LM 22.8 — Chosam b'Soch Chosam, Part 8 of 10 · תורה כ״ב

תורה כ״ב, we are in the middle of paragraph י', we're about to start the eighth שיעור. Unbelievable תורה, we went pretty deep in certain parts. I think it ended up being a few extra שיעורים than we thought, so, but it'd probably be another two. We are on paragraph י', on the standard print, it's page ל״ג עמוד ב', in the middle of the right column, the bolded words וזה בחינת אב ובן, about three-quarters of the way into paragraph י'. Just one thing, by the way, if you are growing, enjoying these שיעורים, I know they're just they're a life source, please feel free to share, put on a status, drop the five stars in Spotify, maybe it'll get a little bit extra exposure.

Again, whoever can grow from them, it's לתועלת. We will just give a summary just we're in the middle of a paragraph, so high level, try to keep it high level. I'm going to use רב חיים קרמר's summary notes from the English, from the English volume just as a basis to help go through it. We'll pretty much read through it. I don't want to expand too much so that we can go right into the text, into the תורה. The, he starts off: to mitigate any decree, a גזירה, רחמנא ליצלן, that's going to come that's going to come onto כלל ישראל, the צדיקים play a dual role.

First, they are going to minimize towards הקדוש ברוך הוא on behalf of the people, minimize the sin before הקדוש ברוך הוא, and from הקדוש ברוך הוא towards the people, they will rebuke the people so that they get the people to come to do תשובה, and with these two ideas they can bring a מיתוק in the דין. That's going to be the first חותם, as it were. The תורה is called חותם בתוך חותם, that's the first seal. The second seal is if they're going to be rebuking the people, there needs to be a relationship between the people and the צדיקים, and that is going to be אמונה.

These two seals together allow this dynamic whereby the צדיקים are going to be able to help mitigate the decree and bring a מיתוק in the דין. That is the the the backdrop of our תורה, where we are going to build out what it takes to have the proper אמונה, to have this relationship with the צדיקים so that they can mitigate the decree. He goes on in paragraph paragraph 3: Perfect faith is drawn through the through the seven shepherds, through the שבעה רועים, within whom are encompassed the leaders of each generation. However, problem is in paragraph 4, there are false leaders who brazenly usurp leadership.

The only way to counter this brazenness, this עזות, is with the עזות דקדושה, and this עזות דקדושה is found in the sounds of קדושה, of holiness, of crying out to הקדוש ברוך הוא, of אנחה, of sighing, שופר, song, charity. What's going on over here? So the here here the people, we want to attach ourselves to צדיקים. Of course, we would, all else being equal, we're looking for leaders, we want to attach ourselves to the proper leaders. But from our perspective, there's there's various competing influences and different different priorities that are competing for our attention. How do we how do we cut past all of the noise?

Now, one idea I just want to mention, if we think about this world, הקדוש ברוך הוא really is כולו טוב, חק הטוב להיטיב, עולם חסד יבנה. הקדוש ברוך הוא wants really only to give us good. The ultimate good, like the מסילת ישרים says, is in עולם הבא. From our perspective, sometimes we lose sight of this. We say עולם הבא, that's the world to come. What's the main world? Where we are. להבדיל, if you think about a a football game, the World Series, and then the winner gets a trophy, but the point is not really the trophy, the trophy is the reward.

What's really the עיקר? Working through the game, that's the עיקר, that's really the main event. From our point of view, it's the opposite. We say in פרקי אבות that עולם הזה דומה לפרוזדור, and the the next world is like the טרקלין, that's like the palace, the house. הקדוש ברוך הוא wants to give us חק הטוב להיטיב. He wants us to live in the house. That's really that's really where the ultimate good is. However, הקדוש ברוך הוא set up a system where the ultimate reward is where the where the where the מצב is created by by the person, where the person gets to earn his reward, where he gets to have have בעלות and ownership of that.

In order to to do that, הקדוש ברוך הוא, instead of just giving us a טרקלין, הקדוש ברוך הוא made this world as a היכי תמצי, as a hallway, as a path to get to that ultimate good. How do we earn it? By הקדוש ברוך הוא putting us into a place with a battle, with a fifty-fifty בחירה, with good and bad, or at least the perceived perceived bad, because everything has come from the source of הקדוש ברוך הוא. It's one of the one of the main paradoxes, or a main paradox of אמונה, is how is there how is it possible for anything that would be רע to come from a source that's כולו טוב?

Where does it come from? Okay, not for now. But if you think about הקדוש ברוך הוא כביכול as sitting outside this system, there's only טוב, and then there's a system now that has the perception and the battle of טוב ורע and all sorts of competing influences specifically so that we can ourself, through our own בחירה, our own hard work, break through the system and appreciate the טוב that we would have otherwise gotten, but now we earned it ourself and it's even better. The truth is is that breaking once a person can attach himself to כולו כולו טוב, that's the true reality, the true, the true אמת, everything else falls away and we'll realize that it's just a facade.

So we need this עזות דקדושה, we need to be able to distinguish and to break past sometimes the the negative influences from our perspective seem much more powerful and much more relevant, but that's part of that that's part of the system that we're in. We also discussed this idea of competing influences not just the people to the leadership and the צדיקים, but even in a פרטיותדיק way, the גוף and the נשמה. So this relates in a nation way, in a in a כלליותדיק way, in a פרטיותדיק way. And then we said, okay, so now we have the צדיקים.

The צדיקים are trying to get the people to repent and there's going to be cries and עזות דקדושה we want to relate to them. However, there's also these echoes that are created by a person's sins, which prevent a person from hearing the sounds of קדושה, the sounds of holiness. And he goes on, we said that by sighing, by אנחה, by crying out to הקדוש ברוך הוא, a person is able to subdue the evil in himself, and through שימוש, through of of חכמים, a person's body and the servants of the in the service of the soul, through the מצוות, a person can subdue the עזות of the other side.

Now we, again, we dug deep in all these things if you go into the other שיעורים, I'm just going to mention almost like a parallel idea, but we talk about using the גוף to serve the נשמה, to serve the חכמים. In the service, I happened to see, I have to go look at the the ספר, but I saw an idea this week, it was tying it to to ויחי, but the the the idea that sometimes there's good and there's bad, and we want to ignore the bad, look the other way, we want to focus on the good, put ourselves into a good head space, and and and and therefore, ברוך השם, we we made the right choice.

However, that doesn't really That's not מבטל the חושך. That's not מבטל the negative forces. They could really come back when we least expect it, in a different context, when we have less reserves and we have less strength. The The really what our עבודה is is not just to look away. Sometimes in an immediate way that's what we have to do. We have to just, you know, סור מרע, just get away from the negative and just focus on the positive. But the ultimate goal is really to convert the חושך. We had an earlier תורה, I think תורה ו', בקי ברצוא בקי בשוב.

It's not that we want to grow despite the חושך and just not lose too much ground. We have to understand that there's different areas of עבודה. The The, if you think in in a number of different contexts, a person has a life-saving surgery that's painful, they thank the doctor. A person a person is exercising and they feel the burn, that's where the growth is, they embrace it. It's not always comfortable, it doesn't always mean that it's easy, but a person can't grow without that, therefore, they come to appreciate the עבודה in different aspects, and therefore, the חושך, it might be in certain ways less uplifting, as it were.

A person doesn't feel the light as much in the times of חושך, but there's no less, חס ושלום to say, there's no less הקדוש ברוך הוא and relevance of עבודה in the hour of the חושך. It's it's in a a different realm, and by doing that, a person can ממש can ממש convert the חושך and that becomes אור also. A person also thanks השם for the חושך. He thanks השם for the challenge, realizes that it's for his benefit. A person can ממש attach himself to הקדוש ברוך הוא just as much in the hour of the חושך.

So the גוף comes to serve the נשמה. It doesn't mean that there's no גוף, but the גוף comes to serve the נשמה. So that's, again, not exactly the idea as you go through the תורה to go back, but the idea of of using them, it's one it's one integrated process, not one despite the other. And so that's as far as that's as far as putting down the עזות the עזות of of the negative עזות so that a person could be able to hear and associate himself with the עזות דקדושה. However, in order to develop this עזות דקדושה, how does a person get the the the עזות that's needed to come close to the שבעה רועים?

Through שמחה. And we said that שמחה, joy, is synonymous is in paragraph 9, from going from דרגא to דרגא, from דרגא to level to level, נעשה ונשמע. And we we discussed this in the context, נעשה to the תורה'ס נגלה, and נשמע to the to the נסתר, really in the context of תורה and תפילה. And we started to build the whole structure around נעשה ונשמע, and the this this dynamic existing at every level, being that נעשה is something that we could do, something that we can relate to, and נשמע is something that's beyond. And that through our עבודה at every step in the process, we we have the things that we relate to.

This we spoke about this idea in great depth as well in תורה כ״א. And we we described this process of there there are the things that we've conquered, the things that now have become part of us, there are the things that we're actively working on, there are the things that we relate to, but we have not yet made it part of us, we have not yet conquered it, we have not yet worked on it, those are the things that we strive for, and there are the things beyond that that's not even necessarily yet on our radar.

And as we grow, we expand and we we bring more of those outer concentric circles into the middle, and that's the process of נעשה ונשמע, the things that we're doing, and the things that we have yet to do. There's the תורה that we associate with נעשה, and then there's תפילה, the the relationship with הקדוש ברוך הוא, reaching reaching beyond, and a person has to have the the yearning to to keep on going in that direction, and keep it relevant within him as he continues to go דרגא to דרגא. And now is where we're going to enter into our part of the text.

We're going to bring it back into this the into the quote from ספרא דצניעותא that we mentioned all the way at the beginning of the תורה, וזה בחינת אב ובן, מאמר וחצי מאמר. This this was the quote, and now we're going to bring this down to this system, this dynamic of נעשה ונשמע. כי הנעשה הוא בחינת נגלה. We're actually going to mention seven different pairings now. ר' חיים Kramer suggests in his note that this is alludes to the idea of the need to have אמונה, to have faith in all שבעה רועים, in all seven shepherds.

Let's read them through, and then the and then the תורה is going to start digging in. So it's כי הנעשה הוא בחינת נגלה. נגלה would be as opposed to each one of these each one of these ideas is going to be something that's a broader category and then something that's that's distilled. הוא בחינת נגלה as opposed to נסתר, הוא בחינת תורה as opposed to תפילה. We said that נעשה ונשמע is like תורה and תפילה, corresponds. בחינת ברא, ברא corresponding to בראשית. ברא, by the way, is also a son, but ברא if you look, even the word בראשית is ב-ר-א-ש-י-ת, we also discussed that earlier.

בחינת בן compared to an אב. בחינת עדן תתאה compared to עדן עילאה. בחינת חכמה תתאה, which is an allusion to אמונה sometimes we say, as opposed to חכמה עילאה, which is חכמה. בחינת חצי מאמר as compared to a מאמר. כנגד הנשמע, so these were all of the נעשה's that we read out and I read it into it. נשמע שהוא בחינת בראשית, מאמר השלם, חכמה עילאה, עדן עילאה, בחינת אב, בחינת תפילה, בחינת נסתר. You'll notice, by the way, that the order changes. I don't have any good פשט in that. It looks to be almost a reverse order.

נסתר is the last one mentioned, but נגלה was the first one mentioned. But over here, some of them are otherwise out of order, so something we could put on the back burner, maybe we'll discuss later, I don't know. But in any event, כי כל דרגא נגד דרגא שלמעלה ממנה, we're talking about מעלה מטה, above and below. Obviously, these things are not spatial, but whenever somebody is moving to the higher דרגא, הוא בחינת חצי מאמר. Wherever he is at for for now is going to be חצי מאמר. I'll give a couple of of of examples of ways that I think it helps me think about it.

I don't know if any of them are perfect משלים, but one suggestion, and none of these examples necessarily come only from myself, I've heard different people talk about certain ideas. When you think about something that's more abstract, when we talk about the אין סוף and the אור אין סוף and the development of the ספירות, from our perspective, we're we're taking something that's more spiritual, more רוחניות, more abstract, and then we are distilling it. הקדוש ברוך הוא is מצמצם things into something into עולם המעשה, into something physical, into something that we can relate to in our terms.

I I heard one time somebody point out that when a person has, let's say, a raw emotion, they're crying hysterically, that might actually be the most accurate representation of what their emotions are, of what they're feeling. When the person calms down and you say, "What's bothering you?" and they put it into words, it takes a step towards the intellectual. Now it's quantifiable, and now you can relate to it, and you can also address it, you can also deal with it, perhaps let's say in therapy. On the other hand, now that it's quantifiable, it's you're able to convey it to another person, it also is a step removed from what actually the truest the the truest representation of what it was.

Meaning when it was raw emotion, the person couldn't even describe it. It was it it was beyond words. There was nothing By by putting it into something that was more tangible, it actually it added in a certain sense, because now it's a חפצא, it's something that's relatable, but it also took away. Perhaps this is also a tool when a person goes to a therapist, when they want to speak things out, if somebody has an emotion that they can't deal with, when a person puts it into words, it puts it into it it it puts it into something that that that can now be dealt with and it becomes less overwhelming, okay?

Maybe people have their own ideas. Another example I heard, I think or I heard in the name of רב Wolbe, but I don't remember, one of the גדולים, when they used to have a חידוש, something that they were really affected by, something that created a הרגשה, some something that they understood that they never understood before, they would let it sit and cook, so to speak, for a number of months, maybe even it was a year, I'd have to I'd have to look back or ask the person who I heard it from initially, before telling it over, before even maybe writing it down.

Why? Because once you write it down, you're almost freezing it in time. You're putting a label on it. When somebody has almost an intuition, some sort of an idea, something that's not limited in the way that you present it, then it doesn't have certain boundaries. Once you put it into words, once you tell it over, so now the information, you can compare, contrast, you can plug it in, it's now usable, that's an advantage, but on the other hand, it's going to stop affecting you at a more at a more inner level once once now it's articulated, it's written down, it's in a notebook, it's something to be worked with.

It's no longer something that's a הרגשה, something that that changes your perspective and your vision. Now, in our terms also, if you think about an animal, an animal can have pleasure, certainly, it's instinctive and it can eat, it can do physical things. On the other hand, an animal will never have the actual pleasure—I'm using the example of pleasure because it's something that a person relates to, benefits from, that they that they have a value—when a person that actually has a pleasure, not just the physical pleasure, of doing, of making a hard, moral, ethical choice, an animal can't have that.

ולהבדיל, the pleasure of having completed a difficult crossword puzzle, Sudoku, a five-year-old does not have that pleasure. They may have the pleasure of ripping it up. The value of a gold watch to a two-year-old, maybe it only has a value if it tastes good in the mouth and it feels good on the tongue. So, when we grow from דרגא to דרגא, we're actually maturing, we're advancing, we're getting close to a more true, real relationship with with ourselves, with our נשמה, with our אין סוף that's in us, and we and we get closer. At each level, we relate to it in our more base way, and we get to a more דק, a more subtle a more subtle appreciation of things as we grow in our עבודה.

We went deep into this in תורה כ״א, the idea we used an example of concentric circles like of a target board. At every level, there's the things that I do, there are the things that I am shooting for, the things that I have ambitions. I relate to a certain idea, but I have not yet integrated, incorporated, I have not yet made it my own, and then there are the levels that I don't even relate to as an ideal. There are things that are totally beyond me. So, over here, at every and this is the the iteration and the process at every level of נעשה ונשמע, things that I do and then things that are beyond me, things that I have a relationship with, and then once I I relate to those strongly and I integrate those, those become נעשה, and then there's the next level of נשמע until we said, "Does this ever stop?" We

talked about in the last שיעור of תורת השם, of תפילת השם, of reaching towards התבטלות. Okay, last שיעור we talked about it. So, over here, כי כל דרגא נגד דרגא שלמעלה ממנה הוא בחינת חצי מאמר כמו אב שמדבר. If you think about an אב, think about a teacher, somebody gives over an idea, מדבר מאמר השלם, that's the full complement of the idea in its full strength. וכשבנו הקטן מדבר אחריו, now somebody, the תלמיד, the son, goes and conveys it afterwards, הוא מדבר רק חצי מאמר. We have an idea of ירידת הדורות. ירידת הדורות: are people not smarter now than they ever were?

Are people not more advanced, more technology? Well, leaving not to get into the full discussion, but if the people that were at הר סיני ממש had an experience, we know that they heard the first two דיברות from הקדוש ברוך הוא, they ממש they they they ממש expired and they came back, then they heard from משה רבינו, שכינה מדברת מתוך גרונו, the closer that people were to סיני is the closer they were to the full מאמר, and as it goes further, even if the information is conveyed and even if the chain of מסורה is unbroken, leaving aside, you know, how מחלוקת developed, all that, but in principle, the closer you are to the actual source, the closer you are in each level of a מאמר versus a חצי מאמר.

וכי כל דרגא נגד דרגא שלמעלה ממנה היא בחינת חצי מאמר. Every level compared to what's above it is something that is going to be, in these words, half. Now, I don't want to say half like as though you're missing information, maybe it's not accurate, but even if the entire thing is filtered so that it's מצומצם, in other words, it is an accurate representation. We've used technology before, like you know, let's say computer code and then what's on the screen. What's on the screen might be a beautiful image, it's something that we can relate stronger to, but it's not as true of an expression as what's actually in the code.

If there was a bug or you had to fix a real problem, you'd have to dig into the code, that's actually what's going on. והדרגא שלמעלה ממנו בחינת מאמר שלם נגדו, וכן מדרגא לדרגא. Further, כי כל בני אדם וחיות, all people, the חיות and animals, ועופות, birds, צמחים, plants, וכל דברים שבזה העולם, and everything in this world, הם רק בחינת חצי מאמר נגד העולם שלמעלה מזה העולם, כי הם רק רמזים לדברים הגבוהים מהם. Everything in this world is like a רמז of something above it. Now, I think what he means over here is, again, there's two ways to view a half.

You could view a half as, you know, I have a black and white cookie, I took the black half and I left the white half on, there's something that I'm missing. Another way to look at it is it's like a filtered version, but everything is represented. So, if a person if there was if the light that was too bright to look at, and then you put it behind some sort of a filter so that you could look accurately through the lens and see it, you wouldn't see it you wouldn't be able to relate to it in its full strength, it would be only half of the light that's coming through, but it would be an accurate representation.

If you have leverage, just the the the the idea of creating leverage, think about the or if you have let's say you're holding on to a long stick, so I flick my wrist from holding it horizontally to holding it vertically. How how far is that, three, four inches when I turn it? Let's say the stick is 10 feet long. That stick might have just moved, you know, how many feet in the air from the other tip of the stick being in a horizontal position until I flicked it all the way up to go upwards in the air.

You can have small movements that have large implications that are totally accurate and representative of what you did, but they have a a different expression. So, everything that we see here in the world is a more base, a more למעשהדיק expression of something that's going on far above us. הסתכל באורייתא וברא עלמא. Everything is within the blueprint, and we already quoted, מבשרי אחזה אלוקה. There's a certain צורה to the world. That צורה represents itself in the משכן. That צורה represents itself in an אדם. And we have our limbs, we have our sinews, רמ״ח איברים שס״ה גידים.

This is corresponds to the positive מצוות, to the negative מצוות. We there's a corresponding element to the בריאה, to the צורה of the world that we strengthen, that we give קיום to when we do our מצוות. The the the world operates according to a צורה. The רמז, what we see in the למעשהדיק way, we have the ability to create leverage, to affect things far greater than us in the world. A animal does not have that ability. In a certain sense, that's why people are more powerful than מלאכים. We have the ability to affect that leverage, and a מלאך doesn't, because we have this בחירה.

Now, in a way, it's a huge ברכה that we specifically do not realize the unbelievable power that we have, otherwise we'd be blown away, we wouldn't have any בחירה, we would we would just be we would just be floored. The fact that we that we walk around in the world as it presents itself to us allows us to go about our daily lives and still have the choice between engaging in קדושה or חס ושלום the other side. וכן מעולם לעולם, this this what we're talking about exists every at every step, at every עולם, at every part of the process, the same way that the אבי״ע, אצילות בריאה יצירה עשיה, whatever is in this world כנגד the next world, also that exists in the next world to the עולם on top of it.

It's not just that there's גשמיות and then everything else. This this process is at every stage. וכן כללות הבריאה נגד קודם הבריאה. The הקדוש - there was אור אין סוף, הקדוש ברוך הוא כביכול had had a had a רצון to and and wanted to create the world. The expression of the world went מכח אל הפועל, also that that means that the בריאה was חצי מאמר, וכן זה חצי מאמר כנגד whatever רצון השם was, it's I don't want to put into words, to create the world before that. כי עיקר שלמות the באין סוף ושם הוא בבחינת מאמר שלם.

והעיקר שלמות is to have התבטלות with הקדוש ברוך הוא. That is the most all-encompassing, it's hard to put into words anything that we talk about אין סוף and אור אין סוף, but the only most truest representation is the source, the נשמה of the נשמה, the source of the source, the ultimate origin of anything that comes afterwards that gets brought מכח אל הפועל. Everything is encompassed within that, and therefore that is the truest. Everything after that is a more distilled representation of it, and therefore the כללות of anything within the בריאה is going to be חצי מאמר vis-à-vis the אין סוף.

וזה ברא שהוא כללות הבריאה הוא חצי מאמר נגד בראשית. The גמרא in ראש השנה tells us that הקדוש ברוך הוא created the the the world in 10 מאמרות. Where's the Where's the 10th one? It only says ויאמר nine times. The 10th one is בראשית. Different ways of understanding the מאמר חז״ל. One way is that it's time: in order to create, you have to have it that something didn't exist before, and now it exists. That's how you created, you brought it into into the system of בריאה. So, there has to be a a timeline. We spoke about this at length in one of the earlier תורות.

But also that הקדוש ברוך הוא created as far as creation is concerned, הקדוש ברוך הוא put it בכח. הקדוש ברוך הוא put in that there should be the היכי תמצי that things should be in the בריאה and unfold from that. בראשית represents the בריאה בכח, שהוא בחינת קודם הבריאה. That is that the world that it's like I think the רש״י tells us already that everything was really created on the first day, and then it only came into being subsequently. בראשית represents תפילה. תפילה is something outside the system. There's a system of nature. When I when I want to דאווען, I want to relate to הקדוש ברוך הוא בתפילה, I'm asking הקדוש ברוך הוא, a person חס ושלום is sick, a person needs money, I'm asking הקדוש ברוך הוא to bring something in from outside the system.

If things just go on the regular progression, on the regular momentum, it's going to be like this. Am I asking for ניסים? No. The more that I relate to הקדוש ברוך הוא in a real way, is that really any different from asking my father, brother, mother, sister, boss for something? I need an injection of some sort of שפע. A person needs they don't have enough פרנסה, they ask somebody to inject extra פרנסה. It's not a נס, they're asking for they're asking for somebody to give them something. So now I'm asking הקדוש ברוך הוא to give me something that I don't have, but that's בכח, that didn't come into the בריאה yet.

We're establishing this framework where תפילה is בכח, תפילה is something outside, תפילה is something I'm yearning for, תפילה is the נשמה, and תורה is בפועל. So the the over here we say בראשית is that first framework בכח, the the first idea that there should be a בריאה, and then everything afterwards is ברא, it unfolded into the בריאה. There's תפילה and then and then there's תורה. תורה represents בפועל, תפילה represents בכח. The relationship outside to הקדוש ברוך הוא, the grasp, the yearning. So שהוא בחינת קודם הבריאה, בחינת תפילה. That is a מאמר שלם, and then the things that unfold from that are a more distilled idea and a more distilled version of that, that's going to be בפועל, כמו בראשית ירא בשת.

בראשית is, if you rearrange the letters, it's ירא בשת. רב חיים קראמער points out a person who who has a relationship with הקדוש ברוך הוא, applies to a person who fears השם because of His greatness and awesomeness. Such a person is embarrassed of his distance, from his inconsequentiality vis-a-vis השם, and therefore prays to draw closer to Him. And when we say that we're inconsequential, a person is very relevant. We just said a person's more relevant than מלאכים, but why? Because שלוחו של אדם כמותו, we make ourselves a שליח of הקדוש ברוך הוא, מבטל our רצון.

השם gives us the ability to have leverage over things that are much greater than us. Therefore that's our relevance. But us on our own, with our own רצון, before עשה רצונך כרצונו, before we make הקדוש ברוך הוא's, we align ourself with השם, so then we don't have our own individual relevance. The relationship with הקדוש ברוך הוא, בראשית, תפילה, ירא בשת, awe, understanding our position, our our relative significance vis-a-vis הקדוש ברוך הוא, really we're only relevant inasmuch as we're מבטל ourselves to השם. That's ש היא תפילה. בחינת יראת השם היא תתהלל. תתהלל is לשון of תפילה, שהוא מאמר שלם.

ועל כן אמונה נקרא ירושלים כנ״ל. We we mentioned earlier חכמה עילאה, חכמת תתאה, that יראה goes down to, אמונה comes from יראה. אמונה is really the חצי מאמר from יראה, from this relationship, from תפילה. And we're going to associate ירושלים with אמונה. This is going to be the the חותם חיצון, the אמונה that we need to get close to break through and establish relationship from the draw אמונה from the שבעה רועים. This is going to be the outer חותם that we spoke about earlier. ועל כן אמונה נקרא ירושלים כנ״ל. ירושלים is called קריה נאמנה, על שם שעיקר בנינה מבראשית.

ירושלים really comes, its בנין comes from בראשית, שהוא בחינת יראה שלם. בראשית we said is יראה, ירא בשת. ירושלים is a if רש״י in חומש explains that the word ירושלים comes from אברהם אבינו said השם יראה, ויקרא אברהם שם המקום ההוא השם יראה, and שם, מלכי צדק, called he's called מלך מלכי צדק מלך שלם. So we put those together, יראה and שלם. יראה, even though it says השם will see, is a is also the same letters of יראה of awe or of יראת שמים. So ירושלים is representative of יראה שלם, complete יראה. כי תמן יראה, over there in ירושלים is יראה.

תמן שלם, over there there is שלמות. כי אין מחסור ליראיו. There's nothing lacking, there's only שלמות to יראיו, to those who fear השם. That is the truest perspective. Avigdor Miller זצ״ל I think says that יראה and ראה, to see, you see clearly, you really understand your relationship with השם, that's then then then necessarily that involves יראה. So it says כי אין that ירושלים is a בחינה of יראה, which is a בחינה of בראשית, of ירא בשת, of מאמר שלם. כי אמונה הוא מהרועים. Because אמונה, we said that ירושלים is קריה נאמנה, אמונה it comes from the רועים.

We draw אמונה down from our relationship with the צדיקים כנ״ל, like we said before. From getting close to the שבעה רועים, we're זוכה to אמונה. ולרועים אי אפשר להתקרב כי אם על ידי עזות כנ״ל. We're unable to get close to the רועים, to the we the positive leadership, we said, without עזות דקדושה, without breaking breaking away and and putting down, we said through שימוש we're able to put down the negative עזות, the negative influence, we're able to break away from it. And then we have to use שמחה to get close to to hear the קול of the קולות of קדושה, for the עזות דקדושה, that's what allows us to get close to the שבעה רועים.

ולעזות זוכין על ידי שמחה. How do we get the עזות? Through שמחה כנ״ל. ולשמחה זוכין על ידי בחינת נעשה ונשמע. The idea of שמחה related to the process of נעשה ונשמע, שהוא בחינת תורה ותפילה וכולי כנ״ל. The process of נעשה ונשמע, of תורה and תפילה, that is a בחינה of שמחה. שמחה is what gives us the עזות דקדושה that we break through the negative forces so we can get close to the שבעה. רועים, so we can draw down אמונה. אך עיקר שלמות השמחה, not just the process of נעשה ונשמע, but נעשה is what we have.

The process of נעשה ונשמע is not that the נעשה is where you are, is really focused on the נשמע, on the process, not just the תורה, but the תפילה, the relationship, the yearning to go beyond where you are, הוא על ידי יראה. The שמחה comes from יראה, כי וגילו ברעדה כתיב. The פסוק in תהלים says, וגילו ברעדה, rejoice in your trembling. היינו, עיקר הגילה והשמחה היא על ידי תפילה. Now just to stop for a second, וגילו ברעדה, the גמרא says, וגילו ברעדה, how can why do you need both? So the גמרא says that a person needs to have a certain amount of יראה and שמחה so it doesn't get out of hand, but we're asking a deeper question that the ערבי נחל explains.

How do you פשוט have these two things go together? They seem to be opposites. How can you have שמחה and יראה? If you're in awe, then you're you're ממש trembling, then you're not בשמחה. If you're בשמחה, you're happy, you're having a good time. The example that we've given before is you have a five-year-old sitting on the גדול הדור's lap, and he says, we are great friends, maybe on his level, but that relationship of getting a candy from this רב, from this גדול הדור, if I told you that a ישיבה בחור, a כולל יונגערמאן, or an adult, his the entire scope of his relationship with this רב is that he gives him a lollipop, and this person is the גדול הדור, you would say, no, that's not a relationship, I want a deeper relationship.

But the depth of the relationship comes from his understanding of who this person is and what he represents. So the more that there is a יראה, the more that there can be a true אהבה. Think about a person's hero, his idol. The more that a person is removed from that and they hold that person on a pedestal, the more that they want to get close to them and they realize how meaningful the relationship is, and the more if that person has some sort of an interaction with them, the more that they ultimately appreciate it. If there's no יראה, so then we go back to our lollipop example.

Even the אהבה from having the relationship is limited. אהבה and יראה have to go together because the depth of the אהבה is the depth of the understanding of the relationship, and the truest understanding of a relationship with הקדוש ברוך הוא is based on יראה. But if there's only יראה, so then that's that that's, I don't want to say standoffish, but יראה is would be a repellent, אהבה is getting close. The the אהבה is the desire to get close to הקדוש ברוך הוא, but the depth of understanding how much you want to get close to הקדוש ברוך הוא is recognizing the gap between you of of יראה.

ברוך השם, we have אבינו מלכנו, so we know we know that we have a primal, at our core, a relationship with הקדוש ברוך הוא, and we can get past all of that, we can tap into it. הקדוש ברוך הוא wants us to give him נחת, בני בכורי ישראל. But the אהבה and יראה בעצם go together. The more there is a יראה, the more that the relationship is appreciated in אהבה. The more that we get close, the more of a revelation we understand that the closer you get to the mountain the higher that it looks. From the top of an airplane the mountain doesn't look that high.

The closer you get the higher it looks. The more there's an אהבה, the more you get close, the more there's יראה. The more there's יראה, the more that you want to get close. And the לכן explains that this עזות דקדושה that comes through שמחה, that comes that the שמחה is a בחינה of נעשה ונשמע, the שלמות of שמחה is really based on the נשמע, is based on the תפילה, then that שמחה, this וגילו ברעדה, the גילו, the rejoicing, but the שמחה, the feeling of satisfaction, the feeling of attainment, that comes from the yearning, from the accomplishment.

Think about any person that accomplishes something, that has the satisfaction, that has the the the the שמחה of having attained something, that's because there's something that they want to attain, that's because there's an ambition, there's something to strive for, there's a feeling of accomplishment. There's a, I don't know the source of the of the statement, I think I've seen it before, תענוג תמידי אינו תענוג, a constant pleasure is not a pleasure. A person goes and they're very cold, they go into a warm room, when they originally feel the temperature change, they feel, ah, the warmth.

They're around the fire, then they get used to the temperature and they no longer feel that that that change. The more that something is constant, a pressure, if you push something, then you feel the push. If you just hold it against it, so then it's constant, you don't feel that impact of the pressure. We're going to speak soon about the idea of ירידה לצורך עליה. If a person would have a just be in a constant state, like we spoke about מלאכים, then there's no idea of growth. The idea of growth means that you're moving up in levels, but the only thing that can inspire growth is dissatisfaction.

This is a profound, I mean, we could talk about just this idea for the rest of the שיעור, and we will go deeper into this idea. In order to grow in order to have שמחה, in order to have yearning, there has to be wanting to be growth. In order to have growth, there has to be something that propels growth, there has to be חושך, there has to be wanting to get closer. We didn't go so much yet into this idea, so for now we only spoke about the idea a person could always be going in the same direction and going ever higher, although yesterday's light is tomorrow's חושך.

If you're getting if you're going higher, so then the higher you go, the more that you realize is that where you were yesterday is low compared to where you are, and we're going to talk go even deeper into the idea of a ירידה לצורך עליה, what inspires growth and dissatisfaction. This is a total reframing of the process of עבודה. נמצא שעיקר בנין האמונה, the עיקר בנין of of אמונה which is the חותם ידין, this is the outer חותם, this is what gives a basis for a relationship with the שבעה רועים, the אמונה that will allow the the צדיקים to go be מבטל the גזרה, which is where we started our תורה, שזה בחינת ירושלים קריה נאמנה, which is represented by the idea the בחינה of ירושלים of אמונה which really comes it's based on יראה.

זוכין על ידי תפילה, this all comes from the process מאמר חצי מאמר אמונה is coming from יראה, יראה is תפילה, is ירא בשת, is בראשית, is being מבטל oneself, going all the way up towards the אין סוף, and this process continues שהוא בחינת יראה, בחינת מאמר שלם כנ״ל, everybody on their מדרגה continuing on this process that just keeps on going on. ועל כן נקראת האמונה ירושלים, שהוא יראה שלם. That's why ירושלים is representative of אמונה because אמונה comes יראה שלם, that is the truth of the relationship of אמונה, of faith. כי עיקר בנינה על ידי בחינת יראה, שהוא בחינת מאמר שלם, שהוא בחינת בראשית, ירא בשת שהוא מאמר שלם כנ״ל.

ירושלים is אמונה is the statement, the expression of a full יראה will will represent itself in אמונה. וזה עדות ה׳ נאמנה, and that's what it says, עדות ה׳ is trustworthy, is נאמנה. עדות ה׳ שהם העדיים, these are the crowns, the נעשה ונשמע that we mentioned before, הנ״ל, נאמנה, על ידה נבנית האמונה. Through the נעשה ונשמע, through the תפילה, the the second cr- both crowns, that's where we get שמחה עזות דקדושה, that's where the אמונה comes from. All of these ideas get brought together through the process of נעשה ונשמע. וזה משם רעה אבן ישראל. It's a פסוק we just had פרשת ויחי very timely, by the ברכות יוסף it says the פסוק says ויפזו זרועי ידיו מידי אביר יעקב משם רעה אבן ישראל, based on רש״י it says that פרעה put the ring onto יוסף, and יוסף supported ישראל and it says אבן.

אבן ישראל is a נוטריקון, it's a contraction of אב ובן, because יוסף was מפרנס יעקב and the שבטים as well, ותרגומו אב ובן, וזה מאמר השלם שהוא אב ובן כחדא. This is in line with how we've been explaining it, but he's coming to say until now we said that there's אב ובן, there's מאמר שלם and then there's חצי מאמר. I think that we sort of read a little bit of this in, foreshadowed where it was going, let's just see his point. כי חצי מאמר הוא בחינת בן לחוד, אבל מאמר השלם הוא אב ובן כחדא, כי שם נכלל הכל.

It's not separate things. The idea of something בכח, maybe not in the way that we relate to it, something בכח is potential, we would say maybe, well, you don't have anything. It's like what a teacher tells a kid, a parent, oh, the kid has a lot of potential, you know what that means? The kid's not doing anything, right? But that's not really When we say that something is בכח, it's inclusive of what comes after it. So, the way that even we just described the idea of יראה, of יראת שמים of יראה שלם and אמונה, something that's broader, something that's ברצון, actually something it's more it's more limiting when the when it becomes actualized, so now that potential has been put in a very specific way into a פועל, so that's a the the idea that now there's an expression or going back to the way that we said when a person takes raw emotion how

they put into words, the raw emotion was inclusive of how it ultimately became manifested and how it became realized. So, it's not really two separate things. The חצי the the חצי מאמר is just one expression of it. That is a a smaller, so to speak, a more narrower version, but the מאמר שלם, the בכח, the broader idea was actually encompassing. ועל the ועל ידי זה, that's what we see from אבן ישראל, the בן is the חצי מאמר, but the אבן is or the the broader מאמר is really אבן, it's אב ובן כחדא, it's one idea.

כי שם נכלל הכל, in the אב it actually includes the בן. The נשמע includes the נעשה. The relationship that we're reaching beyond includes what will ultimately come of it. ועל ידי זה יכול לבוא לבחינת רועים כנ״ל. And through going ממדרגה למדרגה, נעשה ונשמע, and continuing going up, a בחינה of אבן ישראל, of אב ובן, but going the אב ובן doesn't mean going just from the בן to the אב, when once you go to the אב it's inclusive of the בן together, you reach the מאמר שלם and then you you realize you're going from something that's partial into the into what was inclusive of it, and then you go to the next level.

Now what you have is actually partial compared to what was inclusive of that. That's how you keep on going until you reach levels and levels of שמחה to have the outer seal so that the צדיקים can ultimately we said be מבטל גזירות, יוכל לבוא לבחינת רועים כנ״ל, וזהו משם רועה, that's the רועה, אבן ישראל. Now it's attaching the אבן, which is אב ובן, the process of נעשה ונשמע to the רועה, to the שבעה רועים, because it's through this שמחה of the נעשה ונשמע process that a person gets עזות דקדושה that they attach themselves to the רועים.

Okay, now we are about to start paragraph י״א. You're going to have to hold on to your seats. We're going to try to take it a little bit slow, but we're going to say things that are unbelievable that are worth חזרing over and over and over again. אך כשרוצים לצאת ממדרגת נעשה ונשמע זה, a person has engaged in the growth process, he went through the נעשה ונשמע, he was someplace, he had an ambition, he grew, and now he's incorporated that, now he's in another place, and now he wants to continue on to the next stage of growth, and he goes from נעשה ונשמע זה למדרגת נעשה ונשמע גבוהה ממנה, now onto the next phase, נעשה ונשמע, it's a בחינה of קבלת התורה, he's going to to become a כלי, he's going to receive, he wants to get to the next level closer to הקדוש ברוך הוא.

צריך להיות ירידה קודם העלייה. It is necessarily so, part of that process, like in the physical world also, if a person going to throw a ball, they're going to wind up, if they're going to It comes up in גמרא מכות, a person is going to swing an axe, first they go down behind them, right, there has to be a windup, a person goes down in order to go up. צריך להיות, it's it's necessarily so, it's built into the system that there's going to be a ירידה קודם העלייה. We're going to talk about this a little bit, because it's just so unbelievably important.

The next words, כי הירידה היא תכלית העלייה, we'll come back to that as well. So I'm going to quote a little bit from ליקוטי הלכות in a minute, but, you know, when we have this these concepts, these יסודות'דיק concepts that somewhat abstract, somewhat hard to grasp, we'll try to also speak about it, maybe give a few משלים, try to to to give a point and a taste, רמזים, like we were talking about before, so that we can really get a full flavor of how this comes out within the human experience. So one idea that we've talked about is not even necessarily a ירידה, but it's a perceived ירידה in terms of in terms of how we relate to things on a relative scale, meaning a person is in eighth grade, they're at the top of the school, and they they have a certain level of בעלות.

When a person has a certain level of of being on top of things, then they're they're going to relate to growth in a different way, they'll be topped out, they have a different עבודה. Even if you talk in terms of birth order, somebody who's the oldest in a family might have a certain leadership position, they you might treat your five-year-old when he's the oldest or she's the oldest in a certain way, and let's say a person has several children, and now the youngest is five years old. מעשה בכל יום, when the oldest is five and then the youngest is three, you're telling the older one, "Give the other kid the toy.

Take care of this one." There's a certain leadership responsibilities. When the oldest is 10 and then the younger one is five, so you're not treating the five-year-old all of a sudden as the big one, now you're taking the 10-year-old and telling them to give it to five. It's actually something that people have to be very conscious of, totally other discussion, right, not to let the older one not have the benefit of being the kid, and not to let the younger one constantly never have the responsibility of of of having to give. That's a totally separate discussion and just really ראשי פרקים, but the idea that I'm mentioning is there's a certain way that a person relates to עבודה, in this context the kid, when they're the older one, they're the one on top, they're the one who's sort of at the top looking down versus the bottom looking up.

So you take a kid, they're in eighth grade and then all of a sudden they go into high school and they're in ninth grade. They become a 12th grader, a senior, now they're a freshman in college. And when a person is ready to graduate, they're ready for an עלייה, they have to start again at the bottom. Are they When they're at the bottom, are they lower than they were originally? No, in this in in this way that we're addressing it, that's not true. However, there is a ירידה because all of a sudden they feel they felt like they were on top of the world and now all of a sudden they feel like they're at the bottom of the mountain.

That's one idea of of graduating and and rising in stages. The ליקוטי הלכות over here says that a person who is going to have a ירידה before an עלייה is going to go through נסיונות. The truth is that נסיונות, the ליקוטי הלכות if I mention עירוב תחומין ד ז, but let's think about what a נסיון is. We have the 10 נסיונות by אברהם אבינו. A נסיון, a נס is a flag. A נסיון is something that brings מן הכח אל הפועל. People say that a person never gets a נסיון that they can't pass. Now does that mean that a person is going to be successful in every single thing that comes up in life ever?

Not necessarily, but what we're really talking about is נסיונות. The idea of a נס is specifically that הקדוש ברוך הוא gives a person a היכי תמצי, a context to bring a נס, to go מכח אל הפועל, to bring out a certain strength, so that now it makes it real. When if a person has, you know, 10 things that they want to accomplish in life, 10 things, that's overwhelming. If you take them one at a time, once I take one and I grow through that one, I can address the second, then I can go all the way all the way up to the ladder.

Why, if I had those כחות inherent in myself, what's the difference if I actually grow, if I actually go up in the rung? Why can I just why can I just do it all at the same time? The answer is that as a person brings things מכח אל הפועל, they grow. They expand, they make it real, הרגל נעשה טבע, they bring it into their experience, and now they can go ווייטער. So נסיונות are there for growth. On the other hand, נסיונות are opposition, נסיונות are uncomfortable. When a person, excuse me, is in a period of נסיון, a lot of times they feel a they feel חושך, they don't feel like they're in the in the light.

A person, in order to grow, has to have a ירידה in the context of נסיונות to be able to go מדרגה לדרגה. When a person has that, they can get bigger, they can get stronger. Now, he goes on over here, he says, והירידה היא בחינת נסיונות וצירופים. צירופים is is purification process. He gets pushed, it brings out the best in him, and that brings out the next נעשה ונשמע, the next קבלה קבלת התורה מחדש. And he says כי הרבה נפלו על ידי ירידתם, רחמנא ליצלן. During this שעת ירידה, it's באמת סכנה גדולה. I'm not reading the entire thing, there's just so much over here, but I'm going to try to paraphrase, and I'm paraphrasing in the way that it makes sense that that that it's hitting me, and people may have a different reading and a different take on this, but I think that these ideas are very important.

So he says over here again, a person goes through this process, they're in באמת a סכנה גדולה, and many people actually fall totally. A person has to be careful שלא יפול לגמרי, חס ושלום. Now, this seems very strange. In other words, instead of thinking about being on a cliff, you know, think about a person is on a slope. So I go a little bit higher. Now, if I fall, I'll fall from wherever level I am. Now, I go a little bit higher up the hill, so if I fall, why would I be יפול לגמרי? Why wouldn't I just fall a few steps back, but I'm still maintaining I'm still maintaining that growth that I had originally?

So let's take this a little bit differently. When a person grows, whether it's you take a step, when I'm standing here, I think בעל התניא talks about this as well, a person is standing, they're standing on two feet, they have a low center of gravity, they're very stable. When a person takes a step, while they're taking a step, they're moving forward. On the other hand, they're really balanced, they're not even balanced well, they're on one foot as they're going, that would be the easiest for a person to push them off. A person is going on a ladder, they're they're standing with two feet, when they go up, they're all of a sudden on one foot, and while they're focused on upward momentum, they're the least they're the least stable, they're they're changing their center of gravity.

Now, if you if you have, let's say, a a person who is at one level, as a person grows, then they're capable of more, they're stronger, they're heavier, but if at each point in the growth process a person is unstable, right? Then that means that it's true, on one hand, if they grow, it'll become exponential, and they'll grow even stronger. On the other hand, if they fall, then they fall they're falling entirely, they're falling off the top rung, they don't necessarily fall to the lower rung, it could be they fall totally to the ground. Now, why should this be?

Why should it be that they're falling from the top of the ladder all the way to the ground, rather than they're just falling a few feet down the hill, down the slope? And there's a tremendous עבודה being able to reinforce these things so that a person doesn't lose doesn't lose too much ground if they have a ירידה. So let's take another example. A person is a five-year-old. A five-year-old has one level of אמונה, a ten-year-old has another level of אמונה. Now, let's say a person has a PhD, they're studying philosophy. On one hand, they can have a tremendously more deep appreciation philosophically for certain things, look into the בריאה, understand how it comes together, understand philosophical proofs of הקדוש ברוך הוא maybe.

They can understand how the entire בריאה is shows הקדוש ברוך הוא, is the fingerprint of הקדוש ברוך הוא. They can have a really much deeper sense of אמונה and ממש the same way that you look at a building, or you look at a blueprint, and it's obvious to you that a very intelligent person created it, crafted it, you would never say that it's, חס ושלום, an accident. It's obviously the design speaks to the designer, much more so than the person who's five years old. On the other hand, you have to be very smart to be a כופר, to be an אפיקורוס.

This person who's going into he's delving into these philosophical proofs, into the sciences, this person could, רחמנא ליצלן, חס ושלום, also reinforce a כפירה and an אפיקורסות and come up with a whole whole system of logic about how it's nature, not השם. On one hand, the younger child might have an אמונה פשוטה that doesn't reach that that doesn't reach the nuance, the subtlety, the depth of person with a lot more intelligence. On the other hand, if the five-year-old is, you know, not thinking about הקדוש ברוך הוא, they're not going to get into as many problems.

So, as a person grows, as a person becomes capable of more, they can go tremendous, but while a person's going through this, and there's there's these these this cycle of instability and growth, a person has to become very careful that in this period of a ירידה, of נסיון, of instability, as they grow higher, that they could also be subject to a tremendous a tremendous הפסד, and they could be יפול לגמרי, חס ושלום. This applies in an individual sense. This applies in a כללותדיק sense. He brings over here ליקוטי הלכות, in עירובי תחומין, he brings ויבא עמלק וילחם עם ישראל ברפידים, and the מפרשים tell us רפידים, that is that was רפיון ידים, שרפו ידיהם מן התורה, when they were in a period of ירידה, a period of נסיון, that's when all of a sudden the negative forces, ויבא עמלק.

That's when there was a tremendous test to make them lose it all, חס ושלום. It says, ואתה עיף ויגע ולא ירא אלקים. ירא אלקים, which we said a few minutes ago, is זה בחינת בראשית, ירא בשת, מאמר שלם. What does that mean? This is exactly this process, ואתה עיף ויגע, before a person gets to ירא אלקים, before a person is going to get to ירא בשת, to בראשית, which is נשמע, תפילה, a person works towards the next period of נשמע, which now they're going to integrate and incorporate into the נעשה'ס so that they can go to the process again.

In line with that process is first ואתה עיף ויגע. First is the period of instability, of tiredness, of weariness, where they're going to be subject to a fall, חס ושלום. The אוהב ישראל, פרשת שמות, explains that when a person comes back, בכדי שבשעת חזרתו למדריגה ראשונה, יקח גם כן אז הניצוצין קדישין, that the ניצוצות that a person picked up at the lower levels, he's going to bring those up to the level that he started off at. So, a person is at a level ten, he wants to go to a level fifteen, so what does he do?

First he goes down, and then he comes back up to the level where he was at before, and then he surpasses it. What does it mean? So, I'm going to suggest in in in terms that I think have are a little bit more relatable than the language of that he takes the ניצוצות and he brings that back up. Let's say a a person a person wants to grow, they're growing from a certain, like we said before, a certain place of success, they're already a senior in high school, they're a senior in college, they're going through a process, and whatever goes whatever they want to accomplish after that is going to be based on their previous experience.

Let's say a person wants to they're learning חומש, let's say they want to learn רש״י, so the רש״י is going to be based on their understanding of חומש. The deeper a person understands חומש, if a person would go through the חומש and they will be sensitive to the nuance and words and say, "Hey, this how did what what's ממש פשט in the words? Why is there an extra word here? Why is there a missing letter here? Why does it seem to be not grammatically correct? There's a problem, something's not fitting." And now they they learn רש״י, not just who's just explaining, "This is what the פסוק means." But now רש״י is bringing a מדרש.

"Hey, why is רש״י bringing a מדרש? רש״י generally speaks about פשט in the פסוק." "Oh, because פשט in the פסוק doesn't make sense if you read it straight through. There's something grammatically off about the פסוק. There's a missing word. There's something that even in the פשט of the words has to be inserted in order just for the words to פשוט make sense. Let me take a מדרש over here and the מדרש is really going to be פשט in the פסוק. This must be what the פסוק even on its face is actually alluding to." The deeper that you have a sense at the first level, is the deeper and the or the higher, however you go, that you can have a sense of of the next level.

So if a person has only five-year-old חומש, and they come back to it every year, then they're really going to be limited in how much they can learn מפרשים also, because they're only going to be building something on their understanding at the most basic level. What's the עבודה? Now I learned חומש as a as a fifth grade, five years old or in fifth grade, if you would take the same פסוקים and you would introduce them to somebody who has a feel for language, somebody's 20, 25, 30, they have a very very advanced in how they look at ancient texts, and now you show them the חומש as somebody who has a PhD in looking at and they they at texts, and they say, "Hey, there's something off about this." And then you show them the רש״י and they say, "How did רש״י know that?

Did רש״י have more of a PhD than I do? רש״י had a master's degree? I would have been עומד on this problem. רש״י went and then they use this מדרש that seems obscure and they answered up the problem, and they're totally floored." You you look at this ראשון, the רמב״ן, did they have a did they have a degree in psychology? Did they how did they understand that this is how people react and then they put together מדרשים? The deeper you go, At the earlier stages, then the higher that you can go at the later stages.

But the problem is is that where I'm standing, I'm already at the top of the pyramid. I went as far as I can go. I want to go higher. What do I have to do to go higher on the pyramid? I have to build a broader base. How do I build a broader base? I have to go down. I have to revisit those things that I already knew. If you take a person who's פרום from birth, and they do things in their life, they say מודה אני, and they say קידוש, and they put on ציצית, and they put on תפילין, and now they get involved in teaching, or קירוב, it's both the same and different, right?

Either whether it's teaching kids or teaching advanced people, but just that have a more basic level education. And now they have to revisit things that they've been doing their entire life, and they just never thought about it. A five-year-old can ask them a question that's the most basic thing, and they just moved past it without ever thinking about it. A person who's becoming פרום says, "But why should that be so?" And without dismissing the question, you really say, "טאקע, why did I never think about this question? Because I'm in the middle of doing it." And you have to go down deep.

You have to revisit things. You have to start bringing people up. What you're doing is now you're going back down in levels. You're going back down to the bottom of your pyramid, and you're building a stronger base. Once you build a stronger, wider base at the bottom, you can go higher than you ever did. And therefore, you're going to have the It has to be that there's a ירידה קודם עליה. You have to rebuild that base stronger. And I'll tell you that we I said revisit a line: כי הירידה היא תכלית העליה, דליקוטי הלכות, נשיאת כפיים.

He's talking he's going through the ideas in our תורה, that the ירידה is לתכלית העליה, and the ירידה beforehand is the בחינה of עזות הגוף, and a person has to break the the עזות הגוף through שמחה, and שמחה is נעשה ונשמע. So, he goes through as we as we went through until the person gets to עזות דקדושה, and then it's משבר the עזות הגוף. Okay, in whatever way that we've been discussing it, but at the end he has a line, he says, להתגבר בעזות ועקשנות גדול דקדושה עד שמשברים עזות הגוף דסטרא אחרא, okay, so you break down the עזות הגוף, ומהפכין הירידה לעליה, וזוכין להשיג הנשמע, ונתבשר בשלום עליו.

How do you really get to the נשמע? I mean, this is just profound to me. I think that I think that this is maybe what he means, but I'm suggesting. What does it mean to be מהפך? A person has a ירידה. We all we've said before, not my הערה, גם זו לטובה. Objectively speaking, God forbid, a person loses a job, a person doesn't get the שידוך, whatever it is, this is not good. גם זו לטובה, I believe that if I go through this process, it will be for the good, it'll be part of something bigger and better, but right now it's not טובה, it's לטובה, it's not טובה yet.

A person can have אמונה and say, "It hurts." That is not against אמונה. Intellectually you say גם זו לטובה, right now it's not טובה, that's that's okay. I'm on the roller coaster, I'm upside down, I'm throwing up, I know that everything will be okay, it doesn't mean that a person's not allowed to vomit, they do what they have to do, we're holding on whatever level we're holding, and we try to grow. However, when a person now, they're in a corporate job, they're making x dollars a year, they get laid off, and due to sheer necessity they start a business, and that business now makes them ten million dollars, okay, profoundly more, unbelievable orders of magnitude, they're now their own boss, their own בעל הבית, unbelievable.

When they make a סעודת הודאה, do they now relate to having lost their job, it's on the bad side of the page, knowing that everything will be okay or will be for the best? Or do they say, "You know what? I never in a million years would have left a steady job. That was the best thing that ever happened to me." That transforms, it's מהפך, it goes to the good side of the page. When a person goes through this process, נשמע, that's why it's not just a ירידה קודם עליה that it goes down before up, כי הירידה היא תכלית העליה.

It actually becomes part of the same thing. It becomes part of the same process. As a person gets to נשמע, now the ירידה is תכלית העליה. The the ירידה is part of the עליה. It's מהפך, the the חושך is מהפך until it's part of the process, so to speak, of the אור itself. Yes, even looking back, a person can understand that that was a different part of the process than the אור, and they were relating to הקדוש ברוך הוא in a different way. However, looking back, a person understands that there's just as much of a relationship with הקדוש ברוך הוא, השם was watching him as much, or perhaps even more.

Sometimes, the example that we've given is when a kid's riding along on training wheels and the father might be running behind the kid, when a person when the father takes the training wheels off, and now actually the degree of focus and the degree of watching out for the kid, where the father might be holding the his hand maybe just a couple of inches under the seat in case it falls too much one way or the other that he can catch it, he might even be paying more attention to the kid even though the kid feels that there's less of a שמירה over there, that he's being held on to less, that there's just as much, just as much הקדוש ברוך הוא, just as much עבודה, just as much relationship, just as much אור, although a different type of אור in the חושך as well.

He mentions over here, he says, and by a צדיק that the ירידה is through being being יורד לקרב רחוקים, perhaps we can say that, you know, certainly when you have a רב who is engaged in his own learning and his own עליה, and that that רב now goes, like we gave an example of חינוך or, you know, whether it's fundraising, something outside of the ישיבה, but especially having to be יורד to empathize, to be able to be מקרב רחוקים, is a tremendous amount of of, so to speak, ירידה into places and in different ways, and having to maybe hear a different language sometimes, and whatever it is, a person is going to be exposed to a much different array of things which will grow them in and make them much more flexible and grow them in ways they never imagined that they would have grown had they just stayed on the straight path.

However, so he's explaining of a common that a person is a צדיק, if they're a רשע, so then maybe they had to fall, but a common that a person is a צדיק and their capacity is a צדיק, why is there any why is there any room over there for ירידה? So, this is one way that there's going to be a ירידה לצורך עליה, like we said broadening the bottom base of the pyramid in and in and in different ways. כמו שאמרו רבותינו זכרונם לברכה, לא היה דוד ראוי לאותו מעשה, and לא היו ישראל ראויים לאותו מעשה.

It talks about the מעשה of דוד with בת שבע and the מעשה of of כלל ישראל with the חטא העגל, אלא שנתן השם יתברך להם מכשול לטובת העולם. The ביאורי לקוטים over here explains if if דוד המלך or כלל ישראל, from the point of view of דוד, דוד was a מלך also, but he was an individual, if דוד was not ראוי for this for this עבירה, and כלל ישראל was not ראוי for that עבירה, even though as we see it ended up being for a benefit, why were they punished? Why do we even call it a sin?

And he explains that we say that it was a מכשול, they weren't ראוי to be in that area where they should have even had that מכשול. However, he suggests over here the ביאורי לקוטים מפתח ט׳ that that that when the הקדוש ברוך הוא wanted ideally they should be in this נסיון, but should not have had any of their own תאוה or any of their own, you know, personal relationship with that עבירה, and he says, כי מיד כשנוגע בזה אדם מצד עצמו ותאותו ולא מסיבת ההכרח לבד, יחשוב זאת לחטא ועון ממש חס ושלום. Okay, so he's coming to ask why it's even why it's a חטא or why there's punishment if they didn't put themselves in that situation, but let's stay closer to the point that we're saying.

Why is it that דוד המלך or כלל ישראל had to fall into these terrible situations, and ultimately that there was some sort of some sort of a מכשול over there and that they there was an actual stumble over there? And he says because דוד המלך had greatness ahead of him and to bring greatness into the בריאה. כלל ישראל needed to grow to heights, and in order for that because, again, it's part of the process. This should give a person חיזוק when a person does have a ירידה, there's a process. הלוואי הלוואי that we should relate to this process in the best way possible, and even if a person is in in a dark spot, they should relate to it in a positive way, and it shouldn't affect them too much that they end up veering even farther off, that they should have the strength to be able to handle these difficult times and these challenges.

However, there is a process built into the בריאה where there's ירידה לצורך עליה. We said in physical terms, the examples we gave, winding up for the pitch, the ax, we spoke about it in רוחניותדיק terms, and therefore we see that דוד המלך what came into the בריאה, the תהלים that we have, that we're able to grow from, that we could tap into דוד המלך, the י״ג מדות רחמים that came into the בריאה after the חטא העגל that we now use on יום כיפור, by תחנון, that we have these י״ג מדות on a fast day, that we have these י״ג מדות in the בריאה that we now can relate to הקדוש ברוך הוא from the depths, that there's a היכי תמצי that we can do תשובה and have access to these channels that were opened up in our connection to הקדוש ברוך הוא that we never would have had, this this tremendous הארה that came into

the world was only only came in by virtue of these of of דוד המלך and of כלל ישראל who really represented the the גדלות. The fact that over there there was ירידה opened up a tremendous עליה that now כלל ישראל has and that we can benefit from, and it was לטובת העולם כמו שאמרו רבותינו זכרונם לברכה, להורות תשובה, ליחיד and to רבים. In other words, that that the that the יחיד should have an avenue of תשובה by virtue of דוד having had this מעשה, although the גמרא says that everybody says דוד חטא he wasn't חוטא, but again, without going too deep into that specific מעשה, that that דוד המלך למעשה, that there was a מכשול for דוד המלך, and that to some degree we relate that there was a חטא, and we have קפיטל נ״א, this is the קפיטל of תשובה, and דוד המלך spent his whole life doing תשובה, ואני תפלה and his whole

life in תפלה, and that now there could be a מקום for עליה for חוטאים and for כלל ישראל as well. This is how we understand part of this process built in, and just אגב, I believe Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch says even I think maybe he says in the in third קפיטל, but he says it in or a fourth קפיטל, he says in other places as well, that one of the ראיות of the integrity of the אמת, of the אמונה of תורה, is not whitewashing the גדולים. If a גדול is a מלאך, then we we can't we can't learn from them, they're a machine, they don't relate to us.

Understanding this עבודה through the lens and through the understanding, even though yes, we said that הקדוש ברוך הוא put the מכשול there and we don't even understand the מלאכים, the the תנאים and אמוראים, let alone דוד המלך, where we can't say anything negative, but the idea of how the תורה frames things in the the human element and something that we can relate to, it opens up avenues that we can get closer to הקדוש ברוך הוא, that it's not something that's divorced from us, it's something that we can relate to and we understand it through חז״ל, through understanding the גדלות of the קדמונים and the גדלות of the the the the you can't even say people, but the אבות and the the the שבטי י-ה, through the personalities that we encounter in תנ״ך and in and and ווייטער, but we but still למעשה we relate to them in a way that we do have an attachment

point to them, that we're able to have עבודה from it, and this הקדוש ברוך הוא put these greats in the situation of of a חטא so that we can have a relationship also with that aspect of עבודה. Okay, unbelievable. We will, אם ירצה השם, finish certainly to the השמטות, I hope, next time, and then then be able to to to come to to the end of the תורה and then start again, but אם ירצה השם, we'll go הלאה ו-ווייטער.