Vayakhel / Pikudei - When The Dream Shattered, They Started Building

2:44 Dassikanim explains as follows. The donated items to the Mishkan were actually the women's jewelry. And the men. Took the women to donate their gold from their jewelry to the Mishkan. And they thought that the women would be hesitant. They thought the women would be reluctant to give their jewelry. But in actuality, when the women came to the Mishkan to give their jewelry, they gave so very willingly. And the Dasakenim says this is in contrast to the Chet Egel Because we know that by the Chet Egel the men. Took the wives' jewelry, and they took it by force. So the women were hesitant, they were reticent, they were reluctant. They didn't want to give up their jewelry when it came to the chet ha'egel. And the men took the jewelry and gave it to the chet ha'egel to make the egel. But in contrast, when it came to the building of the mishkan So the women not only were not hesitant They came willingly and they gave all their jewelry to the mishkan.

3:54 In fact, the Medrash says there were actually many men who were reluctant, a little bit different than the Dasakenim. The Dasakenim says the men brought the women. Thinking that the women would be reluctant. The Medrash says the men themselves were reluctant to give. The men didn't really want to give to the Mishkan. And it was the women who actually were the driving force behind donating all of their jewelry. What was the reward for this? So the rule was that since all of this happened on Rosh Chodesh Nissan They made a yom tif on that day, and the women didn't work. And that's why even today it's brought down in Shulchan Aruch that women don't work on Rosh Chodesh. Women have a different relationship to Rosh Chodesh than men. There's no inyan of a man not working on Rosh Chodesh, but by a woman, there's a real inyan. There's women that don't do laundry on Rosh Chodesh. There's an inyan of a woman taking a break, taking a vacation, so to speak, on Rosh Chodesh.

4:56 The shaila is What's the significance of the relationship between the fact that the women were reluctant to give their jewelry and Chet Eigel? But we were willing to give it. By the Mishkan, the fact that it happened on Rosh Chodesh seems to be tangential. It doesn't seem to be part of the inyan. It happens to be that it was on Rosh Chodesh. But what's the real pneumias inner relationship between Rosh Chodesh and the fact that the women were excited to give their jewelry to the Mishkan? That's our first question for tonight. A second question for tonight is as follows. Again, I know you probably know this. I'm just repeating it. What were the What was the kior made from in the mishkan? The kior was made from the mirrors that the women brought. We know that Chazal tell us that Moshe Rabenu was originally very hesitant.

5:59 That when the women came with their mirrors, Moshe Rabenu said, 'It's an instrument of vanity, a mirror' To sit a person. Like checks themselves. I have Knei Nahara five daughters. I have one son. Which means I have six daughters. I have one little boy, Baruch Hashem, he's a wonderful, beautiful boy, nine years old, but he's being raised by six mothers. He's the type of little boy when he was very young. He came down the stairs and he was sad, and he looked at my wife and I and he said, "I'm having a feeling." I was like, "Oh, thanks, baby." You're gonna get beat up in Cheder, buddy. It's not gonna work with little Israeli boys. Yeshli hargasha, nobody cares. I know that mirrors play a very central role in a person's life. That's why I don't know. Could be that I'm speaking to the wrong audience. It could be you're not like this, but it seems to me, at least in my house.

7:03 That even windows act as mirrors. I see. I'm with the right people. You know that thing that girls do when they're walking by a window and they stop They need to see. Like Yosef HaTzaddik in the house of Eshas Potipher. Like looks at the window and he sees the Musti Yochne Shalavav. He sees his father. There's a thing that people walk by a window. It's like a shtickel vanity. Let me check myself out, see how I look. So Moshe Rabbeinu said we're going to use mirrors. Which are an instrument of vanity to build the kiyor, to build the washbasin in the mishkan? And our kadosh baruch hu said to my shabenu, 'You're wrong.' These mirrors are more precious to me than anything else that's been donated. These mirrors are the most precious. What's the pshat? So the Medrash Shisha Shirim explains as follows: When it was When things were at their worst in Mitzrayim The men had reached such a level of despair that they had no interest in continuing the Jewish nation.

8:11 They had no interest in continuing to build their families. There are tchukvas like this in Klal Yisrael's history, where things are so bad that somebody says Pasha, why would I ever bring a child into such a world? Imagine the horrors. And it was the women who didn't despair in those moments. The Medrash in Shir Hashirim describes how the women would go out into the fields. And they would take their mirrors into the fields and beautify themselves in their mirrors. And by beautifying themselves in their mirrors, they attracted their husbands, and that's how they continued Klal Yisrael. In the worst scenarios, we tend to think, especially now we're holding by post Purim, so we're already holding in the zman of these moments coming up to the Pesach Seder. It's Kaddish ready to speak a little bit about Yitzias Mitzrayim. We cannot fathom what Mitzrayim was like. The worst day of the Holocaust.

9:09 Was infinitely better than the best day in Mitzrayim. Mitzrayim was torture the likes of which you cannot possibly imagine. If you read the Medrash Echazal as to what was going on in Mitzrayim, the torture, psychologically, physically, spiritually, was enormous. For the, I imagine some of you have seen. Maybe they have them here in the beis medrash, a book called "Let My People Go." Have you ever seen that? It's like an English book, and he compiles all the different medrashim. Well worth the read. The medrashim are horrifying as to what Cholayusar was living through. It makes sense that in such a time period, the men were falling apart. What doesn't make sense is how the women were able to hold on to hope. I'm in a. Anyone else here have a hard time? You don't have to raise your hand. I'll just know from looking through. Anyone else here have a hard time leaving a WhatsApp group?

10:06 I have a trauma From leaving a WhatsApp group. I'm in a couple of WhatsApp groups that I don't want to be on, and I don't know why I have a juke in my head. I don't like archiving chats. I don't like to know that it's happening and then I have to. One day look and see that there's 5,000 messages. I'm in an active WhatsApp group that drives me crazy. I love them dearly, drives me crazy. So one of the chevra today said, "Hope is not a strategy." I don't even know what he was talking about. I don't have patience to scroll through the 250 messages that came before. You ever do that? I'm not. I don't have time to read your podcast. I don't have time to watch the shaklavitaria of Abayah and Rav over here going back and forth about the war over Iran. And whether it was a good thing or not, I have no interest in doing this. But at the end, I saw that my friend wrote, "Hope is not a strategy," and I thought to myself, "Hope is the only strategy."

11:00 Hope is the only strategy. You don't win a war based on hope. But you start a war, finish a war, fight a war, and live through a war because of hope. That's the only way to survive. That's the only way that Klali Yisrael has survived. Tonight, you had a siren over here also. I was in Ber Amiriam earlier tonight. In the middle of the shir, all at once. It was wild. It was like a wild, every girl their phone at once. There's trauma from that noise of In a couple of minutes there might be a siren. But imagine, I don't know, is that what the way it is here, where it's like 50 girls have their phone? That's like a really traumatic sound. Especially three o'clock in the morning, I'm not interested in hearing it. I can't imagine what it would be like all the time to have like 50 phones going off like that. How do we go to bomb shelters here? How do we go to a mamad? How do we go to a miklat? How have we been living like this?

11:56 It's not real. It's not real. In Beit Shemesh, lo aleinu, there were nine people that were killed. Just yesterday, there was a missile that fell less than three miles from my house. I was in America. I was in America last week. I got back on a refugee flight on Friday. Israel is the only country in the world that rescues you back to the war. Everyone in America was like, "You're going back?" I was like, "Of course I'm going back. You're not afraid." It's where I live. It's where I live. I remember on October 7th I turned to the Rosh Hashanah of Mevaseret. We didn't know what was going to be. We didn't know if they were overrunning the country. We're American citizens. Also, we hold dual citizenship. I said, "Would you ever go back?" I remember Isaacson looked at me on Rosh Hashanah. He looked at me and he went I die here.

12:48 I was like, "Right." How does a person live? I often think to myself, 'Am I raising my children like in the trauma of living in this country?' I think that to myself. I have little kids walking around. They go, 'It's so annoying. It's so sirens.' You didn't have to grow up that way in Tenek. You didn't have a siren in Teneck. You didn't have a siren in the Five Towns. I don't know who I'm offending. I assume everybody. What are we nervous about in the Five Towns? What are we? We're not nervous about anything. We're not even living in Chicago. What are we nervous about the drivers? And we're not worried. I see in the way kids cross Central Avenue. If you're really from the Five Towns, you know the cars will stop for me. The gaiva of a fifteen-year-old kid crossing Central Avenue, going, "I own these streets."

13:42 There's no trauma. What do we? I was a kid growing up in the Five Towns. The most that happened is they stole your bike. I didn't grow up with missiles. I didn't grow up with October 7th. And grow up with terrorism. How do you raise your children here in this country? The answer is hope. But where do you get that hope from? I'm here because I hope that Mashiach is coming. And I want to be on the ground floor. I don't know how El Al is possibly going to get. I guess they will. He's going to have to get everybody here to Eretz Yisrael. Al kaf in the sharm. It's going to be unbelievable. I don't know where all the Jews are going to live when Mashiach comes. I already have a place. I came here because I'm ready. I'm hopeful. But it's an irrational hope. It's a very irrational hope. Where does a hope like this come from? This was so precious to the Rebbeinu Shalom that he said to my shabenu, dafka the kior, dafka from those mirrors.

14:33 But taka, where does it come from? And why couldn't Moshe Rabbeinu see it? It's strange. Moshe Rabbeinu could see everything. Moshe Rabbeinu understood everything. How could Moshe Rabbeinu look at the mirror and say "It's just a mirror. It's an instrument of vanity." The Rebbeinu says, "No." You know what those mirrors were used for? Those mirrors were used to keep Klal Yisrael going. Those are the most precious mirrors. So I want to share with you something very deep. There's two things in this world. There's substance. And then there's essence. Substance is the material that everything in the world is made of. The form of this cup, the material of this cup, that's the substance. The essence is the thing that you can't see. That this cup That you can't see it and you can't measure it, but the Rebbeinu Shlulam wills this cup into existence right now. This cup has an essence, the reason that this cup exists. Everything in this world has a what. A how on one side and a why on the other side.

15:38 The what and the how—that's the substance, that's the measurable stuff. But then there's a why. Why does anything exist? Science measures the what and the how, but science does not enter into the world of why. Only a Jew can enter into the world of why. You have to believe in a God to believe in a why. It means there's an essence, there's a reason that things exist. There's something I can't touch, something I can't measure, something invisible that's beneath all of the substance of reality. And the way that we live in Yiddishkeit is we don't want to be surface level people. We don't want to just relate to the form of something, to the materialism of something, to the substance of something. I want to relate to why it exists. I'll give you an example. Let's take money just as an example. Money is very powerful.

16:27 And one could spend their life amassing money, and they can have a tremendous amount of materialism. But somehow People that do If they don't relate to the essence of money, somehow money makes them miserable. They never have enough of it. As Chazal say, if you have a hundred, you want two hundred. If you have two hundred, you want four hundred. If you have four hundred, you want eight hundred. There's never enough of it. Because they're not relating to the essence of money, they're just relating to the power of money. But when you get to the essence of money and you say, 'the Rebbeinu Shlom created this money for a reason. Why? Why does this money exist?' It changes your relationship to money. I want money now, but not because of the power. I want money because of what I can use that money for. If the Rebbeinu Sholom gave me a dollar, I want to take that dollar so that I can give it away. I'm the custodian of this money. It's not my money; it's Hashem's money. It just happens to be in my pocket right now, so I'm going to use that for godly things. It changes your relationship to money. You're no longer obsessed with money. You don't need more of it. You just want it for the right reasons.

17:32 I'll share with you the most powerful thing I ever heard from my father. My father's a b'altshuva. My father's a proud Jew. He never had the opportunity in his life to go to yeshiva. When I was growing up, my father used to say, "A little learning never hurts. So let's learn as little as possible." This is my rebellion against my father. I love learning. My father didn't have the opportunity. I didn't know how frum my father was. I didn't. You don't know sometimes. I knew that he became b'altshuva. I knew that he keeps Shabbos. I knew that he keeps kosher. I didn't know how much his Yiddishkeit really meant to him. When I was 16 years old, we moved to a town called Lawrence. Those of you that are from the Five Towns, you know Lawrence is the best of the Five Towns. We're better than everybody else. If you're from Woodmere, you're third. I'm from Lawrence, I'm first. Cedar is the second. There's an order. Nobody really cares about the other two.

18:28 So my father lost his job. It was a very big deal. We had moved into a beautiful house in the Five Towns. My dad lost his job. I was nervous. I went to my dad at 16 years old. I said, "Dad What's going to be now? And my father said to me the most powerful words that he ever said to me in his entire life. My father said, 'When I had a job, I was blessed to give tzedakah, and I hope that Hashem will give me a job again so that I could give even more tzedakah.' I had never heard anything like that from my father in my life. And by the way, since then I've never heard anything like that either. It was an unbelievable moment because it taught me what his relationship was with money. My father understood a dollar is meant to be given to tzedakah. A dollar is meant to spend on your family. A dollar is meant to spend on Shabbos because in Yiddishkeit we don't just relate to the substance of something; we relate to the essence of it. Why is it here? And life works only when you connect to the why of it.

19:29 There's an unbelievable thing that the women in Mitzrayim understood. A woman understands more naturally than a man. A woman understands the essence of something. A woman in Mitzrayim understood Whereas you might look at our physical bodies and say we are trapped in Mitzrayim. The truth is, we are not trapped at all. Our bodies have never been trapped in Mitzrayim, not for one minute. In fact, our bodies will be the instrument of our redemption. That where everybody else looks and they see these broken women, that they can't leave Mitzrayim. The women understood about themselves, and this is the key: they weren't relating to the material substance of their body. Materially, on a substance level, yes, they had to live within the parameters of Mitzrayim, and they couldn't leave. And anybody who tried to leave was killed. Materially, on a substance level, they were trapped in Mitzrayim. But the women did not relate to the substance of their bodies; they related to the essence of their bodies. They understood that their beauty was meant to create hope and continuity in Klal Yisrael, because they didn't relate to the surface; they related to the essence.

20:46 And this is why the women played such an important role in the creation of the Mishkan. Because what is the Mishkan? When we think about the Mishkan very deeply, what is the Mishkan? The Mishkan is a physical, finite building of material substance. But what makes the Mishkan different is not the fact that it's this type of material; it's that in the Mishkan, the essence becomes transparent. When a Yid is walking through the Mishkan, when a Yid is walking through the Beis Hamikdash, the essence of everything, Hashem's reality is clear. The nisim of the Mishkan, the nisim of the Beis Hamikdash, were obvious when you're walking through the Beis Hamikdash. There is a rabbanu shelolam embodied in this world, in the space of the mishkan, in the space of the beis hamikdash. The mishkan is essence transparent in substance. It's where you can see through. It's like other Marishon. His body was made of all fingernails. That's what Chazal say. The entire body was made of fingernails. Sounds gross. What does it mean? What are Chazal trying to tell us? The fingernail is something you can see through.

21:53 You can see through the fingernail. Other Marishon's body before he sinned, you were able to see through to his neshama. His neshama, like the Rambam says, was glowing out of him, glowing out of his body. That's what the Mishkan was. The Mishkan was like a world of other Marishon before he sinned, where the essence of everything was seen within the material world. That's why the women had such a close connection to the Mishkan, because that's the nature of a woman. The nature of a woman is she doesn't just relate to the materialism; she relates to the essence. She sees the essence within the materialism, and that's why Hakadosh Baruch Hu said to Moshe Rabbeinu, 'You're wrong.' Myshcha Abenu, you're looking at the substance of these mirrors. And yes, a mirror without any essence is just an instrument of vanity. All it is look at me. I don't know if you've ever seen boys do this. You ever see boys stand in front of a mirror? You ever see what it looks like? They do this move. They don't have much to do. It's not like girls have a lot to do in front of a mirror. You know what boys do?

22:57 This move. There's not. What are we going to do, Eddie? Like a little And then they always go, 'No, Rabbi, I woke up that way, dude. I've been waking up for 45 years. I've never woken up looking like that.' On the outside, on a substance level, on a material level, a person goes to a mirror to say, 'Look at me.' That's on a substance level. Rabbi Nachshom says to Moshe Rabbeinu, "If you're going to build a mishkan. You have to learn to see reality the way that women see reality." That a woman was able to go to the field and she was able to say, "I know how to take this thing. The design of it is for vanity. I know how to use it for essence. I know how to use it to relate to my husband. I know how to use it to continue Klal Yisrael. I know how to use a mirror to become an instrument of hope." That's the unique nature of a woman.

23:53 So Hakadosh Baruch Hu says to Moshe Rabbeinu, 'You're right. It's an instrument of vanity, but not these mirrors. These mirrors were used by the women of Klal Yisrael to create hope. These mirrors are the most precious things to me.' How do we live after the collapse? How do we live after failure? There's two perspectives: a substantive perspective and an essence perspective. From the perspective of substance, if I failed I failed. That's all there is to it. I have to grieve over what could have been And the dream is dead. I had a dream, and it's not perfect. It's very masculine to try to measure success. So I failed. It's over. It's not perfect. There's such a thing in baseball called a perfect game. A perfect game means that every single person struck out. There's such a thing called a one hitter. There's a one hitter, a two hitter. It's unbelievable, but it's not perfect.

25:02 So if I threw a one hitter It's an unbelievable game, but it wasn't perfect. And it'll never be perfect. So I failed in a certain sense. I might have won the game, but I failed for perfection. That's very masculine. There's a There's an even deeper dimension here And that's the dimension of the female, the dimension of the essence, which is failure is just the beginning of a process. That something has to break open before it could truly become what it's meant to become. That when we see a seed crack open, there's two ways of looking at it. That seed is dying, or you could say that tree is growing. In fact, you might say that the seed needs to disappear completely in order to get to the level where the acorn becomes the oak tree. And so, when we see failure from the perspective of essence, what that means is my next avodah is not to mourn what might have been. My next avodah is to understand the world of possibility that's opened up because of my failures.

26:12 Of course, it's very difficult to do this Because if you do this, that means you have to hope. Now we're going to get into the inner workings of hope and despair. Let's go deep now. Something like this, from the perspective of perfection, from that masculine perspective of perfect. And if it's not perfect, then it's over. The natural result of that is despair. What am I supposed to do? It's not perfect anymore. There's nothing I could do about it. And so there's a tendency that we have in this world today to grieve and to mourn what could have been. There's a tendency for people to get lost in the sense of despair. The opposite is to understand that when something is falling apart, new possibilities are actually opening up. Sometimes the best thing in the world is when life says no to us. Because as things fall apart, we start. We sometimes see so. Life is taking me in a new direction, and there's growth that comes from that new direction.

27:12 But the real danger of despair is that despair is a lie. Rabbi Nachman said this, and he was right. Ein yish ba olam klal. What does that mean? It means yish despair is not real. Very often, when you're speaking to people who are in a state of despair, they tell you no. You're one of these lunatic optimists. I'm a realist. I just know how it's going to be. So I'm not going to get my hope up. I live in a state of despair because I'm a realist. But the truth is Despair is not realistic at all. Ein yirsh ba'olam klal means despair is not real. It just means that I'm blind to the essence that's unfolding. That's what despair really is. Despair is a form of blindness. It's just because you can't see the future that hasn't happened yet. That's why you're in a state of despair.

28:11 Sometimes you see this when girls date. So there's a sense of despair that could set in, like when is it ever going to happen? When am I ever going to find my person? And sometimes it takes a minute. I have a game that I like to play. Maybe it's not nice. But when they finally meet their person, and when things are going well, and when they meet their person, it's like, wow, I was dating that guy, and I was devastated when he broke up with me, and I thought I'm never going to be able to meet a guy as good as him, and now that I'm with this guy, I see unbelievable. I have a game that I like to play. I like to say to these guys or these girls, if you could go back and whisper to that girl or that guy. That was a couple of years ago. Living in that state of despair, what would you say?

28:59 What would you say if you could go back? If you could roll back the clock and whisper in your ear when you were devastated by the fact that you were crushed? I can't believe that this relationship didn't work out, and now you found someone who's unbelievable, even better for you. What would you want to say? And they all say the same thing: I wish I could go back to that person and just say, "Be patient." Be kind Be compassionate to yourself. Because life is unfolding and it's going great. You just don't realize it. We think I'm in a state of despair. I'm just being a realist. You're blind to the fact that life is unfolding. Hope is a sense of future vision. I can see that which you can't see. You think you're a realist, but the truth is you're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. When a person lives in a state of despair, does anyone want to be your friend?

29:51 Is that a space of attraction? Is that a space of connection? When people live in a state of despair, so what happens? She's just so Nothing is ever good enough for her now, and everything is terrible, and the world is just broken. Everything is bad. Who wants to be with such a person? Only miserable people want to be with such a person. Happy people, I don't know why it's like a thing today to be miserable. The world is a wonderful place. It's genuinely a wonderful place. You'll say, but so many things go wrong. The Rambam writes in Mor Nevuchem, ninety-nine point nine percent of the things in the world go right. The things that go wrong get put on TikTok. The things that get wrong get put on Twitter. Or on Jewish Twitter, WhatsApp statuses. Most of the time, the world is amazing. And we want to be with people who are alive.

30:49 There are people in this room. I'm sure that you know them. You look around. I'm sure you're looking around right now, thinking to yourself, 'Who's the girl in this room? That's just alive, positive, happy, vitality. She's not faking it. She's genuinely happy to be alive. She doesn't live in a state of yiyus. She doesn't live in a state of despair. Why not? Because I can see what you can't see. You think the world is a terrible place. You're blind. You're blind to the reality that's unfolding. Despair is a lie. Despair is a material—it's a material substance-oriented perspective. It's not good right now, so it must be bad. When a person sees through the essence, when they live with the Rebbeinu Shalom, they can see underneath the materialism of the world. Then they see that the world is unfolding. That was the secret of the women in Mitsrayim. They understood All you guys in Mitsrayim, you're just saying, look how broken the world is And the women understood.

31:45 We're going to Har Sinai. We just the shell has to break open in order for us to get to Har Sinai. That's why Chazal say that the world was created with ten utterances, and during the Mabul, those ten utterances were broken And the ten utterances with which the world was created fell into Mitzrayim, and so Klal Yisrael needed to go into Mitzrayim to retrieve those ten utterances, which ultimately became the Aseret Hadibros. The Asarim Amaros were rectified through the Esar Makos and then ultimately became the Asarim Adibros. The women understood we're here in Mitzrayim for a reason. All of this pain, it's just pain. It's not suffering. Suffering is pain minus why. If you walk into a hospital and you see and hear a woman screaming, it depends where you are. If you're in the maternity ward, you're like, a baby is coming. And if you're in the emergency room, you go, oh my god, my heart's breaking. She sounds like she's in so much pain.

32:39 Suffering is just pain minus why. If you don't know why, then it's suffering. But if you know why, then it's just pain. We know why. Now it doesn't mean we know a specific reason, and we're not trying to justify anything. We're not trying to diminish our pain. Our pain is very real. But a woman who lived in Mitzrayim, she never had a sense of despair because she never had the perspective of the material. She always had the perspective of the essence. She said, 'This something is happening here.' The world is unfolding in a certain way. I see how it's going. So I'm going to continue this nation so that we have people who will ultimately arrive at Har Sinai. It wasn't for two or three or four years; it was for 210 years. You have to understand these men who were living in Mitzrayim. They looked at their wives and said, "You're crazy to have hope."

33:25 You're crazy. At the end, they must have said, 'Our grandparents, our great grandparents were enslaved, and we're enslaved, and our children will be enslaved.' That Moshe Rabbeinu would come and say, 'I'm going to be the Mashiach of Klal Yisrael,' must have sounded absurd to them. So that's why they gave up. Because from the perspective of the material, this is our lives. But the women never gave up because they never had the perspective of the material world. They saw deeper. They understood life is a game of not yet. It's happening, but just not yet. That's why to tie it back into the Chetah Egal. The men did the Chetah Egal because they needed to live with something tangible. They said Moshe Rabbeinu is gone, and they saw an image that Moshe Rabbeinu was dead. They said, "How can we relate to Hashem without Moshe Rabbeinu? We need something tangible to relate to." So we're going to create an ego.

34:15 Why did the women not want to give their jewelry to the ego? Because they said, "Just because Moshe Rabbeinu is not here, doesn't mean we're not okay." I don't need something tangible. People are always saying, 'I need to see a miracle for me to believe in Hashem. I need to see a miracle.' If you can only believe in Hashem because you see a miracle, then you don't believe in Hashem. That's an idol. We don't need the miraculous in order to believe in Hashem. Baruch Hu, we're people who relate to the essence of things. So of course the women didn't want to. They had no shaykes. I'm going to give my jewelry to an eagle to a substance. But when it came time for the mishkan They were all in. It was the men who were reticent. The men looked at the Mishkan, and this was the big tire, this was the big move for this year.

35:01 The men looked at the Mishkan, and they said If we never would have participated in the Chetah Egel, then the Shechina would have been Shira in the entire Machanez Yisrael. The entire camp of Klal Yisrael would have contained the Shechina. It's only because we did the Chetah Egel that now the Shechina is going to be limited to the Mishkan. So the men were reticent. We failed. It was catastrophic. Every single Jew, every single Jewish home, every single part of our camp could have been suffused with the Shekhinah. But because we did the Chet Eigel, everything fell apart. And now you want us to go dedicate to a mishkan? The mishkan is a shell of what might have been. And the women said exactly the opposite. They said, "We did a Chet Eigel. Things fell apart. Do you know the possibility of what we could build?"

35:51 They ran to give their jewelry. They ran to give their jewelry, and what day did they run to give their jewelry on? Dafka and reish chedesh Dafka in the time when the moon is smallest, when the light is barely able to be seen. That's dafka when they came. That's where a woman does her best work. When everything is falling apart. I see this in my own life, when things are falling apart, and I'm feeling a sense of not knowing how it's going to turn out. My wife just says, It's going to be fine. Just give it some time. Dafka, when the moon is a sliver of a sliver. That's where a woman comes and she says, "This is my. This is where we do our work. This is where the hope comes in. We never give up." That's why Resh Chodesh becomes a yomtiv for women Because they know how to see through to the essence.

36:39 That's something every one of us needs to learn. We know that in the times of Mashiach, the pasuk says, "Nakeva to soyev gaver" That the women surround the men. That's why by Yerchasna. But you're going to walk around your husband seven times before your husband does that beautiful kinyan kedushin. You're going to walk around him seven times. Why? Because at the moment before we get married, a woman says there's an energy that begins this marriage. The energy is the feminine energy of seeing through substance to create the essence. That's the avoda in the times of Mashiach. Because in Olam Habah, it's the feminine energy that's more powerful, not the masculine energy. That's why the light of the moon is restored. That's the feminine energy of the light of the moon that's restored in the times of Mashiach and in Olam Habah. There's a very big avodah right now in the world.

37:30 The world is, and I don't want to say anything chassidish in a negative way. I do not remember in my lifetime the world ever being this dark. Do you remember what it was like before six years ago? Do you remember that you're 18, so it's hard. Do you remember when you were 11? Like pre-COVID? Do you remember that it was like a pretty normal world, more or less? Things were pretty normal. Then the entire world shut down. It was a pandemic. Living here in Eretz Yisrael ever since then, it's been one thing after another. The Meron tragedy. Was that a? It's not good. Baruch Hashem. That's the trauma. An ice machine could even be a call for going to a mikvah. Just say that. It was the Mayron tragedy. And then October seventh, hostages, soldiers dying Yidden fighting with each other, coming together And just when we got the last hostage back I was like, we're going to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. Baruch Hashem.

38:43 And then that seemed like it was done. And now we're here. And it's like a dark world. Do you know that 70 percent of Jews in America are against this war? How crazy is that? This war that Bez Hashem will make our country and our people safer. Do you know that if you listen, I was in America. I was in America when the war broke out. I went in for an NCSY conference and wasn't able to get back right away because they stopped flying planes because the war broke out. Do you know that in America, if you listen, it's not worth it. It's mamish drivel. Do you know that if you listen to the pundits Why did Trump get into this war? This is just the Jews manipulating politics. Do you know how much hatred there is in the world against this war? I saw. I was shocked. An old friend of mine who I love He was like, "What was the point of murdering an 86 year old man?" I was like, "Murder." We murdered the Ayatollah. We killed the Ayatollah because he was an evil person who made the world a worse place. Who murdered forty thousand of his own people?

39:54 The world is a very dark place today, perhaps more than ever before. And maybe this is exactly the way it's meant to be. But perhaps more than ever before, there's a great need for the feminine energy of hope. To see beyond the material nature of this world, to see the essence, to see the elokus, to see the rebunish l'olam, to see the plan of everything is unfolding. And just because I don't know why it's happening, doesn't mean it's not happening. It's happening, just not yet. I don't need an egal asov. I don't need to measure the material world in order for me to believe in something. I see through the material world. That's what gives me hope. We rely on nashim tzidkanios for geula. We rely on righteous women. The geulah will not come in the merit of men. The geulah will come in the merit of righteous women like yourselves.

40:48 Who will refuse to give up Who will never give in to despair, who will live with a deep sense of hope. Who understand that the world is unfolding exactly according to Hakadosh Baruch Hu's plan, and no matter how dark it seems, you'll continue to shine your light. And be'ez Hashem, in that shlos, we will be zayicha to see. The Beit Hamikdash rebuilt, not just in our days, but mamish right around the corner. Beis Hashem. We also have a beautiful Shabbos.