40. Ki Teitzei 5777: Some Things Just Don't Mix -Defining Oneself

LiveFeed: To Be Updated Written Class: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xf3tohu0vak6bbp/40.%20Ki%20Teitzei%205777%20-Some%20Things%20Just%20Don%27t%20Mix%20-Defining%20Oneself.pdf?dl=0 ------- We live in a generation for which performing Havdalah (separation) is a far more difficult than performing Kiddush (sanctification). I don’t mean this just in the literal sense, in which many traditional families, who have a Friday Night dinner, with Kiddush, do not have a Saturday Night Havdalah. Rather, I mean it in its emotional paradigm as well. Our generation has defined only pluralism and all-inclusiveness as the only politically correct spirituality to embrace. To define a holiness and a mundaneness, and to then draw a border to the Tent of what is In-the-Tent, and what is Out-of-the-Tent, is as un-G-dly, and therefore, as un-Jewish, as it gets. Nevertheless, is Shabbat, Shabbat, without a Havdalah to divide it from the rest of the week, allowing for yet another Kiddush, for the upcoming Shabbat? And, is a Tent a meaningful Tent, with any value at all, if there isn’t an outside and an inside? In this lecture, based on a teaching of the Rebbe, delivered in 1966, exploring the prohibition of hooking up an ox and a donkey together to a plow, we will find the truism that only through boundaries can we create a defined identity. Show me a man with no boundaries, and I will show you a man without an identity. So, listen, learn and make it happen. If you have any questions or comments on this lecture please email Rabbi Avrohom Lipszyc at [email protected].