Vayera - Why We Hold On to What’s Destroying Us When We Know We Need To Walk Away

2:29 Every word of Torah is for us in our generation. There's no such thing as a chelak in Torah that's for something beyond our personal experience. Every word is relevant to us. We're holding now already by Malavah Malka, so we're holding by the Eirus of next week. So to start to look at the story of Avram and Lot and his wife and Sodom and what happened over there, especially as it's relevant to us in this generation, is appropriate at this time. Everyone knows the story. The story is that Avram Avinu became Avah Mon Ga'ym. He's appointed to be the father of all of the nations, and he goes and he davens for stoyim. Perhaps there will be some tzaddik. Perhaps there will be somebody that could inspire sodoyim to do too. This is, of course, in contrast to Noach. Noach was a tzaddik, but he was what in Chasidus we call a tzaddik in pelts. He was a tzaddik for himself. He was a great man. He always did the right thing.

3:25 But he was not a person who inspired his generation. He didn't take responsibility. He didn't take responsibility for his generation. Avram Avinu was avam on ga'im. He took responsibility for the entire dar. That's what it means to be a yid. To be a yid means to look out for the lowest people in the entire world. The biggest tzaddikim are always busy with the biggest rishayim because they don't give up on anybody. Avram Avinu didn't even give up on the biggest rishayim and tzadim. He davens to Hakadosh Baruch Hu. Perhaps there'll be fifty tzaddikim, forty tzaddikim, thirty tzaddikim. Eventually, Hakadosh Baruch Hu tells him, "No, it's not happening. We're going to send Malachim. Stone is going to be destroyed. We're going to save Loit and his family." Everyone knows the story. The story is that on their way out, they were told, "Don't turn around," and Loit's wife turned around, and so she turned into a pillar of salt.

4:17 It's a very deep Indian. Why she turned into a pillar of salt and why she turned around? There's a perket of Rav Elazar that says she turned around to make sure that her married daughters were following her. But the truth is, it's understandable why she turned it around. It makes some sense. We could wrap our heads around it. She turned around because that's where she was from. Would any of us not look if the place that we were from was being destroyed? I imagine. Not to compare in any way, but I imagine that those yidden that were being taken from their homes in the Holocaust, that on their way out they were turning around to watch their homes burn. I imagine that it was like that through history. People turn around to see the destruction of everything that they came from. Light's wife came from Sadoim. It makes sense that she turned around. It makes sense that she had a hard time letting go. The kasha is really on Lot. What was Lot's experience? Everybody always pays attention to his wife.

5:15 What was Leite's experience when he was being rushed out of Sedom to be saved from Sedom being destroyed? What was Leite doing in those moments? It's a fascinating thing. The Torah tells us that Yismael delayed and hesitated. That's already a very strange thing for Leite to hesitate on his way out. I always get upset at the boys when their phones go off in sheer. Now it's good muster for me. Don't judge so quickly. It's probably to tell me who to vote for. Little do they know. I apologize. It's a new phone. I don't even know how to use it. Maybe that worked. If I'm not from Sodom, what do I care? Say that I have my family, so I'm leaving. What do I need to hold on to stand for? Why is there any hesitation whatsoever on the part of Loit? And the Torah tells us via smameha v'yachziko ha'noshem biyado v'yad ishto v'yad stevenoiv v'chemlas Hashem elah alav v'yotzu v'yotzu yuhu v'anichu mihots lair. They literally had to take his hand. The mom had to schlep him out. It's a funny thing. If you stay, you're dead. L'marshal.

6:46 You girls are too young, but I remember on September 11th, I was in New York on September 11th. I was in Queens on September 11th. It could be you saw videos of this. I had relatives who were working right near the World Trade Center. Pictures, videos of people running for their lives. The World Trade Center was coming down. People were covered in ash. It was exceptionally dangerous. Rachmanu Litzlan, those people in the building, what they must have gone through. I had an uncle who was right there. He was running for his life. He was covered in ash. He had post-traumatic stress disorder. Who would hesitate? Who would hesitate to the degree that those malachim needed to take Loi by the hand? And again, understandably, his family that they were from Sedom, but Loi wasn't from Sedom. So hesitates. What is hesitating for? And what does Rashi tell us? We're all still in seminary. Most of you know every Rashi and Chumash. You're not boys.

7:45 What does Rashi tell us? He was concerned with the money that he was leaving behind. It's like that's a lot. That's like a strong attachment to money. It's being destroyed. What are you holding? Are you gonna run out with a couple more shekels? Run for your life. Sometimes you take a loss. Sometimes you're just not gonna have the money that you had. He's holding on for a couple of shekels. It's hard to understand, and especially for us, would any of us do that? When someone puts a gun to your head, everything that's unimportant falls away. The only things that remain are the things that are truly important. Many years ago, I was in the hospital for a month. It was like a very dangerous situation. I was in the ICU. It was a very interesting time. And at one point, the doctors thought because I wasn't getting better, so after like.

8:42 Maybe a week and a half in the ICU, the doctor said to me, "Maybe you have cancer," which is a crazy thing to hear from a doctor. First of all, "maybe" is not a smart thing to tell a kid. It's like either you don't or you do, but don't guess, don't go. It could be. Now let's see what your anxiety does. It's like, Zvarkh Hashem, I didn't, but I'll never forget the tefillah that I had on that day. The tefillah that I had on that day. I put on my tallas and tefillah, and I was in my scrubs. I could barely move. I hadn't eaten for like two and a half weeks already, and I just davened to Hakadosh Baruch Hu and I said, "Please don't take me. I have important things left to do with my life. I have a wife. I have children. I have yeshiva. I have things to do." I didn't say to myself, "I need to make another ten thousand shekel." It wasn't important. How could it be that Leite was so attached to his money? This not a shmos. It's not a shmos about that. For those who are getting nervous that this going to be like some.

9:38 Don't move back to America because you're going to be consumed by the gashmius of America. But just it's an interesting thing that be yitzma meah that he's so concerned about his money that he hesitates. I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave my money behind. It's a very strange story, and it's a very strange story for us, especially how can we make sense of this in our generation. So I want to share with you something that I think is very meaningful. How did Lot get to Stone to begin with? What was the story of how Lot got to Stone? So the story is that Lot and Avram Avinu—it was a shtikle machleikas there. Lot wasn't so honest. The Torah tells us, "Va'isa Lot es einav, va'yar es kalkikar ayardein kichula mashke." When Lot was looking out, he saw wow, wow, wow! This unbelievable prosperity.

10:33 In Kikar Yarden, there's unbelievable opportunities there, and so the Yifchar Loet has Kol Kikar Yarden. So Loet said, "I'll take that area over there." So we see that Loet was already somebody who was willing to leave the confines, the oil, the home of Avram Avinu, for what? For Kikar Yarden, for that which appeared to be somewhat like alluring—that there's a lot of money over there. Says Velo Yoshev Baria Kikar Vayelat Stom, and he lives over there. He lives over there with that chavurah from Stom, and then the Torah tells us V'Anshe Stom Ra'im V'Chatoim LaShem Aod, and the people of Stom were incredibly wicked. V'Chlau, this is a very strange. It's a very strange turn. Every move that the Torah makes is like specific. Lot chooses prosperity. It goes Kikar Yar, then goes all the way to Stom, and the people of Stom were very wicked.

11:29 It's a funny way that the Torah says it. The people of Sodom were very wicked. I can't imagine what it must have been like to leave the Isle of Avram Avinu. Some of us were very lucky. Some of us were born into the most amazing families. Born into an amazing family. It's a gevuldeka thing to be born into an amazing family with amazing parents. So light was related to Avram Avinu, and he leaves. If any of us had the opportunity to be adopted by an Avram Avinu personality. You imagine if you were, back in the day, you were taken. You came on some NCSY program, and they brought you to Rebbez and Batzava Kaniewski. Imagine if Rebbez and Kaniewski decided, 'Come live by me.' The schuz, the opportunity to live by Rebbez and Kaniewski. Every one of us would be. Maybe we wouldn't take it because we come Baruch Hashem from good families.

12:26 But if we have the opportunity to spend time to live by Reb Zund Kaniaski, and if you took the opportunity, who could leave, and who could leave to go become wealthy, who could leave to go live with evil people? It's a very strange thing that Loit does over here. Mamish makes no sense. So I want to share with you an idea. I think it's deeply relevant to every one of us. We have to understand the psychology of Loit. We have to understand what's going on with light, but in order to understand this, let's stop talking about light for a second and let's start talking about ourselves, or maybe we'll talk about our friends. Have you ever had the following scenario? Have you ever had a case where you saw someone doing something that they knew wasn't healthy for them? You ever have such a situation? Maybe look inside of yourself. You ever know that something was absolutely the wrong thing to do, but somehow you can't stop doing it? You have such a situation?

13:24 You beg a friend, don't do that. Maybe she's in an abusive relationship and she keeps going back to it, or she's in an unhealthy relationship and she finally gets enough strength to say, okay, I'm not talking to him anymore. I have nothing to do with him anymore, right? And then, it's two o'clock in the morning. She's feeling lonely and she's about to shoot off that WhatsApp, and you're begging her not to, and she does it anyway. I'm talking about your friend, but at least from the looks of six of you in the room right now, it seems like I'm talking to a couple of people in the room. I don't want to embarrass anybody, but a whole bunch of you just went like this. Why do we do that? Why do we do things that we know are wrong for us? Why do addicts return to being addicts? It's a crazy thing. A person, Mamish, could spend $150,000 going to rehab, working a program, getting sober. Somehow, they keep falling back into it. They keep falling back into it.

14:20 Relapse. They keep relapsing. What's the pshat? Why do we do that? There's a very big Torah in the world of psychology, and it goes like this. We look at people that are addicted, and we ask ourselves the question, "Why the addiction?" But the emes is, it's the wrong question to ask. And if you want to get the right answer, you have to ask the right question. The right question is not why the addiction. The right question is why the pain. What's the pain that's going on over here, underneath the surface that's driving the addiction? Why are these people in such pain? Because when you see somebody who's addicted to something, you should know that addiction is a solution. You look, we look at the addiction and we say this person has a problem, but the Emma says the person doesn't have a problem. They have a solution.

15:14 How do you know that they have a solution and not a problem? Because if it was a problem, they would have already stopped. And that's why people wait until they hit rock bottom to actually change their lives. Because until that moment, it's not a problem; it's a solution. Maybe it's a solution that has a lot of negative impact, but it's a solution. I'm Marshall, you see somebody and he's an unbelievable pain. And he's destroying his life with his addiction. He's destroying his life with his alcoholism, with his drug addiction, with whatever it is. You look at him and you go, "You're mishugana. Your wife left you. You're estranged from your children. You lost your job. You're living under a bridge." Don't you realize this is destroying your life? You know what the person says? It could be that it's destroying my life, but this is the only way I know how to survive this pain.

16:06 So for them, it's a solution. They don't know that they have an option to choose a solution that will actually work better than this one. A chaver of mine, many years ago, he's two years younger than me. He was a terrible drug addict. Very unfortunately, he suffered tremendously from alcoholism as well. I remember in one of the periods where he was sober, I got together with him in Brooklyn.

16:36 And I said to him, how did this whole thing start? So he told me, I'll never forget this. He told me, I never realized how much pain I was in. I didn't know you're a kid. You're 13, 14 years old. How much does a 13 year old boy or girl know about the pain that they're in? They don't know. So I was 15 years old and I was in shul, and there was some balabas in shul. There are certain people that they're not necessarily aware of what's going on in the world. It was some Balabas and Shul who decided he was going to be like the cool father. Like the guy who's like, and he turns to this 15 year old boy and he goes, "You ever make a lechayim?" He goes, "I'm 15 years old." He goes, "Come here, let me make your first lechayim with you." He didn't know that he was mamish handing him a sama mavos. He thought he was a regular kid and he's going to make a lechayim with him. He's going to be the cool father. The guy told me he made a lechayim for the first time in his life. He was 15 years old.

17:31 He said, and it was the first time in my life that I ever felt okay. He said he couldn't wait to get to shul the next week, not for davening, but because there was going to be a kiddush after davening, and he wanted his medicine, because he had something going on inside of him that was in pain, and when he had that lechayim, all of a sudden numbed that pain for the first time in his life. He went back to shul the next week, and he had a bit more. His first overdose, his first of several. His first overdose was four months later, when he broke into shul at four o'clock in the morning. He broke open the liquor cabinet and he drank all the liquor in the liquor cabinet. Baruch Hashem, there was a vasikan minion. It saved his life. Atzala was there in a short amount of time, and he was rushed to the hospital. That guy thought he was just handing a michtika luchayim. He thought he was just like I'm going to be the cool tati, but he didn't know. He didn't know how much pain the kid was in, and he handed him his first drink, and it was a solution.

18:29 Was the solution the kid that in his mind he said I have a problem. This is the solution. It's a terrible solution. Stay there. If you feel like you're only surviving, and that's the best solution you have access to, some people are even willing to risk their own lives for that solution. We sit there critical of them and we go, Don't you realize you're killing yourself? But the truth is, we're asking the wrong question. We shouldn't be asking Why are you using this drug? Why are you using this drink? We should be asking. And by the way, I just say parenthetically, bnei Torah don't use these substances. I'm saying this because we live in a society where somehow these things have become normal, and they're not normal. And we should say that they're not normal because they're not normal. And today, there's like a feeling that girls have. But I have to settle. I'm not going to marry a guy who doesn't drink because every guy drinks. Bristol's not true. There are many guys, Baruch Hashem, that don't. And we should hold our community to a high standard.

19:26 We are the children of Hakadosh Baruch Hu, and we should be connected only to Hakadosh Baruch Hu. These are not good things to be involved in. I know that some people think coming to Eretz Yisrael as a culture and a try this not a healthy thing that's happening here. But the question is not why are they addicted. The question is why are they in pain to begin with? That's a much more profound question. What's the pain that they're in that's driving the addiction? Where did that pain come from? So to understand this, the Torah of the pain, we have to take even one step back before that, which is called attachment and authenticity. Girls, no attachment. You know what attachment means? Everyone started learning of Yaakov Danilovsky's book yet. Attached. It's like on the shelves now. There's a certain today in our community. There's certain sifra that are on the shelves. There's Gemara, Rishonim, Tanach.

20:24 A direch attached. Everyone has the like whatever svarim are in the universe today. What does it mean attachment? Attachment is a need that every single one of us has. Diba chaverim, every one of us needs to be attached to a friend group. Every one of us needs to be attached to our parents, to attached to our family. Attachment means that every one of us has a need for connection. We have a need for closeness. We have a need for emotional safety. We have a need for belonging. That's what attachment means. For a child, secure attachment comes from our caregivers. It comes from our parents, and that's an essential developmental need. My daughter tonight. I have Baruch Hashem a six month old daughter whose name is Sarah Malka. So one of my children is very psychologically oriented. One, the rest are not. The rest are.

21:22 She's celebrating in the back over there. This daughter who's very psychologically oriented, but she is very critical of the rest of her siblings who are not psychologically oriented. We had Baruch Hashem a big tummel today by lunch. What's the right approach? Psychology or not psychology? So my daughter Sarah Malka she was sleeping tonight, and then she was upstairs crying. So my wife went upstairs to get her. So my psychologically oriented daughter, whose name is Racheli, she who's also being embarrassed by her father right now. Which I don't know if you know this, but the single most kishmak thing for a father is to embarrass his daughters. You're not embarrassed because you're used to it. You know that your parents. You should know. You get older, life gets much better. The things you think right now are like delicious.

22:15 Pale in comparison to what happens when you become an adult, and then when you have children to embarrass your children. There's nothing more delicious in the world. I trade all my elam haba for one daughter going aba stop. It's like the best thing in the world. I used to manage driving around with the kids in the car with the windows rolled down, embarrassing every one of my children. That's why they're also baruch Hashem healthy. So my wife went against Sarimalka, and my daughter says out loud because she's very psychologically oriented. She goes, 'You see what happened just now? Sarah was having a traumatic experience that she was crying, and it was dark out, and she didn't know she didn't have any language to express what she needs. And then out of nowhere, all of a sudden, her mother appears, swoops her up, and says, 'It's okay, you're safe, you're with me.' And that's how a child learns to be a child. This is what happened. Maestro Shaya tonight. Am I lying? You're getting out of context. It's not fair.

23:13 Every single moment of every single moment, she's like a walking therapy book. It's amazing. We'll deal with the trauma of this moment later on the car ride on the way home. But there's something else that a child needs, which is authenticity. Truth is, every one of us needs that, and every one of us is struggling with this vision of being authentic. To be authentic means, in a deep way, to be attuned and to recognize that every one of us has emotional needs, and we want to be able to experience the full range of what's happening inside of us. But at some point, there was a conflict.

24:10 Between attachment and authenticity, because at some point somebody looked at us and said, 'Your emotion is unwelcome here.' And you learned you were very young, but you learned I have to stifle some of my authenticity in order to have my attachment. That's what every one of us in this room learned. Lamarchal, you see this a lot with boys. When boys fall, you ever see what fathers do as soon as a boy falls? They pick the kid up and they go, 'You're okay.' Maybe he's not. Maybe he's not okay. Maybe he scraped his hands. It's like the worst feeling in the world to scrape your hands. It's like stinging, and he scraped his knee and he's crying, and the father says, 'You're okay. You're okay.' Why doesn't the father want him to cry? Why doesn't the father want him to cry? The father doesn't want him to cry because the father is uncomfortable with the child's emotion. Or, for example, let's say you have a little kid who's having a temper tantrum. I'll make up a particular place. Let's say in the middle of Gourmet Glot in the Five Towns. Show hands here. How many people are here from the Five Towns? So for this whole section of the room, you know what I'm talking about. For those of you that don't, let me describe it to you. Your three-year-old is having a temper tantrum in the cookie aisle in the middle of Gourmet Glot.

25:37 And maybe other moms are walking by, judging. You know what I'm saying. And now you're having an existential crisis in that moment with that child. You're no longer just parenting the child. What are you parenting? You're parenting yourself out of that moment as all the other mothers walk by you with their nice coffees, looking at you and going, "You're not a good mother," right? Which is not true because their children also have temper tantrums. Just they're home with the person watching. They're home with the I don't know whatever her name is watching. You know what I'm saying? This mother, she's a little yotzloch. She doesn't have a team at home to watch the children. So that kid is having a temper tantrum in the middle of gourmet glatt. But in that moment, you're not parenting that kid. You're protecting yourself from the judgmental eyes of somebody else. So you start yelling at the kid. I once saw a mother like yank her child up, and why?

26:32 Because that's what the child needed in that moment, or because she couldn't handle that situation anymore. We get older, and it's the same thing. We go to school, and we want to be attached to our friends. What do we have to mute in order to become friends with the people around us? Let's show hands here. How many people here? Shun Alf? Whoa. Y'all okay? Okay. Remember when you were sitting on the plane and you were looking around, asking yourself, 'Did I choose the right seminary?' Remember that moment? Or when you got there and you looked around and you said, okay, who do I need to be in order to fit in, right? And there's a look of if you look on, I do this every year in Mivaser when the boys show up to yeshiva. I always like to stand at the bottom of the stairs on the first day of yeshiva to watch these like tough 18 year old guys come down the stairs. And on the outside it looks like you know they've got it all figured out. But if you look at the eyes, it's all in the eyes, right? It's all like, oh God.

27:28 And it makes sense. What do we need to mute? What do we need to numb? What do we need to give up in order to be attached to people? This causes a tremendous amount of pain because any time you cut something off in yourself to stay attached to somebody else, you've lost something of yourself. There's a feeling of inadequacy that you now have. There's a lack of what we call congruence, or what we would call in Hebrew tocho kebaro. That's what we deeply want. Every one of us wants to be able to experience the full range of who we are. But when you cut off a part of yourself, there's something now that's in pain, and it needs a place to go. It needs a solution. So if we understood that the source of all of our bad solutions is our pain, and the pain is because there's something inside of us that needs to be processed. There's something inside of us that needs to be experienced in order for us to be okay.

28:22 Then we would understand that when we show up to life and things are complex for us, the work is always inside. Hafoch ba the kulaba. A person is always looking inside of themselves and saying, not just like criticizing themselves for the way that they behave. That's not helpful ever. But to be compassionate, to be curious, to look inside of yourself and to wonder what's going on that I'm showing up in the world this way. Why do I need these things? I'm not going to sit here and psychologically diagnose Lot. I don't know what was going on in Lot's life. We could certainly make a tremendous analysis of why Lot behaved the way he did. I don't know what went on in Lot's life, and I'm not going to speculate. But I know this: if you're in the house of Avram Avinu and you're feeling inadequate.

29:12 Something is going on inside of your life, and it doesn't mean that Avram Avinu wasn't making the most incredible space in the world for him. He was, but something in Lot's life was missing, and he starts to behave not in the way of Avram Avinu. And they decide to part ways. You go this way, I'll go that way. And where does Lot look? We know he looks out and he looks for prosperity. That means there's something inside of him what we would call today not an abundance mentality, but a mentality of I never have enough. People who have abundance mentalities are not interested in running after stuff. People who feel like they never have enough, they're always looking for more. They're always looking for more. I have a chaver that I grew up with. From the time that we were very little, I knew that for sure he would be wealthy, and I thought maybe I would be wealthy. Why?

30:08 Because we both grew up very poor, I saw from the time he was little that he was always hustling to make a couple of extra dollars. He was the first guy when we were in elementary school. He was already running around and hustling and getting jobs. The rest of us were riding our bikes. He was always saying, 'I got ten dollars, I got twenty dollars, I got thirty dollars.' Today he's fabulously wealthy, and not surprisingly. I know him since the time I was one. It makes sense. He grew up with very little. He had an impoverished mentality. He was looking for money. Baruch Hashem, today he's a very big bentaira, but also I know he has a hole in his life, something that he feels he was missing. My father, Baruch Hashem, eventually was very matsliach, and I remember that when we moved to Lawrence. I remember realizing, like I realized it in my head, I was like.

31:01 I thought when you get to this stage, and now you have the house, and you have the big backyard, and you have the nicer car, I thought happiness comes along with that, and I didn't see that people were any happier in my neighborhood than they were when I lived in Farakway. I know today Farakway became as fancy as Lawrence, but back in the day it wasn't that way. And for me it was big. So when it came time to make a decision about what I was going to do with my career, I had a different mentality about money than he did. So I thought maybe we'll both be wealthy. I knew for sure he would be. I didn't know if I would be because I didn't know. But once I got older and once I saw that my father was matsliach and I saw again that it didn't bring any more simchas ha'ayim, which is not chas v'shalom to be mezuzal in money, but my pursuit of it changed. The emphasis. I never would have had the ability to live in Eretz Yisrael if my father didn't first take us to Lawrence because I would have said to live in Eretz Yisrael and

31:58 And to not have such a nice car, and to not have Baruch Hashem, we have a wonderful place that we live. But it's certainly not what I, what we would have if I was living in America. We don't have a backyard. We don't have fancy things. We have one car, and it's a Kia, and it's on its way out. Actually, I owe tremendous karsat tov to your brother once again. He told you what he did for me. Some Arab came to yeshiva and cut off my whole security system, so I could drive home. Anybody could steal my car right now. It's not worth very much. I asked Orias, "Is anybody gonna steal this?" And very gently, you know how Orias is—he's the sweetest guy in the world. Orias goes, "Nobody's stealing your car." I was like, "Ouch!" I wish I had a car that people would want to steal. I don't know what was going on in Lot, but I know that he was in pain, and I know that people in pain reach for things in their life to solve the pain that they're in. And now he finds it, but the Emma says he's in conflict the whole time that Lot is in Sodom. He's in conflict.

32:56 Because Lamech grew up in the house of Abraham Avinu, and Lamech Lode is a generous person, and we know that Esau's Lode is critical of Lode because he wants to be involved in Achnasas Orachim in a place and watch this. This is the fundamental move in a place that was all for people who had that impoverished mentality. That's what Sedom is. Sedom is a place where people say, 'Take care of your family. Don't help others.' What type of society has that? We're so spoiled. We grew up in this incredible Jewish community. We don't realize that our community is the ultimate community of Chesed. In your life, you have probably, unless you live outside of the New York New Jersey area, and even then maybe not, you probably never called 911 in your life. If somebody Chesuch Shalom falls, cuts themselves, get sick, you call at Sala.

33:51 If Chassidish somebody gets cancer, you call High Lifeline. If you have a special needs child, you call OHL. You call Hesk. If your car breaks down on the side of the road, you call Chaveirim, and some Chassidish guy shows up on the side of the road, and in two seconds flat, you have a new car. It's an unbelievable thing, the Chesed of our community. It's hard for us to imagine a community that, by definition, is selfish. But then, when you think about it a little bit, isn't that what happens when people feel that they don't have enough? They create an ethic. They create a hashkafa of helping other people is the wrong thing to do. Take care of yourself. Don't take care of the person next to you. Take care of yourself. Be responsible for your family. And if every family will be responsible for themselves, then everybody will have what they need. That's what you say when you don't have enough. When you do have enough, and I don't mean enough money. I mean when you have enough inside of yourself, then you're generous with whatever you have because you say, "Listen, if I have it, the Rebbeinu Shlom gave it to me."

34:49 That's what. That's the way Lot grew up. Lot grew up as a generous person, and even in Sodom, he couldn't stop himself from being generous. But what does his wife say? You're doing the wrong thing. You're giving. You're giving out. You're giving out food to other people. And this was a real conflict that existed within Lot. On the one hand, he's authentically very generous. He's the nephew of Avram Avinu. On the other hand. He chose Sodom for a reason. Sometimes we live out what's really happening inside of us. If you want to know why you're friends with certain people, it's probably because of something going on inside of yourself. Lot chose to go to a certain place, but he didn't realize it. If you look very carefully, when Lot made the decision to go to Kikar Yarden, when Lot made the decision to go to Stolm, why did he do it? Because he said, 'Wow, look at how much money they have.' What does the Torah tell us right away? But there were terrible people there. Mamish, the biggest Rishonim live in Stolm. Lot didn't know. He didn't know what was going on inside of himself. He just said, 'Gishmak, I'm going to have so much money if I go live over there.' Because a person whose in self has broad perspective.

36:08 A person whose in self is able to take multiple things into account. They're able to see this is a positive, but there's also a larger negative. Lo couldn't see that. He was so consumed by his need to have something that was gonna numb his pain. Now I'm gonna be rich. Now I'm gonna have enough. And he wasn't paying attention to the fact that the people around him were wicked. He couldn't see it. He was blind to the reality that's in front of him. And that's something that every one of us struggles with. We think we're living in reality, but we're living in a reality that we choose to see, and that's why the person next to us often experiences reality completely differently than we do, because they're wearing a different set of lenses. So Lote was wearing the lenses when he looked at Stone. All he saw was the wealth. He didn't see all the negativity. He didn't see the people there. He didn't say, 'What in the world am I doing with those people?'

37:01 I think a lot of us can probably find some truth in our own lives about that experience, where you hone in on one thing that you think is going to be the solution to your problem, and you ignore everything else. Maybe there's a reason you're ignoring it. Maybe because that thing that you're ignoring is deeply true for you. Maybe Lote chose to be with these impoverished mentality people because in some way it was a reflection of him. And so now it's being destroyed. And that's a great muscle for us about what happens when your life starts to fall apart because your coping mechanisms no longer work, because often our coping mechanisms have negative impact, and at some point, it's just causing massive destruction. Even then, what happens? Even then, when a person knows I can't go back there, for Aisha Slo, she grew up in Stone. That's who she is.

37:57 Makes sense that she looked back, but if you're going to hang out back there, then you're going to be destroyed along with it. So she was destroyed, but Lote wasn't from Sodom, but you know what? A little bit, he was from Sodom. At some point, he had integrated that inside of himself. It was the only way he knew how to survive. I don't know who I am outside of Sodom. So he's hesitant to leave it behind, like all of us. There's We all came to Eretz Yisrael for a year or two, or God willing, the rest of our lives. You could do a better Amein than that. If that was like a Shidduch thing, you would have said Amein the Kol Kach. That's like a Shvacha Amein. Girls, we're living in Mamish Ikkves of the Mishicha. You have the opportunity to live in Eretz Yisrael. Let's try that one more time. As Hashem, you're here for a year or two, hopefully for the rest of your lives. Amein. Not bad. We're making progress.

38:57 That I mean is a little bit of a yismeiyan. What are we holding on to? Your bubby's and zaydis, if they knew they had the opportunity to live here in Eretz Yisroel, those that were running away from the Nazis in Achsham in the 30s and 40s, if you would have told them that you have the opportunity to learn Torah in Yerushalayim Yerakodesh on a Motzei Shabbos, they would have said to you, Mashiach is here. It's pretty wild. What we hold on to, even now, it makes sense. Makes sense that we're holding on to it. And by the way, it's a conversation that you'll have a lot over the course of this time in your life, because you'll say, 'But I don't know. My family, my community. I'm not used to the language. I'm not used to the culture. I don't know which way to vote. I don't like certain things that I see. It's Middle Eastern. There's a lot of things, for sure. There's a lot of answers. But yes, my meyer, there's a hesitancy that we have to let go of something that doesn't really belong to us. America doesn't really belong to us. England doesn't really belong to us. France certainly doesn't belong to us.'

39:54 Somebody I had over for Shabbos this week, he was in Vienna. He said initially, when he was in Vienna, he didn't know if it was like France, so he was hesitant. But then he ran into a bunch of Hasidim, and he said he felt totally comfortable after that. Hasidim look much more Jewish than he did. He's walking around in Vienna comfortable. It's goulas, it's goulas. At some point, we have to leave. At some point, we have to come back here. It's a mitzvah. You have the opportunity to do it. Enough for that. That's my own personal. I hope you'll take it in, but it's a personal plea to Klal Yisrael to come home. Just because something feels familiar doesn't mean that it's safe, doesn't mean that it's true, and it doesn't mean that it's right. What was right for us at some point in our life, maybe we outgrew it, but there's a hesitancy to leave it. We see this. We see that people are hesitant to leave. Where was Lot told that he was going to go?

40:48 He told that he was going to go to Avram Avinu. He was going to go to the mountain. What does the pasuk say? The Anochi lo uchal lihim alei tahara. He said, "I can't go to the mountain. I can't go back to Avram Avinu. That's called shame. I can't return back to who I am. That's a very familiar feeling. Also, that when we make the decision that I'm going to let go of those coping mechanisms and I'm going to return. Towards that tzaddik, whatever that tzaddik is for us to return to that source of authentic nourishment, it's hard to go back. Lord says, "Let me go to Tzavir first. I don't want to go back to Avram Avinu. I can't look Avram Avinu in the face after everything that I've done, after everything that I've been through." The malachim literally need to schlepp him out. That's sometimes what happens to people that are in pain. That the only way that they can leave is if people schlepp them out.

41:43 But really, there's an even deeper way of understanding this, and we'll finish with this because the hour is already very late. Sometimes it means that a malach has to hold your hand. That it's not just having somebody schlepp you out, but it means that there's somebody precious to you in your life, somebody who sees you and they see that you're in pain and they see the destruction, and they're willing to hold your hand and walk with you. Because remember what was missing. Remember that. Fundamentally, what was missing was that feeling of attachment. And when you have that malach in your life that's willing to hold your hand and walk with you out of Sodom, sometimes that's the attachment that you need in order to be able to leave behind the destruction in your life. And you should know that malach in your life, whoever it is—if it's a parent, if it's a friend, if it's a sibling, if it's a counselor, if it's a madricha, if it's a shabbet girl, or a teacher, or whoever in your life—you should know.

42:40 That malach is the most important person in your life, the person that's willing to walk with you gently and carefully as you leave, because it's hard to leave because at some point we're identified with that coping mechanism. We don't know who we are if we leave it. It's like if I stop being this, what will I be now? That's why David Amar says, 'Sor me rav ase tov.' Sor me'ra is only step one. If you don't fill that sor me'ra with asetov, then all you are is that vacuum of emptiness. I've been this way for so long. I don't know who I am without this. That's the vulnerability of growth. The vulnerability of growth is to be able to step into the abyss, to let go of who I was, and to embrace the unknown of who I will become.

43:28 If you just take one step away from who you were, but you don't take the next step into who you are, then you're just left in that vacuum, and that vacuum is exceptionally uncomfortable. Because remember, at the end of the day, we need to be attached to something. This year is a tremendous opportunity for you. There's a certain sense that I have that so much of this year is not the amazing Rebbeim, it's not the amazing Mechanchot or Rakazot that you have. You had amazing teachers in high school, also. You just probably didn't realize it. And the emphasis—I wish that I could say that it's coming to Eretz Yisrael. The avira of Eretz Yisrael is for sure a huge part of shaping a person, but it's hard exactly to quantify what it is. I have a feeling that for so many of us, what this opportunity really represents is the opportunity for the first time in our lives to step out.

44:25 Of who we were, and just to stay curious, just to wonder how it is that we arrived at this point in our life, to check in with ourselves, to say, Am I who I want to be? What are the coping mechanisms? What are the things that I'm doing to, perhaps, numb some of the pain that we're in? Growth today cannot be just taking upon ourselves more things, because that might also just be the same coping mechanism in different form. A girl who comes, she comes to Etz Strela, and now she's got a nigel vaser by the bed, and she's davening a shmona esrei that's like the amshon of a rebbe, three four hours long, and she's taking copious notes every single thing that the teacher says, and if the teacher coughs, she writes down he coughed at this moment. It's almost like Labavicher is writing down every single thing that the rebbe said. That could also be a coping mechanism.

45:18 I'm not enough for myself, but if I walk out of my time in seminary and now people say, 'She did well.' What does that mean? What does it mean she did well? Why? Because you can look at her on the outside and measure the things that you think are different. So now that qualifies as she did well. And how many of us are yearning for somebody to say to us, 'She did well,' because that's still the same impoverished mentality of outsourcing our identity and getting validation from the outside, as opposed to being genuinely connected from the inside. And of course, on some level, we'll always need some external validation, but hopefully, it won't be the external validation of like I'm thirsty and I'm starving for somebody to recognize who I am. So my bracha for all of us this year is that we should be zayicha to a level of authenticity in our growth.

46:08 That allows us to deeply access what's happening inside of our inner world, so that we can fill ourselves with the only thing that the whole was ever made of, which is the Rebbeinu Shlom himself. And the more attachment we have to the Rebbeinu Shlom, the Es Hashem, the more in self, the more whole will be, and will have that ability to return to the tenth of Avraham Avinu. Shavuot tovah, got the vach.