Vayeira ~ Aish Kodesh 10/21/2010

Rabbi Henoch Dov Hoffman

Index of Rabbi Hoffman's Audio Files Aish Kodesh October 21, 2010, Parsha Vayera HaShem appeared to Abraham on the plains of Mamre should really be oak trees of Mamre, and it stands for strength, the graves of Chanina ben Dosa and his wife have a 1,000 year old oak tree. They are usually planted on the graves of tzadikim. It is very special to visit a grave and study and talk to the tzadikim. HaShem was visiting Abraham when he was sick, the Shechinah rests over the bed of a sick person, so it is a way to witness the presence of HaShem. The innovation of Abraham is to be able to bless the bad. It is hard to activate the prayers of people; people mumble. The angels sing praises all night, they want HaShem to hear the perfection. The people who do not sing them with the right motivation are missing the boat, and that is most of us. G*d makes His parnasa from the praises of the Jewish people, when we sing His praises to the world, this sustains His presence in the world. To sing the whole Pezukai de Zimra every Friday and every Sunday morning. The Lines of Psalm, which includes the Hallelukas from Hodu through Yishtabach. We donât eat breakfast until after we have begged G*d for our life; He is recreating the world at every moment and our lives are hanging by a thread. We had a meal of thanksgiving. There is a purpose. The Jewish people have lived under a roof with holes in it. One of the biggest moments in my life was sitting in a restaurant during the time when there were a lot of restaurants being bombed and turning my back on the door. If we are the chosen people, why are we so vulnerable? The first question which is asked a potential convert at the bas din is why have the Jews been hounded out of every country and the answer they give determines if they are accepted or not. The purpose of prayer is to beg for our lives and a lot of people do not want to beg for anything. G*d with great compassion is pouring this life force into the world and we do not necessarily deserve to be alive. My teacher said he prayed with people and when they took the three steps back for Shemonah Essray they would say good bye to everyone because they did not know if they would come back. The Aish Kodesh is trying to tell people about this kind of prayer. Most people have an obligation to pray like they have a load of bricks to haul to the top of the mountain and none of this liveliness is in the prayer. Abraham prayed in the morning but he did not pray Shacharis, which was instituted by the men of the great assembly. Abraham went to the Tower of Babel and said: The city is burning! He was a post-holocaust Jew from the Flood. Noah did not pray for his generation; this was his biggest mistake. He did not like them; he thought they were bad. Abraham said this was a huge mistake. A famous rabbi Abba Hillel and his wife. Juvenile delinquents broke all their windows. They would go up on the roof and pray. He prayed that they would die. His wife prayed that they do teshuva. When there is a drought the rabbi prays for rain and nothing happens, but when his wife prays it rains, because she prayed for teshuva. Abrahamâs idea was that a Jew needs to be a place where they have to beg for water. The advent of civilization is based on a faulty premise of comfort and convenience, and then human values take a dive. He experienced this with Nimrod and Pharaoh. Comfort leads to a domination of the animal soul, which only wants to have pleasure. The godly soul is covered up by those desires. We have unique custom in Judaism started by Abraham that we pray after we eat because before we eat we do not know if we are prayed for the gift of life in each piece of food or if we just wanted to satisfy our animal desire. The same with sexuality, where all kinds of rules were institute. The Sanhedrin voted a law that a man who had an ejaculation cannot pray until he goes to the mikva because his pleasure disconnects him from the life that is in that act. Sex is very confusing to people because there is an appetite that can trump everything else. Why did G*d give me the desire in the first place? Abraham institutes a custom which is a reminder of that fact, that this is a place of battle which we celebrate. The whole Torah is a celebration of free choice. The custom about this is circumcision. There are three steps: meela cutting, which makes the organ less sensitive. This is to remind Jewish men they had to discipline this part of them and tied to their prayers about the mouth and eating. The second step is folding back the flesh that is left, called pri-eh. The third part is when the moyel sucks blood from the wound. There is a large movement of people who call this abuse and some liberal Jews feel it is a violation of the body. Question: When Abraham went into the furnace, did he expect a miracle? Answer: That is a good question, especially since he did not ask for miracles. It does not say in the midrash, but I think that he put himself in a meditative state that protected him. Abraham failed all his tests. He prayed for Sodom and it was destroyed. He did not pray for Yitzchak and he should have. Success for Torah tzadikim as defined by Abraham is that we are all in a maze seeking G*d and the job of the tzaddik is to mark the dead ends. So a failure is a success. The main idol of Nimrod was his anger. He went up the river at the age of 75. Terach could not get past his own anger. Anger is the number one form of idol worship and Terach could not get to Canaan, the land of humility. Lech lecha, go to yourself, leave the house of your father. That is a big move for a 75 year old. He destroyed the idols of his father when he was 37 years old, the same age as Yitzhak at the Akeida. To be present with yourself you have to leave your future expectations and the past behind. Parental expectations can imprison a child. Yitzchak is imprisoned in his fatherâs chessed and his job is to write a book on gevurah. Abraham had thousands of students and Yitzchak did not have one student. He said I do not have outreach, I have in-reach. Part of creativity is a separation from what you have created. He hears G*d speaking in the voice of his father saying: burn up your son! The love of Abraham and Sarah is burning up Yitzchak. They were real, generous, loving people. The key word in the Akeida is Abraham and Yitzchak were walking together. Together is repeated four times. There is no mention that Yitzchak disappears from the story. It is a puzzling story because the Satan says in the Talmudic version of the story how are you going to explain that your G*d of love ordered you to kill your son and you did it. He also said I overheard G*d saying he wants you to sacrifice a ram, and Abraham answered: you are a liar. Abraham was determined to follow every test through to the end. Abraham had to go to the moment of abuse and say no, I am not going to do it. This is what I do in psychodrama. Parental abuse is a very complicated issue, as is how we relive it. I had one person in psychodrama relive this and the welts reappeared on the body. Abraham was willing to report each test honestly, and this has defined tzaddik. Noach did it, too. This is a counterintuitive approach to success, acceptance of limitations. I think it is wonderful to be a child of Avraham Avinu. Abraham is laying down the foundations of teshuva. Sexual appetite and eating appetite require the bris of the mouth, the heart and the flesh. All are lined up and equally important. You have to learn how to talk and talk from the heart. Prayer is called heart-work, not mind-work. They wanted to make a deliberate connection with emotions. They knew the heart pumps the hormones and triggers the appetites. Abraham starts circumcision and his timing is very deliberate. He kept the whole Torah except for this law until this moment. Abraham looked at the world and intuited the mitzvote because the mitzvote have a ______ to them. Abraham learns from nature. Every mitzvah is an inoculation of inconvenience. No money on Shabbos, no shelter on Sukkot, no bread on Pesach. The addiction to comfort which he saw in Pharaoh- He had children by his daughters. There were no rules, no discipline. Abrahamâs journey to the desert created Birkat Hamazon after eating thanking G*d for the life in the food, I can really see that this food is injecting life into me, before I couldnât see it because it was too pleasurable. And the exodus. Every day, every hour we have to remember the exodus. Wilderness and Shabbos are co-equal. Shabbos is protest against civilization. The prayer after the end of Shemah, true to establish that G*d took us out of Egypt, and Birkat, are the only prayers commanded in the Torah. Abraham learned that Egypt is a dead end and took his followers into the desert. Joseph knew how to go into the pit filled with scorpions from Abraham going into the furnace. He also learned how to handle when your family tries to kill you. The sons of Jacob should have gone back into the desert rather than settling in Goshen. We do not reject the pleasures of life but we need to be able to channel them rather than be addicted to them. The name of Noah is Mr. Comfort. I am going to rebuild the world in my own image; all the people who disagree are eliminated. But Torah says we need helpmeets AGAINST us to help us out of our projective world. He had a rude awakening when he was sodomized, which was all the behavior he was trying to get away from. The symbol for this is the exodus from Egypt into the wilderness. Lot says: Egypt is the Garden of Eden. Abraham says it is time for us to separate from each other. Lot becomes the symbol of people who are willing to pay a very high price for his profits. Ruth, who is the reincarnation of his daughter, Playtote, has to leave Moab, which is like Sodom, where the number one rule is do not give food to anyone. When the Jews came through the desert Moab would not give them food. In Sodom when a person became old they would not give them food. In the cave where he has sex with his daughters the pleasure principle rules. Lot is Everyman. You cannot have just tzadikim for meshiach. Ruth comes from Moab; you never know what can come from a bad seed because we live in a world of teshuva. Enormous good has come from the Holocaust because have seen what comes from bad choices. In the Six day war I was only 20 and the American embassy say all Americans are required to leave. Nobody foresaw this victor because they were surrounded by enemies. The first 3 days of the war we under very heavy shelling in Jerusalem. 2½ divisions of Jordanian troops and one Israeli _______¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬. If thereâs a bomb in a pizza parlor, 24 hours later they are serving pizza again. If you read the Hebrew, G*d never even mentioned killing his son. Abraham also had his idols. He worshipped love and kindness because his father was so mean. You are not supposed to worship love and kindness, you are supposed to worship G*d. The other idol was expectations. When you do that, you do not see what their potential is. Abraham is committed to go into a future he does not know, so his expectation of Yitzchak taking over his empire is going into a future which he is creating. Yitzchak had to carry the fire and the wood up the mountain and in the Shoah people had to carry bodies into the ovens. Ishmael said I chose to be circumcised at 13 and you did not choose because you were only 8 days old, and Yitzchak responded he was willing to give up his whole life. BIBLICAL VISIONS BY JANET SHAFNER Abraham lifted his eyes. Cain could not do this so he was trapped in his misperceptions. Abraham knew he had to go to that place when his knife was on the throat of his son. I spent eight years trying to get someone to get back to that moment when the father was beating him and say no. he gets to the place, the father was beating him, and he could not say no. He jumped off the bed and becomes Jesus and says father forgive him he knows not what he is doing. He was back in that mind where the father is powerful and you do not ay no to dad. That is why the temple was built on the place when the Akeida occurred. Abused children either become abusers or victims. It is hard to be the child of famous, powerful people. Yitzchak needed that knife on his throat to leave home. He needed to feel the cruelty of his father. This was the hardest test for Abraham. He says no more tests even though he lives for another 30 years. There is no Vayera in Sacred Fire. Sacred Fire page 13, Chaya Sarah. Rashi explains: [Sarahâs years were 100, 20 and 7] Sarah wrote her part of the story including where she is dealing with Hagar and Ishmael. They are trying to help people do teshuva by leaving a mark in the maze. Sarah may have been idealistic in insisting that Hagar become a wife of Abraham. She did not like it when Abraham began loving her and when Hagar became pregnant on the first try. Abraham could not do his bris until Ishmael was a teenager. He accepted nature the way it was. He was not going to use escapes from reality, but would use reality to get close to G*d. So he had no way to accept doing a bris until Ishmael was a teenager. He thought his kids would turn out great. The job a teenager is to pop balloons of the expectations of the parents. Only then did he see that nature does not take care of everything. When he saw that he could not control Ishmael, G*d gave him the command for the bris. One of Ishmaelâs main problems was acting out sexually. You need a place to understand a mitzvah. You have to do the mitzvote whether you understand or not, but it is extremely important to understand. Story from compendium of midrashim on the torah: He would catch grasshoppers to idols, seduce and rape married women, Sarah suspected that he was shooting real arrows at Yitzchak. Shimon bar Yochai said he did not do that, but that he claimed the right of inheritance. Ishmael was yitzakhake, laughing with Sarah, it might mean he was trying to seduce her. Sarah said Cast out this slave and her son. Maybe her idol was having children. Sometimes our kindness backfires. She said even if he was not your son he would deserve to be your heir, and even if he was not such a good son he would still deserve it because he is my son. Torah says a man with a good son and a bad son cannot disinherit the bad son. The common theme is favoritism and sibling rivalry. How do you know who is good and who is bad and what is parental favoritism? Money meant nothing to Sarah; she was afraid that Yitzchak would learn some of Ishmaelâs evil ways. In the Hajj they still enact this scene like a psychodrama. The whole Xtian story comes from the Akeida. One midrash says that Yitzchak was killed and was resurrected after three years. Back to Sacred Fire: What is this chapter teaching us? In other words, her virtue was greater than his. In the holy book⦠Suffering has a purpose in the world. R. Menachem Mendel of Rymanovâ¦. If anguish is unbearableâ¦. He had just lost his child and he saw so many people who had suffered too much. If this could happen even to Sarahâ¦. The Torah may also be telling usâ¦. This is an amazing paragraph. Powerful statement. Perhaps the text itself⦠Student: Perhaps Sarah was sacrificed in lieu of Yitzchak. Rabbi: Sarah planned that Hagar would be kicked out and Ishmael would be dead, and instead Abraham remarried Hagar. Was Sarah praying for the teshuva or demise of Ishmael and Hagar? Student: withheld tears make us too salty. Trf: dead sea: impermeable. The Phantom Tollbooth and the Sea of Knowledge/Humbug comes out dry. The Aish Kodesh saying that she died for all Jewish people for all time really creates a hero. Abraham and Sarah saw themselves as affecting people for 3,000 years. This is called seeing yourself as an ancestor. Your decisions are important. Student: Jews are harbingers of civilization; but they elevate it. The most radical thing Aish Kodesh says here is that Moshe edited the Torah. Most people will say that Moshe took dictation. Sarah wrote her story and she made some choices. Moshe put the Akeida right next to the death of Sarah. This is a more mature view that to find G*d you have to find yourself. Our ancestors struggled to find themselves. I prefer this to a fairy tale. I bless everybody that you can reframe your suffering. Good Shabbos. Rabbi Henoch Dov teaches in Denver, Colorado. You can contact him through his web page, www.RabbiHenochDov.com or via email sh6r6v4t9@aol.com.

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