Excerpt of a shiur given on 20th of Kislev, 5786

[The Rav has been talking about how residents in Israel used to travel everywhere either on foot, or by donkey].

Until they brought the first car in 1900.

R’ Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, he was the only child who didn’t go to see the automobile. They say in his biography, that in 1900, in 1920, the first bus came to Jerusalem. All of the [kids in the] cheders went out to greet this bus, except for R’ Shlomo Zalman Auerbach.

He was a child of five or six, he said I am not leaving the chumash, I am not leaving the Torah. I’m not interested in if there is a bus, there isn’t a bus. This doesn’t interest me.

So, only in 1920 did the first bus arrive, until then, people still travelled on donkeys. Until there were buses.

==

In Yemei Shmuel, it’s recounted how he got to the bus stop in 5700, because then he wanted to travel to Meron. But they blew up the bus stop in Haifa.

Now, we were in Haifa, and below, there is the bus station, it’s far, far down.

From there, we used to go with red flags [the Rav is recounting memories from his childhood], the whole of Haifa used to walk from the bottom to the top, they went on foot along the whole of Rehov Herzl, Rehov Hahalutz, and afterwards, we went with Sifrei Torah.

At the age of 14 and a half, we already received some seichel (intelligence), until then, there is no seichel. You don’t know, they tell you that Stalin was the People’s Sun – but he wasn’t he People’s Sun. And slaughtered all the workers.

He used to take an [official] salary of 200 rubles, but he stole billions. He robbed billions. And he used to say my salary is 200 rubles.

At the end of the month, he also used to borrow from someone in order to pay off the makolet. But now, the lies are being revealed.

Now, many people are returning in teshuva.

==

So, we are speaking now about the matter that Esav is scared of Yaakov – a deathly fear.

He knows that each person [from the sons of Yaakov] can conquer 10 countries. And Yehuda said let Russia come! Let America come! And England, France!

In the Mivtza Kadesh campaign, (England and France) helped us. In Mivtza Kadesh, they took the canal from us, the Egyptians, so then, there was the Mivtza Kadesh campaign, 1956. I entered the yeshiva in 1950, and this was ‘56, here it was already ‘56, because it was in October, the Mivtza Kadesh campaign. You weren’t even born.

This was in ‘56. So, Nasser took the Canal for himself, so the English and French came to help us re-open the Canal. He said that he wasn’t going to let any one pass through here, it belonged to him, personally.

Who built this [the Suez Canal] was Rothschild. They built the canal.

==

At that time, the [German Kaiser was] Wilhelm, Wilhelm II, he ascended to Jerusalem, and Rabbi Chaim Yosef Sonnenfeld didn’t want to shake his hand. He said, this is Amalek, this is.

That the Germans were Amalek.

And Wilhelm II came to Jerusalem with Prince Josef [the emperor of Austria-Hungary], and then R Chaim Yosef Sonnenfeld sent him a messenger, sent him Shimon Deutsch, and he told him that he wanted, because the reformers were standing ready to kick the orthodox out from the law [i.e. from being able to help legislate and influence what was happening in the Jerusalem Jewish community].

The reformers had more time. The orthodox learn Gemara, they didn’t have the time to go and meet all the [European] Ministers, to go to parliament there, in Vienna. They had no connections to any Ministers.

So they [the reformers] said [about the orthodox in Jerusalem] – these are backward people. They only learn a bit of calculation, a bit of maths.

==

But in the Gemara, Tractate Eruvin, there is all the mathematics!

In Eruvin, also in Yevamot, there is all the calculations, there is all the laws of Pythagorus! I saw an introduction to Yevamot that brought all the laws of Pythagorus.

Pythagorus is 3, 4, this is 5, and afterwards, 6, 8, this is 10. 16, 12 this is 20. 32, 24, this is 40.

How does it come out?

3 times 3 is 9; 4 x 4 is 16. [Together this makes] 25. The root of this is 5.

If you do 8, 6 = 10, and [explain that] 6 [x 6] is 36, and 8 is 64, this is 100. So 100, the root is 10.

After this, you do 12, we already got to 8, 12, 16 is 20. And the Gemara [explains] that it’s possible to know the whole of mathematics! The Laws of Pythagorus, and Archimedes and Newton.

==

Newton revealed that if a plane falls, so a tennis ball falls in the same way.[1]

People think that a plane falls faster, [but really] if a plane falls from a height of 10,000 metres, 10,200, this is 6,000 and 4,200. 6,000 [metres] this is 10 minutes. Six thousand metres, each 10 metres takes a second. So it comes out, ten minutes. And another 4,200 is another seven minutes.

Divide 4,200 by 60 seconds, so this is another seven minutes. 17 minutes [in total].

It’s possible to say three Tikkun Haklalis.

==

Translated from Shivivei Or 441.

==

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I.e. they both fall together at the same rate, as the force of gravity works on both the plane and the tennis ball with the same strength, i.e. 10 m/s.

==

BH, I will try and unpack this more in a future post.

But one thing that strikes me, is that if a plane falls 10,000 metres in 17 minutes, then so should  a ballistic missile… and clearly, that’s not what any of us were seeing here in Israel.

Which suggests that whatever was hitting our buildings wasn’t so much falling on us from ‘outer space’, but being fired directly at us…

We’ll stop there.

Hamavin yavin.