{"id":3111,"date":"2019-02-17T15:51:28","date_gmt":"2019-02-17T15:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcmangel.net\/?page_id=3111"},"modified":"2019-02-17T15:51:28","modified_gmt":"2019-02-17T15:51:28","slug":"tetzaveh-5779","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/?page_id=3111","title":{"rendered":"Tetzaveh (5779)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Drash Cards for Tetzaveh (5779)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Marc Mangel<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 First a commercial about\ndoing the drash.  Each day I read a book\ncalled HaYom Yom <\/em> [explain what it is].  For Thursday, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak wrote:\n\u201cWhen someone walks the street and thinks words of Mishna or Tanya, or sits in\nhis store with a Chumash or Tehillim \u2013 that is more valued today than when the\nstreets were bright with the light of Torah\u2026We must have some Torah to take\nwith us into the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 So volunteer for a drash,\nand start working on it on Sunday, spending a little bit each day thinking\nabout it (writing it towards the end of the week).  You will be carrying some Torah with you into\nthe street for an entire week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

___________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Here are some verses from\nVaeira<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cYou shall say to him \u2018God, God of the Hebrews has sent\nme to you to say \u201cSend forth my people that they may serve Me in the\nwilderness\u201d [ Shmot 7:16]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cCome to Pharaoh and say to him: This is what God has\nsaid:  Let my people go so they may serve\nMe\u201d [7:26]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cStation yourself before Pharaoh.. and you shall say to\nhim \u2018This is what God has said: Send forth my people so they may serve me\u201d\n[8:16]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cCome to\nPharaoh and tell him : This is what God, God of the Hebrews has said: \u201cSend\nforth my people, so they may serve Me\u201d [8:28]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 And from today\u2019s reading<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cI will\ndwell in the midst of the Israelites and I will be their God\u201d (29:45)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            \u201cThey\nshall know that I am God, their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I\nmay dwell in their midst\u201d (29:46)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 I want to make two points, comparing and contrasting the\nsets of verses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 First point, and I am no apologist for the Israelites of\nthe generation of the Exodus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Even King Shlomo cannot understand what it means for God\nto dwell in our midst.  Pinchas Peli\nnotes that in 1 Kings 8:27, Shlomo plaintively asks at the dedication of the\ntemple \u201cBut will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heavens and heaven\nof heavens cannot contain You, how much less this house that I have built!\u201d.\nThe Israelites had almost 500 (480 to be precise) years from the Exodus to the\nbuilding of the Temple to figure this out and did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 So maybe we can better understand the Israelites in next\nweek\u2019s Parsha when they build the Golden Calf. They were told 4 times to serve\nGod (and they surely had examples of what that meant when they were in Egypt)\nand only twice that God will dwell in their midst.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Second, about this notion of God dwelling in our\nmidst.  It took until the 3-4th<\/sup>\ncentury for R Samuel ben Nahman in Midrash Tanchuma to make it clear (Naso 16).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 He writes \u201cWhen the Holy One, Blessed be He, created the\nworld, He longed to have an abode below just as He had on high\u2026.[After creating\nAdam] The Holy One, blessed be He said this to him, \u2018This is what I long for,\nthat just as I have a dwelling on high, I would like to have one below\u2019\u201d.  God wants a dwelling below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 It took another 1500 years before the last Lubavitcher\nRebbe made fully clear what a \u2018dwelling below\u2019 means. It is now called the\ntheology of \u2018Dirah Betachtonim\u2019 [in modern Hebrew \u2013 an apartment in the\nlowerness] and is wonderfully explained and explored in the book Heaven on Earth <\/em>by Rabbi Faitel Levin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 To get the point of a dwelling below, we have to go\nKabbalistic briefly.  The Kabbalah\nrecognizes four worlds\/universes: \nAtzilut [that of pure Godly energy], Beriyah [Creation], Yetzirah\n[Formation, where the angels sit], and Asiyah [Making, our world].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 In these four worlds, the only place where physical\nactivity occurs is in our world Asiyah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 We may want to \u2018ascend\u2019 to one of the other worlds to get\nall ethereal (according to Sefer Yetzirah\n<\/em>the highest that we can hope to climb is to the world of Yetzirah, where we\nwill be with angels) but God wants to be down here with us because that\u2019s where\nthe real action is.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 According to the theology of Dirat Betachtonim, every\ntime we do a physical mitzvah, we elevate the physical to the next world, thus making\nit more possible for God to dwell in this world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 It is kind of like a Newton\u2019s law for spiritual activity:\nfor every one of our actions with a physical mitzvot, there is a Godly reaction\nof having a bit more dwelling in the physical world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 To paraphrase \nRabbi Levin: \u201cDirah Bethachtonim\u2019s view ascribes greater spiritual value\nto the performance of physical mitzvot than to prayer or meditation\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Think of it: every time we do a physical mitzvah, we help\nincrease the dwelling of God in our physical world. And the only place to do a\nphysical mitzvah is in this world \u2013 even the angels in Yetzirah cannot do a\nphysical mitzvah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 This  idea applies\nto obvious physical mitzvot ones like tefillin and lighting Shabbat candles,\nwhere we make leather and parchment or wax into holy (hence The Rebbe\u2019s\narmy).   But it also applies to mitzvot like dropping a\ncoin into the Tzedaka box or choosing to eat a kosher item rather than a\nnon-kosher item or ensuring that a lost item is returned or that there is no\nstumbling block for a blind person.  When\nyou start to look around, the opportunities abound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 Thus with a little bit of perception and effort, each one\nof us can increase the size of God\u2019s dwelling in this world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drash Cards for Tetzaveh (5779) by Marc Mangel \u2022 First a commercial about doing the drash.  Each day I read a book called HaYom Yom  [explain what it is].  For Thursday, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak wrote: \u201cWhen someone walks the street and thinks words of Mishna or Tanya, or sits in his store with a Chumash … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":51,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3111","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3112,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3111\/revisions\/3112"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}