Getting God as your Advocate (2:4)

0:00We're up to chapter 2, mission 4 at the continuation of the teachings of Rabbi Ghamli, the son of Rabbi Jew to the prince. And this very short mission packs a lot of power. I'll read it quickly and then we'll dive in deep to see some of the lessons. Who are you, Omer? He would say, I say, Ritzono, Kirozonechah. Treat or mate his will, I.e. God's will, as if it were your own will, Kadeh in order, so that Shia Seirut Sonchah, Kirozono, that he should treat your will as if it were his will. You treat God's will as if it's your will, he'll treat your will as if it's his will. That's number one. Number two, Batel Ritzono, Meppne, Ritzono, nullify your will before his will, Kadeh Shiavat El Ritzono, Akherim, Meppne, Ritzono, that he should nullify the will of others before your will. If you nullify your will before God, God will nullify the will of others before you.

1:06So all the commentaries, now all the commentaries have different interpretations of what this actually means. What does it mean to make your will like God's will? What does it mean to nullify your will before God's will? What does it mean that God will make his will like your will? And I want to survey some of them, kind of think they're all very powerful ideas. Okay, so let's start with Rashi. Rashi begins very short Rashi. All he says is, I say Ritzono, Kirozono, make his will as if it were your will. So what does that mean? Says Rashi, even when doing your will, you're fulfilling your agenda, make it as if it was his will. A.E. do it for the sake of heaven. Try to align your interests, your wishes, your agenda with God's agenda. Try to seek win, wins, where it's not I've got time and I have me time.

2:09It's my me time. It's also God time. Now this is an idea that we see many different places in Jewish philosophy, that even when we're doing the themes that are stensibly our own agenda, nothing to do with religion with God with spirituality. Now that's just us living our lives. We're trying to bring God aboard and make it a spiritual experience. The simple example is if someone eats a sandwich, you eat a sandwich, a lot of people eat sandwiches. Non Jews eat tons of sandwiches. Prisoners eat sandwiches. People in Baila, Dashi, everyone eats sandwiches. I don't know if that's true, but a lot of people eat sandwiches. Yet what do we do before we, before and after we eat a sandwich? We invoke God. We make a blessing beforehand. We make a blessing afterwards. We're told to say the names, say words of Torah while we're having a meal. And the obvious question is that, well, there's your domain, the mundane domain, the physical domain, and there's God's domain.

3:10And why are we blending the two together? And this is the answer. The answer is that even when you're doing your well, everyone needs breakfast, but we're told here, make breakfast a spiritual experience. And that way, what you're doing is you're bringing God not just letting me, letting him be relegated to the spiritual aspects of your life, even the physical mundane aspects of your life elevate them, infuse them with holiness by making it that it's God's will to. There's an amazing story brought down to the midrush about Hilo. Hilo, the great, great, great, great, great grandfather of the author of this mission. His students were following him around, and they're asking, well, where are you going? You see Hilo going somewhere. He's going to the bathhouse. Take a shower. But he gives him a very different answer. He tells him, I'm going to do a mitzvah. Well, what mitzvah are you doing? I'm going to take a shower. Wait a minute, you take a shower. I won't take showers. How is that a mitzvah?

4:11And he says to them, well, if someone was in a palace, and there were the statues in the garden, and they were polishing the statues, is that considered doing the will of the king? Of course, you're part of the king's team. You're one of the custodians of his grounds. You're tending to his palace. That is doing the will of the king. Well, similarly, I'm here. I'm representing God in the world. I'm a Torah scholar. And well, what has to happen with this human, which is in the image of God needs to be cleaned. Therefore, it's a mitzvah to polish your own body because you're cleaning the image of God, the image of God, the image of God. What he's telling us is that even something as seemingly removed from spirituality, as showering and he'll resize, well, that's what he's doing. He's not going to take a shower. Oh, let's think. Take a shower. How do we make this? He's going to do mitzvah. That's his actual legitimate answer because he'll, of course, integrate this idea into his belief. And you ask him what he's doing.

5:12He's going to do a mitzvah because he's going to take a shower. He's not going to take a shower. Let's make that into a mitzvah. He's just going to do a mitzvah because in his mind, everything he's doing is trying to do the will of God. The Rambham is always presented as this rationalist. And then I show people what the Ram says, and I think it's chapter two of the laws of the Torah study. The Rambham is the one, and we'll see this a little bit later on in Perkaryavos and chapters of the Fathers. He's the one who is very wary of someone studying Torah and someone else's dime. And someone say, I'll study Torah with everyone else pay for my needs. He says, you have to work, you have to make a living. So everyone likes to say, well, the Rambham says, you shouldn't study Torah so much, because you should be making a living. Well, if you look at it with Rambham actually says, he says, well, let me tell you what the typical daily schedule should look like. Everyone has to work. You can't just off-load the work to others, but everyone also needs to study.

6:15So how much should you study? You study nine hours a day, and then you work for three hours a day. And now we have 12 hours of work time, work opportunity. Nine is Torah study, and three is actual work and spreadsheets in their cell spreadsheets. That's what he tells us. And to us, like, that's not a working person. That's someone who's studying full time. That's what we would think. But the Rambham says, no, that's just the average Joe. That's not a Torah style, and that's just the average Joe. So of course, that sounds very radical. Where is this rational that everyone's talking about? But in addition, the Rambham says, well, we're about to go and turn those three hours where someone's working. Even then, in your head, try to think about matters of Torah. And I think that's this similar idea. Even during, you're doing your own will. And your own will. Make your will like God's will. Try to find a way to make your working, make it also spiritual. And that way your entire life, not just the times where you go to synagogue,

7:16or the times where you study your whole life, 24 hours a day, you are doing the will of God. And when you're doing the will of God for 24 hours a day, he'll make sure that your will. I mean, the other, the other, other matters that are of importance to you outside of the domain of God. Well, he's invested in that as well. And he'll make that flourish. There's a famous statement from the Gone Villa. Otherwise known as the Villa Gone, or Rabbi Eliyahu Elijah Kramer of Lithuania 1720 to 1797. He said, well, everything you do to be a Midsaw. Even if someone is sleeping, that can be Midsaw. And the obvious question is, wait a minute. Ha, eight hours of sleeping, eight hours of Midsaw. It's a slam dunk for everyone. And the answer is no. It could be Midsaw, but it's not necessarily a Midsaw. It depends on the context of someone sleeping. It's quite simply, if someone says, I'm sleeping, so I can have strength to do the will of God.

8:16Well, that in itself is an example of someone making his will like God's will. But in addition, the Gone says, if someone is studying Torah, great as much as possible. Well, if someone's tired, studying Torah, they're tired. They've got to go to sleep. They can't be blamed for the fact that they got tired. It's not like we chose to live in a kind of life and body that needs sleep. That's God's decision. You can't blame me. I want to study Torah. God made me tired. It's his fault, so to speak. I don't lose my merit. And therefore, if I study and then I'm tired, I've got to go to sleep. I go to sleep. The only reason why I stopped studying was because God made me tired. It's considered as if I was studying the duration. However, there is a caveat. If someone is studying, and then they say, I'm finished studying now. I'm going to go schmooze.

9:17I'm going to play on my phone. I'm going to go do other stuff. I'm tired after all, right? I can't study anymore. And they do other stuff, and then they go to sleep. Well, then the sleep was interrupting not their Torah study. It's interrupting their other stuff. So it's considered that, well, if they weren't tired, they would do all these other stuff for the next eight hours. And thus, the goal and advise is that people should study Torah all the way until you're sleeping. And that way the whole duration of the sleep is considered as a Torah story. However, if you stop, if you intersect in the middle doing other stuff, well, that's considered what that's the last thing that you stopped doing. And therefore, that's what you would have been doing if you weren't sleeping. And therefore, that's what it's counted spiritually for the duration of the sleep. That's what he says. So, for example, when I was in Yisheva, one of my rabbi, my teacher, Ashari Ali, who was instantly a great, great, great grandson of the Gonevillema,

10:17he used to say, there's a blessing that we say at night, as you're at full sleep, it's called the Hamapil blessing. And the Hamapil is a prayer that you say to ask God to watch over you while you're sleeping and to wait you up in a good situation in the morning. Now, the halalah is that after you say the Hamapil blessing, you can't say anything. You gotta go straight to sleep. So, that means it's the final partying thing that you do before you go to sleep. So, Rav, Ashari advised his students, say that blessing when you're still in the base matters, still in the study hall. That way, it's uninterrupted. You're studying. You say the blessing, you go to sleep. Nothing stops this process of your studying tour and then straight to sleep. But that way, the six hours of studying, it's the easiest six hours of studying you ever do, or eight hours of studying because you're sleeping and everyone knows how to sleep, besides for some of my children, but everyone knows, no, that's a joke.

11:19But it's not so. Everyone knows how to sleep, right? And therefore, and it's the easiest thing, you don't have to resist anything. It's amazing. What a win-win. But that's again, this idea that if you use, come up with this attitude of saying, even the things that I need to do for my own agenda, I'm going to do it for God, then you're bringing God into your world, and therefore, the mission of promises that He will take initiative and ensuring that your will is actualized. We all need to make a living. Does that have to be divorced from God or not? Here we're told it doesn't need to. If someone says, I'm making a living, because I want to do mitzvos, and I need it to do mitzvos. Again, that's what they're doing. They're turning what could be a mundane part of their life, divorced from God and turning and bringing God into it. And then, for God's sake, okay, you're rich, then to make a living,

12:19because you're trying to do what I want, okay, I'm going to take a part, I'm going to be your partner in making sure that this becomes my will as well and I'll create for you business opportunities too. That's the first idea that we've seen in this mission, that make your will, your agenda, make a God's agenda, therefore, make your agenda. His agenda, how do you do that, even the things that are mundane, make it spiritual. Ravani Yonar gives a little bit of a different spin on this. He says, make your will like God's will, which means not necessarily to have crossover between the two wills, rather, treat God's will with the same gusto and the same zest and the same passion that you undertake, your agenda, do that as if, do that with God's agenda as if it was your own. Don't say, well, Mitch is like, I got to do, oh, I got to do that.

13:20But the things that I really want to do, oh yeah, I'm all in. Similarly, I had an example. Someone in the neighborhood said, in our neighborhood, we have a shul, that was, I don't know, it was, it was both a long time ago and it's very dilapidated. And right across the street, there's a new development. They're building new houses. So someone pointed out that he's very bothered by this. All the people in the neighborhood are building these big, magnificent, stately homes. And the shul, the home of God, so to speak, they don't care if it's falling in disrepair. And that's an example of what Remainty Owen here is telling us, the mission is treat God's arena, God's domain, the way you treat your own domain, just as excited as you are as building a nice house for yourself. Be that excited in building a nice house for God.

14:22And I'm okay saying that right now because they just announced the suite, the suite that they finalized their loan to begin construction of the medra renovations of the shul. So I guess they learned the lesson of this mission. The Ruhheim, or Pheim Elushin, has a different take on this mission. Made his will like your will, which means at a minimum, treat the interests of God the same way you would do the interests, your own interests. And he says, it's a divided day and half. Half for God, half for you. At a minimum, made his will like your will. If your will is 12 hours, make his will 12 hours as well. No less. And he adds, even with your half, do it so that you need it to subsist.

15:23And then he'll consider that the half for yourself was really like the half for him. The way he reads the mission is, I say, Rathana Kharatsune, I made his will like your will. And therefore, he will make that your will is like his will. Even the things that you do that are not necessarily spiritual, but because you are ensuring that you're treating God's will like your own will, even the things that are not God's will. So to speak, the your own will, he will treat it as if it's his will as if it was a minceva. The chastitya of it's who my grandfather said is the foremost commentator on per gravos. It's a little bit of an obscure book. It's not one of the main commentaries, but it's not an easy read either. But he has incredible lessons on this mission and all the other ones. So he says, make his will as your will.

16:27What does that mean? Sasachhafid khasid yayyavats says, let God decide how to implement your will. Which means we have a lot of things that we want. And we also think we know how to get them. But who is way better at deciding how to get things? Of course, that's God. That's way better than we are. And God has a much broader and infinitely broader view and ours is very narrow. And we think that we know what we want and we know how to get it. But the truth is God is much better at getting those things than we are. Wait a minute, it's a mission. Make your will as if it were your will. It's let God decide how to do your will and not. You should have tried to decide how to do your will. So for the example that I would think of is that a lot of people, well, everyone I would assume once they get married and have a good spouse.

17:31How do you choose this spouse? So I think there's two ways to, let's say, certainly to pray for a spouse. You can say, oh, oh God, please let me marry this person. So you're asking God to help implement your will. Because you think this person is the right person for you. Says the mission, no, there's a better way to do it. Tell God, I want you to figure out who's the right person for me. Because I realize that there are limitations to my wisdom and my insight and my foresight. And therefore, I want to make your will my will, not my will, my will. And therefore, if this person is appropriate for me in your eyes, let it work out. Otherwise, let it crash and burn. Essentially what we should do here is we should yield our will to God's will and let him decide how to implement our will.

18:41Whatever your will is, yield to God to have to figure out how to do it. And he gives an example, he writes that no people are fallible and people have limitations. And they don't necessarily know which path will bring success to their mission, to their agenda. Because sometimes I think one thing is good and it's actually bad, it's actually opposite. Or vice versa, that means bad and it really is good. And he gives an example, his more to high in the poem story, he reveals to the king that there's an assassination plot to kill him. And he had no idea that that would ultimately lead to saving the Jewish people because this is going to put him in a chisholid's favors and it's going to lead him to save the nation.

19:41Moroch had no idea. God knew that. Moroch, of course, wanted to save the Jewish people, but he knew he had to do it. God decided how it's going to happen. And similarly, this mission was telling us that we should in our prayers and in our attitude should say, I want X, Y, and Z and I want you to help me get it. Our requests to God should not be about helping my plans to succeed, but helping my objectives to succeed by God showing me the way to get there, which is a very powerful idea. And he gives another interpretation of this mission. He points out a question. He says, it doesn't say, I say, it doesn't say, do the mitzvos of God, like it was your will. It doesn't say that. They do the will of God as if it was, it doesn't say do the commandment of God.

20:43What does this mean to do God's will and not just God's commandments? So he tells us the important idea. It's possible for us to do God's mitzvos, to do God's commandments, but to not do God's will. That means is it's possible for someone to dot the eyes and cross the teeth and fulfill the exact letter of the law that God wants. But the spirit of the law, they ignore. They're doing God's mitzvos, but not God's rutson, God's commandments, but not God's will. The ultimate objective is for us to change through the mitzvos. The God's will is not just that we do the mitzvos, it's that we do his will and we change ourselves. And we resist the temptation that we all have and we have to confront and contend with our inherent hurdles that we have to do in God's will.

21:47Similarly, it's possible for, you know, we have things that we want from God and God said, oh, give you a letter of the law what you want, but really not what you really want. It's like what you're asking for, but not what you want. The example that he actually quotes and the same example that the Ramband, where we read a few weeks ago, where the verse tells us to be holy, he does him to you be holy. What does it mean says the Ramband, it means to abstain from things that are permitted, which means God says all these things are not kosher. Well, stake is kosher. So I'm going to have three states for better sludge and supper. You know what? It's all 100% kosher and I'm fulfilling a lot of the law. But when God says all these things that we should not partake in, which not indulge in, it doesn't mean we should indulge in everything else. It means we should live a more spiritual, sublime life. And someone could say, well, all these women are prohibited. Well, certainly back in the day, polygamy was okay. I can marry 100 women and I can live a life of degeneracy, but it's totally kosher. I'm doing the will of God.

22:49I'm doing the will of God. I'm doing the mitzvah of God, not the will of God. And that's his point. Doesn't say do the mitzvah of God just fulfilling a lot of the law. It's doing the spirit of the law as well. Just like when you want your own interests to be addressed, you don't want, you don't want just the exact text of what you asked for, but you want the spirit behind it. You know, with my children, sometimes I ask them to do things and they do exactly like I said, but obviously not like what I meant. And that's an example. You want them to do what you mean, not just what you say, the exact words and no more and no less. And that's what we want. That's what we should do for God's will. Okay, so that's the first part of the Mishnah. The second part of the Mishnah is to nullify the arrow will before God's will. So Rashi tells us that in order to abide by the will of God, we actually have to, we face resistance. If anyone tells you it's easy, the Mishnah says that they're wronged because you have to nullify your will.

23:53You have to overcome to do the will of God. You have to overcome, if you didn't have to overcome, well, it wouldn't really matter so much. You'd be an angel. Angels don't have to overcome anything to do the will of God. And therefore they don't have to run their life or their existence is not meaningful because they don't have any resistance that they need to overcome to do the will of God. It's all natural. For us to do the will of God is not natural or it's not a natural by default. Maybe it could be natural, but it's not natural by default. We have to overcome something. We have to nullify our will, our pre-existing predilections in order to do the will of God. And in addition, there's another idea that we see several places that it's not that we should try to make believe that it's very easy to do Mitzvahs. It's very easy to refrain from sin. That's a mistake, A because it's not true. And it can lead to all sorts of problems, but B because the whole point is that we're supposed to struggle with and we're supposed to overcome.

24:59So for example, the Talmud says, suppose someone's walking by, we have a on the corner of the street one of the streets I lived in West Belford, the kind of made the main entrance to the neighborhood. There's a restaurant. And it's called Wat A burger or Wat A burger. And apparently there's loads and then all over Texas. But I've heard from people, I don't know, I don't know anyone that's ever eaten there, but I've heard rumors that the food there is fantastic. So if I'm walking by there, it's right next to the Beth Rahmum Shul in her neighborhood. So if I'm walking by with my children and kind of have the wafting aroma of the water burger that kind of permeates the whole neighborhood. So there's two things you could say is it, ah, Trayf disgusting. Or you could say, yeah, it smells kind of good, but it's not crucial we got to listen to God. We're told in the Talmud to do the latter to say, yes, it is good. I'd love to eat there. It's so convenient. You know, convenient is the non-coach. It's incredibly convenient if you ever try driving from here to Canada.

26:04Being kosher observant, you realize the the dearth of kosher food in the heart of the country. We face opposition doing God's will. There's a conflict that we have free will. We're by default oriented to not want to do the will of God. And that's why we have Torah. And that's what we have to overcome with the nullifier I will before God. There's a famous line that we say on Rosh Hashanah that we're invoking Abraham's merit in the episode of the binding advice. Abraham was Kavash Rakhamov, Lasos was something called Abraham Shul. Abraham conquered his mercy to do your will, the same words that appear in the original your will wholeheartedly. Therefore, you conquer you, you have your mercy conquer your anger from upon us, which means Abraham's mitzvah is great. Not because he made it easy because it was hard. It was hard for him to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. And because it was hard, Hittin Elfai is will. Therefore, it is a great mitzvah that we invoke again and again.

27:10So I think the bottom line of this point is that in order for us to do the will of God, we have to nullifier will and that's okay. Now we shouldn't necessarily look for reasons to have more conflict, but when there is conflict, we overcome it and then we say, okay, God, you will help us overcome the will of others, those that seek our detriment. Today, she ev'at the result of her murderous murderous murder in order that he will nullify the will of others before your will. Now what does it say if you actually read the mission? The way it should, what it should have said, if it was all consistent, make your will, make his will like your will. So he makes his will like your image your will is if it's his will nullify your will before his will. So that he should nullify you would think it would say if it was following the consistent pattern, he would say he should nullify his will before your will. So the commentators point out, God's will is never to our detriment, never. It's always to our betterment. Now we don't necessarily see necessarily how God's will is to our betterment.

28:19That's one of the problems of being a human that you have a very narrow field of vision. However, here we're told, God's will is always to our benefit. We never want to nullify God's will because it's always good for us. However, other people sometimes may seek to do us harm. And therefore by nullifying our will before God's will, he will nullify the will of others who seek to harm us and they won't get in the way of us doing our will. So a very powerful mischievous with a lot of important lessons of how we should behave and how we should think about what we do and very powerful promises that we're giving to the mischievous. We want God on our side. And how do you get down on your side? How do you get God as an advocate for you? Well, if you take up his cause, he'll take up yours. If you nullify your will before his will, he'll be on your side to nullify the will of others and that, of course, something we all want and therefore we should try to accomplish this.