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Beit Midrash
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- Chemdat Yamim
- Ein Ayah
Ein Ayah: Evil and unsightly things, from an ethical perspective, can come among living people only when they are enveloped by external beauty. Beauty is innately respectable, and it makes a positive impact internally on the spirit, which "expands" in the face of the feeling of clear, clean delicateness that it contains. However, if the beauty envelopes something that is ethically disgusting, in relation to the person looking at it, then the beauty itself is destructive.
It is not just that the beauty is liable to serve as a trap for the beholder (i.e., cause him to sin), to capture the one who is beguiled by it within the internal unsightly matter. Rather, the impression that this beauty that envelopes something disgusting is itself bad, as it is in any case of prohibited gazing. As such, it weakens the healthy foundation of the stable morality of the purity of the spirit. This is because the beauty draws one internally to it as something that is specially connected to the morally disgusting matter. The spiritual weakness that it creates puts a person at ease with the feeling related to horrible sins because the attractive nature of the beauty covers the unsightliness. Even if the beholder’s spirit has not deteriorated to the point that it is drawn into the trap of disgustingness and sin [to act upon it], still the filth that weakens a life of purity certainly makes a mark with the help of the feeling of the external beauty. For this reason, the jewelry of the outside is connected to the jewelry on the inside.
Rabbis in Midrash
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Moreshet Shaul Hashem Is your Shadow – part I
Based on Siach Shaul, Pirkei Machshava V’Hadracha p. 420 – an address from 1941
P'ninat Mishpat A Non-Contractor in Changing Times – part I
(based on ruling 85128 of the Eretz Hemdah-Gazit Rabbinical Courts)
Moreshet Shaul Our King on Rosh Hashana, Our Father on Yom Kippur.
Based on Aroch Siach, p. 221 (Rav Shaul Yisraeli)
P'ninat Mishpat A Non-Contractor in Changing Times – part II
(based on ruling 85128 of the Eretz Hemdah-Gazit Rabbinical Courts)
Moreshet Shaul Hashem Is your Shadow – part II
Based on Siach Shaul, Pirkei Machshava V’Hadracha p. 420 – an address from 1941
Parashat Hashavua Happiness for the Right Reasons
[With painful longing, we share these divrei Torah from our co-Rosh Kollel for close to 40 years, Harav Moshe Ehrenreich zt”l.]
