Rochel is the Koach of Shtika
Rochel is the Koach of Shtika
Rabbi Moshe Weinberger – Da Es Midosecha June 25, 2020
Da Es Midosecha Rabbi Weinberger Julne 25.mp3
We are learning about the four foundations, right now silence.
There are practical applications of shtika and dibur.
In all of tanach there is one person identified more than others with shtika and she does not seem to be a person who is afraid to speak up. That is Rochel. In the torah leah seems to be more of the quiet sister. Rochel speaks strongly for wanting children yet she is identified with the midda of shtika.
The koach of Shtika is the koach of Rochel. She grabbed, she acquired this koach of shtika, and as a result she was zocheh that her descendants know how to keep their mouths closed, the art of silence.
A few examples are the stone of Binyamin is jasper, yashvei, yeish pe, Binyamin had what to say He knw what happened with Yosef, the secret of what took place. He knew about it, but he kept his mouth closed and did not give away the secret.
Shaul HaMelech is an einicle of Binyamin, when Shmuel was sent to annoin the king he found Shaul, designated as the King but he did not mention it to anyone. We are not talking about a promotion at work.
Esther haMalka was silent in the palace about being Jewish.
Rochel is the koach of shtika.
It is interesting that this is coming at the same time we learn Reb Tzaddok of Rochel and Leah . He is speaking about Rochel as the world of Yosef the model of all tzaddikim and Leah as the mother of all baale teshuva.
Leah has the koach of praising Hashem, speaking words of praise in poetic words of praise. Leah is perfected speak, hodaa. Rochel is the koach of silence. Yet when you look at chumash Leah seems quiet. What is the meaning of the shtika of Rochel and the talkativeness of Leah.
Rav Tzadok explains it as the silence of Rochel is not counting her words, it is the world above the tzaddik gamor who does not have noise inside for whom the path of life is very clear and straightforward, it is not noisy it is silent. There is a beauty n that path of the tzaddik that is a quiet confident tranquil way of life. That is the mahalach,
As opposed to the world of Leah, crying that she was like Esav, fighting to not become an Esav. Her inner life was very noisy, turbulent, like Yedua with Tamar, a lot of fighting and kicking and screaming to remain good. That is the world of the bale tesuva.
It is the same here. Rochel is the world of silence and Leah is song and speech because of the noise, the turbulence in the heart of bale teshuva struggling to overcome the obstacles in their lives and overcome what is screaming in them for them to overcome.
It is not a matter of Rochel being a quiet person in speaking, it is that she had an inner tranquility and silence. Leah imeinu is like a person fighting off the demons inside, I am not going to do this, constant inner warfare and noise not to slip back into the world of Esav. That is a deep Torah from Reb Tzaddok.
Rochel is the model of a tzaddik. Leah is the model of bale teshua. Therefore Rochel has the yesod of tzaddik and the inyan of Leah is Yehuda and Dovid HaMelech and Moshiach.
What is the koach of shtika according to Rav Schwartz. We learned earlier that there is a side of kilkul and tikkun, with afar, we spoke about that and with aish, fire, there is a fire that builds passion and a fire that is destructive. Shtika can be afar or aish, it can build or destroy, Shtika of kilkul and shtika of tikkun the ability to silence the fire of kilkul is Rochel, to silence the fire that is destructive, the fire of kilkul the ability to silence that noise, that fire, is the silence of Rochel, the silence of that which could destroy everything
He explains in the pasuk that Bais Yaakov is a fire and Bais Yosef is a bigger fire, lashon hislavus, a huge fire. The pasuk says Esav is a kash like straw. The vision of the future is the fire of Yaakov and the flame of Yosef will consume the esav, the straw. Esav is Kash – koshe and shtika we spoke about . The pasuk is bais Yaakov….
Yaakov wanted Rochel Imeinu, perfect tzaddikim children, not children like us with all kinds of crazy things, tzaddikim, not struggling. Everything should go easy, that is what Yaakov wants. He fell for Rochel and that is what he wanted. He wanted a quiet beautiful Yiddishkeit for his quiet beautiful children
Did you ever have a quiet time learning, a sweet moment in that sefer and then you get a call from your wife that they sent your son home from school? There are those interruptions of imperfections were all of a sudden the noise comes back.
Yaakov wanted to build an am Yisrael without noise but it was not meant to be. Hashem wanted hi to marry Leah. He has two names, the heel which is fighting and Yisrael
This promise that Yaakov is a fire and Yosef is a flame, the shidduch of Yaakov and Rochel is fire. From this shidduch of Yaakov and the koach of Rochel there comes Yosefl Hatzaddik
Aish is is a kilkul of shtika, there is a holy fire, a constructive productive aish kodesh a fire of kedusha that passion of the tzaddik. Avodas Hashem and then the fire of kikul esav the fire of destruction, Rochel can silence the fire that is unholy she can silence it. To eliminate it
Leah is always living with that noise Rochel can silence it and when the noise is silent that is the flame of Yosef HaTzaddik
Hashen is saying my words are fire. Speech we learned comes from ruach. When a person speaks it comes from ruach breath, air, oxygen, speaking, is associated with ruach. Chazal tell us there are ten portions of sicha and women have taken nine. All the guys that lie to talk too much and make jokes at the expense of women they like to make jokes about women taking nine portions of speech. Not dibur of sicha sicha is translated as conversation but that is not completely accurate. Reb Tzadok has big Torah’s on this. The maimer on Shabbos, he has sicha. When a Jew learns torah and speaks Torah Dovid calls it conversation of Torah, sicha. Sichas hara, lechutei sichos. Sichos is not the same thing as dibur. It is something else.
Women have taken 9 portions of sicha, men have one, the guys that talk too much say they talk 9 and men have one and women suffer this abuse, since sicha is Torah, sicha is a word to converse in torah, that women would be more chaiv in Torah than men but that is not the case, logic would dictate that since women have 9 portions of sicha that learning Torah would be for women. Dibur is male and dibur comes from ruach air. With this koach of dibur men speak words of Torah that are words of daas.
A talmid chochim, Moshe, has daas but if you have a talmid chochim who does not have daas is compared to a carcass. A talmid chochim has koach of dibur but is lacking in daas. They are out there, they can have a a lot of information but daas is something else an emesdik talmud chochim in a place of shelamos not only knows a lot, he also has daas, he knows when to be silent, Daasi is discernment and the midda of daas is how everything is to be applied lmeisa in a practical and real way. A talmid chochim is a baal daas.
The gedolim had daas , a midda, not intelkigence. A koton is potor from mitzvah because they don’t have daas kids may be geniuses but chazal says that child is not a baal daas and that women are not lacking in intelligence but their way of thinking is lacking compared to a man in daas.
If we lack daas, learning can be a waste of time and the type of learning men do can come through a women in a way that can be destructive. Now I know many women will take offense at that . there is halacha but it has to do with emotion and psychology, which Is why it is a controversial topic unless we understand the penimius of daas – torah temima explains the inyan of a woman learning gemara, that since she has a fire of regesh of emtion, a gevura of fire, what happen is that she becomes exrremely exictied about her initial understanding even though it is not thought through to the end yet she is passionate because of her regesh but is often incorrect.
Going through something based on an incorrect assumption and entering into that in a deep way can be dangerous. Man does not have that depth he is more measured and less emotion packed and intellectual, less affected by emotion. For a womanm it takes flight. It can jump from one thing to another. A man’s way of thinking is more weighty - waited weighted. The woman will grab the idea and it will consume her, in a deep way, she has tremendous kochos of the intellect, but if the initial understanding is wrong, and you go into a deep kilkul, it takes us away from torah and truth
That is the issur of women and talmud Torah particularly with the oral law. Even thogh they can ask the question that she is malchus, oral law..women have a koach of speech and the inyan is daas. That is the difference between stam dibur and sicha,
A woman who has a different type of daas of making those connections in a gradual and tempered dispassionate intellectual way, in that respect, she is not given the mitzvah of talmid torah, for daas is not as shakool as the daas of a man. It is not as shakool the regesh, the fire, affects that scale of weighting things sufficiently. The woman, if she speaks the torah is lacking in daas and that is a dangerous type of talmid torah because we come to the wrong conclusion and build a whole edifice on something that is wrong from the very beginning. To take all of her fire to debate and to prove a point that was not thoroughly thought out, it was lacking in daas. This chiluk is because some women get very upset. There is not a shelamos of Talmud Torah. The koach of Rochel is to silence the fire. Of kilkul, the destructive fire.
Yaakov, is koach of Torah, tiferes is torah. He met Rochel and this was his chaverusa for life, Rochel imeinu, koach shtika. It is one thing to silence speech. It is another thing when it comes to sound to the voice. Sound comes from fire, the shin shoreges we learned last week that sound comes from fire, a shriek. Kol, sound
Rav Schwartz doesn’t explain it but there is something remarkable. The kol is kol Yaakov. Yaakov is kol. Rochel is a shidduch that knows how to temper that sound of fire, that kol. Rochel Imeinu as the ability to temper the sounds, the voice, of Yaakov with the fire of tikkun tha the voice of Yaakov should be tikkun. To silence the noise of Esav the kol kol Yaakov is perfected by the silece of kedusha so the fire of Yaakov is a fire of torah, not to go off track to kilkul
Rochel has the koach of shtika which ultimately brings the downfall of Esav, kash. Yosef asked that his bones be taken from mitzrayim. Why does he refer to himself as if someone died, a deep thing he is saying here.
Chazal tell us that Yosef on his level was punished because when he heard his brothers speak and they said avdecha aveinu, he didn’t protest to say Yaakov should not be an eved, Yosef allowed his father to be called a servant and he is referred to as bones in his lifetime.
Rav Shcwartz explains that Yosef comes from Rochel and Yosef’s shtika was not perfected. For 22 years he didn’t tell anyone who he was, he didn’t communicate back to the family but still his silence was used inappropriately but he was not supposed to be silent when his father is called servant. The important thing to understand that the koach of shtika, that he was silent, came from Rochel He did use this silence excessively, He should not have been silent when his father was called servant. Silence does not mean we don’t talk it means we say what needs to be said but not what we are not to say. Measured and thought out. We need those boundaries.
Yosef did not keep that boundary and he is atzmos Yosef, like a dead body. The ikar is that Rochel gave Yosef the ability of shtika to be silent. Rochel and Yosef knew how to talk. In this particular situation he should have spoken up. He should not have sat silent when his father is called avdecha and he was punished.
Yosef brings us to the downfall of amalek, of Esav. What is the shtika of Esav? It means to silently harbor hatred and to silently want to destroy the world that is the inyan of Esav.
The inyan that Yosef received is of silent voices that should not be heard and to reveal sounds that are true. Yaakov and Yosef. When Yosef became known to his brothers and the silence ended, it says in the pasuk the sound was heard that the brothers of Yosef had come.
Rcohel is shtika and the perfected sound of voice, when speech is tempered with daas. This is connected to the blowing of the shofar.
What is the difference between a person who is silent as far as speech is concerned and another erson who is making sounds.
When a person stoops saying words, he can still be making sounds it is just not articulated in words.
The Torah says that by Har Sinai, there was a great sound of the shofar, the sound of the ten commandments. According to one view in the gemara, on a deeper level the voice of Har Sinai has never stopped the sound of matan Torah. The sound of matan Torah ahs never stopped.
The sounds were extraordinary . they could see sounds. There is something extraordinary and the sound has never stopped the dibur has all stopped thousands of years ago, we cannot hear. But the voice, the sound, continues on through time.
The explanation of this is that after the ten utterances dibur stopped there are ony 10 not 11 however the sound of the shofar getting stronger and stronger has never stopped. That sound of matan Torah continues always through time and can never stop, it means that the words the dibur of Har Sinai is silent but the voice is never silent.
Therefore, when Rochel is silent, one the one hand the shtika from afar is that she does not speak and she is megala the voice of Yaakov. The mem is that sound of humming. Rochel is the sound, the shtika that brings out the voice of Yaakov. She is the fire of the aish sherekes, which means to lift up the voice from dibur to a higher level of kol. Just like the diburim stopped, there is something miraculous that carries on that great people can tap into and hear, the noise of Har Sinai, Rochel can bring out in Yaakov elevated speech the voice of Yaakov. Shtika in dibur a higher level of Torah where it is just the sound of har sinai, a voice in the brain or heart, the deepest thoughts of a talmid chochim.
It says in the pasuk there is such a thing that a person is silent in speech but his heart is screaming out to Hashem. His heart is screaming.