Yom Kippur ~ Aish Kodesh 10/06/2011

Rabbi Henoch Dov Hoffman

Index of Rabbi Hoffman's Audio Files Aish Kodesh October 6, 2011 Yom Kippur When you convert there are no accidents. Youâre changing from accident to Divine Providence. Thereâs absolute free will and absolute divine supervision simultaneously. You canât find G*d unless you find yourself. Stand back and non-defensively review ourselves this time of year. At the speech the other night it was very nice to be talking to Susan Heitler because she works as a psychologist with professional tennis players from all over the world. How you learn from failure is what makes the difference between a good player and a poor player. Most people internalize the failure and the failure becomes them. But we donât believe that. We believe we have a pure neshumas inside us. We say every morning my neshumas is pure. She works specifically on five minutes after a bad shot. Itâs not so easy for her to teach them not to internalize it. The Torah puts a lot of effort into saying itâs very, very hard work; itâs avodas HaShem. We want to do teshuva. Weâve been working on Yom Kippur teshuva stories that illustrate these points. They have many details to them; theyâre very well written. We worked on one, between Rabbi Gamliel and Yeshua. Weâre talking about an art. The Aish Kodesh had to work very hard before the war in order to not be overwhelmed by the Warsaw Ghetto. He introduces the concept that weâre working on our conscious mindfulness, so weâll read what he wrote about that. He says we learn from kashrute, a mistake is like a drop of pork fat that falls in your beef stew. You donât have to throw it out; one part in 60. We eat it and thatâs making use of the bad and using it to serve G*d. My friend asks how am I going to explain to the children that Jews have Satan? Who is Satan? Student: Satan is somebody who tests you. We donât declare the new moon and donât blow the shofar the day before Rosh Hashanah to confuse Satan. Why is Meshiach descended from Lotâs incest with his daughters? The same reason. To fool the Satan. Islam and Xtianity did something entirely different with Satan because they were under the influence of Zoroastrianism, which says that there is a good G*d and a bad G*d. Satan means prosecuting attorney. And heâs G*dâs main helper. This guy is walking down the road and sees one big semi after another going by and he flags one down and asks, and heâs told weâre carry all your misdeeds and transgressions to your trial. Finally comes a little VW bug and the driver says weâre going to your trial and weâre carrying all your good deeds. The mind is a courtroom; weâre constantly judging everything. The goal of the Torah is The schoichet said weâre not putting our sins on the chicken. Student: It goes back to Cain. The death can reach the world because somebodyâs perception of an event. He thought he was rejected because his sacrifice was not accepted, so by shedding that blood it was a form of atonement for that. When we do that to the chicken we are doing that for ourselves, so basically almost the chicken in a symbol of the shedding of that blood; itâs a metaphor for our own acceptance of our shortcomings. Person: When you hold the chicken, which is warm and gentle, itâs a reminder of my own death and to make the most of every moment. But I have a lot of excuses. We have conflicts of interest in business transactions. My agent tried to talk me into taking a compromise when I sold a house and I asked, âWho are you working for?â The more neurotic we are, the more we try to control the situation through manipulation. That is lo lishmah, not for itâs own sake. Itâs a challenge for each one of us know when there are ulterior motives going on. The Torah asks us to examine ourselves because thatâs where we grow. Through faith we have a counter to anxiety. I donât have to manipulate to get the best price possible; thereâs a G*d in the world. Evolved Torah people are very calm inside. Theyâre not anxious. Itâs the result of very hard work. Steve Jobs said every day, even before he got sick, this could be The Day. There were no solutions in Israel. Iran says Israel is a one-bomb country. Thatâs the way Jewish history has always been. Itâs better for a Jew to beg for water in the desert than to sit by the Nile. Student: In the Matrix the man said he would rather have the fake steak. Sitting by the Nile is being in Matrix. In our work, civilization is the Matrix. G*d gave us the opportunity to manipulate and feel abandoned, and then we have a choice to engage in this great work called Avodas HaShem and be ehved HaShem, a servant of HaShem. I have an animal, I have food, and I am exchanging. The food came from a farmer, people drove it in on a truck. In Alabama they passed a law forcing all the Hispanics out of the state and thereâs no one to pick the crops. There are a lot of processes which go into putting the grapes on the table, and if Iâm mindful of the whole process and whatâs going to happen when I dissolve that grape into my bloodstream. Once I eat it, it will be dissolved into my bloodstream. Itâs a very aggressive thing to do. Human beings live through aggression. Thatâs an exchange. What am I giving in return? I canât be peh-el-peh with G*d unless I can be close to people. Thatâs why we study Torah together. Mouth-to-mouth relationships is much higher than books. The oral Torah is a much higher level than the written Torah. You can quote the Torah to justify all kinds of horrible things. But this process of collaborating with people and making collective synergies. Weâre hanging by a thread. Entropy threatens our lives. Relationships are very delicate. Entropy means all the components become more isolated, more remote. Some people would rather have something look good cosmetically. I want used books and used people. Everything is an exchange and a prioritization. If we have a pile of books, the Chumash goes on the top. When I say a bracha on this grape, Iâm raising every grape that was eaten without any mindfulness. My contribution is, "what am I going to do with my energy from the grape?" Number one is gratitude for all the components that went into the grape, including the sun. I made wine for a whole summer in Bordeaux in France. Thereâs a lot that goes into a grape. Then we pull the grape apart and the complexity, how the seed can grow another vine. Then Iâm going to use the energy to talk. Am I going to teach or just blow hot air? Suddenly just eating one grape becomes a big deal. We have to slow down and be mindful. When Iâm mindful and creating synergies, good collaborations between people through good judgment, then Iâm paying my price in the exchange. This gift gives me the confidence to give out food. HaShem created humans with potential for mindfulness and mindlessness. My son taught us a niggin, âIâm sleeping but my heart is awake and thereâs a knocking at the door,â from the Song of Songs. Many people can sleep through life. You go to your job and react to it and most of the things you do are by habit. This is called sleep. Weâre calling what we just did with the grape work. HaShem didnât give the chicken that option to be conscious. A chicken is a chicken. We meditate on this every morning. Everything is an ego trip and thereâs no difference between a man and an animal. Thatâs the baseline and we have to work up from it. The rabbis in the Talmud made a diary every day. Are you a human reaction or a human being? Are you a human doing or a human being? And G*d never gives us the security to know what our fates are going to be. In the desert youâre on the Zion ship and Abraham says you donât know where youâre going. Ever. You can take small steps and if youâre surprised maybe youâre getting somewhere. Student: when I review my day chances are Iâm doing the same thing conceptually with the same stories, and if Iâm surprised then maybe I stopped my stories long enough to let something new happen. If I write out all my notes of everything Iâm going to say, then creativity gets shut down. Steve Jobs could connect everything to everything. He dropped out of college and didnât look through stereotypic glasses. He said the first mouse by Xerox had three buttons and people got so anxious that he developed a mouse with one button. A lot of attention to detail. He stayed in college after he dropped out so he took a lot of calligraphy courses to learn grace in letters and a lot of Macintosh stuff came from this. Friday night we say all the prisoners at the table. Weâre responsible for the bars in our prison cell. Whatâs my ulterior motive when I eat the grape? Iâm worried that if I eat when Iâm teaching I wonât be thinking about the grape and Iâll get anxious. I want to be mindful and feel something caressing my lips and going down my gullet. But eating out of anxiety thereâs nothing more to it. It soothes the anxiety but Iâm not mindful to it. Big money goes into getting people addicted to drinking coffee. The Torah has this word âtouched.â Sometimes my ulterior motives are just a light touch. Iâm not really interested in my life-force. I need to lose weight and I know it affects every aspect of my health. A million things affect the food value. The sugar in Oreo cookies is designed for addiction. Iâm damaging my health. Iâm at such an age and level with my food I know I could be creating myself or destroying myself. Thereâs a lot at stake. Abraham started our religion by eating the chicken. I spent most of the afternoon preparing the chicken and tonight after class Iâm going to cook the chicken. First itâs soaked, then salted, then rinsed three times. There are three qualities of soul and one, nefesh, the cow soul, resides in the heart and we share it with animals and rocks. The blood is the soul. When Cain didnât cover Abelâs blood, why is that a big deal? Itâs disrespectful to G*d. We thank the chicken and the ancestors of the chicken where all the birds covered Abelâs blood. They covered the blood of the first human murder and we cover their blood when we kill them. You can murder a chicken. Student: Killing for no reason, like the way the buffalo were killed off. We could be a mindless consumer. The worst thing is to buy one in a store and not even think it was even alive, to think that everything in the store is there for my use. I can become way too physicalized in this health movement. Then G*d isnât part of it. There are people who torture animals but the worst is total mindlessness. Student: What is forgiveness? The Hebrew is different from the English. Iâm agreeing to dance. A synergistic relationship creates. Entropy is when people get more distant from each other. Iâm intimate with the grape, the people, I have new thoughts when we talk. Then weâre co-creating and living in the image of HaShem. Steve Jobs didnât get caught in a box; thatâs what made him creative. Our potential gets plugged up. The mainline for Yom Kippur is âremember us for life, King who desires life.â Write us in the Book Of Life. Life is our potential. Tuma means that our potential consistently gets stopped up one way or another. Ulterior motives and manipulation are the main ways they get stopped up. We get scared. We anticipate. We want to know what happens in the economy tomorrow. The famine came to the whole Middle east and Yaakov, who was very smart- we win the Nobel prizes because of the Talmud. We have a 2,000 year history of universal adult education. We expect you to do teshuva and learn every day. Half of Europe was still in caves. Nobody in the world knows what theyâre looking at when theyâre looking at a Jew. Tsivya is thriving in her house. Sheâs making money, Barryâs making money, whatâs going to happen? Student: theyâre going to blame them. Mechila is synergy. Forgiveness has a Xtian connotation. Mea culpa. Two things donât lead to teshuva: I had a bad day and you will suffer. All of our stories are about hurt feelings. Hurt feelings are a gift. Student: Forgiveness is admitting youâre wrong to that person and telling that person what youâre going to do to correct it and youâre not going to do it again. Thatâs teshuva, not forgiveness. Itâs a commitment to correct the behavior that caused the problem. Weâre fiddling on the roof, balancing between love and discipline. With your right hand you embrace me and with your left hand is on my head. The triangle for machol is dancing circle and forgiveness. The test of human behavior is creativity. Are you fulfilling your potential? Maybe you wasted some of your potential. I changed this garage so I could fulfill my potential as a rabbi. Iâm listening to the grape but I have to listen to myself. We will do and we will listen to ourselves doing. The first step is to forgive everybody. You have a responsibility for your grudge process. It has nothing to do with anybody else. The way you hold onto things Student: Itâs interesting who the forgiveness is for. Machol means dance circle because when Iâm dancing Iâm fulfilling my purpose but the sum is greater than the parts. If I can create a collective Mt. Sinai here. If Iâm bringing out all the potential of each person, our study sessions are going to be like explosions. We call it skillful means. Or we end up bouncing off each otherâs idealized version of ourselves and we end up with nothing. We see companies go into a lethargy. The Baal Shem said he couldnât get into a shul because all the prayers stayed in the room and there was no room for him. Nothing was going up. They are all hoarding. My father was disappointed when I told him I was going to be a rabbi. He owned a liquor store and he said, âMy truck drivers earn more than you do.â I had to choose between what I thought my potential was and evaluating what my father thought of me. A man was hit by his father and became a suicide bomber. What happens when you donât find a partner to talk to? All of this stuff is negotiation. I guarantee Egypt would improve its economy if it makes a synergy with Israel. Countries used to invite Jews in and then theyâd kill the Jews after they became jealous. The triangle this week is on one side books of Jewish law, like Shulchan Aruch or Mishna Berurah (the clarified learning). Law is important. Regulations are important. Thereâs a huge move that says government laws and regulations are terrible. If you do away with laws people will eat each other alive. We need laws and courts and police. Theyâre all external and they can be abused and people feel the government has been abusive. We need discipline. Thatâs the left hand under my head. Moshe gave us rules, a structure on which to build. Then thereâs Aggadida, pulling feeling from the heart like water from the well. One story can transform you. We have Aggadida and halachah. Now we have to create a synthesis. The Talmud. Moments of stories and moments of laws. Iâm going to tell you one and challenge you to show the interaction between the two. We believe people can develop and change and the main word of this season is hope. Caesar Chavez picketed my fatherâs store. The Jews started a large labor movement in Loge, Poland. The owners turned the strike into a pogrom and ended up killing the Jewish workers. A lot of times forgiveness is just relieving peopleâs guilt. Itâs not reality. I say our dance is a little weak, how are we going to improve it? I love this story. I want you to see how the story interacts with the rules. We have people who do rules very well. They daven, they keep kosher. But then the Torah says G*d tried to create the world with gevurah and nothing happened. Too many rules, you shut down everything. We have a whole group of people say letâs throw all the rules out. Ron Paul says itâs shutting down the liberty of the people. The Torah says to him, âYouâre crazy.â Synergy is a thin thread. Everything naturally goes towards entropy. If you want synergy, you have to work at it and develop a keen sense of balance. If you donât have it, youâll find yourself alone and isolated. If you build up the walls, things come in through the windows. Every town in Europe had its own court and the big machor was the head of the court of that town. They could assess fines or put a Jew in charem, shunning. We figured out money a long time ago. Yakov Yosef Polanoy was the head of the court of the town of Zargarod. He was very disciplined and he wanted his congregation in shul at 6:50 with his tefillin on. He comes to shul at 7:00 a.m., the doors are locked and everyone is over here listening to a man telling stories. He starts screaming. The gabbai comes running. Yakov Yosef says, âstories? Bubbameisers? Weâre supposed to start davening! Bring that storyteller over here!â So the gabbai brings the man over and he says, âWhat did you do to my minyan? You destroyed it with your grandmotherâs tales!â The man said, âLet me tell you a story.â Yakov Yosef is ready to kill him. The man says, âI have a coach driver named Alexy. He faces the back of the coach because you never know where the coach is going. Thatâs faith.â If you know where youâre going youâre in trouble. Itâs not your world. If you go through a day without being surprised, you donât have faith, youâre living a script. âWe were driving the coach and I saw a wise old Russian peasant. I said to him, âMy horses not neighing.â The man said youâre holding the reigns too tight.â Yakov Yosef fell down on the ground, sobbing. Skillful means. Stories change people. Student: Yakov Yosef should have been surprised; he should have said what could have captured the attention of my minyan? Person: When you hold the reigns too tight and youâre not free to let your mind explore and make up a story, itâs all restriction and no creativity. He was holding the reigns on himself. Thatâs why he was crying. You donât cry for other people like that. He was a perfectionist with himself. Yakov Yosef came to study in the Baal Shem Tovâs Midrash to study. Someone said what are you making? Yakov Yosef said Iâm studying my Talmud. Are you making a living? Yakov Yosef says I have to study the Talmud, I donât have time for schmoozing. Go talk to someone who has nothing better to do. That afternoon he met the Baal Shem. He said, âWhat did you think of Elijah the Prophet today?â Total surprise, total shock. He went back to Zargarod and made a list of all the fines he had assessed and paid every one of them back. He realized that his projective world was skewed through 3D glasses, and thatâs when you start doing teshuva. He became the Baal Shemâs most faithful follower, and after the Baal Shem died he went around telling stories. He heard that a very wealthy man was paying top dollar to hear stories. So he went there and was treated with great riches. He couldnât remember one story. He stayed there for a whole week. The man was paying him to stay there. The man comes after him, crying, âCanât you remember one story?â He remembers one story. We came to a town at Easter. The priest was organizing a passion play and then they would come and kill Jews. That was the spring ritual in Europe. There was a big group in the town square and we went into a Jewish home where all the windows and doors and windows were boarded up. The Baal Shem Tov turned to me and said go tell the priest I want to talk to him. My eyes got big. You want me to die today? Theyâre ready to lynch! He goes to the square and told the priest âthe Baal Shem wants to see you.â The priest agreed to come. He came in and he started crying. Iâm really a Jew, I left the faith and I became a priest and I feel terrible. What can I do? How can I ever get forgiveness for what Iâve done? The Baal Shem says one if somebody comes and tells you this story, youâll know youâve been forgiven. The rich man says, âThat was me. I was the priest.â A story transforms people. We have stories and we have laws. You have to study both. Rabbi Gamliel is too much gevurah. Heâs the head of the Sanhedrim. He had a guy stand at the door of the study house who judged everybody who came in based on whether they were a hypocrite in or not. He only let consistent individuals in to study. [See previous week for full story.] Final Remark: I will be more aware of my exchanges. I had difficulty going to Shabbat meals when the conversation degenerates into small talk. Thatâs part of the exchange. Loneliness guarantees depression. People have empty places where the light never gets to inside themselves. On Yom Kippur every person has to understand their dark, empty places. Entropy is a dark, cold empty place. Rabbi Gamliel and Yeshua story from two weeks ago, the last class. Weâre interested in stories which model people who talk to each other. You will be judged by the quality of pillow talk with your spouse. Azariaâs wife was probably right when she told him to turn down the job as the head of the Sanhedrin. The next day they took the guard away from the door and stopped charging. 700 new people came in and hundreds of new laws were made. Gamliel said, âI clogged the pipes, I was wrong.â Then he has a dream that says, âno youâre right, theyâre wrong.â Who do you listen to? But the synergy was so obvious that the bais midrash turned from Hewlett Packard to Apple Computer. Or Enron. Mistrust. Leveraging, lies. A company is just like a family. Thereâs entropy and thereâs synergy. Nixon sulked. He said they wonât have anybody to beat up any more. If I hit a bad shot sincerely but right into the net, what did I do wrong? Gamliel screwed it up and shows us how we learn from screwing things up. Steve Jobs pushed himself all the time in a perfectionist way, which may have affected the cancer, and thatâs not a pretty part of the story. Gamliel found himself alone and said Iâm not going to sulk. Our thinking is narrow by definition. Because we have the Talmud we win Nobel prizes, we start up businesses. This is the book that gave birth to our religion and the Jewish mind. Itâs better than all the security in the world, having a Jewish mind tempered by 2,000 years of persecution in the crucible of history. One day youâre walking in the Warsaw Ghetto and the next day youâre walking in Jerusalem. I told the story about the Six Day War and I looked into the audience and saw a woman I hadnât seen in 44 years, and we had the same story about believing the countries were invading and we were going to die. We recognized each other from the Six Day War. I counseled a lot of Israeli soldiers. They pay a terrible price to be in a war. In one paragraph weâre talking about this amazing beautiful deep story and in the next line weâre talking about how we have to be on time for davening in the morning. SACRED FIRE page 226 -Return O Israelâ¦. Student: we are going to offer sacrifices with our lips: our lips will offer oxen. When we pray weâll be achieving the same thing we did when we offered that ox. If you can beg G*d for your life, youâre on to something. If you feel that moment of death in the chicken, thatâs always a powerful moment, youâre going to be transformed. The Aish Kodesh says every prayer, every study session should transform you. We have nothing to take for granted. But we live with faith and without anxiety that forces us to control every little thing. It becomes a good way to live and a good way to die. Student: That means our lips will offer our lives. I am the chicken. Every Korbon you had to say I am the Korbon. I will be cooking and eating this animal that will merit. They would only eat meat that they had brought as a Korbon. My grandmother brought every meat to the schoichet and made a personal connection. Now we have packing houses. Twelve times check the knife. No sins are ever put on an animal in Torah, anywhere. The scapegoat was there for discussion. All the people who were angry tried to kill the kohane who was taking the scapegoat out. It was a very high exchange. Goats donât have consciousness. We want the goat to go over the side of the cliff so the people who scapegoat, which was a lot- G*d created us to live at the expense of other organisms. If the animal has blood, think more. -Ashur cannot save usâ¦. How can you say to your hands you are our gods? Student: We take credit for what we do. -I will heal their backslidingâ¦. This is an amazing story. One rabbi splits the river for three schlubs and heâs comparing him to Moshe! I know this is a great story because I implicitly trust the Aish Kodesh. Why is a guy arguing with a river anyway? When the rabbi was dying he said life is a long river. Chaim in the back said what does that mean? The rebbe so itâs not a long river? We talk to rivers. You can have a good conversation with a river. Rivers have souls, rocks have souls. -You may or may not accomplish your purposeâ¦. Rivers and animals donât have choices. We have choices. Weâre comparing a river, which canât make a choice. We canât make a choice. A lot of people donât make choices; they script the whole thing. The river isnât talking; our consciousness is talking. After youâre on the river for a week, what do you hear? Student: I donât hear the busyness of the world. I hear the speed, the rocks, the rhythms. But I have to slow down to the riverâs speed. The first day, I canât listen. Iâm going way too fast. -There is a treatmentâ¦. Why does Rabbi Pinchasâs actions have more moral weight? Heâs making a choice. He gets credit for good choices. G*d built good consequences in for good choices. He can create synergy or entropy. We know he created synergy because he didnât cross the river alone. He took the baker and the Arab with him. If he had said theyâre not on my spiritual level, thatâs isolating. -Aside from the explanationâ¦. Sometimes saving is just making eye contact. What is he teaching us about synergy thatâs new and astonishing? Student: Something thatâs against the natural order can happen. Something in ourselves that goes again the flow can happen. When I see the bars of my prison, I can see the bars of your prison and save captives. Synergy saves lives; entropy kills people. Go with the river and go with the flow. -At the simplest level- FINAL REMARKS Student: I like forgiveness being a dance circle. Thereâs a lot to that interaction because itâs continuous. Is it over? Is the obligation gone? Forgiveness is a start. Itâs part of the flow of the river. Itâs not just about itâs done because thereâs always something next. Thatâs what the river understood. The river could put its own wish aside because thereâs always something next. We could pray for ourselves and thatâs good. But itâs in the plural and Kol Nidreâs in the plural, and if we can connect so we can be collateral for each other we can save each otherâs lives. The spirit of Yom Kippur is Iâll steal your sins, you steal mine. A lot of people just pray for themselves. Student: Can we put our fate consciously with really base people? Person: The person might be the recipient of the action while the person asking for forgiveness has to make himself soft and small. I had an unsatisfactory interaction with someone, and I thought maybe Iâll complain about her, no, I decided not to. Then I found out she had complained about me! I apologized to the person she complained to and apologized to her, too. I practiced on someone who is small fry in my life trying to work up to someone I canât get that third one to. Student: What struck me as powerful was forgive all iniquity and our lips will offer oxen. There are a lot of ways to look at it. This is really serious. Iâve had so much going on and Iâm repeating my behavior by wearing myself out, you have to be clear about what youâre asking for in your life and take it seriously. Be present, not get overwhelmed by the river. Person: I donât think I saved anyoneâs life today. I felt put on the spot. I felt dishonest after. I had received a gift card for my birthday to Tattered Cover. I knew exactly what book I was to get, Killing Lincoln by Bill Riley. I see a book I hadnât read, Night by Elie Weisel, and then I saw Stories of the Bible by Michael Berg. I was skimming it and saw a story by the Bal Shem Tov. It was beautiful. Sometimes forgiveness, no one has to say anything. Because of the love thatâs there. I didnât talk to my sister for a few years and had decided I wouldnât talk to her the rest of my life. The day she saw me in the hospitalâI had dismissed the letter she had writtenâbut the day she came into the hospital. This is where she works; she wasnât working that day. She knows all the nurses and doctors on the unit where I was in ICU. She told one of the aids to ask if she could come in. At that moment I could see the risk she had taken amongst her peers. We didnât need to discuss what had happened or say Iâm sorry, it was just there. Student: I didnât grow up in a Jewish family, but I had connections to the farm, so I knew what killing was like. I didnât know about elevating the food. Maybe for me some of the tests Iâm going through is to be more aware of that process. Rabbi Henoch Dov teaches in Denver, Colorado. You can contact him through his web page, www.RabbiHenochDov.com or via email, www.sh6r6v4t9@aol.com.

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