Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe Podcast Collection

0:03 You're listening to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe of Torch in Houston, Texas. This is the Parsha Review Podcast.

0:11 Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the Parsha Review Podcast. Parsha's told us. Parsha's told us.
0:19 We know we have the story of... Rebekah giving birth to twins, Jacob and Esau, the two brothers. And the question that... First, let's read the verse.
0:31 The verse states in chapter 25, verse number 22.
0:39 And the children were arguing, it says over here in our article translations, they crushed within her. And she said, And if so, why is it that I am? And she went to inquire of Hashem. And as we know, the Torah tells us, she went to the prophet, and she asked the prophet, what's going on within me?
1:07 is pregnant with two children. What does Rashi say? We know the famous Rashi. Rashi says, our rabbis expounded it, as meaning a language of running, when she would pass by the entrances of the places of Torah study, of shame and ever.
1:37 Jacob would run and toss about Lotseis to go out of his mother's womb.
1:43 But when she would pass upon the entrances of the places of idol worship, Esav was tossed about to go out. And she was confused because she had no idea she had twins within her, in her womb. She didn't know she was pregnant with twins. Here she is, when she goes to the study hall, oh, he's kicking, get me out.
2:06 When he goes to the place of idol worship, kicking,
2:08 what's going on? So the prophet tells her, no, you have two, nations in your womb. And we know this is Jacob and the nations of the world. Okay, so let me ask you a question.
2:20 An amazing question. What does the Gemara say? The Gemara in Tractate Nida says the following 30B. It says, Oma Rev Simloi.
2:30 Rev Simloi expounded the following teaching. To what may a child be compared to when he's in his mother's womb? okay he says it may be compared to a ledger that is folded and laid down so you fold it lay it down okay that's what a child is compared to a in a fetus is compared to in its mother's womb Okay. Its two hands rest on its two temples.
3:09 Its two armpits on its two ankles.
3:16 And its two heels against its two buttocks.
3:23 And his head lies between its knees.
3:29 Its mouth is closed and its navel is open. And it eats from what its mother eats. And it's drinking what its mother drinks.
3:44 And it does not discharge excrement. Why? Because that would kill its mother.
3:51 Miraculously, though, once it is born and it emerges into this world, to the ear of this world, that which is closed, the mouth opens. And that which is open, the navel, closes. Because without this,
4:13 This newborn baby, if it would be the reverse, wouldn't be able to live for even one moment. Okay. Then the Gemara says that the embryo experiencing a heightened spiritual perception while in the womb, what's going on there? And a lamp is lit for the unborn child above his head.
4:38 And he peers and he's able to see from one side of the world to the other. And the Gemara continues saying, why is that that he's able to? The Gemara continues.
4:54 And in the womb, it is learning the entire Torah. And he brings a verse to prove this. So let me ask you a question. Jacob, soon to be the patriarch of the Jewish people, is in the womb.
5:11 learning Torah, learning everything there is to learn, drinking his mother's latte, enjoying the greatest closeness possible with Hashem, right? Because you're basking in his Torah, you're being fed, you're all taken care of. Why is he rushing to get out? Why is Yaakov rushing?
5:37 They're passing by a study hall. He wants to get out. Why would you get out? You're sitting there learning with all the angels the Torah.
5:43 You're sitting there. You have no barriers. You have no limitations. You're living in a world of total clarity.
5:51 There's no barrier of a wall. There's no barrier of a door. There's no barrier of human beings. There's no barrier of temptations.
5:59 There's no barrier of desires. There's just closeness to Hashem. And he's jumping. He wants to get out.
6:08 What is going on over here? Solid question. So actually, one of the great sages of Gussman would always ask his students,
6:22 Why doesn't the halacha obligate one to stand up when a pregnant woman walks in? Now, Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetzky, one of the great sages of America, would always stand up and let a woman who's pregnant walk in first. He would hold the door open for her. Why? He would say because in her room there's a baby learning the whole Torah.
6:44 That could be Elijah the prophet. You never know. So you let the pregnant woman walk in first. But Rav Guzman says, but there's no halacha to do so.
6:55 It's nice, it's courteous, it's etiquette, but there's no halacha that obligates us to do that. Why not? Why not? Here you have a baby, an embryo or a fetus that is learning all the Torah in the world, the greatest scholar in the world, and we don't stand up.
7:17 There's no obligation to stand up for the honor of the Torah.
7:22 See, he explains so beautifully.
7:25 Because unearned Torah isn't valuable.
7:31 There is no obligation to know the whole Torah. There is no obligation to know the whole Torah. It's not about knowledge. It's about working hard to acquire it, to learn it, to study it.
7:49 You won't find anywhere in our blessing. We pray every single day. We talk about in Ahav HaRabba, the prayer right before Shema. We say the abundant love that Hashem has loved us.
8:04 He's given us the Torah. And we ask Hashem to teach us. What does it say here? Please Hashem,
8:12 graciously give us to understand, to elucidate. to listen, to learn, to teach, to safeguard, to perform, and to fulfill all of the words of the Torah.
8:36 None of it, none of these, are to just know the Torah. It's not about the knowledge of the Torah. Yes, we should know Torah. It's not about having knowledge.
8:46 AI knows all of the Torah. So what? It doesn't mean anything. So he knows all the Torah.
8:53 It's not about knowledge. It's about getting into a world where we have challenges and we're able to overcome those challenges and we're able to grow. You know, Reb, Reb, Reb, Shlomo Zalman Arbach was known to be such a studious learner of Torah.
9:13 And his family was very, very poor. One time his brother came to him and said, you know, today was a special day. We have potatoes, kartoffel. He said to his brother,
9:26 you can have my kartoffel. You can have mine. You can have my potatoes. It was like a special treat.
9:33 You can have my potatoes. I have my potatoes. The Torah, it's about the sitting and learning. It's the nonstop learning.
9:41 It's the working hard. And I will tell you. that there is nothing more difficult than uninterrupted Torah study.
9:53 You see, to sit and to learn and to immerse ourselves and to push away all of the distracting thoughts, all of the distracting temptations, suddenly, I can tell you this, I had this in the beginning when I started not bringing my phone to synagogue. So, you know, three times a day I go to synagogue, morning, afternoon, evening. and it's, you know, you have your phone on you all the time, right?
10:21 I would leave it at home, and sometimes I don't leave it at home, but I have a special place at the entrance of the synagogue. I put it up high on top of a shelf, and that way it doesn't bother me. You know what happens? Suddenly the Yetzirah says to you, as you're in synagogue, he says, oh, don't forget, you have to call that person.
10:40 Don't forget you have to visit that person. Don't forget you have to, like all of these things suddenly come up. So you know what I did? You can look in my synagogue where I pray in my thing.
10:51 I have a pen and a paper. When all of these thoughts come up, and I have from yesterday, I have my paper right here of the list of things that came up in the middle of prayer, right? All the things that came up that the Yetzirah is trying to distract me and say, oh, pull out your phone. This is why you need your phone.
11:11 This is why you need to have, you know, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You need to be all in. And when you study Torah, my grandfather writes so eloquently, so beautifully, in his first chapter of his book, Aleishur, Saba writes, the moment you open the book of Torah, all of your imaginations come attacking you. All of your dreams, all of your fantasies. Suddenly, you know what?
11:45 You know what would be a great idea right now? I would love to go on a vacation. I would love to go on a cruise. You know, suddenly you're like, you know, I got to fix my car and you know, I got to do that and I got to do this and I forgot to send them a birthday gift.
11:56 All of the thoughts come in. Everything comes to distract. It's not about knowing Torah. AI knows Torah.
12:06 The computer, Google knows Torah. So what? Do they have the challenge? It's like when Moshe came up to receive the Torah in the heavens, the angel said to God, what's this Yelud Isha?
12:18 What is this born to a woman? That's what they called him. What is he doing among us? So what did God say?
12:26 Moshe, you tell them. So what did Moshe answer to them? Moshe said, there's a commandment in the Torah to honor your father and mother. Do you have a father and mother?
12:41 And the angels are like, no. There's a mitzvah to eat matzah on Pesach. Do you eat matzah on Pesach? No, we can't. That's why the Torah is given to us.
12:53 We're going to have challenges. And if you think that Hashem...
13:00 doesn't understand that we have temptations. Hashem created temptations. Hashem created Yetzirah. So for a person to feel, oh, I can't believe it.
13:10 I'm such a sinner. I can't believe I've done this. No. To say, Hashem, I know what you did. You want me to be better.
13:19 Hashem, I know why I didn't pray well this morning. Because you want me to work harder at it. Because you gave me this temptation. Because you gave me this challenge.
13:29 You gave me these distractions. I'm going to work harder to be better. Hashem doesn't get angry at us because we failed. On the contrary, that's part of the mission.
13:42 And when we learn Torah, when we study Torah, what we're doing in essence, is we're breaking away all of the barriers. What we're doing when we study Torah, it is the one anecdote. It is the one tool, antidote, that is able to remove. It says, someone who's ill with all the illnesses of the world.
14:06 You know what the healer is? Torah. Torah is the cure. Because Torah is what brings our closeness to the Almighty.
14:16 Torah is what takes us from being a simple flesh and blood and elevates us beyond the level of angels. So now we can understand why Jacob was running to get out of his mother's womb. Why is he running? What's the run?
14:36 You're learning everything. You have no barriers. That's true. But you also have no challenges.
14:41 Which is why the Talmud also says, when does the child get the challenge of the Yetzirah? When it comes out to this world. Because if it was inside the womb, it would tear itself outside of the mother's womb. Our sages tell us the baby, the fetus would tear itself out.
15:01 Why? Because what's the Yetzirah? The Yitzhara is like, sit back and be free. Are you kidding?
15:07 I'm locked up in this little, right? I can't. And he would tear himself out. So he gets it when he's born.
15:16 That is the gift of life. The gift is that we're able to overcome challenges with our Torah study. It's not about knowing the Torah. It's about working hard to acquire it.
15:30 You don't just download a file called Torah and now I have it. Which is, by the way, a very big challenge for those who are brilliant minds. Because they learn it once and they know it. So now what?
15:45 I know it. You got to live it. You got to live the study of Torah. Learn it again and again.
15:53 Reb Chaim Kanievsky knew every single word of Torah. So what? He reviewed it every day. Again and again and again and again.
16:00 And for those who don't. You know, someone was once in the car with my rabbi, Rabbi Yitzhak Berkowitz, and he said to him, he said, it's not fair because you know all of Torahs. Like, thank you very much. You have a photographic memory.
16:15 He said, that's not true. He said, I wake up at 1.30 every morning to review everything I know. He wakes up, he sleeps only two and a half hours a night. And he studies and studies.
16:27 And I asked him once, I said, Rabbi, when are you going to sleep? He said, I'll sleep when I die. I'll have plenty of time to sleep then. I said, so why do you, like why?
16:35 And he said it was a meticulous training where we normally sleep eight hours and he taught him his body to need seven hours, to need six hours, to need five hours, two and a half hours he sleeps. He said at
16:49 1.30 in the morning, nobody bothers me.
16:52 All day he's dealing with questions that come to his desk. All day he's dealing with communal issues. All day he's giving Torah classes. When is he going to actually learn?
17:02 He has to learn when everybody else is sleeping. So 1.30 in the morning he's up and he learns till 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock in the morning without interruption. Because it's not about knowing Torah. It's about the hard work of studying the Torah.
17:17 That's what Jacob wanted. When he passed by the study hall, he wanted to be there. He heard the reverberations of Torah. He says, I want to be there.
17:27 I want to sit by my Talmud, by my Gemara, and I want to learn. I want to have that hard challenge of studying Torah. They say that the Vilna Gon, the Gon of Vilna, who finished all of Torah when he was four years old, and all of Talmud when he was nine years old, and got involved in Kabbalah when he was just 13 years old. You know what they say?
17:50 That his mother, when he was a little infant, would bring him to the study halls, to his ears. His subconscious would be hearing Torah all day. All day he would be hearing Torah. You know what happens when you train your child to do something in their life.
18:08 Like you can instill, you know, funny. We once asked, my father was a hobby pilot, okay, not hobby airport, just he would fly little planes, single engine land planes. And we once asked him, how did you get into it? Like, where did you want this?
18:27 Where did you get this desire? He said the following, when he was a child, in play group, he remembers that his teacher had a brother who was in the Israeli Air Force, and he flew right over the school. and dropped a note for her with a rock.
18:50 He dropped a note for her and kept on flying. He said from that moment on, he wanted to become a pilot because there's a very strong influence. If you put your children in an environment where everything's about Barbie dolls, that's what they're going to want to be. If you put your children in an environment where it's about values and morals and ethics, that's what they're going to be.
19:11 They absorb their environment. The Gona Vilna was placed in the study hall when he was an infant.
19:18 And he became the Gona Vilna.
19:21 Yaakov wasn't pleased to just sit in the womb and have all access to Torah. He wanted the hard work. of earning it, of studying it, of toiling in it. It's all about the work.
19:37 It's not about the knowledge. It's not about having it. It's about the hard work of attaining it. My dear friends, Hashem should bless us all that on our mission in life of working hard for our Torah.
19:52 We should see the beautiful fruits of our labors. Okay? All of the labors of Torah. Every day to sit and to study Torah and to work hard and try again and try again. You know, the famous piece of Talmud that's recited when someone finishes a tractate of Talmud is that we study, we work hard, and they work hard.
20:18 Who's they? Tradesmen. People, right? We work hard, but we get rewarded and they don't.
20:27 What? I mean, they get paid. No, they don't. Let me tell you. If you hire someone to fix your faucet, you call up the plumber and you say, hey, I have a leaky faucet.
20:36 Can you come fix it? Sure, no problem. They come. How much is it?
20:39 It's going to be $250 to fix it. Okay, great. They come to the house. They get under the sink.
20:45 They take out everything, make a big mess. You know that? Okay, great. And even though they put that stuff on their shoes, right?
20:50 It doesn't make it there. He gets under there. He looks. He's like, wow, this is leaking.
20:54 It's a problem. Let me see what I can do. He goes to Home Depot, gets the parts that he needs, comes back, comes back, this and that. He's there for 10 hours and it's still leaking.
21:06 He says, I tried everything I can do. Here's your bill. You're going to pay him? No, you're not going to pay him.
21:13 Why? You didn't ask him to work hard. You asked for results. You asked for results. Doesn't work like
21:22 that with Torah.
21:23 Imagine you sit and you study something and you spend 20 hours
21:28 on this piece of Talmud and you don't understand it.
21:31 Will you get rewarded for it? Yes. You will get 100% reward even if you didn't understand a single word. You tried.
21:40 You worked hard because Judaism is all about the effort. It's not about the results. It's 100% effort, 0% results. God doesn't care.
21:55 He doesn't say anywhere in this prayer about knowing, oh, so you know the whole Torah, now you've accomplished. No. It's about the hard work of it. We're here to work hard. My dear friends, let's be like Jacob.
22:08 Let's go for the fight to study Torah, to earn Torah, to learn Torah, to teach Torah, to shear Torah. Have an amazing Shabbos.

22:18 You've been listening to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe on a podcast produced by Torch, the Torah Outreach Resource Center of Houston. Please help sponsor an episode so we can continue to produce more quality Jewish content for our listeners around the globe. Please visit torchweb.org to donate and partner with us on this incredible endeavor.