Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello, my friends.
[00:00:01] Chag Sameach to you. This is Rabbi Shlomo Cohon with the Practical Parsha podcast. And we're back. It's Hoshana Rabba night, and so far, the Yontif of Sukkos has been beautiful. I've really been enjoying it. I hope yours has been enjoyable as well.
[00:00:19] And we're about to go into tomorrow night into the second part of the holiday, which is Shmini Atzeres and Simcha's Torah, where we're going to complete the reading of the Torah. We're going to finish the Torah and begin again anew from the beginning again, start the cycle all over again. Because Torah never ends, Torah learning never ends.
[00:00:45] And I want to, number one, thank God for giving me the opportunity to finish this cycle of the Torah.
[00:00:54] And God willing, I should have the strength to continue this coming year to go through the entire Torah again.
[00:01:02] I hope the, uh, Practical Parsha podcast board, I hope they're going to renew my contract to give me another year, to give me another crack at it. I think I'm doing all right.
[00:01:13] And before we begin, as always, if you have any questions, comments, or maybe you want to send a suggestion to the higher ups to let them know that they should keep this podcast going, I think they're going to send me an email at rabbi shlomo kon kohnmail.com I'd love to hear from you.
[00:01:33] Now, this week, I want to do it a little bit different.
[00:01:36] I want to talk about the last parsha of the Torah, which is Vizos Habracha.
[00:01:45] And since the holiday is Tuesday, Wednesday, it doesn't give us so much time for bereshas. I don't want Parshas Bereshas, which is the first parsha of the Torah, to be overlooked. There's so much there.
[00:02:02] And what I wanted to do this week is to give one or, uh, two thoughts on the last Parasha of the Torah.
[00:02:12] And then right away we'll talk about Parsha's Bereshas that, you know, just in case I'm not able to put out a separate episode for Parshas Bereshas.
[00:02:25] So just to give a quick overview of the Zos habracha.
[00:02:29] The Zos habracha is the last parasha in the Torah.
[00:02:35] And now Moshe Rabbeinu has walked around to the entire people. He said goodbye, and he finally is about to pass on.
[00:02:47] But first, before he's about to ascend Har Navo to die, he blesses the Jewish nation.
[00:02:58] He gives them a blessing with all his heart and soul.
[00:03:03] And it's actually the Parasha of Azos Habracha is such a moving and beautiful, um, blessing that Moshe Rabbeinu gives to his people.
[00:03:14] And Moshe Rabbeinu, as we know, he went through everything with the Jewish nation.
[00:03:20] Through good times, through bad times, they challenged him. And in fact, I saw it brought down. The reason that Moshe Rabbeinu was not able to enter into the land of Israel was because he sinned by the waters of Meribah, where God commanded him to speak to the rock, and he hit the rock. And if you look into the story over there, what happened exactly is that the Jewish people challenged him.
[00:03:50] And because they challenged him, he got upset, he got angry at them, and he hit the rock.
[00:03:56] And it sort of comes out that because of the back and forth, the tension and the situation that he was placed in with his people, it caused him to make that mistake that he would not be able to enter the land of Israel and he would have to pass on.
[00:04:14] So, and you think about it, you know, maybe there could be some resentment deep down from Moshe Rabbeinu that he's not able to enter the land had a lot to do with the Jewish nation, right?
[00:04:28] That whole situation he got into was with his people, because of his people.
[00:04:34] But yet, at the same time, we see that Moshe Rabbeinu, you look in the wording of the Parsha, you look at the blessings he gives to each and every tribe, where he praises them and. And gives them strength for the job that they have to do.
[00:04:52] You see very clearly his pure, unadulterated love for the Jewish nation, for his people, nothing else.
[00:05:02] No hard feelings, no grudges, no regrets, just total love.
[00:05:10] I think just before we get into the Parsha a little bit, I think this is a very important trait to have. You know, we talk about Moshe Rabbeinu. He was the greatest of all prophets, actually. In fact, in this week's Parasha says that there will be no prophet like Moshe, none, no one who is able to speak to God face to face, to have that level of clarity in his prophecy.
[00:05:36] So maybe it seems like. Like a very, very lofty level that we're not able to get to, to get to the level of Moshe Rabbeinu, you know, in our service of G D.
[00:05:50] But I think we have to know, and in fact, the Rambam Maimonides brings us down, that everybody has the ability to be like Moshe Rabbeinu.
[00:05:59] And what that means is that not that we're going to be Moshe Rabbeinu. It means. It means that we have the ability within ourselves that, uh, just like Moshe Rabbeinu, just like Moses used every aspect of his being in serving Hashem, in serving G D.
[00:06:17] He used all his potential, all his essence for the service of Hashem.
[00:06:24] So too, we have the ability to channel our strengths and our weaknesses and everything about ourselves to the service of Hashem, to serve G D, to be better people.
[00:06:39] Maybe we're not at the level of Moshe Rabbeinu.
[00:06:42] We're not at that height, that lofty level. But we are ourselves.
[00:06:47] And we have the ability to give all of ourselves, to apply ourselves to Torah study, to push ourselves, to observe mitzvos.
[00:06:58] These are all things that we can do on our level. We can give all of ourselves. We can give the 110%, just like Moshe Rabbeinu. And I think this is very important, this idea, not just about this one aspect of Moshe Rabbeinu where he didn't hold a grudge, where he didn't. He just had this love for the Jewish nation. He realized their true essence, what they really wanted to do. They really wanted to serve Hashem. He's able to see through the fog, see through the challenge, and see what their heart really desired, that they really, really, truly wanted to serve Hashem. They just. Things got in the way sometimes. He was able to see that. And I think the lesson for us is that we can get to that level as well, push aside the things that are bothering us. And I think just not even about holding grudges against people. I want to make it more general. Sure. That's one area to focus on, to not hold grudges and to push past things like Moshe Rabbeinu. But I think in our whole essence, in our whole essence and everything about ourselves, I think we can learn a lesson of using our potential.
[00:08:08] And I think the biggest blessing a person can give and receive is that we should fulfill our potential.
[00:08:18] Because ultimately, that's what we really want. We want to fulfill our potentials. What can we be? What can we become?
[00:08:27] And in fact, that's what Moshe Rabbeinu was doing in this week's Parsha. He was blessing each tribe according to their strengths and according to their mission. And I think this is a very powerful idea we see from this week's Parsha.
[00:08:43] I just wanted to jump to the end of the parasha because I believe there's a very powerful idea which is brought down and I think gives us another aspect of Moshe Rabbeinu of who he was and what we can take out of that.
[00:09:05] I would really suggest to every person to look over the last few verses of the.
[00:09:15] It's very inspirational, the verses, ah, the ah, blessing that Moshe Rabbeinu gives the Jewish nation and how, you know, how he refers to them. But it actually gets a little more interesting because at the end of the Torah, there's a dispute about who wrote the last few verses of the Torah.
[00:09:34] Was it Moshe Rabbeinu or was it Joshua? Because it says in the Torah that Moshe Rabbeinu passes. But either way, it says at the final passages in the Torah, it says, never again has there arisen in Israel a prophet like Moshe whom Hashem had known face to face.
[00:10:02] La' asois be' eretz mitzrayim le faro l' hul avadav' zah. As evidenced by all the signs and wonders that Hashem sent him to perform in the land of Egypt against Pharaoh and all his courtiers and all his land. Ulachol hayyad hachazaka, Ulachol hamoira hagadol asher ossa moishe leinei kol Yisra'. El. And by all the strong hand and awesome power that Moshe performed before the eyes of all Israel, that's the last verse of the Torah. Now, I could really talk about a few different points here. Number one, just talking about these verses, how Moshe, you know, he was the leader of the Jewish nation. There's a concept of giving over that he did all he was. He wasn't a prophet in the sense like, you know, to make a separation. These prophets of other religions. He was a prophet who performed open miracles.
[00:11:02] Through him, God performed open miracles demonstrating Hashem's, uh, greatness to the entire nation.
[00:11:09] That's something to talk about.
[00:11:11] And also there's this concept of mesorah, of passing from one generation to the next, how Moshe passed to Yeshua, to Joshua. But I really want to focus on today is the last verse in the Torah.
[00:11:24] The last verse in the Torah says. It says, it's referring to and by all the strong hand that an awesome power that Moshe perform before the eyes of all of Israel. Now if you look at Rashi, what is this referring to? What is this verse that's, you know, showing Moshe's greatness, right? The. The. It's a continuation from the last two verses, saying that there was no other prophet as great as Moshe. As we see from the fact that all the, all the miracles that happened in Egypt and because of this strong hand and awesome power that Moshe performed before of all the Jewish nation. What's that referring to? So fine the plagues in Egypt. I understand. But what's this last verse referring to?
[00:12:12] So Rashi tells us. Rashi says, ulachol hayer chazaka.
[00:12:19] And the strong hand that Moshe showed the Jewish people. Shakiba le ha satira balucha is beyadav. Moshe M. Rabbeinu. We know he went up to heaven to receive the luchos, the tablets.
[00:12:31] Rashi continues.
[00:12:35] And the awesome power that Moshe performed. It's referring to the miracles according to Rashi.
[00:12:42] And the final words?
[00:12:44] It says that in front of the eyes of all of Israel, the last three words of the Torah, that he performed all these things.
[00:12:59] Uh, in front of the eyes of Israel. What's it referring to? So Rashi tells us he made a calculation in his heart to smash the tablets in front of their eyes.
[00:13:18] She nemar, as it says, um, that he smashed the luchos. He smashed the tablets when he came down the first time from heaven with the tablets with the luchos. And he saw the Jewish nation that were worshiping the golden calf.
[00:13:40] He decided at that moment that the Jewish people were not worthy of receiving these luchos.
[00:13:49] And he smashed them in front of the entire Jewish nation.
[00:13:54] Feskima, das hakodesh, Baruch Huladaytai and Hashem, Rashi is telling us, was moskim to his decision that he made. He agreed to what Moshe Rabbeinu had done. That's smashing the tabletshibarta. Uh, quotes from a Gemara that Hashem thanked him, that he smashed the first tablets in front of the eyes of the Jewish nation.
[00:14:23] This is a fascinating idea here.
[00:14:25] Out of all the different things that the Torah could finish with the final words of the Torah, the final verse of the Torah finishes with the greatness of Moshe Rabbeinu. What's the greatest thing of Moshe Rabbeinu?
[00:14:44] Not the fact that he led the Jewish people out of Egypt, that it performed all these miracles.
[00:14:50] It's the fact that he took the luchos, he took the tablets and smashed them in front of the Jewish nation.
[00:14:59] That's how the Torah finishes.
[00:15:01] What is going on?
[00:15:03] How do we understand this idea? What's the lesson for us?
[00:15:10] And there's a lot of commentary that to discuss this idea. Um, but it really comes back to one point.
[00:15:18] We know Moshe Rabbeinu, his mission in life was to do the will of Hashem, whatever G D wanted him to do at any given moment.
[00:15:31] That is what he did.
[00:15:34] And now Moshe Rabbeinu, he went up to heaven 40 days and 40 nights to transcribe the Torah over from Hashem. Uh, the luchos that were brought down from heaven were alpi Hashem. They were written by God.
[00:15:55] We know that the luchos, when God revealed himself to the Jewish nation, the luchos were a part of that.
[00:16:02] And, you know, this was Moshe's mission in life, to bring the Jew, the. The. To bring the Torah to the Jewish nation.
[00:16:11] And after 40 days and 40 nights in heaven, he comes down the mountain, and he sees the Jewish nation serving a golden calf.
[00:16:23] So there's many things that can go through Moshe Rabbeinu's mind at that moment.
[00:16:29] You know, this is his life's mission. He doesn't know that there's going to be a chance for the Jewish people to be forgiven and get a second set of luchos to get a second set of tablets. And what does he do? He takes his life's work and smashes it. He sees at that moment that the Jewish people are not on the level to receive the tablets.
[00:16:50] And the right thing. He makes a decision in his mind with his understanding that the right thing to do is what Hashem would want, is for the tablets to be smashed. He doesn't hesitate. He doesn't pause. He takes these tablets, which was his life's work until this point, and smashes it on the ground.
[00:17:11] And Hashem, uh, says yashikoach, you did the right thing.
[00:17:16] You did the right thing. And I think this is the powerful lesson we see from Moshe Rabbeinu. It's easy to build, to achieve, but it's not so easy to walk away or destroy at the moment when you're supposed to do that.
[00:17:32] Moshe Rabbeinu, he realized that this is what Hashem wanted him to do.
[00:17:37] He didn't make any calculations, even though it was, you know, these luchos, these tablets are so dear to him.
[00:17:43] He did what was right at the moment. He was willing to walk away from everything, to do the right thing.
[00:17:49] And that's the lesson of Moshe Rabbeinu. And I think that's the lesson us as Jews have to take when it comes to the Torah.
[00:18:00] We have the Torah. We live by the Torah, we die by the Torah. We have to know that we're willing to walk away from everything for the sake of doing what Hashem wants.
[00:18:12] And that's the message that the Torah ends with that. Moshe Rabbeinu was able to smash the luchos because that was the right thing to do he was able to walk away.
[00:18:27] And that's something I believe that we all need to take out from Moshe Rabbeinu to live. We live with the Torah, we die with the Torah. Um, everything we do is measured. What does Hashem want us to do? Right? We think of every action that we do, the things that we do in our life, right?
[00:18:46] To have that outlook, willing to give up of something if it's not the right thing to do, even if it costs money, even if it's not so easy, we have to be willing to do it.
[00:19:00] That's the powerful lesson from Moshe Rabbeinu. And that's why the Torah ends with this lesson for us, because the Torah finishes now with this, and we're starting again.
[00:19:11] But the key is being able to hold strong no matter what the situation is.
[00:19:18] And I think that actually flows very well into the, you know, after we complete the Torah, we say, chazak, Chazak v' nis Chazayk, Be strong, be strong, and may we be strengthened.
[00:19:32] Because when you have that self, you know, that fortitude, we get the strength. And I think that's something very powerful for us to remember. The next idea I want to share with you is going to take us to the beginning of the Torah. Now, Parshas Paratius, you could spend years on Parshas parishas. There's so much depth and so much meaning and there's so much to be understood.
[00:19:57] And I wanted to make sure that, that being it's a short week because of the holiday, I want to make sure I leave you with something for Shabbos Beresh. I don't want to leave it out, God forbid. Maybe I'll be able to do another episode, hopefully. But if not, I wanted to share one thought for the first parsha of the year. The parsha um, the Torah begins with Bereshas bore Elokim es Hashamayim v' ESA Aretz the In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
[00:20:32] And the commentaries ask the question of why it was necessary for G D to start with the creation of the world. Right? If the Torah is a guidebook for the Jewish people, why was it necessary for Hashem to begin the Torah with creation and heaven on earth? Start with the first Mitzvah in the Torah. Why do you have to start with creation?
[00:21:00] And the commentaries give different reasons as to why that is so.
[00:21:05] But many of the understandings to this question come back to the fundamental idea that God wanted to establish that he was the ruler the world, he created the world, and he is the ruler of the world.
[00:21:22] And I think there's an idea, as we see in Boratius in the book of Genesis.
[00:21:28] You know, obviously the whole first parsha is called Genesis, but it's also within the book of Genesis is really a culmination of the creation of the world to the Jewish people.
[00:21:41] You know, forming a nation.
[00:21:45] And it sort of starts off with the creation of the world and everything about it in seven days and creation of man.
[00:21:53] And we see after that point, you know, it sort of goes downhill, right? Not downhill, but, you know, there's Adam and Eve. And very shortly after they're created, Adam and Eve sin, and they're kicked out of the Garden of Eden. And then again, we see that there's the story of Noach, uh, the flood.
[00:22:18] The people sin, the world is destroyed. And then again, you have the Tower of Babel. You know, the people of the world, they try to make a war against God until it comes to Abraham, to Avram Avinu, and he finally gets it. He finally realizes that there's an Hashem and his descendants, right? Not all of his descendants, but Yitzchak Yaakov. The Jewish people are the ones who get this mission of being a light unto the nation, of being a light unto the nations to bring about the will of Hashem, right? So that's really the culmination. That's the timeline of the book of Genesis. Starts off from the creation of the world and maybe with man's ultimate goal, all of humanity, this goal of bringing about God's will.
[00:23:09] And man as a whole fails that mission multiple times until the Jewish people are the ones who take it up and run with it.
[00:23:21] Now, I wanted to talk about a little bit the first verse of the Torah.
[00:23:28] In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. Now, we know that there are many things in life that concern us. We go through, you know, unpleasant things. Sure, that there's. There's good things. There's a lot of good things in our lives, more good things than bad.
[00:23:44] But there's, you know, all of us have to go through challenges.
[00:23:49] Now, not all of these challenges we view as bad, right? We go to the dentist, and we have to go through that procedure because we know if we want to have teeth and we don't want them to fall out, we need to have to go to the dentist and have them drill in our mouth, right? We spend years pursuing a career because we know we want to have a way of making a livelihood to support our family. It's not so pleasant. People have to, you know, do certain things for their career. They get up very early, go to school, take out debt or uh. There's many situations that we go through that are not pleasant to say the least, but we see the point in us doing them.
[00:24:31] Now. There are other situations where we go through suffering or challenge and we don't understand why we have to go through it. And in fact, it's not just us. This is probably the biggest question in humanity.
[00:24:47] You know, why do we have to suffer? Why does man have to suffer? Why do children have to suffer? Why do good things or why do bad things happen to good people? We don't understand the picture, right? We can't understand it. Our minds can't comprehend.
[00:25:04] And it's challenging for us. And we question Hashem, we question God. Rabbi, uh, Twersky explains the first verse in the Torah helps us with this understanding.
[00:25:16] You know, when we have to go to the dentist, we're in the dentist chair. We understand why we're doing gives us some solace. It helps us get through the situation, right? The simile with any other unpleasant scenario that we find ourselves in, that we see the reason at the end of it.
[00:25:34] But for the things that aren't clear to us, their suffering without a reason is unbearable.
[00:25:44] But when there's Hashem, uh, in the picture, when we have a God that created the world and the God is greater than us and bigger than us, and we have a realization that there's a purpose of creation, that in the beginning Hashem created heaven and earth, that there's a purpose for creation, that God created this world for a reason.
[00:26:06] We might not fully understand that reason, but we know there is a reason.
[00:26:11] In our whole lives, we might never fully comprehend why God created the world, but we know that there is a reason for it.
[00:26:21] And once we know that there's a reason for it, our lives begin to have purpose.
[00:26:27] Because, you know, sure, there's things, short term things in our lives that, that we can go towards, but ultimately there has to be a bigger purpose in life under, you know, once we reach that short term goal of getting that job or getting that degree or buying that house or going on that vacation, it's never going to fill that, you know, that hole, that unsated desire that every human being has of what is the purpose of us on this world.
[00:26:57] And I think knowing that step number one is knowing that Hashem created the world in the beginning. Hashem created. There is a purpose, there is a God. And I think once we establish that fact, so now we're not living purposeless lives.
[00:27:16] The suffering is for a reason.
[00:27:18] Maybe we don't understand everything, but it's towards a goal. And that's, you know, maybe the next conversation after this is, what's the purpose? You know, sure, we might not get it perfectly clear, but we have to know that there's a mission. We know there's a mission. So now what's the mission?
[00:27:34] You know, it's. The question is answered. It puts us on the right trajectory because once we establish the fact that the world was created by God for that purpose, so now we could start to investigate and probe why are we here?
[00:27:52] What's our job in this world? And I think that's a very important idea.
[00:27:58] Step number one, which is from the first verse in the Torah that we can take out from that to remember, Hashem, uh, created the world with a purpose. We don't fully understand the purpose, but once we know that there is a reason, we can start to think about things and start to investigate and look into it further. And this is something which, you know, us as Jews, we have the Torah, which is the blueprint for creation, which is step two for us to go forward with. But the point is we have step one is, number one, Hashem created the world in the beginning. Everything is for a purpose, everything is for a reason, and nothing is by coincidence. So with that, I am going to finish for today's podcast. I hope you enjoyed. If you have any questions, comments, or would like to reach out, feel free to send me an email at Rabbi Schlomocon Kohn at gmail com. Have a great day.
