Jewish Inspiration Podcast · Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe

You're listening to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe of TORCH in Houston, Texas. This is the Jewish Inspiration Podcast.

Good afternoon, everybody. It is so wonderful. Today we are going to talk a little bit about this week's parasha. As just a little bit of an inspiration I heard a beautiful, beautiful idea from a friend of mine, and I wanted to just share it here. Rabbi Blachman will be happy. Hopefully that we're sharing his Torah. He's from Jerusalem so it's Shabbos by him already, but he sends out a weekly D'var Torah
and I thought that what he said today was so beautiful that I need to share it here in our class. You know, it says two times in this week's parasha about the names of the tribes that were on the garments of the High Priest. The High Priest had a choshen, a breastplate, that had all the names of the tribes, all 12 tribes, each name on a stone independently. And then you had, on the shoulders, you had each, the Avni Shoham,
on each one, one had six names and one had six names and this was also part of the vestments of the Kohen. So the obvious question is why do you need it twice? I mean, you're not going to forget the names. These are the tribes. These are, you know, it's, what's the significance of this? Why is this important and why are they called different things? One is called the choshen, the breastplate, and one is called the Avni Shoham, the Shoham stones, but also called the Avni Zikoron, the
stones of remembrance. So our sages tell us that this is the key for the Kohen, that the Kohen has to have the entire Jewish people in his heart. The first thing, you have to have the Jewish people in your heart. You need to care about other Jews. You need to be sensitive to other Jews. And what do we know about Aaron? Aaron was the epitome of love for your fellow man. He was the epitome, that when people were in a
difficult situation, they would go to Aaron to resolve matters, whether it be matters of partnerships, friendships, marriages, all types of interpersonal disputes, would go to Aaron because Aaron was an ohay v'shalom v'erod v'shalom. He loved peace and pursued peace. In fact, the Midrash tells us that Aaron, what would he do? He would tell two parties that he knew were fighting. He would go to one and say, you know, the other guy that you're fighting with, yeah, I hate him, right? Say, yeah,
he feels so terrible for what he did. Like, he's just too embarrassed to apologize. Like, really? He took responsibility? Yeah. And then he'd go to the other guy and say the same thing and then they'd become friends. Right? Ohay v'shalom v'erod v'shalom. He would pursue. What do most people do when they hear two people fighting? Like, it's not my fight. I'm out of it. Keep me out of it. No, no, no. Aaron went and pursued it.
He was rodev v'shalom. He ran after peace. He had the love for every Jew in his heart because nobody's at peace when they're fighting. No one's at peace when they're in a quarrel. In fact, it says that when Aaron died, all of the house of Israel mourned his passing for 30 days. It says regarding Moshe that the people mourned. It says not the house. Why not the house? Because all the people who were involved in marital issues, who had
problems in their marriage, they would go to Aaron and now they were disillusioned. Uh-oh, our peacemaker is not here anymore. What are we going to do? The houses were mourning. It's a powerful thing. Aaron felt the responsibility and this is the responsibility of every Kohen, but also every Jew. You have to feel the responsibility for the entire people in your heart, but then comes the shoulders. You have to be able to carry the burden of your fellow Jew on your shoulder.
That their pain is your pain. Their challenge is your challenge. Their grief is your grief. That it's not just, oh, I feel their pain. I feel them in my heart. I love them like a brother, but actually to carry their burden as well. You know that song, you're my brother, you ain't heavy. The way you need to feel about every single one of the members of our tribe, you're my brother. You're not heavy. You're not a burden.
I love you. If you were my brother, I would take care of you without thinking. You're my brother, even though you're not my biological brother, but we're one nation, one soul. So in the way that a person, by the way, we say this, we say you have to love God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your means. We have to feel that Koshen, that breastplate, the heart needs to feel for every Jew and
then we need to carry that burden in our service of Hashem as well. We have to love Hashem and we have to carry his burden. This is what we do here at TORCH every single day. There's a rabbi named Reb Chaim Shmulevitz. He passed away many, about 50 years ago, and he would give a lecture every year on Yom Kippur, Yom Kippur evening, and he would say the same thing again and again. He said that if there's anybody here who hasn't missed a night of sleep
worrying about the plight of the Jewish people, spiritually and physically, you have no business coming to pray on Yom Kippur. You don't feel God's pain. That his children are estranged, that his children are distanced, that his children, Jews who don't know they're Jews, out there in the world, they don't know what that means. I once invited someone for Shabbos. He says, who's that? Yeah, that's, we're talking in year 2000, that people don't know it. We have to do something
to awaken our brothers and sisters. We have to feel that God is in pain. God is suffering, so to speak. We have to feel that responsibility. The shoulders. We need to carry the burden. The Kohen did that, his responsibility. And what was the Kohen? The Kohen, by the way, had to always be in peace with everyone. You know, if the Kohen was involved in a quarrel, in a fight, he couldn't serve in the temple. Because what was the main job of a Kohen? To represent everyone.
It's almost like politicians. They represent everyone. No, they don't represent anyone. They represent themselves. But what a Kohen needed to do is represent everyone. If you're in a fight with someone, you're not representing that person. You can't serve in the temple. You have to be at peace with everyone. Because you were the icon of what it meant to be loyal to Hashem. Where if your heart wasn't 100% pure, when you walked into that Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, you were gone.
God knows. We don't. You can fool everyone else. You can't fool God. This is the responsibility that we learned from the Kohen. To feel it in our heart and that's not enough. Carry the burden. Carry the burden. Someone came over to me last week. He came to me in a real, you can see that this person was genuinely in pain, and I asked him, what's going on? He said to me last night, I said, I wanted to feel the pain that your wife is experiencing.
You could see he was he was genuinely in pain. He's carrying that burden. We learn this in our Middot, in our character traits. We talk about Noseh Be'Olim Chaveiro. It's one of the 48 tools to live life to the fullest. Carry the burden of another person. When there is a hurricane in Haiti, I said, what can I do? I'm in Houston. I can't do anything for you. I'm sorry. Don't give money to the Red Cross. You know that that's not gonna get to them.
What can I do for them? I can feel their pain. And what does that do for them? That cures. That they know, and even if they don't they don't know who you are, they'll never meet you. That you care. That has a power. When you know somebody else, not just like, I'm so sorry, and just move on. To really feel in a heart to carry the burden as well. How would I feel if that was me? How would I feel if I was in that accident?
How would I feel if I was in that situation, if I lost my job? And you're talking to somebody to really feel their pain. When my daughter lost her, her baby, so my brother-in-law went to one of the rabbis that had given a blessing to inform him that the baby had passed away. The rabbi cried for hours. My brother-in-law was there. He said, he said like three hours. He was just sobbing. In pain. For who?
He's feeling the pain of the mother, of the father, of the baby, of the family. To feel somebody else's pain. That's the job of each and every one of us. To not just say, we become desensitized because we live in a world where it's just like we have one news. They say that the news the news cycle is is every 20 minutes. Every 20 minutes is another crazy story of another insane thing that happened someplace.
So we get desensitized. But to really feel what it's like when a mother wakes up and finds that her daughter was murdered. Heaven forbid. I mean, these are things for us to really feel beyond ourselves. That's really the charge that the Torah wants us to be at a level where we're not living for ourselves. The ultimate living is when you're living beyond yourself. When you're living for another person. I think that if we're able to
internalize this, we're able to take this message to feel the love for every person. But don't just feel the love. Carry their burden. Whatever that burden is, carry it. And it doesn't mean that you have to be sad all day. You can also be happy with other people. My great-grandfather, as I've mentioned many times previously, he was handicapped. He was thrown off a moving train when he was a young teenager by some thugs. So he was never able to walk again on his own.
It's not like we have medicine today and ways of healing people with such challenges. So he always needed someone to carry him. One of his students was getting married in a faraway city. He wasn't able to travel there for the wedding. So one night, in the middle of sitting with his family, he stands up. He leaves the room. It's my great-grandfather. He goes to his room. Gets into his Shabbos clothes. Puts on his tie, his hat. He says, look, you're going someplace? You're going to a wedding?
He said, no. Now he starts dancing. He starts dancing. Who are you dancing? What's going on? He says, right now my student is getting married in that city. So I'm dancing now with him. I'm feeling that joy. That's what it means to carry someone else's burden. It's not like, yeah, I thought about you. It just takes the conscience off and goodbye. To really feel somebody else's joy. To really feel someone else's worry. That was the responsibility of the Kohen, the icon of the Jewish people.
The high priest was an exemplary personality, where he needed to not only, yes, I love every Jew. That could be superficial. To feel that burden of every Jew. That's a big thing. You know, the yellow ribbon that we were all wearing for the almost 900 days of our hostages being lost, taken away from us. It wasn't, what is the blue ribbon? What does the red, the yellow ribbon do? Doesn't bring them back.
But it's for us to feel. People ask me, like, is that going to help? So you have a yellow ribbon. What's that going to help? It's not about them. It's about me. So that I don't forget. So that I feel the pain of the mothers, of the fathers, of the brothers and the sisters, of the neighbors and the friends. Because they're my brother. Hashem should bless us all that we should take this lesson from the Kohen in Parshat Tetzaveh.
And utilize it as an opportunity to uplift all of those around us. To inform them how much we love them. To carry their burden. To feel their pain. To feel their joy. Have an amazing Shabbos, my dear friends. So you're mentioning a Talmud. The Talmud says, which is depression and sadness. That doesn't mean that you can't feel someone else's pain. There's a difference when someone is despondent and they're like, they're giving up. The Shekhinah doesn't reside there. The Shekhinah, the presence of G-d, resides only with joy. Why?
Because G-d wants us happy. G-d wants us happy. G-d wants us to be in an ecstasy of joy every single moment. The mitzvahs, the mitzvahs are meant to bring light to our life. Not to, G-d forbid, oh, it's such a burden. Oh, how things are going. It's terrible. But I will tell you that there was a statement, a phrase that was said very commonly in the early 1900s when Jews came from Europe. They coined a phrase which was, according to Rav Moshe Feinstein, the worst phrase
in all Jewish history. And the phrase was, It's difficult to be a Jew. You know what? You're going to go to the, to get a job in a factory and you don't show up on Shabbos because you're keeping Shabbos. You came back Sunday morning, you were fired. You got a pink slip. And then you get another job. And then on Friday again, after Shabbos, you're not showing up on Sunday. After not showing up on Shabbos,
you'd get another pink slip. And people got 52 jobs a year. In fact, a friend of mine told me his grandfather had all of his pink slips in his sukkah as decorations because it showed his commitment and dedication to Shabbos. You understand that people, it was difficult. But that can't be the approach. We can't look at, nobody wants to do something that's depressing. And if you say it, you start feeling it. Right? Psychologists say, right, doctor? That if you say positive things, you'll feel positivity. You say negative things,
you'll feel negative things. Just by what you say, it has an influence. It's an unbelievable thing. I was just talking to parents yesterday, came to talk to me. They were dealing with an issue with some of their children. I said issue with their children, right? It should be plural issues. It's the same issue. It's the same issue with all the children. So I explained to them something. They did a study recently. It's called the still face experiment, where they had a baby.
I think it's four month old baby, maybe three months old. I should pull it up here and show it to everyone, the video, where the baby is communicating with the mother, right? So the mother's smiling and the baby's giggling. Baby's so excited. And then they instructed the mother, the research team instructed the mother to ignore the baby. So the baby tries to get the mother's attention and the mother's ignoring the baby. And it's painful to watch. It's distressing.
They do it on purpose. It was a study to show what happened. So the baby starts looking at the mother and then it's analyzing, it's seeing that it's not getting the response because the mother's not hearing her. So then the baby starts like waving its hands, like, you know, trying to get the mother's attention and mother's ignoring. And then the baby starts moving to try to get the attention. And then the baby starts to cry and then starts to freak out like, you know,
just, and I was explaining to the parents, I said, your children are communicating with you and you're not listening. We need to listen. The most common question I get, what do I do with my child? He always throws a tantrum. Because you don't listen to him until he throws a tantrum. If you talked to him and communicated with him, he wouldn't need to throw a tantrum. He throws a tantrum because that's the only language you respond to. If you
talked at an earlier stage, you wouldn't need to throw a tantrum. Doctor, do you agree? All right. So I was leading a group therapy for parents, right? And we got into an example where a kid was acting out and screams and so on. And the mother said, I don't know what to do. Everybody gives me all kinds of advice. What should I do? I said, you just walk, don't say anything to him, walk up to him and give him a big hug and report back to us at the next session.
Next session, that's exactly what you did. I said, how'd your son respond? He gave me a hug back. That was the end of the argument. So yes, you have to communicate with these kids. And what you said earlier, they did an experiment. I remember it was a rabbi who was recording another study in Detroit, actually. And they had these kids, they were all given the same IQ test, and they divided them into two groups. One they praised,
they said, you are the most outstanding, you are the scholars in this group, and you get advanced studies and whatever, you get prizes. The other group was the same intellect, everything, but they didn't give them all those compliments. When they did the subsequent tests later on, the kids that were praised actually scored significantly higher. Amazing. Amazing. I quoted that because you mentioned it here previously. I quoted that in my class as well.

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