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Okay, This is a short, short דבר תורה. Something that's very special. Yehuda approaches Yosef HaTzaddik, not knowing that Yosef is Yosef And he's making a plea for Binyamin's life. Says Vanaymer Ladaini Yesh Lano Avzakin. We have an old father. Vielid Zekunim Katan And he has a young child. It's a child of his old age. Va'achiv mase And our brother is dead. And Rashi already picks up on the fact that this is a she, and that's up to the speaker. Up until now, the brothers have avoided saying that Yosef is dead. But here Yehuda says straight out, 'Vaayechol melech, I think that's the same as saying, "Va'achiv mase," that Yosef Hatzadik is dead, and he's saying that, of course, to Yosef Hatzadik. So it's one thing to lie. It's another thing to lie to the person. Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. It happened once, like, I don't know if you know this, but there was a rav in Muncie whose name was Mordechai Berg.
And he passed away. There was a big crowd all over Eretz Yisrael that said, 'Of Mordechai Berg has passed away' And many people took pictures of it and sent it to me. And legitimately asked me, "Are you okay?" I was very confused by it because how does that work? Like if I If I am dead, what do you expect to come back? And if I am dead and somebody responds, it's pretty inappropriate. People sent it. So Rashi picks up on the fact that it's that it's a lie, and Rashi says he was afraid, so he lied. If he'll say that the brother's alive Yair, have you Etzli? Then he'll say, 'Bring this brother to me.' So, in order to avoid the ramifications of the situation, I think it's important to consider the implications of saying we have a brother who's not here, and then Yisef is going to say, 'So bring the brother to me,' so he just avoids the entire issue altogether.
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It's a very pragmatic approach to dealing with it. It's a very beautiful Rashi. I'd like to offer a different pshat. Maybe a little bit more alpine rush. Rashi always gives the simplest pshat. I'll give a little bit of a different perspective. You'll notice in the pasuk that Yehuda says, '很好' have a lot of elderly fathers. "V'yeled zekunim katan " And he has a child who's who's younger,"Yeled zekunim. But when it refers to Yosef HaTzaddik It doesn't refer to him as the son of Yaakov Avinu, but as our brother, 'Va'achiv Mase.' How do we survive? That's not a small question. Survival is not a simple thing. When we think about survival back in the day When we were tribal When we lived more in small communities So for a person to leave the community, for a person to leave the tribe, for a person to leave thatchtätel, it was very dangerous. Literally, very, very dangerous. Physically dangerous to leave.
And for us today, in a different type of way, it's very dangerous. We'll speak about that in a moment. Yosef Hatzadik is sold down to Mitzrayim, and the brothers come through different gates. And we know that Yosef Hatzadik accuses them of being spies, because otherwise, why are you coming through all these different gates? So it seems then that the brothers At least on some level, for whatever reason, they were searching for Yosef Hatzadik. When they came to Mitzrayim He said, "Yosef Hatzadik has been missing for years." So we need to find him. And perhaps we could say as follows: Up until this moment Yehuda held that hope that Yosef HaTzaddik was alive That he'd be able to go find his brother. They'd be looking somewhere in the streets, and they found a lot of people who are not doing anything. Yeah, and they'd see some vagabond, some beggar on the side of the streets, and they would say, "Yosef, it's us."
And they'd bring him back. And so the entire time that the brothers were Hemming and hawing. Where is Yosef HaTzaddik? It wasn't because they were lying. It's because they were hopeful. But Yehuda understands a very basic truth: that if I'm going to convince the viceroy of Egypt to let Binyamin go I'm going to have to speak the truth. Because we know that Dvarimay yitzim elalev, mealev, nchnasim elalev, that the words that we say from a deep place of honesty, they seem to resonate. More deeply with the people that we're speaking with There's always that dynamic, charismatic speaker And it's very beautiful and it's very exciting. But it doesn't always penetrate us in the deepest way. And then there are certain sadikim when they speak, they're not necessarily the most dynamic rabbim, they're not necessarily the most charismatic, but they're exceptionally real. And because they're exceptionally real, it's like it makes a hole in our hearts and it borrows its way in very deeply.
And somehow, in some way They're able to reach us in a way that the charismatic speaker is not. And a person could walk away from one of these charismatic speakers with a nice idea. It was great. It was entertaining. But when someone real gets up to speak and they say something that comes from their heart, it touches the other person in a very deep way because real is very attractive. The self only responds to it the presence of another self. That's no small thing. Because there's a great vulnerability in showing up as self. Especially in dating. In the beginning, dating is very uncomfortable. It's very awkward. Why is it so awkward? Because I don't want to show you who I am. Because if I show you the data, I could be rejected. And so the self does not naturally show up on a date. The problem, of course, with that is that it's not attractive to meet someone who's not in the same place as you. In fact, it's the opposite of attractive.
That's why Sometimes a person Specifically, the girls say this all the time. A guy in theory could be very good looking until he opens up his mouth. You have that guy. You have like that macho guy who shows up, talking to his friends, bro, what's going? It's not a move. It's start speaking in that way. Nobody's attracted to that. It's not comfortable. It's not safe because it's not real. Masha'inkim, when someone shows up in himself. They show up. This is me. He named me. It's a nuclear reactor of love and connection when we do that. So Yehuda understood that if I'm going to make an impact over here on Yosef HaTzaddik, then I need to drop all pretenses. No more parts. There just has to be self. No more protection. Just being very real in this moment. And perhaps we can suggest that in this moment. Where Yehuda strips away all of the fears and all of the fakeness, and just shows up real in that moment, so he says to Yosef HaTzaddik, "Our brother is dead."
And maybe in a certain way, it's the first time that Yehuda ever really considered this possibility. Maybe up until now, every time they said our brother's not with us, it was with the hopes that we're going to find him. But in this moment, he lays his soul bare, and it's the death of hope. Our brother is dead. And he's not Yaakov's son in this case. He's not Binyamin. He's not this elderly child. It's it's this was our brother And because of our actions, he's dead. And it's even more profound when you think about it because there's something that we have to grapple with. How do we survive this whole test that Yehuda had? We're not going to kill Yosef HaTzaddik. We're not going to put him in the bar and allow him to be eaten by Nachashim and Akravim. Let's send him down. We'll send him down to Mitzrayim.
If Yosef Hatzadik believes that he can find Hakadosh Baruch Hu anywhere in the world, if he's not going to be a shepherd, if he's going to find God in math and science, which is what he was dreaming about economy and science, astronomy. So good. So we'll send them down. You have a big theory. You have a big hashkafa. You want to test it out? See how it's going to go. Good. So we'll send you down to Mitzrayim. But now Yehuda has to come to grapple with a basic reality. Maybe it was a good idea to test this experiment. We believe in being shepherds, removed from the world. You believe in being in the world. Fine. But how does someone survive without a brother? How do we survive without family? And so, in this moment, Yehuda says to Yosef Not knowing that he's Yosef, Achiv Mase.
He takes responsibility. He died, and in a certain way, it's because we were his brothers and we let him down all of the times. All of the times that Yosef Hadad Sadik was crying out to us for help, all the time that he was running and saying dibasam ron, he was giving all the reports to Yaakov Avinu, and the times where he was sharing us with his dreams. All of those times, we let him down as a brother. Why was Yosef Hadad Sadik sharing those dreams with them? I'm your brother. We're all in this together. We're a family. Achiv mase, our brother died. I want to share with you what it's like to be an heir to Israel right now. So the events of Simchas Torah were beyond brutal. But I'm not talking now about the actual attacks themselves. I'm talking about what it feels like to live in Israel at this moment.
This summer I was working for NCSY. And I was speaking in a hotel that's basically five minutes away from Beit Meir. Some of you went on NCSY color where Eishalaim is. So from my house on a Friday To five minutes past eight, Mayors what? It's a twenty-minute drive, a twenty-five-minute drive with traffic. It took us an hour and twenty-five minutes to get there on an Arab Shabbos. Because there were thousands upon thousands of people that marched from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to protest the democratic reform. And they were marching with their Israeli flags and giving out waters and ice creams and watermelons on the side of the highway. Since we were stuck in traffic anyway, my kids were like, 'Abba, do you think we could get some watermelon?' I said, "No." Just my luck. It would have been at that moment that the traffic broke.
The country was tearing itself apart. I don't know if you guys heard about it in America as something you read about on CNN. I'm telling you, I've never seen the country so fractured. Thank you. And there was a real hava mina. People were talking about civil war. And those that were on the side of Anti-democratic reform, there was even a shprach: "We're no longer going to serve in the army." We're not interested in serving in Tsahal anymore. We don't want to serve this country. It was a real conversation that was happening in the country. In the summer There were charedim, chilonim Mizrachnikim People who were datilumi. This summer, every single type of Jew existed in Eretz Yisrael: Sfarim, I think 很好 After some chastira There are no more charedim. There are no more chilonim. There are no more datilumi. No more mizrachi. There are no svardim, there are no ashkenazim.
I have never seen anything like this before in my life. It is the most beautiful time. In the most tragic time, it is the most beautiful time that I have ever spent in Eretz Yisrael. In 16 years, I have never been more comfortable living in Eretz Yisrael. It's unbelievable. The stories of the people who have been affected by this, and the ones who are still being affected by it. The guy who had a restaurant in Tel Aviv that wasn't kosher, that kashered his restaurant so that he could serve people and make sure that he could serve all Jews. Aroma, you guys know the cafe Aroma. Aroma closed down. The one in Beit Shemesh is making ten thousand sandwiches a day. Ten thousand sandwiches a day. My parents, who are retired, who live in Eretz Yisrael All day long, they're sitting and making sandwiches. My mother, this is like my mother's like a Jewish, like a really Jewish mother. You know what I'm saying, like. She just loves to make eggs, like in general. You know what I'm saying? Like the type of mother you walk in the house because you want an egg.
I want a steak. But you're not doing that, right? My mother is sitting there on the griddle, just making eggs all day. Most unbelievable thing: the country is shut down. There's no division. There's no period. You go to a base. Who's flipping burgers for the Chayalim? It's everybody. All the people that are identified as Charedi and Haredi, and also in the Chilonim and Atilumi and Mizrahi and Sfardi and Ashkenazi, everyone flips burgers equally. Everybody raises money equally. Everybody is doing whatever they can. It's the most incredible thing. Like you guys remember, there's like a lot of anger in Eretz Israel. Like speak to a taxi driver, and like you did nothing wrong He's just very angry at you, and you have no idea why. It's the craziest thing. There's no more anger, the entire country. There's no more anger. Nobody's upset at each other. Everyone's just like I can't tell you what it was like.
When the call came out in the beginning of the war, that the Chayalim wanted sittus. It's. Every yeshiva was making sittus. I don't know if you guys saw the picture. There was a picture of Rav Isaacson just sitting in Bais Medrash, making sittus. It's the most classic Rav Isaacson moment of all time. It's like somebody put on the WhatsApp group like we need sittus. So Rav Isaacson, I guess we need sittus now. This is Yeshiva Torah. He's like, 'That's your job.' I'm making sense of this. It's the most beautiful time to live in Eretz Yisrael. Because we finally got it into our thick skulls. We're slow learners, the Jewish people And we keep forgetting that we're brothers. That's why we need the cousins to remind us that we're brothers. It's a beautiful place, and I think it's the most special time I've ever been living in Eretz Yisrael in my life.
It's just everybody loves everybody. I'll share with you a very beautiful story. I don't know if you guys know this, but Rev Isaacson and I have daughters that are best friends. Rev Isaacson's twins, and one of my daughters are best friends. One of the girls from the group comes from a Charedi family. So there was a husband who went off to war, and a wife who had two very young children, and she felt very overwhelmed and felt like she couldn't take care of her kids. So she moved into Amapechemesh. Into this person's house, a charedi person's house. This person doesn't have like this is not like Los Angeles where they have back houses. You could say this isn't like somebody had like a little mini apartment. They stayed in the house, mamish in the house And so the mother was doing laundry for the kids and for herself, and they were eating all their meals at the same dining room. Everybody was together.
So after two weeks This is the mother who's not from. She comes to this charedi mother, who's significantly older than her And she says, "Can I borrow a skirt?" So this charedi mother, she looks at her and goes, "What for?" She said, "Well, I feel uncomfortable. We're living in your house, and you're charedim, and I'm not dressed nicely." And this charedi mother looked at her and she said, 'Absolutely not. I'm not giving you a skirt.' This is your home. You do whatever you feel comfortable with. The woman started crying. This is a mother who's a woman who's been eating meals in this person's house. She doesn't know them; they're strangers. Eating meals in their house. Having her laundry done and her kids taken care of. She said to her, "Af pam b'chayim shelil lo shamati acharedim kazu." Not once in my life have I ever heard of charedim like you.
My entire life, I grew up hearing the charedim hate you. I never saw anything like this in my life. And I want you to know, on my block, six families from down south moved in. Six families. They're not even going to be able to afford it. I think they'll have to live in the streets. You know, if you had a vacation rental, Yerushalayim, you can't find an apartment. You can't get a hotel room. They're full, full of refugees, and not just the ones from down south. The ones from up north also. So many families from up north. That's where I was born. Avichai is literally on the border. Today, again, he's one step back. But in the beginning of the war, Avichai day one was mamish on the border. When he got home, I think it was after a month. He got his first leave. I asked them how far they were from the border. So we were upstairs in the office. He said, 'Okay, so he said, "About from here to the mall," pointing to the mall. Rabbi said, "That's very close.'
That's closer than from here to the Opal. That's very close. It's real. It's real. All those families had nowhere to go. Where did they go? Strangers opened up their homes and said, 'Take my homes. Take my home.' It's not like they couldn't make Parnasah. There's plenty of Jews coming to Israel to visit. These people could rent out their homes. I'm renting out my home. Nobody charged anybody. Nobody charged anybody. How did these people get groceries? What did they have? Everyone in the neighborhood went out. And bought groceries for everybody. Chanukah was coming up. So you know what they did. They raised money so every single kid from a refugee family could get toys for Chanukah. There was a warehouse full of toys that they sold all their toys at cost. They said, "Just raise the money. We'll give you the toys at cost." Every kid got toys.
My mother announced to our family. She said, "This year, I'm only giving toys like the little kids, and I'm not giving to any of the bigger kids because we're going to donate all the money for toys. So my brother said, 'Well, my kids are refugees too,' and it was like a whole. It was me. I said that, but my brother said it too. It's the most beautiful time. Achiv meis. We did a terrible job. Did we do a terrible job, guys? We forgot the most basic principle in all of Yiddishkeit. We're brothers. Every single Jew is a brother with every single other Jew, and we found ways because we're so smart. We found ways to create communities upon communities. This one is not like me, and that one is not like me, and I don't believe in this one's tirah, and I don't believe in that one's tirah. Did we figure out ways to keep each other separate?
We did an amazing, horrific job. And every once in a while, Hakadosh Baruch Hu reminds us, and this time it was the biggest patch of my lifetime. Much bigger than anything I've ever seen. You guys are brothers. We like say it. It's like a cute thing that rabbis say in Ashir. Like, gotta have achdos. Achdos has become a cudgel. Achdos is an attack word. It's what people say when somebody does something that they don't like. They go achdos, achdos. They throw it out there as if saying achdos in an angry way is going to create more achdos. Achdus is not a joke. Achdus is the natural condition of the Jewish soul. If you are a Yid, then you believe deeply in Achdus. You believe my brother is me, and I am my brother. We say in Yichida, in the highest point of the Jewish soul, every single Jew is connected. That's not a joke.
The Beis Hamikdash is destroyed because we lose each other, and the Beis Hamikdash is rebuilt because we find each other. The most powerful mussar I ever heard in my entire life was from the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe wrote that Gullus began when Yosef HaTzaddik was sitting in a pit, and Reuven was doing tshuva for an avera that he had done twenty years prior. Our brothers and sisters are in pits, Rabbi Eisei. There are people that are suffering. Where is it from? Somebody else will take care of it. That's not my brother. Somebody else will take care of it. If we don't treat each other like brothers, the Rabbanim Shalom is going to push us to make sure we treat each other like brothers. So there's a certain point where the brothers, Yosef HaTzaddik, he's probably alive somewhere. At the end, when Yehuda gets honest, he says, not knowing that he's Yosef Hatzadik, Achiv Mase. How could he have survived without us? How could Yosef Hatzadik have walked the streets of Eretz Yisrael for 22 years and be matsliach?
Who would have taken care of him when he was walking down the streets? Who is going to take him in? Some government program is going to take him in. There's no government program. It's family. That's all there is at the end of the day. There's family. That's who takes you in. One of the Mivasar alumni. He's a social worker now, and he told me his dream is to start social programs for Ga'el. So I said, Adam, it's fine, but I'm just curious, why are you doing that? He said, because we have them all already. That's an unbelievable thing to think about. If your car breaks down, if your car breaks down, we have an organization for you. Call Yedidim or Chika. But the you know I'm saying. If your car breaks down, if you have a special needs child, if you get sick, if you don't have food for Shabbos If you get a cut, you call Atzale. Seriously, what do we not have?
We we've created unbelievable institutions of Achdus, But as a people, do we really feel Achdus? If the only time you experience Achdus is when you're walking in the airport in San Diego and you see somebody else with the yarmulke, this just happened and you do this move, you do this, you go. It's that slight Jew nod Like that. That's our, like the anti-Semitism is real. It's very real And it's a big bracha. It's a very big bracha Because we're going to wake up to the fact that they're making havdala because we didn't make kiddush. They're pushing us together. They're pushing us together And it'll stop when we finally stay together. That's not an inspirational thing to say. It's the truth of reality. Our choice in life is either to align ourselves with reality as it is, or to have reality push us back into reality. Those are the two choices. Reality is happening. And a lot of people in life, reality is happening, and they close their eyes and plug their ears and go, "No, I'm going to go against the reality." But it always catches up to you because you can't bend reality. At some point, reality pushes you back.
So this is what's happening. We chose for so many years to bend reality, to push each other away. So now reality pushed us back together. This is a very big avodah And I want to share with you guys something. You guys think that it, like you're in America, so you don't know, like. Like, what does it really mean to stay connected? I want to share with you something. I'm sharing this with you guys as friends. Our Rosh Yeshiva He doesn't like to show emotion. Like loudly or Or viscerally or in a way that you could see it. But I'm telling you, it's there. Since Zachariah resigned from Iluim His son Zachariah, since Zachariah has four children under the age of five. And he's doing real things, Zehary. He's mamish. Can't say out loud what he's doing, but his gun is quite large. In fact, Rabbi Isaacson said He said, Rabbi Saffer, the story you tell about being held at gunpoint, that gun gets bigger every year.
So Rabbi Isaacson said to Rabbi Saffer, Zehary's gun is actually that big. Rabbi said, you have to reach out to the rachiva. You have to reach out to the rachiva and say, Rebbe, I'm thinking about you. And if you were there when Avichai was Av Beit You have to reach out to Avichai, even if he doesn't respond. You have to reach out and say, Avichai, I'm thinking about you. And Rav Gold, I'm thinking about you. You have to reach out to these people. Chayav. They don't have to respond, but you have to reach out. You think it doesn't mean anything? It means a tremendous amount. We're not alone in this. I felt. I came to America. I landed. Friday morning, and then I was in JFK, and then I jumped over to Los Angeles. When I landed in Los Angeles, I got a message from a friend of mine: "Is everything okay?" I didn't know what was happening. I was on a plane. I said, "What do you mean? Is everything okay?" He said there was a siren just now over Beit Shemesh. There was a siren over Yerushalayim.
So I messaged my wife, even though it was already Shabbos. I messaged my wife for Matzah Shabbos. Just tell me, is everything okay? So Matzah Shabbos When I think about it, it's like Sunday morning in America already from Los Angeles. So Matzah Shabbos, Sunday morning, I spoke to my wife. It's hard as a Kowewli. It's hard to be seventy five hundred miles away from your family when you hear that there was a rocket attack. And I'm on the phone with Mikey And he's six years old. And I said, Mikey, where were you when the siren went off? So he was. He said, I was outside playing. All the little boys play outside on Friday night. So I said, and what did you do when the siren went off? So he said, I ran inside to go to the ma'amad and I didn't have my shoes on, so I left my shoes outside. I said, "Was anybody home?" So he said, "Yeah, Chana was home on the couch sleeping." So we went inside to the mamad together. I'm speaking to another daughter. Where were you? I was in Shul. What did people do in Shul? They just moved away from the windows. There wasn't time to get to a miklat.
If you're far away from your family and something happens, your heart starts to beat a little bit, and you just want to know the details. Distance cannot be a cause for cognitive dissonance. Just because you're six thousand miles away in New York doesn't mean that you can afford, emotionally and in reality, to be distant from those Jews in Eretz Israel. You can't afford it. If you're distant, if you feel like it's happening on CNN, it's not happening on CNN, guys. This was our brothers, Achiv Mace Achiv Mace. We're responsible for those brothers. There are brothers. They're not our father's children. There's a difference. We're not just brothers because we happen to be born to the same parents. We're brothers because that's what we are in essence. And I just want to say thank you for all the guys that reached out And to all the guys that just wanted to check in, and to all the guys that mipam lepam, Rabbi. I just want you to know I'm thinking about the yeshiva, and I hope you guys are doing well.
And guys ask how's it going in yeshiva As well as it can be under the circumstances. The guys are doing great, Baruch Hashem. And the guys have grown tremendously. What they've seen over the last eight or nine weeks has been unbelievable. But I just want to say thank you to those guys. It mattered a tremendous amount. If you reached out to your abayim and you're just a one-liner, I heard something happened, Rebbe. I want you to know I'm with you. It meant a tremendous amount. Shenizker, Rebbe, I say we're on the verge of Mashiach. We're on the verge. When I say verge, it's like at. We're talking about we're not even talking about minutes anymore. We're talking about moments away. There's a tremendous opportunity right now in Shamayim for us to join together. It's a tremendous opportunity. Doesn't matter what shirt you wear. Doesn't matter what yeshiva you go to. It doesn't matter you wear a yarmulke. Don't wear a yarmulke. It doesn't matter. Rabbi, I am telling you, you guys have to catch up to us. In Chutzl'aretz, you have to catch up to in Eretz Israel. In Eretz Israel, there is no more charedim. There is no more chilonim.
It's a big hack. There is a big hack right now. They're like, we have differences, and we have to make sure that we maintain the dignity of those differences. But lamaisa Nobody's hacking anymore about democratic reform. I can always tell what's going on in the country based on the overpasses. You know that's like Israeli politics, like the overpass right before Mivasaret every morning. I'm driving with Rav Isaac, and I'm like, okay, what do we believe in today? The signs on the overpasses are We're going to win only with Achdus. That's the signs on the overpasses today. You guys have to catch up. You guys are behind us because it happened on our front lines. You guys are behind us. Blessed Hashem, we should talk about Zeicha fast to come together. And if we come together, the Rebbeinu Shlom. If we treat each other like brothers, and B'ez Hashem, the Rebbeinu Shlom will treat us like sons.
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