תפילין טבעוניות

00:00 Speaker 1 This is Igris. We are not looking at a letter from exactly fifty years ago. Right now, we're going through a, uh, a backlog of letters. We did this last time too. I have a list of letters that I found while looking for letters from our year that have just been so interesting that I've kept them in a, in a document for slower times. Right now, we're ahead of schedule. We're essentially done. I think we're totally done with the letters for Tavis. We're not yet ready to start the letters for Shop from exactly fifty years ago, which means now we're doing a detour into just interesting letters from anywhere in Igris. Uh, this one I've been saving for a very long time. Excited about it. The downside is that there just isn't a whole ton to talk about. I found some extra sources for us, but I don't know if it'll take up our whole time. Nonetheless, really cool topic. We're going to talk about vegan tefillin or vegetarian tefillin. This is something that came up when I was on campus a couple times. If you hang out with, uh, with liberal enough people, this will come up eventually. And on a liberal arts college, this was, uh, definitely something that came up more than once, was the humanitarian concern, the animal rights concern, that, uh, on one hand, I wanna do a mitzvah, and on the other hand, I don't wanna use a, uh, an animal-derived product. Now, a lot of people have that particular

00:59 Speaker 1 hang-up, and we're not gonna judge that particular hang-up. All we're going to do right now is say that some people have that problem, that they wanna put on tefillin, but they don't use leather products. And of course, tefillin are made from animal carcasses, so that becomes an issue for them. What's interesting, one interesting note, just because for those who are here live, you get an extra bonus, you can never get this by listening, is that, uh, I do have pictures. So what I have here today is, uh, I found the Ksav Yad. So this is the Ksav Yad of the letter. Uh, you can actually see the section that the Rebbe referred to. Uh, I can make out a lot of the words, which is unusual for me. You know, I'm not, I'm not the expert in the Rebbe's handwriting, but I can see the Siman Gadol, which is the way the letter starts. So you do have this on your screen, the Rebbe's Ksav Yad of this letter. This letter was written in the year Tav Shin Chaf Ches, and it is from volume twenty-five, page eighty-three. The letter is labeled Tes Tav Mem Dalet. There's no other letter like it, although I will show you some Hasidism and Yichidas like it. There's no really other letter like it. This is the one letter on this topic, and here we go. The Rebbe says, "I received your telegram and also your letter from Chaf Tes Tevis and from other times." There's there, so I

02:02 Speaker 1 guess there was more than one letter sent. Says that when regarding some medical condition, just interesting side point. Regarding some medical condition, they should speak to a refi yadid, a r- doctor who's their friend. I haven't seen those last three words attached to this before. A refi yadid that is non-biased. I don't know why in that particular case the Rebbe wanted a non-biased doctor. It's not what we're getting into today, but just pointing out I've never seen those last three words attached to the refi yadid. The Rebbe very frequently tells sick people they should see a doctor who's a friend, but I've never seen before the Rebbe tell somebody they should see a doctor who's a friend who's not biased. So don't know what was going on there. Let's go to our part of the letter. The Siman Gadol, my favorite phrase in the Igris. You always know something good is gonna happen at it, after Siman Gadol. With incredible confusion, with incredible, uh, dismayed confusion. I read in your letter the reason why a certain person was having difficulty putting on tefillin, and the reason why this person was having difficulty putting on tefillin, because he says that it's forbidden for a person to damage living things. So this person says that they won't put on tefillin because tefillin are unethical. The Rebbe says Siman Gadol is very dismayed and surprised to hear this from-- to read this in your letter. What does that have to do with us? What does that have to

03:17 Speaker 1 do with the present situation? The Rebbe says, "First of all, tefillin doesn't have to come from a living animal. You don't have to shecht an animal to make tefillin. If an animal dies all by itself, you're allowed to use neveilah. This isn't the same as kashrus. This isn't the same as a lot of other rules where you have to shecht an animal. You can use a dead animal as long as it's a kosher animal. If a cow dies of natural causes, a cow lives a long and happy life, free-range, and one day drops dead, you're allowed to make tefillin out of that." So the Rebbe says, "First of all, I don't understand the problem. Tefillin are not unethical. Now, you just take an animal that's dead that was gonna be wasted anyway. Check out Shabbos Chaf Ches, Seif, uh, Seif, uh, Aman Alef." The Rebbe says, "To the contrary, according to everything you just told me, better than leaving the skin of an animal to rot away, and be destroyed, or to turn it into shoes or something that'll be used, uh, for the feet of person or something like that. Here you have a mitzvah opportunity." So the Rebbe here is saying that what-- You, you know what happens to animal carcasses that are just left to rot in the ground? Far more disrespectful things. If you wanna do the most respectful things possible to an animal carcass, turn it into a mitzvah. You know what they're gonna do if you don't turn it

04:24 Speaker 1 into a mitzvah, and you leave them for the leather processors to do what they want? They're gonna use it for shoes. You're gonna be walking on them. Is that respectful? Says, "Here you have an-- And on the other hand, there's a mitzvah opportunity. Here what you can do is you can take this animal carcass that otherwise would have been wasted, would have rotted in a very demeaning way, or would have been used as shoes in a very demeaning way, to instead turn this into a to l-- turn this skin, this leather, into something that uplifts a person and makes a person holy and also becomes something that is a a, uh, a glory for his head, which is the regarding tefillin. particularly that which is explained in Kabbalah and Hasidism, especially when you consider what happens in all of the worlds when somebody does the mitzvah of tefillin. Uh, if you look in Hasidism and Kabbalah, you'll find this," the Rebbe says, and he says, "One place to look is Kuntres Acher, and in many other places as well." So just for a completion of the letter, I brought us that piece of Kuntres Acher. It is one of the easier, maybe the easiest piece of Kuntres Acher. Kuntres Acher is not terribly easy. There's one section that is not difficult. Um, this is a fairly easy essay Um, with incredible depth, of course. I'm just saying it's easier to read than a lot of . And this section is also quite easy to understand.

05:39 Speaker 1 The Rebbe says here-- I'm sorry, the Alter Rebbe says here, . All of the worlds, higher worlds and the lower worlds, they all hang on the particulars of one mitzvah, . For example, . If a carbon is kosher, then it creates a , a unity among all of the higher worlds, and all of the worlds become elevated, and there's more life force in these worlds and more, uh, more power in these worlds. . But if I then decide that I'm going to receive the blood of this sacrificial animal in my left hand in the times of the Beis Hamikdash, I put it in the wrong vessel. I put it in my coffee cup instead of in a designated . or there is some sort of a . If I change even a small detail, I ruin everything in a cosmic spiritual sense. And then the Alter Rebbe says, . So if I have tefillin that are kosher, this reveals the intellectual aspects of the emotive attributes and of the feminine attribute. which is usually the-- which is the six, seven, six plus . which happens to just be the life force of all of the worlds. And if I make even one small change in how tefillin are made, this makes the tefillin pasul. And those , that intellectual aspect, leaves the emotive and feminine aspect, which ends up being the life force for the entire world. That's what happens if my tefillin are off by a little bit. So the idea here is that

07:05 Speaker 1 a single dikduk in Torah can change the world. So when we talk about what-- The reason why the Rebbe is referencing this in the letter is he's saying, "Look what you could do with this, with this animal carcass. The animal does not have to be killed. Now that the animal's dead, you may make the claim that there are more ethical ways to deal with the dead animal." The Rebbe says, "I don't see them. You can turn them into shoes. You can let them rot away, uh, and, and become full of maggots, or you can use them to lift up all of the worlds, to give life force to all of the worlds. The most ethical thing to do with a dead animal is to turn it into tefillin." This is the Rebbe's response. Uh, this is, by the way, the same reason that the Rebbe isn't in favor of a vegetarian diet in general. We actually saw this in a previous year. We had a Negiah Shear just on diets and on unique diets, fad diets, and in this we brought a . But this fits here, too, and it's been almost a year since we did that, so there's no reason not to refresh our memory. This was the I wrote notes down here with, uh, Rebbe Eliyesh of Sharish of Cohen, who was the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Haifa at the time. Uh, and he was, uh, in-- the president of its rabbinical courts from nineteen seventy-five to two thousand and eleven. His

08:01 Speaker 1 father was a student of Rav Kook and the Nazir of Yerushalayim, and Rav Kook was famously a vegetarian. He even suggested that when the third Beis Hamikdash comes, maybe we'll offer plants instead of animals, although at the same time, they do say that Rav Kook used to eat a small piece of chicken on Shabbos. This come-- This is a man that comes from a school of thought of vegetarian frumkeit. Here, the with the Rebbe in the year, uh, . And we have here a recording, a, uh, a recording, a, um, an unedited, uh, transcript of the . And here it says, . Uh, this Rav told the Rebbe that he's a vegetarian. said this is not the appropriate way to act. You should not be a vegetarian. You should not be a vegetarian according to Hasidism or according to Kabbalah. Excuse me. Because then there's no opportunity to fix up the world. 'cause you're not able to fix things that you're not going to eat. So here we're seeing a very similar approach where the Rebbe is saying that, uh, the animal should be used to elevate the worlds, and when you choose not to use the animal to elevate the worlds, you're shirking your responsibilities. And now, so the Rav answered him, . There's a Se-- there's a Sechemeth that says that you're not allowed to make fun of vegetarians, and you're not allowed to, you're not allowed to, uh, to disparage them. So the Rebbe stood up from his place, and he went

09:19 Speaker 1 and got a Sechemeth. The Rebbe, let's see it. So the Rebbe goes to the bookshelf and opens one up, and he reads it, and indeed, the Sechemeth does say that you're not allowed to ridicule vegetarians. But then the Rebbe said, that only applies to . And clearly, this Rav, clearly this Rav was not according to the Rebbe. So the Rebbe says, "If you're a very special person, there's a couple, you know, real unique individuals in a generation who are allowed to decide that they're not going to eat meat and that they're going to be vegetarians or vegans, but that is not for the masses. For the masses, it's a shirking of their responsibilities." Uh, afterwards, just fun ending here. She asked the Rebbe, "When are you gonna come to Eretz Yisrael?" And the Rebbe said back, "It's not dependent on me. I don't know." So Rebbe says, "It's not dependent on me, so I don't know when I'm coming." Uh, they also talked about helping with some of the that are over there. So we see the Rebbe has an overall shitah. We're familiar with it from our prior Shear on vegetarianism. But the shitah applies, uh, just as strongly to tefillin, that in response to somebody saying that they're not putting on tefillin because they are, um, concerned about animal rights issues, the Rebbe's answer is that, first of all, there's no animal rights issues. The animal dies naturally. And second of all, can you think of a better use for the animal

10:24 Speaker 1 that elevates all of the worlds? A couple years back, somebody put together a T'rurah, uh, which is a long list essentially in this T'rurah of places where the Rebbe talks about the value of using leather in tefillin. I don't know what they were getting at. Must have been a very special bar mitzvah. But whatever it is, uh, I was able to find several of these . I'd like to read some of them together, and, uh, with that, we'll conclude after we read these sections. So next, Rebbe would also explain further develop the shitah of the Rebbe that, uh, that it is important Kabbalistically, spiritually, Jewishly to have tefillin that are made of leather specifically, not just because it's a mitzvah darayta and of course we have no choice, but also because there is a Hashkafic reason why we're so attached to leather tefillin. Uh, this one is, uh, printed in Likutei Sichot volume twenty-six, page sixty-four. It's a small piece of the Sicha, and, uh, we have it here translated into Hebrew. It says here, when a Yid takes the leather of an animal, the skin of an animal, and turns it into klaf so that he can write a Sefer Torah or tefillin and mezuzot, this is the fulfillment of the entire reason why God made the skin of the animal in the first place. that it should ultimately become klaf, a piece, a, a thing used for the Torah in a revealed way. So here what the Rebbe is saying is that, uh,

11:34 Speaker 1 something in addition to what he said in his letter. In his letter, he says, "This is the best use of the animal we have in front of us." Here in the Sicha, the Rebbe is saying it is also the reason why God made that animal in the first place. That animal was initially made. You know, we have this, uh, I see the billboards. So there's an expression, animals are not for our benefit. Animals are not for-- A-animals are not meant to be food. Um, maybe they're-- I, I think to a degree, they're probably right. So, uh, the idea that animals are not there for us to torture, God forbid, or for us to benefit from for stupid reasons, absolutely. But, uh, what are animals there for? They're there to make tefillin out of. That's what the Rebbe says in the Sichas. The creation of the animal fundamentally was that it should be turned into a Torah or tefillin, and so this is the fulfillment of its actual purpose. This is a from and it's on page one ninety-one. And here the Rebbe talks about the importance of it coming from physical leather specifically. The when it comes to fulfilling all mitzvahs, The rule for every mitzvah is you have to do it with physical matter. You have to take it from the physical world, this corporeal world. If we were to take the skin of an animal the way it exists in Yetzirah, not in Asiyah, not in our world. But if we were to

12:39 Speaker 1 take the spiritual skin of an animal, one level up in creation, you could not use that skin to do the mitzvah of Tefillin. So it's not about finding the most spiritual thing, it's about finding the most Asiyah-dik thing, the most natural, uh, physical thing. We could learn about leather from the Torah. We could learn about how leather applies to Tefillin. That would be the Torah at the level of Yetzirah, where it's still theoretical but not physical. But in order to actually fulfill the mitzvah, we're going to need a physical animal, physical skin. That comes from the darkness of the physical world. I think this last point is important because the Rebbe is telling us to lean into the idea that this is not particularly nice. If somebody's having trouble with the idea that, uh, that, that taking the skin off of an animal and using it as a that I'm gonna use every day in my Avodat Hashem doesn't feel so great, the Rebbe says that's kind of the point. The point is that we're taking from the darkness of Adam HaZeh. We're taking from something that on the surface is not beautiful, on the surface is perhaps cruel seeming, that we're taking from the of this world, the darkness of Adam HaZeh, the and we are transforming that into a beautiful mitzvah. So this is a sort of a different approach than what we saw up here. What we saw up here in the Sicha is the Rebbe taking the approach, this is why

13:48 Speaker 1 the animal was created in the first place, don't cry about it, and, uh, down here saying, maybe you can cry about it. Maybe you can say, maybe if somebody really is very sensitive to this issue, the proper response is to tell them, yes, specifically by taking something that is dark and making it something beautiful, we're creating a mitzvah. Perhaps another, uh, slightly different, uh, but similar approach. We have here from a Sicha from . You'll find this on page four ninety-one. The Rebbe says that we could choose different parts of an animal. You know, we could choose loftier parts. We could make Tefillin out of the animal's skull or its heart or, I don't know, something that is a little more lofty. We end up specifically using the skin of the animal because it is the lowest place. The entire Torah is compared to Tefillin, so the things that we study in Tefillin, we can apply really to all mitzvahs. In order to fulfill the mitzvah of Tefillin, you only do it with a physical animal's skin. And within, within the animal itself, we don't take a piece of the flesh. Maybe we could compare that maybe the blood of an animal is its life force, just like the, the flesh of an animal is, is like the flesh of a person. Maybe we could make a comparison to these things. Maybe there'd be more spiritual value in taking the flesh or the blood of the animal. We take the skin. The lowest part of

15:00 Speaker 1 the animal, the part that it had-- that has least to do with its life force. And that's what we use for Tefillin. What are we able to do this mitzvah? Only when we take a physical animal. And only with physical skin. We write the Shema on it. This makes the mitzvah in the most complete way. We have one more we're gonna look at, and then we will pause for questions and comments. The last one is found in . The, uh, section is , and it's on page one sixty. You can tell this Torah was written a while ago because a lot of these now are updated in , but I don't have the Mekares for them, so you can use the old Mekares if you wanna look them up. The whole point of the creation of the world is to bring Godliness down to the physical things, specifically into Yakar, into a state of dearness, of beauty, which is the Tefillin, which are in the entire Torah is compared to Tefillin. And that is practical action. Using a physical body, with, of course, cloth that comes from a physical animal, and with ink that, that is written on the cloth, real physical ink. In addition to this, uh, spiritual service, the job of Tefillin, as I'm sure you've heard it, a thousand mitzvahs stands. This is what we used to say as, like, our go-to. People would say, "Wanna put on..." You'd say, "You wanna put on Tefillin?" Say, "Give me, like, the real short

16:21 Speaker 1 version of what I'm doing. What's the shortest version?" Is that sometimes people get confused because their head and their heart aren't on the same, aren't on the same team. We're gonna put your head and the heart on the same team. That, of course, is in . It's in Tanya. The Rebbe says that's true, but there's actually a second thing going on that we don't talk about as much, and for that we need the animal leather. Since the Tefillin is from the animal skin, our job here is not just to get our mind and our heart of our Nefesh Hakodesh, of our godly soul, on the same page. It's to control our animalistic soul. We can only fulfill the with that. Point here is that there's a second dimension to Tefillin, which is that it's not just supposed to keep my Nefesh Hakodesh, uh, operating at top capacity. It's also supposed to be shutting down, or not so much shutting down, but controlling, harnessing my Nefesh HaChayyim, my most base instincts. And I can't talk to my base instincts, which are animalistic, unless I use an animal. So fundamentally, making Tefillin out of something that doesn't come from an animal would defeat one of its main purposes. One of the main purposes of Tefillin is to create a communication point between me and my inner animal, and I can't do that without using an animal. So even if there were other alternatives that could help us get a lot of the same ideas of Tefillin, we'd

17:31 Speaker 1 still be missing out on that fundamental change in the Nefesh HaChayyim, which can only come from using something that comes from a physical animal. You can really only talk to your body using a body. You can only really talk to your animal soul using an animal. So it is absolutely crucial to the process. So we have here a couple other approaches from the Rebbe, or similar, um, uh, I guess complementary approaches from the Rebbe to why it is so important that the cloth that from the Tefillin come from a physical animal. But what we have going back to our original letter is the Rebbe's overarching claim, which is that I'm very surprised to hear that anybody would have issues putting on Tefillin because they're worried about animal rights issues. First of all, because there isn't an animal rights issue. You can use a dead animal that's not alive anymore. And second of all, because a person should be intelligent enough, they should be spiritually, emotionally intelligent enough to realize that the best possible outcome for a dead animal, at least once it's already dead, is that it should be turned into something that is a mitzvah, that will be able to elevate and heal all of the worlds. Okay, questions, comments?

18:31 Speaker 2 I don't have any questions. I mean, I think it's, it's, it's great. Uh, I think this, the, the letter is probably the most, uh, the strongest argument is the letter. Like, you know, there's the strongest ar-- Yes, all the other stuff that you bring in, the sifres and everything else is obviously great for the conversation overall about, you know, uh, what, what advantages we have to putting on Tefillin, but for the basic question of, "Hey, how could you use animal skins?" Blah, blah, blah. Okay, so why don't we just let it rot? And I actually did not know until now that you can use, uh, from a, a Behema that wasn't shechted. Like, it's just a, you can take it from any animal anywhere. So that actually f-- That down, meaning that shows even more how Gashmi is the, uh, the Tefillin is. It's not even from a Shechita. It's like Ma'amaris, literally it could be from an Aveila. It could be from just a, a, a, a, a, a dead animal on the side of the road. So it's very, ve-very, very cool. That's my only comment on that.