Tzav - Keeping Your Fire Aflame

2:18 And last but not least, again, same type of question. This question is from the Ruach Hayim. We know that the Mishnah Avos tells us that there were ten nisim that occurred in the Beis Hamikdash, and one of the nisim was that the rain never extinguished the fire. So again, we have the same type of question: if we're going to have a nes already Why don't we have a nes that it never rains in the Beis Hamikdash on the area of the mizbeach? You hear the question. If we're going to have a nase, what should the nase be? Not that it rains and the fire doesn't go out, says the Ruach Hayim. Make it so that it doesn't rain on that place. So we have three questions on this Esh Tumid. Number one Why does the Kohain need to place the wood there? Why do we need to protect the fire when we're traveling? And if the fire never goes out anyway.

3:16 And because of the rain, just make it that it doesn't rain there. Why do we need a miracle for it to rain? But it doesn't go out? In order to answer this question, I want to delve into a different topic. Another topic in this week's parsha is the carbon toda. Who's obligated to bring a carbon toda? So the Gemara in Brachos 54b tells us four people are obligated to bring a carbon toda. Those who cross the sea safely Those who cross the midbar safely Those who are sick and become healed. They're chol and mizrpey. And if you are released from jail, you're chayev to bring a carbon toda. You girls are familiar with this halacha. Same thing as berchas agomel. When the tor brings down this halacha He says there's a mnemonic device we use to remember this halacha. The mnemonic device is: we say in davening, "V'chol haChayim yodu chazella," and all of life will praise you forever. "V'chol haChayim yodu chazella," says the Torah.

4:30 "Chayim" is Rashi Tevos. The Ches stands for Chole, as in Chole umisrape. You got sick and you recovered. The Yud stands for Yisurim. A reference to somebody who went to jail and suffered in jail and then was freed. The second yud stands for Yam and the mem stands for Midbar. The chol ha'chayim yodu chazal. When are we modeh? When do we bring a carbon toda? When do we give thanks to Hakadosh Baruch Hu? When you have any one of these four things of chayim Ches is chol u'misrape yisurin Yam or Midbar. That's what the Torah says. And again, we have three obvious questions on this. Very simple, very basic questions. The first thing that we have to ponder is: these four things seem to be the antithesis of life. These are four things that put a person in danger. And if you come out of it, then you're alive.

5:30 But it's chayim is the rashi tevos of all of the things that are negative. Chola Yisurin Yam Midbar. This is the antithesis of life. This is not life. This is the antithesis of life. So this mnemonic device, these Rosh Etevos, it's very strange. They're the opposite of what we would think we communicate. The second question is a technical question. What should the Torah have said? What should the mnemonic device have been? Not the cholachayim yoduhasella. Which words of those four words are critical? The opposite. Bad guess. Try again. Which words are critical? Chayim is critical because that's obviously the mnemonic itself. What's another critical word there? Yoducha is a critical word. That's the lashon of Toda. That's giving thanks. What are the two words that appear to have nothing to do with this? The chol and sela. So why does the tour bring down the whole thing? The chol, chayim, yoducha, sela. Let him just say the mnemonic for when you bring a carbon Toda is chayim yoducha. You should give praise for these four things when you go through these four things.

6:58 So that's our second question. It's a technical question, and the last question is a hashkafic question, an important hashkafic question. Which is what's this? What's this idea of a mnemonic device? Whenever you see, sometimes you see in the Torah we have mnemonic devices, like let's say in the Hagada we have the tzach adash ba'achav. It's a way of remembering the makos. What's the entire idea of a mnemonic device? Why do we need a mnemonic device? Is it just a helpful way to remember something, or is there perhaps an inner meaning? So those are our three questions on the carbon toda. All in all, we have six questions: three questions on Three questions on what? Three questions on the H Tumid And three questions on the carbon toda. I want to read to you a line that I read from a psychologist whose name is Adam Grant.

7:58 And he's a I think he's went to Wharton. He's a very brilliant man And he put out this line the other day, and it really struck me that this is the idea of what we're discussing here. Listen to the line. The line goes like this: Resilience is not about being invulnerable to hardship. It's about accepting adversity as part of life. Some struggles are challenges to conquer; others are weights to carry. Strength does not come from avoiding setbacks. It comes from refusing to be defined by suffering. This concept is not a concept that is discussed in 2024 nearly enough. We have a vision. That life is meant to be comfortable. And it's not true. Life, by its very nature, is chaotic. And it is uncomfortable. Our job is to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. Because if you're uncomfortable with the uncomfortable, one thing is for sure: you're not showing up to life.

9:09 If you're uncomfortable in a relationship, you check out and you're not participating in that relationship. If you're uncomfortable with what's happening in life, your response is to shut off. You're not showing up to life. By the way, you're not showing up to the good or the bad. Because if you don't show up when it's bad, you're also not showing up when it's good. If you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other. You can't selectively numb. So people who check out of life when life gets difficult, people who don't have resilience, people who don't know how to struggle and stay engaged. They're missing a fundamental feature of life, which is I have the ability to be present with whatever is happening at this particular moment, whether that's good, bad, or ugly. I am present. I am alive in this moment. Most people today have no idea how to do that. The second something gets uncomfortable, they turn on their phone, they turn on Netflix and they binge. They turn on their phone, they go on YouTube and they swipe up on YouTube Shorts for hours on end. The second something gets uncomfortable, they're on TikTok. The second something gets uncomfortable, they're taking that drink, they're taking that smoke, whatever it is that people are doing to cope.

10:22 All coping comes from the fact that fundamentally we are uncomfortable with what's happening in life. And in order for us to be resilient people Which is the topic du jour? Everyone today is talking about how we build resilient children. Because we saw what happened in COVID. When you teach children that life is comfortable, what happens the moment life becomes uncomfortable? They all fall apart because they have no coping skills. So there's something wild that happened in this last generation, and specifically in our community. I want you girls to hear this. I'm going to say this as clearly as I possibly can. There's something insane that happened in our community. We got extraordinarily wealthy. We became extraordinary, off the charts, ridiculously wealthy. What do we do with that wealth? So we invested Baruch Hashem, in a lot of beautiful things, but also in the material and emotional and psychological comfort of our community. When I don't mean to say like in my day. I don't want to be that guy.

11:35 I want to share with you what camp was like when I was a kid. I went to a camp called Magen Av. Magen Av was a federation camp, which is code word for it was cheap. And my parents couldn't afford to send me to an expensive camp. Baruch Hashem, so I went to a low end camp. You want to know what a low end camp looks like compared to today? First of all, we had a bunk. That bunk didn't have air conditioning. The idea that a bunk would have air conditioning was beyond us. Nobody in a million years would have ever thought that a bunk should be air conditioned. We had fields to play sports and Kim. We didn't have fields. We had areas, and all the areas had these weird yeshivish names. For example, the place where the Mets play now is called Citi Field, but back in the day it was called Shea Stadium. Have you heard of Shea Stadium? One of the fields was called Shea Stadium.

12:33 Another field was called Yankee Stadium instead of Yankee. The Baltimore Orioles played many years ago in a stadium called Candlestick Park. We played in Candlestick Park. Our basketball court, the gym, was a barn. The name of the barn was Madison Square Garden. And you know what? Growing up I thought it was awesome. Because nobody ever told me that a field should have a backstop where the ball wouldn't fly. If the catcher missed the ball, it just went. You had to run after it and get it. Most camps have like fancy backstops. If you pitch the ball and the catcher misses it, don't worry, it hits the metal thing behind. I don't even think we had that. We had very little, but we didn't know that you were supposed to have more. So you know what we were happy. You know what our trip was. Our trip was there was a general store a couple of miles away

13:32 And we walked to the general store where we could use our own money to buy food, and then we walked back. That was a trip. It was the entire trip. We didn't stay anywhere fancy. We walked to the. I remember. By the way, you were only allowed to take out a certain amount of money. It was like maybe five bucks for your trip. So it was a question of how far you could stretch your five dollars, and you didn't want to buy too much, because then you had to schlepp it several miles back. I remember walking back to camp with bags of Entenmann's donuts in tow. That's what was important to me. The canteen was like potato chips and a drink, and you only had it once a week. And you know what? It was awesome. Wednesday night was cookout night. They told us, as part of our packing, this would never fly in a million years today. Bring a knife to camp.

14:25 It was part of the packing list. Could you imagine if a parent today got a thing? Bring a knife to camp. I remember telling my mother, "No, I need a good knife." Why do you need a good knife? Because you know you do on cookout night. You go to the forest and you chop down with your knife. You saw off a branch, and you wanted it to be a live branch because a dead branch was going to burn. And then you cleaned the branch and you made a little pointy thing on top. They gave you hot dogs, and you skewered the hot dog. And you cooked it. It wasn't cookout like you went to the dining room and they gave you like hamburgers and hot dogs. They gave you marshmallows and hot dogs, and you cooked them. That was a night activity on Wednesday night. Our night activity was dinner, and it was awesome. But if you would do that today, because we invested so much in the creature comforts of our children.

15:20 What we taught them inadvertently—we didn't mean to teach this to you. We meant to make your life better. Instead, we made your life significantly worse. What we meant to teach you was: we want to give you the best. We want to give you good stuff. But what happened? What happened was that we taught kids that you couldn't go to camp if you didn't have air conditioning in your bunk. There's a certain camp—I won't say which one—it doesn't matter. There's a certain camp that they have. I know for a fact. This is a camp that I Was friendly with the owner for many years. He has an ice cream parlor on the campus. It's not canteen. That's an activity. It's an activity called ice cream. And everybody goes in and they get a cone and they get big squirrely ice creams and they sit down and they get all their toppings. That's an activity. He brings in people to do mani pedis for the girls before Shabbos.

16:14 This is true. Why wasn't I sent there? You should thank your lucky stars you weren't sent there. Because what happens to a group of people? These are girls that are showing up to camp. When they had a fire in that camp, they had insurance, so there's no problem. We're going to get you all your money back. The parents are like, ten thousand dollars worth of clothing was destroyed, and they weren't lying, because that's what the girls were coming to camp with. What did we do? We made life so comfortable. That we inadvertently sent the following message: If you're uncomfortable, you're not okay, and that's not true. That's a terrible chinuch lesson. Becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable is part of life. If you check out every single time life becomes uncomfortable, if you need to run to therapy every single time life becomes uncomfortable, something is wrong.

17:07 There's something called overtherapized. There has to be something called resilience. Resilience means life can be challenging. That's not a bug. That's a feature. Life is meant to be challenging. That's a good thing. If you're challenged, you become great in the process. And think about it. Every person in this room knows this. If you ever had something in your life that was difficult But you rose to the occasion and you were resilient and you pushed through and you achieved. How good do you feel at the end? How much did you grow from that challenge? The answer is you grew tremendously, exponentially. Because difficult things build you as a person. If you had It's funny sometimes I look back on my high school classmates. It's not necessarily the brilliant ones that succeeded the most. It's very often the people that worked hardest and achieved that in the end succeeded the most. The athlete in high school, he may not be the brightest, but you know what he had to do. He had to go to practice five, six hours a week. He had to show up to games. He had to learn how to rise to the occasion. He got built from that. That guy, when life throws him a curveball, he's going to be okay.

18:27 Girls, I'm going to say something. You may not like this, but it's important. When I asked my rebbe, not I asked, when someone asked my rebbe, and it was relayed to me. What do you look for in a husband for your daughter? My Rebbe said, a man. And it's not obvious today. A man is someone who knows how to show up to life and take responsibility. What happens when life doesn't go well? You don't want somebody who says, I don't know what to do. You lose your job, you find a new one. You're having trouble with your kids. Get innovative, spend more time with them, and figure out what to do. You're having trouble in your marriage. Show up. This is not an easy thing to do for a generation that was taught that comfortable is good and uncomfortable is bad. That's a bad chinuch lesson.

19:14 There's no doubt that we have to learn how to become comfortable within the uncomfortable, but it's still uncomfortable. Why is this? Why is this a feature, not a bug? Why did Hashem create the world in which there is suffering, in which there is chaos, in which there are difficult things? The answer to this question is very easy and very obvious, but you need to lock into this concept, otherwise you're missing it completely. The goal of this world is to build for Hashem a dwelling place in our material world. I'll say it again, make sure everybody gets it. The goal of this world is to build for Hashem a dwelling place within our material world. That's why God created the world. Hakadosh Baruch Hu desired to have a dwelling place in the world down below. What does that mean? What do those words mean? That God wants a dwelling place in the world down below. This concept is revolutionary. If you get it Chaval for those girls that in this moment are uncomfortable and are running to their coping mechanisms.

20:22 Kedai to stay locked in. If you're God and you're creating something else, by definition, that thing is going to be other than God. I'll say it again. Make sure everybody gets this. If I'm God and I create something, what is that thing? Other than God, not God. So when God creates the world If God is perfect, then what is the world? Imperfect. So God says, "Listen." God says If you want me If you want to build a dwelling place, it means make a godly place that's imperfect. Make the imperfect place godly. Make the chaos godly. Make the suffering godly. What's a Jewish response to chaos? Find godliness within the chaos. I'll give you an example of what this looks like. There's an organization called A Time. Girls have heard of this organization. A Time is an organization. It's also the same organization as Bonyolam. It's an organization that helps couples having fertility issues.

21:41 It was started by the Bachner family. The Bachner family, Rabbi and Rabbis and Bachner, were not able to have children. They tried to have children for 20 years. They went to every doctor and had every test done. After 20 years, they were going to one last doctor, and this doctor was going to be the poseik. Will they have children or won't they have children? End of the road. Stop trying. It's not going to happen. And they went to that last doctor. And he told them, "You're not going to have children." In the car ride on the way back from that doctor's appointment Rabbits and Bachner turns to Rabbi Bachner And she said. We're going to start an organization for people that have fertility issues because God said no to us, but now we have all this knowledge. We know every doctor, we know every test, we know every procedure, we know all the ways of working with the insurance companies. We have all this knowledge. So in the car ride on the way back from learning that she would never have children, she started an organization that today is responsible for over eight thousand births.

22:54 Eight thousand births. She said. I heard her on a podcast. She said she gets invited to brises, to bat mitzvahs, to bar mitzvahs, and even to weddings of children that were born because she had the courage to look at her own suffering and say "How am I going to respond in a godly way?" She said, "Hashem didn't give me one children. He gave me one child. He gave me over eight thousand." That's a godly response to suffering. What a godly response is to suffering? Hatzala. Hatzala is a godly response to suffering. We don't wait for EMTs to come. We don't call nine one one. We call hatzala because they'll get there faster and they'll take care of you. You're broken down on the side of the road. How do we respond to suffering? Chaverim. If you lose a loved one, misaskim Chaver kedisha. You have a special needs child. Ask.

23:50 Chassid shalom. You have cancer. High lifeline. Do you see how everything in our community is designed to help people who are struggling? In a place where we find suffering, Jews respond by saying we will deal with this in a godly fashion. We'll heal you. If you're suffering, we heal you. That's what we do. Is one of my favorite vorts from Rassalavetich. It's an amazing vort. I read it from Rabbi Jonathan Sachs in the name of Rassalavetich in a book called "To Heal a Fractured World." This is absolutely one of my favorite vorts ever. We say in Benching: Nareiisi, gam zakanti, velo raisi, tzadik nezav, v'zaram avake shlachim. I was young and I was old. Nareiisi, I was young. The gam zakanti, and I was old. Velo raisi, and I never saw. Sadik Nezav, a righteous person, be abandoned. Vezarum evak eshlochem, and his children went hungry and didn't have bread to eat.

24:43 Ask Rosh Salavitcha an obvious question. Really? You were young and you were old, and you never saw a righteous person be abandoned, and he didn't have food to eat. His children didn't suffer. Isn't that axiomatic for our world that righteous people suffer? So how in the world could we say nar aisi gam zakanti velo raisi tzadik nezav vazar mavake shlochem? It goes against every single thing that we're taught. Says Rav Salivich, listen to this answer because it's stunning and beautiful. Nar aisi, I was young. Vgam zakanti, and I was old. Velo raisi doesn't mean and I never saw. It means and I never stood by and watched as a tzadik was abandoned. And his children didn't have bread to eat. That's what it means to be a Jew. Look around in the world. Any time you see suffering in our community, what do we have? We have a response. We don't sit by and watch because we know that life is suffering.

25:44 And our responsibility is to bring godliness into that suffering. That's what it means to make the world a godly place. Let's go back to that unbelievable tour. When does a Jew bring a carbon toda? When he's thankful, thankful for what? Thankful for four things. I traveled the sea and I survived. I crossed the desert and I survived. I was sick and I survived. I was in jail and I survived. But the Rosh Teivos are not the survived part. What is life? Life is the Yam. Life is being adrift in the sea and not knowing whether you're going to make it to the other side. Life is being in the desert and not knowing if you have enough water to get through. Life is feeling, girls. This should hopefully relate to at least some of you. Life means sometimes feeling like you're in jail, feeling stuck, and not knowing which way to turn or how it's going to end up.

26:49 Life is sometimes lo alenu Being sick. And not knowing how the story is going to end—that's what life is. In a certain sense, I hope you'll hear me. In a certain sense, we feel most alive when our life is threatened. When we're in a dangerous situation, your heart's beating. In a certain sense, you feel most alive in those moments. I'm not going to get into the gritty details of it now. It's a great story, but for a different time. There was a time nine years ago, ten years ago now. When I was in the hospital, and I was in the hospital for a month I was in the ICU. You girls know what it means to be in the ICU. It's not good if you're in the ICU. And I want you to know, I didn't start off in the hospital in the ICU. First, I spent a week in a regular floor in the hospital, and I was getting sicker. And they moved me to the ICU. I realized the situation was getting serious when they moved me to the ICU. I was like, "Whoa, this is serious business."

27:50 And you could tell the difference. Cause here I was in Hadassah in Kiram Hospital. When you're not in the ICU, they have very sweet nurses. These like really like delicious, warm, gentle Sfardi nurses. And when they would give me the IV in the morning, they would put the thing on me and they would gently tap to get the vein out. And then it didn't go right away. They'd be like, I'm so sorry, Neshamalo. Like they were the sweetest people. And then when I moved to the ICU, I don't know who I'm about to offend, but I'm sure it's somebody. All of a sudden, we had Russian nurses, and it was a completely different experience. Who'd I offend? Now I know how to say it again. And all of a sudden, instead of tapping you to get the vein out, they're smashing me in the arm.

28:37 And they're like sucking in. I'm like, ow! The woman said to me, I'll never forget this. She said, Stop it. You're fine. I was like, I'm not fine. That hurt. And every morning Every single morning They come around. I don't mind, but I'm not getting involved in this. It's not here. Every single morning Every single morning, they would come around and do rounds. Adassa in Kiram is a teaching hospital. What happens in the teaching hospital is that they come first. They wake you up at five o'clock in the morning to take your temperature because that's the ideal time to take your temperature. When you're sleeping and you're in the ICU, so that by the time they come around on their rounds, you could have your chart filled out all in front of you. So every morning, Doctor Almogi would come around and he would sit there with the chart and he would look at my chart and he had a whole bunch of students that were with him. I never really paid much attention to him because my Hebrew isn't great. I couldn't really understand what they were saying anyway. I figured they knew what they were doing.

29:49 So what happened? One morning they're sitting there. I've been in the hospital already for about two and a half weeks. I'm in the ICU. I haven't eaten for about two and a half weeks, and I'm running a massive fever. Can ask my wife tomorrow what it was like. She was nine months pregnant while this was happening. Could be. It was a crazy time. One morning they looked at me and were talking amongst themselves. I wasn't paying attention. And all of a sudden, I heard them say the word cancer. I was like, "What'd you just say?" And Dr. Amogi looked at me and he said to me "I'll tell you later." I was like, "No. That's not the way this works. You tell me now. You don't get to say cancer and then walk away. But that's exactly what he did. He started walking away, and I said, "Come back here." And he just kept walking. Now the problem is that I had not eaten for two and a half weeks. They had me doing 'quote unquote' exercise. Exercise meant that I walked from the ICU down to the end of the hall.

30:47 Sit down at the end of the hall, take a break and a drink. They had a water machine at the end of the hall and walk back. It took me 45 minutes just to walk down the hall, a 45 minute break, 45 minutes back, and then I would sleep for the next six hours. My system was gone. So I can't really chase Amogi. But I got out of bed and I started moving as fast as I could Which was basically a shuffle. And I finally caught up with them. He sees me coming, so he dispatches one of the younger doctors and says, "Go put that guy back in bed." So the guy came to me and he said to me, 'You have to go lie down.' So I said, 'You guys just said cancer and walked away.' So he goes, "We'll come back to you." "I said, 'What if it's cancer?'

31:34 And the guy looks at me and he goes, 'Then we'll treat it.' I said, 'What if you can't treat it?' He goes, 'Then we'll treat it. We'll do something else.' And he sent me back to bed. And Almogi comes back about an hour later after he's done with his rounds. We had a very nice relationship, Doctor Almogi and I. He's a real tzaddik of a person. And he said, "Look, the treatment that you've been receiving for the last two and a half weeks—it should have been working. Initially, when I was admitted into the hospital, they told me three to five days. At the end of five days, they told me five to seven days. The end of seven days, they said," "Buckle up, you're not going anywhere for a while." That's when they put me in the ICU. And Almogi said, "The treatment should be working, but it's not. We have to consider other possibilities at this point. We don't know. Maybe it's cancer." That's the craziest thing to hear.

32:23 I was in my early 30s. I have four kids, and my wife is nine months pregnant. But I want you to know That morning I had the best davening of my life. The best I've never had a davening like that since. I might never have another davening like that again. I put on my tallis and tefillin. I didn't open up a siddur. All I did is I turned to Hashem and I said, Hashem Don't take me yet. I still have work left to do. I said that over and over again. And I called my dad. I said, Dad, the doctors think it might be cancer. He goes Should I tell mom? I said, What do you think? He said, I don't think we should tell her. You can tell Elisa. So I think I have to tell her, it's not like the type of thing you keep as a secret. It's a crazy thing.

33:11 I learned in that moment that life In an instant Can turn from being fine to being not fine. But that's not the absence of life; that's life itself. And it's a tragedy that we don't know how to stare suffering in the face and find godliness within it. Because if you do, the opportunities to make the most out of life, the opportunities for those godly responses are right there. If we can't pay attention to suffering, then there's no chay lifeline, there's no hatsala, there's no misaskim, there's no oel, there's no kampask. None of these things exist unless you're willing to look at suffering in the face. Chayim means suffering. It's not a bug. It's a feature. It's just a question of how you respond to life. If you teach this to kids, they will develop resilience. If you don't, then any time they hear something that they don't like or that's uncomfortable, immediately they run to their phones because they don't know how to do anything but look away. Because that's all we ever taught them. Because we taught them that life is meant to be comfortable, and it's not. It's wrong. It's a bad hashkafa.

34:25 There's a by a shiva house. We say hamakom yinachem eschem besoch shalav elytsilum yerushalayim. Some people add in, and R' Salavitchik was very against this. You should know no more suffering. R' Salavitchik was very against that line. He said to tell someone not to suffer is to tell them not to be a part of life. Life, by its definition, has tragic aspects to it. There's nothing wrong with that. Those are opportunities for godliness. There's tragedy because this world is other than God. If it was God, there would be no tragedy. But then there would be nothing for God to merge with. There needs to be something other than Him. Does that make sense? So listen now to that Torah one more time. It's an unbelievable vort. We don't say Chayim Yoducha is the namanik. What do we say? The Chol HaChayim. All of life. Not only the good parts, even the difficult parts are part of life itself. Yoducha, we give praise to them. Selah, forever. Once you go through chayim, once you go through life, once you've suffered, you're changed forever.

35:35 And that's why it's a rashi tevos. A rashi tevos means the way it is in its origin. Think about that for a second. What is the word chayim when you say it's a mnemonic? It means when you look at, let's say chole What is chole in its origin point? It's a ches. What is yam in its origin point? It's a yud. What is yud in its origin point? It's another yud. What is midbar in its origin point? It's a mem. If you look at this world and you look just at the suffering, it means that you don't understand what it is in its origin point in Shamayim. That's life. It comes down here in the realm of suffering, but life in its nature is above that. With this in mind, girls, I want to share with you something. This is our second to last year before Pesach.

36:27 Пretty crazy Pretty crazy. And many of you are about to go back and have a ben azmanim. I imagine not all of you are staying in this country. And you're going back with your eish tamed. You're going back with this holy fire that you've hopefully gained here in Yerushalayim. Here in Talmud Torah. What a beautiful thing to have. And some of you have an expectation. That when you travel You don't have to protect your fire. But when you travel, things are in flux. When you travel, things are chaotic. Things go wrong when we travel. When we're safely ensconced at home, we're okay. But when we're traveling, we never know what's going to happen. Some of us have an expectation that it's not going to rain on our fire. But that's not true. It rains on the fire. Our job is not to avoid the rain. The ruach haheim's kasha. Go back to the original kashays. And why doesn't Hashem make a miracle that it doesn't rain? What's the answer? There's no such thing as life where it doesn't rain. Life has a way of raining on your fire. It has a way of trying to extinguish your spark.

37:43 Life has a way of traveling in such a way that you feel very unshaky. You feel like you don't know what's going to be. That's the question I always get around this time of year. How do I hold strong? You know what you're really asking when you say that? How do I make it so it's not uncomfortable? How do I make it so I could hold on without having any bumps in the road? The goal is to have bumps in the road. But to figure out how to hold on anyway. It's your responsibility to protect that fire when you're traveling. The fire comes from Hashem. Ultimately the fire comes from Hashem, but you're the one that has to chop wood. Of course. Ultimately, the fire is never extinguished. No Jew will ever lose their fire. That will never happen. No Jew will ever lose their fire. That's a gift from God.

38:31 But you have a responsibility to make sure that your fire is lit. That means you wake up every day and you chop wood. You put that wood on the mizbeach. What does that mean? Bein asmanim. It means you wake up in the morning. You daven. You do chesed. You're home. You have an opportunity to help your parents. You haven't had the opportunity to be mechabit your parents. For almost six, seven months at this point. Jump at those opportunities to chop wood. I but Rebbe, you don't understand. Nobody triggers me like my mother. What do they say in psychology? If it's not one thing, it's your mother. So how do you want me to stay engaged and be behaved by my parents when my mother makes it so difficult? That's her job. You have a difficult relationship with your mother because parents and children have difficult relationships. Don't turn away from that. Don't say it's too uncomfortable. Other Rabbah, it's uncomfortable. Find the godliness within it.

39:29 But I'm going back to see my old friends. I'm not here in Tormer Dvorer, and I don't have the chizuk that I get in Yerushalayim Merkodesh. The fire won't be extinguished, but it's your job to protect it. Because it's gonna rain on the fire. How do I protect it? Protection doesn't mean that I cut myself off from all my old relationships. It means I figure out how to maintain my integrity even when some of my relationships are challenging. I shudder to think. I shudder to think that today, our response for some reason is, if you're in a relationship with someone who's less from than you, cut them off because that's like difficult to your relationship with Hashem. I can't imagine that's what Hakadosh Baruch Hu wants for us to be cutting off yidden. I can't imagine somehow it became a part of our chinuch lexicon that this is the way we speak.

40:18 Terrible Terrible. It wasn't the way I grew up. I grew up. They told me if there's a kid who's not doing as well as you in yeshiva, it's an opportunity to help that guy. It's an opportunity to love him like a friend. Some of my closest friends in the world are not bechelal observant. They don't keep Shabbos. They don't keep kosher. Nothing. They're my closest friends in the world. I don't love them because they were observant, and I'm not going to stop loving them because they're not observant. I, but maybe they're going to be in a place and they're going to say something to you that's going to extinguish your fire. It's going to rain. It rains when there's fire. So figure out how to protect your fire. Don't figure out how to try to cut off the rain. You got to chop wood. It's your responsibility. Of course, the fire comes from Hashem, but you got to do the work because it builds you as a person.

41:06 This is life. Life is challenging. Life is difficult. But you know, it doesn't mean that just because challenging things are happening, that you can just extinguish your flame. You have a chiyuv to keep your flame burning. There's a question that I get at the end of every year. I'm telling you now, I hate the question. I am avoiding the question. Don't ask me the question. At some point, they're going to come to me. All the seminaries, they come and they say, "Could you come for our yom yun at the end of the year to teach the girls how to take it with them?" That question, by its very definition Is a broken question. Because if you're teaching a Torah The entire year that's only localized for Yerushalayim Erakodesh, and it doesn't tell you how to go back to Munsee or Lakewood or the Five Towns or Tineker or Chicago or Los Angeles or wherever you're from.

41:58 It's a chisaron in the Torah itself. It's a chisaron in the Torah that you were taught. The Torah that you were taught is a Torah that teaches you how to engage the world, not how to remove yourself from the world. If you can only be from here in Talmud Torah, if you can only be from Yerushalayim, then you're missing something fundamental. The Eish Tzmad That fire that never gets extinguished goes with us wherever we go. You're going somewhere for Pesach. You're going home, Givaldik. You have an amazing opportunity to introduce godliness into the place where you are. Every one of us is a flame. What a flame has the ability to do is ignite another. So may it be Hashem's will that as we head into Bein Azmanim, as we're traveling with our Eish Tumid, we know that it's going to rain. But that's not an excuse. We have to protect our fire and share it with others.