 Yeah, Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech, and let me say it again. Community Matters. Hawaii had a fabulous community which is so diverse. We all respect each other's backgrounds. We all respect each other's races and religions. In a sense, it was, is, and I hope it will be, kind of, heaven on earth in terms of the diversity of our people. One of the sects, if you will, one of the religious groups is the Jewish people. Rabbi Itchell Kresenjanski, with a Y. He's the leader, the chief rabbi, if you will, of the Hawaii chapter of Kaba Kaba in Hawaii. He joins us every now and then, and we can kind of put things together about what's going on in the Jewish community. Hi, Rabbi. Hi, Jay. It's a pleasure to be here as always. We're going to talk today about Kislev. I pronounced that right, Kislev? Yes. It's a month? Yes. Is it different than the Hebrew calendar? They're kind of different than the Western calendar. It's the third Jewish month on the Jewish year. We just celebrated two months ago the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. It was the month of Tishrei. Then there was a quiet month with no holidays. It was Tejvan. And this month is Kislev. Once again, we have some very important holidays that we celebrate in this month. Kislev, when is it? Is it synonymous with December? Well, it usually falls out around December. We are today in the fifth day of Kislev. Today we are the third December third, correct? Yeah. So it's pretty close. The difference between the Jewish calendar in general and the secular calendar, the Gregorian calendar, is that the Jewish calendar is a lunar-based calendar. Those by the months are based on the moon, cycle of the moon. The re-emergence and the rebirth of the moon marks the beginning of the new month, the Jewish calendar. The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar. Oh, Gregory. Yeah. Back in the, I don't know, third, fourth century or something like that. And there's a difference in the amount of days between the lunar calendar and the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar has several more days than the lunar calendar. So in the Jewish calendar, every couple of years we have a leap year, meaning we have two months of Adar to straighten out because the Jewish holidays are seasonal holidays. The third tie is the Jewish holidays are Passover spring. In order for Passover to always be in the spring, every three, four years in the Jewish calendar we have another 30 days that we insert. So Passover gets pushed off 30 days and always in the spring. How charming actually. In a world of Gregorian, we have the Jewish calendar and lunar reference. Are they both the same 365 days a year? No. The lunar calendar's year is 354. Really? How interesting. Do you have to synchronize once in a while? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's where we have the leap year. Okay. That's where we have the leap year. And by the way, it's interesting, but the calendar and the establishments of the Jewish calendar was one of the first commandments given to the Jewish people right after they left Egypt. And the commentaries explain because the idea of time, the value of time and the sanctity of time is really at the bedrock of everything that we do. Is that a Jewish concept? Yes, that's a Jewish idea. And what's interesting is that we know that the task of the Jew, as Judaism teaches us, is to sanctify and elevate everything in this world, to turn physical things into spiritual things, infusing them with meaning and purpose. The first thing that was created, looked back at Genesis, you actually will probably get it wrong because the first thing that was created, you would think, as it says in the Jewish Bible, the heaven and earth created first with space. The truth is, time was created first because before creation there was no concept of time. There was no concept of before and now and after. That's a creation. So time is really the first thing that was created. So the first commandment in the Torah to the Jewish people was to sanctify time. That's why Shabbat is such an anchor in the Jewish life to this idea of sanctifying time. So you're going to set your watch, so to speak, on these special days of the week like Shabbat and the special holidays in the month and year. Those are timekeeping devices. Exactly. The other thing about time is, and I was telling you before the show, is that I'm connecting the dots of my own worldview these days. And one of the things that, one of the dots I connect is about time. And it's about, you know, we all have a limited amount of time to do whatever we're going to do. And we have to see it that way. We have to see it that way in terms of, you know, what we achieve, what we learn, where we go, what we participate, what kind of projects, what kind of organizations we associate with and also the relationships we have. It's all limited. And so you have to see it as limited and then you have to spend it wisely. Yeah, that's very correct. It's a very beautiful insight. And it's interesting because in the Torah portion that we read last week, we read about Jacob and Esau, the two children that were born from Isaac and Rebecca. Isaac was the second of our three founding fathers of the Jewish nation, four fathers. Jacob is the third one. Jacob is a righteous person. And Esau is, he's the firstborn, but he is a man of the field as the Bible describes him and he was a hunter and the sever, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a story in the Torah portion that we read is that one day he comes from the field and he's very, very hungry and he turns to his brother Jacob and he says, can you give me from this lentil soup that you're making? Jacob says to him, sell me your birthright and I'll give you the soup. It's too long to get into why Jacob said that. But Esau said to himself, I'm going to die anyway. So what value is the birthright? He says, yeah, sure, take the birthright and just give me the lentil soup. So we see that for Esau or his worldview was because time is this finite, I'm sorry, because life is finite and we only live a certain amount of time. So of what value can anything be? Because, you know, at some point we're gone. So therefore whatever is good for the moment, you know, it takes precedence. And yet we find in the Talmud, Talmud says that, you know, that King David composed a book of Psalms. And one of the things that inspired King David seeing these songs of praise to God and faith in God is that he realized he looked at the day of death and that inspired him to sing these songs on the Psalms. You have two different, like a split screen. Esau looks at death and says life is not worth living. Nothing can be as sacred because it's all going to end. And David looks at death and realizes that life is finite and we have to utilize every moment and accomplish it. As you're saying, you know, every moment that we can, we utilize it fully because we're not going to be around forever. And both recognize the essential truth that is finite. So let's go back to the calendar, Kislev. It has Hanukkah. We talked a little about Hanukkah. Maybe you want to talk some more about it. Because we talked before it was coming up. Now it's already happened. It's coming up. Like I said, today is the fifth day of the month of Kislev. And Hanukkah falls out on the 25th day of the month of Kislev. Right around Christmas. So it's in about three weeks. A little less than three weeks. And yeah, Hanukkah is one of the most joyous Jewish holidays. The Festival of Lights. The Festival of Lights, Laska's. Laska's, the Maccabees, the oil they burned in the lamp. Much longer than anyone expected. The miracle of the lights. So we can talk about Hanukkah. But before Hanukkah, which is on the 25th day of the month of Kislev, is the 19th day of the month of Kislev. And Hebrew is called Yud-Tes Kislev. Yud is ten. Yeah, and Tes is nine. Ten comes before the nine. That gives you nineteen. Correct. Okay. Right, just like in English, one nine. Yeah, right, ten plus nine. Right, exactly. So, by the way, because in the Hebrew alphabet, the letters are also the numerics. So, Aleph is one. Yud is ten. Tes is nine. So, on Yud-Tes Kislev, the 19th day of Kislev, a little over 250 years ago, the altar rabbi, he's referred to Yiddish as the old rabbi. He was the founder of the Hasidic movement, of the Chabad Hasidic movement. That's your movement. Right. His name was Rob Schneer Zalman. And that's why the family dynast, he was called Schneer's son. His name was Schneer. The second and third generation were. Schneer was the original name. Right, Schneer. And then this all happened in Russia. The altar rabbi was born in a town called Liyadi. I think it's in Belarusia. He lived in another town called Lyosna. And he began to disseminate the teachings of his master. His name was Dov Bear of Mizrich. That was a town where his master was from. And his master was a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, who was the founder of the Hasidic movement. Basically, the Hasidic movement was steeped in Jewish mysticism, in the esoteric teachings of the Torah. Can you help me with the mysticism? Mysticism sounds mystical. But what is that? Should we be concerned about it? Is it the kind of thing you don't want to touch? Is it the kind of thing that's hard to understand? That's a very good question. And when it began to emerge into the wider community, there were many people who actually expressed the very same sentiments you were just expressing. That we should stay away. It's dangerous. The mystical teachings of the Torah, the esoteric teachings of the Torah, are the soul of the Torah. Just like a human being has a body and a soul, the body is through which we function. We eat, we pick up, walk. These are functions of the body. But there is a soul that animates the body and gives it life. That differentiates, that soul is what differentiates a living person from a dead corpse. A dead corpse also has all of the functions, all of the whole body before it decays. But it's not a living being. In the same way also, the Torah has a lot of laws and what we call mitzvahs, commandments. That is the body of the Torah. These are the functionary aspects of the Torah. Keep the Shabbos, keep kosher, do this, don't do that. The soul of the commandment, what is the life behind the commandment? And what is the inner meaning, the deeper meaning of the commandment? Things are more than the team. Exactly. You have to look to the next level. That's the esoteric teaching of the Torah. The Torah is almost like a code. The esoteric teaching of the Torah helps us decipher the code so that what the Torah is not just telling us do's and don'ts, but it's opening us up to a whole deeper dimension of reality. There's a building in Shamanad called the Mystical Rose. I forget the full title of the building, but the word is there. And I'm thinking that mysticism is not limited to Judaism. There are other religions too that have mystical concepts that are core to understanding that particular religion. In this case, Catholicism. In Judaism, for example, the mystical teachings of Judaism, we learn about the essence of the person. I'll give you an example. So according to the psychologist, the last generation, what Freud thought is that man is driven by some basic instinct. It's the pursuit of power, pleasure, fame, whatever they may be, whatever the different school of psychology is. And according to this school of psychology, man is basically like an animal. We have animalistic drives. What separates us from the animal is that we can conceal. We have a mind, so we can keep things in check and conceal what's lying at the core or the subconscious. And presumably contained as well. And contained as well. Judaism, in the mystical teachings of the Torah, teaches us the very, very opposite. That man is inherently godly. That if you dig down deep, what you come at is a core of goodness and godliness, a spark of God. That is the essence of who we are. And often that is concealed. You have to, just like when you dig for a well, you got to dig deep, not give up in the same way also. You have to probe and probe until we're able to tap into the essence of who we are. So that's hard to do if you believe that. Then you find that there's some awful things that have happened in the world, the wit, the Holocaust. I've been the terrible, if you haven't seen, the devil, my neighbor is a movie now about I've been the terrible, very interesting movie. But when you find out that there's somebody who doesn't really seem to have any goodness at all in him, zero or only evil, then how do you reconcile that with the notion that everyone at the core is good? So firstly, there are individuals, like you described, who are thoroughly evil. So I guess just a way of an example, this was actually one of the teachings of the Altarebi, the one who we celebrate his release from prison on the 19th day of his life. So he writes that, because we know we all have free choice, that's a given in Judaism, we all have free choice. We can choose to do good, we can choose to do bad. We have these forces within us, the godly soul within us seeks to inspire us to be more godly and more selfless and be kind and caring and good. So we also possess an animal soul within us, this is what the mystical teachings tell us, which drives us to the pursuit of Edenism, pleasure and basically everything ego related. And it's a constant struggle. The old dichotomy is a constant battle. So what Judaism teaches us, number one is that man has the ability, every person has the ability to have their good side, their godly soul come out on top and control and contain the impulses, the evil impulses we have within us. To the point where we can actually vanquish them, we can transform them into forces of good. Good within us can never be eradicated totally, because that's the essence of who we are. But it could be so deeply buried where a person may not even know it's there. So if a person chooses to do bad and to be bad, the person is moving away from their true essence, the core of their being, to the point where they can become totally disconnected from who they are. Will it catch up with him, this person? Or is it possible that it will never catch up? Well, you see, that's a very good question. So if we look at the world and at life from very external point of view, peripheral point of view, then yes, it's possible a person can pass through life and never repent and never change and die an evil person. We see it a lot. But the truth is we all know that we don't see the bigger truth, meaning there's idea of the reincarnation of souls past lives and future lives. And the life that we live now, the snapshot of the present, is just one moment or one part. Back to time. Exactly. So in the larger pic context, only God knows the journey of the souls. Very important stuff. So I'm not sure we're going to get to a lot more holidays. Let me just share with you what an interesting thing. Yeah. When the Al Tarebi was arrested, and he was arrested on Trump the charges that his teachings were somehow stirring some kind of rebellion within under the Tsarist rule. And because also Israel at that time was controlled by Turkey and Turkey and Russia were in a war. In the 17th century. Yeah, right. And the Al Tarebi was sending money to Jews living in Israel who needed help financially poor people. And it was misconstrued that he was sending money to the enemy. So when he was in prison, they had some education minister come in to interrogate the Al Tarebi to try to figure out who this man is and what his teachings are, et cetera, et cetera. And he spoke to him and in a short while he realized that this was a saintly person. And all the lies that were said about him were not correct. So at the end of his interrogation or interview with the Al Tarebi, I have a question to ask. This is clearly your scholar. I'd like to ask you a question that's been bothering me for a long time. And he said, sure. What's your question? So he says, you know, I studied the Bible. And there's a passage in the Bible that has troubled me for a long time. And that is in the very beginning in Genesis. Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden. And they sin by eating from the Tree of Knowledge. And God told them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. So it says that after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, after Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, God comes into the Garden of Eden. And he asks Adam, the Torah, for a human being, to ask him, Ayeko, where are you? The question that this man had for the Al Tarebi is what does God ask him? Adam, where are you? God knows everything. He knows exactly where he is. So the Al Tarebi told him what the commentary say in the basic commentary. Obviously God knew where he was. He entered into a conversation with him and asked him, did you eat from the Tree of Knowledge that I told you not to eat from? He started the conversation by asking, where are you? Kind of like therapy. So that's what the Al Tarebi told this minister. And this just said, I know what this commentary is, but I always felt there's something more deeper here. So the Al Tarebi asked him, do you believe in the eternity of the Torah? The word is eternal. I believe that. Instead, the meaning is as follows. This is God's call to Adam, but Adam is really all of man, all of humanity. That God calls each and every one of us with a question, where are you? And the Al Tarebi says an example. The person is 60, 70 years old. The Al Tarebi actually stated the exact age of this person. And so the question God's calling to that person is, where are you? What are you doing in this world? Have you accomplished the purpose? Within your allotted time. Before we run out of time speaking of which, I would like to go back to something you and I talked about before the show began. And that's a discussion, it's a continuation for me. A discussion a day or two ago, yesterday, I think, about the nature of the family in our society. And it strikes me that Judaism, that the people around you and God have a special value on family. And I would like you to tell me about that. Sure. In Judaism, the family is the most important unit, the most important part of our lives. And so much of the commandments, the mitzvahs, are to strengthen the family unit. Firstly, the Torah believes in the mitzvah, meaning the good deed, the obligation of marriage. Marriage is one of the 613 commandments to get married. So the Torah is telling you us to get married, because it's a mitzvah, it's a good thing. Exactly. And the famous words of the Torah is, Man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave his wife and become one flesh. That's the first thing. The other mitzvah related to that is there's a mitzvah to have children. And according to the Torah, as explained in the oral tradition of Talmud, we have a commandment to have one boy and one girl, a male and a female. That's the biblical commandment. Keep defending the fertility rate up. Be fruitful and multiply. That's the first commandment giving to man. But obviously, God forbid, someone can't have children medically, whatever. That's a different story. But someone can. Then the Torah obligates us to have at least two children, a boy and a girl. It also encourages us to have many children. Every child is explained in the Torah as a blessing, as a channel of blessings. So the family unit is very important. The whole idea of Shabbat, Sabbath, and why the Sabbath is such a holy day, is because it's family-centered. And in Judaism in general, as we spoke before, the center of Judaism is not in the synagogue. The center of Judaism is in the home. And it's there where we are meant to express all of the values and the teachings of the Torah in the home. So it's more than just following the time schedule like Shabbat and all that. It's more than just following the rituals at various holidays and times. It's something else too. It's a matter of having the children, but also teaching the children and making them a family. So what kind of detail do we get about that? Here I am in the home. I've performed all the rituals. I've maintained the time schedule that is called for for the week of the month. How do I make a good home, family, family home under the Torah? So for example, take Shabbat for example. I'm sure you remember your childhood experience. Friday night it was the Kiddish, it was the Shabbat dinner. It was the time when the family, whether it was just the immediate family or guests or the extended family would get together and would have a Shabbat dinner. That's something which is critically important to foster family relations and the ties that tie parents and children and siblings between one another. That's what Shabbat is all about. That's what the holidays are all about. Yes, we went to synagogue and we prayed. We went home and we had this meal and discussed everything and the question and the words of Torah or just politics, whatever. So the emphasis on the family and the home is very, very strong in Judaism. So much so we live in a society, at least in the United States, where it's the rugged individual that is, you know, you are who you are. In Judaism you are part of a family. You know, it used to be a tribe, you know, then family. And that's how you identify yourself. You know, I'm a member of this family. So one last question before we have to break. And that's this. So when you send, you do your duty, you get married, you have children who at least and maybe more. And you have this warm, loving family in the home, Jewish home. And then they leave. They go. Because they have to go. They have to leave their nest. Yes, the family expands. The family may be, you know, for example, my family. My parents live in New York. My older brother lives in Australia. We live in Hawaii. I have a brother that, another brother lives in New York, lives in Montreal. So we're scattered around the world. Well, our children or whatever. You know, especially today with the technology today, geographic distances are really not barriers to that. It's more of a psychological. Is that, you know, one of the big, there are probably many things we can talk about, but one of the big gifts you want to give to those children who leave the nest is stay in touch. Stay in touch with the family. We're still a family. It doesn't matter where you are. We're a global family. And the love that you, you know, the attention, the sense of family that you had while you grew up in our household must continue, should continue. We want to leave that message with you. It does continue. By the way, in a larger sense, but equally true, is that this is what is the blessing of the Jewish people. We're all one big family. And wherever a Jew is, you go travel to Venice and you'll just walk into a synagogue. You'll feel like you're at home. It doesn't matter that they may speak a different language, but it's, you know, and... Well, that's why we should do another show. We should go where you have to go. I'll go where I have to go and then we'll come back again. Pleasure. Be a family at this table. With pleasure. Thank you. Wonderful to see you, as always.