In Chicago, it rained. Good morning, everybody. We’re continuing our study of trying to find the path of Avraham Avinu. We spoke about bringing knowledge that is intellectual to the heart, so that it becomes part of our life. Let’s see how that comes into play with Avraham Avinu and what he accomplished.
We spoke a few days back about how Avraham Avinu came to the realization that there is a Creator in this world at a very young age. For the rest of his life, he worked to bring that information into his heart, so that it became a part of him. We have to go through that process for ourselves, because experiencing it ourselves will make the biggest difference.
So the question is: first, how did Avraham Avinu come to the realization and clarity that there’s a Creator to this world? We know that when a person sees something orderly in this world, he knows that someone put it there. For example, if a person were in the middle of the desert, where there was nothing, and all of a sudden saw a pyramid of rocks built in a specific order—one wide rock at the bottom, then a narrower set above it, creating a pyramid—any reasonable person would immediately understand that someone made it, someone put it there.
When we see seder, when we see order, we know there is a message; we know there is a seder; we know that someone made that order. Even a simple door that we all have in our homes, with a knob and hinges, a little window somewhere in the middle for people to see, a knocker somewhere on top, and a hole to look through with an eye, shows us that there is a seder. Someone created that door.
If someone came to anybody here and asked, “You see the building you’re in right now? Were you here when they made this building?” you’d say, “No, I wasn’t.” “Well, I was. Let me tell you how that door you’re looking at—your front door—came about.” And they’d start describing a day when there were tremendous winds, fires broke out, and there was an area of debris outside your home with all types of materials lying around: pieces of wood, metal, glass, and some buckets of paint. Then, all of a sudden, a major storm hit. Things went wild. Things were on fire. Things were flying around. When everything settled, as they say, when the dust settled, we looked and couldn’t believe it. There was this door, with its hinges in the right spot, a piece of glass specifically at the top to look through, a knob specifically positioned at a level where a human could comfortably turn it, and a paint color that just happened to match this room.
If someone gave you that story about how your door became a door, you’d say, “The person is out of his mind. No way.” No reasonable person would believe that could happen.
Now the question we must ask ourselves is: How come, when someone gave us a story like that, we don’t believe them? After all, we weren’t there. Could it have happened? Theoretically, it could have happened if the winds came a certain way, the fire burned a certain way, and things came together a certain way. Theoretically, it could have happened. So why is it that when someone tells me my door was created in that manner, I automatically brush it off and don’t believe it? Why?
Again, if I was there and witnessed otherwise, that’s one thing. But since I wasn’t there, how does my mind know to reject what that person is saying? This is very important, because in life we hear a lot of things: information about creation, about history, about things other people saw, even in our own lifetime. Somehow our mind knows when to say, “This thing maybe happened; this one for sure did not happen.” Or sometimes we even say, “This one for sure happened.” How does our mind know how to determine that when we weren’t there?
It’s amazing: the human mind can hear something that it wasn’t there for and say, “That for sure did not happen,” or, “That for sure happened,” or, “Maybe it happened.” How does our mind know that? It’s important for us to understand how our mind rejects or accepts things, because when we understand how it works, we’ll be able to apply it to many things in our life.
Specifically, the subject we’re learning may be the most critical for understanding the beginnings of this world, the world that we’re in. This world that we’re in, as the Chazon Ish describes it, is a place where a human finds himself in the middle of a riddle. He comes into this world and literally feels that he’s in a riddle, and that he’s a big part of the riddle. The Chazon Ish’s words are beautiful. In the beginning of his book, he says that since this riddle is relevant to the person, he can no longer live a normal life until he’s able to figure out the answer to it. The words he uses are: “Because what is life and its significance to this person if he doesn’t find the answer to the riddle?” The Chazon Ish’s words are that this person would be willing to jump into a fire if that’s what it takes to get the answer to the riddle of life.
All of us are here. They put us down here; we don’t really know how we got here, we don’t know how we were created, and on and on. All of a sudden, we find there’s a riddle here, and we’re a part of it. We must find out the answer.
But it’s important to know how the human mind operates. Hashem gave us this brain, and there are certain parameters to it. Just like when you create a computer, there are parameters, there’s programming in the computer that gives it the ability to know when something is correct or incorrect, and the ability to listen to commands. All that is programmed in a computer. The human mind is already programmed to understand logic, to know math. One plus one equals two; that’s a fact. There are things that are called theories. There are things that are called probable.
What does our mind use when it hears information that it never witnessed with its own eyes? One of the ways the human mind determines if something is true, false, or possible is by using the odds of things happening to decide whether we’ll accept or reject it. What do I mean by odds? We know, for example, that if something is 50-50, and someone gives me information that in my eyes could be 50% that it did and 50% that it didn’t. For example, someone tells you right now that yesterday... My mind says, “I don’t know. I can’t say for sure, but I’m definitely not rejecting that. Fifty-fifty.” It rains half the time in Chicago—maybe 30% of the time, maybe. I hear. No, I have no problem accepting that. Someone tells me it didn’t rain; I also have no problem accepting it. The higher the odds, the more I accept. The lower the odds, the less I accept. Simple math.
Now, our mind is brilliant and knows how to determine odds, even without us consciously writing out the math. Our mind, right away, when it hears something, automatically figures things out: “This is not happening.”
I don’t know if we realize the odds of things, even simple things, that may happen by themselves. Let me give you an example, a very well-known example. I’ve probably said this a thousand times, but for the purpose of getting clarity in our class, it’s important to repeat it. It’s always good to know it. We don’t realize the staggering odds of even the smallest accident.
If we took 15 cards, numbered them one through 15, and stacked them in order—one, two, three, four, five to 15—and then threw the cards up so they mixed in the air and came down on each other the same way they were before, what are the odds that they’d come down in the exact same order, one through 15, in which I threw them up?
This question has been asked of many, many people, probably at this point by people, including myself, and I’ve gotten the most interesting answers. I can tell you the worst answer I got. So let me ask you first: What are the odds that they’ll land one through 15?
Now, how do we determine odds? How do I know what the odds are? Very simple. Odds are determined by figuring out how many possibilities there are for these cards to fall. If there are 15 possibilities, the odds that one of them will be one through 15 are one in 15. If there are a hundred possibilities, it’ll be one in a hundred. If there are a thousand possibilities, it’ll be one in a thousand.
So, in order to determine the odds in our situation, we have to know how many possibilities there are for 15 cards to fall in. They could fall in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. They could fall in one, three, two, four, five, six, seven, eight. They could fall in one, four, five, three, two. There are different combinations. So how many combinations are there in 15 cards?
The worst answer I’ve ever gotten in this area—and I hope nobody’s thinking of this answer—is one in 15. If you’re thinking one in 15, you should really go back to school just to learn basic mathematics. If you think one in 15 is the answer, I’m not sure this class is for you. You need some more work.
But I’ll tell you the most popular answer. The most popular answer to this question, I would say, is one in 225. Two hundred and twenty-five possibilities; one of them, by the way, is one through 15. The percentage of one in 225 is very, very small. You wouldn’t bet too much money on that. One in 225 is less than half a percent that that would happen. That means that with 15 cards, there would be 225 possibilities for how they could land, and one of them would be one through 15. It sounds like a lot. With 15 cards, there are 225 possibilities, 225 ways to land.
When a person hears that at first, he says, “What? Really? That many? That many combinations? One through 15, one through 14, 225?” Again, the odds aren’t that great. Someone tells you there’s a half a percentage that this could have happened; I don’t know that you’d bet anything on it.
But what’s staggering about this example is that even though the number 225 is quite high for 15 simple cards landing on top of each other, it’s nowhere near the spectrum of the real number. It’s not even close. The number is not 225. The number is not one in a thousand, which would also be dramatic. It’s not even one in a hundred thousand. It’s not even one in a million. There are more than a million possibilities in 15 cards. As hard to believe as that might be, there are more than a million possibilities. For 15 cards landing on top of each other, there are more than a million combinations.
Guess what? If there are more than a hundred million combinations in 15 cards, there are more than a billion possibilities. More than a hundred million possibilities. I’m going to give you the real number. The real number is 307. Three hundred and seven trillion. That’s how many possibilities there are in 15 cards. I don’t know if you’re able to write that number. Three hundred and seven, and just keep writing many zeros.
Now, this number is beyond our... What do you mean? Fifteen cards? How could 15 cards...? You tell me this right now, and I’m talking to you. I know it’s true because it’s mathematics. Just take 15 times 14 times 13 times 12 times 11, and you’ll get the number. But make sure you have a very big calculator, because a small calculator won’t be able to get the numbers. It’s a huge number.
Now, after you settle down with that and say, “Okay, you know what? I hear it’s math. What can I do? I can’t imagine it,” what does that mean? Fifteen cards? The odds of 15 cards falling in order are one in 307 trillion?
Now, I wanted to feel this number. I didn’t want to be guilty of just having intellectual knowledge of this number. I wanted to feel a number like this. How do you feel this number? What does that mean? Sometimes numbers get so big, you’re like, “Okay, fine. It’s a trillion. It’s 10 trillion. What does that mean?”
So I thought to myself, let me understand this number. Let’s say I decided I wanted to go on a lifetime project. I wanted to take 15 cards and just throw them up every minute. I’m going to throw them up one time, one time every minute. We’re going to throw up the cards, and they’re going to land. I’m going to gather them again, take a breather, and throw them again.
Now, I’m not going to sleep. I’m not going to eat. I’m going to go 24-7. 24-7. All I do is throw up 15 cards, and they fall down. So, question: How many times will I be able to throw up these cards if I lived, let’s say, 100 years? Now, 100 full years. From the day I’m born until I’m 100, all I do is throw up 15 cards. How many times would I be able to throw up 15 cards for 100 years, 24-7?
Basic math, right? There are 525,600 minutes in a year. 525,600 minutes in one year. Times that by 100 years, you get 52 million. So if you lived well and lived comfortably, and all you did this whole entire life of 100 years was throw up the cards, without sleeping or any interruption, you would be able to throw the cards up 52 million times.
Now, the number I gave you, 52 million doesn’t even change some zeros in the number. Well, you’ve done nothing. In order to throw the cards up 307 trillion times, you’re going to have to live millions of years to do this.
So now, all of a sudden, someone comes into your room. Before I told you this, if someone came into your room and asked you, “Hey, those cards, they’re 1 through 15 on top of each other. How’d they get there?” you’d say, “I never believe it. I threw them up; they lay on top of each other.”
Now, before this class, you would say, “You know, I hear it could be.” It wouldn’t shock you. But all of a sudden, you hear the odds. You say, “Wow, I’m not so sure. You think out of the billions and trillions of chances that happened? Can’t be.”
Now, what if somebody liked what I was doing so much that he wanted to join me as a chavruta (study partner)? He wanted to have his own set next to him, and we’re going to start throwing cards up together. Beautiful. He gets a seat next to me, and we are on a mission, a 100-year mission, to throw up the cards.
What are the odds that he and I will throw them up and get 1 through 15 at the same time? Him and me together. What are the odds that he will throw up 1 through 15 on the same throw? Out of the 52 million, I’m going to get it at the same time. The number is way bigger than we can imagine. It’s an endless number.
Now, if somebody came into the room and said, “You know, how did these two stacks of cards get to be 1 through 15?” and you said, “Wow, we threw them up together, and they both landed 1 through 15,” would you believe it? Again, before this class, you might have believed it. I’m not sure. “Okay, what’s the big deal? It’s possible.”
But now you see—what? Impossible. Again, not impossible. If you want to be unreasonable, you can always be unreasonable. There’s always room to be unreasonable. That’s part of free choice. As part of free choice, Hashem always gives someone the option to be unreasonable if they so choose. But when we make decisions in our life, we usually use reason. We don’t make unreasonable decisions.
Now, these 15 cards are not very complicated. We all understand that. The simple door in your home, if you look at it right now, is far more complicated than 15 cards. The example I gave you of the door coming together with all its parts because of a storm that hit—the odds of that happening are far greater than the odds for 15 cards. That’s why when you look at a door, you say, “No way.” Your mind says, “No way. Never happened. Cannot be.” The odds of things like that happening are—forget about it—not trillions, hundreds and hundreds; I don’t know what numbers come after trillions.
That’s why the mind says, “No, no, no. That didn’t happen. No way. That had to have been put into place. There’s no way. Someone did it.” And if I tell you your house came together that way, you’d say, “Are you kidding?” Nobody in this room.
Could you imagine? Could you imagine I have a beautiful song that I wrote on a piece of paper? A beautiful song. You read the words and say, “Wow, how did you write that? So nice. The words just—they fit. They’re beautiful.” And you say, “You’re not going to believe it. You’re not going to believe it. I was sitting here. It was an empty piece of paper. I had an ink bottle next to me. By mistake, my daughter came, she pushed my hand, the ink spilled and went all over the paper, and all of a sudden the song came.”
Now, how many guys would come back to this class if I said this today? You guys will all be okay. This guy has lost his mind. It's official. That's it. We're done. Quarantine is over. We're going back to work. Baruch Hashem. The guy's nuts.
What does that mean? By the way, not only a song. If I told you I wrote a word—a word, just a word, a word that makes sense—from ink that spilled, you would say, “Impossible.” The odds of that happening, from all the letters of the alphabet, that they should write in the same spot a word that makes sense, are impossible. The odds are crazy. They won’t happen.
So when we study this world, when Avraham Avinu studies this world, this world is way more complicated than 15 cards. Way more complicated than a word on a piece of paper. Way more complicated than a door sitting in front of your house. It’s way more complicated than your home, with all its intricate details. This world, every detail of it, is mind-boggling. The amount of seder and order.
Just in the human body alone, there are over 25 or 30 trillion blood cells. Each blood cell is a work of art. There are books today that discuss only the human cell and all its parts, how each part works with the others, and how the cells work together in one human body. The human body alone, in the way it operates and in all its parts—for all those things to happen without a Creator, you really have to be insane to believe such a thing. You would never believe it in the real world.
When you start studying the world around us, you know, a few thousand years ago, astronomers thought there were about 2,000 stars. Who can blame them? They took the telescopes of the time, looked with their eyes, and saw one, two, three, four, five. They counted stars and got 2,000. Which, by the way, is a lot. The sun is huge. If you have 2,000 stars like that, that’s quite an accomplishment.
Today, scientists have discovered that in our galaxy alone, just in our galaxy, there are over a hundred billion stars. There are only eight billion people in the world. But there are over a hundred billion stars. I don’t think there have been a hundred billion humans on the planet since creation. Could you imagine that number? A hundred billion stars? And each—and by the way, many of them are larger than the sun. The sun is not the biggest star. The sun is huge, and the stars sit somewhere in this galaxy.
What’s holding up the sun? Why did it fall? How does it stay in the same spot? How does the earth go around the sun? It takes one year to do one lap. We’re millions of miles away from the sun, but the distance stays exactly the way it needs to be. How it could be is mind-boggling: the earth is somewhere in the middle, the sun is somewhere too, and the distance between them is constant.
And guess what? We’re lucky for that, because if we were a little bit closer to the sun, we would fry. Could you imagine today, how beautiful today is? It’s 80 degrees. Do you know what kind of miracle that is, that there should be an 80-degree day? Why is it 80 degrees? How did it get to be 80 degrees? You know how the calculation of the distance between the sun and the earth has to be such that they’re perfectly aligned, so we can have an 80-degree day. If we were too close, we would fry. It would be 200 degrees. If we were too far, we would freeze to death.
The fact that you and I can walk this planet, and the temperatures are within livable range for a human, is a great seder. It’s a great nes (miracle). How is it? Why doesn’t the sun come a little closer one day? Do you know that we know every single day—tell me a day, any year, tell me in 2080, on March 3rd—when the sun will come out in Brooklyn? I’ll tell you exactly to the second when sunrise will be. Amazing. The sun and the earth are never ever off.
Now we think, “Oh, the sun is here, the earth is here.” The earth is not here. The earth is moving. We’re moving around the sun. Where we were yesterday in the galaxy, we’re not there anymore. The earth travels something like 65,000 miles per hour. Can you imagine this plane called planet Earth, with all that’s in it, with the mountains, the oceans, and all the people? Mind-boggling. This planet ball, so heavy, is traveling around the sun at a speed of 65,000 miles per hour. Tremendous speeds.
So where we were yesterday—even though you woke up this morning, looked up, and said, “Oh wow, there’s the sun. There she is back again. Here we are”—you’re in a different part of the world. You traveled literally hundreds of thousands of miles from yesterday. But the seder is that you’re in the right spot every single day, at the right temperature. How does that happen? How could that be? Where is the earth getting its energy from?
By the way, they say that our galaxy is one of a hundred billion galaxies. So we’re not even done. We just spoke about our galaxy, and we’re one of a hundred billion. Our galaxy—forget the earth—the galaxy itself is traveling at speeds of 250,000 miles per hour. It looks like some of you are getting dizzy, but that’s the truth. This world and all its operation is mind-boggling. This is not a simple world. Everywhere you look around you, you just can’t miss it. Seder—15 cards is a joke. Everything we see is mesudar (ordered).
How does Avraham Avinu, a young man, even a little boy, come to the clarity that there’s a Creator to this world? It’s not really so complicated. Use the same mind you use when you hear about things that happen. Someone tells you this sentence was written by itself, and you say it’s impossible. If a sentence can’t be written by itself, the entire planet and all its beauty and all the complications in it, that’s happening by itself.
The human body alone, like Iyov says—some people need to learn to see Hashem in the stars. Some people have to see Him in the oceans. He says, “Me, I look at my body, I look at my body, and I see my Creator.” Just look at the human body. Just look at the human body. The human body is mind-boggling. What is going on in there?
Just the blood vessels flowing through our body, the blood. Do you know how far the blood travels around the body? Do you know that there are enough blood vessels in the human body to travel around the world about two or three times? That’s right. Thousands of miles of vessels in each human. There are something like 50 miles of canals in the human teeth. Fifty miles. In my tooth, right now, here in this mouth, there are 50 miles. Where? What does that mean? I don’t know. Go figure it out. This is science. This is fact.
So you look at your body and say, “Whoa, how did this go? How did my nail get here? How does it know to come here? How did my nail know to grow right in this spot? How come nails don’t grow on the back of the hand? How come my teeth are right over here?” Wow. Nice. And by the way, the sharp ones are in the front. There you go. Nice, sharp ones. The back ones are wide. Very simple. It makes sense. You know why? Because when the food comes in, you need a knife to cut it. First you cut it. After you cut it, you chew it. You don’t chew and then cut. Oh, that’s very nice. Look at the seder. Every human. How do teeth get there? How do the teeth know? How did the enamel know to grow there, in that seder and that order?
And we can continue and continue, and we will continue. The initial understanding that there’s a Creator to this world doesn’t require someone to be a rocket scientist. It’s the simplest and easiest way to understand what’s going on in this world. It’s the simplest and easiest way to understand what’s going on in this world. It’s the simplest understanding.
Being a kofer (one who denies) requires a lot of emunah (faith). If you want to deny the obvious, you need a lot of faith. To believe in a Creator who created the world around you is obvious. It doesn’t require a lot of information. By the way, it has to be that way because Hashem expects a 13-year-old boy already to have emunah. He didn’t study all the intricate details of the world and the sciences, because it’s obvious. It’s simple. It’s simple.
We use that all the time when we believe things. Avraham Avinu, at a young age, discovered this simple mathematical equation: Yes, there is a Creator to this world. It’s undeniable. Things don’t happen by themselves. That wasn’t enough. As great and clear as that is, it’s not enough, because guess what we did today? Today, we did something intellectual. We took something, thought about it, did the math, and said, “Okay, equals there’s a Creator.” Wonderful. It’s very nice. You may have enjoyed the class and the information, and now you have a little more than you had before, but has it really made a difference? Is the Creator real? Is He with me? Not necessarily.
That requires 70 years of work. I don’t know if we all have 70 years to work on this, but certainly we have an opportunity together to take the road of Avraham Avinu. That information he started with, he really started to work on it and make it real.
How do you make what we learned today real? Tomorrow we’re going to start taking this information and making it part of our soul, part of our being, of our lev (heart). How do you do that? By starting to learn about the details of specifics.
Meaning, it’s very easy for a person to wake up in the morning and say in his tefillah (prayer), “Oh, Hashem’s great. Your creations are wild. Amazing.” Someone tells you, “How’s this world?” “Wow, it’s an amazing world. The green grass, the beautiful mountains, the breathtaking oceans. Amazing.” That will not do it.
Generalizing is not enough. A person must take time to focus on specifics. As we go through the specifics, we will start to come in touch with the things that we have learned. It’s not enough just to say, “Great. There’s a Creator to this world.” We’re going to have to start to feel it with our senses. That’s by studying the details of the universe. That’s what we’re going to study tomorrow.
Wishing you all a wonderful day. You should be in all that you do.