Accepting Risk (Ep. 177)

hi this is deborah dolowski welcome to the robert arlowski show whether you're watching with our friends over at tour anytime or wherever you watch or listen to your podcast it's always a pleasure to have you along for the experience hey you want to build a studio how about that now you don't have to build it from scratch you could just rent the location and outfit it with all the equipment so that we could raise the level of the robiolovsky show for the thousands and thousands of listeners who listen all around the world and uh you know we'll have a more permanent location we'll name it after you or anybody that you want so uh if you're interested please contact uh admin at raviolovsky.com and uh we'll be happy to have a studio named after you as you know uh we um we do things uh a little bit uh on the fly over here and uh we do the best that we can and uh in fact somebody uh submitted a question recently uh um you know how does the show work and everything i advise you to go to our third anniversary show where i interview our producer and i don't think he would be a verse if he had a professional studio to work in so if so uh like i say we're always happy to um if anyone's interested if this speaks to you yeah different things speak to different people and i happen to know that this is a um tremendous uh physic for a lot of people but we'd be able to say from the studios of the robberyolowski show that would be your name would that be exciting anyway just throwing that in and we have a sponsor for this episode it's sponsored in memory of rivka baskerville and sponsored by the freeds and memory of mrs grinberger and my wife in fact grew up uh with the green burgers and the shawl and uh it was uh they're very very special people and i'm honored that we can uh dedicate the uh the show uh in memory of that yard site and uh it should be uh an aliyah for the shama and it should be as close for the entire family who i am not at liberty to go through everything they're going through but they're going through a lot and they are wonderful wonderful people who do so much good work uh for claudiusville so it should uh be an uh leah from the neshama and for the entire that they should see only sanchez okay something i want to talk about and uh i'm i'm gonna base it on one of the questions yes you know we have question and answer at the end for those of you who don't make it to the end of the podcast um jay gelb asks how does someone stay calm and level-headed when they are frustrated in an agitating situation so that's what i really was going to talk about this week anyway when i was looking over the questions and i saw that question i thought well doesn't that targeted the question is the following at the end of devarim that's talking about when you're going out to muhammad there is a mitzvah not to be afraid yeah and there's four different le shyness of don't be afraid yeah don't be afraid don't be afraid don't be afraid don't be afraid don't be afraid don't panic don't lose heart it all comes differently shyness and rashi says because the enemy does four different things they trample their horses they bang their shields they blow chauffeurs and they scream out in human voices desolate points out the one thing they have in common is they're all just sound sound and fury and signifying nothing the words of shakespeare it's just uh uh it's just noise but it frightens us and it's an interesting thing you hear a loud noise you get frightened what is that it's nothing just a noise people get afraid we get afraid now that doesn't mean that there aren't scary things in the world right uh a person who can't pay his bills it's scary it's a scary thing people made investments the investments went bad the gemara brings that as an example of uh of tierda people are worried i see my ship floundering at sea and i have all my investments in the merchandise on that ship it sinks i'm going to lose everything well that's scary there's no question about it yeah you're walking down uh the street in a in a bad neighborhood like anywhere in new york and you're afraid you're afraid i'm not going to tell you there's nothing to be afraid of we were uh at the kaiser we went to darwin like we we doing kodash me or my wife and i got a little lost wandering through the shook areas that we don't usually know you know my wife gets nervous and uh so i it was very hot i said if you want we can walk around the long way you know through the armenian quarter and through the jewish quarter or we can take the shortcut through the arab shook and it's covered over so uh you gotta decide what am i more afraid of heat stroke or getting killed it's so terrorist so she chose the terrorists so we go through the shock and it okay except at some point the sewage was backing up you had to like wade through sewage and uh women and i don't mean my wife in particular here but women in general wear the most ridiculous shoes you know they have these shoes that are called flats they're basically slippers only without the support that men's slippers have and they just walk down the street with this it's like wearing nothing know but they don't want to wear army boots you know or something that's really strong and secure you know so she was wearing sneakers but the sneakers have holes in them and it was really horrible she was really upset anyway we get to the turn off and the turnovers close because they're doing construction so we had to continue down into the shook and um uh further down into the shook and we turned in and okay we got to the castle we said we're going to walk back to the show and as we walk through this uh other exit we come back and i see the shook right in front of us so i said okay we go this way maurice says i'm pretty sure we came down the stairs and i said no no the shook is right here you know say anything with enough confidence and even if people know that you're wrong they will believe you [Laughter] now my wife my wife says okay anyway it turns out that the arab strike is much larger than we were aware of i didn't know there was a drugstore you know in the middle of the arab shook they were selling clothing there was toy stores every time we were in a different section of the shop than we had ever been in before and although my wife was pretty confident on the regular you know shook this was we didn't know where we were i still don't know where we were anyway so uh but it goes on for a very long time i didn't see so many from people or police around anymore and uh my wife was kind of nervous and uh fine eventually found our way back we found uh found signs towards the uh towards the uh sharia for the jaffa gate but we also saw signs for shashlam which we don't usually go through and uh eventually we made it back it was kind of scary and i'm not worried i'm worried for my wife i'm not worried for me because um orlovski's never die in dramatic ways we just don't we don't die in plane crashes that's why during covet i knew i wasn't going to die of covet we don't die in pandemics we don't we don't get killed in terrorist attacks we die from diabetes and heart disease that's how orlawski's have gone for hundreds of years we don't die we just we fade away we wither my mother made it till 89 in terrible health she had heart failure for 20 years she was just she was a wreck yeah and i said we all go we we slowly fade away but my wife i don't know you know she's she's a big sardacas you know she might be right for something to happen cause for sure you know but she was really nervous and i said there's nothing to be nervous about because getting nervous doesn't help you either we're going to get killed or we're not going to get killed it's really very simple there's nothing to be afraid of fear does not help you fear um comes from one thing and that is a lie could be talking coach burkha runs the world and you have to take precautions the messil sushem says there is a mitzvah ushmaritem you are required to take uh care of yourself and make sure that you're not being irresponsible that's why the people who say well i'll throw myself over building it if i'm supposed to die i'll die and if not i won't that's not true because the aveira of shemartam is not sure i'm alone the fact that you went against rats and hashem is enough for you to die if you weren't supposed to die so what can you do you you look at a situation and you take all reasonable precautions reasonable so there are people who will never fly because the plane could crash listen a lot more people are killed in car crashes than plane crashes okay so i won't you know uh i won't uh i won't drive a car you know more people die from falling out of the bed than by getting hit by lightning and yet in a lightning storm you see nobody will go outside so maybe you should put your mattress on the floor and not sleep in a bed because you're taking a risk everything's a risk i'm on a lot of medications because surprise surprise i have diabetes and heart disease [Laughter] it comes with the territory anyway so uh um when you open up a box of medication that comes with a paper very very long paper with very small writing everything that could possibly happen to you now sometimes they do sometimes they do but they're obligated to put in all the possible side effects um i was given this one diabetes drug i don't know what it's called in the market it's called amaryl here and i wake up in the middle of night with these terrible leg cramps but like unbearable leg cramps they won't stop it's from the medication it's a side effect so i stopped taking it eventually i took a lower dose and every now and then i wake up at night with a cramp i can usually walk it off sometimes i can't uh it's a terrible terrible terrible thing but i need it because my my blood sugar is too high i take a uh uh a shot once a week it's called uh osampec it makes me nauseous i can't take the full dose i just can't i get so nauseous i can't get out of bed so okay so i take enough that it's having some impact but i don't get the terrible terrible noisy i get a little nausea yeah everything's everything is a risk factor you have to take things into account when you go in for uh surgery or certain procedures and you need anesthesia they make you sign a release form because there's lots of stuff that can go wrong with anesthesia i had a colonoscopy and they said do you want the anesthesia i said or what so some people who are afraid of the anesthesia so they have it without anesthesia now this is about 50 feet of flexible tubing that they're going to put in to uh an organ of your body where things usually come out and don't go in and i was like i'll take my risk with the anesthesia i met someone he says his wife was afraid she did not take the anesthesia it was unpleasant it's a nice way of putting it [Laughter] i was actually going for a colonoscopy and the gastro said we'll also do an endoscopy that's where they go into your mouth and go down i said okay but if you're going to use the same tube do the endoscopy first they said no no we have different tooths just be on the safe side okay so you always have risks and you have to take those risks into account and there's no way to avoid all the risk in your life so what you have to do in a situation is say the best i can do is be reasonable and so there's a difference between being cautious and being phobic i'm terrified and listen we saw this during covet do you ever see people sitting in their car by themselves wearing their mask do you ever see somebody walking down the street with nobody around outside wearing a mask because people were terrified terrified it was interesting they did a study democrats as democrats you know what percentage of people who get or hospitalized i think they thought it was something like 80 percent the real answer was like 2 percent there's just fear just just people are terrified so you have to be talking i could borrow who runs the world and i'm not going to be able to live a life without any risk i have to take a certain amount of risk there's going to be a certain amount of calculated risk that i take in do i do a procedure do i not do a procedure i remember when my father had his heart attack they brought him to uh mercy hospital in rockville center that's where the that's where the ambulance went and uh they went to consult with major cardiologists so there's a place called saint francis which is a heart hospital that's all they do is they specialize in heart and they said listen they don't have the facilities to deal with your father's condition you have to move him here and the doctor in mercy hospital said if you move him it could kill him so what do you do you're going to have to take it you have to take a chance there's some risk involved if i stay here there's a doctor who says that he's going to die and if i move him there's a doctor who says he's going to die so we asked three major cardiologists two said movements one said keep them and so two to one they moved him they they did the operation and he and he survived thank god but um you've got to make a decision in every situation you have to make a a decision there's going to be risk and which one do you do i during the holocaust the decisions that people had to make i run them over in my head from time to time i just can't wrap my head around it i remember talking to somebody and i said how come people didn't leave and he said to me leave he says people were so poor they didn't have they didn't have money to put food on their table how do you think they were we were going to go they were surrounded by anti-semites all around them what do you think they were going to they were going to take a shuttle to the airport and get on a plane first of all all the countries were closed to them and every place around them was uh was was anti-semitic governments and they had no money so fleeing hide in the in the forest who says the young strong men what about the children what about what about the elderly do you abandon them or do you stay you try to try to work with them hope this is going to pass i mean nobody could anticipate what was going to happen obviously this was so outside of the realm of imagination no one had ever experienced anything like this with a total genocide there was no hope nothing to do maybe they would have made different decisions but where do you go what do you do riveran cutler uh did the villenegan's gorilla it's a special way of flipping pages in a particular type of uh tanakh till you come to a posic and you count certain parashiots and pursue my whole thing anyway he did the girl and it came out hashem said to arun to go to moshe you know that pasek when moshe was coming to mitsurai so he says well the most famous moshe alive now moshe feinstein he's in america so i'm going to go west and they said don't go west that's where the nazis are coming from he says i'm going west the other town went east turns out that the nazis circled around he survived the others didn't i have to make a decision where do i go what do i do how the decisions that you have to make and do i wait do i wait over here do i go there should i try this you just get trapped okay but sometimes it's not it's not that decision um i was in america with my wife and my nephew was getting married up in muncie it was in november and uh i left myself an hour and a half to get to muncie from long island all of a sudden there was a freak snowstorm a freak snows in november okay so we set out i was skidding a couple times a little scary but okay we get onto the highway we get going a little bit and then stand still we're not moving turns out there was a 20 car pile up on the george washington bridge where you supposed to go you're stuck i have to get to muncie i'm on an island long island is an island yeah i have to get off so my brother managed to you know get off of where he was and he got onto the tappan zee bridge and when he got to muncie all the roads were closed because all the cars skidded in the snow and they were accidents all over the place and all the roads were closed he had to turn around he made it all the way to muncie had to turn around and come home a lot of the people who made made it to the house and i just put on snow suits and and you know and trudged by foot to get to the hall you you're stuck in traffic what do i do do i stay on this road do i go to another road i have to make decisions i can't so today you have ways just do whatever waze tells you to do you know don't make any of your own decisions ways are good ways they'll tell you what to do [Laughter] if you have ways you know it's sure i don't have ways you know i have a phone in america that i can get ways by here so nothing i do i have to make my own decisions you're stuck in traffic what are you supposed to do where do you go you know what's going on in the airports now i spoke about this in podcast when i was there and they suddenly they cancelled my flight down to memphis back from memphis there was one seat on one plane over in philadelphia i had to get to philadelphia to get on this one plane with one seat left and then when i'm leaving memphis there are no flights out any place nothing you can do come back tomorrow with the witch's broomstick you know and you just stop what do you do and you hear these stories going on now you're reading the news people were sitting on a plane for five hours waiting to take off and then the crews timed out so they had to cancel the flight the people on it that happened to me once on united leaving our show it was delayed so much that the crew timed out they were they were still okay but in the middle of the flight they would run out so they would just have to stop and you know parachute out you know leave you and you can't land without the crew because as you're leaving you have to have somebody going bye bye so long thank you thank you for coming by bye bye thank you thank you very much bye bye otherwise how can you get off the plane [Laughter] oh i don't have the guts but i always wanted to when we hit the tarmac i wanted to scream out i would like to be the first to welcome you the newark airport in the studio no no i want to be the first one no you're the second to welcome them i'm the first one but uh you're in an airport what do i do should i switch flights should i go over here do i do this what do i do how do i and you're trapped you're trapped when somebody's getting close to shabbos do i get off the plane do i stay on the plane do i take my chances oh my gosh you know the decisions people have to make decisions decisions so you do the best you can and there's no point being afraid because being afraid is not going to change the situation you have to you have to trust in hashem and you have to do the best that you can and you can rethink situations a hundred times but how do you know very kineric that's how it was the mushrik in for many years he escaped with the mirror from europe and someone asked him well khan invasion was in america when the when the war broke out and he went back to europe to be with the yeshiva why did he go i connected he really didn't unders nobody knew he didn't know this was going to be extermination he thought it was going to be a rough time people world war one was a terrible time for the yeshivas and they were kicked out of here and kicked out of there and the poverty and it was terrible but it wasn't extermination we had no basis for understanding this nobody knew what was going to happen it's easy after the fact i'm so smart now that i know what happened so you gotta make decisions i gotta i gotta be reasonable and being afraid doesn't get you anywhere if if if being frightened would help but you got to make the best decision you can and then trust in hashem it's a famous story with briskarov that there was bombing going on and he's in the room and he walks here and he walks there and he's looking around trying to decide what the safest place is and once he decided he laid down and went to sleep that's it what am i being afraid for you can you get you can uh paralyze yourself with fear and so you have to have confidence i forgot who it was there was a french philosopher i i had written this down once upon a time to look it up but he says um most of the things that kill us are things that never happen it's worrying they say we're concerned there might be this we want to do a test you know and until the test results come in you're so frightened and then the test results come in and it's like no it's fine there's nothing there and you just you just worry and worry and worry i'm so afraid what if this what if that but talk about hashem now when you go out to battle it says don't be afraid that doesn't mean that you're going to survive the battle but being afraid is not going to help there's no guarantee you're going to be successful you've got to do the best you can you got to be reasonable and you take reasonable precautions and you make reasonable decisions in life and that's how you go about it that's the best that you can do we're living in scary times no question about it iran keeps upping their nuclear weapons and they've been very clear who they want to use it on remember the 1960s during the tarmullera who used to write funny songs so he was writing about nuclear proliferation and just remember there was one verse there egypt's gonna get one too just to use on you know who so israel's getting tense wants one in self-defense the lord's our shepherd says the psalm but just in case we better get a bomb so now it's iran and they're very clear if we have a bomb we want to use it and drop it on israel it's amazing i remember one summer where you could go up north because lebanon was shelling us and you couldn't you know you couldn't go anywhere you know near near gaza because they were shelling us so you had to you know go between that you were sheliman bene brock you know back and forth that's that's how you spend venus vine you know a third of the country we're in bomb shelters what can you do you can be afraid to be afraid i was a fellow from south africa we were friendly with and um he was in town when the uh suicide bomber blew himself up near cafe ramon and he got shrapnel in him that they couldn't remove and uh my kids say does it hurt he says no but when it gets cold the middle gets cold inside of my arm so he says so do you regret that you came to israel and he says no you think this wouldn't have happened to me in south africa every bullet has a name you have to take precautions you have to be reasonable there's no way you can stop living no way you can you can avoid everything there's no there's no life without risk there's always going to be risk this fellow from south africa he left south africa because he was uh you know afraid of the crime came to america a couple of uh guys attacked him in his house shot him thank god he lived but uh where's the guarantee but talk about hashem there's no point in being afraid you have to have confidence you have to be uh uh sure that occurs who is there he's watching after you i've had to coofers where my uh where my career was uh was on the ropes and i had people give me suggestions do this do that i said listen god knows who i am he knows where i live my file is open on his desk he knows you think if i tried this or i tried that i'll be more successful you have to be talking i told this story uh my son had a very very long list of what he was looking for in a shira and i said listen you got to do this you know he says i am i happy talking and i darwin that's the stuff i said look there aren't many girls out there that you're looking like the one that you're looking for he says but ah but i only need one founder [Laughter] because he'll be talking being afraid not going to help so that's what we have to do we have to we have to be confident as we go into difficult difficult times this is a difficult time all the things that are going on around the world it's scary scary one thing you should do is not watch the news it doesn't help [Laughter] and the other thing is you have to know because pearl runs the world you have to have confidence and you have to be sure about your relationship with hashem and that's what you should focus on and that brings us to the question and answer portion of the ruby yolovsky show anonymous asks what do i do if i impossibly get angry how do i stop well speaking as someone who has an anger problem i was born angry meadows are something that you're born with and uh i was born with anger i had to work on it a lot the thing that i found that was very interesting is i remember seeing this in one of the muslims firm that when you get angry it's like a spark and if there's no fuel then the spark goes out spark itself goes away you may not have that control because of your amiibos that when you see something go the question is do you give that fuel do you let it get going stop the ramban and then garrison ramban says that stika is a very important thing because it saves you from cars don't say anything if you're angry walk away walk away from the situation you don't have to respond you don't have to say anything yeah you have to you have to calm yourself down that's very important so do not give fuel to the fire the more you give to it the worst that it is anonymous asks in most cases how come you find that kids especially teenagers get along with grandparents better than parents it's simple because grandparents don't have any responsibility i mean it used to be that way yeah parents have the job to raise the kid if the grandparents give the kids uh candy give them soda with caffeine they don't have to stay up all night when the kid is going crazy from a sugar high or caffeine high the parents have to deal with it grandparents can be much more relaxed because they're not responsible to raise the children parents have to raise the children every ari khan once made a very interesting observation he says in judaism god is our father and christianity he's our grandfather christianity god doesn't have any expectations of you it's all love it's all this he doesn't care what you do or what what happens but a parent is worried you understand a parent who says to a kid you don't have to go to bed you don't have to take a bath you can eat all the candy you want you have to go to school social services will take the kid away because that's called neglect it's not called being a parent a parent has an obligation to raise the kid grandparents don't so grandparents aren't as invested and so it's easier for them to be able to be less involved parents parents not only are worried about the kids but also they're the ones who are held responsible when a kid does something wrong when a kid is crying on an airplane it's the parent's problem when a kid is in a supermarket having a temper tantrum it's the parent's problem anonymous asks thereof has a reputation for being funny is it ever hard to be funny does this ever cause a pressure to be funny when you're not interested so uh i i i i i speaking a personal level my father told me from the time that i was little that you're a lawyer and you're never going to succeed and if i don't take care of you you will starve to death and that's true by the way i believe that anyway so my father believed it was possible to come up with a system to win at dice and he spent the last years of his lives trying to come up with a system of dice and he would always tell me i'm going to leave this to you my dice system this way whenever you need money you could just go to atlantic city and you can gamble for a few hours and you'll be able to make a parnosa i'll leave the business and the house and everything to the kids but i'll leave you my dice system [Laughter] he never figured out the system you know so uh so i got left some urusha but i i said my father in heaven said the same thing you're a lawyer if i don't take care of you you'll never be able to do anything so he gave me a different matana he made me funny um it's just almost automatic so sometimes it's gerhard sometimes i sit down you figure out a way to what word is funny you try different words you know i know this from comedians you find certain words uh if you know my yb jewish you know uh pestilence you know i don't know why pestilence is a very funny word [Laughter] we have to say pestilence and people are already laughing you know so it's a total gift so um even when i am speaking seriously sometimes a joke will slip in uh i had somebody who was very upset at me he said this is about program and he said you know you get up and you tell jokes i said i don't tell jokes it was a very moving thing and he pointed out this one this one this one there's a few jokes that slipped in without my even realizing it little asides yeah so um do i have a pressure yeah yeah there are some times when i'm giving a share and i think to myself this is dull now sometimes the torah itself is so exciting the way i'm presenting it and i don't have to do anything else but sometimes only giving a public share and what i have four goals when i give a share i said i want to say because i very often have tammy who are listening i want to say something that's new i want to be practical i want to be inspiring and i want to be entertaining i want people to walk away and have a good good time so i have four goals and i feel like it's not entertaining enough so then i yeah i i have to come up with something but uh but if you've ever seen people who try too hard to be funny it's very sad and that's why they're a certain abundant they don't try to be funny they're not funny and uh they get by with the torah or with the inspiration or whatever else they do i happen to have a gift that uh coach baruch who gave me yeah to be able to do it anonymous asks how is it for the rev to move towards some regard to a two-day yantif thank you for such a wonderful show it was fantastic it was great now i'll give you an example you work very very hard for the pesach seder and you put everything you have into the pesach cedar and you'll get schmidt and the next day davin take a nap you know have lunch and have uh and it's over in america you now have to psych yourself up for another seder and the sad thing is you have people who say oh i like the second side of better because i'm too tired at the first one but the first one is dear isa so you really get a feel for what the torah envisioned when you have a one day yandeff it makes you appreciate it that much more so for me i found that it added tremendously to my voters hashem is it possible to learn the entire torah so that's an interesting question the rambam in his introduction says you have a mitzvah to learn torah to learn the whole torah which means the mitzvah to learn the torah sheikh viksav and the tara sheba so teresa wasab is very easy 24 books of the bible so you know what that is um the random says teresh about is bigger because there's shas and there's um well he didn't really have the mafirsha band you know but there's all the halachic uh midrashim sephirah the safri the bachelte yeah and all those things that you have to get for us there's also the the tour and the to to be able to get that down and to understand it to get the turrish paper um so the rambam writes the beginning of mr torah i'm writing this because this is all you need for uh for turismo just learn this safe and you'll have all the tourism in it so that was one of the objections people had to the mishnah torah and that's why the rivide wrote a parish where he argued with the rambam in order to protect the mishnah torah from being this self-contained safer but yeah you can you can learn the entire torah having said that of course not because there's shattam on top of shatman dreshes on top of jurashas so so reby see ugly the tana said that in the yam of torah i've learned one drop there's always more but there's a certain just like by torah there's a definition there's a definition to tourish about pair that a person can learn and needs to learn okay that's it for this uh for this episode if you want to find out more about the show you can go to my website rubyalovsky.com you can leave a comment you can sponsor an episode you can have sign up for any of my online shirum the trelashier is moving along beautifully and i get tremendous feedback from the participants it's really adding to that feeling they tell me and i know it's adding to mine too uh there's two missile shisharam there's a da fiomi uh it gives you an opportunity to be able to sign up and participate in the shoe room people ask me why don't you put the shiram online i said because the shirt is interactive by definition i can't give a shirt and put it online because it's not it's not between the two people that's what a sheer has to be has to be interactive um and that's it for uh for this week if uh hope to be able to see you at the next one until then i am david orlowski and this is the raviolovsky show