The Fine Line – Matot - Masei
The shiur is dedicated to אימי מורתי פסיה בת זיסל שולמית, may she have a speedy recovery, רפואת הנפש ורפואת הגוף השתא בעגלא ובזמן קריב.
וַיִּסְעוּ מִדָּפְקָה וַיַּחֲנוּ בְּאָלוּשׁ (במדבר לג, יג).
In this week’s shiur I would like to discuss the fine line we tread, a line we are constantly challenged to find the appropriate balance with. To preface that, I would like to relate to you my experiences of the past week, which have direct bearing on the subject.
I was privileged to participate this week in the כנס המקדש, a once in a decade event to raise the awareness and consciousness regarding the Beit Hamikdash.
The two day conference included a סעודת מקדש, a catered banquet with innumerable courses of delectable dishes prepared by a famous chef, comprising the food that made up the various korbanot, nesachim and bikkurim with the focus on remaining true and accurate to the culinary reality and materials of the time. We provided all the breads in the banquet, including rolls made from חמשת מיני דגן, Yechezkel bread and samples of the Menachot. Between the courses were short talks and presentations showcasing the latest, groundbreaking research into the various aspects of the Mikdash, ranging from resuscitating ancient strains of grapes for making wine for the nesachim, to planning and mapping out the future city of Jerusalem when the 3rd Mikdash is rebuilt . The following day was an expo in ancient Shiloh, the site of Mishkan Shiloh, with exhibitions and demonstrations of a wide variety of procedures in the Mikdash, such as preparing the Ketoret, weaving fabric for the Parochet, baking the Menachot, switching the Lechem Hapanim on the Shulchan (demonstrated by yours truly), lighting the Menorah, dressing in Bigdei Kehuna, washing hands and feet with the Kiyor and many, many other activities that were performed daily (and weekly) in the Mikdash. The event was organized by Professor Zohar Amar, dean of the department of Land of Israel Studies from Bar Ilan university – a true to life “Indiana Jones” of Mikdash research, in conjunction with Machon Hamikdash, the מדרשה לידע המקדש, Machon Lechem Hapanim and other prominent research organizations.
Actually seeing the eleven ingredients of the Ketoret with your own eyes and smelling each one individually and in combination, seeing the actual Lechem Hapanim bread, not just models, according to the various shapes and opinions, touching it, tasting it, seeing what shade of blue, purple, red/brown the colors תכלת, ארגמן, תולעת שני are with your own eyes rather than imagining what they look like, and also seeing the little insects from which the dye is derived … changes one’s conception completely. We are sensory creatures by nature and only really, truly understand things when we experience them in the flesh, as it were.
Talking about “in the flesh”, I want to share with you my initial reaction when I arrived at the seudah. At the entrance they had an enormous pit filled with coals and above it an entire sheep, the Korban Pesach, roasting on a spit made from pomegranate tree branches (anyone who decides to grow pomegranate trees will be a millionaire when the Mikdash is rebuilt because everyone will need the wood to roast the Korban Pesach every year). It is not the first time I have seen a whole sheep before, every day when I drive home I see flocks of them along the way. This was different. It was a whole sheep, including the head, feet, etc. but after שחיטה, skinned with all the interior exposed. I must admit that at first the sight was slightly jarring, seeing it up so close you could touch it. The initial reaction was jarring because that is not the way we routinely encounter sheep in our modern society. They are either those fluffy things in a hillside, or a juicy spare rib on your plate. Most of us do not experience the intermediate stages between the fluffy thing on the hill and the steak. We are “sheltered” from the “gore and guts”, we are what is called in the Gemara – an איסטניס. We are delicate, because we have been conditioned by modern society to having become removed from the source of our sustenance.
Older generations were not like that. I remember my mother telling me stories of when she was a child (about ten years old), taking a chicken to the shochet erev Shabbat and watching the shochet doing what he does and the now headless chicken still scurrying around the yard. If you exposed a ten year old child today to that, you would probably be arrested for child abuse and causing psychological trauma, requiring years of therapy to repair the “damage”. Eighty years ago, a parent didn’t think twice, it wasn’t an issue. Did my mother later suffer trauma as an adult from the experience? Quite the contrary, she routinely cooked and ate (delicious) chicken meals and considered the whole affair quite amusing. Children (and adults) today are much more delicate, we are no longer connected to our food chain, we have been distanced from the natural source of our food. To most of us chicken grows in vacuum packed, ready portioned packages on a supermarket shelf. The monolith food industry does whatever it can to sever us from the true source of our food, so that we will buy what they dish up - most often a flavorless, denatured form of the original. Two weeks ago we ate some cherries one day after they had been picked off the tree from a small farmer here in the Shomron. Compared to other containers of cherries we buy from the supermarket, these were delicious and not partially moldy. They lasted over a week without spoiling. One wonders what the producers of commercial cherries do to their product (in an attempt to make more profit) that makes them so inferior.
This is why the seudah was such an eye opener, because it was not food detached from the source, it was directly from the source, immediately after being picked, shechted, etc. The texture and flavor of the food was unsurpassed (and not simply because it was prepared by a well-known chef). They served vegetables that no supermarket sells, ancient strains of lettuce that were grown specifically for the seudah, a variety of קישואים that once was indigenous to Eretz Yisrael, that were so crispy and juicy that nothing you buy today in a supermarket can compare with.
It was then that I realized what the true obstacle to rebuilding the Beit Hamikdash is. It is not political, not even religious … it is that we have become detached from the real world. Certain powerful people with agendas have purposely toiled day and night to separate us from the real world.
The food industry feeds us substandard, denatured, nutritionally deficient food. Even food that we consider to be “raw materials”, like produce, meat, fish, milk, etc. (not the obviously processed food like pretzels, hamburgers, cold cuts, etc.) is so highly processed that it bears little resemblance to the originally intended creation. The processing begins with feeding livestock cheap, denatured feeds instead of letting them graze/forage in their natural habitat, pumping them full of drugs, antibiotics and chemicals to increase their size, milk production etc. Spraying the crops with pesticides and genetically engineering them to increase yield. And all of this on the premise - that they are saving us time and effort. Why bother cooking? Why bother growing vegetables or fruit in your garden? Why go to the trouble when instead you could be spending more time with your family, enjoying more leisure hours in the day? They don’t tell you the price of relinquishing control over your food. It is a price that if we truly understood, would never pay.
The pharmaceutical industry feeds us drugs to separate us from our own bodies. Yes, they also manufacture lifesaving drugs, antibiotics, insulin, etc. However, that is not where they make the “big bucks” it is from over-the-counter painkillers, sleeping pills, anti-inflammatories, laxatives, etc. Got a headache? Pain in the knee? Constipation? No problem, just pop this pill and it goes away. Continue living life as normal. So we pop the pill and just go on living life as normal, masking the headache, the pain in the knee, ignoring and not addressing the root cause. By ignoring the root cause we inevitably exacerbate the problem. We become reliant on the pills to allow us to function and at the same time make the pharmaceutical companies richer.
The entertainment industry, the movie industry, the internet companies like Youtube, disconnect us from our “miserable”, real lives with escapism. Why live a normal life when you can live the reality of princes and princesses, celebrities, superheroes and fantasy? It is not enough that we watch TV once or twice a day we have to have the escapism strapped to our bodies and in our faces every waking hour, on our cell phones, with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. We need to be plugged in! Companies like Tesla and Elon Musk are already talking about having chips implanted inside our bodies to deliver the escapism more efficiently with virtual reality.
The question is …. Why not? What is wrong with all this? After all, when HKB”H created the world He said to us פְּרוּ וּרְבוּ וּמִלְאוּ אֶת הָאָרֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁהָ וּרְדוּ בִּדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם וּבְכָל חַיָּה הָרֹמֶשֶׂת עַל הָאָרֶץ (בראשית א,כח). We are commanded to take charge of our world וְכִבְשֻׁהָ, and improve on it. So what is wrong with all the above? That is our job isn’t it?
The answer is that it is our job to improve the world, to find cures for diseases, to relieve pain, to improve our food quality, to make people happy, etc. as long as we keep HKB”H in the equation. If however we try to eliminate HKB”H from the equation, then that becomes כֹּחִי וְעֹצֶם יָדִי עָשָׂה לִי אֶת הַחַיִל הַזֶּה (דברים ח, יז).
If you think that the modern food/pharmaceutical/entertainment industry shenanigans only began recently, you are mistaken. They began the same day man was created. Adam and Chava were living in Gan Eden. Do you think Hollywood can improve on that? They were eating prima quality food from the trees in Gan Eden. Do you think Nestle can improve on that? and they didn’t need pharmaceutical companies because nothing ailed them.
But the yetzer harah succeeded in making Chava believe that this was not enough. Why settle for what HKB”H gave you? This resulted in Chava taking the fruit of the עץ הדעת, wheat, and doing exactly what the modern food industry does to our food. חרשה זרעה קצרה עמרה דשה זרתה בררה טחנה רקדה לשה אפתה (ברכות נח, ע"א). Was it an improvement? Of course not! But it was the same mistaken perception that since we have the intelligence, the talent, the skill, the drive, the innovation - that we can make this world better than HKB”H made it, all on our own. The truth is we can make the world better - if we work with HKB”H, that is what כִבְשֻׁהָ means. Not try to bypass or eliminate Him, not militarily, scientifically, economically, medically, philosophically, nor in any other way.
In Alush HKB”H gave us the Mann. HKB”H said “Let Me do the kneading this time, let Me take care of you. Trust in Me, not solely in yourselves!” That is what being in the Midbar was all about. It was a crash course for the next stage – living in Eretz Yisrael.
The Beit Hamikdash is a celebration of everything in our world, the world that HKB”H created, our food, our joy, our inspiration, our brotherhood of man. It is constantly reconnecting to the real world, not trying to escape it, not trying to pervert it. It is a celebration of our “marriage” with HKB”H.
We cannot sit idly by in the Beit Hamikdash and ”watch a movie”. We have to be actively participant in the “movie”. We have to do our hishtadlut. We have to insert pipes under the Lechem Hapanim so that there is airflow and it does not go moldy. The Lechem Hapanim was a miracle – it remained miraculously fresh for an entire week. Why do you need pipes? Let HKB”H take care of the mold, like He keeps the bread fresh.
That is what כִבְשֻׁהָ means, doing our hishtadlut and letting HKB”H take care of the rest. We have to be participant and not totally reliant on HKB”H to perform miracles. That is a relationship. Not one party working and the other sitting idly by. HKB”H does not need our hishtadlut, we do – to keep the relationship a vibrant, living entity.
This is the fine line. Where does the hishtadlut cease to become hishtadlut and instead mutate into כֹּחִי וְעֹצֶם יָדִי? It occurs when we begin to try to eliminate HKB”H from the equation. That is the line.
The greatest obstacle to rebuilding the Beit Hamikdash today is reestablishing the balance between what is real and what is delusional. Ironically it is the delusional modern society, completely detached from reality - which idolizes the detachment from reality - that regards anyone who wants to rebuild the Beit Hamikdash delusional.
This week I had the privilege of meeting lots more “delusional” people like me, more than I knew existed. It was a heartwarming experience and it is a sign that the Geulah is on the way בבי"א.
