 This is the second letter in the alphabet. We've learned in the first session about the first letter, alif, and we learned that alif basically is a letter that signifies divinity, godliness, God, etc. So the second letter, bet, second letter is bet on the top of the screen here, and the word bet basically is very similar to the word in Hebrew, bayit, house. And it's interesting that the letter bet is, you could say, shaped like a house or a room. It's got a floor, it's got a roof, it's got a side, and one side is open because our sages recommend that our homes be open, that we should have homes that are open and that we're hospitable. So the letter bet has this idea of a house, a home, and we mentioned in the first week that there is one of the ways of determining the meaning of a letter is by something called a code of first words or the code of first letters. So the first time this letter bet appears at the beginning of a word in the Hebrew Bible is not in the first word of the Bible, bereshit, because there the bet of the first word is really a prefix. There the word, the letter bet there means in. So in Hebrew, bet means in. So there would be in, bereshit, bereshit in the beginning. So that's not really a great example. The second word of the Bible, barah, means to create. In the beginning, created was what God did. So one of the concepts of the letter bet is the idea of creation. The letter bet somehow is connected to the concept of creation. And therefore we have a story that's being told with the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Again, the first letter, alif, we saw means God. The second letter, bet means creation. So again, alif, bet, God created. So the letters of the alphabet, we're going to see, the Talmud will tell us this, we're going to see a few different ways of working this out, but the Talmud tells us that the letters of the alphabet actually tell a story. The letters come in pairs and the pairs of letters actually tell a story. We'll get into another pairing of alif and bet. But one of the obvious ones is alif, God, bet, created. Maimonides tells us, the Rambam teaches us that in order to come to love God, if you want to come to fall in love with God, study his creation. The creation is God's masterpiece. We speak about God as tsur olamim. One translation would be the rock of ages, but tsur is related to the word sayar, artist. And tsur olamim, the artist of the world. And so we have an incredible world that is filled with beauty and delights. And if we are able to perceive the complexity of the world, the beauties of the world, Maimonides tells us that we will be able to come to love God. So again, if we want to get to know the alif, if you want to fall in love with the alif, God, go to the bet. Because again, bet stands for this idea of creation. Also, alif we saw has the meaning of learning and the meaning of knowledge. For example, in the book of Eov, Job, chapter 33 verse 33, it says that you're going to learn or to teach wisdom, knowledge. You're going to learn knowledge. So that's the letter alif. Alif is learning, alif is knowledge. Bet is not knowledge so much. Bet is wisdom or understanding. You know, one thing that we see in our world today with the proliferation of information is that there are a lot of people who know a lot of information. They know a lot of information. They don't really understand it necessarily. And so alif is the idea of knowledge, of knowing things. But bet is going deeper. Bet is understanding it. It's wisdom. The word bayet, for example, we saw bayet means house. But bayet in the Bible also means inside. For example, in the book of Exodus, chapter 26 verse 33, it says, me bayes la paroches, inside the partition. So this idea of bait, bayet, can mean inside. And therefore when it comes to knowledge, basically, but base means base is bina. Bina again is deriving one thing from something else. It's getting inside the information. It's penetrating. It's getting inside. And that is a kind of spiritual building. It's building on knowledge to have wisdom and understanding. And also obviously, we need wisdom to be able to build in the physical world as well. The book of Michelet Proverbs chapter 24 verse 3 says that you need wisdom in order to build a house. So here we see the concepts of house and wisdom and building all coming together. And the Talmud tells us that one of the ways that you can look at the first two letters, alif and bet, is that alif means learning. Alif is learning. Bet is wisdom. So the alphabet is giving you a message. Alif, bet, learn wisdom. It's a message for us. Now bet is the second letter in the alphabet. And so bet is the number two. And the reason that it's the number two and that it's connected to creation is that our world, the created world, is a very dualistic place. Meaning that when we look around our existence, everything seems to be made up of polarities, of one thing that's the opposite of the next. And that's the nature of our world. There's light and darkness. There is masculine and feminine. There is life and death. There's good and evil. There is hot and cold, positive and negative. I'm only going to give a few examples. There's the division between the physical and the spiritual. We have this world, olam hazeh, and the next world, olam haba. Our Torah is a dual Torah. There's a written Torah and an oral Torah. There's high and low. There's in the Kabbalah, Chesed and Givura, the polarity of Chesed, which is absolute giving. But then there's the competing force of holding back. And that's really intention, giving and holding back. There's our Yehza hatov, our good inclination, and our Yehza hara, our evil inclination. In the east they might talk about the yin and the yang. We have a world that's just awful. Everything that we experience is duality. And our major prayer, the Shema Yisrael, deals with this polarity. That is one of the major messages of the Shema. The Shema says, Shema Yisrael, listen Israel, Hashem, the Yudkhe Vavke, the tetragrammaton, Elohanu. These are two different names of God. And the reason there are these two different names of God is because we experience God in different ways. What our sages teach us is that the Yudkhe Vavke Hashem is the midat harachemim. It's God's attribute of mercy and loving kindness. But then there is the Elohim, Elohim, which is God's attribute of justice and strictness. And the truth is that they represent two very different ways in which we experience God. God is experienced as sometimes very close to us, as imminent. We speak about God, our Father, Avinu. And yet sometimes we experience God as not very close, but as distant, as transcendent. We speak about God as not Avinu, our Father, but Malkenu, our King. And you can't get that close to a king. So again, we experience God in two different ways, that polarity. And what the Shema is saying, the Shema is almost a response to this dualism. You know, the Zoroastrians had a problem that everyone has. How could there be evil and terrible things happening in a world if there is a good God? And so the Zoroastrians posit that there isn't one God. They say there are two gods. There's a God of light and a God of darkness. And when the God of light is prevailing, then everything is good. And if the God of darkness is prevailing, that's when terrible things and evil happens. So that actually is a compelling answer to the problem of evil. Why is there evil? Because there are two deities. The Shema says no. The Shema says that sometimes we experience God as loving and as close and as nurturing and as our Father. Sometimes we experience God as a king and as a judge and as being strict. And it seems that maybe there are two gods. And the Shema says no. Hashem Ehud. At the end of the day, God intrinsically by the very core of the being of God is all loving-kindness. We don't always feel that way. We don't always experience it. But behind everything is Yud-K Vav-K, is Hashem. Is this God of love and this God of closeness? Now we came across this word last week with a different arrangement of letters. Last week we saw the word Bechor, which is a firstborn. And we saw that it's significant that the letters of Bechor are the letters Bet, which is two. Reish is two hundred. Chaf is twenty. So the letters that make up Bechor firstborn are two twenty and two hundred. Two hundred and twenty-two. It's like being in Las Vegas and you play the Slam machine and you get two, two, two. It's all twos there. And why is that? Because we saw that the firstborn gets a double inheritance. So it's a great word for a firstborn. But here the word is not Bechor, but Barreich. And Barreich means to bless, or blessing, Baruch, another form of that word. And so the term of blessedness and to bless is also connected to this idea of two. Bechor again is two. Reish is two hundred. Chaf is twenty. So this number two is very deeply connected to both creation, because again the letter Bet is the letter of creation, and to the word blessing. Two is somehow two-ness, very tied into blessing and creation. Why is that? So the Maralph and Prague, a famous mystic, European mystic who lived I think in the sixteenth century, he says that true blessing is only possible when opposites come together in harmony. For example, we have a physical side of ourselves. We're partly physical. We were created from the dust of the earth. We're very physical. And yet we have a spiritual side. God breathed into that physical body made from the dirt of the earth, the breath of life, which is a divine spiritual soul. And our bodies and our souls exist in tension. They're not easily partners. They don't always cooperate. Some philosophies, like the Greek Epicurus said, etric and be merry for tomorrow you shall die. Meaning there have been philosophers that have said, look, your life is limited. Have a party. Enjoy yourself. Glorify the physical. Don't pay too much attention to the spiritual. It's just going to distract you. Don't get too caught up with things like prayer and philosophy. Just enjoy yourself, eat, drink and be merry. That was one philosophy of how to deal with the tension between your body and your soul. On the other hand, there have been many religions that said, no, you should ignore the physical and emphasize specifically and only the spiritual. So basically go ascetic. That means fasting a lot and taking vows of poverty and vows of chastity and sitting in isolation, maybe in the Himalayas in a lotus position and drinking yaks milk. There have been religious philosophies that said, basically, if you want to succeed as a human being, deny the physical and basically just focus on the spiritual. Judaism says, the Torah says, no, that they have to work together in tandem in harmony. There has to be a synthesis where the physical serves, it works in the service of the spiritual. That is the kind of partnership that we're able to achieve where we don't sacrifice one for the other, that we try to harness the physical in the service of the spiritual and it's then that we can have true blessing. Again, true blessing is when you have a unity of two disparate parts. We had this word before on the top of the slide, bait is the second letter, bait, but bait can also be read as buy it, a house. But we have another kind of structure. In the middle of the slide, we have the word miktash, a sanctuary. And we know that in the Torah, in the 25th chapter of the book of Exodus, God commanded the Jewish people, Asule miktash, make for me a sanctuary, the shokhanti betocham, and I will dwell among them. The Torah doesn't say make for me a sanctuary and I will dwell in it. It says make for me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them, meaning in the hearts of all of the people that associate with that sanctuary. What is the difference between a house, a buy it, and a miktash, a sanctuary, a temple, if you will. So buy it, if you look at the letter is its bays, which is two, and yud, which is 10, and tough, which is 400. So buy it is 412. Miktash is mem, which is 40, kuf 100, doled four, and sheen 300 for a total of 444. I probably sound like a New Yorker when I say that. So if you have 444 and you subtract 412, you get a total of 32. 32 is a numerical value of laev, lamin 30 bet 2. Laev means heart. So what is the difference between just a house and a sanctuary? And ideally we should each transform our houses into a sanctuary. The difference is if we have a heart into it. And the truth is that the Torah that we have is all guidance on how to direct our hearts in the proper direction. And God ultimately resides in our hearts. So Talmud says that God desires ultimately our hearts. And so this is what's able to transform a house into a sanctuary. Now we have the second, third, and fourth letters in the alphabet. Bet, gimel, and doled. We're going to focus tonight on gimel, the third letter, which is in the middle. So gimel is related to the word gamal. And gamal has several meanings. One of the meanings of gamal is to nourish something until it matures, until something becomes ripe. Gamal can refer to weaning of a baby. Gamal basically has the concept of nourishing things, weaning, giving, supporting, taking care of. That is the concept of gimel, gamal. Gamel, similar word in Hebrew, means to give. Gamel means to give. So we have an expression, gimilut chassadim, which is to give kindness. Gimilut chassadim are acts of loving kindness, acts of kindness that we give. Now gimil also is very similar to the word gamal. We learned this last week that the word gamal is very similar to gimil. And gamal in Hebrew means a camel, which actually sounds very much like camel, camel and gamal. What is the connection between a camel and this idea of giving? So it's interesting, just the shape, by the way, the rabbis say that if you look at the right hand side of the gimil, it's got that long neck of the camel. And a camel has this quality of being a giver. The camel is able to endure tremendous stress to be able to allow travelers to survive in the desert. It can go a long time without drinking in order to give water to travelers. So the camel is a giver. The camel is a nourisher. The camel is a sustainer of human beings and others that need water. Now again, the top of the slide here is the word gimil, gimil, the letter gimil, which again means to give. And then we have the word chassad. Chassad is the word for kindness. It's interesting that numerically these words are basically the same. Gimil, three letters is gimil is three. Mem is 40. Lamid is 30. So that's a total of 43, 73. Chassad is chet, which is 8. Samach, which is 60. And Dallad, which is four. For total of 72. So gimil, kindness is 73. Chassad is 72. And you should remember that last week we learned that when we deal with the numerical values in Jewish thought, you're always able to add one for the value of the word itself. That's called the kolel. So basically 72 and 73, you get 73 and 73. It's the same number. And actually, we're going to go into this concept tonight a little bit deeper of why you're able to add one to the value of a word. So chassad, the second word on the slide here is interesting. It's a combination of two words. Chassad can be looked at as chass. Chass means to have compassion. And the letter Dallad. Dallad from the word Dall. Dall means poor, impoverished. So chassad is chass, compassion, Dall, on the Dallad, on the poor, on the impoverished. First few letters of the alphabet. So again, we go back to our story. Aleph, God, Bet, created. God created. Gimel. Why did God create? So the Torah tells us creation was an act of loving kindness on the part of God. It says in the book of Psalms, chapter 89, verse three, olam chassad ibaneh. The world is created out of loving kindness. So our alphabet tells an incredible story. And the Torah begins, by the way, with acts of loving kindness. In the Garden of Eden, God provides Adam and Eve with every delicious kind of fruit and vegetable. We know that as soon as they sinned and they recognized they were naked, God provides them with clothing. The entire Bible is basically a story of God's loving kindness to the world. Now the shape of the gimel, shape of the letter gimel, and where it's positioned, is that the gimel stands right outside the house. You have the bet, which is buy it house, and gimel, it stands outside the house. That's just like Abraham, our forefather. Abraham was known for his chassad, for his loving kindness. And after his circumcision, he was already a very old man. He couldn't stand the fact that he wasn't able to help others. God wanted to spare him. So God made the sun come out very, very strongly. Hopefully no one's going to be traveling in the heat of the day. And Abraham is sitting outside of his tent. He's outside the tent. He's looking around. Maybe someone's going to pass by that I can help. And so God finally has compassion on Abraham and sends three visitors. Abraham wants to be just like God. God is a gommel. God is a giver. And so Abraham wants to be a giver. And it's interesting that the letter gimel, and you would see this more if you saw the gimel in a Torah scroll, but a gimel is composed of two different letters. A gimel is made up of a Zion. You see it on a slant, sort of a 45 degree angle there. A Zion and a Yud. Yud is a little leg sticking out. Zion is the letter seven. Zion is a seventh letter. Yud is the letter for 10. So gimel, if you add up its component parts, is 17. 10 and seven. 17 is also the numerical value of the word tov. Tov of goodness, of good. Tov is tet, nine, vav, six, and bet two. So nine, six, and two is, I can't count that high either. Nine, six, and two is 17. What is this all talking about? So the giver, if you look at the gimel, the gimel is standing outside of their house. And their foot, the little Yud, is extended forward because he's moving towards the next letter. The next letter is the dalad, alif be gimel dalad. Dalad we saw means poor, impoverished, because the gimel wants to walk towards, move towards the one that's needy to be able to give. The gimel does not just sit back and wait. The gimel wants to be a giver, and it goes out. It extends itself to the poor. Now we spoke about the code of first words. And so the gimel appears at the beginning of a word. This is a little bit tricky in the verse in Genesis, which speaks about what God did on the fourth day. God created the great luminaries on the fourth day. And the word for great luminaries is Ha Gidolim. Now the word Ha Gidolim, it looks like it begins with a hay, but hay there is just a prefix. Hay is a letter for the. So really the first letter in that word is gadol or gadolim, which means great, big, great, greatness. So the code of first letters tells us that the gimel is connected to gadol. The gimel is connected to greatness, to bigness, to largeness. What is the connection between gimel, which we saw means giving and kindness, and largeness, bigness, greatness? What's the connection? So if you remember from the story of Moses, we're told that Moses grew up in the palace of Pharaoh. And in chapter two of Exodus, verse 11, we're told that he grew up and he left the palace. He grew up, it says, and he left the palace. And the Torah says that that's exactly how he grew up. The word there is vaigdal. He became great. He became large. How did he become great? Because he went out. He went out to his brethren to see who he could help. And we see what Moses does. He breaks up fights. He risks his life. He cares about people. He extends himself. And that's how Moses becomes great by extending himself by giving. The midrush tells us that when we do acts of loving kindness, even the place where the kindness takes place becomes greater. The midrush tells us that there were two brothers who owned a very large field and they divided this large, large field evenly. One brother was a bachelor and one brother was a family man. One day the bachelor says to himself, you know what? I don't need as much as my brother. He has to feed a whole family. So what did he do at night? He gathered up a lot of his produce and he took it over to his brother's field and he snuck it over there, tried to be really sneaky, and he dropped all his bundles of produce into his brother's field. At the very same time, his brother said to himself, you know what? I've got a bunch of kids who will be able to take care of me in my old age. My brother doesn't have anyone. He needs more than I do. So he took some of his produce from his field, from his crops, and he brought it over to his brother's field. And this went on for many, many weeks. And each morning the brother would wake up and they'd look at their property and say, what's going on here? I thought I gave it to my brother. Now it's back in my own field. It doesn't make any sense. So one night the mystery was solved because one night they actually met as they were bringing their produce to each other's field and immediately they dropped their bundles, they embraced and they kissed. And the sages tell us that this is the spot where God decided to build the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. This place of giving acquires greatness. When we had a temple, that was the place where we were able to get close to God. The word korban, sacrifice, is from the word korov, closeness. So closeness was a result of having the sacrifices to bring. Now that we don't have sacrifices, our sages tell us, the same thing is accomplished through the guests that we host at our tables, at our Shabbat tables during the week. Whenever we host someone as a guest in our homes, that's how we get close to God. And so we're told that the pious Jews of France, when it came time for them to be buried, they would make sure that their coffins were constructed from their Shabbat tables because at that table is where they conducted all of their hospitality and they got very close to God. Now we're going to change course. And I mentioned before that we have this rule in Gamatria, in the study of numerology, that you can take the value of a word itself as one. Is there a source for this? Where do you see that this is legitimate and not just some kind of hocus pocus? So there is a verse in the Bible. This is Genesis chapter 48, verse five, where Jacob is blessing his sons. And we know that he didn't only bless his sons, he blessed Joseph's two sons as well. Joseph's two sons were Menasha and Ephraim. And it says in this verse that Ephraim and Menasha will be like Ruvane and Shimon to me. Ephraim and Menasha are going to be like Ruvane and Shimon, the first two sons, the first son and the second son. If we take the numerical value of Ephraim and Menasha, I'll do it quickly. I'm going to just give you the letters. So we have Aleph, which is one. Pei, which is 80. Reish, which is 200. Yud, 10. Mem, 40. Menasha is Mem, 40. Nun, 50. Shin, 300. Hey, five. For a total of 682. So Ephraim and Menasha is 682. Ruvane and Shimon. So Reish is 200. Aleph is one. Vov is six. Beys is two. Nun is 50. Shimon, Shin is 300. Mem is 40. Ion, 70. Vov, six. And Nun, 50. For a total of 683. So Ephraim and Menasha is 682. And Ruvane and Shimon is 683. But the Torah says that Menasha and Ephraim and Menasha should be considered just like Ruvane and Shimon, meaning that even though they're one off, the Torah says they are equivalent. So you're able to add one for the value of the word. There is in the Torah a discussion of a horrible affliction called Sarat. Sarat is often translated as leprosy. It wasn't leprosy, but it was some kind of skin eruption. It could also appear on people's clothing. It could also appear on the walls of their house. That's why we by the way, we know that it's not leprosy because people's clothing and houses don't get leprosy. But the Bible speaks about some kind of a skin affliction. And our sages teach us that one of the main causes of this skin affliction is speaking about others in a negative way. Gossiping and slandering people is one of the major causes of this affliction called Sarat. Now the verse in the Bible that speaks about not going around tail-bearing about other people is Leviticus 1916, top of the page here, which says, lo telech rochil beamecha. You shall not go around as a gossip monger among your people. And if you look at the numerical value of that phrase, lo telech rochil beamecha, it equals 883. Lamid is 30. Aleph is 1. Tuf is 400. Lamid is 30. Khuf is 20. Reish 200. Khuf 20. Yud 10. Lamid 30. Beamecha is Bayes 2. Ayen 70. Mem 40. Yud 10. Khuf 20. A total of 883. On the bottom of the slide, negah sarat, the affliction of sarat equals 883. If you want to know the source of this sarat, it comes from slandering others. Negah sarat, just to spell it out for you, nun is 50. Gimel is 3. Ayen 70. Sadhi is 90. Reish 200. Ayen 70. And Tuf is 400. Total of 883. So we know in the Passover Haggadah, in the Passover Seder, there is a discussion of four archetypal children. Four archetypal children, the hacham, the engaged child, sometimes called the wise child, the rasha, the disengaged or disinterested, sometimes it's just translated as wicked or evil, the anode alishul, the one that doesn't know how to ask, and the tom, the simple one. Not so easy to translate these terms. So the Haggadah tells us that what do you do, what do you say to the rasha, the child that's the evil, let's translate this as rasha, evil. The Haggadah says hake et shinav. Literally, you could translate this as smack him in the teeth. Now, as a teacher, I would say, this is not very sophisticated pedagogy. I'm not sure how effective it's going to be to smack a kid in the mouth. And it's actually a very disturbing kind of advice. So our sages tell us that there is something much deeper hinted here. The word rasha, race is 200, shin, 300, ayin, 70. Rasha is 570. What are we told to do? We're told to smack his teeth, shinav, smack his teeth, shinav. And the word shinav is 300, shin, nun, 50, yud, 10, and vav, 6. Shinav is 366. So when you have this rasha, we're told to smack his teeth, is shinav. If you take off 366 from 570, you get 204. 204 is the value of tzadik, a righteous person. Tzadik is 90, dala is 4, yud is 10, kuf is 100. So the Torah is teaching us not so much to smack him in the teeth. It's saying take out his shin, his shin. And when you do that, you're going to transform him. Don't beat him up. The advice is transform the rasha into a tzadik. What's interesting is it's telling us to take out his shin. If you look at the top of the slide, the word rasha, an evil person, has a shin in the middle. When you take out the shin from rasha, so the letters that remain are reish and ayin. Reish and ayin, the first and last letters, spell out ra, evil. But if you turn those letters around, ayin and reish, it spells out air, which means to wake up. And so what you're told to do really is to try to wake up this wicked child so that they will become ultimately a tzadik. There are two passages in the Torah that are absolutely frightening. And they're called the tochacha. One is at the end of the book of Leviticus, end of Vayikra. And one is towards the end of Devarim, in the 28th chapter of Devarim. And these chapters are basically what God threatens the Jewish people with if they will not listen to him and then not obey him. So in Deuteronomy chapter 28 verse 15, it starts off by saying, it will take place. It will be if you don't listen to the voice of God. And the verse says, I'll read the entire verse, it says, it will be if you do not obey the Lord, your God, to observe, to fulfill all of his commandments and statutes, which I am commanding you this day, that all of these curses will come upon you and overtake you. And it's a whole chapter of horrible maledictions and curses that will come upon the Jewish people. The Midrash on this verse, the rabbinic Midrash on this verse quotes a verse from the book of Psalms chapter 34 verse 20. And the verse there says, many evils before the righteous person, but Hashem saves him from them all. Why is the Midrash connecting this verse in Psalms to the beginning of the Torah, to the beginning of this series of curses? So I have for you highlighted in red the word raot. Many evils. The word raot is from the word ra. Ra is evil, raot, evils in the plural. The word raot is race, 200, iron, 70, vub, six, tough, 400, for a total of 676. The word raot evils is 676. Incredibly, the number of words in this entire passage of the Torah, in Deuteronomy chapter 28, if you count up all the words, it's 676. 676 words. And what's really amazing is that God's name in this passage appears 26 times. God's name of Yud, Ke, Vov, Ke, the tetragrammaton appears 26 times in this passage. If you take 26 and you multiply it by 26, why would you do that? God's name appears 26 times, but the numerical value of God's name is 26. Yud, 10, hey, five, vuv, six, hey, five, 26. So the numerical value of God's name is 26. That name appears 26 times. 26 squared is 676. So we have here this word, the evils that will befall us. If we don't obey God, the word raot is 676. The number of words in the entire passage is 676 words. God's name appears 26 times. And 26 times 26 is 676. What we learned from this is all, if you could just hold your questions, please. Thank you. What we learned from this is that all of the curses in the Torah can be transformed into blessings. Hashem is able to cancel out all of these curses. And that's why the verse from Psalms says that many evils befall the righteous, but Hashem is able to save him from them all, meaning even though we might face potentially terrible evil things, but God is able to save us from all of them and actually transform them into blessings. We have here the word sukkah. Every year after the high holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we have the holiday of Sukkot, the festival of booths. And the Torah tells us to build a booth that we live in for the entire duration of the holiday. What's interesting is that the letters in the word sukkah actually paint a picture for us of the laws of how to build a sukkah. So the first letter is Samakh. And that teaches us that ideally a sukkah should have four sides. A sukkah should have four walls. However, if it doesn't have four walls, you can make do with three walls. And that's the second letter, the chav, has three sides to it. And the truth is, even if it doesn't have three full walls, it can have two walls and a part of a wall. And that's the letter, hey, two walls and a half of a wall. That's also a kosher sukkah. So the word sukkah itself tells you about how a sukkah should be built or could be built. It says in the book of Exodus, chapter 20, verse 2. We learned this verse in the previous week. I am the Lord your God who took you out of the land of Egypt from the house of slavery. I have here highlighted through the word Asher. I could say that. To Anokhi, I am Hashem al-Okecha, the Lord your God. Asher, that hotseticha took you out, me erets me in triumph in the land of Egypt, me bait avadim. The word Asher, the numerical value is alif, one, shin, 300, reish, 200. Asher is 501. Now in the Passover Haggadah, we know that one of the things that we recount are the 10 plagues. And the Haggadah tells us that Rabbi Yehuda had a numanik to help us remember the 10 plagues. And that numanik is which stands for dam, svardeya, kinim, arov, devar, shchin, barad, arbey, koshech, and b'chorot, the killing of the firstborn. Interestingly, if you take all of these letters in the numanik of Rabbi Yehuda, Dalat is four, tzadi is 90, chaf is 20, ayin is 70, Dalat is four, shin is 300, bait is two, alif is one, khet is eight, and bait is two. A total of 501. The numanik of Rabbi Yehuda is 501. And therefore, what the verse is saying to us is the following. Anokhi ashem al-okecha, I am the Lord your God. Asher, not that, but Asher, through the agency of these 10 plagues, hozay ticha me erith mitzrayim, I took you out of the land of Egypt with Asher, with the 501 that represents these 10 plagues. So we have our word which we learned previously, Torah. Torah is the revelation of God that we have. And I mentioned earlier tonight that Torah has two parts to it. It has a written aspect that we call the Torah Shabikotav that's in writing. And then we have the oral Torah, that's the Torah al-peh, that is oral, that is oral. If we take the word Torah, we learned this already last week, Torah is 611. Tuff is 400, vav is six, racious 200, hay is five for 611. The word bhiktav in written writing is 100, I'm sorry, bhiktav is bayes two, khaf 20, tuff 400, bayes two for 424, bhiktav 424, vav al-peh is bayes two, iron 70, lamid 30, pey 80, and hay five for total of 187. 187 plus 424, no surprise here, is 611. So Torah is 611 and it's equal to its two parts, the written and the oral, 187 plus 424 is 611. So here we have a verse from the end of the book of Genesis. When the brothers came down to Egypt, so we know that Joseph already was the second in command of all of Egypt, and we're told that Joseph settled his brothers and his father when he came down, and he gave them property in the land of Egypt in the best of the land, we're told, vimetav haaretz in the land of Ramses, as Pharaoh had mandated. Pharaoh had told Joseph he can give his brothers this place in the land of Ramses. So the verse says, this is Genesis chapter 47 verse 11, 47 verse 11 in Genesis, vayitein lahem, achuzaah, he gave for them a possession, ba'aretz min srayim in the land of Egypt, vimetav haaretz in a great beautiful, in a good part of the land, ba'aretz Ramses in the land of Ramses. Now Rashi tells us that this good part of the land, vimetav haaretz, Rashi tells us is Goshen. The Torah doesn't say Goshen, Rashi tells us it's Goshen. Now I mentioned, I think it was last week, I'm not mistaken, that when I was in Israel in 1980 I met with the stapler Gaon who has a book called Birchat Peretz and I showed you that one of the things he does in this book is he takes the commentary of Rashi to the Torah and he shows that the numerical value of Rashi's commentary is equal to the verse that he's commenting on. So if you take the words that Rashi's commenting on and you figure out its numerical value it'll be equivalent to what Rashi says. I think last time we mentioned the example where the Torah says that in Genesis 11 the whole world was of one language, Saffa Akhat, Rashi there says Lashon HaKodesh and the stapler Gaon says Saffa Akhat and Lashon HaKodesh, the holy tongue, the holy language is the same numerical value. So here he says the same thing that the words Benetav Haaretz in the good part of the world, the good part of the land is 359 that's Baiz 2, Mem 40, Yud 10, Tets 9, Bet 2, Haaretz is Hay 5, Alif 1, Reish 200, Tzadi 90, Total of 359 and Goshen is 359, Gimel is 3, Vab is 6, Shin 300, Nun 50, Total of 359. Just to repeat what I said last time, the stapler Gaon did not have a digital version of the Bible. He did this basically in his head. The word Staka is often mistranslated as charity. It's not really a good translation, Staka from the word Sedeck, which means righteousness or justice because we don't give Staka for charitable reasons. Charity is from the root Karitas, which means feeling, right? We talk about Charisma, someone that you get a good feeling from them. So we don't give Staka because we feel pity and we feel sad for someone. Staka is given because it's an obligation out of justice. And the reason is that what we have, we don't own. Anything that we have in life was given to us to hold as a steward of God to use responsibly. And that includes giving a certain amount to people in need. Now the word Staka, let's take the first letter, so we could say that that letter stands for Staka. Isn't that interesting? And it's the letter 90. If you move two letters over, it's kuf, which is the letter for 100. So how much are we supposed to give? So you can take kuf 100 and make it into Sadi 90. If you have 100, you can make it into 90 by giving 10, which means you've given 10%. That's the minimum. The minimum that you're supposed to give is 10%. You can turn your kuf into a Sadi, but is there a upper limit? So the truth is the upper limit is as follows. The last letter in this word is hey, hey is five. If you go to the, well, go over two letters, you get a doled, which is four. So you can change your five into a four. Basically, you're giving up 20% there. And that's the maximum amount that should be given. Our sages say that we don't want to turn people into porpers that they themselves will need. So the amount of giving should be between 10 and 20%. The word staka itself equals 199. Sadi is 90, doled is four, kuf is 100, hey is five for 199. Why is that significant? Because how much money do you have before you're no longer allowed to collect certain kinds of staka? So for example, in the Bible, one of the kinds of staka was called peya, peya were the corners of the field, which were left unharvested if you had a field for the poor to be able to collect. So the Torah tells us that if you had 200 zoos, if you had that much money, you couldn't collect peya. But if you had only 199, you could get the staka and staka is 199. Now we have a complicated one, as you can see from all the colors. In the book of Numbers chapter 25 verse 11, we have a horrible story where there are two people that are fornicating flagrantly right in front of Moses' tent. Moses is just stunned. No one seems to know what to do. And a terrible plague breaks out. God is very upset that this terrible transgression is taking place. And finally, Pinchas, the son of Eliezer, the son of Aaron, the Cohen. The Torah says, he turned my anger away from the children of Israel by his zealously avenging me among them, because he took a spear and he shish kebabbed the couple that were sinning. He ran the spear right through them. And the Torah there says, because he zealously avenged me among them, so I did not destroy the children of Israel because of my zeal. And the Torah says on that phrase in Numbers chapter 25 verse 11, He sheev et hamati. He turned back my anger. He turned back my wrath. He sheev could also mean he turned around. He turned around my anger. He turned around my wrath. Now the book of Psalms chapter 106 verses 30 to 31 describe this story of what happened with Pinchas. And it says there in verse 31 that when Pinchas basically took vengeance on these two sinners, it says in the book of Psalms that this was an act of tzedakah. It was an act of now you could translate it as charity or tzedakah righteousness. There it would be translated better as righteousness. But the word also we saw can mean charity. Now one of the major kinds of giving in the Bible was something called machatzit hashekel, the half shekel. And in the book of Exodus chapter 30, it describes three times this giving of the half shekel. And that's why the custom is to give three half shekels. Now if you look at this word machatzit, look at the word machatzit. So you have in the middle the letter tzadi. The letter tzadi we saw stands for tzedakah. Tzadi stands for tzedakah. Now right surrounding that middle letter tzadi, you have a chet and a yud. Chet and yud spell chai, life. Chet and yud spell life. The outside letters farther away from the tzadi, farther away are the mem in red and the tuf in red. Spells met, death. So when you have charity, what charity does, what giving does is it brings life close and it pushes death away. As a matter of fact, it says in the book of Proverbs, Mishle chapter 10 verse 2, tzedakah tatzil mimavet, that charity saves from death. So what does it mean when it says in the verse that Pinchos turned around my anger? So there you have on top of the page the word chamati. And there the middle word, the middle letters are the mem and the tuf, the red letters for death. And the outside letters are chet and yud, chai. So what Pinchos did was he turned around these letters and he made the chai closer. He brought chai close. He stopped the plague and he pushed the death away. He turned it around. He reversed the order just like you have in the word machatzit, where the closer inner word is chai for life. Here's a word that we should never know from. It's the Hebrew word for divorce or document of divorce, get. It's an unusual word that Torah tells us, that Talmud tells us that when and marriage ends, even the altar, God's altar, sheds tears. But why is the bill of divorce called aghet? So there are two reasons that are given. One is that the letters gimmel and tet are three and nine, which is 12. And interestingly, aghet always has 12 lines. If you count this as the divorce document here and if you count the lines of writing, there are 12 lines. It's always written with 12 lines. That's one reason for why it's called aghet. But the Vilna Gaon, the great sage, the Vilna Gaon has an even more profound reason. He points out, and again, he didn't have a digital Bible, but he pointed out that in the entire Bible, these two letters, gimmel and tet, never appear side by side. Not in one word, and not even if you take the first letter of one word and the last letter of another word, they are simply two letters that never appear side by side. And so these letters represent total separation, that with this document there's now a total separation from this couple. So when the Jews stood at Mount Sinai, we're told in the book of Exodus chapter 19, verse 23, that they were not supposed to go up on the mountain. Only Moses was supposed to go up on the mountain. Everybody else was to stay put. Don't go up. As a matter of fact, we're told that they had to set boundaries around the mountain. So chapter 19 in the book of Exodus, verse 23, says, Hakebel et hahar, the Kiddashto, that you should set boundaries for the mountain and sanctify it. The word Kodesh, holiness, means separate, meaning that you set boundaries for the mountain. So the mountain will be separate from everybody else. The Belzerebi, the Holy Belzerebi, discovers something unbelievable about this verse. We're supposed to set boundaries around what? Around the har. The middle of the slide here is the word har, which means mountain. Har is a mountain. And he said, what would happen if you surrounded these letters? So if you surround the hay and the race, let's do that together. The letter that comes before hay in the alphabet is doled. If you look at the letter that comes after the hay in the Hebrew alphabet, it's above. If you go to the race, the letter that comes before the race in the Hebrew alphabet is kuf. And if you take the letter after the race in the Hebrew alphabet, it's shin. These are the letters that make up the word kadosh, holy. So the Belzerebi said, that's what this verse means. Hagbel, surround, hahar, the mountain. And what will happen when you surround this word har? The Kiddashto, you will get holiness. You're going to get the word kadosh. The Torah tells us in the book of Numbers chapter 20, when the Jewish people were starving, they had no water to drink. So God told Moses to go to Iraq to take his staff. And God tells Moses to speak to the rock. But verse 11 in chapter 20 says, Moses raised his hand and he struck the rock with his staff twice. It doesn't speak to the rock. It takes his staff, he strikes the rock with his staff twice, and an abundance of water gushed forth, and the congregation and their livestock drank. And here I have a part of that verse which says, v'yach et hasela, he struck the rock, b'matehu with his staff, pa'a mayim twice, v'yeetsu mayim, and water came out. The amazing thing was discovered. If you take the word for rock, which I have on the top line highlighted, the word rock is sela, samich lamed ayin. And you take that word and you spell out each of the letters. So again, if you look at the red letters on the middle of the slide, going down, you have samich lamed ayin, it spells out sela. But I've also spelled out each of these letters. So samich is spelled out samich mem chaf. Lamed is spelled, lamed mem dalid. Ayin is spelled out ayin yud nun. So that's rock, that's the sela. What did Moses do? He hit it twice. He hit the first letters off, and he hit the last letters off, and he was left with the middle letters, mem mem yud, spells out mayim. So when he hit the sela twice, he was left with mayim, with the water, and that's what came out. It says, v'yach et hasela, he hit the rock, b'matehu with his staff, mayim twice. And what happened, what came out, what comes out is the word mayim water. So we know that one of the most controversial verses in the Bible, actually this verse comes up several times, but I have it here from the book of Exodus, chapter 21, verse 24. It's the famous case of Lex Talionis, an ay for an ay. The Torah says ayin takhat ayin. To many people this is extremely disturbing. It sounds barbaric, and it is barbaric. And the truth is that this was never the law in Judaism, even though it says ayin takhat ayin, an ay for an ay. The Torah tells us in the oral Torah that you never take out someone's eye or chop off their arm in case someone hurt someone else. Rather, you pay five kinds of compensation. You have to pay them for the value of the limb that was hurt or destroyed. You have to pay them for their doctor bills. You have to pay them for their lost wages. You've got to pay them for their pain and you have to pay them for their embarrassment. The Vilna Gaon found an incredible hint to this law. He said, if you take the phrase takhat ayin, the word takhat in Hebrew means literally underneath. That's why what we're sitting on is called a tuchas because it's underneath us. That's called takhat. So the Vilna Gaon said, what is the penalty for ayin? If you hurt someone's ayin, hurt someone's eye, what's the penalty? The penalty is takhat ayin. What is underneath ayin? What's underneath ayin? So take the letter that appears underneath each letter of ayin in the alphabet. After ayin comes pay, after yud comes chaf, after nun comes samach. And if you rearrange those letters, it spells out kesef, money. So the penalty for hurting someone's body is the payment of money. Deuteronomy chapter 14 verse 22. This is going back to our giving of takhat. The Torah says, that you should give a tenth of all the produce of your seed of your land. It's supposed to give a tenth. This is a pretty straightforward idea. This is the minimum amount of giving to give a tenth. There is a collection of midrashim called midrash pliyah. The word pliyah means bizarre, strange, bewildering. And so this is an entire collection of midrashim that are basically weird, strange, bizarre midrashim. And on this verse the midrash pliyah quotes a passage from Genesis chapter 13 verse 9 where Abraham is parting from his nephew Lot. And Abraham says to Lot the following, that if you go to the left, I will go to the right. And if you go to the right, I will go to the left, meaning we're going to part from each other. Now the verse in Deuteronomy said that you're supposed to give one tenth of your produce. And the midrash comments on this by saying if you go to the left, I'm going to go to the right. If you go to the right, I'm going to go to the left. And any normal person's going to say what on the planet is going on here? What does this mean? So there is a teaching from the rabbis that takes the first two words, aser ta aser. It's obviously a bit redundant. It's really sort of saying double language to give a tenth. Eser in Hebrew means a tenth. Aser ta aser. So the rabbis in the midrash teach the following idea. They say aser, give a tenth. Kdeh shatit asher. In order that you will become wealthy, meaning one of the best ways of becoming wealthy is to give away your money. And the rabbis teach you if you give a lot of staka, you'll become wealthy. Now the word eser is ten. The word ashir is wealthy. And that's because the letter shin can be read as either shin, sh sound or sin, like an s. And it depends upon where you put the dot. So if you look at aser ta aser, there's the s sound, there the dot is on the left hand side of the shin. If the dot was on the right hand side of the shin, it would be ashir, wealthy. So the explanation of this midrash, this strange midrash, is as follows. If you put the dot on the left, right, if you go to the left, I'm going to go to the right, meaning if you put the dot on the left, which makes the s sound, and you make it eser, if you give a tenth, then God says, I'm going to go to the right, and it's going to be the ashir, and I'm going to make you wealthy. If you give a tenth, the left side, I'm going to make you wealthy the right side. But im hayamin, if you go to the right, meaning if you want to remain wealthy, if you want to be an ashir, by what? By not giving your ma aser, by not giving a tenth. Then God says, I'm going to go to the left, God says. You want to stay wealthy by being cheap? God says, I'm going to go to the left, and you won't even achieve one tenth of what your fields could have produced or final example for tonight. Towards the end of the Torah, end of the book of Deuteronomy, the Torah says, for the Torah is not an empty thing for you, for it's your life, and through this thing, you will lengthen your days upon the land to which you are crossing over the Jordan to possess it. So the phrase, it is not an empty thing for you, is key, lo, dava, rake, who, mekem, it is not a empty thing for you. And the Midrash reads this in the following way. The Midrash says, key, lo, dava, rake, who. It's not something that's empty, meaning the Torah is not empty. And if you think it's empty, it's mekem, it's because of you, meaning it's not the Torah's fault, it's your lack. The Baal Haturim is a commentary to the Torah, which engages in a lot of numerical teaching, a lot of gamatria. If you look at a, if you want to find a commentary that has lots and lots of numerology, it's the Baal Haturim. And he was responding to people here who would say gamatria is nonsense, it's just playing around, it's not real. So he said that this phrase, key, lo, dava, rake, who, mekem, it is not an empty thing for you. It has the numerical value of 678. And numerical value of gamatria is 678. So he's showing through gamatria that you shouldn't make fun of gamatria. As a matter of fact, the rabbis teach us in Ethics of the Fathers at the end of chapter three, I think this Shabbat actually, we'll be studying chapter three of Pirkei Avot, it tells us that gamatria is par parot lahakma. It is a condiment to wisdom. And actually the sages teach us that gamatria is one of the 32 ways in which the Torah can be interpreted. So gamatria is not just some cute thing that is to be poo pooed. It's actually an inbuilt part of Torah itself. And the Baal Haturim tells us that this verse at the end of the book of Deuteronomy is showing us that gamatria is not something that is empty.