Podcast #72: Behaalotcha

Shlomo and Elisha are having a conversation about their surprise meeting in person instead of over Zoom. They discuss how Jewish people in America are desperate for authentic information from Israel, as they are bombarded with Palestinian information in the media. They express their sadness and frustration over the lack of access to the truth. They encourage listeners to reach out if they can be of any help. They then discuss Parashat Behalotcha, the third parasha in Bamidbar, which focuses on the complaints of the Bnei Yisrael and the journey they embark on. They talk about the feeling of leaving God's presence and the difficulties that arise. They share the story of Harav Kuk's journey to the Holy Land and how it relates to the parasha. Shalom, Shlomo. Hi, Elisha. English, right? We're starting with English. Right. Okay. So, I just want to tell everyone that Shlomo is sitting across from me. We're not on Zoom today, which I was really surprised. I came to the office knowing that I'm going to have a Zoom conversation with Shlomo because he's in America. Huge surprise. Shlomo is here in the office with me, very red eyes. He landed this morning, very tired, but he won't admit it. He won't. Shlomo, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you, Elisha. Good to be back. Good to be here in front of you again, rather than on Zoom. How was the trip? The trip was amazing. We were in Boston, New York, and in Winnipeg, visiting family in Pittsburgh. Big family reunion, amazing. And of course, being face-to-face with people you haven't seen for 10 years is a lot better than Zooming with them. For sure. For sure. Well, we're very happy to have you back. And we have Parashat Behalotcha, we're in the book of Bamidbar, third parasha. Just before that, I want to mention something, Elisha. Sharona and I spoke to two different Jewish groups, one from a synagogue, Beth Shalom in Westboro, and another group, Sharona's sister, Elisha. The Jewish people in America are desperate for knowledge and information from Israel. They're bombarded with Palestinian information, almost solely on the media. And Israel is falling down on the job. We had a huge ear listening to us, and we didn't even speak. We answered questions. We simply said, what would you like to know? And we gave them our opinion. They're desperate to get authentic information from the Israeli side, and they don't get it. That's pathetic. That's really, really, really sad, really sad. And I've been kind of following what's going on in America, in England, in Europe, the amount of propaganda, the lies that are being spread there. I'm not even so sure we could do that much about it. Even when there are attempts to show the truth, then these truths are condemned as lies, as propaganda as well. But it's not for the Palestinian side. This is for the Jewish people who love Israel, and who want to find out what's going on. Simply to hear from us. To hear the truth, the good and the bad. And they don't get it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. All right. So those of you who are in America, or in Europe, or elsewhere, listen to this podcast. If we can be of any help in any way, let us know. If we can come on to Zoom calls, if you trust our opinions on things, and you think our voice is going to be helpful in any way, let us know. Please. Please. And on to Be'alotacha. It's the third parashah in Bamidbar. It's one of the longest of these, as you note in your drasha. The drasha we'll discuss is from your book Ayeka, the Hebrew drasha, which I loved. Be'alotacha is 1800 words. It's almost the longest next to Nassau. And it's fascinating. And it has very few mitzvot. It's not about mitzvot. According to the Rambam, there are only five mitzvot in Be'alotacha. But a lot of amazing stories. And as always, Elisha, you penetrate beneath the surface. On the surface, it's about the complaints of the Bnei Yisrael, and Moshe is desperate, and he wants to quit, and he offers his resignation. He complains to God. And under that, as you note, as you help us see, is a story about compassion. The title of your drasha is, in Hebrew, Ligalot et Achimla, to find, to discover the compassion of God, as we set out on our journey, and as the Bnei Yisrael set out on theirs. Yes. Yes. First of all, it has a lot of things in the parashah, but indeed, it starts getting very ugly when they actually leave Mount Sinai. After a year, and just over a year at Mount Sinai, they're leaving. And as we've stated in the past, leaving Mount Sinai is not easy. And I wrote that in the drasha as well, a long time ago, I can barely remember, that it may have been easier leaving Egypt than it was leaving Mount Sinai. When they left Egypt, they left certainty, and they left the flesh pots, and when they're leaving Mount Sinai, they're leaving God, or at least so they think, that God is connected to Mount Sinai, because God dwells in the mountain. And I'm kind of thinking, thinking out loud, that whenever things get rough in our lives, even moments, a small moment of a crisis, it's a moment where, for a moment there, we don't have God. For a moment there, we feel abandoned, or we're just not even conscious of there being, you know, God in our lives. And whenever, if we can start thinking about it this way, something I encourage everyone to do, and I certainly do it myself, whenever there's a difficult moment, I remind myself, okay, God right now is not present for me in this moment. He's present all the time. But for me right now, in my consciousness, God is not present, and that's why I experience it as a difficult moment, as a painful moment. And the minute I can remind myself that God is always present, and it's only our own consciousness that is not aware of it, immediately the situation lightens up, and it gets a whole new perspective. And I really want to encourage people to consider this now, maybe taking it for granted that it's an easy thing to do. I understand it's not, for someone whose faith is very wavering, is that a word, wavering? Wavering. Yes, fluctuating. Fluctuating. Not to mention someone who doesn't believe at all, then this whole conversation right now is totally irrelevant. But I remember maybe a little story, when I was studying Rabbi Nachman's teachings with a teacher, I said like one-on-one with a particular teacher who gave me the key to understanding Rabbi Nachman. So he gave me a few teachings, a few classes, he gave me the key and then I could decode Rabbi Nachman on my own, which was wonderful. And in one of our sessions, I complained to him about something, I can't remember what it was. He encouraged me, like, you know, give me an example, something that's not, you know, that's right now, that's not working in your life right now. And I can't remember what it was, but I shared with him whatever it was, and said, okay, so in that place right now, you don't have God. That's where God is not present for you right now. And I took this really to heart, and whereas, indeed, in this particular situation, God is not present for me in a deep, deep sense of the word, it's just me and my own powers that need to deal with the situation, and I'm unable to deal with the situation. And the minute I was aware that God is always everywhere at all times, and I was able to summon God into the situation as well, nothing much changed, but the burden was lifted. And I think that the story of the wanderings in Parashat Behaal Otcha are very much about that. Really seeing children of Israel leaving Mount Sinai, leaving God's presence, so to speak, and all of a sudden, everything is really difficult. They're hungry, they're thirsty, they're continuously whining, because they're weaning, they think they're weaning from God, which is not the case, but I think that's true for most of us. That's how we live our lives. Agreed. And I kind of understand the Bnei Israel and their complaints, and it really is a beautiful metaphor for each of us, for our own lives. So here they are, they're at the foot of Mount Sinai, and they are so beautifully organized in a rectangle, and each side of the rectangle has the Levites, and then on each side there are three tribes, and they're perfectly organized in this beautiful camp. Everything is orderly. Oops! All of a sudden, we're leaving, pack your bags, the plane is leaving, the train is leaving, and this chaotic situation of moving two million Bnei Israel into the desert, and Sharon and I, when we first came to Israel, we went on a trip to Sinai after the Six-Day War, and we climbed Mount Sinai, so-called Mount Sinai, which the Arabs call Mount Sinai. The Christians, actually. The Christians, that's right. The Christians so-called determined it, but we have a feeling for what it might be like going from this camp at the base of this beautiful mountain, and going into the desert, going into the wilderness, into the unknown, leaving your comfort zone, literally, your comfort zone, into the dry, forbidding desert. It's scary. It's scary, and I understand their complaints, and all of us at some point in our lives, more than once, we do the same. We do the same. We leave the familiar and go off to a different country, a different job, a different profession, different relationships, different families. We all do this, and it does seem, as you say, that God doesn't seem to be present, and you have to really, really have to listen. Am I doing the right thing? You can hear a tiny, small voice inside you, but you really have to listen. If you don't believe it's there, you're never going to hear it. If you do believe it's there, you have to really listen hard in order to hear it, but it is there, as you note in your wonderful dress show. Yeah, yeah. I think it is a game changer. I think that if I had to develop my own psychological methodology, which I'm tempted to sometimes, even though Yair Kaspi already did much of it, I would indeed go and trace wherever we are troubled to really see that these are the places where God is not present in our lives. And Elisha, I'd like to tell the story of Harav Kuk, because it's relevant to this Parsha, because Harav Kuk did a similar journey to the Holy Land twice, and in a most convoluted, indirect manner. Harav Kuk, who is our spiritual guide in many ways, I believe, came here in 1905 to Jaffa as a brilliant rabbi, and he complained, as Moshe complained, he wrote, There's no one with whom I can share my thoughts. This wearies me greatly. As you know, the Jewish settlement in Jaffa in 1905 was very small and weak, and not a whole lot of Torah scholarship there. And eventually he left, he went to Germany, he was interned by the Germans during World War I as a hostile, and then was released at the end of the war, went to Britain, served as a rabbi, and then came back to the Holy Land in 1921, and he was actually the chief rabbi of Mandate Palestine, probably our first chief rabbi. Yes, indeed. And I think he came back in 1919, didn't he? Yes, 1919. On the famous Zionist Mayflower, the ship that brought all those many who left the land of Israel right before World War I, not knowing the war was going to break out, and expecting just to go, they went on a voyage, on a mission, on fundraising, on whatever, they went out on like Rachel, the poetess, was on that same boat, and in 1919, that boat brought back all of those returnees, a very, very famous voyage. But it's really interesting for how many of us, the journey to the Holy Land is very much like the B'nai Yisrael, it's a long, a winding journey with ups and downs, just like Karav Kook sometimes twice, which he did, yes, and we eventually find our way here if we listen to that voice, and that voice is saying, this is your country, come to your country. Right, come home, come home. Come home, come home. Yes, yes, indeed. And here they are represented by the pillar of smoke and the pillar of fire, the cloud and the fire that we're kind of following, and a beautiful metaphor to really ask ourselves, you know, are we conscious of our pillar of fire, pillar of smoke, of cloud, are we conscious of what's guiding us, of what are we following wherever it is that we're going to, or are we just supposedly randomly floating out in space in our lives, and then looking back and saying, hmm, maybe there's some kind of order to what looks like the madness, some kind of order to what looks like our lives as chaotic, that we're actually driven by something, that we're actually, without noticing, we're following a certain trail in our lives. So, a small story, Elisha, in one of our previous podcasts, we talked about the term mashaber, which is Hebrew for crisis, we all go through mashaberim, crises, and you mentioned that the mashaber is an actual physical thing, it's the birthing stone, it's the stone on which women in ancient times used to give birth, and Elisha, in Winnipeg, we went to an amazing museum, the museum, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, and it has a wonderful Shoah exhibit, an exhibit about the Inuit, the Inuit are what we used to call Eskimos, they're the natives of Alaska and the Yukon, and one of the exhibits, Elisha, was a birthing stone, the Inuit women gave birth on an actual birthing stone, and there's a wonderful sculpture showing it, and we thought to ourselves, wait a second, the Bible talks about the mashaber, how in the world do the Inuit in Alaska get to something that we found in the Mideast in the Bible, and it seems that they migrated from Asia across a land bridge, because Alaska used to be connected to Russia, and many of the Native Americans, Native Canadians, migrated from Asia, and in Asia, probably had influence from the Mideast, or simply that birthing stone was a very common way that women gave birth, all over, all over. Yeah, yes, yes, so it seems that we're really talking about journeys today, even the Inuits and how they came from Asia through the land passing and into North America. Yes, so Elisha, I mentioned there are five, only five mitzvot in Baha'u'llah Terah, one of the mitzvot is painful and remarkable, this is according to Rambam, the Rambam went through the Torah, right, and listed the 613 mitzvot, the last of the five mitzvot from Parshat Beha'alotcha is to sound the alarm when there is a catastrophe, that is the mitzvah of Elisha, and it's so painful to read that, because the young ladies whose job it was to use the electronic equipment and keep watch on the Gaza border, saw things going on and reported it, they sounded the alarm for a looming catastrophe, and the senior officers didn't listen, and many of those young ladies lost their lives, because they were right on the border and they were attacked by the Hamas, and fought bravely, and some were taken hostage and some were killed, they reported this, they sounded the alarm, it's painful to know that, and it proves how valuable women are in the IDF, that has been disputed by some religious, including some of my grandsons who serve in the army, they don't think women should be in the army, but there are certain things they do really, really well, including spending time looking at screens in a boring job where nothing is happening until something does happen, and they're really good at that, spotting danger from afar, yes. So I'm reading from your Rasha, Elisha, and there's a part that I really, really like, toward the end, and I'll translate it freely, at any given moment, people, all of us, we don't distinguish between our pots of flesh that we yearn for, we work for, and the mountain of God, the Mount Sinai, that we aspire for, the sublime and the profane, as you might call it, and we have trouble really distinguishing between those two things, because we all like to live well and enjoy life, but there's something more to that, there's something beyond that. I'm an economist, Elisha, and we preach the religion of capitalism, which is a false god, and which is disappointed, I think, it's created closets full of stuff, but very little happiness, I think, and we really have to work at, as you say in your Rasha, listening to this inner voice that says, you were put on earth for something different than walking around shopping centers and stuffing your shelves with things, you have to find out what your purpose here is, but there is a Mount Sinai for every person, and it's not the flesh pots of Egypt. Yeah, yes, I really enjoyed re-reading this Rasha, like years after writing it, yeah, there seems to be like two main things, two main archetypal things that we long for, one, we always talk about longing for Egypt, and the flesh pots of Egypt, and that really is a longing for material, material comfort, if only we had enough money to live comfortably and not be worried about blah, blah, blah, and having plenty of food, and having abundance of things and stuff, but there's another longing, and that's longing for Mount Sinai, a longing for God, and a longing for God, especially in modernity, especially in modern age, especially starting in the 21st century, for most Jews and Christians, the notion of God, at best, is a very intellectual idea, is a very literary, meaning, you know, well God said blah, blah, blah, and I would ask that person, do you believe in God? No, no, I don't believe, so what do you mean when you're saying God said that? Well, yeah, that's what the story tells, and so we're reading these stories, and we're so devoid of God, and I want to suggest that deep inside, deep inside, we're actually, we're not longing for Egypt, we're longing for Mount Sinai, we're longing for God, we're longing for a true sense of the divine in our lives, and I'm hoping that we will know to distinguish between when we're longing for God, and when we're longing for the flesh pots, because more often than not, when we go to the fridge, the classical move, you know, when someone is bored up, they go to the fridge, open it, and it's like, what do I want? What do I want? I want something, I don't know what it is, we grab something, a snack or something, but really what we want, we want God, we want God, we don't want a snack, we don't want anything from the fridge, but we don't know it, so we long for the flesh pots of Egypt, so we truly, really, really long for God. Absolutely, and it's hard to believe, Elisha, but we actually teach that in business schools, we teach that to our entrepreneurs, that is hard to believe, let me prove it. So when you launch a start-up, the question is, what is your vision, what is your goal, what is your purpose? And one purpose is to become amazingly wealthy, that's the flesh pots, and most people have that as a vision, the dreaming of an exit, where someone buys your company for a billion dollars and you have enough money for all of Kfarsaba, for the next ten generations. And we counsel our students, we're interested in being entrepreneurs, it doesn't work that way, and this comes from entrepreneurs who have done it, and the guide is Mount Sinai, make meaning, not money. That means if you serve people, if you create something wonderful that makes them healthier, smarter, wiser, happier, better people, if you create something like that, if you make meaning to our lives, chances are you'll do okay in terms of the flesh pots, but if all you do is try to make money, without focusing on the Mount Sinai, on the meaning of what you're doing, and serving people, if you serve yourself rather than people, you will not succeed, you will fail. If you go for the quick buck, and we've seen this a lot, if you go for the quick buck, in general, such entrepreneurs do not succeed. So there's actually a lesson for start-ups in Parshat Behalotcha, and you note that it's in there, but you have to really look for it. Yeah, that's beautiful. Actually, you did tell me that before, but I never quite made the connection. As an entrepreneur, if you know to look for God, if you know to answer people's quest for Mount Sinai, for God, for meaning, then the flesh pots will follow. I love that. That's beautiful. Of course, what this means operationally, in practical terms, is that when you launch a start-up, your focus is not on yourself, not on your team, not on your business, it's on the people that you intend to serve, and you start with them. We even tell our students, start with who, who do you serve, and how do you know you're serving them? This is not easy because many engineers, many high-tech engineers are not super at personal relationships, and you have to understand your client better than they understand themselves because they won't tell you what they need. They're used to managing. They're used to getting along. You have to understand them empathetically, observe what they're doing, and figure out how you can better serve them, even when they themselves can't tell you. That's hard. Right. That's very interesting. Very interesting, and I think that the solution, in a way, is that we, in a weird way, we don't really need to know what they're truly looking for. Obviously, we do, obviously we do, but on a deep level, if we simply recognize they're looking for God, everybody wants God in their lives. Now, most people, unfortunately, mistakenly, think of God as an old man on a cloud, and then, obviously, we think, no, no such thing, that's childish, etc., but if we think of God as meaning, as depth, as an anchor in the world, as the supreme being, as the essence of who we are, etc., all these deep, deep things, that's what we're really after. That's what we're all after, and we go out to the shopping malls looking for God, but not knowing it, so we come out of the shopping mall, instead of with God, we come with a new pair of shoes, but we really went there to find God. Yes, and I want to focus on that word, meaning, because, Alicia, when I was younger, I didn't get it. I didn't get that I had to find meaning for my life, and eventually, I was fortunate to do so, because we came to Israel, and in Israel, first of all, your life has meaning as a Jewish person in Israel, because everything you do is for the Jewish state, and that gives it meaning, but beyond that, individually, sometimes it comes a bit late, because young people don't really think about what is the purpose of my life, why am I here, why did God put me here, what meaning do I find for my life, they don't really think about that, and you think about it when you get older, and suddenly, you realize you're not going to live forever, and then you kind of look back, and you ask yourself, what have I done, and I'm running out of time to finish what I need to do, and if I were to counsel young people, I don't know if you do this, is there a way, Elisha, without preaching to young people, to explain this to them, that they really do need to think about their purpose on God's earth, because they were put here for a reason, and it's pretty hard sometimes to figure out what that is, do you ever counsel young people about that, and how could we do that? Well, absolutely, and one example is, you know, with our Bar Mitzvah kids, it's a cornerstone in our program, in our Bar Mitzvah program, and this evening, actually tonight, once a year, we take one of the local schools here, when they reach sixth grade, them and their parents, we go to Masada, and last year, for the first time, instead of Masada, we went up to Tel Hai, Tel Hai today is not, we can't go there, because it's not safe, there are bombs and missiles and drones, and et cetera, so instead, we're actually going to be doing it locally, near Binyamina, right by Zichon Yaakov, and I've met with the kids several times, and it's all leading up to a program we're going to have tonight, in which they're going to try and answer, they're going to sit in big circles, and they're going to try and answer for themselves, what is my Mitzvah in life, what did I come here to do, what am I called to do, what is my calling, and it's going to be really cute, because it's going to be like concentric circles of parents and children, and every child is going to be able to tell different parents, the parents are going to be moving one chair up, and each time the kid is going to be able to, is going to answer another question, what am I good at, what am I really good at, what am I gifted at, and another question is, you know, what good do I want to bring to the world, and finally the last question is going to be, so now that I'm becoming Bar Mitzvah soon, just for this period right now, what's my Mitzvah, what's my commandment, what am I commanded to do, given what I'm good at, given what I love doing, given the values that I was raised on, what's my calling, what am I called right now to do, that's going to happen tonight, and I think it's part of our language here at the Tequila, to a great extent. That's fascinating, so Elisha, my wife and I will celebrate the Bar Mitzvah of our granddaughter Eliana, here at Ve'ehavta, in 10 days, and Eliana is a remarkable young lady, she's 12 years old, just had her birthday, she's multi-talented, and she's a gymnast, she reads Torah, she's an artist, she's a writer, a brilliant writer, she's a lawyer, she's so many things, I think gifted young people may have more of a problem than others, because they are so good at so many things, and they're interested in so many things, it's very hard for them to find a focus, I'm not sure, I'm sure she will find her way, but I'm not sure how to counsel her. Do you counsel gifted young people, and how can we counsel young people who can do it all? Well, first of all, I think we only counsel people, kids who need counseling, who want to be counseled, if they're content being right now, just being carefree and doing this and doing that, and because Eliana is indeed doing so many different things, she's happy doing so many different things, that's wonderful, one day she may need to choose, but if the child, him or herself, if they're having a crisis, or whatever it may be, then it's worth talking about and discussing it, and really, yes, talking in terms of God's calling. I agree, and I guess if I were to counsel young people, I would tell them not to decide too quickly and too early to try things, because when you go to university and you pick your major at age 18, when you don't know anything about the world, it's ridiculous, you need to try things, and the search is for not so much what you're good at, what is your true passion, and I work with engineers and MBA students who are in their 30s and highly successful, and I ask them, what is your passion in life, and they have no idea, nobody has even asked them that question. What are you passionate about? It seems to me that is the Mount Taharsinai that should guide us, and not so much what we're good at, because if you're passionate about something, you'll find a way. Right, that's very true. I think the question of what are you good at is also, what were you gifted with? If you're gifted with a certain talent, then it's a sign, it's not a coincidence, and here's one of the tools that you're expected to use in life, and we need to start ending, right? We do. Yes, so again, going back to the theme of your drashah, on the face of it, the parashah seems to be about complaints and Moshe's attempt to resign. You say in your drashah brilliantly, God does not allow us to quit. We are not allowed to quit, Elisha. Moshe wasn't allowed to quit. He's really fed up in this parashah. He tells God, what, did I give birth to these people? Did I conceive them? Give me a break. I've had it. I'm out of here. No way. So just like Moshe, we're not allowed to quit. We need to persist, and especially when we found our calling, our goal, our mission, and when we find it, we must be stubborn to persist just as Moshe and Harav Kook and all the other great, great people who never quit. Yeah, yeah. Amen, amen. So, L'etreot, everyone. Shlomo, I hope the jet lag is not going to be too bad. I hope you get good nights of sleep. No problem. It's wonderful to be back in our little country, Elisha. It's an amazing feeling when the plane's wheels touch the runway to be back in our own little country, which is struggling now and in difficulty. But there's no place like home. Oh, good. Good, good, good. L'etreot, everyone. Shabbat shalom. Shabbat shalom, everyone.