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The very unusual thing in this week's parsha is that we see a repetition that we don't often see in the Torah. And that is that the Torah already told us how the Mishkan was going to be built And it went through all the details of exactly what we were supposed to do. The Torah was written in future tense, and it said, 'This is.' What's going to be, and in Vayakel and Pekude, this week we only have Vayakel, but Vayakel and Pekude, the Torah goes through the entire thing again, and it tells us in the past tense that this is what was built. So it's like, up until now, the Torah said this is what it was going to be, and now the Torah says this is what it is. And the Torah didn't really need to do that. The Torah could have just told us that this is what Moshe Rabbeinu did.
But the Torah doesn't do that. The Torah says this is what it will be, and then it goes ahead and repeats, saying this is what it is. There's a deep Torah that I want to share with you tonight. It's the Torah of rupture and repair. Rupture and repair are important words in the world of relationships. There's an institute called the Gottman Institute. The Gottman Institute has what's called a love lab. The love lab is basically apartments. And people live in these apartments. And they study the people in these apartments. They have married couples living in these apartments. And they have the most sophisticated scientific tools that they use. To measure the relationship And they measure different speech patterns, different chemicals that you secrete, and your heart rate. It's an unbelievable like, and they have books. You can read these books. They have amazing books. They have podcasts. All really great stuff.
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It's called the Gottman Institute. I think it's in Seattle. John Gottman and his wife, I believe he is And I think I heard on a podcast that I heard from him once that he is Which one? I know for sure one of them is Jewish. His father's Jewish, but she's Jewish because he works with his wife. So the Gottman Institute studied all the different features of what makes a successful marriage. And one of the things that makes a successful marriage, but it's like one of the most important things, Is this concept called rupture and repair? What rupture and repair means is follows. It's unreasonable for any relationship to expect that the relationship will always go well. That's not a reasonable expectation in a relationship. Rupture does not ruin a relationship. What's the key difference? What's the difference between a successful relationship that's long-lasting and healthy versus a relationship that falls apart?
So the difference is, these are their words, not my words. How a couple stays in repair And repair is the most important part of a relationship, because rupture. The break, the fracture in the relationship—that's called rupture. Rupture is destined to happen. In fact Rupture is not only destined to happen. The design of a relationship is for rupture to occur. So let me just try to take a second to unpack this. This might sound a little bit weird to you, but stay with me. In some way You're going to marry the person that triggers you most deeply. There's reasons for this, and I'm not going to get into the reasons right now. There's something called Imago therapy, and Imago therapy basically states that you meet someone and you're deeply attracted to that person because they fill some childhood need that you have. They offer the opportunity to heal some wound.
And you'll marry them. And then when they pull back, the pain of that childhood wound is really exquisite. It's really deep pain. Is that a healthy marriage? And it's a normal, healthy marriage. And that's what's called in the Torah language, ezer kinegdo. That you marry somebody who's going to be a helper to you, and they're also going to stand opposed to you. You marry somebody who helps you through the fact that they trigger you. Because when somebody triggers us The ammunition that goes off happens inside of ourselves. We do this day. It's a very 2024 thing. It's like this 2024 woke type of thing to say you triggered me. But that's got nothing to do with me. If I trigger you, where did the ammunition go off in you? I can't trigger you if you don't have the ammunition inside of you. So you might not like what I said. That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to say something. If you have a trigger go off, that's information for yourself.
The design of a healthy relationship is self rectification. The relationship brings you to a place where you are your highest form of self. And the way to do that is to be in a relationship where stuff comes up. Rupture is part of the design of a relationship. My wife has a line. I'm not sure if it's hers or she heard it from someone, but it's brilliant. She said, "It's easy, like let's say a couple breaks up or a couple gets divorced or whatever it is, and they go, 'I'm so much happier now.'" So my wife says, "Yeah, it's easy to be happy." When you're not in a state of friction It's much more impressive to stay in a state of joy. Even when you're in a state of friction. Can you please repeat that? Absolutely. It's not my line. It's my wife's line, so I'm happy to repeat it. It's easy to be happy when you're not in a state of friction. If there's no discomfort, things are awesome.
But that's not impressive. It's impressive to stay. I stayed in self. I stayed joyous. I stayed loyal to my values, even when there was friction. It's like somebody said, "I kept Shabbos this week." Really, you kept Shabbos? I didn't break one iota of Shabbos. What did you do? I locked myself in a room with nothing and I slept for twenty-five straight hours. You didn't keep Shabbos; you just didn't break Shabbos. How you stay in a relationship after the rupture—that's what's impressive. Every relationship is designed, on some level, to fall apart. But that's not a bad thing. That's the design of the relationship. The question is not whether or not you'll fall apart. If your relationships don't have any falling apart quality to them, that means something's off. And many years ago, I shouldn't tell you this story Which means I'm about to tell you this story. Many years ago I had a roommate who is a tzaddik. He just is. He's just the nicest guy in the world.
Talking about a real sweetheart of a guy, anything. He's like, I'll get that for you. It's a really genuinely nice guy, nauseously, disgustingly nice. My roommate. He attracted this. This poor guy. And he found a girl. Who's him, in a girl, like that. That sweet, adolmadel, gentle, how are you? Like they never raise their voice above this level, right? And she was from Baltimore. And so the wedding was going to be in Baltimore. And I guarantee you don't know that, or maybe you do. And we all drove out to Baltimore. I remember, it's cool when you're younger, like you go out and you're like, before we got to the wedding a little bit early because it's one of our close friends, and we're like throwing on the football in the parking lot of this place where they got married, because you know, it's a bunch of guys.
And one of the rebbeim, one of the big rebbeim, was his Masada Kedushin. And I was called up to be an aide under the chuppah. I was already married, so they called me to be an aide under the chuppah. And I'm standing there with this big rabbi, and you have these two precious, angelic-looking kids, each one like so gentle, so nice, so edel, so adin. And this rabbi under the chuppah. After everyone's sitting and it's like we're about to start, he's about to make the brachos. And he looks at me and he goes How sick does it make you to know that this couple is probably never going to fight? I was like, "Rebbe, maybe not now. It's a good joke, but maybe we'll talk about it after. They're in the yichud room. We can have that conversation." But now that I'm older I don't think that Rebbe was right.
I think they were two amazing people. But I guarantee you, if I would ask this guy. If I would say to him, now you've been married, he's been married eighteen years. If I would say to him now Did you ever fight? I guarantee you, he would say yes. It doesn't matter if you're the sweetest, most worked-out person in the world. There's going to be friction in a relationship. The relationship, at some point, the center cannot hold. It's not designed to hold. It's designed to fall apart a little bit so that you can discover it together. The question is not whether or not it's going to fall apart. The question is how you stay in repair, and that's what I want to talk about tonight. How do we stay in repair? The length of repair we're in. Not just the length, but also the way that we stay in repair. Having the focus to stay in repair. What does it look like to repair a relationship?
And I have I think, and I saw this idea that the mishkan is an amazing way of teaching us how we stay in repair because there's two mishkan's. There's the mishkan of the ideal before the chet ha'egel, and that's all the stuff that we had up until now. This is what it's going to look like. But then the chet ha'egel happened And then there's the mishkan as it is after the sin. After the rupture, it's like by Har Sinai. By Har Sinai was a chuppah. Hacinai was a sweet couple, looking at each other longingly. You ever see that? You could always tell who's older and younger at a wedding. When the kallah is walking around the chasen And she's doing her sivuvim there, and he's sitting there davening be kavana, and she's closing her eyes, being guided around. You see all the girls on the side saying telem, and you see all the boys on the side, and they're like it's gonna be me. And then you see all the older people going. They're so naive.
What they don't know. Come back and talk to me in 15 years from now. There's a jadedness because we've all, on some level, there's the ideal. There's Har Sinai. We were under the chuppah by Har Sinai. It was amazing. Us and Hashem. But 40 days later, there was a cheita eigel. And then there was the mishkan And then there's a life that we build, and we're going to discuss it tonight. A life that we build after. Things don't go well. What does that life look like? Based on the question, the Ruff thinks that we should stay in repair. I hope that we'll stay in repair. Unless a relationship, and here again, I'm not speaking about marriage. The goal tonight is to speak about our relationship with Hashem. Marriage is a good microcosm. But yes, I hope that repair regarding your relationship. That's correct. Whether it's with Hashem, with our spouse, with our community, with our children. The goal is to teach us how to stay and repair.
Is the goal to get back to the original place or to keep going? I think as we're going to see, and again, I think you're asking a beautiful question. I think you'll see it from this. I think that without rupture The relationship will never reach its truest form. And so you have to break apart in order to build something that's much deeper. One way of thinking about it, again, I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but one way of thinking about this is: remember, your neshama in Shamayim was fine. It was fine. It had everything it needed. It was in a place called Olam Neshamos. It was comfortable. Why do all the classes connect? I'm like, we just learned. I literally hope that all the classes connect because that's this concept called Torah. So you see, Hakadosh Baruch Hu set it up beforehand. Your neshama has everything you need. So why do you come down to this world? What's the answer? Because there's something down here that your neshama can achieve that it cannot achieve up there. It needs, so to speak, to break away from Hashem in order to discover a newer and deeper relationship with Hashem.
Last question. It's unreasonable to think that a relationship won't have ruptures because the design of a relationship is to rupture. But the question is not whether or not the relationship is going to rupture; it's how we stay in repair. The first lesson of the Mishkan is to build something holy and something meaningful. After a relationship has a rupture The question is what you build now? And this is a really important way of looking at our relationship. Let's talk about it first in a marriage, and then we'll talk about it in terms of our relationship with Hashem. If you and your husband have a fight I'll repeat it again. If you and your husband have a fight Beseder. So you have two choices. Imagine a marriage as building a home. We think of building as brick and mortar. But the truth of the matter is that every single day in our relationships We're building.
But you can also put down your tools And sadly Lots of people after the rupture put down their tools and pulled out of the relationship. And people pull out of relationships in a thousand different ways. I'm just going to describe to you one of them, and it's a sad one. There are couples. It's a sad thing. There are couples that just stop talking to each other. The pain they experience is so deep, and the love and desire they have for each other is so strong. That the rupture is like an earthquake for them. And because they go into a protective state, they put down their tools and say, "We're not building" We're not building right now. And that is a terrible waste of an opportunity. Because if something breaks, there's an opportunity to build something better. I don't know how old you girls were when Hurricane Sandy hit. Anybody here from like the?
It was 2012. So you were young. I remember. I had friends in Hurricane Sandy who were in dangerous situations. One of my friends. He was on his way to his in-law's house in Hurricane Sandy and he went to the top floor and the water rose meaning there were three stories the water rose a full two stories and it started getting wet on the floor of the third story and he's looking out because they were right on the bay in the Five Towns right by going to North Woodmere if you know Branch Boulevard it was right there on Branch Boulevard. And he was on the phone nine one one, and he said, "You need to send a boat or a helicopter, because we're going to die." That's where he was holding. He was thinking to himself, "He's because he's a swimmer." "How can I strap my baby to me in such a way that I'll be able to save my child?" That's the level that he was talking about.
After Sandy So I went back to New York and I visited some of my old friends, and some of them lived right there in those houses that were absolutely destroyed. It's an amazing thing if you go. Right near Branch Boulevard, all those houses now are basically on stilts. What they do, they literally jacked up the houses. Do you know you could do that? You jack up a car. You can jack up a house. And these houses that were destroyed in Hurricane Sandy, those that had the appropriate insurance The houses that were destroyed, all of a sudden, these people that had mediocre houses before, not big by any stretch of the imagination. All of a sudden, there was an amazing opportunity. There, now you have to walk up a lot of steps to get to their front door, but now they have massive basements, brand new dining rooms. Why didn't they just allow their house to sit and rot?
Because that's where you live Then the breaking is an opportunity to build. Let's play it out in real time. Your husband said something that deeply triggered you. You could put down your tools and say, "I'm out." I'm not participating in this relationship until you make it safe. Or, with great courage, you could lean into the vulnerability and say to your husband I want to share with you that I know you didn't intend to hurt me But I want to share with you what just came up for me. Not because I need you to fix me, but because I care about you and this relationship. And I want to be able to let you know when things hurt, so that we can work together, so that we can hurt each other as little as possible. That's called building a home. That takes courage. You built something meaningful. You said to your husband, 'Let's not do it this way. Let's do it this way.' What does it look like in our relationship with Hashem? Same thing.
You had a moment. You said, "Okay." A ruach shdo came into your head, and you said, "I'm doing this avir. I promised myself I wouldn't. I was in this really inspiring she'er." I said I'm not going to do the avera, but in the end, it was just too much to bear. I wasn't able to hold it. So you ended up doing something that you're not proud of. What's next? What comes after that? What do you build? What's born of that avera? What's born of that moment of rupture? I want to share with you again. This is not a perfect example, but I want to share with you what this looks like. There's an organization called Bone Olam. Have you heard of this organization? It's an organization that helps people who have fertility issues. Do you know how it got started? There's a couple. It was a couple, and unfortunately, for many, many years, they tried to have children and they were unable to have children.
And this couple He's a rabbi, she's a rabbi's and whatever, and they went to every single doctor and every single genetic testing and every single thing that could be done in order to have children. And finally, there was this one last appointment, and this is going to be it. This doctor is going to say al piderchateva, you're done trying. You can't have children. And they went to this doctor, and he reviewed all the charts and all the things and he did all the tests. And he said to them, unfortunately al piderchateva, there's no way for you to have children. And they're in the car ride on the way home. And this rabbinson turns to this rav And she says. We're going to start an organization to help people who have fertility issues. Because we know all the doctors and all the labs and all the tests, we can help people be guided through this process.
And he thought he said she was dreaming; he thought she was crazy. But since that car ride Bone Olam has helped over 8,000 children be born Which is unbelievable. It's what you build when things go wrong. Eight thousand children, and this Rebbitzin has spoken publicly, and she said, 'Hashem didn't bless me with one biological child, but He blessed me with eight thousand children, and they go to bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs and brises and weddings of all of the children that they helped bring into the world, and they've raised, I think it's well over a hundred million dollars to help people have children.' It's what you build after things go wrong. The messed up kid from high school Who I knew. I'm not going to tell you his name. Even though I'm pretty sure most of you have heard of his organization. I won't even say his organization because I don't want to say any lashon hara.
But I remember that kid, and he was a lunatic in high school. But he got real help. He had a real rupture in himself, in his relationship with Hashem. And today, that guy is responsible for one of the largest organizations in the Jewish world for helping people that are going through, whether it's drugs or alcohol or different things that they're going through. He's the one at the front lines, and he's probably one of the most famous Jewish people in the world in this area. Because he drew from the wellspring of his own pain to build something holy and to build something meaningful. The problem is we do an avera, or we have a rupture in our relationship, and we think shows over, and what we don't know is that's the beginning. That's the birthplace. The birthplace of incredible things is when things fall apart. It's like the seed that falls apart, right?
It needs to decay in order for the thing to grow. Imagine if somebody was sitting there watching an acorn decay and going like "It was such a beautiful acorn." That's an oak tree. That's not an acorn. That's an oak tree. We come down into this world as neshamas, and there's a big brokenness that occurs. The brokenness is. I was in Olam Anishamos, and now I'm down here in this world, in this body. It's like perfect, because now you could become an oak tree. After the Chet Eigel, the first thing you do is say, "What's my mishkan to build?" You went out last night. I'm making something up. You went out last night. By the way, you say, "God bless you." He does. I promise. Not just when you sneeze. All the time. God bless you. You went out. I'm making something up because you didn't. Let's say you had a friend who went out last night.
She wakes up this morning. She comes to her teacher. If she's smart, she comes to her teacher. She comes to her rebbe. She comes to her mechanechet, her rakaze, whoever minahela. I don't know what the different positions they have here. All those positions, And she says, "Okay I want. Last night, I was here. Last night, the shell broke open in this way. What's my opportunity today? What am I building today off of the rupture of last night? When I was in yeshiva many years ago, there was a guy in yeshiva that I felt acted totally inappropriately towards me. I was 18 years old and I was really upset at the way he behaved. And anybody would acknowledge that he behaved inappropriately. I went to the mashgiach of the yeshiva. I was so upset at him. I said, 'What do I do? This guy—he's like—he acted like an animal towards me.'
What did the mashgiach say? He told me, "He goes." How open are you right now? That was his first question. I said, "What do you mean?" He goes, "How open are you to hearing a radical idea?" I said, "I'm open. I'm in. Tell me." "He goes," What chesed are you gonna do for him? " I was like, "I don't. I don't think you heard me. This guy really violated my boundaries. He said, "I know. I heard you." What are you gonna do for him? And it changed the way I thought of it. The relationship was over because of the way he behaved. And what was the mashgiach telling me? This rupture is giving you an opportunity to be a balchesed to somebody that rubs you the wrong way. It'll build you. It'll build the relationship in a new way. And maybe after you do that, he said to me, maybe after the relationship is holding a little bit more stability, maybe you can say to him, that thing that you did That was really hard.
And maybe he'll be in a place to hear it. Truth is, it didn't work. I wish I had a good happy ending to the story. I wish I could tell you that guy's my best friend today. But I know why it didn't work. Because I wasn't really open to it. Because I did the chesed for him, because the mashgiach challenged me. So what was I going to do? I had to rise to the occasion. I did the chesed. But I didn't do it wholeheartedly. And I believe that was one step in a process towards teaching me that somebody who hurts you, just because somebody hurts you, doesn't mean you cut them off. Which is like a very big thing to do today. We're done. Relationship over. If the relationship is in pain, that means the pain needs to be healed. That means something needs to be built.
Number two And this is a really hard one. What do you want me to say again? If the relationship is in pain, that's not an opportunity to amputate. That's an opportunity to heal. What are you going to build? Another feature of the Mishkan Really important. I don't know how much time I have left, so let me. You can walk me down. Afterwards. Another feature of our relationship with Hashem that comes from the Mishkan after the Chet Ha'egel is that you'll notice the Mishkan for forty years is constantly being broken down. Being put back up. It's portable, meaning it's designed to move. When we think of rupture and repair, the way we stay in rupture and repair is to know we are on a journey. And that journey The relationship goes up We build it, and you know what happens? Then we put it away. The relationship goes down, and we journey to a new place together, and then it goes back up again, and then it goes back down again, and we journey to a new place together, and that happens so many times over the course of forty years. But an interesting feature. This is key.
An interesting feature is sometimes when we made camp again. We were right back in a place that we had already been. So two things. Meaning we were in place A, went to B, C, D, and then we came back to A again. That's what happened sometimes in the desert. We were camping in the place that was already. In a relationship, we know. It's designed to go up. It's designed to go down. It's designed to go up. It's designed to go down. But sometimes you'll ask yourself the question, "How did I get back to this place?" Did I like slide all the way back to the beginning? " You know how like I like about Baron Miriam. Here we could be straight. You girls are, you have enough energy to be straight. I see you're like that's what I like about those places. Growth oriented. It's truthful. You ever have a good streak?
And then the thing you promised you would never do again, after three months of not having done it and feeling so good about yourself, and then you're right back in that place. I liked how sometimes you can tell the tone of the room. Someone says, "Yeah, we know that," and someone else says, "Yeah." It's like this really depressed, low note, yeah. And you're asking yourself. This is the way it sounds for me in my inner world. The voice that comes up is like You accomplished nothing It's like all that work is gone in an instant. That's the way you think about it. It's wrong. It's dead wrong. It has nothing to do with the truth. The design of repair is that you level up. You go from A to B to C. But if you didn't fully heal A, what's going to happen? You go not down You go back.
Because you weren't ready to heal level A. So you did what you could, and then you went to level B and level C. Now that you're at level C, you know what you've got to do? You get to go back to A and heal it again. And you may not heal it completely. Maybe the first time you healed it 30 percent, and the second time you got to 60 percent. You might have to go back a third time and a fourth time until you graduate from that level fully. When we're in relationships with our spouses, with our children, things will fall apart, and you say, "we talked it out, right? And we worked it out. We developed a system of how it's never going to happen again, right? And then what happens? It happens again. And you say, 'I guess we accomplished nothing.' And you'll start to blame and externalize, and you go, 'See, he's not capable. I told him exactly what I needed, right?' And you start to build this narrative of externalization, and everything is his fault, and it's not possible to be married to such a person.
Or. You could choose, because choose is a very big word, and every one of us has the art of choice inside of us. You could choose to narrate the story differently and you could say I was designed to go from A to B to C, and now we're back at A, so that's where we're building. We're going. It doesn't. You're not going in circles. You're leveling up, and you're healing yourself one stage at a time, and that process is not linear. Everyone here is on a journey, and we think, "I'm on a journey. I'm good." No, you're on a journey. That journey is not linear. It goes from A to B to C, and sometimes it goes back to A. How do we know we've healed a level? When it stops coming back. And you might think to yourself, "I'm 18 years old. How could I keep doing this?"
I'm not smarter, but I am a little older than you. And I can share with you that some of the same stuff that I was dealing with at 18 years old, I'm dealing with it at my age now as a grandfather. And that's okay because the level that I'm dealing with it at now is different than the way that I dealt with it at 18. At 18, I healed the wound to here. At 19, I healed it to here. At 30, I healed it to here. And at 43, I'm healing it to here. And I'm pretty sure that at 70, I'm still going to be healing some of those wounds because that's the nature of reality: rupture and repair. So you can't have people forget the fact that people have unhealthy expectations around rupture. My marriage is never going to suffer. My relationship with Hashem after seminary, smooth sailing. It's going to be perfect. After Berah Miriam, I'm going to be Rabitz and Kaniewski. That's who I am. People are going to come to my house to get my brachas. They're going to see me and my shining husband, and just the glow that's basking from my house is going to illuminate the entire world.
Forget the don't bother saying I'm mean to it. It's so crazy. But I'm telling you, it's not that forget that's unreasonable. That's not even the problem. The problem is that we don't realize that repair is not like a fix. There's no fix here. There's what you'll build and what you'll build over and over again, even in the places that you've already built. And last line because I just got to finish up. Our avodah is to make peace with the cycle of rupture and repair. Because so many people are fighting it. Our avodah is to make peace with the cycle of rupture and repair. People like, it can't be falling apart. That's because we don't have the ability to handle the vulnerability. Of things that don't go well But the truth is, the reason why we won't make peace with the cycle of rupture and repair is because we're not okay with the vulnerability of things falling apart. What's going to happen if it falls apart? What's going to be if it's not okay? You know what the answer to that is?
It's going to be okay because there's repair. That's the avoda now. The avoda is rupture and repair. So we have to say, going into our relationships with Hashem. With our marriage, with our children, with our communities, we have to know the center cannot hold. This is not going to be easy. But we are enough to be able to go through this process. Hashem created tshuva before He created the world. Because He knew that things were not always going to go well, and tshuva is built into creation. To sum up. There's the ideal mishkan before the chet ha'egel, and then there's the mishkan we build after the chet ha'egel. That's why the Torah says it twice. What are the lessons we learn? Number one, it's all about rupture and repair. If you build something holy from your rupture That's great. That's how you repair. Don't just put down your tools. Build something. There's a nugget in that rupture. Mine that nugget, find it. It's golden. It's beautiful.
Number two It's going to happen over and over again. The mishkan goes up, the mishkan goes down, the mishkan goes up, the mishkan goes down. Number three It goes backwards. It doesn't mean you failed. It means you're circling back until you heal that place. And in the end You have a mishkan. In the end, you've made the world a more godly place. In the end, you've built a home. That's safe and that's beautiful and that's comfortable in a deep place of belonging. Girls, have a wonderful Shabbos.
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