Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Talk for hours and hours about what's on my heart today, but I will try to keep it at a minimum and put my little timer here there.
Exactly.
And the old joke, I think I've told it many times, but what does it mean when a preacher looks at his watch for the third time? Absolutely nothing. Right? So, no, seriously, these last two weeks have been rough.
I know that. For many of us, our hearts have weighed heavy over these last few weeks. We've wept and we prayed and begged hashem to show mercy on our brothers and sisters in Israel have had their lives tragically disrupted by the thousands of Hamas combatants that have invaded Israel two weeks ago. As of today, what they did to civilian women and children shows clearly this is not a religious war.
Shows that this is not a religious war because there is not a God that would condone this.
It shows that their intentions have nothing to do with the land or an independent state.
Their actions clearly communicated that their goals are aggression, dominance, and attempt to satiate a clearly insatiable bloodlust.
So my issue that I'm going to talk about in this today is how in the world do we make sense out of all of this? How are we supposed to process it? And more importantly, how are we supposed to respond?
Rabbi talked last week about how we're processing, how we're feeling, how the emotions are coming and the anger, and are we supposed to hate and all those kinds of things. But really, I want to talk about what we can do, and especially the vast majority of us who aren't able to pick up a rifle and enter the physical combat. The first thing, of course, we need to be doing is what? We need to be praying. The second thing that we should be doing is looking into the word of God for wisdom, understanding, and guidance.
So with that in mind, we're going to take a look at the Torah in this week's Torah portion.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:02:38] Speaker A: So this week's Torah portion, as we've already discussed, is Noah. And if you'll hit me with a slide for verse 19, Blake, we're going to read this.
Do I have that one? I do not.
Do I have it?
Yes. 619. No, it's okay. So in 619, it says, la todolt Noah noakish sadiq tamim haya badorotav et hailohim heathalak. Noah heathale.
Which translates to, These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man. I may have the verse the reference wrong. I don't know.
Actually, it's 611. I'm sorry? 611 is what it is. These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man. Blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. There we go. We've got it here.
Noah walked with God.
So I want to draw your attention to something. We're going to go through different things in this parsha, but we're going to see something that's going to be amazing. We're going to see how this week's Torah reading relates to everything that we've been experiencing.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:03:58] Speaker A: So in this verse right here, you can see in the Hebrew, where I put a box around the word Noah. This is the word for Noah, okay? So you see the word Noah appearing once, twice, three times.
And there's a Hasidic teaching that says this is an illusion. These three references to Noah in this one verse are an allusion to Noah's.
I wouldn't say insight, but Noah's experience maybe.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Because Noah actually got to see three completely different worlds, if you will.
He got to see the world pre flood. He got to see the world during the flood, and he got to see the world after the flood. As you can imagine, those are completely different from one another, okay? Before, during, and after the flood. Now, as far as how that relates to us, the problem is with us today. We can only see two worlds right now. We can see the world before what happened in Israel. We can see the world as it is currently. While this is going on, we don't have the ability yet to see the world after this goes down and after it all pans out. We're living in difficult days of fear and uncertainty.
Sure, we want to be able to see this future and know what's coming, but we haven't been granted the revelation yet. So we have to be content with what's revealed to us this moment and do our part to act on that information. That's what we're really going to be talking about today. As I said last week, rabbi addressed the question of feelings. How do we feel, how do we respond with our emotions and all that kind of stuff? Is it right even? A lot of these times we're wrestling with, are these feelings right even? And today I want to address the question of where do we go from here?
So yesterday. Michael Carl. You guys know the Carl family from Florida? He shared a video, and it was of Tehila Gimpel, and she and her husband Jeremy are Orthodox Jews that live in the land of Israel. They met Aliyah from the United States, and they've been on the forefront of keeping the world informed about what's really going on in Israel. They do a great job of that. And a fun fact is that Jeremy is originally from Atlanta, Georgia.
And so one of the things that Tehila said on this video was that she believed that the weekly Torah portion spoke to our current circumstances. And just like Tehila and other religious Jews around the world, I also believe the same thing. I've seen it happen many, many times over the years that I've been studying Torah and seeing finding this to be true. And so the Lord uses the weekly Torah portion to speak truth and direction in our lives that are pertinent to our present situations as we study each week, the weekly Torah portions. And this week, I believe, is especially appropriate.
So if we will go to and I think this is Robin, the one that the slide. That's genesis 611.
This passage. And I won't worry you guys with the Hebrew, but you can see it in English, the Earth was also corrupt before God, and the Earth was filled with Hamas.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:07:34] Speaker A: I left that word untranslated, and you can see the yellow, how it corresponds there.
So this is what we're dealing with in our Torah portion. And you hear the connection already, right?
And before I get into this, you can tell where it's headed, this connection here. But yesterday, I was reminded by somebody that I had actually taught this many years ago, made this connection between this passage and what Hamas was doing probably about 20 years ago. And now here I am, a teaching, and again, nearly two decades later. As the Good Book says, there's nothing new under the sun.
Therefore, I'm making the same connections I made all those years ago. I'll be at in a deeper way, a deeper understanding, and new connections for our present situation. Okay, so I have to give credit where credit is due. First of all, I've already mentioned Tehila Gimpel.
She inspired some things that I'm going to be speaking about today. Also Rabbi Yehoshu Ben Gordon Zechar Tzarik Levracha, a Blessed Memory and the Tov and hasidus in general have inspired parts of what I'm going to say. So not a lot of what I'm going to say is actually original or new or revolutionary or whatever, but it is simply a reminder of the things that we need to remember.
And so in this passage, the Earth also was corrupt before God, and the Earth was filled with Hamas.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:09:12] Speaker A: If we just read it for face value, we're like, well, what is that? Well, our sages have wrestled with this question of how should we accurately translate that word for years and years and years for thousands of is, according to I got this information, of course, from Tehila. She said rashi translates. It robbery. If you've read your Kumash I mean, we read the Kumash today in the Torah portion, and that's what it robbery. The world was filled the Earth was filled with robbery.
Ankolos, who translated the Torah into Aramaic and into the vernacular of the first and second century, he translated it as hostage taking or kidnapping.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Isaiah 59 uses it in the context of violence.
There's another passage in the Torah. I wasn't able to get this reference. I didn't have time to look it up. But it uses the phrase aid hamas.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:10:23] Speaker A: If you're familiar with Hebrew, aid means witness, and Hamas is the other attached word, and it's generally translated something like a false witness or a slandering witness.
Another rabbi called the Rabag, who lived at the turn of the 14th century that he says it refers to rape, the or hakhaim.
He sort of settles the question. He says, what does all of this mean? We have all these differing opinions of what this means. What does this work Hamas means? And of course, the Jewish answer is yes, right? All of the above.
And so we have in a general way, you could say the world was filled with violence.
World was just filled with awful, awful, awful things, okay?
And so it was so bad, God had to do something about it.
Interesting enough, the organization Hamas, they created their name, not even really aware of this connection because they don't use the Bible.
It's actually an Arabic acronym for hakarat ala Makwama al Islamia.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: And it means the Islamic Resistance Movement, but happens to mean haqas mean all these other things in Hebrew. And it's weird. One of the things that Tehila Gimpel brought out in her talk was that usually Hebrew and Arabic, they're very similar in their meanings. There's a lot of overlap in the words. Now, I've created this chart, if you could pull it up, Blake, to show so many similar words, like for our English, the word for boy, the Hebrew word is yelled. Many of you guys are familiar with that, but the Arabic word for boy is walad. Sounds very similar.
The Hebrew word for girl is baat, and the Arabic word is bent. The Hebrew word for son is shemesh, and the Arabic is shams.
The Hebrew for peace, as we know, is shalom, as in macon. You may have heard that before. And the Arabic word is salam.
The Hebrew for listen is shema. The Arabic is ESMA.
The Hebrew for day is yom. The Arabic is identical. Yom.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:12:59] Speaker A: So you would think that the Arabic word and the Hebrew word for Hamas might have a similar meaning. They would go, oh, I don't know about that. We'll rethink that. But guess what the Arabic word means?
It means enthusiastic bravery.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:13:20] Speaker A: And the point that she made that really struck home was what for them is their greatest attribute to us is our greatest evil.
And if you're asking the question, why can't there ever be peace between Israel and Hamas, it's because Israel's facing an adversary whose greatest virtue is the world's greatest evil.
Are these new problems?
No, they've been around a little bit. They've been around longer than what we think. A lot of us think this stuff has come about since Israel's become an independent state, but this hasn't just sprung up.
And this isn't a prophetic declaration about the end times, but Yeshua said times like these were coming in Matthew 24. I'm sure many of you guys have already read it this week, and we read a version of it in Luke's Gospel, a parallel passage this morning, Matthew 24. Yeshua said, for as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of man. For as in those days, before the flood. They were eating and drinking and marrying, giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them away. So will be the coming of the Son of man. Then two men will be in the field, won't be taken, and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill, one will be taken and won't be left. Therefore stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming, but know this, that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of man is coming in an hour you do not expect. And so this has traditionally, at least the last couple hundred years or so, been translated to look at it's been translated to mean something about a rapture. But in the context of it, it really is about the day of the Lord, which judgment is coming, and there will be wars and things like this. And the one that's taken is not the one who is saved. The one who is taken is actually killed. The others are spared.
Sometimes we get so caught up in just living our lives that we don't see the bigger picture.
We forget that everything has a purpose and history will repeat itself until everything is played out according to the Lord's will. We can see this with just a cursory. Look at the scriptures when it comes to the Gaza situation.
So, biblically, the area of Gaza was home to the Philistines, one of the thorns in Israel's flesh, particularly during the days of Israel's first monarchy.
So why do the people who live there identify themselves as Palestinians? Until the year 130 Ce, some 60 years after the destruction of the Temple, israel tried to free herself from the stranglehold of Roman occupation. True occupation, not what is going on in Gaza.
Their unsuccessful rote was led by the false messiah. You may have heard of this guy, Shimon Barkokva.
And in 132 Ce, the Romans quashed the rebellion and reclaimed all of Judea. This time they renamed it Guess what? Palestina to distance the land from its Jewish connection, associate it with and disassociate it from Israel completely, and now reassociate it with Israel's enemy, the Philistines.
The Philistines and Gaza are connected even in prophecy. Book of Amos says thus says the Lord for three transgressions of Gaza and for four I will not revoke the punishment, because they carried into exile whole people to deliver them up to Edom. So I'll send fire upon the wall of Gaza and it shall devour her strongholds. I will cut off the inhabitants from Ashdod and him who holds the scepter from Ashkelon, I will turn my hand against Ekron and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, says the Lord. So don't misunderstand me. My point is not to say all these Palestinians, especially innocent Palestinians, should die. My point is just that this is an ongoing issue. This is a biblical issue.
Jews everywhere in the whole world have always come under persecution for some reason. The world has a death wish for our Jewish brothers and sisters.
So this week, Hamas continues to try and kill Jews and anyone who supports them. And over a thousand rockets were fired at the city of Ashkelon alone this week.
Multiple, I don't know if you heard this, multiple sophisticated guided missiles and drones were shot all the way from Yemen, south of Saudi Arabia, all the way up to they were intended to go to Israel, okay? But they were shot down by US military over the ocean there.
But this shows how serious it's getting.
All the rockets you may or may not know this, but all the rockets they've been firing into Israel have just a range of maybe a few miles.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:19:19] Speaker A: That's why they can't really do and they don't have a big payload, but these were big time, had really serious warheads. They were guided, very sophisticated, and they were on a course for a thousand mile journey.
Thousand mile journey, okay. And they were well on their way.
The good news is Brook Hashem, two hostages were released.
But the situation isn't one that's going to end overnight. As the IDF has said many times, or even in another week or a month, it will continue to escalate until it's over. So with that sort of background, we all want to know what's going on. We all want to know why this is happening.
And I think internally, we're like, what is going on? Why does this have to happen, especially now?
And so, again, let's look to our Torah portion. If you'll pull up the slide that we did at the beginning, I believe it was the verse nine, it says, La todot Noah, noah sheet sadiq. So these are the generations of Noah was a righteous man. Blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. So what does it say about Noah?
He was righteous and he was blameless. And I didn't highlight this one, but he walked with God.
Okay, how many of you fit on that list?
I know I'm lacking.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:21:03] Speaker A: If it's face value, there's a debate, as you know, within Judaism how righteous Noah was. But if this is to be read at face value, then what chance do we have on some of this stuff, of this happened to him? How do we expect it not to happen to us? I mean, we can say, of course, yeshua, protects us. And that kind of, you know, he was righteous, says blameless. And that word can also refer. It also has the connotation of perfect. Some translations say perfect, yet he had endured the Hamas throughout his life.
How long did he build the ark 120 years.
All the while, people mocking him, laughing at him, jeering him, water is going to come out of the sky. You're crazy.
So he had to endure at least 120 years. I can't remember how old he was when Hashem called him throughout his life. And then he had to endure the Mabul, the Flood.
And he was in there for pretty much a full year inside this ark with a bunch of smelly critters and grumpy family members.
So that was a challenge and a trial in and of itself.
So how much more so will we have to face these challenges? We have to remember that challenges, as I've said many times in the past, are not meant to destroy us. Trials are not meant to destroy. They're not meant to tear us apart. They're not meant to bring us down. But they're meant to strengthen us, to challenge our resolve. And yet again, the Torah portion is connected to our current situation.
Our sages teach us that the Mabula, the Flood, represents the trials we face in life, and they are the tests that we must endure to increase our attachment to Hashem. This is based on the passage from Song of Songs, and I forgot to make a slide for this, but it's short. Song of Songs or Song of Solomon eight, verse seven, that says, many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it okay?
And so in this passage, the waters and the flood, what's their purpose? They want to quench. They want to drown. And so my question to you is, what are the floods and the waters that are trying to overcome us, that are trying to overcome you? And even if it's not related to the situations happening in the Middle East, we all have trials in our lives that we're struggling with, that we're dealing with, okay?
We're all dealing with things in our lives. And it seems every day we get a new gift.
As Travis says, bless God new trial that we can run to. It reminds me of Boaz's football team, their whole athletic program, really, Christian school. And don't back away from the challenge. They looked at the passage in the Book of Judges, I believe it was Samson, maybe.
And their theme was Run to the roar. When you hear the lion roar, you don't run away. You run toward it.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:24:49] Speaker A: This is sort of what our attitude should be. The ball shim Tov, the founder of this, hasidic movement back in the 17 hundreds, 1617 hundreds, has an interesting interpretation on God's command for Noah to do something special with the ark. Okay, there's a passage in the ark, and it's a weird phrase in Hebrew, and we're trying to figure out what's going on, but we're going to look at this. Go to verse 16, if you don't mind.
Okay, this is what it reads in Hebrew. It says, Sohar TASE lateva, sohar TASE lateva. And this here's a couple of translations. A window shall you make to the ark, or a window you need to make for the ark, or an opening you need to make for the ark, or you shall make for the ark. Some translations don't have anything remotely close. Like, I was reading the ESV this week, and it says a roof, but that's nowhere even related to the word for roof, which is so anyway, I don't know where they got that. But anyway, these are a couple of valid translations here, but the question is, what is at? Sohar what is this? Is it a light? Is it a window? I mean, they didn't really have glass panes back then.
So it seems from both these translations that sohar is something that allows light to come in and whether it's an actual light source or a window, more like maybe a hatch or something like that, that would allow light from the outside. It's related to something like that.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: The Balsham tov somehow saw a connection between the two words teva, which means ark, and Tzuchar, that means a window or an opening, and said that the secondary meaning of this word teva or ark, was word, like the word of God or something like that.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:26:55] Speaker A: And anyways, interesting phrase. And he said this. He said, Let the word, let the word. And the Hebrew is teva, said in Torah or prayer, radiate light.
And there's a connection there. It's a Matzir. It's the same Hebrew letters with just a mem in front of it as the Tsohar.
In every letter, there are worlds, souls and divinity that rise up and interconnect and cleave to one another and to the divine. In this way, all the worlds rise and become as one, and then there is immense joy and immeasurable delight. So what does all this mean? In other words, life will be filled with problems.
And his message to his Jewish brothers and sisters was, jews can overcome this through love and attachment to Hashem, to the Lord. And so my sort of exposition, my sort of take on this is that all of us must enter into the ark of Torah prayer and mitzvot so that the light of Torah prayer and mitzvot can illuminate the world. And how does this work? Because the world can't be illuminated with darkness.
[00:28:19] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:28:20] Speaker A: And so we can't go out and just this is one of the issues that people have with Israel battling Hamas. It says basically you can't fight evil with evil.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:28:35] Speaker A: But that's not what's going on here. But in the sense that we have to realize the same thing. We can't shine our light if we don't have light within us, right? So we have to quote, turn on the light within us first before we can shine it into the darkness. And so how do we do this? You're feeling helpless.
I know that a lot of times I feel helpless. What can I do? I just want to run over there and help and whatever, but I feel like I can't do anything about just there's nothing to do. But again, what can we do? Let's turn again to the portion of Noah.
There are different opinions. As I mentioned earlier, I alluded to earlier that Noah was righteous. How righteous was he? Because there's one opinion that says can we pull that passage up real quick? Of righteous. Says he was righteous and blameless in his generation.
Actual, I believe, plural, but he was righteous in his durations. And some people pick up on that and say, well, guess what? If he was living at the time of Abraham, he wouldn't be so righteous because Abraham was the definition of righteous, and Noah would just be nothing.
And so there's one opinion there, but there's another opinion that says he was righteous in his generation because he was able to withstand the wickedness all around him that not many people could.
Okay, we can look at it one of two ways. We can fill the glass halfway and look at it from two different angles.
But the lesson we need to learn from this at this time is that we are metaphorically in the same boat with Noah's. With Noah.
The same will be probably said of you and me. If we try to do something to make a difference in the world, there will always be detractors. Some will see the thing that we do and rejoice and be glad, praise it. Others will see it and view the negative, and they'll view everything we do in a negative light. But no matter what others say or how they see us, we shouldn't allow other people to deter us from our mission. What is that mission? To shine the light of Torah Messiah into this dark world. And so the waters of Flood feel like they're rising around us. But guess what? We have a master, a rabbi who did what? He walked on those waters.
He sang that song. These boots are no, and I'm just joking, these sandals are made walking all over you.
But the critical part is you're thinking, well, he's yeshua, I'm not.
But Peter did.
[00:31:43] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: We're all peters in some way or form or fashion, right? Some of us more than others, in the sense of we're hot headed. We have doubt, we have impetuousness, whatever.
[00:31:55] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:31:57] Speaker A: But Peter was able to walk on the water just like yeshua. Because a disciple, when he is fully trained, will be like his master.
And so he was able to walk on these waters and not let it get to him, except for when what happened took his eyes off yeshua. He focused on the problem rather than solution.
He focused on what he instead of focused on what he was supposed to be focused on, he got tied up in what was going on around him.
You guys are well, familiar or at least most of you, I don't know some of the background of some of the folks in here that are visiting today. Thank you again.
But you guys know the Shema? We sang part of it during our service a while ago.
Do you know why? The shema is central to Judaism.
Most people think it's simply a declaration that there aren't multiple gods.
That's true, but there's a much deeper purpose. We recite shema yisrael adonai Elohenu adonai hat. We recite here, O Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is one. In order both proclaim to the world and to remind ourselves that there's only one power that rules this world, and he alone is truly in control.
We continue by saying, love Him with all your heart and with all your soul.
Right? And the last one, Maldecha, with your muchness. What is that?
We translate it to a lot of times with your strength, but it really doesn't mean strength. We translate it your resources, because that's a tangible way to do that, but basically everything you have and more.
Love him with that.
And through our recitation of this, we attach ourselves to this one source, the divine Source, who is sovereign, supreme, overall, trusting Him even in the darkest hour, we proclaim Hero Israel, that he will be our protection from the infestation of Hamas in this world. Now, I'm not talking about the organization. I'm talking about all of the Hamas in this world.
We have to realize that the waters of the Mabul, the waters of the flood, all the war, rumors of war, craziness of uncertainty, even an increase of violence that is currently being unleashed in the world will ultimately cleanse this evil from the face of the world.
And where do we run? Where do we flee?
We enter the teva. We enter the ark. And how the list I put together first, we can increase our Torah study.
We can increase our prayers. We can increase our mitzvot. For those of you who may not know, this is your deeds or your commandment, the things that you take on commandments.
We can join the Tehillim campaign. First of all, I want to thank you guys that have participated in this already. Tehillim campaign is reading through the Psalms together as a congregation. We're on Shalom at home on our network that we started, like, a week ago, and people post what chapters of the Psalms are reading, and we go through those sequentially, and we work together to read through the Book of Psalms as many times as we can. Praying probably if you've never done that before, you're probably, seeing as you're praying these things, how many of these psalms are like, oh, my goodness, this is applicable. This is exactly what Israel was facing when David or whoever wrote this, and these are the situations that they were experiencing. This is the struggle, the real struggle that they were having.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:36:16] Speaker A: And you can join that. Join our Shalom at Home network and get on that list and start praying with us. You can join the Lehaim campaign that my wife started if you're not familiar with that.
She is baking hala each week and selling it to raise money to donate to Relief of Israel and help support in any way we can. And it's just a little bit we only do a few loaves a week. And it's not that everybody needs to come and buy hala, but what you can do is you can do something similar, okay? You can buy a loaf for somebody else.
One of the things that she's doing is that she is adding tea, light candles into the thing with the so maybe somebody will light candles for the first time or whatever and a prayer to recite for Israel as you're lighting candles.
[00:37:15] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:37:16] Speaker A: And so do things like that. We can strengthen our attachment to yeshua, of course. We need to continually work on that and spread ahavat hinam. Now, this is not something you put on your sandwich.
Ahavat hinam is baseless love.
There's too much baseless hatred in the world. We can turn it around by spreading baseless love, okay? If a person does something you don't like, if a person says something wrong to you, a person acts rude to you, a person cuts you off in traffic, that's going to be the hard one.
You can be kind to them back instead, retaliating evil for evil.
You can choose the right and choose to give them the benefit of the doubt. You can choose to love. I'll end with this quick story because it's very applicable, and Sabrina told it around the shabbat table last night. She said she ran into somebody in the store this week, and they told them this story.
Anyway, their daughter was going to have a birthday party and I think this was last year or something their daughter was going to have a birthday party and she was inviting all these people and wanting people to come. And their best friends and their daughter's best friend as well. Their family friends as well as their daughter's closest friend was a family that lived right across the street from them.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: And as the birthday party is getting closer and closer, she's talking about it with the friends across the street, their best friends and everything, and her friend was sort of acting weird and just sort of getting a little distant and things like that. And then day of the birthday party, the family doesn't show up, okay? We're like, what have we done?
What is going on here? I noticed that she's acting peculiar, but I wonder what we've done to offend them.
And they're like, I'm going to call and check on them. He's like, no, let them do whatever.
Anyway, the next time they saw each other, she mentions something. She says, hey, we really missed you guys at the birthday party.
And she says, Why weren't you guys able to come? And she said, you forgot to invite us.
She said we weren't invited. And she says what? You were on my list. She said, I forgot to invite you guys.
And so she said, I figured that was the case, but I didn't want to impose.
Anyway, they made things right and they're all good, but the lady and the family that didn't get invited could have just really been been out of shape and taken it out on them and that could have ended their friendship.
But even though it hurt, she gave her the benefit of the doubt and all things worked out. So that's one instance of how we can give people the benefit of the doubt.
We have hope through. Yeshua, that one day the Lord will turn all things around. And I'm going to leave you with this passage from Isaiah, chapter 60, verse 18. It says, hamas shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders, and you shall call your walls yeshua and your gates praise.
Violence shall no more be in your land, devastation and destruction within your borders, and you shall call your walls salvation and your gates praise.
May it be soon and in our day. Shabbat. Shalom.
