Mind Flex - Rebbetzin Lori Palatnik and Josh Brody

[Music] so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm coming to you from jerusalem the eternal capital of the jewish people the birds are singing my neighbors are out and it's a pleasure to speak to you from my home how do you make god laugh tell them your plans here we are at the beginning of 2021 and what do usually people do at the beginning of the year well they make new year's resolutions at the beginning of 2020 a lot of people made new year's resolutions a friend of mine told me her number one resolution was to do more travel well how do you think that worked out if we look back whether it's last rosh hashanah or for sure last january 2020 new year's resolutions all bets are off this has not been easy and people have struggled on many levels and i have to tell you one of the number one things that people struggled with and so many people reached out to me was the feeling that i'm not in control the anxiety that things are out of control i'm here to tell you that you love not being in control you think you don't but you do you love it so much you'll pay for it scary movies horror films roller coasters mystery novels suspense novels we love this feeling what's going to happen so what's going on in 2020 i have to tell you i do not like the feeling of not being in control i i do not go on roller coasters i do not go bungee jumping i do not pay for horror films i really don't understand the concept of these cyclone ups down roller coasters why should i pay them to have that feeling they should be paying me and that's why i really struggled many years ago in my quest to understand is there a god the first of the ten commandments is a ni hashem i am god that doesn't sound much like a commandment it kind of sounds like a statement i am god don't murder don't steal don't commit adultery those are commandments so what's the commandment maimonides the rambam from the 12th century explains to us that the commandment the first of the ten commandments is to know there is a god to know how do you know anything in life how do you know how do you know your mother's your mother how do you know you weren't adopted how do you know your mother's your birth mother imagine god forbid you grew up in a extremely dysfunctional family and i have to tell you that every family is dysfunctional it's just to the degree of the dysfunction but imagine it's like crazy like off the charts spooky dysfunction and parents die and now there is a fight between the siblings suing each other over the inheritance siblings are claiming that you were adopted and trying to gain some of your inheritance because of it crazy stuff now you're in court and you're on the stand and the their lawyer is telling you prove that you were not adopted what are you gonna say and there's a lot of money on the line well some people tell me like i would tell them here here's my birth certificate oh that's right birth certificates can never be forged i i look just like my mom look look you know i know somebody in toronto who really suffered for years from infertility and they ended up adopting a boy in romania from romania this boy looks so much like her husband you would think they were cloned so people say this and they told me and there were pictures oh yeah they were at the hospital when you were born but she wasn't your birth mother what's the evidence well usually people finally come to dna dna now we have conclusive evidence so when i was on my journey my journey to know there is a god i needed evidence now this is not to have faith and this is not just to believe this is to know i wanted in my quest of research and questioning and and because it's very active knowledge is active i wanted very much the the end result the conclusion would be there is no god then i could just go back to my life i had a very good life before i came into this very serious jewish world i wasn't looking for anything i wasn't lacking for anything but how could i just walk away and pretend or decide on something so important without knowing i grappled i questioned it was not simple in the end in my quest my conclusion was not only that there is a god but that god gave the torah to the jewish people at mount sinai and if there is a god and god gave the torah to the jewish people at mount sinai i guess i better read it and understand what's in it and then how do i fit into this where do i fit this was not an overnight journey and i believe that the jewish journey is one that never ends even at your last breath because we go through challenges and even when you know something when challenges come either it's going to strengthen your knowledge and belief and or it's going to shatter it the more evidence you have and constant reminders the less you're going to be shattered the less you're going to be weakened but sometimes it's not that we're broken when things happen to us in life we get cracks and as rabbi lord jonathan sax says that when we have cracks light can come in looking back at 2020 that's what happened how did we get through it looking back with 2020 hindsight what how did we not just survive my husband and i made a decision to thrive one of the ways was to focus on yehudim and not necessarily banay israel because the jewish people were called many things primarily banay israel the children of israel and yehudim what is the etymology of all of this where do these names come from well beneath israel yaakov jacob he he struggles with the angels remember jacob's ladders the latter and the angels are going up and down and he's battling after the battle god says you're no longer going to be called yaakov you're going to be called israel and israel means to struggle with god because he struggled with one of the angels of god so one of the names of the jewish people is bene israel that the people who struggle with god and we're also called yehudim that's where jewish comes from what's the etymology of the word jewish you ever with somebody on on a plane somebody not jewish and go well where does that come from when you come from jew land you're irish because you come from ireland yehuda was one of the sons of the 12 tribes from yaakov from jacob and we're called yehudim the word yehudah means to thank god to thank god that his mother leia when she had him thanked god in a very deep way so we're the struggle with god people and we're the thank god people when you're struggling with god no matter what's going on in your life you're being a jew don't feel badly that's being we struggle one of the ways that i had the clarity to get through this and i'll bring you to yohudim is that my husband taught me that we have no idea why god is doing this world pandemic nobody can tell you this is why you don't know why god is doing it to the world but you can know why god is doing it to you i can know why god is doing it to me and that's what we need to hold on to and we need to have not just 20 20 hindsight but 2020 clarity when somebody says you have 20 20 vision you know you have clarity you can know not why god's doing it to the world but why to me what am i supposed to learn from it but we decided to focus on yehudim the thank you god people i came down one morning early on in the pandemic and my husband said to me when we were in quarantine my husband said to me there's no water i'm like what he goes i don't know they they shut off the water there was no water i go there's no water he said lori if you had a choice between no wi-fi and no water what would you choose and i would say no water he goes we have wi-fi and that's what we decided to do through this whole experience focusing on what we have and not what we don't have another thing that we focused on was the ability to listen to listen every morning in moosara we live in a beautiful eclectic community just outside the old city walls and every morning at dawn you hear the birds singing that's how you know that the sun is coming up the birds start singing and a few days in to the pandemic maybe even a few weeks i said to my husband listen the birds are singing all day long they're singing like loudly all day long it was like we were living in a bird sanctuary it's like we stepped back from the world and now the birds and we gave the world back in a more natural state without the noise and the pollution and everything that we do to the world damaging god's beautiful world and the birds were singing sheer to hashem the birds were singing praise to god if you listen now you could probably hear the birds because a couple days later i said to my husband maybe these birds were singing all along but we weren't listening because they are singing why weren't we listening because we're running we're running and we're doing it we're running we're doing and we're in control why did i have a hard time grappling with is there a god because if there's a god that means he's in control creator sustainer supervisor i'm the type of person that doesn't like the feeling of not being in control and that's why i don't go on roller coasters that's why i don't go i don't i don't go bungee jumping i once went rappelling uh in israel and i remember it was like somebody's bar mitzvah tour and i was on it and everyone now we're gonna go rappelling and i'm like what and so we put on our helmet and strapped ourselves in like with the harness and everything and here's this like young like younger than my kid israeli guy saying to me because you're on the edge of the the cliff and then he says just let go i've got you i'm like who are you like what do you mean let go i'm gonna trust you i probably if 20 or 25 minutes would not let go it was very and he's just telling me i've got you let go and everybody else is going i guess it was my pride and i just let go and he did have me when i realized that god ran the world and i almost remember the moment and i remember where i was after my grappling and my investigation that god really ran the world i was so relieved that i didn't have to run it anymore nobody likes feeling that they have no power but when we say god has all the power it doesn't mean you don't have the power to choose and we're taught that god will help you in the way you want to go you want to go this way he'll clear the way you want to go that way he'll clear the way one way is the right way and one way is not so years ago i was speaking in new york in manhattan we're talking years ago before gps before mapquest before all our electronics and our phones i remember i was speaking at the seminar but i wanted to visit my sister who lives in muncie which is outside of new york and i was trying to figure out how to make that happen there was like one bus but by the time the seminar was over i would miss that bus and i guess somebody overheard me and she said listen i my husband works in manhattan and we live in muncie so why don't you i she says i have to leave now i couldn't leave yet why don't you take my car it's parked outside and and i'll get a ride home to muncie with my husband and then i'll come over to your sisters and pick up the car it was so kind and so generous of her so i said i have really no idea how to get to muncie and how to get to my sister's home so i gave her the address she goes oh i know where she lives she goes i'll write out the directions she wrote out directions okay this is when fred flynn stone was alive so she wrote out the directions and i'll never forget the first line the first line was the car is facing in the way you want to go between me and my daughter this became a little bit of an inside line many years later she was going through a hard time and she was heading to israel and back then you you wrote plane letters for your kids so i wrote a plane letter for her and the first line was the plane is facing in the way you want to go momentum has been blessed with the opportunity to impact tens of thousands of homes we bring women from all over the world over 20 000 from 32 countries in partnership with over 250 organizations they go on a one-year momentum journey which begins with a transformational eight-day experience in israel project inspire is one of our most beloved partners and lay people in communities with project inspire they they reach out and they recruit jewish mothers who are a little bit estranged from their jewish identity in the community and they create cohorts and they lead them on these trips what's the number one thing that happens after eight days in israel on momentum the women are facing in the way they want to go we give them instructions for life most of us grow up and i grew up this way so i understand that the torah is dusty bible stories men in robes walking through sand dunes there's nothing to do with my life but has everything to do with our life we're the people of the book and a lot of us never read the book there's wisdom in there to help us to succeed in the most important relationships in our life our marriages our children our own potential but there is a foundation concept that without this it's a book like chaucer or shakespeare there's wisdom in there but if you know there is a god and this is god's instruction book for life then it's a whole different ballgame it doesn't mean we don't have choice you can go left or you can go right and there's probably certain points in your life because there wasn't mine where you come to that fork in the road it takes a lot of courage to go in a way that maybe not everyone else is going but you know that's the way and the almighty will help you because he has all the power but he gave us this beautiful beautiful gift called free will free will is not just chocolate ice cream vanilla i think i'll pick chocolate free will is making a moral choice right from wrong and that takes a lot of courage the gift of 2020 was that we had to stop running and doing and we had to start listening not just to the birds but to to god's voice if you heard god's voice in the clouds this morning uh we probably have therapists in your city to take care of you the almighty does talk to us loud and clear it actually says that god's voice breaks the cedars of lebanon that's how loud it is but it's not a voice from the mounted top or clouds it's through pratit and momentum we call it hp higher power when things happen in your life god's talking to us in 2020 god was on sense around i always say that if this yoyo was a combination of gilligan's island meets the jetsons gilligan's island do you remember that tv show well maybe i'm dating myself i probably am well you can google it gilligan's island was about a group of people who were shipwrecked on a desert island and the whole series that i went on for years i don't know how many years was them trying to get off the island and they're all different characters gilligan the skipper the movie star we were all kind of shipwrecked quarantined in place we were in time out why does why do we put our kids in timeout we put our kids in time out because obviously they were not behaving properly they were not behaving at their best we put them in timeout we tell them to sit on that stair you're in time out to think about our actions to think about your words and we want them to come off that stair we want them to come out of time out better people what do we say when they come to timeout we tell them to tell their sibling who they smashed over the head with a toy truck say you're sorry so what did they say sorry and the one who was hurt that wasn't a real story because it wasn't we were put in time out because obviously we were not at our best there are things that we need to learn and we need to come out and say sincerely that we're sorry come out that we're changed that we are better people otherwise this was for nothing people say oh i just want to go back to the way it was let's just go back to normal i just want it to be normal you want to go back to the way it was if we go back to the way it was then this was for nothing we have to emerge as better people committed to making a better world but it was also the jetsons the jets was a tv show about people in the future and one of the futuristic things on the jetsons was that that when they phoned somebody they could actually see them on the screen can you imagine and that's exactly what we have the talmud says that god sends the raphua before the mecca god sends the solution even before the challenge you think you can't get to a challenge god gave you everything you needed before to get through it so even though we were in timeout and even though god decided this is who you're supposed to be shipwrecked with these are the relationships you need to work on he gave us all this technology so that you could facetime and you could whatsapp video and you could zoom just like the judsons but somebody told me something very heavy a friend of mine called me up and she said lori what if this is not the makkah what if what we're going through right now is really not the challenge what if this is the refura what if this and what we've learned and grown through this experience is to build us and build our resilience and faith and knowledge and trust and and build us as people for what is really going to come i'm not saying there has to be another world event like this god forbid but you're going to have challenges in your life in the future and so am i through this experience let's learn from it let's grow from it let's become greater people let's build our relationship with the almighty because there's going to be challenge ahead let's take all of this so that we can face those challenges when the almighty when we say that he has all the power it doesn't make us it doesn't diminish us it actually should lift you because we are limited people we're limited i can't do anything or everything i could do some things but if i can tap into god anything is possible you know people say like what's your superpower what's yours i have a friend she's got an amazing superpower she can eat anything in a restaurant and redo it at home she can make that whatever she knows every spice it's a superpower can you imagine she goes home and she can recreate it what's my superpower well i travel or i used to travel all the time i was always on a plane i'm always in airports because again momentum is an international movement i have a superpower that i can find an electric outlet to plug in my phone or computer anywhere i can seek out whether it's it's uh it's it's a kiosk or a bar or or or no matter where i am even on planes i can find out where that plug is yesterday i wanted to go to the hotel i wanted to go to the western wall to thank the almighty because my husband and i just finished getting our second vaccination i don't want to go through all forget about the politics of vaccination or how you feel or how you feel but one year ago almost to the day i told my kids my number one job is to keep abba alive i'm here to protect your father you call him you learn with him you give him that emotion in that spirit and i'm here i'm on it i told them don't worry because my husband's at very high risk so yesterday was not only two weeks since our last second shot which means you're at that 95 efficacy was also eight years to the day that my husband had open heart surgery to be thankful that we're alive because being alive means potential that anything is possible so i wanted to go to the old city which is about just a 15-minute walk from here and as many of you can picture jaffa gate momentum women come with project inspire they they go through jaffa gate so many of us jaffa gate is one of the gates to get into the old city to walk down to the coattail to the western wall and jaffa gate was closed i have never seen it closed in the decades that i've been coming to i've never seen it closed the gates were closed so what did i do i went around to another game and i went to zion gate charzione which i don't believe has doors that close and i was able to get in and i went down to the hotel i'm here to tell you the gates of heaven are never closed you can always call out to the almighty he has all the power if you tap into it that means anything is possible you can do anything but what do you want and why do you want it god has all the power he showed us that in 2020. there's no need to worry there will be an end remember why are we afraid of bungee jumping why are we not afraid of bungee jumping and and and scary movies and roller coasters you pay for it because you know there's going to be an end one of the things that is hard for us now because we don't know when this is going to end you don't have to worry about that it will end god's got his plan you can let go and you can let god from jerusalem i miss you israel misses you may we all be reunited very very soon i used to have this law partner who was really a fantastic lawyer i mean he had everything you could look for he was brilliant incredibly insightful and he was particularly good in the courtroom especially when it came to questioning witnesses he really has had this unbelievable ability to draw things out of people that sometimes especially they didn't want to admit he had one drawback though and in his own words he had what he called an irish temper once he started getting upset it kind of forget about it he was all in on being mad and just kind of really couldn't do anything to control him one time and we were sitting in a conference room a whole day for witness interrogations we were questioning witnesses in this one case we were involved in and i remember we're sitting there and he's questioning a witness for the other side and of course his other side has his own lawyer and is the case for anyone ever ever seen what a deaf witness deposition is like he as he was asking questions the other side would at times object to some of the questions he was asking and over the course of this this questioning i started to notice that the other side of its objections were becoming more and more ridiculous and i could see my partner starting to lose his cool you know it was literally like sitting next to bruce banner as he's starting to turn into incredible hulk and i was getting nervous but also what i noticed was it seemed clear to me that the witness's lawyer was going out of his way to intentionally try and provoke my partner and he himself seemed to have sensed that my partner was losing his cool and was going to start to throw him off his game and was trying to bait him and get him to really just lose it so at one point i called first let's have him take a break so i took my partner out into the hallway and i said let's call him david david you really got to relax this guy is just trying to provoke you and get under your skin you got to get yourself under control and i'll never forget what the guy said to me my partner looks at me and he says josh this is who i am and if the guy is going to be ridiculous i'm going to let him have it and i'm not going to stop and he just went with that he went back inside the conference room and i remember sitting standing there just like thinking about it like an intelligent human being a mature adult and yet he knows he's being provoked and his only reaction is not okay you're right i'm going to try to control myself it's not even i'm sorry i can't help but it's just this is who i am this is the person i am and that's just what's going to be you know it made me think like is that really true it's really true that someone's born a certain way and there's nothing they can do about it now look when it comes to temper they think to ourselves no look people know you have to be able to control yourself you know it's sort of like you imagine you're having a conversation with a friend and you say something that upsets him and he starts getting really mad and you think he's overreacting so what do you do it's the first thing you say to him calm down relax now put aside the fact that obviously i think we all know that when someone's getting upset the single worst thing you can say to him is calm down it will have the exact opposite effect but even putting that aside we're saying it because we think that they actually can get themselves under control and they have the ability to calm down so okay maybe anger is a little bit different but you know i think i'm funny so is actually this week my daughter was in college was kind of complaining to me that she had this research paper that she had to do and she was like i can't do it i can't do research i'm terrible at doing research it's just not me i can't do it and she says you know if it were math i'd have no problem which of course is always funny i think most of us are the opposite but just just abba i can't do it it's not me you know and there are plenty of other things i think that come to our personalities or other people that we know that we hear this a lot right maybe you've ever heard the following i'm always late or you know i just have to speak my mind if something's on my mind that's just who i am i need to tell people what i'm thinking i'm terrible with names right these are things that we say about ourselves about our personalities that we seem to be locked into as being this is who we are you know and the reality is that who we are we think is going to define how we're going to react in any given situation if i'm somebody who has a bad temper i'm going to react in a certain way to somebody you know rear ending me then if i'm somebody who's more relaxed and able to keep things coming keep things potentially in perspective but this creates a little bit of a problem we know that one of the bedrock principles of judaism is free will is that hashem gave us the ability to make choices and decide for ourselves what we're going to do what our actions are going to be but if it's true that the personality that i have creates the parameters of how it is i'm going to behave then it seems like my free will actually is kind of limited and i don't have the free will that i think that i do because well look this is the kind of person that i am and maybe there's really not much i can do about it and therefore i'm stuck with it it needs to feel again this sort of tension here between these two ideas and actually we find this concept comes up actually in this week's porsha so this week's parasha talks about the birth of yaakov and asev now we already know having been through this story before how things turn out for them yaakov becomes the last of our forefathers of the ovos one of the greatest jews to ever live asev you know kind of went in the other direction to the same extreme and became one of the most wicked people to ever live but here's something interesting the torah tells us that before they were even born that rifka when she was pregnant she didn't know she was having twins and the torah says she was having some issue with the pregnancy not quite sure what was going on she was concerned and so the rabbis explained the concern was the following that whenever she walked by a house of idol worship the baby was kicking as if it sort of wanted to come out she sensed that it wanted to come out but on the other hand as she was walking by a yeshiva or house of torah which there was really only one in those days the baby was also kicking as if it wanted to come out and she since it wasn't just a physical sensation there was something spiritual going on with her child that it was seems like it was being torn in two different directions she couldn't quite figure out what was going on so she went to you know besieged hashem to try to figure out get some guidance and she's told that she was having twins and so this kind of put her mind at ease because now she knows yeah so with the child that was kicking its way out wants to kick it its way out to go to a house of a vodazor of idol worship that was one child and the other child was trying to go towards torah but wait a second so the torah is telling us that even before they were born asap had a proclivity towards idol worship towards doing the wrong thing and yaakov was drawn towards learning torah towards doing the right thing but if that's the case how can asa be taken to task for turning out who he became it seems like he was destined to be that way from even before he was born when he was born he clearly didn't have any free will he wasn't even a sentient human being at that point and yaakov on the other hand why is he given so much credit for becoming who he became the deck was stacked in his favor it seems unlucky he was the proverbial guy who was born on third base and you know we look at him as if he hit a triple how is it fair how was their free will even come into play if before they were born they had this sort of being drawn in that in those directions know people often think that our free will is defined by who we are we said before if you know somebody accidentally bangs into me and knocks my spills my drink on me if i'm somebody who's born with a temper i'm going to react very differently than if i'm somebody who is more relaxed and easygoing and so we think that yeah so my free will how i'm going to behave is defined by what kind of person i am but it's actually backwards the reality is that who we are is defined by our free will by the choices that we make right free will does not mean doing what you want to do animals do what they want to do free will means doing what you don't want to do but knowing that it's the right thing to do bahira free choice is all about overcoming those things that pull us in one direction overcoming those aspects of our personality that drive us towards a certain type of behavior but that's not the right way to behave but here it means overcoming that not giving into that sort of base or nature that we have but focusing on what the right thing is and choosing to do that now hashem gave each and every one of us different personalities with different strengths and weaknesses different benefits and burdens of the way that we are naturally made up but that only defines where we start in life it does not define where we're going to end up where we're going to end up requires a lot more of a question of what kind of work we do how we respond how we react the choices that we're going to make now of course this may seem a little bit unfair because you know you can ask yourself you know if i'm the kind of person who has a natural temper and i look at a friend of mine who is naturally easy going you know we're gonna have a different time in life in terms of dealing with challenges and look we all know if you're angry you're rarely happy so if you want to be happy just by almost by logic you want to be somebody who is easy going but if he's naturally easygoing and i'm naturally hot-headed then it just seems completely unfair how we supposed to actually achieve something in our lives given the problems that we have from our innate personalities in the way that we're born there's a couple of different things that are very important to keep in mind i think first is as human beings we are only able to see results but you can't tell what's going on behind the scenes with a human being in terms of you don't even know what's going on in their life and you certainly don't know what's going on in their head and what kind of things they have in their personality or thought processes that are going to impact how they behave all we can see are the results hashem's perspective of course is radically different hashem knows exactly what's going on with that person hashem knows exactly what issues he or she has and what's causing them to behave the way that they are so hashem really doesn't care about the results hashem knows what the results are going to be the results ultimately are up to hashem what hashem cares about is the effort that's put in in the time and the energy the person puts in to try and make themselves better it's all about the effort for the growth not necessarily the growth itself and of course this logically makes sense i mean you can imagine that after 120 years two people get up in front of the pearly gates to what one rabbi might used to call that great big court case in the sky and one of them was born with a great personality easygoing kind charitable very smart born into money and yeah he lived a great life and somebody else is born with you know not that bright very irritable he never had any money and never able to support himself and his life from the outside from our perspective looks like this guy clearly got it right and this guy clearly didn't but hashem doesn't look at it that way hashem looks the first guy and says look i gave you tremendous gifts what'd you do with him if all you did was go with the flow [Music] hashem's like look i'm not that impressed i gave you all that and for the person who looks from the outside from a human perspective like he didn't do well at all hashem says wait a second i gave you very little to work with and what did you do with it you worked at it you tried you tried to make yourself into a better person that's huge from hashem's perspective this guy was one who got it right not this guy and we have to recognize that yes we all have challenges we all have different parts of our personality some parts we like some parts maybe we don't some parts we wish we could change some parts of which we could amplify and we could look at somebody else and say oh that guy's got it made so aside from the fact you have no idea what's actually going on in that guy's head even if you think you have it right or even if you do have it right the fact is hashem's perspective on it is very different hashem's looking for the effort we're going to put into the growth hashem's looking to us to say hey i want that you should be able to actually work at it and get it right and by the way this is not something that you know ordinary human beings make the mistake at we often think of david hamelich of king david as you know he was you know david melech israel he's he's the guy he's the king but the story of how he actually became king is very fascinating so hashem tells shualhana v samuel the prophet to go to yishai who was david's father and say you know tell him that he had a son who was going to be the king of israel and so shmuel goes and he says to ishai you know one of your sons is going to be the king i mean you know shmuel didn't know which one it was so he brought his sons out and he's going through them one at a time and as he's going from looking at them and seeing like oh this guy's a strapping young man he clearly looks like he's somebody of stature hashem's like no no that's not him and he goes through all the ishai's sons and hashem's like none of those guys and she was like what's the deal so he says to eshai do you have any other kids anisha is like well yeah i've got you know david i mean he's out tending the sheep and you you can't mean him right and schwall's like no i think that must be him so yeshua goes and brings david the soon to be king david and shmuel takes one look at him and says and notice something interesting he said to shmuel he looked like asav asif is described as someone having red hair and duff it also king david had red hair and something about his appearance shmuel looked at him and sort of turned to hashem and said he's like asan he can't possibly be the guy you have in mind and hashem's like no no [Music] i know he has and it looks to you and you're not wrong that he has certain innate personalities but he's going to overcome them he's going to channel his personality the right way and he's going to turn it into greatness and that's why he's the one who i need who i want to be king you from the outside maybe you don't see it but i'm telling you small he's the guy because growth is internal it's not about the actions themselves it's about what's going on inside of us about the efforts we're putting in to try and grow and you can't necessarily see it from the outside see and this is where asev made his mistake asap looked at his innate personality what he was immediately drawn to and he said this is who i am this is just the way i am and i'm just gonna go with it yaakov yakov didn't become great because he was born into it right it's not because he was born to yitzhak and rifka and he was interested already in learning torah and he had the most you know greatest torah teachers you could possibly ask for that wasn't it what made yaakov great was the fact that he looked at himself and says i know i have this but it's not enough it's not enough to go with the flow i have to put in more effort i have to try harder i know what i can do i can do better than just going with the flow like how often are we doing something you know at work and people like tell you wow that's amazing what you just did and we know like yeah i don't know i either kind of fell into it or just sort of came naturally to me it wasn't a big deal and that's why hashem looks at it i know what you're capable of but are you putting in the effort to push your boundaries see asif couldn't do that asap was hot-headed he had a temper and it didn't come naturally you just said okay this is what it is i'm just going to go with it see part of the mistake ace have made i think the mistake that a lot of us make character traits midos are not inherently good or bad they're tools to be used you know we think that oh somebody who is compassionate and kind is inherently has good character traits and somebody who's you know has a terrible temper is immediately inherently bad not necessarily you imagine somebody who's kind to everyone he meets okay what happens when he's kind to a murderer or he's kind to a criminal i don't want to punish him i want to just let him go let him have it easy i want to be compassionate if that's the way he's behaving then you have a real problem because that compassion is actually going to cause difficulty for other people or imagine someone who's you know again compassionate who always wants to do people a favor you know you're waiting in line and somebody says hey do you mind if i you know the other grocery store you're waiting online and somebody says hey you mind if i cut in front of you only have a couple of items oh of course it doesn't bother me at all happy for you to jump in front except there's 15 people behind me in line and now i'm making all of them wait in order that i can be kind to you if kindness is a tool you have to use it appropriately and anchor anger's the same way yeah it's easier to use anger the wrong way because it just comes naturally to a lot of people but the fact is that anger when channeled properly can actually help other people grow it can help other people improve themselves and change their behavior you know sometimes you know it's like you know your kid misbehaves and it's kind of cute but something that they did you know three or four year old you know colors on the wall like maybe it's kind of cute and you know it's not a big deal because you were planning on painting anyways you kind of laugh at it but you also know that if you just completely let it go and don't show your disappointment that the kid's not going to learn and realize that he can't behave that way so you have to take that anger and you have to channel it you have to turn it into the right thing yeah asap was a hothead and he had incredible passion and he just let it go what he didn't realize is had he taken it and channeled it the right way he actually had greater capacity for growth than yaakov did the rabbis tell us that asap could have been the one the reason that yitzhak as the torah says loved asev was because he saw within aesop this passion and this ability to grow to incredible heights as long as he channeled it the right way but he wasn't willing to so on the outside maybe he tried to show his father that he was behaving the right way but on the inside nothing he wasn't interested in trying to actually put in the work to do the growth he just wanted to go with the flow and as a result he became who he became and so it wasn't that he was born as somebody who had to be someone who turned to a vodazaro turned to idol worship and all sorts of terrible things that he did he had a strong passion a passion that he wanted to immediately channel into immediate action and so it happened to manifest itself as towards the voters are which is sort of more the immediate as opposed to torah which requires work requires growth so he had this sort of inborn personality but it didn't define how he had to be he could have changed who he was he could have changed the course of human history had he actually gotten it right but he didn't want him and because he didn't want to that's how he turned out who he was and that's why he's taken a task for the way that he behaved now i think after hearing all this hopefully you're realizing recognizing there's growth to be had but of course it always ask the question every time i give a talk like this i always try to be as practical as possible okay so now what so i know that i can turn my personality traits one way or the other and i can achieve growth and i have to rely on hashem but what exactly do i need to do how do i actually put it into action so i like to share a couple of thoughts and ideas that i've kind of gleaned over the years from a variety of different torah sources first and foremost is recognizing that a person has the capacity to change no matter how bad a personality trait you have whatever it is it is absolutely changeable and it's not just changeable hashem actually put you here he wants you to change it he gave you the job knowing you can do it from the blind famously said as much as a person needs to believe in hashem he needs to believe in himself and he needs to recognize that he has the capacity the ability to make real changes in his life changing our personalities for the better is not just possible it's our purpose that's what we're here for you have to start with that recognition second and this i think where a lot of people often fall down you have to recognize it's going to take work and it's not something that's going to change overnight you know very often we get inspired by something and we immediately said oh i'm going with this and we think that we're going to see change immediately but then something happens and we flop you know for example let's sticking with temper you know i'm not going to get angry anymore i'm just going to take it easy and something happens it gets i guess that gets us upset and we lose it and we get mad and we can't understand what i mean i i i was i'm not getting angry anymore why is this happening we don't realize that it's a long term process it's not change is not going to happen overnight over a weekend over a month it's going to take consistent pushing and trying and chipping away and you're not even gonna necessarily see the results immediately you won't even notice it at some point something will happen you'll be like oh that used to get me upset and now i realize it's not that important so we have to be prepared for it you know i reminded a couple months ago i think it was i was watching a video video on youtube with my my 11 year old son and it was a video of some kid who was about his age at like the world yo-yo championships and this video i mean i was just amazing this kid is two yo-yos and he's flipping them around and swinging him and just making it look effortless he's got the smile on his face having the time of his life and it's just one of the coolest things i've ever seen and my son who has a yo-yo says oh you know what i'm going to go do the same thing and he goes and he grabs his yoyo he only had one and it took about 30 seconds and he smashed himself in the head with it and he's looking at me like he can't understand this i saw this kid doing this video was so easy why can't i do it i said you don't realize you didn't see the hundreds if not thousands of hours of this kid practicing of this kid working at it he didn't just wake up one day grab two yoyos and start spinning around like that he had to work at it and we have to realize the importance of working at it and that it's going to take time number three is recognizing going cold turkey really doesn't work we can't just decide one day you know what i'm done i'm not getting angry anymore i'm just going to take it easy and i'm going to relax and i'm going to not let things get me upset that that's basically a setup for failure instead you really need to look at this as the long-term goal that it is to keep your eye on the prize but not just saying i want to be someone who doesn't get angry you got to look at it sort of flip it and replace the not wanting to be angry with i want to be somebody that's calm it was this expression i've heard esteemable people do esteemable things i want to be somebody who is against sticking with anger i want to be somebody who is relaxed how is somebody who relax how does that person behave right it's not just going cold turkey and taking anger out of your life and going into a vacuum it's focusing on what's more important see this was the mistake that ace have made ace of thought i need things immediately and if i'm not going to see immediately it's not even worth doing right he sold his future for a bowl of soup because in the moment that's all he wanted we have to recognize there's a long-term goal here for us and we have to keep our eye on it by replacing it by not saying i just don't want to be angry i want something else that's more important and actually my daughter just recently told me the story that robham kanievsky who's obviously considered to be the the guadalajara the greatest rabbi in israel right one of the things that everyone knows about him he sits and learns torah like 20 hours a day even right now he's in advanced i think he's in his 90s he learns torah 20 hours a day one of his grandsons decided that he was gonna you know we heard about some handwriting you know analysis that could be done he took something that his grandfather wrote and he anonymously submitted it wanted to see what the analysis would come back to this describing the grandfather and the analysis comes back and it says oh the person who wrote this is very lazy and as you might imagine uh grandson was like that's crazy this whole handwriting analysis is obviously ridiculous my grandfather's lazy i mean come on so he went to his grandfather and says you know zadie i actually i submitted this um and they said that you were lazy i mean isn't that how crazy that is it's 100 right i am lazy that's that's my natural tendency is to be lazy but the thing is from an early age i recognize that more than i want to be lazy i want to be close to hashem i want to have that relationship with him and i wanted that more than i wanted to be lazy and so i put all my energy into doing the work to learn towards bring myself closer to hashem i didn't just say i'm not gonna be lazy anymore i had something else to focus on to put in its place number four i think is the importance of planning in advance especially if you're going to be in a situation where you know there's a likelihood that something's going to make you upset or something's going to trigger whatever it is that is the thing you're trying to work on you know if you're going to be in a situation where you're basically no that's you know you're going to some family gathering and you have this one you know relative that just makes you crazy being prepared in advance knowing that it's coming okay i can deal with it it's interesting toru masora has this course for teachers to teach them how to do public speaking and we're reading a long time ago about someone who had taken this class and part of the the the curriculum for this public speaking course was that you had to get up and give a speech and everyone else in the class had to try to disturb you and so this guy was describing i was getting getting up and giving this speaking these other rabbis you know they're they're making loud noises they're chewing gum they're you know wadding up paper and throwing it across the room and the purpose of the exercise was learn what it's like to work through the adversity of an audience that's being a little bit hostile or being a little bit disrespectful and working through it and this guy described how it was unbelievable how once you did that because you knew it was coming so every time that he speaks now he knows that he's going to have some people who are not paying attention no problem and he just doesn't let it bother him it does he doesn't let it throw him off his game because he knows that this is coming so planning in advance is something that can really be unbelievably helpful in being prepared so you don't lose your focus and fall back into old habits and lastly and this is probably the most important one you have to doven for it you have to ask hashem you have to turn to hashem and say hashem help me there's something in my life that i want to improve i know that you put me here in order that i should change it and make it better and i need you to help me do it i can't do it on my own but if you help me then i can be successful and with that prayer showing hashem how much you want it hashem will answer your prayers hashem will help you along enable you to do it and with those types of tofilo those types of davening we should really we should all be zohan and all be merit to be able to improve those areas of our lives that we wish we could be better and to continue the growth until the coming of [Music] meshiach