Acharei-Kedoshim: Facing Darkness, Choosing Holiness

In this episode, I discuss Parshas Acharei Mos-Kedoshim, which name indicates the shift from “after death” into holiness.

I speak about desire, how powerful it is, and what happens when it isn’t held with awareness. The Torah offers very clear boundaries, and I’m beginning to understand them not as punishment, but as protection - a way of preserving life and keeping us aligned with something higher.

I also reflect on the tension between longing for closeness to G-d and the responsibility to stay grounded in this world, and what it means to bring holiness into our everyday lives, not just in sacred moments, but in how we speak, relate, and show up.

This Parsha also brings up difficult realities around sexuality. I touch on the places we don’t usually speak about - harm, silence, and the ways darkness can exist within individuals and communities. For me, this is part of the work: not looking away, but learning how to face what’s real while still believing in healing, accountability, and the possibility of return.

Because holiness isn’t created by avoiding what’s broken, but by meeting it with truth, clarity, and the courage to transform it.

Lea

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to More to the Story. I'm Leia Raboshkin Wolf, and today we will go into the this week's Torah portion. Um again, like last week, it's a double Torah portion. So we go through Ahore, Ahore Mos, and then the following parsha, which is Kadoshim. And I shared this last week when I was presencing with the energy, it felt like it felt very intense, it felt very big. And I realized that, oh, it's a double parsha, it's a twin parsha. And so the birth is, you know, the same birth has to be able to contain, like within the same six weeks, we need to be able to receive double the amount. And so there's a lot of light available in this week, more than usual. And please, God, we'll be able to open ourselves up to receive all that Hashem is offering to us. I'm gonna dedicate this class for the complete and immediate Rafa Shalema, physical healing, spiritual healing, emotional healing on every level for my dearest friend's husband, Shmuel Ben Brahatirtsa. Um I cannot wait to celebrate his miracles and thank Hashem for his kindness. So thank you for creating this space for me to share this Torah that's coming through my heart. And I'm so grateful to all of you for coming and creating this space and for birthing this Torah into the world this week. I feel like it's so incredibly messianic that women can step out of their day-to-day lives and be able to nurture their souls and really, really be able to tap into in the merit of the righteous women, Mashiach will be birthed and come through. So we're gonna go into the parsha, but before we do, for me, um, I always need to ground back in what the previous parsha was to bring me to the Karan Parsha. So I'll share one thought on about last week's parsha and come into this the Karan Parsha. In last week's parsha, the topic was tsara, leprosy. What would happen when a person would find this blemish, this deformity on their body, on their home, or on their clothing. And the entire process of how to realize that you have interacted with a death energy, whether you spoke words that brought dark energy into the world, whether you touched a person that was more attached to death than to life, or I wouldn't, I shouldn't say more attached, but who had interacted with dark energy, and so you became contaminated because of the cross-contamination. And what we the what we learn is that only a kohain was able to pronounce a person as a bearer of tsarat. And so when you noticed this, you went to the kohain, and the kohain was the one that said, um, this is indeed tsarat, and so therefore there's an entire process to bring the person back into alignment. And um when I was feeling into the this teaching, I was thinking how they say that the reason that a Kohain has to be the one to diagnose this is because the Kohen is sourced in love, in Ava. We are all descendants of Kohanim, are all direct descendants of Aaron Akohen. And Aaron was the older brother of Moshe, and it says that he merited to weir God's Choshen Mishbah, the secret codes of God's name directly on his heart, because when he heard that his younger brother would be the Redeemer of Israel, his heart rejoiced. He was fully like open-hearted at the idea that his brother would be greater than him. And so the heart that was able to rejoice for his brother is the heart that can wear God's name on his heart. And we know about Arun that he was the he, they say, O if shalom, virodiv shalom, he ran, he chased peace and he pursued peace. If he heard that two people were in conflict, he would go to one side, he would go to the other, he would try to like be the middleman to bridge peace between them and um couples who were going through a challenge, he would do what he can to bring the couple back into connection. And so when nowadays we carry on this tradition that when Kohanim bless us, they first bless us bi'ah with love, and then they come and they share their blessing of Yebarachacha, which is the the code, the code to try to pass on blessing. But I was thinking that um, you know, this application for me in my life. I remember when I was um earlier on in my healing journey and I was pursuing truth. I wasn't pursuing peace, I was pursuing truth. I wanted information. That's the the devour in me, the strength in me. Um and so I would like go inside of my psyche or my being and start analyzing myself. And um I was being really critical, like against my own ego. I was like highlighting and noticing all the ways that I fell short. And at a certain point I realized that when you don't have the voice of love inside of you, and you start going on this excursion of healing and trying to find out the different parts of you that are not whole yet, you it's it's like a horrible critical experience of like earing out your dirty laundry to yourself. And um, from last week's Parsha, I was reminded that in order to heal, in order to diagnose, in order to find leprosy in myself, the first step is how alive is the voice of love inside of me? How often do I hear a positive comment dropping into my heart saying, You got this, you're doing really well, thank you for taking care of me. You know, we have like different soundtracks going on inside of us. It's like imagine a beautiful room and it has beautiful speakers built in, right, within the home. And I know for myself, the critical speakers, they they have no problem operating. They they can go off at any moment, multiple in many moments, in the same moment, right? And then what about the speakers of love? Is the volume connected? Are the wires connected? Do I hear a cheerleader within myself saying, You got this? Thank you. That was so courageous of you. Thank you for noticing that, thank you for trying that. Just a voice of compassion, a voice of encouragement inside. And um, when that voice is strong, when the voice of Arun is strong within myself, that then it becomes okay for me to notice the areas in myself that I need to grow in. And I'll I'll take it one step further before we go into this week's parsha. We are told by the Alta Rebba, the first Chabad Rebbe, that a human being has an animal soul and a godly soul. And really, life is this dance between higher consciousness and lower consciousness back and forth. And when you're in lower consciousness, everything feels negative, not everything, the voice of negativity and the voice of criticism, your ego is very much alive and it very much turns against itself. And when you're in that state, everything anything you find feels like, oh my god, like this is so embarrassing, this is so shameful. How can it be that this is who I am and this is how I I lost my temper or I lost my cool or I forgot my child's important date? Like everything feels really, really, really personal. When you're in that animal consciousness, you're very one with your ego, and everything feels like it's your fault or it's a very big deal, it's very, very personal to you. What I'm noticing is that on the days when I'm in higher consciousness, like when I'm not gripped in an ego state at a lower vibration, when I find something about myself, it's like, oh, God formed my life and God brought me to this place of being exactly as I am. Okay, I have this blemish. Wow, I wonder how God's gonna choose to help me heal that blemish. I wonder what the journey and the process will be to bring light to that part of my psyche that was dark. And it no longer feels like this horrible judgmental experience of finding out something about myself that I need to heal. It doesn't feel like, oh my god, there's more to heal and there's more to heal, and when will the healing be over? Because it's no longer so personal. You're operating from like a higher place within you, and you realize that God sent you into this world to heal, and the healing is it's that's it's it's a journey, and it can be more fun and it can be an opportunity for connection when my ego doesn't feel so ashamed of finding out that there's something not perfect about me. The truth is that our our imperfections are what make us human. It's why we're down here in this world. We are fully, fully human, and we we have full permission to be human. Um so that's my my you know carrying over from last week. That's what was on my heart. And now we'll come into this week's parsha, acharemos, and those words literally mean after the death. And this week's parsha takes place on um, I believe it's Yotishre, because it's that's the day of Yom Kippur, or maybe it's right before Yatishre, because um right after the Mishkan, the tabernacle was put up, and Moshe inaugurated it, and then he passed over the inauguration to, once it was inaugurated, he passed over services to his brother Arun to lead them. Arun was going through the divine service with his children, and two of his sons didn't follow protocol, and they went inside of the Holy of Holies without an invitation. And what happens is they pass away. A fire comes out of the Holy of Holies and travels through them and takes their life. And so this parsha picks off right there in that moment where Arun finds out that his children, two of his sons, have passed away. And um this the bulk of this parsha, the first section of this parsha, talks about how you know Moshe gives over to Arun what the instructions are from God on how to engage with the Holy of Holies in a way that won't ever take another life, right? How can we enter into the sanctuary of God but preserve our life? It says that the one of the reasons why these men lost their lives, not Devanavyu, is because they were full of desire. They like they saw God's wonder in their divine service. They were full of like appreciation and longing and desire. They just wanted to be one with God, and they never brought it back down to grounding back into this world. As great as God is, as one as I want to be with God, God wants me down here, back here in this world. This is where I have to surrender and say, no matter what I want, this is where God wants me. And um it says that Aron, his passion and his love for God was, I don't know if it superseded his sons, but it was on their level. And God was afraid or, you know, it's taking an action step to make sure that Aaron wouldn't go ahead and have the same experience as his sons. And so this parsha starts off teaching us about the secret codes and the divine service that happened in the Mishkan on the day of Yom Kippur. And um I'll go through it as fast as I can, it's pretty technical. Um and then we move into the next um part of the parsha. So when Arun would begin, it says actually that whatever you're gonna hear now was about Arun, but really this entire formula was passed down throughout the generations to every single Kohin Gadal. This was the formula and the recipe. And if you just take a moment to remember what Yom Kippur means to you, we we have the tradition of Yom Kippur. We carry the meaning of Yom Kippur and the availability of what it brings to us, and this is where it's all rooted. Like these are the teachings that have been held and passed down to bring us to the Yom Kippur that we still use as an inch of our faith and of our Jewish existence. So it says that the week before Yom Kippur, whoever the koin gaddal was, he would leave his home and he would go live and sleep in a chamber within the Besamikdash or the Mishgan, separate quarters. And in that week he was going through this preparation, this preparatory process to prepare him to be ready for this his greatest moment. Within that process, on day three and day seven, other Kohanim would come and they would sprinkle the ashes of the Para Ajuma over him as a way to purify him in case he came into contact with anything of a dark energy, of a death energy. And excuse me, he would purify himself, he was going to the mikvah, and he was relearning and remembering every halacha, every single teaching connected to his service. And on the day of the night of Yom Kippur, it says that the Khachamim would come before him and they would remind him and test him and teach him how to pour the incense, the Khatoras, because if there was one iota to the left or to the right, the Kohen Gadl was um he opened himself up to death, right, to the consequence of death. And so, like he perfection was demanded of him. And he had this entire team and this built-in system to support him. And on the day of Yom Kippur itself, the night of Yom Kippur, the Kohen Gaddl did not sleep. He remained up the entire night, and he was given different portions of Torah that were engaging, that were intriguing to him. There were their specific ones, the same ones, and he would stay up and learn them because he was not allowed to sleep. What I found so beautiful was it says that the great men and people of the city of Yerushalayim took it upon themselves not to sleep that night and to make noise and to go about in movement so that he would feel their energy awake so that the world wouldn't become still and silent. And I was so moved by this idea that a leader is supported by his people. He's not alone awake in the middle of the night holding space for everybody else. There's a partnership going on here. And they were so fully aware of the Koyim Gado's role of leadership that his willingness to step into a role that demanded perfection of him at the cost of his life. He, you know, God asked this of him and he stepped up to the plate and took it upon himself. But he he does it within the context of a nation that is behind him. And they work together. So the actual experience of Arun, um, Arun himself, before he was able to step into a leadership position when he started the day of Yom Kippur, he had to bring a personal carbon to atone for him and his household in case they did any error in their divine service, in case they um didn't eat the holy foods at the exact location that was needed. And so he started off with like cleaning his own slate by bringing his own offering from his own funds. After that, there was a very interesting process where the from the communal fund, um, two goats, I believe, were um offered. One was going to be a sin offering and the other was an ascent offering. And they would put both goats before Aron and he would cast a lottery. With one paper said for God, and the other paper said for the Azazel. And he would pick one up with his right hand, with his left hand, and he would place it on each goat. The goat that was chosen for God, that was the goat that was designated to be brought in the sanctuary, in within the Mishkan. The goat that was chosen for Azazel had its own process where, you know, we'll go through it in a moment. Let's see if I can share a little bit about the goat that was for God. So Aron first um does this lottery and then he brings his own offering, and then um he he brings this the goat for God in the Khodashakdashim, following that with the Katoras with an incense offering. Um and then he goes, he circles back to the goat for the Azazel. And that goat is um it's called the scapegoat. It's the goat that it's like the karban seabor, it's like this collective goat that carries the trauma and the sins and the pain of the entire Jewish people. Um and it gets a specific cohen, not our own, would take this to a speci a land that was designated as a Zazel, which was very, very rocky, and they would take this goat and they would shove it really hard down a cliff and it would die on these cliff edges, on these rocks. And you know, before we before we sat down for the shear, we had a cacao circle here, and um I invited the women, I'll I'll just share it here now again because some of us came in at different times. I find that Torah is alive and Torah is healing when we can be honest about how we feel when we take Torah in. And so look, I welcome your emotional reaction to these teachings, and I hope that you can too. Because when we're honest with how we feel and we question things, we merit answers. And so you're you can hold space for what feels uncomfortable and not in integris with the God that you know and understand. And hopefully you get to we get to merit to bring um clarity and um something palatable, something digestible at some point later on. Um so it says that this goat would figuratively carry the sins of the people to another land. Um and I was thinking about this and I was having a conversation with a friend. Nowadays we do um a ceremony called um kaparis. Every year before Yom Kippur, we're told that we take a chicken and we hold this chicken and we presence with life in front of us. We realize that as a Jewish person, in order to consume meat, in order to interact with a carbon, you're coming face to face with life and death in front of you. And you're asked to become very, very aware that life is so precious. And it is this animal that is willing and evil and instructed by God to carry any energy that needs to leave this world on your behalf, right? And being that it comes from your money and your energy, it's literally in place of us, it's in place of you, it's in place of me. And God gave us this gift as an opportunity to let go of dark energy, as an opportunity to realize that human beings make mistakes. We are human, we are allowed to. And we're given the tools, the corrective tools, the ceremonies, the processes, the codes of God of how to be able to step back into life with a clean slate. And so we're not callous about life. We know how precious life is, and we're so aware of how precious our life is. We're so aware that we need every remedy and every gift and guidance from God to succeed. We're mothers, we're wives, we're individuals, we're humans. Our work is huge. And when you stand in front of an animal that's gonna take the place of your own life, it can bring you to this moment of like life is real, I need to be awake. It can wake you up, it can stir you. The discomfort that's in front of you of like this life is going, but what am I doing with my own? It's really this checkpoint moment to make sure, like, am I as alive as I can be in this moment? Because a life will be taken on my account. And can I show back up with everything that I have? Can I pray to wake up more and more and more each day? Um, I was also thinking, like, whenever I heard this teaching of like the carbon that was thrown off the cliff, it always felt very um uncomfortable to me. Why does one animal get to be slaughtered and brought up in like this holy pure temple, this golden marbled temple with like we do it in the least possible, the least painful way, we collect its blood, there's so much intention. And then the other contrast to that is like quick death. It's probably not quick death, it's actually very painful death without thought and without um presencing with all the moments. Um, and I was. I had this moment for myself when I was learning it this year where I was thinking like the the as unholy as the death is of this goat, this world is very holy. The rocks are holy. It's Mother Earth. It's Mother Earth catching it down here. This is i this the environment that this goat dies in, it's up to us. God gave us a temple and he told us, when you take a life and you give it to me, bring it to me in my home, and this is what my home looks like. And it all of a sudden it feels so polished and it feels so magnificent in comparison to the goat that has to die outside of those bounds. But this world was left to us with God's help to turn into a temple. And so long as we want to change this narrative, that one goat dies alone, outside of the camp, on its own, without presencing and without intention, that's the work left to us. So as uncomfortable as it is, it's also this for me, it's this moment of like a wake-up call. If I do care about the goat that has to die on the on its own, on these rocky, rocky cliffs, as a placeholder for all of the pain. And we all we all know we all know what this means. We all know the members in our community who had to live on the outskirts of town and who had to die silently because there wasn't a holy space for them within the community for the challenges that they were given. And I I welcome those souls. I know so many of them who are in heaven, who are here. Um and I I hope that this teaching and this parsha can bring so much light to bring the outside camps closer inward, or for some way for the veils to lift. Um, so there's no more scapegoats. Like there's no more, you know, it actually will we'll tie back into this at the end of the parsha because um the end of the parshios talk about sexual immorality and all the prohibit prohibitions around sexuality. And I find that that is like such a central area where there's scapegoating happening in our lives today. So I'll leave it at this for now, and then we'll circle back to this idea of the scapegoat on the other side of the parsha. Um the person, the Kohain who walked the scapegoat to the Azazal, his clothing became um tameh, impure, and his his he was impure. And so right away he had to go into the mikvah with his clothing, immerse his clothing, immerse himself. Anybody or anything that he interacted with would take on his energy. And um so he had to be very, very careful to contain his energy. And then on the topic topic of clothing, it says that in general Aron, the Kohen Gadal, had eight garments, but on Yom Kippur itself, he wore four garments because four of the garments had gold on them. And being that a big part of his service on Yom Kippur was to atone for what happened with the golden calf, he wasn't going to show up into the sanctuary wearing gold. And so he was brought down to four garments when he entered the Holy of Holies. And it says that he never wore the same garments again from year to year. Every year a new pair of garments were prepared for him, and um off of the funds of the community, the communal funds. And you know, I was thinking about how, you know, in Torah we have this value to not waste, to use things out well. And then you have a teaching like this that says that there's a time and a place where a service, a moment is so precious and it's so um, it's once in a lifetime, the same garment will never be appropriate again. And so it's just that balancing of tension where we have a rule to not be wasteful, and yet there are moments of exception. Um, I found that to be interesting. Um, from here it goes into what does Yom Kippur mean for us? What does God ask of us on Yom Kippur? And we learn that we are not, we have to afflict ourselves by fasting, not drinking, not wearing leather, not anointing our bodies, and not being intimate with our partners on Yom Kippur. And this was a command for the native Jew as well as the convert. Um it says that on this day Hashem will bring atonement for you in order to purify you. The karbanos atoned for some aspects, and then this these teachings of of um afflicting yourself was your contribution to invite the atonement into yourself from Hashem. Like you welcome Hashem in on Yom Kippur through your contribution of fasting and not eating until you show up into the relationship. Um from there it speaks about how these teachings are going to be needed for from year to year, from generation to generation. And so they would get passed on from the Kohin Gadal of that time to all future Kohin Gadals throughout the generation. And Biney Israel would have these life-balancing secret codes that would bring the entire world and the entire community into alignment, into like a brand new clean slate. So it's so interesting. Like it feels like a lot is being asked, it feels like it's heavy, but it's literally like imagine a world with like fresh snow and nothing touching it. Every single year we get to step into that reality. Every single year we're invited back into the world as though we were a brand new baby that just entered this world. And it's interesting, like God, from God's perspective, we start over every year, but from our perspective, we still come into the new year and think, oh, I'm muddy, I'm dirty, this snow got infested here and it got tracked on here. And from the inverse, from God's perspective, I gave you these codes, I gave you the recipes, you held on to them, and so you can show up to Yom Kippur with this excitement of like this purity that awaits you, this brand new, fresh, clean slate that you're invited into for the upcoming year. Okay, the last few details around you says that it would be it would be considered as if he had shed a person's blood if he would offer a karban outside of the temple. At that time, um the Jewish people were learning from other nations and they were offering sacrifices to demonic entities, as were the nations around them, right? And so God made it very, very clear in this week's portion that if you try to bring us an animal, you slaughter an animal outside of the designated space that I commanded to you, it's as though you took blood and you will be punished, you will die prematurely and without children. It's like really strict and very, very clear. Um it says this rule was put into place to prevent Jews from slaughtering sacrifices to demons, as they had been. And it also sternly warned um the converts as well: whoever consumes blood of a sacrifice or a non-sacrifice, it's also considered as if you spilled blood, and it's just like it's a um a strong um isser against God. God is these are like the boundaries of life. The explanation for this is that the soul is alive through the blood, which was why God was willing to accept the life of an animal in place of the life of the person. Um, and so you're not gonna drink in the soul of another entity or another being, right? And then lastly, it says if you eat the flesh of a bird that did not die by being slaughtered, it would be considered as ritual impurity, and you will infect yourself with ritual impurity. There's a designated way to take a life, and that's through the process of shritha and kosher slaughtering. Um, and if that were to happen, if you did consume meat, there was a process to bring the person back into purity with immersing in the mikvah, etc. So this is part one, and from here we go into um forbidden relationships in the Torah. And I want to just invite everybody, um, you know, in in I feel like there's different levels of life happening in the world. Like there's the mainstream life that I know and lived, and then there were these little pockets of life that I bumped into when I went deeper into my healing journey. And um, in my day-to-day life, in the mainstream life, you don't bump into this conversation. So it's so interesting for me that in the Torah I do bump into it, and in these secret circles of sisterhood, I bump into it. So being that maybe this is a bridge space between those two worlds, I just want to invite everybody that a trigger warning like this content is real and it's difficult, and whatever you need to do to presence yourself, to protect yourself, you're welcome to do that now. Okay, so this this the sub the subject title of this would be Forbidden Relationships, forbidden relations. And it says, Hashem is telling the Jewish people, you've seen the the way that Egypt behaved. And I'm about to take you into the land of Canaan, and you're gonna see the ways that Canaan behaves. And do not imitate their practices with regard to their carnal relationships, specifically where you dealt dwelt in Egypt, and specifically to the areas in Canaan that I'm going to take you, those two locations had the worst of the worst around inappropriate sexuality. The darkest sexuality was coming from the places that God took the Jewish people. And that should clue us into something. That says something right there in the Torah. Instead, safeguard and follow my ways. I'm gonna read it inside. So the the previous Pasak says, do not follow the ways of Egypt and Knan. And then it says, Rather, you must perform my ordinances and safeguard my rules by studying the laws governing their observance. Furthermore, you must continue to pursue them and their study even once you think you have mastered them, and never think that you are free to forsake their study in favor of the study of other cultures or religions. I am God your God, whose authority you accepted unconditionally. You must therefore obey my rules as well as my ordinances. What I found so interesting, like the commentary, is interwoven into that Pasuk where it says that you must continue to pursue them. To pursue them is the word of God in the Torah. These teachings are forever evolving because Torah is alive. And so what it means to safeguard sexuality is always evolving. And so if your parents passed you, passed down to you teachings about sexuality, it's it it evolves, it grows. Torah is alive, the world is alive. What you need to pass on to your child, inherently, based on this pasuk, we have a command to pursue these teachings. These teachings move. And the ask of a parent, the ask of a human being is that you need to pursue these teachings. It's not an ancient understanding that you can receive and pass on and follow the ways of your past great-great-great-great-great-grandmother that wouldn't cut it, that wouldn't protect you and bring you up to date with the teachings that God has for us here. So these are the teachings that God gives us here, and then you know, hopefully we'll get to pursue the lessons. Don't uncover the nakedness of close relatives. Don't uncover the nakedness of your father or his wife, even if she's not your mother. Do not uncover the nakedness of your mother, even if she is not the wife of your father. Do not uncover the nakedness of your sister, even if she's your half-sister, even if she was born from an illicit relationship. You may not uncover the nakedness of your grandchild. You may not uncover the nakedness of your father's sister, nor your mother's sister, nor your father's brother or his wife. She is your aunt. You may not uncover the nakedness of your daughter-in-law, nor your brother's wife. You may not uncover the nakedness of. Here it says, you may not be married to a mother and a daughter. Right? In those days, marriages, you can be married to multiple women. And so it's a filthy thing to God for a mother and a daughter to be married to the same man, nor marry the children that are born to your wife, right? You're not allowed to marry your own child. Such a union is the counsel of your evil inclination. Specifically about the mother and the daughter and the child. God has these words attached to it that if you are being pulled there, it's the counsel of your evil inclination. You may not marry two sisters in their lifetime. From here, um it's gonna go on to talk about the dark energy that comes from sexuality while you're in your menstrual cycle or before you're clean. And then we go back to the end of the parsha. Um it ends off repeating a lot of these um restrictions around sexuality. So I'm gonna follow the flow of the parsha and we'll come to talk and unpack a little bit more on the at the other side. The next teaching is about your menstrual cycle. You must not approach a woman during her menstrual separation, nor the seven days that follow her period. You may not lie with another man's wife. You must not give all of your children to the priests who sacrificed to the molech. In those days, there was a God, a deity, that um had priests that would take a living child and pass them through living fires. They would make the child walk through beer foot between the fires as a sacrifice to their God. And God, our God, um the true God, is saying to you that if you um engage in such behavior, I will punish you for this so severely. Um and none of this is allowed or desirable. Um I'll pause for a moment because I'm not gonna, I don't think I'll come back to this. No, nothing in the Torah is um history. Everything is alive about Torah. And I think it's a very, very difficult but important question to ask ourselves. In every generation, there are people who still serve this God, this entity, this false God, this molech. And they ask us to take our children's shoes off and to walk through two fires and to see if our children will come out alive, to sacrifice our children to death energy, to torture, to the stealing of their souls, to the stealing of their autonomy, and finding the courage to step into higher mothership, motherhood, parenthood, to be able to say, is there a space in my child's life that's asking them to walk through fire, unholy fire? Is there a space in my child's life that's asking them to sacrifice their soul or or compromise too heavily on their safety? Um, I know for me there was. I know that a huge part of my journey was becoming a mother and seeing what society, what my community expected me to do with my children, um, from the rituals and the common information that were available. And my entire being was couldn't do any of them. I couldn't do it. And at the time I thought, I'm just not fit to be a mother, I can't do this. Um, it took me some time to realize for me, for the sensitivity of my soul, for the sensitivity of my children's souls, some of these things are a sacrifice to a false God, and I have to opt out. I'm gonna choose to take my child away from that. And I I don't have a uh I don't think it's fear to say that there's a standard rule for anybody, right? For me, it was sending my children into an educational system at 18 months old. That wasn't okay to me. That wasn't okay for my children. For me, different teachings around breastfeeding and sleep training and the the teachings that were being told to me was a sacrifice to my child. My soul was couldn't be alive inside of me. It was in agony thinking that I had to follow these ways, watching what was going to happen to my child when I even came close to trying to implement the wisdom that was coming my way. Um, and then from the healthcare system, right, from doctors telling me what I needed to do to my children and child, to my child, like all of that. And, you know, there was enough going on at the time that ultimately there was like this breaking moment for me where I said, I'm not taking anything as status quo. Nothing is a given. I will step out of the current, I will step out of the trends, I will step out of the the natural movement that's in front of me. Um my husband and I moved outside of a religious community, not intending that. We just, that's where God took us. And um it felt like we had Sarah and that we had to leave the camp, right? But God was really bringing us into this place of privacy and isolation. And I got to think through everything and make choices and realize that just because it's being done, it doesn't mean I need to do it. And thank God I come from a family who has strong, strong connection and ties to Torah. And so I was able to work with this truth in me that there it must be that God is good, and there are other options that are aligned with Torah, but don't exactly look like the ways other people are doing it around me. And it really came. The answers did come, and may they continue to come for all of us who want to be able to step in and say, like, I I want to protect my children with everything that I have inside of me and raise the bar. Like more life and more life and more life. Not the opposite, God forbid. Okay, we'll go back into the um to the teachings. You must not lie with a man as you would a woman. You must not lie with an animal. The nations who I am sending out of Canaan are accustomed to this behavior. You must not spiritually defile yourselves. The land vomited out its inhabitants. Follow my rule so that the land won't vomit you out. I found that to be like such a beautiful and powerful um pasak in the Torah. Like it's so vision, it's so visceral, it's so visual to me. God's land of Israel is so holy and it's so um nurturing, and it has so much capacity to hold and be aligned with God and truth, and it demands holiness from us, which is interesting because um we're literally about to go into Parshis Kadoshim, so that's perfect. Um the first the first Torah portion was called Ahremos after death, and then this to the second Torah portion we go into is called Kadoshim, which means sacred, holy, separate. And um I feel that God is teaching us and making it very, very clear to us what holiness means down here in this world. In order for Mother Earth to hold us and to contain us and to desire us and to be able to support us, we need the same Wi-Fi signals. We need to be able to be sending the same frequencies and moving together. And so all of these behaviors that we're told to stay away from or to engage in, they're really just moving us deeper and deeper into our soul so that we can be these clear channels, these clear vessels where the frequency of God just pulses through us and operates through us on every level. Um, okay, we go into the teachings of Parshus Kadoshem, and it says here, God says that sometimes when I called you together, I never made it mandatory that everybody had to hear me, but for these teachings, everybody needs to hear this. So this was the command given to Moshe that this was um he had to gather all the people to hear this. And what what is this? The first line that I have written is, You must be holy, for I, God, your God, am holy. We're here to be godly, we're here to emulate our Creator. And so the the demand is that we be a holy people. And how? We need to respect our parents. You need to feed, clothe, and escort them whenever necessary. You may not sit in their seat, you may not contradict them explicitly and speak when it's their turn to speak, unless you they ask you to desecrate Jabis. If a the only time that you're allowed to outright violate your parents. Word or will is if they ask you to go against Shabbos. And I I think that's um, you know, Shabbos is the feminine, it's the it's the nukvah, it's the everything that is feminine. So if a parent is asking you to violate your essence, your femininity in any way, you have the full permission of Torah to disregard what they're teaching or telling you. You may not have a you may not serve a vodhara, and when you um bring sacrifices to me, you need to have the kavana that it be acceptable before God. Before you do engage in service, pause and presence that don't do this by rote, don't do this by habit, right? When you're standing in front of God, be able to steady yourself, to pause, to find a groundedness and have a prayer, like uh an awareness inside of you and a communication with Hashem that this sacrifice will be pleasing before Hashem. Don't be caught up in the doing, right? Have a moment of being. Okay, the next mitzvah that's spoken of is um, and this really applied to them because of the agricultural society that they lived in. Certain parts of your field, the edges of your field, and the items that fall while you're harvesting must be left for the poor and the converts. You're not allowed to take everything that grows on the ground. There are sections that are sectioned off for different people in Hashem's in the nation that need it. You may not steal or falsify or deny information, you may not lie to each other. A community may not lie or deny information to each other. This is so that God's presence can be here amongst us. You may not swear falsely in any of God's names. You may not oppress your fellow by not paying him on time. You must not place an obstacle before a blind person, fear God. This applies on all levels. So this teaching is taken that if somebody is ignorant on a subject and you start using that to your advantage, that's that's literally um putting an obstacle before a blind person. You're not giving them all the information, and then you try to buy a valuable item off of them, or you put them into a situation that they don't know is coming their way, and you're treating the blind person in a way that they cannot protect themselves. Do not pervert justice and don't be um partial to the poor when you're giving a verdict. Don't favor the poor and favor in because you you have a compassion for him. Or do not and do not show respect to the rich or the great man. Don't be a gossiper, and you must not stand idly by when you see your brother's blood shed. When you see someone's blood boiling or spilling, you are not allowed to stand by quietly and witness it. Your the the command is that you move into action. You must not hold hatred for another on your heart. You must rebuke him without embarrassing him in public. And so when you do have a grudge or a kink in a connection between you and another person, you have the mitzvah to try to work it out. Whether that's within yourself and your journal, whether that's in prayer, whether that's with your therapist, but ultimately you're not allowed to hold energy against another person on your heart. And you have a mitzvah to ask the person for time to ear out this challenge and see if you can bring flow back to this not, because you can't hold a grudge against another person and hold it on your heart. Don't take revenge and treat someone the way they treated you, and you may not crossbreed your livestock or grains or spices and vegetables, and don't wear a garment that's made out of wool and linen. Okay, now we come back to um a teaching about holisexuality and not holisexuality. So there was a situation where a Jewish woman was a bondwoman. Here, I'm gonna read it. I'm gonna read the whole paragraph and I'll see if I can make sense out of it. As you have been taught, a Jewish bondman who is already married to a Jewish woman is allowed to marry a non-Jewish bondwoman. You have also been taught that a non-Jewish bond woman may gain her freedom before the end of her term of service, either if someone pees for her release or if her Jewish master frees her himself, and that once she is freed, she assumes the status of a full Israelite woman. Finally, you will soon be taught that adultery, even if committed with a woman who is merely betrothed, is a capital crime. Now, if a Jewish man conducts relations with a woman, and this woman happens to be a non-Jewish bondwoman who was designated by betrothal for a master's Jewish bondman, and she has not yet been fully redeemed, nor has freedom been granted to her by her master, there must be an investigation. Um she's basically like she's engaged, she's betrothed. And if you sleep with this woman, it's considered full adultery and you will be tried as a capital offense. That's the teaching. Okay, now we go into um bikurim. Bikurim is a beautiful mitzvah. When the Jewish people came into the land of Israel, they planted a lot of fruit trees and different, right? They did a lot of planting. And the mitzvah was that in the first three years after they planted, no one was allowed to harvest or take anything off of these trees. When you came to the fourth year, everything that grew in that fourth year was considered for God. And you were, if you picked it, when you picked it, you had to collect it and specifically consume it in um, you had to bring it to the Basem English and redeem it. Some of it was given as gifts to the Kohanim, maybe the Leviim, I'm not sure. And then you were allowed to redeem it through like a monetary exchange and then eat it in that space. But the first fruits are for God. God has this connection with like the first children, the first animal that's born, first fruits. Everything that's like the first has a lot of strength. And because God saved us in Egypt through taking out the strength of Egypt by going after their firstborns, there's this firstborn status in Judaism that we maintain and we protect. Okay, again, we're reminded not to eat the blood of an animal. And there's a lot of random mitzvahs that we learn in this parha. We're almost at the end of it, so hang in there. There's this mitzvah to not cut off the angular borders of a man's hair, his payat, and as well as to not destroy the five edges of a man's beard, his chin, his two cheeks, and his two temples. Okay, the next teaching is while you're in a state of mourning, do not follow the ways of the Amorites and cut your flesh. They had this practice of wanting to tap into the pain of grief and mourning, and so they would make it very, very visceral by um going into their bodies to elicit the pain. Hashem made it very clear that our mourning stops, like there's boundaries to mourning. And we're also taught that a tattoo is forbidden in conjunction with this, like we don't carve into our flesh. I am God. You must not defile your daughter by making her a prostitute, or I will punish you by making the land engage in prostitution. The land will become filled with immorality if you push your daughter into prostitution. Um then from there we say Hashem reminds us to observe Shabbas. Everything that we're hearing now in this parsha, these were like the foundational tenets of a holy society for God, because these were specific teachings that God said, everybody needs to hear this from you. This applied to everybody. So if we want to know the core foundational truths that are precious and important to God, we're hearing it. And it feels like a lot, and it feels like a lot of don'ts, right? And also feel like feel what that feels like to be told no, no, no, no, no, no. Um, it's interesting that I think that number one, where I was going with like feel what it feels like to be taught in this way of don't and no and no and no and no. To me, um, that feels very masculine. And it also feels like the way, unfortunately, we can talk to children. They're like these live wires of energy, and they take a marker and they just are ready to color. And don't go, don't get it on the tablecloth, don't get it on the wall, don't get it on the floor, don't and don't and don't and don't. And when you stop yourself and you say, I'm not allowed to say don't, or no, or stop to my child, you realize how much you are in the habit of wanting to do that, or that's your that's the way we were, that's what comes out of us. And um, that was just an awareness that I was having. And I I I've also been presencing with, you know, when I grew up till not very long ago, when I would read these words from the Torah, they felt very harsh and they felt like God was very scary and very um punitive. And I think I'm coming to this place for the first time in my life where I don't feel that he's punitive. I feel like he's so clear. I feel so grateful to the bounds that are so explicit. They're just very, very, very clear bounds. And at the same time, the then the knowing that the the people who were receiving the Torah were in exile for 210 or I don't know how many years. And things had to be very clear for them. Like there couldn't be philosophy and there couldn't be softening, there couldn't be, you had to state the rule very, very clear so that they can just attach to it and follow the rules and follow the orders. So for me, putting it into context of this is how the Torah had to emerge, and also coming to this place of these rules are gifts for me. They teach me about the bounds of life and death, they teach me about what brings in dark energy and what brings in light energy. The it feels like, I mean, I think the Tanya says this that God created the world with light and dark. We are either feeding the light or we are feeding the dark. It's one or the other. And usually there's um a pull towards the dark that's like it's it's this energy that's disguised, it's disguised godliness, and God is just saying to you, like, I hope you'll be able to refuse this offer. I hope you'll be able to say no to it. Um so yeah, I I hear you, I I hear where you're coming from, and from another perspective, um, I'm feeling like the clarity is actually a gift. And you know, in in parenting, they say that when a parent doesn't have boundaries, it's very scary for the child. Their soul is rooted in, their animal soul is rooted rooted from the world of tohu, which is chaos. And they have chaos inside of them, it's very scary. They realize they have this huge energy inside. And if they don't sense that a parent has containment, has tikkun energy, which is boundaries, which is rectification, which is a vessel, which is it's Yaakov. Yaakov is from is from the world of Tik Tikkun, and Isav is from the world of Tohu, and these two brothers have to live in, these two beings have to live inside of us. And when a child doesn't feel that a parent knows how to tap into the energy of containment, these are the boundaries of life. This is what will happen if you go out of the boundaries of life. You're going to engage with dark energy. It's hard to. And thank God we have all of these teachings, like most of um last parsha were all of the codes of how to purify yourself if you did make a mistake, right? And so I I don't um I don't imagine like someone went a little bit out of bounds and that's it, they died. I imagine that there was a process of being warned, um, of there being witnesses, of a build-up. They just also remember that they were coming from Matan Torah, which is like they were so far from acting like this in so many ways, they were so elevated. Then they fell down into Khaita Egal, right? And I don't know where I guess like with the inauguration of the Mishkan, they had their Yom Kippur, they had their clean slate, and then the world was very clear, it was very pure. Um, so that's how I'm imagining it. But I I do hold space for how I know as a teenager, like every don't felt like a hammer and a nail hitting me. Every time I would hear a teaching like this, like I would hear like from a teacher, or it would be like boom, boom, boom. Also because I was operating for my ego, which wanted freedom, right, from all of these teachings. And so it felt very, very restrictive. On where I'm holding today in this moment, is like, wow, what a gift to be given so much clarity of how to live my life, right? Okay, um, it says, observe Shabbos and honor my sanctuary. Don't come inside with your shoes and your walking stick and your money belt and your dusty feet. Make sure you're cleaned up before you come in. Um, I'll take a moment to talk about how a woman is uh a couple's marriage and their intimacy is the Kodashakdashim in their home. Their home is the temple and their bedroom and their sexual life is the Kodashakdashim. And we learn about how to conduct ourselves in our own own homes and what our true needs are from hearing what God's needs are. If you want to understand what your soul needs and what your soul is disgusted by and can't live with, all you have to do is read these codes. It's so interesting. It's like all of these um rules about dark energy become very, very meaningful to me when, you know, in the thick of my husband's recovery from addiction, when I started hearing my soul like revolt against the darkness that was next to me. And so these teachings are like they're God's truth, but they're my truth because I'm the feminine. And I can feel when dark energy, dark sexual energy is coming at me. And so it no longer feels restrictive, it feels like I there's light around me when we respect the boundaries of energy. There's dark energy, there's light energy, this is how you cross-contaminate, this is how you stay away from it, this is how you purify it, if you bring it home by accident, right? And so these teachings became like the codes to my freedom and the darkness that I was living in. But coming back to your bedroom is your temple, is your is your sanctuary, it says here, don't come inside with your shoes and dust on your feet and a walking stick and your money belt. And last week we were speaking about um mikvah, the process of spiritual immersion in the waters, and how um we have that mitzvah as Jewish women to purify us through our monthly cycle. And I was having a conversation with friends on Shabbos after that, and um they reminded me of something that they said that they saw a teaching that on the day that a woman goes to mikvah, right, which is chosen by God based on when she stops bleeding and when she can count seven clean days, it's literally between God and the moon and the waters and the tides, telling her what day she's called into this holding of the waters, you know, to bring her back into the waters of Ganeden. Um, this person saw a teaching that the husband should make it his business to go into the waters on that day, too. And I said, um, I came value that intuitively. Like I, my husband and I have had that conversation where it intuitively felt that if your woman is going to such lengths to purify herself, to tap into higher consciousness, to let go of the past, to invite all the support and the light that she needs for the upcoming month, wouldn't it make sense? Isn't it intuitive to you that you should prepare yourself and try to be at your greatest frequency possible? And the mikfa is this gift of stepping into the waters and all cords are cut, right? Especially if you enter it with this prayer, like God, may all the projections coming at me and coming from me, may they all be dispelled, may I have a clean slate, may the these waters bring me back into my truth so that I can show up to my wife, so that I can show up to my children, so that I could show up into intimacy as a clear vessel and portal. And so, you know, over here we have it. Like don't come inside into your, it goes for the wife and the husband to honor stink to honor your your thectity of your sexuality by preparing for it. Right? Wash your feet, make sure you you're clean, make sure you prepared. It's not this last minute thing where your your your wallet is still in your on your body. It's something that you thought of with respect and preparation and and you just honor what it what it means and what it is. Okay. Um we have the last page of teachings, and then we'll go into one or two ideas and we'll we'll conclude. Um Hashem teaches us in this week's parsha that we are not allowed to communicate with the dead through this process of divination. Don't try to call on the dead from dark um from dark black magic. We must rise before an elderly person or a wise person and respect them. I thought it was interesting that the two mitzvahs are right next to each other because when you need information, go to the elderly and go to a wise person. Don't call on the dead. That's the role of the elderly person in our midst. They have access, they have wisdom, respect the journey that they have been on, and realize they are your channel between the codes and what you want to know. Don't bypass them and tap into divination. You may not taunt a convert amongst you by reminding him or her of their past. The convert who dwells with you must be treated the same as a native from among you. You must love him as you love yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt. So, and we also have the like the main tenet of the entire Torah in this week's Parsha, which is Via Haftalarecha Kamocha, to love your fellow as you love yourself. That's the mitzvah here. Um be honest with your business, with your measurements, right? Don't have false, um, dishonest codes of measuring. And then it says that um, okay, now it goes into um punishments. That's where the Torah ends off in Parsha's kadoshim. What happens if you go against these teachings and um you do serve the Molech and you pass your child through, the punishment is that you will be stoned by the courts. What happens if you practice divination? You would be cut off from the people, you would die prematurely and childless. And then we're told, you must sanctify yourselves and be holy. Two married people who commit adultery with each other, the punishment is death by strangulation. If you lie with your father's wife, both of you would die by stoning. If a man lied with his daughter-in-law, both would be put to death by stoning of the courts. If two men were together, death by stoning. If a man sleeps with his mother-in-law, both will be burned in a fire. That is an act of the evil inclination. If a man lied with an animal, both would be stoned. If two siblings were sexual with each other, since the court punishes them with lashes if they were properly warned. Since he uncovered his sister's nakedness, he must bear the consequences of his transgressions. If a man lies with a woman during her menstrual cycle, he has uncovered her nakedness. Since he has uncovered the fountain of her blood, as did she, they will both be cut off from their people and die prematurely and childless. Safeguard all my rules so that the land to which I am bringing you to dwell in will not vomit you out. And then we have the last two mitzfos here that talk about spiritual defilement through eating animals that were defective or slaughtered inappropriately. And then the final pasak here is you must be holy for me, you must be holy to me, for I, God, am holy. I have distinguished you from all peoples in order that you be mine. Okay, and that's the conclusion of the mitzvah. And I I feel like this parsha has so much, a lot of intensity and a lot of heaviness in it. And all of that is welcome in this space. Like that is by presencing with those that reaction to taking Torah in, that will, in my opinion, that births a newer Torah, the Torah Khadasha that we want. And so your reactions are invited here. And um, we'll I'm gonna just share a few ideas that I had on some of these teachings, and then we're I'm I'm happy to open up to conversation with. Anything that feels heavy or challenging or triggering. Okay, so the first thing I wanted to touch on is this idea of desire. It says that our own sons had a very, very strong passion and yearning and desire to connect to God, and their desire was not contained. And so where did it take them? It took them out of this world. And so, okay, and we know we know according to Kabbalah that a person has a crown, a crown chakra, like an aura around them where their crown rests. It's called a ketar, and it's made out of ratson and tainog, which is desire and pleasure. Now, when a person has very, very strong desire within themselves and strong passions, it can lead them places. And so what I'm seeing here is here, I'm gonna see what I how I wrote it here. What I'm feeling here is that the Jewish people are told that if you have desire running through your system, but you are not conscious of it, it's this energy that takes you places, that you are reacting with it. You desire something, and so before you know it, you're eating it. You desire to purchase something before you know it, you own it. When desire is an impulse that comes out of you versus something that you see and you choose. I have this desire inside of me, and now I'm going to be able to pursue it, right? One is reactive and the other is contained, it's conscious, it's awake. And so for me, I'm seeing like the Hashtam telling you that if you don't become conscious to desire, it can lead you, God forbid, to a place of death. Because that's how strong the energy of desire is. And that's what happened to our own sons. And the the lesson for us, and like the mandate for us, is that we need to wake up. We need to become the mother to this energy of desire. We need to parent this energy. This is like the energy is like a little child inside of us. It's stronger than us. It comes from the world of Tohu. It has the power to bring mashiach, it has the power to change our lives, but it needs a parent to be awake to it, to guide it, to contain it. And so that's what I'm seeing. Like in so many of these teachings in this parsha talk about desire and sexuality, right? Don't desire your father, don't desire your mother, don't desire your sister, don't desire your brother. What happens when you do desire? What happens when like the Torah is not talking up until this date, the Torah didn't mention anything that was irrelevant to me. And so these, everything that I taught in this week's parsha is very, very relevant to us today. Are we aware of it? Are we awake to it? Are we honest with ourselves about desire that is moving through us? And the like the imperative to wake up and notice these desires and guide them in a way that they can be holy, like the Parsha's name, Kadoshim. Um yeah, I have here like God demands us to climb from a sleep space, from the animal space, and fight the battle to wake up. And only then will we will we be able to notice desire and be consciously and be able to consciously check in with with ourselves about how it's best to channel this energy, right? So that's um that was what I was noticing here. And then the next thing I wanted to talk about, um, it's actually uh it's very much connected. Maybe I already said it. This parsha teaches us how to have boundaries with our desires and ways of connecting. In the first half, we hear about the boundaries on Arun, and in the second half we learn about how to be in service of Hashem in his world as a Koen Gadl in our day-to-day experiences. So the first half of the parsha, we're we're hearing how Arun was demanded to be to behave in his service of Yom Kippur. And the rest are all the teachings and the rules for how we need to behave on our day-to-day life when we're in service, right? We don't slaughter and bring carbanos and incense, but we are told that the way that you serve God is by conquering your desire, by being aware of it and not giving into it and channeling it, and so that you can bring light into the parts of your life that you walk. Right? Arun is the leader creating his service for us, but we have our part, and it's all of these teachings and all these mitzvos. Okay, I'm gonna conclude with this idea of um, you know, in this week's parsha we have the mitzvah of loving another person, right? We have to layha kamocha. And um we're also told that we have to be a holy people. And the examples there are like I feel like there's two, there's two things happening here. There's the mitzvos that are very lofty and very, you know, they're contained within the Mishkan, and then you have the mitzvos that are very mundane, they're very everyday, they're very human. Like, don't hold payment back from someone who works for you, and don't bribe someone, and don't change information and hide information. Um, don't embarrass a convert, leave food at the edges of your field, right? They're very down here, practical in this world, mitzvos that are given to us. And um what I'm seeing here is like there's no such thing as my religious practice, my religious life, and my real life. They're the same exact thing. Your spiritual service is the way you show up every single day. Like your service doesn't start when you come into a shol, a holy space. It doesn't start when you go to when you enter into the mikvah preparation room. It started when you were walking in the grounding in the grass in your day, but leading up to mikvah, when you were putting your feet in God's world and in his earth. It started when you were cooking dinner for your family or for yourself and touching God's earth and the fruits that grew from it. There's no such thing as my life and my spiritual practice. And I feel like for some reason we were raised in a way like the system, the school system, like this is holy and this is mundane. And I feel like this Parsha invites us to realize, and especially as a women and mothers, actually for men also, like when you're out working, you're providing, you are you're literally in your spirituality, you're at the height of your spirituality, I would say, because all of the energies are coming at you to try to distract you, and you stay focused and you stay committed and you stay in the zone of being the provider for your family, and that is holiness, like that is kadoshim. We learn these um rules in this parsha. Okay. The this idea is um I'll share about you know the mitzvah of a vihaf to the reha kamocha, to love your fellow. And um what I've been noticing in my like leading up to this week, like Hashem brought me into experience is to remind me what this mitzvah means for me today. So um last week I was having this experience of hearing my inner critic, the speakers were working really well, nonstop, going off at me. And um, I was also noticing a lot of um, I was criticizing, I was being a very judgmental person. I would think of a person or interact with a person, and a judgment would come. And my children were triggering me, and it was this very, very big lead up to this process that I had. And um on this mitzvah, because when I bumped into this teaching here, I felt like the permission to share this here. What I've been learning is that the first thing, I think this says it well, when I martyr myself, when I deny my own needs, when I forget that I am a human being and I only want to take care of one side of my life, my soul, or the opposite, when I deny my soul and I only take care of my humanist, something in me is being martyred, something is being scapegoated, something is being left out of the picture. And usually what happens is you repress, you repress, you repress, and then to the extent which you repressed, that's how strong it shoots out of you. Because there's only so long that you can deny your needs before the critic will let you know. And um, in short, what I can share is that um from an incredibly wise woman, she helped me realize, my the therapist that I was working with, that the way to soften the voice of my critic was to take time and meditate on my accomplishments, to gently feed information without like arguing with the critic, right? The critic has its rules, you don't go into like an argument with it, but very gently, like after I ate a good meal, to be able to pause and say, like, wow, I really took care of myself right now. If I reached out to a friend and I had a beautiful connection, to drop in like with that moment of awareness. Um, it can happen in the moment or it can happen for me, it happened like at the end of the week. I took the time to go through my week and to notice my accomplishments, to notice the good that I brought to myself and to this world. And to I watched this incredible experience happen where like the critic just like melted away. Like she had nothing to argue against. And um I had the same awareness that you know the Valshemtov teaches us that everybody and everything in our world is a mirror for us. And so when I'm judging somebody else, what the the realization is like Leia, you know, you're actually judging yourself. Inside of you right now, there's a critic that's raging, and she's judging every single thing you do. And in God's kindness, he brought another person into my life, and because I love that person, when I judge them, I'm like, what's going on here? This doesn't seem accurate. And so then I have this reminder of like, no, no, I'm I don't actually judge that person, I'm judging myself. There's a judgmental voice going on inside of me. Everything is a projection, right? That's how my my operating system works. I was noticing also like almost everything I bring to my husband as a problem or as an area to grow afterwards or before, I can realize like I can apply that about myself to myself. I hear it and I see it in the context of my marriage. But if I'm being honest with myself, I can also improve on the same thing I'm asking him to bring to our marriage. There's room for me to step up with that. And I was realizing like the gift of my ego, like instead of fighting her and instead of dismantling her, learn her. Learn how she operates. Oh, so she judges people? Oh, okay, I just got clued in. No, you're actually judging yourself. And when I have feedback to my husband about my marriage, thank God, it can be done in a way where I share and where afterwards I can hold a mirror inward and say, like, what's mine here? Right? What can I ask him and say, like, actually, I need to um I need to make some changes to that. I haven't been choosing myself enough, right? And like that's really the core of what was bothering me when I came to you with all of this. And I'm gonna own that. I would welcome you to choose me more too, right? But that I'm I'm coming to realize like this mitzvah of loving your fellow and loving yourself, how they work together, we're really, really, we're mirrors for each other. Um, so that's really um the end of the parsha. I want to open up another topic quickly. Um I was thinking about the names of these parshios. That we have Ahore Mos after death, and this year we bring it together with the the next parsha, which is kadoshem, which is holiness, which is life, which is sacredness. And um, in these two parshyos we straddle very, very difficult um topics, very difficult mitzvos. And I'm referring to dark sexuality, to incest that's spoken about the prohibition to uncover the nakedness of a close relative. And um I was sharing earlier how you know you don't bump into this conversation in your day-to-day. These are not subjects that are spoken about in the world. And yet, and so there are many people who would like to believe and to live their lives as though this is an anomaly, that it's unheard of, that it's happening in Egypt and Canaan, but it's not happening in the Jewish people. And um, for years I've been telling my husband, why do you think on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year when everybody's in shol, we read this paragraph, we read the Psukim from this teaching. It's called the Arayos. What's the prohibit the prohibitions, what's usr, what's not allowed, what's dark, what's cut off from us. It's the day of the year where most people are in shol, and on some level, they're being they're going to be reminded with the boundaries of life and death. We literally have the words ahorimos after death, and then you have the words kadoshim, holy. And um, you know, somebody asked me, a friend of mine, like, can you share with me the impact of sexual abuse, child sexual abuse? And her question is still like ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing, ringing in me, like months later. Every time I bump into something in my life that I feel comes as a result of child sexual abuse, I think like, oh my god, I should write this down. I should write this down and have a list to share with her. There were so many places in my life that did not flow. The lifeline wasn't there, it didn't exist. The neurons were cut off. There were no pathways. I had to reinvent the wheel in so many areas of my being, of a mother, of a human, of a wife, because death comes in when there's sexual abuse. There's actual death that comes into the world. And then on top of that, you need to pretend you're alive. You need to learn how to keep up with your classmates and how to keep up with your siblings and how to keep the illusion that you're alive, but you're really a zombie. You're I was the walking dead, who had to be so clever and creative in how to make it look like I was alive. Because secrets and shame, and you're carrying the threat that if anybody finds out, he's gonna come after your family, right? And so you really become an incredible, you pull from every power inside of you to become a phenomenal actress and umor compensator. I shouldn't say actress, I'm not an actress, but compensator. You learn how to become very functional and use parts of your head instead of your body because you were cut off from your body, or you were cut off from your head, and so you're really, really in your body, but you have no executive thinking powers, you have no ability to plan and be coherent. And in my my space of um healing from this death and coming back to life, I have met the most incredible people and women. I'll speak for the women that I've come to know, and I'm not gonna skip a parsha which addresses them. Finally, they're addressed, and I can't bear to skip over mentioning them and celebrating them and acknowledging the warriors of like the highest elite units that we have in our world. And they are the friends that I have come to know who had who were brought into this arena of facing the darkest sexuality, the darkest energy that you could conceive of down here in this world, from interacting with a close relative sexuality. God says in this week's parsha that those two energies, when sexual energy from two relatives come close to each other, it will warrant stoning, it will warrant death, it will warrant being burned in a fire, it will warrant dying childless and being cut off from the world. It cannot live down here. Those don't go together. They are the bounds of holiness and darkness. You are opening up fire and hell and and and asking a young body to contain that. She feels that. She contains that reality inside of her, or he does in his body. I was thinking today how you know we're out of temple times now, not today, like earlier in the conversation, where people are not held accountable, right? There isn't an immediate tsarat that would come on the body if someone touched their sister or touched their brother or grandfather touched his granddaughter, right? And so the sickness gets embedded in our bodies and it lingers and it gets passed down from generation to generation, unless someone was honest and they showed up on Yom Kippur and said, I need to bring a sacrifice for this. God, I need to be honest with you. I need a moment of reckoning. I need to find courage to say, I touched death and I need to be cleansed of it. And when we can I'm already jumping the gun and I'm skipping. I'll finish the thought. My, you know, the first time I um I wrote to Rabbi Y.Y. Jacobson, he was teaching um a class on, and it touched on sexuality. If it was most of Hasidis's sexuality, if we're being honest, right? It's just codes for us. But um he was talking about um in a very strong way against people who who um were perpetrators of the the boundaries, right? They violated the boundaries. And I found myself like saying, like, no, no, don't go so hard on the perpetrators, don't don't tear them to shreds, even though I was on the other side of the aisle, because for a few reasons. Number one, for there to be safety and peace in this world, perpetrators need a place to heal too. If you tell them that they need to go Chutzlamachana, they need to go outside of the camp, that there's no room in this world for their redemption, what are you doing? You're cutting off half of your own being. We are all one. And if we can't presence with that and know that we need spaces of healing for every single reality. There's no reality that cannot be contained if we're brave enough to own it and to accept it. And there's also this like deep feeling inside of myself that my redemption will come when Mashiach is here. And Mashiach will not come until everybody has their healing. And so if I cut off half, I don't know the numbers, the numbers are too high, but if you cut off half of your community because they are perpetrators, you're you're you're cutting off the dream of a little girl that Mashiach is gonna come and save her. And so it was my own selfish motivation of like, if this game is gonna happen, if we're gonna win this game, then we need everybody to have a place of healing. And there's nobody that's not welcomed into a space of healing. I I feel like the the what's the word, like the demonizing and the shaming and the breaking down and the hatred towards abusers actually will make those who were abused suffer for longer. And I'm sorry if saying that causes anybody pain. I I validate and I understand the place in healing where all you want is for your abuser to be held accountable and for them to be cut off from the people. And you can, for me, that was a process that I surrender to God, that Hashem is just and fair and good, and that any healing and any justice and any holding of account, right? Being held accountable is gonna happen on some level. And I welcome that part of my being that needs that, and I also recognize that for me Mashiach means that we're all together and we are all united in this. And it cannot happen if we ostracize half of our crowd. And I'm I I'm saying that you know, most people will have a very, very hard time believing that it's half our crowd, and that's I'm speaking loosely, but the numbers are so high. And your nervous system might go into overdrive when you hear that. But I I'll trust that if this was meant to come through, it's gonna come through. I've met the most incredibly brave friends in my journey who had to reconcile with the idea that their uncles and their grandfathers were their abusers, or their fathers, or their brothers. And it is a reality. It's something that we don't like to talk about. We don't talk about it, and it's something we do not like to think about. And the truth is it cannot fit in our mind. A healthy mind cannot conceive this reality. This is a dark reality, and you're a holy being, so make it make sense. It won't. It cannot, right? And yet at the same time, you know, when I um came into the space of healing and I was sitting in circles, and slowly, as trust was built, this friend would tell me her story, and then slowly eventually drop the piece of who her abuser was, and it was a blood relative, and my system would like have to process what what does that mean? What world are we living in? What's happening here? Um, you know, I came to this place of if I don't wake up and learn how to accept the reality that God is telling me and showing me is in front of me, my kids don't have a parent. So I need my nervous system to ground itself and to come into balance and to come back into safety while incorporating these truths. I think that so many of us, and for myself, like if we we pretend or we cut it off and we say it's not happening so that we can feel safe and so that we can feel calm. But now my prayer is God help me feel safe so that I can be a light, so that I can be effective and also not deny evidence and not deny your reality and not withhold evidence like we were told we are and we're not allowed to do in this week's parsha, right? Don't don't falsify and don't deny information that happens in this world. And when we were we were opening up this cacao ceremony in the beginning of of today's parsha, I I sheared how you know later on I'm probably gonna talk about incest because that's what the parsha is asking of me. And what came out from, and I welcomed everybody to shear and take in their response and their reaction. And what came out of me was like, you know, when I heard that David Hamalach's two children, one raped the other, what I felt inside of me was like, David Amalach, you were King David, Mashiach comes from you, but where were you when your son was raping your daughter? And I know that I latch onto you every single day, and I know that my grandmother created a path for me, a cord, a thick cord that travels on your frequency, that opens doors for me in heaven, but where were you when your children were touching each other? How can you be King David Melchisrael? Mashiach comes from you and you weren't there when your children needed you to be. Make that make sense, right? And then David Ramalach is our teacher, and he's the brave one to come before us and say, Every family is gonna go through this. And you are a king, and you are a mashiach, and you are a leader with this reality happening through you, and don't let the darkness and the shame convince you that you're not a king if this happens here. It's to me you activate the kingship and the messianic energy into your family when you can presence with this truth, because very, very more and more are, but very few are right now are there or are willing to be. And um I don't mean to wake up people's nervous systems in a way that causes chaos. Like that's the farthest thing that I want. And yet, for the brave individuals that I have met along my journey, I will not be quiet and say that there's an entire partial dedicated to us, to us children and adults who know this information and who know this experience, and let the record show that God did not allow it and that it was considered a filth and a disgust and an abomination. And God said, I will not dwell amongst you if this behavior goes on. And I'm holding space for these individuals who are who are so brave to know the experience of darkness in this world and who have chosen to heal. To be able to say, like, there's healing for something this dark in the world. I've watched friends and like people show up for healing, and the light that they invite in is as intense, if not stronger, than the darkness that they know, that they knew, because they they need something stronger to lift up the death energy and the darkness. And through their healing, they are become this beacon of light. They become this beacon of mashiach, of miracles and light that they demand, that they have a right to demand, because they deserve redemption too. And then I'll conclude with this idea that for every single Makkah, God created a Rufuah. And for the people who are on the other side who are on the side of, God forbid, having hurt another person, there's healing for everybody. There needs to be healing for everybody, and it takes a tremendous amount of courage and it takes a tremendous amount of honesty to be able to own up and say, I need help. But Mashiach is dependent on those people. Like they are, they carry an insane burden. There were times when I had compassion for my abuser, that he chose the job that like I felt like you chose the poop of life. You chose the ugliest, darkest, shittiest job in the entire world. And you had to embody that, and you had to live that, and you had to do that to me. And there were moments where I was able to have compassion and say, like, you were trapped in the form of a clipa down here in this world, and I have compassion for you. I have compassion that you had to choose such a dark and hard mission. My my prayer and my conclusion here is that Achore Mos, after death, may there be life. May this week's energy usher in a tremendous amount of courage for everybody on both sides of the aisle. And I want to apologize to anybody who I hurt in the process of having this conversation. It comes from a place of my little girl wanting the shiach. And this is what I know. So this is what I'm sharing. Thank you so much for coming this week.