility that we misdiagnosed you, and that it's not appendicitis but cancer. So I'm 34 years old. And my wife is—I should mention this—nine months pregnant. That's how I always remember what year it was because my daughter was born shortly after that. My wife, who had been going back and forth to the hospital every day, nine months pregnant, while we had our four other kids at home.

32:49 And the doctor just told me I have cancer, or maybe I have cancer. I said, 'Well, what do we do?' And he said, 'Well, it's unclear if you have cancer, and we can't do a biopsy right now because your stomach is so inflamed because things are so bad. So we're just going to have to wait and see.' I said, what does that mean? You're going to wait and see? If it's cancer, shouldn't you get started treating it? He said, well, we don't know if it's cancer, but it might be cancer, and it's possible it's cancer. I can't tell you what the likelihood is because we have to do a biopsy, and I can't do a biopsy. So I said, when will you be able to do a biopsy? He goes when you start getting better. I said, let me understand this. I'm not a doctor. I've never studied medicine in my life. But if I have cancer, you have to wait until I get better to discover that I have cancer. It doesn't seem to me that that's the way that cancer works. So he goes, if in a couple more weeks you're still not responding to the treatment, then we'll know that it's cancer because you should still be responding to the treatment.

33:42 And then he left. And I'm sitting there by myself Seven o'clock in the morning, eight o'clock in the morning, Mashu Kaze By myself in the ICU with the Russian nurse by her desk And I have no capacity to daven, to open up a siddur, or to put on towels and tefillin. Because my body was just so ravaged, even to sit there and wrap tefillin on myself was exceptionally difficult. But in that moment, I said to myself, "I need to daven, not from a sitter. It's not shayech to daven from a sitter, but I need to daven to Hashem. It's an unbelievable es lasos in my life. I have to figure out exactly what I'm going to do here." I managed to put on my tefillin. I sat in my hospital bed. I started to cry. And I said the single most powerful tefillah that I've ever said in my entire life. It was the most powerful tefillah since the first 34 years, and I haven't ever come close to it since. I hope that I never will again.

34:33 All I did—I don't even know how long it was. It may have only been five or 10 minutes. But as I'm sitting there crying with my tefillah on in the ICU, all I kept saying was, "Hashem" Don't take me yet. I still have a lot left to accomplish. And I kept saying it over and over again. And I started thinking to myself. What do I have left to accomplish? What is my life? You start thinking about your kids and your wife. You start thinking about the Torah that you'd like to teach one day in Eishat Torah to the Chizuk Mishum. And all of a sudden Everything became very clear. My value system became completely clear. All the nariskeit that I chased in my life was just that. It was absolute nariskeit. And the only thing that's left in those moments are the real things that you love, the people that you love.

35:21 The things that are important to you, your most core values. You have values that are important, but they're not really important. They're not really important. We have a value: keep a clean house. I promise you, when the going gets rough, you don't care if the house is clean. When the going gets rough, the only things that matter are the three or four core values that you have in your life. And the less than a handful of people, because it is always less than a handful of people. It's the immediate family. It's maybe your closest friends. Everybody after that is just peripheral. Everything became exceptionally clear to me. Obviously, I'm here and Baruch Hashem, it wasn't cancer, and we didn't know that until August of that summer. So it was living with this for a long time of wondering, do I have, don't I have? And in the end, I had surgery at the end of the summer, and Baruch Hashem, I'm okay.

36:14 But I want you to know that the greatest gift that Hashem ever gave me in my life was that morning. When it appeared to me that I was at my most vulnerable. And if you know somebody that's gone through something like this, or you've gone through something like this yourself, then you know what I'm talking about. And if you haven't Then I hope that someday you never have to experience this. But I hope that you pay attention so that you don't have to experience this. Rav Mati Berger has an amazing line. Rav Gavd literally told it to me three seconds before the shiur started. He said, 'Hashem wants your attention. Either give it to him, or he's going to take it.' Every one of us has the ability to pay attention to what's important in our lives, and if we don't If we sit there with this giant board, and on that board is all this nariskeit, then Al Kiddush Baruch Hu is going to say, "Where am I on this board?"

37:08 I don't feel like I'm in the center of attention, and Hashem will be at the center of attention in our lives. So if we don't give Hashem our attention, somehow in life He puts Himself at the center of attention. It's the single most incredible thing that happens to us in our lives: we're forced to pay attention in life to things that are real. This journey is not linear. I want to be very clear: it's not. People go through things, and then there's this expectation, 'Oh, she got cancer, and so now everything is going to be perfectly clear in her life.' That's not the way this goes. Life is exceptionally complex. There's a process. There's an unfolding to the way that life happens. And it's not obvious how things should develop. There's a process that we go through. People get sick. People lose loved ones. October seventh happens. We didn't have national healing on October eighth. In fact, if you're asking anybody in the room honestly, we're not even close to healed yet. It's going to take us a long time to be able to unpack this and to heal from this and to figure out exactly what the nature of this story is. I was talking to a young woman who Baruch Hashem today is in remission.

38:14 And it happens to be that this young woman. This particular young woman, she's an exceptional person. She really is one of the most growth-oriented people that I've ever met. Really, truly, when you speak to her, you feel like you're speaking to somebody 30 years older than her. And she's somebody who had cancer. And she had to go through it, and it wasn't pushed at all on any level. Baruch Hashem, she's in remission. And she told me I'm still healing. Now I'm physically well, but I need to go through the process of acceptance in my life. That connecting to Hashem for me doesn't always mean the classic things. It's not obvious that I'm going to be able to daven from a sitter, and maybe sometimes I'm going to connect to Hashem through music. None of us in this room would blame her if among the many feelings that she's feeling, which I'm sure is positive and grateful and lucky, but might also be anger and frustration and pain at Hakadosh Baruch Hu of how could you do this to me?

39:10 And those are reasonable, important feelings. It's not obvious that it goes from one second to the next. You get sick, and then all of a sudden you know exactly what's important. You get sick; a lot of things get clarified, and then there's a tremendous process that every one of us has to go through, and that every one of us is entitled to go through in our lives. Or to put it a little bit differently, maybe the entire tafket of our lives is to go through this purpose. Maybe the entire tafket of our lives is to go through the process of being exceptionally vulnerable, so that we can discover who we are. Because the truth is, everyone in this room Including myself, we are armored up. We are so armored up because we're terrified of what we're going to discover if we actually look inside. That armor does fall away over time. If you're normal

39:55 And that means you have shalom bias challenges because you're young and you're newly married, and this thing that you're trying to build together is not so easy because you married a human being and he came with his stuff, and you're a human being and you came with your stuff. If you're normal, you're going through this. I want you to know, first of all, welcome to the club of married people that are struggling. I know we don't talk about it a lot because nobody wants to be the person that raises their hand and says, 'Yeah, I'm having a hard time with this.' But if you're embarrassed to raise your hand, just know that the five people sitting next to you are also having a hard time. It's one of those conversations that we need to have more publicly. But if you're going through that, I want you to know a hard marriage is a gift. A hard marriage is a gift. It means you're going to have to look deep inside yourself and do incredible amounts of work on yourself in order to become the person that you're meant to become.

40:42 And you might be sitting there going, "Why did I marry this person?" That's why you married this person. Life is exceptionally vulnerable. Learning to be okay in a marriage is an important part of learning to be in a marriage. And maybe we weren't okay beforehand. And maybe now we're going to finally have to learn what it means to be okay. Mordechai says to Esther. He says, Esther, let's look at who you are. Everything in your life is about vulnerability. You have no parents. Your core identity is hidden. You have no husband. You're being used by a mushras And now your husband Mordechai is coming to you and saying, 'Go willingly to that mushras to save Klal Yisrael.' What is he saying to her? He's saying, Esther This is you. All of the hiddenness that you have inside of you, the opportunity for all of it to come out is right now. What's Esther's pasuk in the Torah? It's a double Hester. What's a double concealment?

41:48 The Balshamtof explains a double concealment is that even the concealment is concealed. It's the deepest depths of concealment. They say a story about Rav Avram Hamalach, who was the son of the Maggid of Mezrich, who came to his father and he was crying. And his father said, 'What's wrong?' He said, 'I was playing hide and go seek with my friends, and nobody could find me.' So the maggid said to him, 'That means you won.' So Rav Avram looked at him and he goes, "No, they stopped looking." And they say that the maggid started crying, and he turned to Hakadosh Baruch Hu, and he said, 'You're so well hidden that your children have stopped looking. How much pain is the Rebbeinu Shalom in that we're not looking for him anymore?' Esther Amalke is that bechina of the concealed. It's the depths of concealment. Who she is like waiting in a bayonse to explode onto the scene. Mordechai is saying to her, Umio deyam lees kazozi gat la malchus, and she's walking to the king. Keli lama azavtani Kasher avadti. All those double shonos. Vanochi astar. I'm totally hidden. Kasher avaditi, and I'm hidden. I'm so lost that I'm going willingly to the king. The divine presence has left me. I have no shechina within me anymore.

43:00 And then that final stage of keli lama azavtani, that cry to Hakadosh Baruch Hu, that double cry of keli lama azavtani, Hashem, why have you abandoned me? But if we listen closely to the words of Esther, even though it appears to be a cry from the depths of her soul saying, why have you abandoned me? Isn't it fascinating that in that moment, who does she turn to? She turns to Hakadosh Baruch Hu and she says, "Keli, lama azavtani." In the moment where God seems to be the most distant from us in our lives, is when we discover Hakadosh Baruch Hu in our lives. The final words are, "Why have you abandoned me?" But who does she turn to complain, "Why have you abandoned me?" She turns to Hashem. Isn't that what we've done for the last year and a half? Have we not watched Klal Yisrael for the last year and a half cry out, "Keli, lama azavtani"? On the one hand, we feel totally abandoned, but on the other hand, who have we been crying out to? We've been crying out to the Rebbeinu Shalom, and not just the Dati community.

43:58 But it's every single Jew in Kollel Yisrael finding themselves anew. Jews that never put on tefillin before are putting on tefillin. Jews we all heard the stories of the hostages that were keeping Shabbos that refused to give up their Jewish identity. The people that didn't live for Hakadosh Baruch Hu were willing to die for Hakadosh Baruch Hu, because the core identity is revealed when your back is up against the wall. You know Obviously, on a national level, it's going to take us years to heal. But right now, I think many of us are in the process of taking the next steps after last week with the Bibas family. Can any of us imagine what it was like to be Mr. Bibas last week? Can any of us imagine what it's like to have the survivor's guilt that he has? To have gotten out of Gaza To escape only to find out that he's the only one from his family who escaped.

44:48 That his children were brutally murdered, not by Israeli airstrikes, but they were brutally murdered and then mutilated in an attempt to cover it up. Can any of us imagine what it was like to be him, if he saw the videos of them parading his children's coffins through the streets Singing, dancing? Look what we did. Can any of us imagine what it was like for him to see on the coffin that returned his wife that it said arrested on October seventh, two thousand and twenty-three, not taken hostage. Not murdered, we arrested her. As if she wasn't some innocent civilian who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then to find out that it wasn't even his wife's body. What Mr. Bibas went through is unimaginable. The strength that this human being must have is beyond what any of us should ever have to fathom.

45:38 It happened to him, and it happened to everybody in Kallah Yisrael. Who amongst us didn't see over the course of the last week and a half a million orange hearts wherever we were going? It's the pain, the vulnerability. We're standing not just like Klal Yisrael was standing in those times with the sword over their neck. The sword hit our neck. And it took our children And it took our wives, and it took our daughters, and it took our sons. We're living in a time where the Purim story is as relevant as it has ever been to us. The vulnerability that we're experiencing is so incredible. But the opportunity is also incredible—the opportunity for self-discovery, the opportunity to say Hinei, this is who I am in my life. That is the single greatest opportunity that we could ever have. Let's go back to those initial halachos.

46:30 You can't read the Megillah out of order. There's no skipping steps. I want you to know when I turned 40 years old, it messed with my head because I was like, my life is half over, and I don't get a do-over on the first half. It never occurred to me. Probably most men die around 80 something years old, and I'm halfway done. I'm not in high school anymore, and I'm not in my 20s anymore, and I'm not in my 30s anymore. I started to do an honest evaluation of what I've done with my life. Have I accomplished anything? It's an unbelievable thing. As I started to reflect, I realized every lesson that I learned in my life, I learned it exactly in the right time. Hakadosh Baruch Hu sent me those lessons exactly in the right time. I couldn't have skipped any steps. That's what we all wish, no? You ever have that daydream where you're like, you wish that you could go back in time to when you were five years old with all the knowledge that you have now and live a completely different life? You ever have that daydream? Am I the only one? I don't mind being vulnerable.

47:23 But I have that daydream all the time, and I think to myself, first of all, I would definitely gamble on a bunch of games and make a lot of money. I have that Back to the Future thing going. But I also think, how would I show up differently in high school? What type of friend would I be? What would I look for when I was dating? Everything in my life would be different if I only knew then what I know now. But that's not the way life works. You don't get to read the Megillah backwards. You have to read your entire Megillah in order. And then what do you do at the end? You can't make the bracha until you roll back up the scroll. Now at the end, you get to look back and you get to say, "I learned that lesson here, and that's how I became this person." But it requires taking ownership. You have to be willing to look back in order to look forwards, and that's why the final bracha is Harav es Rivenu in the present tense. Now that I'm at the end of the Megillah, I get to say, so what will my life be like moving forward?

48:18 I want to say a word. I know I do this often when I'm speaking in front of Barry, but I want to say a word about Barry, and I want to say a word about the Chizuk Mission because I have been a part of it for five years And I do think that it's incredible. For a lot of the Jewish women in the community If we're being honest Our sort of educational career ends at seminary. It's not like the guys where after yeshiva they go to yeshiva again, and then after yeshiva they get married and then they go to kollel, so they're in yeshiva again. And the support system for men is very robust. They go to shul, they have rabbanim, they have friends, they have their kollel and rosh kollel. There's a very robust system of continuing education for the men. Not so much for the women, as I'm sure you've discovered. Not so much for the women And Barry found a group of women. She found a group of women and she said, "We deserve to be inspired. Also, we deserve to make sure that as the future mothers of Kallah Yisrael, you have Hashem in your life at the center of your attention, so that you can be the people that continue the next link in the chain."

49:24 It's an unbelievable thing that she's done, and everyone in this room owes her a tremendous debt of gratitude, not only for today's program, but for the reality that if you want to take advantage over the course of the next 30 years of your life, Barry Feld has dedicated herself to making sure that every one of us is paying attention. Because, as we said from Rav Matti Berger, Hashem wants your attention. You're either going to give it to Him or He's going to take it. The nature of the Chizuk mission is to be a growth-oriented person who's deeply identified with the core Hakadosh Baruch Hu that dwells inside of every single one of us. That's what we're here doing. We're not here having a yom yun before Purim. This is just the first step in what we hope will be many steps, thousands of steps, tens of thousands of steps in your life to come closer to Hakadosh Baruch Hu and to build a life of meaning and passion. So yes, Barry, we owe you a tremendous debt of hakaras hatov.

50:19 And it should be a slos for you and your family that all of the growth that be'ez Hashem that we all do. Should be something that you can take with you to the bank. That after 120, when you come up to Shamayim That Hakadosh Baruch Hu say, 'New Barry, what did you do for my daughters and Klali Yisrael?' And you say, 'I took care of them.' That in times that were difficult, I made sure that we put Hashem at the center of our attention. And so it's my bracha really for all of us, but specifically it's my bracha for all of us. It should be a bracha for Barry that we should be zeicha in these times of anaychi hester astarpanai bayomahu to be able to cry out to Hashem keli lama azavtani and to be able to be zeicha to bring the gulah shleima. Amen.