Rabbi Simcha Barnett- Mind-Flex Series Part 3

so I'd like to welcome you to the project inspire mindflex miniseries and this is the first of a mini sweetly mini series of no Hawaiian Berg's life-changing insights I was a student of Rabbi Weinberg's for you know many years really for over 20 years and I remember when I went to Israel for the first time I was taking a break from my job on Wall Street travelling around the world and I always wanted to go to Israel and when I got to Israel one second go into why that's happening let me try this again let me try this again one second okay let me try this again I think I'll be able to do now we had two different platforms on so I was traveling around the world and I bumped into asia torah in the old city of jerusalem and i started taking some classes and it was very exciting time and i was really struck by the depth of the wisdom that judaism had to offer I got to Hebrew school and to me it was just not relevant was like many in my generation I having to go to reform or a form Hebrew school and it didn't speak to me and when I heard the Torah in a very authentic way in a traditional manner it was just unbelievable and I thought to myself how could I've lived I was on Wall Street I went to an Ivy League college I considered myself like well-read and I studied philosophy and religion and politics in in college and I never heard of Judaism it was almost like and and it was just mind-blowing to me it was like that old commercial in the 90s this isn't my old grandfather Chevrolet I mean this was a brand-new animal to me and particularly hearing the insights of Reverend Weinberg even brought it to another level you know we just got finished with Passover and how it was about questions and that's the beginning of our search for wisdom and freedom to dig deeper in life and one of the questions asked the simple son asked Mazouz why why do we do this and it says a simple question when you really think about it it's not a simple question at all why is the most beautiful most pure question why is the question that kids ask us all the time remember when your kids were five six years old and they pepper you with yyy you're like leave me alone you know go go go watch the Discovery Channel I you know you shied away because long ago you stopped asking that basic question that question why and one thing I remember a veteran Weinberg is that he always had the purity of a six-year-old but wonder because he said this is God's creation God is trying to teach me through the Torah and through the Torah in the world and my job is to soak it up so why is like the flashlight or the shovel which digs down into reality for me to uncover when life's about and to connect to God but he had the simplicity of a six-year-old with the intellect of a genius he put those together you have very very powerful and practical lessons from Torah so I want to share with you a few that really made a difference to me and let's just start with what I would call rabbi one every signature approach and that was describing how God created the world for our very pleasure and he had a classic series that you can get even now in the acecomm mp3 site the five levels of pleasure it was a classic analysis of why God created the world for pleasure and what are the various levels of pleasure because there are superficial levels of pleasure and then there are very deep levels of pleasure so I remember the longtime CEO of Asia Torah Eric Coopersmith he was coming similar to me you know he was traveling from Europe he had been on a professional hockey team in Switzerland he was originally a Canadian native very bright guy and very dynamic and capable but a great athlete as well and he was trying to get into the NHL and a lot of times when you went to a team in Europe that was kind of like a farm league to get into the NHL so your privacy's very close to Israel and he had a break from his team's hockey schedule and he popped over to Israel someone must have brought him to a class of Reming Weinberg I remember a picture of this rabbi with a long white beard you know when the person I remember said you know if he wasn't wearing black I think he was Santa Claus that's kind of what he looked like very jolly and he was talking about pleasure and he was saying that God created the world for pleasure and that is the basic principle of Judaism now many of the classic philosophers Jewish suffers in the kabbala see this in different ways but to Eric coopersmith this was a mind-blowing concept and something he couldn't believe had anything to do with Judaism because the Judaism he knew wasn't about that at all and it really intrigued him and he said to himself you know the rabbi is right life is about pleasure but you know what he and I seemed to have very different ideas of what's pleasurable one of us is crazy and I'm not so sure it's him it could be me and that prompted him to go and to consider it much further but really why I would point amongst other things to the great story the first Jew the first year was Abraham and we meet Abraham in the partial f Lahab God says to Abraham he says Leija go you later look ha my arts ah ha from your land my melodica from your birthplace from a base of Eva and from the house of your father it's a area so the land that I'm going to show you he says go now the obvious question that the commentators asked he throws in a superfluous word you it's an imperative form when I say go it's obvious who I'm talking about me to you but the Torah says laical AHA go you extra word Rashi the commentator the biblical commentator kind of jumps on it right away and he says you know what that you means he says it means lejano sofa limit of a sofa go for your pleasure go for your good this is the first commandment that God is giving the first Jew God Abraham is the father of the Jewish people the very first commandment which is a paradigm for all the commandments or don't think when I command you to do something it's for me usually when you command someone you ask someone demand for something get me a coffee obviously it's for the benefit of the commander but with God it's the other way around God is telling us whenever I give you commandment dough look what you're doing for me it's really what I'm about to do for you and remember you would say brilliantly he paraphrased john f kennedy's famous statement in the sixties don't ask what your country can do for you but rather what you can do for your country so Ronnie winery would say don't ask what you can do for God rather ask what you will allow God to do for you because he understood that guy being perfect was a one-way street God didn't need to anything from us at all he was the archetypal Giver now this is a mind blown if you think about it from a religious perspective a Jewish perspective to think that God is giving me all these Commandments from me I always thought it was the opposite way around and it was further kind of amplified this concept because I only only knew me and a lot of my contemporaries days like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur which are very austere which seem to be all about exacting a pound of flesh like I'm kind of paying God back for everything I did this particular year why he wants me to pay him back this way I don't really know but that's what it sounded like there there wasn't a lot of joyous occasions I didn't go for Purim or for Shabbat or for different things in life which have a little bit more of a pleasurable aspect to them but to understand that God created the world for our pleasure is a mind-blowing concept it actually turns the whole angle of Judaism around instead of thinking what can I do for God I have to think you know what if God gives me these mitts vote and each one of them is for me so the question is not do I like them and I not like them is the question is what is the hidden benefit what is the hidden pleasure and I remember thinking when I started to get involved well at the time that that particular time I wasn't used to these pleasures I wasn't used to spiritual players to me praying was not something that sounded fun yeah I if you asked me if I was a spiritual person I would have said my bad as spiritual as a rock I remember on my way around the world I was in Thailand and I went on this massive technical rock climb up this mountain face and I got to the top I was in really good shape but it was really Artemis I got to the top and I peak over the top of this cliff and there's this Buddhist monk in orange flowing robes at the top of this mountain how did he get up there I don't even know he wasn't breaking a sweat at all and I looked him and the image in my mind was this is spiritual not me I am physical I've nothing to do with the world of spirituality but when I when I got involved in Judaism I realized that real spirituality is using the physical world and elevating it so all these mitts vote in the Torah there were that many of them most of them were physical actions but they had a spiritual base to them and that was a discovery it was like discovering how you can a soul can live spiritually through the physical world the other thing that intrigued me that really intrigued me similar to Eric Cooper some the thought the future CEO of Asia Torah was that this is what all human beings intuitively think life's about if you ask everybody you know what are they after they're after maximizing their pleasure whether they call it happiness they are trying to maximize their self-interest their pleasure their happiness 24/7 and avoid pain that's what you're doing so the fact that Judaism honed down onto this main principle that every human being you tap every every man on the shoulder you ask them what are you living for what's the world about that's what it'll identify it gives you a lot of credibility that this religion is true that this religion is is real because it hooks up with how you feel as a person so that gave me a tremendous mm of of clarity as well and then also what it says is everything you don't realize you don't think about you don't know that it's gonna be pleasurable like create an example just weed it out just look for just look a little bit deeper ask the white questions and it will actually come to you and it's funny because I really enjoy praying I really enjoy talking to God I recognized I had a spiritual side that I just didn't know you know didn't know existed before it was almost like a person who when they were young you give him a glass of wine versus a used to colon bug juice you know that very sugary you know juice they get in camp they'll always take the bug juice the real sugary cereal the sugary soda or drink but when they get older they want the wine because it has deeper pleasure and that's what you give us a bat there's a lot of deeper pleasures very much like a wine connoisseur knows the deeper pleasure in wine that's what Judaism has to offer there's one other thing that I wanted to mention about pleasure which was another subtle point rubbing wine work would often say which made a tremendous difference in I think's a game-changer he would say there's a counterfeit pleasure out there that everyone unfortunately goes after was very geared or weighted to go after and he was he would bring it up in the following manner he would say what is the opposite of pain what's the opposite of pain now not at ten people maybe even 95 out of 100 would say the opposite of pain is pleasure it's an equation the opposite of pain is pleasure and then we'd point that he'd say no that's you know I get it most people think that it's really not true the opposite of pain is no pain the opposite of pain is no pain now what word do we use generally for no pain one word that kind of describes that he would say it's Comfort the opposite of pain is comfort now people think that comforts pleasure that's the confusion and I would I would put it like this imagine you're in your car and you're in the middle of the summer and your air conditioning is broken now unfortunately happens to me an awful lot and I'm in pain sweating it's horrible it's you know ah you made anyway when I go get the freon the injection of freon the air conditioning systems fixed when the air comes on I wouldn't say that I'm in pleasure at that point I would say that I'm in the absence of pain I'm comfortable I'm comfortable really true pleasure the price tag for true pleasure typically is pain or struggle or effort I know it's a pejorative word in our in our culture but if you think about if I ask you one of the greatest five pleasures of your life usually it'll be things you invested yourself in like we say in the gym no pain no gain we all know that if you get down to it struggle and effort is typically the price tag for the greatest pleasures in life if people are trying for comfort want the easy life want the hammock with the pina colada on the beach just about asleep that's the ultimate in comfort if that's what life becomes for any of us if that's our goal one thing I can guarantee you you will never get real enduring pleasure in life you'll always be a little empty unfortunately you know that there's a lot of people a lot of people's endgame of retirement it's just that stop all the pain stop all the trouble I want to just coast you know and you when you coast on a cardiogram that's go flatline that means you're dead that's not really that's not really good so the the game-changing piece of wisdom here is that life's about pleasure myths those are about pleasure don't get full going after comfort then what you really want when you really want as pleasure think of life as a chess game where the goal is not to be comfortable and not think but the take on the pain of the struggle and the think me about the next move and the idea would be take pleasure take pleasure in the destination don't get up and don't get caught up in the pain of the gym keep your eye on the goal on the brass ring that's the first piece of wisdom second piece of wisdom which is is similar another bombshell another life-changing game-changing piece of wisdom it really starts from the definition of God the Jewish people brought to the world when you think about monotheism which the Jewish people are typically credited for the idea of mild ISM is that there's one God but the Jewish people are meant by this concept of one God has we brought a concept of God is one meaning god is perfect oneness meaning everythingness we say shmaaya Sorella Schemmel okay Noah Shem I thought we say that God is the one everythingness that threads through all of life and all of creation perfection infinity that's the new novel understanding the Jewish people brought from God and our religion is based on that lockstep because you'll understand pleasure comes from that concept if God doesn't need anything if he is as rich so to speak as Donald Trump I don't need to give him alone just as Donald whenever asked me to give him alone does it it's nonsensical so when you understand that God is perfect that there is a Jewish God in the world and God is one he wants our pleasure and it's similarly similarly God didn't need to create the world and the philosophers Jewish philosophers asked why did God create the world if he doesn't need anything if he's perfect what could have been his rationale for creating the world and they say there could only be one answer and that perfection God all he wanted to do was give very much like a parent they want to give altruistically to their children God is the parent on high and God wants to give to his children so he creates a world a hospitality in to give to us now what I would call this it really is a definition of altruism because even though parents try the closest we know of altruism they still have their own needs but if God has no needs he is the proverbial one-way street so he creates this world it creates it as an act of love an act of giving and I'd say it's the original and the longest-running love story in the world every the love story is a corollary and this original love story now everybody wants love and people realize that kind of love is what the world is really about you know all you need is love you know it's a song but it's really true now but most people can't define love or a lot of other concepts what pleasure really is what's free will what's freedom the blow away thing about Judaism that I love so much is that Judaism gives definitions for these concepts most people if you ask them about love they'll say I can't define it I just know when I'm in it I know when I'm in love now if that's the case how can you ever get to these beautiful concepts and more so the Torah actually commands us to love God and to love your fellow Jews now how could you be commanded to do something you have no definition for and even more so how can you command an emotion how do you Sally summon up an emotion on command serving why ever would point at a definition of love staggering it really comes from Maimonides and his description of the mitzvah of loving God he would say that loving God depends on knowledge of God the more you know the more you love it's like a mathematical equation so why is it a mathematical equation and the idea floats when we just said if God is perfect that means it's all virtue all good all love nothing negative nothing fractured nothing bad all virtue so love is produced when I recognize God's virtue and attribute that to him in other words we have these euphemisms mother time father time mother nature and it's really trying to say these parental analogies for this world because the world's loving the world's giving like a mother the world is protected like a father the world is beautiful the world is loving what it but but if we a Tribute the magic of the world - father time and - mother nature not to God will never grow to love God imagine the more we know of this world the more knowledge of this world which is God hiding behind the curtain the more we will love God knowledge of God equals love lot step I know what he does for me I'm gonna love him just like anybody if you knew if you paid attention how much your mother and your father loved you and good for you and you really appreciate it your film love for them same thing with God so Robert Weinberg would say for people it's a little trickier because God is all virtue but he would derive the definition of love for you and me and everyone else it was as follows love is the emotional pleasure of recognizing virtue in another human being and identifying him with that virtue mean he is that virtue and if you think about it take anybody that you love identify this person the reason why we always love people is because they're sensitive and they're kind and they love me and they're giving in their courageous those are reasons we love people now if you ask the person you know if you save yourself a person that I love do they have any faults then they ever wake up on the wrong side of the bed is of course they do of course they do now imagine we focused on their faults rather than their virtue then we wouldn't love them think about anybody you don't like and if I asked you why don't you like them you will come up with their faults now each of us is a mixed bag of false vices inversion love is the choice to focus on virtue that's a staggering and practical definition and he would often try to prove this he would say God gave us an amazing analogy to teach us how to love all human beings and then analogy his children they would say that a person is pre-programmed to see the virtue of his child and he would say time using this kind of a story to illustrate this you would say if you go to your neighbor who's pregnant if she's gonna love her child which is about to have she would look at you as if you're crazy and you would say to her what are you talking about your child might grow up like the Greenberg kid down the block obnoxious kids you know make maybe you should get to know your kid a little see if he's worth you know as a keeper before you get too attached him and that woman would laugh you know what do you you're nuts but we was trying to illustrate is that the only reason we don't do that is because we have an in born attachment to our child we're gonna love them automatically now it's funny because we don't have that that same commitment to other people if you take our spouses who we choose to marry at one point we saw their virtue and we saw their virtue in you know very large and whatever vices they had pretty small we identified them with the virtue but we didn't realize that over time we had to be committed to seeing their virtue or else we'd fall or else we'd fall out of love with them the key to loving another human being really while I would say is to be committed to seeing virtue that is unbelievable because that is the key to why God could command us to love him and to love other people he's not saying sum up an emotion he's saying you've got to be committed all you need is commitment to see virtue to see virtues of the world of God and to see virtues of other people and you will love them and love is a fabulous pleasure it's a pleasure we're all looking for and it's the key to life because we're modeling God's behavior so this was the second in my opinion game-changing piece of wisdom a definition for love that's practical and a pathway to really start looking at other people and generating more love in your life and I'll tell you if you start looking at the virtue of people that annoy you all of a sudden they kind of look at you like in as a mirror and they will start responding to your changed attitude and you'll generate them to as well love you and that's the beginning to peace that's beginning to love of all humanity it's number two the third piece of you know game-changing wisdom and again every one of these pieces you can have an entire classroom more I'm trying to boil down for you the essence so one of the most foundational concepts of Judaism is free well the earliest source I guess you would say in the Bible's that were created selim Elohim the image of God and many commentators say that means just like God's a creator we also have choice and we create as well we have we have free will it's fascinating because the Kabbalah and the Jewish philosophers say animals don't have free choice they're programmed and angels don't have free choice angels are spiritual beings that do God's will God's yes men so to speak and an animal is pre-programmed and they fight and it's the unique combination of animal and angel body and soul which gives us the ability to free will to want to go in one direction and want to go in another direction the Battle of freewill is the battle between the body and the soul long discussion great classroom Weinberg has called five levels of free will which goes into this in great depth but what I want to focus on is the definition that he would point out from a Torah about free will because most of us would actually and if I asked you what free will is most of us would say it's the choice of good and evil meaningful or not good and bad doing things that are meaningful not meaningful but if you go to the Torah it's very interesting in the last parsha and it's of him right at the end and this is right from russia shana by the way because russian it really is the birthday in freewill and the turbo says see i've placed before you today the life and the good and the death and the evil life good death evil life and death good and evil obviously life goes with good death goes with evil also later on says I place life and death before you blessing and curse again blessing goes with life and good and curse goes with deaths and bad I place this all before you you shall choose life so that you will live and your children after you now remember what we always pointed out that everyone wants to do good even Hitler if you asked him what's he doing good he would say absolutely killing the Jewish people is good for Humanity everybody thinks they're doing good even when they're doing tremendous evil now good and blessing go together curse and and cursed and evil go together everyone understands they're trying to be good that's not the obvious the real essence of free will the essence of free will is in the first part life and death and we can even see this because in the end the Torah says choose life he ignores that later ignores the first the other two points choose life so you live there not bad my records say first of all he points out that's fascinating who would have thought that free will choice is between life and death I would have thought like I said before it's good and evil meaning and meaninglessness but life and death and the Torah says something that seems funny I would have thought that unless I choose death she was suicide I'm alive the Torah says no choose life so you will live implying that if you don't make an active choice of life you're really dead now how are we supposed to understand that and he would point out the final exit someone that's really choosing death to illustrate what the Torah is talking about he's a God forbid we should never be in this situation and we should have tremendous mercy and anybody who would be pushed to this but he would say he would ask us what is the reason if you boil it down that people would choose suicide very small amount of people but anybody it's any amount to many but what's the reason and we would always come down to its escaping pain the person's an incredible amount of pain there's a loss of perspective and the pain overwhelms everything else and he would say was really an escape from pain that's what it was about and then he would say my friends we might not take this final exit to really get rid of all our pain but we commit suicide in installments little installments here and there and even creeped krest crept into our language we kill time we zombie out we're dead drunk we're spaced out what it means is there are times in our life where we don't want to engage fully in the pain of living so free will he would say to us is something which is operable 24/7 and this is another fascinating point because when you're thinking about free will as good and evil how many times during the day do you actually acts as good and evil or even meaning and meaninglessness but the choice of engaging in life we're disengaging I mean that we can all relate to is a constant choice am I going to do the same thing at work today as I did yesterday am I going to improve myself and learn some wisdom today am I going to work out get healthy am I going to keep growing in my character or am I just gonna keep going with the decisions I've made for the last 10 20 years I'm just gonna put this the radio station onto my commute to work or am I gonna listen to a book on on an mp3 if you look at free will that way it's it's amazing because it's constant now put your God hat on for a minute if you were God and freewill was the key to greatness that powerpack he God gave every one of us to model him to actually become God's through through our own effort and to earn reward and earn our own perfection now that way wouldn't he have given it to us in a way which he can be accessed every single second of your entire life that's mind-blowing that's a rabid why we would point out that free will is operable at all times in our life all times in our life and he would say I remember we would say I had an analogy imagine you're in a bus and you don't usually have these buses and go for an hour or you're in a bus and a guy is a stack of $1 bills on his lap he's next to the window windows open and every 30 seconds he throws $100 out of the No and then at the end when the staff down to nothing he turns to you when he says do you have a few hundreds that I can borrow and you think are you crazy you just threw him out the window well rabbi wander would say that's what we do when we go to God on Rosh Hashanah and you say can you give me another year life you give me another stack of hundred dollar bills so that I can unfortunately throw it unfortunately out the window now he would given a very practical definition of free will as well that this is also worth the price of admission he said free will is the choice between doing what you feel like doing and doing what you want to do meaning the choice of life or death death is the comfort death is what I feel like doing in the moment the disengagement the mollifying the body I really want to be healthy and to lose weight I feel like eating the chocolate cake I really want to be sensitive and patient to my kids particularly when I'm cooped up you know in covert 19 its fraying my nerves but you know what I want to do when you get me when I'm lucid and clear before I go to bed I want to be loving I want to be courageous I want to be I want to be those are the lists of what you want but in the moment I feel like snapping I feel like getting my work done and not having to deal with the machinations of what's going on in my in my house so Herbert Warner would say each one of us has various free real struggles I have freewill struggles around food my wife doesn't at all she has our own freewill struggles some people have freewill struggles about anger or about impatience or about not being confrontational so those people need to be confrontational to stick up for themselves they're like kind of get run over so the question is what are your freewill struggles what are the things that you really want to do in life and what are the things that trip you up the things that you feel like doing I want to be patient with my mother when she asked me about her taxes or about our finances that's what I want I feel like saying mom what are you worried about I talked to you about this last week that's a free-will struggle for me I want to be healthy and to be fit I feel like or reading I want to be able to manage my anxiety I feel like drinking it away each one of us probably has three or five freewill struggles but realize if you don't know what they are and what they how they speak to you the feel like versus the want you'll be ambushed every time and you'll confuse what the soul really wants what the body really feels like so freewill and knowing you have is a game changer it's not six times a day with good and bad it's every single moment engaged in life disengage within life life and death like Hamlet to be or not to be that is the question every minute of my life and then how does it break down practically my free will struggles what I feel like doing reverse what I want to do if you can do what you want to do more often than what you feel like doing you will be a great person and not only that you'll be a moral person the Torah says let the sadiq falls down the righteous person falls down seven times by calm and gets up and the evil first person falls down once and quits it's fascinating evil is not the direct choice of doing bad it starts by quitting or staying in the game the righteous person if you just stay in the game you fall down you did what you felt like doing versus what you wanted to do one too many times you have dust yourself off you get up if you get up enough times you will become a great and will become a righteous person and that's the number three number four Robbie Weinberg was very involved with six mitzvahs in the Torah and the six mitches in the Torah that he was involved with are called the chase mitzvahs Timothy there are six constant mitts vote in the Torah obligations that are incumbent upon us always most people don't even know that's the case but these mitzvahs are mitzvahs of thought of god-consciousness which we can fulfill every single moment of the day most mitzvahs you cannot fulfill every minute of the day a couple of weeks ago we ate the matzah on Passover that was a mitzvah to that time we put up a mezuzah on our door when we get a house we will give sadaqa when we get money but it's not a mystery incumbent upon us constantly but there are six myths was incumbent upon us all the time the first one is to know and believe there's a god the second mitzvah is to not have any other gods idolatry the third Mitzvah is to know God is one the fourth and the fifth or two emotional aspects of God love of God and fear of God and the last is don't go after the things which take you away from God ego and desire is the six constant mitzvahs so so the the second Mitzvah is don't have any idols idol worship around big Weinberg wouldn't say to us today we don't really have vinyls we don't really bat down to them God and the prophets say that God took that away from us a long time ago but philosophically what are our idols and our idols are things that we give power to things that we quote unquote worship I like to say that everybody worships something you can worship God you can worship yourself you can worship money man is a worshipping creature he's going to worship something make sure you worship is real so if the idea of idol worship is is giving power to things that really don't have power I mean whatever you say you know what idol worship of our time is and he would say the Irish of our time is saying I can't I can't is believing in idols now why is that human explained if God who is the unlimited all-powerful Almighty he can do anything he wants he can give you any ability you might have is there anything you really can't do and people will say of course of course when they and they be knocked into their senses of course they would say that's true previously they would say that my abilities define my capability meaning I see what my abilities are and I decide I'm capable of X based on my abilities grab and wider we'd say that's always going to sell yourself short because you'll never transcend that which you think you can't do but if you know there's a god of the world that can help you do anything you know that your capabilities can transcend your abilities and that's called a miracle and the Jewish people have always been a people of miracle and we've always transcended what the natural world would say we were capable of in every in every endeavor human endeavor in life from economics to military mind to whatever you want to say to impact in terms of wisdom our capabilities we're never defined by our ability so it was a very nice idea a very life-changing idea the rabbit wanderer would take it even deeper and he would say you know you know what I'd worse really is you might think it's saying I can't but I'm a worship is really saying I can people be like what I can I can't understand how is idol worship I can and we point out in a tremendously deep way he would say the only reason you think there are things you can't do is because you think there are things you can do the root of I can't is based on I can but it's much more subtle and much and much more insidious I can is based on the belief that you make things happen in the world and really it's not just that God will help you but God gives you the power to lift your finger I might have my free will say you know what I want to lift my finger now but God has given me that power to do so it's a fake out because I think it's up to me and the way you know we say it you know it's said in English it's better than Hebrew better than unis rather but me in English it's God proposes man disposes meaning I decide that's what my free roll starts and ends one person once told me it's like the choice to grunt or not to grunt you know to be engaged or to disengage God does everything else now when I realized that the power of the power my power has come from God that's the only way I'll ever not get stuck in the I cants if I realize all my power comments from the Almighty there's nothing I can do there's nothing I won't undertake and that by the way is why he decided to do a crazy thing 4050 years ago to reach out to people who were who were far away from the tradition and teach them Torah everybody thought he was nuts you don't know how to raise money you don't have a crater in ization he was a scholar what did he know he said you know if God really can do anything and all my power is really based on that there's no amount of power he doesn't give me I think his tour was high and his instructors for living his incredible way of delivering Torah is a proof of the idea that once you undertake the responsibility that provides the capability the ability does a respite doesn't doesn't translate the capability responsibility translate to kick done he gave a great analogy the analogy would be very famous now as you say you know there are cranes all over Israel and there's building go on like crazy it is I'm truthfully we go out on the porch of the youth even you'll see and you see cranes everywhere and it's the most beautiful sight you know that crane is swinging and bringing in thousands of pounds of building material and right before it gets to the ground there's a there's a guy a man or two and he's guiding the pallet into place he says if you were a child and you were just seeing the guy like you're on the ground and you don't have a vision of the Train you would think this guy is Samson you would incorrectly assume that this fellow is the stray the ability behind the crane he says that's the mistake we make we think we're the ones swinging the pallet into place with our own might if we understand that God's the crane and he could lift thousands of pounds beyond what we could ever ever do and all we have to do is put it into place there's nothing we wouldn't undertake and we'd also say quite in quite interest Lam I'm saying this one's imagine going to Las Vegas and you know that people play slot machines every once in a while you know it's very exciting when you see a person win the slot machine and then all the coins come flooding out and they try to take the bucket and put it on there to catch all of coins he said you know what I do and he said I'm like a guy and all I do is keep putting in quarters you know her tokens and I pull the pull the lever and I hit jackpots and I just put my hands under and collect the money and he would laughs quote unquote unquote all the way to the bank says it's not me if I thought it was me chairing this money and doing this I would have quit a long long time ago the last thing I want to mention was also a tremendously powerful there's a fifth piece of like kingdom wisdom that the russia shiva the rabbi Weinberg taught me and all his other students he would always say what are you living for you know there's a famous classic of Jewish thought and social sharing in the beginning it says you have to clarify your obligations in the world and what your purpose is now coming from a secular background that in and of itself was very interesting to me that there really was purpose and then I it was written what that purpose was you know a lot of people I think just think that life happens on its own is not initially a purpose you create a purpose that you want to create and every one of it has a different purpose but from a Jewish context yes even though we do have different abilities we have a different way in to make our contribution we have one overarching purpose national purpose purpose as a community as a Killa as a as a a family unit and on a personal level but there is a purpose that in and of itself was very interesting they would say what are you living for and most people really didn't know and I remember when I was in college you know I mentioned before study philosophy studied religion and I talked to my friends alive and it was an intellectual group of people I remember one time travelling on the way back from like a spring break in the car the subject came up is there anything you'd be willing to die for and we grew up it was it was not very far after the Vietnam War was over five six seven years after Vietnam was over so I was right in the rearview mirror very very fresh and there was a kind of an understanding of feeling that that was a war that many people really didn't feel it was worth dying for and we were thinking man the question was posed is there anything you'd wanted you be willing to die for at the time as young man you'd have families maybe would have said you know our kids or our wife we we felt you know there really wasn't anything out there worth dying for and I remember feeling sad when I I said that or what I realized that was the end of our discussion because I guess i intuited deep down for years later I reconstructed it and i intuited that if there was nothing worth dying for that meant there was nothing truly worth living for the fascinating concept being life where it wasn't that wasn't that meaningful the more meaningful it was the more you'd be willing to sacrifice for it and even potentially pay the ultimate sacrifice rabbi Reiner would point to the famous story The Binding of Isaac the Acadians clock and we all of the story and God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his cloth and then he stopped them at the last minute and I never would say the stories teaching you the following you all think God wants you to sacrifice your life and your life for him for religion and you know many of the other religions do that kamikaze pilots suicide bombers and the ultimate price is the sacrifice your life well God's teaching us is not to sacrifice your life but know what you're willing to die for Abraham understood he was willing to die sokka's well Isaac as well his son was willing to die for a closest to God to follow God's will we have it there's a lot to say about it but they knew what they were long to die for and God says you know what I don't want you to die for it but I want you to know what you're willing to die for and I want you to live for it know what you're willing to die for it not so you have to die that's not our religion because if you don't know what are you willing to die for it's like playing life is like playing with monopoly money you're never gonna get serious you're never really gonna live then what I want you to do is live for it and if you're gonna live for it enjoy it no you're willing to die for it don't die for it live for it and enjoy it because he would see a lot of religious people even the guys in the yeshiva and we get involved in it and we would get we would get distracted by the effort and the struggle we'd focus on the pain and we'd walk around like martyrs like kind of carrying the the you know the yoke for God as if God wants us to do that and he would laugh and he would try to poke fun at it for us to realize the insanity of moping around for the ability to engage in life and fulfill your purpose and he would tell us you got to focus on the pleasure not the pain it's like the guy in the gym if he hasn't focused on the gold medal if he's only focused on the pain he's done he would give us an analogy thoughts a brilliant analogy would say you get let guys go out on a hot summer day young young teenagers and they're playing basketball 90 degrees they might play for two hours psychologist comes on the court and wants to do an experiment gives each kiddie so I'll give you a $50 a piece if you run and jump you defend each other one thing though I'm gonna take the ball away do the same thing run jumped swag call out the coverages whatever it is I'm taking the ball away he said how long do you think those guys are gonna last the guys that same guys that can do two hours no problem he says if they last ten minutes they're gonna be lucky why because there's no pleasure there's no brass ring there's no goal to distract them from the pain he says that's us in life he said the key to life is knowing what you're living for you know that you're leaving for you just get caught up in what's going on at the moment and you only have one life to live it's an opportunity of a lifetime okay so these are the five you know pieces I feel of life-changing wisdom that would be one were taught that pleasure is what God created the world for Judaism is all about pleasure pleasure is something we intuitively realize life's about don't get caught up in thinking comfort is true pleasure if life's about comfort you will never get to true pleasure free will that's the engine for us to be great it's not the choice of good and evil it's the choice of life and death engage in life disengage from life the more we engage the more we live the more the greater we become the more we disengage spaced out shirk that responsibility shirk that opportunity the less great people we're going to become free will very practically is doing what you want to do more often than what you feel like doing what you really want versus what you feel like the more often you do what you want to do or is what you feel like doing the greater person you become define your essential freewill struggles so you don't get ambushed the fourth piece of life changing wisdom is to understand that giving power to yourself what you can't you can't do that makes you small in life that holds you back if you realize everything is a gift from the Almighty there's nothing you can't do with his this help then your capabilities will not be defined by your abilities they will be defined by taking responsibility and the last maybe even the most important is what are you living for if you don't know what you're living for have a real reason to live and endure to live you're just fooling around and you're never really gonna get true and serious pleasuring life and you're never gonna have a shot at getting to fulfill your older potential because you're just kind of bumping around where life takes you I hope you enjoyed this when I teach these lessons and reinforces these within me and it fires me up because they're practical and they're about life and they're about being successful and the more we can think these to heart the more we can be tremendously tremendously successful and thank you for listening I hope you really enjoyed the three-part mindflex series on urban oeq Weinberg's insights next week and the week after we're going to be hosting of fantastic and a famous program called discovery discovery seminar has been one of the best seminars which explores the rational basis for God and Torah through many different avenues from science from psychology from history it's not to be missed next week is are the first three episodes Monday Tuesday and Wednesday of next week and the week after that going back to our main schedule Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday but not everybody good Shabbos