The Life Story of King David Told by Rabbi Chaim Block

so there was this uh um bar mitzvah boy getting ready for his bar mitzvah writing a speech and he goes to his mom and he wants to know his genealogy where he comes from his bubbies zadie his great-grandparents and he said mom before the great-great-grandparents where do we come from so she talked to him about abraham isaac and jacob and where did we come from before then we come from noah before then all the way back to adam and eve and what an illustrious pedigree he's inspired and so a couple days later he is being driven to a soccer game by dad so he says you know i'm preparing the bar mitzvah speech and i asked mom about where we come from and he goes into grandparents great-grandparents says but before then where do we come from so he says we come from neanderthals he says but what about before then primates and before then bacteria and so he's a little puzzled he goes back to mom he says mom dad told me something about primates and neanderthals and bacteria he says i don't get it he says listen i can explain it to you he's talking about his side of the family i'm talking about my side of the family and so it all works out and so my hope is that after you have gone through this lecture you will appreciate how we all come from her side of the family and understand and and recognize that who we are today is so intimately involved with who our ancestors were the trials and tribulations the challenges the triumphs of those who came before us and you know king david is one of the most misunderstood biblical figures in history he's also an incredible spanner of generations his personality i would venture to say more than any other personality in the entire bible and i would even go further and say in the entire universal history of mankind there is no single individual who spans the entire continuum of history world history so let us begin from in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth and we know on the sixth day he created adam harishon and khawa and according to the madrish adam and eve were created in the ninth hour of of the day on friday and they were given one single commandment one single realm that they could not engage in all the other realms they're all yours do not eat from the tree of knowledge and according to the madrish they only needed to withstand the temptation for three hours until shabbat if they would have been able to withstand that temptation god would have fed them the friday night meal from that tree and they would have been blessed with divine knowledge so what was the point in not allowing them to eat this tree for three hours well god wanted to gift them this knowledge on his terms not on mankind's terms and when we amass knowledge and when we engage in intellectual uh activity we do so with the cognizance that this is a blessing and a gift from god and so adam and eve failed in this only mitzvah that god had given them and as a result the world as a whole was affected and had now to deal with a mixture of good and evil and from that time and on we're trying to sort out the good from the evil and elevate the good and so this failure of adam and eve has given us for all of time some work to do and so adam we are told looked into the future and tried to find a soul a human being that would be able to rectify their failing that would be able to restore the world to its pre-sin days to its pre-tree of knowledge days which of course is the advent of the messiah of the mashiach when the messiah will come the world will be restored to its original state of of holiness and he found king david's soul the only problem was that king david was only allotted three hours to live and so adam gifted he transferred some miles he gifted 70 years of his life to king david and we know that adam was supposed to live for a thousand years he only ended up living for 930 according to the torah and so david now has 70 years of life to do his work and indeed david lived for exactly 70 years and so let us together trace the journey of david hamelech of king david's soul throughout the generations until he's born in fact there's a fascinating progression of david's life even before he's born so let's fast forward a few generations abraham has a cousin whose name is lot a nephew excuse me his name is lot and lot separates from abraham and he goes to live in sedona god later destroys saddam and saves lot and his two daughters who run to the mountains as it's related in genesis and the most bizarre story is recorded in the torah that lot's two daughters thought that the entire world was destroyed and that there's no one else to continue the human race so they intoxicate their father they are intimate with their own father and they both become pregnant and the older one gives birth to a son and she calls him moav the father of the moabite nation and the word moab is a composite of two words may of from my father moab later becomes the king of moab later becomes the father of ruth now the story of ruth is well known it's recorded in the book of ruth and so ruth follows her mother-in-law back from moab back to the land of israel after she loses her mother-in-law loses her husband and then her hus and ruth's husband dies who's naomi's son and ruth has a sister anybody remember what ruth's sister's name was arpa arpa means shoulder or back she turns her back on naomi she goes back to moab ruth daffkaba ruth is connecting herself to naomi and she goes back to israel with naomi and she goes to collect produce for her mother-in-law humbly collecting along with the poor people and she meets the owner of the field whose name is boaz boz is the judge the leader of the jewish people at that time and boaz ultimately marries ruth now but there's a little story that happens before he actually marries ruth but let's go back for a moment and let's trace the lineage of boaz who is boaz boaz comes from the tribe of judah and goes back to the story of judah himself as one of the tribes who leaves his brothers and has some children with his wife bashua and tamar is his daughter-in-law who married his his son his son dies and tamar performs the leverage marriage with his second son his second son dies and yehuda is a little hesitant to allow tamar to marry his last son his third son so he says to tamar go home shayla is still a little young i'll call you you don't call me and tamar goes to his her father's house she realizes that sheila is not on his way and when tamar's when yehuda's wife passes away yehuda is traveling and she knows prophetically that she is going to have children with yehuda but she doesn't know how it's going to happen but she says to herself and in those days you have to understand things were a little different and she disguises herself herself as a harlot and she puts herself on the crossroads yehuda an angel we're told is pushing him in her direction and they have relations tamar becomes pregnant with twins and she gives birth to parrots and zarach parrots is the great grandfather of boaz wow what a pedigree what a what a an elevated um process or pathway for david hamelach and the question is always asked why is it that king david's ancestry is so colorful and not the righteous mainstream pedigree that you would expect king david to have so there are a number of explanations there's one that the kabbalah offers and tells us that his soul was so powerful was so strong was so holy was so significant for the world that it had to be hidden and snuck in the powers of evil the other forces would not let it be born just so easily so it needed to be disguised where you would least think it would be emerging from furthermore this was to be a precursor of what david would have to experience in his own life challenge adversity and the sharpening and honing of his spiritual instincts that can only happen when one goes through adversity so even on his soul level he was already going through levels of adversity and there's another message we can learn from this as well that david david's greatness is a lesson to each and every one of us that one could be great and one can accomplish amazing things regardless of who your parents are regardless of what economic environment you're born into or whether your parents are great and illustrious and prominent or very simple you can accomplish so much based on who you are and the special divine gifts that each and every one of us has no one should think that i can't succeed because of circumstances per se so here we have king david the greatest personality ever to live and his parents and his ancestry were not exactly the holiest perhaps and so boaz is willing to marry ruth but there is a relative that is that has the right of first refusal and why this is so relevant is because ruth met was married to naomi's son boaz was a relative to naomi so he had what we would call the legal responsibility to marry his relatives widow to continue his relatives line but he had a relative who was first before him in line so he says to ruth i will marry you but i have to check it with plony almoni which means mr so and so he's not mentioned his name is not mentioned because he didn't do the right thing plony almoni was afraid to marry ruth why was he afraid to marry ruth because ruth was a moabite woman and the torah says that a moabite can never marry into the jewish people so how could he marry a moab by woman but what was not really publicized and well known in those days was that this prohibition only applied to the men and not to the women interesting it's the only circumstance where there's a difference between men and women when it comes to the egyptians there is no difference between men and women why is there a difference with the moabite because as the rabbis explain the torah gives us a reason never marry a moabite because they didn't bring you bread and water when you were traveling in the wilderness they weren't hospitable they weren't kind and women were not expected in those days to go out on the highway to provide food it was the men's task so therefore only the men were prohibited from joining the jewish people not the women but that was not well known in those days so plony alimony said i'm not going to taint my lineage with marrying a woman that i'm not supposed to boaz was absolutely certain being the leader of the jewish people that he was allowed to marry ruth so he married her but guess what most people don't know this the next day after his marriage he died wow tongues start wagging you know why he died because he did the wrong thing ploney alimony was right of course this was just another layer of concealment to give david something more to have to contend with because this idea of his illegitimacy would follow him and dog him throughout his life and so boaz passes away boaz has a child ruth gives birth he's the great grandfather of david and the torah and the book of ruth ends that he had a great grandson jesse yeshi and yeshua gave birth to david that's david hamill's birth there is a fascinating midrash that not many people know it's a wild midrash and it gives us some background into david's birth david had seven brothers before him it seems the madras tells us that jesse that yeshi had some doubts about this issue of the moabite woman being allowed to marry and later on in life he could not disavow himself of those doubts he was always concerned and thinking about maybe he is not a legitimate jew because his grandmother was ruth and ruth may not have been kosher and if that's the case he's not allowed to marry his wife who's a full us so he's living in sin with her so he sends her away he separates they don't get divorced but he separates in those days you had many people had more than one wife so he's in a dilemma who can he marry he needs to be married he can't marry a non-jewish woman because maybe he's jewish he can't marry a jewish woman because maybe he's not jewish so he does an interesting you we would never be able to relate to this but this is the way it worked back then he had a slave he had a mistress she his wife had a had a a mis um slave uh a mistress and a what he did was he gave her a letter of emancipation a conditional letter of emancipation and he said if i'm jewish then this letter of emancipation is operative i free you and you are a full-fledged jewish woman and if i'm not jewish then you're not considered free and then i'm allowed to live with you either way it's don't try to understand it it's just part of the story so he's he wants to marry this former servant of his but she used to serve her mistress yisha's wife she couldn't bring herself to do that so she said to her mistress you disguise yourself like rahul and leia and you marry you remarry your husband he won't know who it is and that's exactly what happens he didn't know he thought it was his his um his and she becomes pregnant with david she becomes pregnant he thinks that she has had a relationship outside of the marriage the brothers are incensed and yeshi insists that we need to hush this up he couldn't bring himself to accept that his wife would do that david is born as the black sheep of the family before he even has a chance to take his first breath and he's immediately separated from the rest of the brothers he's immediately put on the side and as soon as he's old enough he sent away from the home to pasture the sheep so david from the very first memory was an outcast in his own family and david expresses this in a beautiful verse of psalm he says i was a stranger to my brothers uh and to a foreigner to the children of my mother could you imagine a kid being raised with that stigma never accepted in his own family always stigmatized and yet we are told that during these days of his adolescence and his childhood he spent it in this in the meadows with the sheep communing with hashem communing with god and this is where the first psalms of the book of psalms were born this is where he got his inspiration to become the sweet singer of israel and as we'll talk about a little bit later his psalms become the source of 75 of every prayer that we pray today has its root in the book of psalms and this is where this young man who refuses to allow his personality to be defined by how he's treated is beginning to grow into manhood meanwhile on the political scene in the land of israel we know that saul was the first king samuel the prophet had anointed saul as the first king for the most part he was very successful but towards the middle of his reign he disobeys god when he does not completely destroy the people of amalek and he doesn't destroy their livestock and he doesn't acknowledge it and it's not a class on saul so we won't go into all the details we'll actually talk a little bit more about that later on in the afternoon and god says to samuel saul is done saul will not continue to be the king and his children will not continue to be the king you need to look for a new king so samuel secretly clandestinely goes to bethlehem where god told him that the next king will come from the house of jesse while saul is still alive while saul is still the king another king is being anointed secretly because if saul would find out he would kill that other king immediately so it's all done under under wraps samuel pays a visit to the house of jesse and he asked him to line up his children and the first one the oldest one whose name is aliyev a tall broad-shouldered handsome charismatic individual a person you would think would be fit to be the king and samuel stands in front of him and said negan i'm standing opposite the anointed one of god and you know what god tells him samuel altabate el marejou don't judge a book by its cover don't look at how he looks look inside this is not the king he has a temper he has other character traits that are not fit for royalty and he goes down the list everyone they come before samuel samuel says no no no no no he turns to jiashi yishai and it's interesting because he says do you have anybody else in your household because david wasn't even sent for nobody thought david had a chance of being the king he was a shepherd boy he was the black sheep and you notice that samuel did not say to yeshi do you have any more children because yeshua would have said no he said do you have anyone else in your household and yeshua had to admit yes there is one more david he's with the sheep and samuel said bring him in and as soon as david walked into the room samuel said this is the next king to the shock of his family oh my gosh jesse at that moment recognizes that david's his son or else that would never be possible all of the suddens david davis legitimacy is clear to his brothers to everyone and how does the tanakh describe david's appearance very fascinatingly amazingly david is referred to as an admoni he's a ruddy of ruddy complexion where else do we have a description in the torah where someone is called admoni asav the wicked esau son of yitzhak david is described in the same way as esau has described and he's actually pretty short not kingly looking at all but it's interesting the other description that the tanakh gives us is that he was yephei enayim he had good eyes beautiful eyes and we take this to mean that it they were not only physically beautiful eyes but spiritually he was able to see the good and the holy in everything around him he had beautiful eyes and something i neglected to tell you earlier on is that chava eve when she was being tempted by the serpent to partake of the tree of knowledge how does the torah describe the intensity of her temptation the tree of knowledge looked good to her and it was too difficult a temptation to withstand so she you the torah uses the word so we have the contrast david king david will begin his process of the rectification of the sin of the tree of knowledge with his eyes through his eyes which is where eve failed eve couldn't withstand the temptation of his eyes good and the holy in every aspect of life so david is called a admoni and we are told that king david's soul emanated from the same root as esau's soul extraordinary isa was the wickedest person ever to live and we're told that david hamelek's nature was a very violent one and indeed he fought many many wars he was able to channel his violent tendencies to the service of god so esau was not predestined to be a wicked person he was just created with tendencies that he would have to work a lot harder to keep himself on the straight and narrow esau failed in his in his test and david would take the same nature but sublimate it and guide it and channel it into the service of god the gemara tells us that if you have this interesting affinity with blood you like to see blood become a moral become a kosher slaughterer channel it into something positive because if you don't it will ooze out into the negative and this was the essence of david's life he was always struggling to do the right thing it wasn't easy for him and he lived a very difficult life we always have this notion that kings live a life of privilege and comfort everything is provided for them they live in palaces and they have limos and guards and david hamelech probably lived very few peaceful days in his life and so david is the next king but it has to be under wraps meanwhile as soon as david was anointed saul was stricken with inexplicable depression because the spirit of royalty had descended from saul and now was placed on david you can't have two kings so although he was du jour he was the legal king but the facts of the matter was that david was now the king in hiding in waiting so he was a shell of his former self meanwhile the jewish people are facing challenges from the philistines and we all know the story of david and goliath let me give you the the rest of the story gullius was challenging the jewish people he had this incredible strategy he said as follows why should we fight full-blown wars and destroy each other's cities and towns and all the assets that will that belong to the victor why don't we do a cleaner way of war it's almost like the virtual battlefield today you choose a strong mighty warrior to fight against me whoever wins takes the other's country and gets a country that functions that's ready to go without having to rebuild it so gullius would come every morning and taunt god and taunt the jewish people and challenge them to send forth someone who would fight him normally that would have been saul saul would have taken up the challenge and he would have beat goliath but saul was overtaken by fear he didn't have the confidence anymore so day after day golias would taunt the jewish people and ridicule them what you have no your cowards you're a bunch of nobodies david for some reason was in the camp at that time he hears the taunts of goliath he's inspired and filled with this rage against goliath who dared blaspheme god in that way and he was overcome by the sense that he could beat goliath so he went to saul to ask permission now of course what i didn't tell you that david was a har player and he would play for saul and and lift his spirit so saul knew who david was saul is afraid to let david go david convinces him and david goes on to the battlefield and we all know the story but before i tell you what happens just something you may not be aware of is that goliath is david's cousin because arpa the sister of ruth way way back then when she went back to moab she married a moabite and goliath is her great grandchild so david is up against his own blood on the side of the philistines and david is on the side of the jewish people coming from ruth and we all know the story he has a well-placed stone there's a lot of explanations that's exactly what happened medically we heard about it in the class yesterday and goliath is killed and a great great victory the jewish people had and great joy and people are dancing in the streets and praising david and kind of ignoring saul and this is where the jealousy begins saul says to his advisor who is that guy quite extraordinary he knew who david was but he wanted to know where does he come from can he possibly be the next king not my children but him and they told him he came from parrots and he started to get worried and then one of his advisers says don't worry about david he's an illegitimate child his great grandmother was a moabite not allowed to marry and so begins the stigma newly brought forward that would again dog david even after he becomes king and so david spends years running from saul many of the psalms if you take a look at their meaning the the introduction is these are the words of david as he is being chased by saul or as he's running from saul or as the kohanim of nob are slaughtered because they gave shelter to david and so on and so forth many of the psalms were written as heartfelt please that god not forsake him in these very very difficult days saul is killed on the battlefield david is instated as the king not all the people except him he has seven years where only the tribe of judah and benjamin accept him and then later on he's moved from chevron to jerusalem and he begins his his reign you would think his troubles are over his own children rebel against him and the most well-known episode of king david's life is which one no kidding you are there's no argument about that and so david is has such a close relationship with god he speaks to him every day when things are going well he thanks hashem when things are going more difficult he praised hashem and he says to god you know the jewish people are going to pray the shemonia they're going to say avraham familiar the god of isaac abraham isaac and jacob i would like that they should also say the god of david and god said i don't know about that not so sure that you rank all the way up there with them because they had many many tests and you have had tests but not as many so david says well honey hashem do me a favor god and test me and god said you really you really okay with that and david said yeah bring it on well the next night he goes up on the roof he sees batsheva bathing he can't feels overwhelmed and he takes her she was married to another person at the time i'm not going to go into all the legal aspects that the gemara says that she was legally divorced and because her husband had gone to battle but it definitely isn't the way you begin a relationship not for a king the jewish king and this becomes the defining event of his life so what happens he has this relationship later on of course she becomes the mother of muhammad but that's this is before then god sends not nathan the prophet to have a little conversation with him and nathan comes to david he says you know david i want to tell you about the following story and i need your advice it says there were two farmers one of them had a full farm heads of cattle many many heads of cattle and the other farmer the neighbor had only one cow and one day the rich farmer was having guests so he goes to the poor farmer takes the poor farmer's only cow because he doesn't want to you know bite into his herd and he slaughters that cow for his guests what is the verdict what should be done to this person so david says that person shall die and nathan pointed his finger at him and he said you are that person you had and could have had any of the women in the in the kingdom and you went and you took a person's only wife you're you're gonna die and david says something his response reverberates throughout history he turns around to nathan the prophet and you know what he could have told you could have said to nathan what all the other kings have said in the history of the jewish people when the prophet came to chastise them get the heck out of here how dare you speak to me like that put them in prison persecute them david turns to nathan the prophet and humbly says khatasi i have sinned and psalm 51 is dedicated to david's penitence to david's repentance and david says the khatoshi negdy saw me this sin of batsheva was with him all his life he was repenting over and over again for this sin and this is the greatest moment in king david's life notwithstanding all the victories on the battlefield and preparing for the better mikdash this moment of contrition of royalty on its knees before hashem that is the gift of repentance that david gave to the jewish people for all of history if david could repent then who are we to think that we're above that who are we to think that we can't acknowledge that we're not perfect this was greater than the righteousness of david in fact this augmented cemented gave david's righteousness a wholesomeness to it that made it achievable for each and every one of us to achieve that righteousness because being perfect is not a prerequisite to being righteous it's being humble it's acknowledging and taking responsibility for your actions and then david's response to god in one another's psalm is al to vieni li denis sawyer and god please no more tests i i'm not great enough i acknowledge avraham yaakov david i'm out of it and king david as a result becomes the greatest model for a human being a person who lived an incredible life of challenge and adversity and greatness and acknowledging his feelings and it's interesting that david hamelech royalty emanates from the royal sphere kabbalistic sphere of malhot of kingship and we're said that the attribute of malhot synonymous with the moon which waxes and wanes which is synonymous with the jewish people who count who reckon their calendar after the cycle of the moon and what's fascinating about the moon is it doesn't have its own light it's a reflection of the sun and that's why the moon waxes and wanes because according to the position of the moon vis-a-vis the sun that's how much of the moon you're going to see and the moon is a reflection of the sun for the sake of giving light in the darkness so god says to jewish royalty if you will consider yourself as only a reflection of me of the son which is representative of hashem then you will succeed then you will be a successful monarch humility and royalty go hand in hand they're not contradictions when you're humble and you recognize that all your greatness emanates from a higher source then you could lead boldly then you could lead fearlessly then you can be a representative of god's kingship in this world and indeed that's what a jewish king is a jewish king is a human being who acknowledges the sovereignty of god as an example to the rest of the country to the rest of the people that if the king could bow before god then every other subject in the country should be able to do the same and so david hamelech was the paradigm of a jewish king the quintessential king the humble servant of god and that is why his prayers his words in the telum become a conduit for our words of prayer a channel for our words of prayer because they were so selfless they were so clean of any static of human ego and so we can put our thoughts and troubles and simchas and joyous events within the words of the psalm and finally king david lived in the 14th generation from abraham solomon lived in the 15th generation the 15th day of the month is high full moon that represents the zenith of the jewish people's existence at that time and indeed solomon comes from the word comes from the word shalom peace he built the sanctuary david was preparing for that and the temple was destroyed in the 30th generation the day just before the new moon the day where the sun is this where the moon disappears and so david hamelach who is the ancestor of the mashiach prepared the world for the ultimate redemption through his descendant and so we see how the soul of david spans the entire continuum of jewish history of world history from adam all the way to the end of time to the coming of mashiach david's nishama's rape radiates throughout those generations and so we're told that on the day that the temple was destroyed the messiah was born the messiah of that generation that on the day that we experienced our greatest destruction in our history was the beginning of the planting of the new seeds of redemption and that's why the next day is rosh chodesh because the next day we celebrate the birth of the new moon ever so small of a sliver as the moon begins to appear again and so we look towards that day when all of david's suffering and all of david's sacrifice and all of david's investment in his life to bring forward the line of the messiah will come to pass and as we we we say in our prayers three times a day let our eyes be able to see tangibly when god will return his spirit to zion may it happen speedily in our days amen thank you if you like that video hit the subscribe button and notification bell below for hours of the best jewish content 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Channel: Jewish Learning Institute

Views: 104,114

Keywords: jli, Jewish Learning Institute

Id: erbKW9qZBrE

Length: 50min 29sec (3029 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021