Vayera: The Promises to Avraham, Part 1

We are beginning chapter 18 of Bereshit, the third revelation of Hashem to Avraham. The first was for the promise of the land. The second was for the assurance of a lineage, of descendants, of generations to be born. But for those generations there was an important condition: the circumcision, the milah. And from the moment he performs the milah, he is entitled to a new revelation of G-d. Only this time G-d says nothing; He does not speak to him. It is a courtesy visit. So Rashi tells us — let us go back to his commentary — on Vayera elav Hashem, “Hashem appeared to him”: levaker et ha-choleh, to visit the sick. You can picture it in your mind: the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself presenting Himself at Avraham’s home to comfort the sick man.

How are we to see this vision, this revelation? Let us come down, for a moment, to a rather down-to-earth level: how does one become the object of a revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He? Today, if you went around declaring such a thing, you would be locked up. But here, on the contrary, we are told: pay attention — Avraham is the object of a vision. He is the object of a vision in which the Holy One, blessed be He, has nothing more to tell him, but simply comes to encourage him. What is happening? To understand the object of this vision and how it comes about, we must go back to the first creation of Adam. There, when we read the text concerning the creation of Adam, it says: Vayomer Elokim totzei ha-aretz nefesh chayah le-minah — G-d said, let the earth bring forth a living soul after its kind: behemah, the beast; va-remes, and the creeping things; ve-chayto eretz le-minah, and the beast of the earth after its kind. Chayto eretz means, rather, the living creature on earth. And the text says: and it was so. But the next verse — what does it say? G-d made; that is, He carries it out Himself. This time speech alone is not enough; He must intervene in bringing about the dimension of man, who will contain the four required elements. The creeping thing — man crawling for his food. Yes indeed, he is the nachash, the serpent crawling for its food. He is also a beast of burden, and he struggles fiercely, relentlessly, to survive, because the world of creation is made quite simply of a permanent tension between created forces — forces that are, in a certain sense, complementary. Only there is something the earth does not give.

When we say that the earth does not give, that nature does not produce: it produced the animal, it produced the creeping thing, it produced the beast. But chayto eretz, the living being on earth, nefesh chayah, the living soul — that it did not produce. And it is G-d who must take matters in hand, and He will use the earth and His own spirit to bring man into being. And further on, indeed, we are told that when G-d breathed His spirit into man, vayehi ha-adam le-nefesh chayah — “and man became a living soul.” Man became a soul capable of giving life, a living soul capable of giving life. That is to say, there are certain elements that nature can produce by itself, by virtue of creation — and this includes even human intelligence.

Human intelligence belongs to nature. What does not belong to nature, by contrast, is the divine breath that G-d placed in man so that he might be in His image. Now how does one get there? First of all, what does it mean to be in His image? It means being capable of hesed, of kindness, of a gratuitous act, in everything we do. Generally, when one speaks of hesed, of kindness, one counts five relationships between a man and his fellow: that of the father and his son, of the rich and the poor, of the employer and his employee, of the strong and the weak — and also that of the man who, of his own good pleasure, is able to give a free gift. And it is said that in reality there are no free gifts. There is always an underlying interest in what we give.

And even waiting for recognition from the other is a way of asserting oneself. So where is the free gift that would be the equivalent of what G-d did in creating His world, so that man could truly be in the image and likeness of G-d? It is in that space that the Holy One, blessed be He, reserved for Himself in the creation of man — and which the ministering angels opposed (we will speak of these ministering angels), saying that it was not possible to entrust this responsibility to human beings. So now we will understand why it is only after the milah that this love, bordering on the irrational, is realized — this gratuitous act. For in principle an act of kindness presupposes, first of all, an unconditional love. But this love — if it has not been cut free of its excrescences… The excrescences are four in number: the excrescence of the flesh; the excrescence of the heart, of desire; the excrescence of speech, which sometimes oversteps its limits; and the excrescence of the ear, which lends itself to every kind of conditioning.

Orlat ozen, orlat peh, orlat lev, orlat… Now how many dimensions of existence are weighed in a person’s life? Havayah, yud-hei-vav-hei: they are four in number. We call them the physical reality of life, the psychological reality of life, the intellectual reality of life and the spiritual reality. When we have managed to remove these excrescences through that element — that is, through the organ charged with reproduction, with formation, with conception, with carrying creation forward — then we have gone beyond the framework of creation. The framework of creation is seven days. The framework of the milah, of circumcision — and by that understand the four circumcisions together — is the eighth day.

Now where, in the daily prayer, is the allusion to the milah, where we ask that Hashem heal us of the desires of the flesh, of psychological deviations, of intellectual deviations, of spiritual deviations? It is in the eighth blessing of the Amidah: Refa’enu Hashem ve-nerafe, hoshi’enu ve-nivashe’ah — “Heal us, Hashem, and we shall be healed; save us and we shall be saved.” Lend us Your assistance so that we may escape the hold of all these excrescences. So this milah is imposed on the child on the eighth day; it comes from outside the framework of creation, that is, on the eighth day. Why? Because the milah is truly the mitzvah one performs le-shem shamayim, for the sake of Heaven — even as the father’s heart burns within him, as he cannot bear the suffering of this child,

newly born, just come into the world, awaited, so long awaited, and he wonders whether one must suffer this in order to answer the will of G-d. What is the meaning of it? One can indeed lend oneself to fulfilling this mitzvah, but on the third day the question arises. This fourth dimension within us — the essence — is in turmoil. There is a spiritual fever that a person can feel at certain moments, accompanied by a feeling of revolt and at the same time by a faith that withstands every trial. So you will understand that Avraham is in the grip of this spiritual fever on the third day. He performed the milah at the age of ninety-nine, and he wonders about this milah: does it not cut him off from the rest of humanity, from all his friends? And it is a trial he cannot ask of others — they will not follow. Is this, in the end, really where one should begin?

And the way Avraham measures himself against the trial on the third day is that he is indeed wrestling with all this spiritual ardor within him, which questions him and to which he must respond. Vayera elav Hashem — to visit the sick. You know what visiting the sick means: when a person is bedridden, when he has lost his strength, lost his energies, and is powerless, that is when his mind begins to rise above the pettiness of life, to rise above the everyday pleasures themselves, and to pass to another level of reflection. This passage to another level of reflection is what the Chazon Ish called malakh li-rega’im: he becomes an angel at moments.

At moments he is the object of such a spiritual elevation, because he has disconnected from everything and realizes his powerlessness to fight these forces that he lets go of. So here too it is a visit to the sick: he is rafeh, in a weakened state. That weakness must be removed — to remove weakness is rapeh, to heal — and the angel charged with restoring the spirit is the angel Raphael, from the verb rafa: Raphael, rafa. So what we conclude from this analysis is that the encounter with G-d takes place in self-transcendence through hesed — through a gratuitous act, a free act of kindness. Does such a thing exist? Yes, it exists. When one has given someone advice, passed on a useful tip, shared a teaching, helped the other realize himself as a man created in the image and likeness of G-d — we have performed a gratuitous act. For true hesed is not the one practiced by the person who gives charity to others; it is not that one. That is an accessory hesed. There are many practice exercises one does in order to manage to solve a problem that is much harder. But one must first go through those exercises.

Consequently, the attempts at kindness one makes at the various stages of life are only practice exercises for the man who will manage to connect heaven with earth and earth with heaven, and who will, as it were, establish creation as a whole as a sacred entity, a divine entity. And that is why we will see that Avraham will take up the defense even of the inhabitants of Sodom. But how can that be? They are corrupt people, unbelievers. But he is concerned to build this world together, bearing the seal of the divine, that is, the seal of kindness. Since the creation of the world was in its origin nothing but an act of kindness, one must persevere in that path. And Avraham, as we have said, is the man who walks before G-d; that is, he is the one who sketches out what G-d would wish to make of His world. And how is this illustrated by our Sages, in a marvelous way? Precisely in the opening of Avraham’s house to every wind, to every passer-by. Imagine: Avraham has just been circumcised, at an advanced age; he is in pain. He is exempt from the mitzvah of welcoming people into his home, and so on. Moreover, the Holy One, blessed be He, did him a service, as we are told: He drew the sun out of its sheath — that is, the heat was scorching — so that he would not be troubled, and people stayed shut up at home. But he is driven by the desire to meet the other, to go out to meet the other. He does not want to remain alone with himself; he does not want to be occupied only with himself; he does not see it that way. And that is why he sits petach ha-ohel, at the entrance of the tent. So even when the Holy One, blessed be He, exempts him from any effort, he considers that his duty is to go forward and to defy, as we said earlier, all the obstacles that may stand in his way.

Well, that is why he can say — can you imagine? — he can say to the Holy One, blessed be He, when he sees the three people passing before his tent… He sees them in the distance; they are not necessarily passing right by, in fact, since he has to run toward them while he is suffering, to insist that they come into his home. While G-d has come to visit him, he says to Him: “Listen, please, wait, let me finish with this.” We get irritated when we are waiting at a counter and someone slips in from the side and gets served before us; we grumble. But here, imagine: Avraham says to the Holy One, blessed be He, “Listen, we have time; we will see each other afterward, but let me take care of these people who are passing by.” It is simply to show us, through the encounter with the other, what true divine service will be. The world could not live without the attribute of hesed. If human relations were founded simply on give-and-take — that is, everything with the expectation of a return, of whatever kind — then the world is heading for its ruin. That has already happened once, with the Flood; it can happen again in other forms. And to prevent that, there need not be many tzaddikim. One tzaddik is enough to save the generation. Kindness came to complain, says the Midrash, before the Holy One, blessed be He, saying: since Avraham has been here, I am out of work; I have nothing left to do; he does everything in my place.

It is a way for our Sages to say that, in reality, what we share with the divine are the middot, the attributes. And the first attribute is hesed. Of course this hesed underlies a mishpat — it underlies a justice, a law. But there must be a going beyond those laws. There is a structure to the law. Ki gavar aleinu chasdo — “for His kindness has prevailed over us”: if we are the object of His love, His kindness, His grace, it is with a relative gevurah, that is, a sense of justice applied — applied to us. That is why we are here, sometimes suffering from seeing nothing come back to us. It is the gratuitous act of the Jewish people that makes its very life marked by suffering. So we have explained Vayera elav Hashem. And here I would like — though it is not my usual habit — to relate a little Hasidic story. Perhaps you know it: the story of Zusha. You know that Hasidim are accustomed, on the occasion of the festivals, to visit their master. He went to see the Rebbe of Mezeritch, his master, and told him that he had a daughter to marry off and was destitute. So the Rebbe of Mezeritch gave him five hundred rubles to marry off his daughter. But on the way home he passes by an inn, spends the night there, and there he finds a young widow in tears, weeping because she had lost her purse containing five hundred rubles, the money with which she was to marry off her daughter. She could not find the money — how was she going to manage? He was seized with pity. He cries out: “But I found that money!” The woman was overjoyed. Only he tells her: “I cannot give it back to you unless you give me a ten percent commission — fifty.” The woman is outraged: “What? A commission? Ten percent commission — for what?” They go to a din Torah, a hearing before a rabbinic court: they go to see the rabbi of the town. The rabbi of the town is also scandalized by the behavior of this man, this Rabbi Zusha, and says to him: “Aren’t you ashamed? A poor widow who is going to marry off her daughter — and because you found this money, you ask for fifty?” And, shamed, Rabbi Zusha goes back home. The Rebbe of Mezeritch is making a tour; he passes through that village, and the rabbi relates the facts to him — that a certain Rabbi Zusha had demanded fifty rubles for having found the money. The Rebbe of Mezeritch had already understood, and he waited for his disciple to visit him again.

He said to him: “What came over you? Why did you behave that way?” He answered: “Listen — when I wanted to give away the sum you had entrusted to me to marry off my own daughter, I felt within me a feeling of pride, an inordinate pride, because I was doing this tzedakah and giving this money. And I wanted to fight that feeling of pride. So I asked for a compensation, knowing full well that they would humiliate me and give me nothing. But with that humiliation, I was quit: I had performed a gratuitous act, an entirely gratuitous act.” It is a perfect illustration of this giving at the very limit of gratuitousness which is bound up with the person of Avraham. Now our Sages affirm: Al sheloshah devarim ha-olam omed — the world stands on three things: al ha-Torah, ve-al ha-avodah, ve-al gemilut chasadim.

Torah is the formation of the self. Avodah is the korbanot, the sacrifices. Gemilut chasadim is conduct toward others. Now it is said of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov that they studied in the yeshivah of Shem and Ever, a great yeshivah — but it was not that Torah which served them. Because when you study Torah, you study ahavat hesed, the love of kindness. It is as though you were reading a book of instructions, of recipes, of laws, where you are told how one ought to behave — how one ought to behave, which does not mean that you yourself are going to do it. So it says: one must not speak only of ahavat hesed; one must practice asiyat hesed, the doing of kindness, and actually carry it out.

Now the fulfillment of this kindness is not simply in the study of Torah, because there one can remain in the celestial spheres, debating problems without end. Nor can it be only the korbanot, where in the end one is in prayer, forever pouring out one’s soul before Him. The goal is gemilut chasadim. We are the children of Avraham. We are the children of Yitzchak. Avraham realized himself through hesed. Yitzchak realized himself through his gevurah, his self-mastery, the introspection he carried out on himself and in which he brilliantly succeeded. Yaakov made the sum of the two, and that is why he is beloved.

Both are needed. I told you: hesed and mishpat. Hesed is Avraham, mishpat is Yitzchak, and Yaakov […]. And what we are studying here is the ABC of this very way of conceiving one’s life. For if we speak of the avot, the patriarchs, it is because we are the banim, the children. Ma’aseh avot siman la-banim — what the fathers do… People always say siman la-banim, “a sign for the children.” No, it must not be understood that way: siman la-banim is a lantern for the children — siman ba-banim, that is to say, what the parents do is what is invested in the children. That is how the children will be. What we have been is what they will be. And therefore we, who are bnei Avraham, the children of Avraham, are woven of these same attributes. That is why the Torah pays attention to these details when it recounts them — for all of this could have been summed up in one verse, or two, but it is a whole story in which we see Avraham running in every direction, trying to offer something, insisting. Well, every detail has its place. And note: we are dealing with malakhim, angels — and what is that?

You know that the Rambam tells us one cannot imagine a meal with angels — all that is impossible; it must be in a prophetic dream. A prophetic dream is all very well, but something is recounted here: namely, that they ate, that they rid themselves of the dust of the earth, of their idolatry. That is where Rabbenu Bahya tried to take up the Ramban’s contest with the Rambam on this point: for one of them these are angels, whereas for the other it can only be a guise. That is, man is sometimes charged with a mission that makes him, at moments, an angel — someone charged with a mission.

Someone charged with a mission — and that is why the text speaks sometimes of malakhim, sometimes of men. At times it speaks of these very men as malakhim, as angels. But when can one truly make this interchange between man and angel? When we have conceived of the world as a divine creation, as a divine whole. It is not a world into which we try to breathe a divine soul. No: man, the world itself, the created universe, is shamayim va-aretz — it is at once heaven and earth, that is, at once spirit and matter. Only there is a space separating heaven from earth, a tension between the two, and man stands in the middle to make that junction: to bring heaven down to earth and to raise earth up toward heaven.

When this work is accomplished, the world recovers its divine wholeness; that is, it is attuned once more to the divine will that created it. It is not made of forces that tear one another apart, but of forces that complete one another, and then everyone within it is at once man and angel: man when he is attached solely to the problems of the earth, angel when he rises above them and indeed succeeds in breathing into this matter a divine breath, as G-d did at creation. That is what the text wants to tell us. It is said that tribute was paid to a man who showed himself tolerant — more than tolerant — toward Avraham. You know that there are countries which at certain times banned circumcision in their territory; they considered it a cruel, wicked act toward the child.

So consider that in Avraham’s time there were three close friends: Aner, Eshkol and Mamre. Two of them said: “Wait — all this morality you teach us is very fine, but this amputation in your flesh answers no purpose.” They do not make the connection between what is flesh and what is spirit. Of course. They do not know that the support of all spirit is this flesh, and that this flesh is indeed what carries man to flights of love, flights of well-being, and so on. So they dissuaded him. But there was one alone who encouraged him: “If this truly belongs to your convictions and your faith, you should do it — even if it means being cut off from others for a while. But the world must learn, through circumcision, that this is not a pesharah; these are not compromises one makes.” No — hesed is not a compromise; spiritual life is not a compromise. It is something that costs us dearly to achieve, but something is accomplished, even if not at our own level. Because — listen: the fiery furnace; the risk of not having a child; Yishmael — he knew a rebellious child inside his own house.

He suffered over Sodom and Gomorrah; he was there. His wife is taken from him. Well then, what did he get? How can one say — what reward did he have for the whole life he led? Well: the fact that what he did committed the generations to come — above all, that his descendants chose to restore the work of G-d so that it would not go to ruin. That was Avraham’s sublime reward. What we truly accomplish is the path we trace for the generation to come. Here I will stop — I see we are at fifty-four minutes; I will let you ask questions. — I have a question, I have a question. Good evening, good evening, Rav Benizri. In fact, you said that the parents are the children — that is, that the parents’ deeds reverberate on the children, on their future. Is that what you meant? — It is not that they reverberate.

They are already tracing the path of their children, because a child begins, first of all, by imitating. — Yes, that is certain. Now, I don’t know why, I was thinking of something else: that the children pay, down to the fourth generation, for the bad deeds of the parents. That is a bit of a sticking point. — Well, I will tell you: it is not a sticking point at all, because the verse must be read differently. — Yes, please explain it, because it is… — So: poked avon avot al banim al shileshim ve-al ribe’im. Poked means the one who carries over, the one who remembers, the one who counts. Avon avot al banim, the sin of the fathers upon the children. But what is the subject of the verb poked? Poked.

Poked: the avon is poked — the sin, the sin itself, carries its own effects down to the fourth generation, and at the fourth generation the Holy One, blessed be He, says: stop. If they have not understood that they are indeed caught in a whirlwind from which they will not escape, it is I who intervene. It is I who intervene to stop it at the fourth generation. That is to say, what one does… One must know that a good deed traces its own path by itself. It is not I who give it from outside, you see? — Of course. — In the same way that you have a physical and psychological heredity of the being, so, as we gradually build up our spiritual being, we are constructing within ourselves a constitution of being that transmits itself to our children.

And it can be for good; it can, unfortunately, be for ill. But it is not we who do it; it is not we who are responsible. Rather — let us say it is the deviation itself, as if there were a cell that had strayed, deviated from its path, and was destroying the whole tissue of the being, of the spiritual being. — And so, you are saying that at a certain moment, at the fourth generation, the Holy One, blessed be He, stops it? — Yes, He stops it, yes. — Because it is often interpreted […]. — He stops it because a total reconversion is needed. — Sorry? What did you say? — A reconversion is needed. We spoke of the four stages, the four letters of the Name.

So as long as the four elements are not rotten, a repair can take place by itself. But when the four elements are indeed affected, then a re-creation is needed. — All right, OK, yes, I understand. It’s like — I don’t know if it was in one of your lectures, a very long time ago, you also said that in fact it is the generations to come… — No, no, no, you do it every day. — Ah yes, of course. — What you were yesterday, you are not today, and tomorrow you will no longer be what you are today. So you have already, you see, shed certain cells of the day before and remade yourself, haven’t you?

So tell yourself that you are not remaking physical cells; you are remaking spiritual cells. And that is just as well, because the physical cells are wrinkled; they have already aged. That is unrecoverable. But what is recoverable, and in all its splendor, is the cells of thought. — Yes. Thank you. — Thank you. — I had two small questions, if you allow me — small details. At the beginning, you were speaking of orlah: orlat ha-guf, of the body; orlat lev, of the heart; orlat peh, of the mouth; orlat shemi’ah, of hearing — and what about an orlah of the einayim, the eyes? […] — Orlah? Of the eyes? — Isn’t there an orlah of the eyes?

— There is no orlah of the eyes. Well, wait — one day I will develop this for you. One day I will develop it, because the eye, the ayin, is an element unto itself. You are asking me a question I should have dealt with in Vayera. Vayera: He let Himself be seen… — Yes, ra’ah, to see. — Vayera means to show oneself, to manifest oneself. Now in Pirkei Avot, the master questions his disciples and says to them: what is the surest way of conduct in life? And one says lev tov, a good heart; another says an enlightened mind that loses nothing, that reasons well. And one says ayin tovah, a good eye.

The eye in itself is a decisive element — the way one sees, the way one apprehends. And, what is more, it is feminine. Well. — There is still one little question, which in fact relates to Parashat Noach — or perhaps also to this one. You mentioned it: we always speak of the yeshivah of Shem. — Yes. — What did they learn? Which Torah are we talking about? — What a question! You have provoked me. The Torah — since we were not capable, since we proved incapable of discovering it by ourselves, G-d wrote it down for us and gave it to us. But in principle, if we were like the avot, seeking and thinking through the problems of existence, and thinking through by ourselves the problems of creation, then we would ourselves have discovered the Torah. It is the Torah of ve-al libam ektavenah — “and upon their heart I will write it.” It is the Torah that is inscribed on the heart of man. It is he who forged it. Because the Torah is not imposed from outside; it must be articulated from within. So what the first generations did was to go in quest of the Torah, and they discovered everything. That is why it is said that it was Pesach when the angels visited Avraham — at Pesach. That is an aspect we will analyze later, next year. But in short, it is simply to say that here, when it is taught that they fulfilled the whole Torah, even eruv tavshilin, even eruv chatzerot, it means they were capable of discovering it by themselves. For insofar as the Torah preceded the creation of the world and was the centerpiece of the architecture of the universe, then in the end, if you know how to discover the universe, if you know how to read the universe, you discover the laws of the Torah.

— But then, in what sense was Avraham the first? — Well, it was not Avraham who was the first; it was Shem, or Malki-Tzedek, king of Shalem. Malki-Tzedek is the king of justice, the one who sought out the secrets of justice. And it is with him — with Shem — that Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov earned their spurs. — Why is Shem not among the avot, really? — Sorry? — Why is Shem not counted among the avot? Shem — that is my question. Why? — Good question. Good question. Because, as I suggested earlier, it is like study in yeshivah: sometimes, for some people, it places them in the celestial spheres and disconnects them entirely from the earth.

And at that point there is no putting it to the test, no adaptation of what they have studied to the world in which they live; there is no interaction. That is serious. And that, the yeshivah will not do for you. The yeshivah gives you the weapons. But it is up to you to bring the thing about. Adraba, adraba — on the contrary… […] — I would like to come in here. You mean that yeshivah is good for a while, and then afterward one must work, enter active life? — But it is not afterward; it is at the same time — one must be in active life. — No, no, because people often do it. — But one must simply consider that work, in fact, is everything.

— But from the moment you actually build your home, you actually devote yourself to serving the community, you are making the connection between the celestial world and the earthly universe. — What you are saying is interesting, because there are many who do not think that way. — No, I don’t think so. — I think you are mistaken, Mrs. Moriel. You don’t know the world of the yeshivot. — There are some who study from morning till night and that is all, and it is the wives who work. — What do you mean, “that is all”? You don’t know that world; you have preconceptions; you don’t know that world. — No, no, I don’t have preconceptions.

— Let us say that it is difficult to generalize, but that it is something that happens. After all, excesses exist in everything. — Sorry? What are you saying? — Excesses exist in everything. There we are — exaggerations exist in everything. We spoke of excrescences. One must know how to practice circumcision on every level. — There are limits to everything, then. — But in the other direction too: limits in ignorance too, and in not studying. — That is certain. — Yes, that is certain. — Fortunately that is not what goes on in our noble assembly. — We’ll need a moderator here! — I have a small question. Unfortunately I haven’t followed; it has been a little while since I came back, since after the festivals when things started up again. Have all the lectures since the festivals been recorded, since the lectures resumed?

— So the lecture of last week and, obviously, this week’s are not recorded. — But it says “record” here. — No, they are recorded, but they have not yet been uploaded to the system. — I saw it on Facebook. I wasn’t at the lecture, and I saw it on Facebook. — On YouTube? — I saw it on Facebook. I found it because I wasn’t there last week; I was at […]. — Well, I don’t go on Facebook; I’d like it on YouTube. — So, as I say, on YouTube, Lech Lecha will probably be posted this very evening. So, up to Lech Lecha, everything is done. — Ah, everything is done, all right. And are there dates? Do you put the dates or not?

— No, I don’t put the dates. You have to go back through them in order. And so the lectures are listed one after another. — Do you put titles, at least? — I put titles, yes, I put titles. — All right, that’s easy. OK, fine. And why not the dates? If I may — why not the dates? Because sometimes one wants to go back to something a bit older. — Yes, that’s true. Let’s say it like this: putting the dates is an excellent idea. I will add them too. Unfortunately, it is difficult to put them in the title. I can possibly put them in the body of the text, but for the title I only have a hundred characters. — All right.

— You can put it in the first comment, underneath. — There we are, that’s it, that’s right. — Good evening, everyone, shavua tov. — Rav Benizri, please excuse all the participants who preferred to join today on Facebook. It’s quite astonishing: there were more people on Facebook than on Zoom — about eighteen people. — Yes, it is very surprising. — And yet they are not regulars of the lecture. So there we are: the days go by and are not alike. In any case, a big thank-you once again. — Thank you all. — All right. Thank you. — Thank you very much. — Thank you. — Thank you very much. — Thank you. Goodbye. A good week. Good health. — Good evening to all, good evening, goodbye.