Rabbi Akiva Tatz - Q & A on the Soul

[Music] any questions yeah mind if I sit can I sit down you're gonna find me there's parts of the soul that come into the world in the parts that need to be corrected what happens after death so the soul in the womb the babies taught the whole Torah which means his potential as is about to be born the angel teaches in the whole Torah gives him a cruel blow forgets at all now his born in the world as a little child it needs to regain that wisdom three-zone effort you know what he does he goes back into that world as a perfected soul that is that is built itself always remain both yes when exactly all the the marriage the family is always represented as layers of soul as part of a cosmic human human existence but that identity of your particular place in the world and marriage and families always retained and absolutely as part of who you are in the world when you said when you sent into this world you're a part of a spiritual reality part of God put into the package of this particular body in this particular particularity of this life and that's how identity indeed yes yes it was originally part of the massive soul of Adam and each of us is a splinter or a fragment of that soul and eventually we put back together again but you'll still be the place according to the cup of the ariza most of us come from his left shoulder okay whatever that means but that is the pattern that's the pattern through history good question so answer to how you know your purpose in the world what this particular soul has to do in the world the answer is its vested in the nature of the soul if you know what your soul is you know your talents and your abilities true indeed that's the purpose before you can function in the world perfectly you need to know what your tools are and you should start in your teenagers I wrote a book for teenagers there's exercise in that book where you draw a circle and the teenager has to put into the circle the things that are unique and special and good about them and have the courage to put outside the circle that they're not good at then end up with a picture what's unique and different about them then you know who you need to marry what job you need to do what you need to do in the world and this you know if you guys are all builders and I'm a foreman and we don't speak the same language as a mirror I take you to the building site I'll give you a bag of tools I put you someplace on the building look around where I put you see what needs to be done see what tools I gave you you don't speak you God put you into this world as a man a Jewish man at this time in history he gave you a bunch of tools which is your personality look around what needs to be built take out your tools express them a very good indication of that work in the world is is doing what you like you usually good at what you like and you usually like what you good at if a person is doing a job they're not enjoying it's dangerous it's not healthy you need to be doing a job that you really enjoy and then you do it well marriage by the way needs to feel good and love relationship needs to feel good you don't get married to feel good that's called prostitution you get married to give love but if it doesn't feel good then they started wrong with it a love needs to feel good a job that you do you need so you need to be doing it at least some aspect of the job here so most of us are here for the third or fourth or fifth time there's no real rule about that no in the in the results great book that he talks about it he he he student are behind it all describes having been here five times and who he was in each one and the mistakes he made in each I don't face a general rule about that no you get sent down and again till you get a drive not as an animal you could be sent down inside the body of an animal or a man could be sent in a woman's body which is very painful but you're going to get given if history ends and you haven't fixed it you're going to suffer enough in the next world to burn away the imperfections and the stains on your personality let me put it like this your final perfection is not negotiable and the world's final perfection is not the gospel that God is guaranteed the only option you have with your freewill which route do you want to take to get it why because he loves you when you have a child you said you're childless and I'm guaranteeing your perfection now you do your homework and you work hard we'll work together and if you don't I'm gonna beat the daylights out of you but I'm gonna get you there because I'm responsible for you and therefore God gives you the opportunity how much work you want to put in to get there but the end point is not reversible absolutely the person souls are part of God impossible to wipe it out yeah that's a good question that's a good question so most souls that come to the world are parts of Adam that have been brought down before in every generation there are some new souls we're gonna who they are but by the end of history they all need to be brought down there are some modern Kabbalistic sources that say that their reason a lot of ladies or going through miscarriages now not all miscarriages is because every soul needs to come into a body and even if it's only connected enough just to be formed as a human being but it needs to be so they've all been given a chance to be brought down into the world a child that's been born in the world even as a miscarried baby that's a human being be part of the family as long as the recognizable as a child been formed fully that's why we bury kids like that deep even we do and mark the grave but yeah we don't do mourning but nevertheless the child is very good no no first of all you can't come down as anything other than your but you can come down down locked into an animal body or met as a man locked inside a woman's body that's a great suffering it's not normal all of them in some way and we're not exactly familiar with the it could be it could be it could be one of the reasons that their person feels distress because they feel inwardly they're in the wrong gender it could be it's possible but that's it that's a terrible situation it is very dysfunctional and it's painful and surgery's not going to help that so we tried to help them emotionally and spiritually and if necessary psychiatrically the modern world handles that sometimes with four months in surgery as well which is very some of them took quite well 30 40 % and others become suicidal and suffer greatly by the way there's a legitimate aspect to this which is kids who are born with indeterminate not just feeling in the wrong body they've got sexual by intersex where their body has neither gender or both this is a well known problem in that that we have a lot of surgical experience with and that takes a team of pediatricians and endocrinologists and surgeons you've got to choose a sex you can't send a kid to school looking weird so at some point you've got to make a decision and sometimes the surgery is very good looking but it's not functional so it's a very very tough decision but that's not our discussion with the mode okay so now what about a practical output so let's say the male-female connection so you want to get married how do you choose a suitable suitable partner right and if you're married already here you can understand this to see where you went wrong and how you can help your kids or other people if you're a rabbi you counsel people right you help make sure looking as a as a friend you should be helping you we have a very great suffering this generation or a lot of young people not succeeding in getting married it's not a lot of wonderful young ladies just getting old and older no one no one takes them right so what are the principles of choosing a partner and making that soul connection so the first thing is that you need to make a list of criteria to see that the person is suitable for you I would say they're two non-negotiable criteria non-negotiable you must see one of these you're gonna be a big trouble then there's a red line and below that a whole bunch of negotiable criteria of course when I say to non-negotiables I'm assuming that the absolutes are in place she's female able to have children right because the Mitzvah one of the missiles of marriage is to have children so if the lady the girl knows she cannot have children that's the issue that's an issue we have required a goal came to see me some time ago she said to me I was born without any ovaries so I've got a womb and I can become pregnant but I got no eggs now I want to marry a Jewish man it's not a Jewish home I was going to marry me so am I allowed to tell him that if he marries me we'll take an egg from another lady right and if you he will fertilize the egg and I'll be put into my room and I'll carry the pregnancy if you say yes great if you say no who's gonna marry me now we don't like doing that not so simple to do that after egg transfer surrogacy not simple it raises many questions one of the questions is apart from whether it's allowed or not although we we do allow it in with certain conditions but one of the questions is who's the mother there's an egg taken from mrs. a or miss a right usually as I've got a friend who his wife is she's fertile but she's very young no way she could carry a pregnancy would kill her so they took eggs from her and they paid a non-jewish lady to carry the pregnancy so so now the lawn Jewish lady had the baby she took her money and she gave the baby recognized the baby Jewish or not so I'm a Jewish egg in a non-jewish body this is not clear logically so what's done is we cover both bases we do a conversion on the baby in Israel today both ladies are registered as the mother in Israel and you grow up with two legal mothers why because Israeli law outlaws marrying a sibling like most countries now we don't know who the siblings are or then the brothers and sisters of the non-jewish lady or the brothers so if you register both women as the mother it becomes illegal to marry both sides which is great now is the child Jewish or not so we put the child through a conversion even though it's not clear that they need it I'll tell you one interesting problem that we're having in London now it's done quite often now but 15% of Israeli babies are born from some sort of IVF that doesn't always mean from a it could be the husband or what but one in six families have trouble conceiving so I'll tell you what happens in London now it's a Jewish lady she pays a non-jewish lady to have the baby and then the baby's born and she's given back to the family now eight days later there's a Brit Milah now the question is is this a Jewish baby or not if it's a Jewish baby it's a normal Brit if it's not a Jewish baby this is a Brit not for bris Miller but for conversion and the difference is the mohel makes a different bra ha now which brakesh would he make as soon as he opens his mouth and he makes the baraha on conversion everyone's gonna know that this is not a normal situation and the parents are embarrassed by that but he's gonna make the wrong bra huh so some of them oil him in London have been told to mumble Mazel Tov you know what he said as he contemplates the people so these are the kind of things that recon is you know but and there's many versions I know a surgeon in since and Louis since and Louis Missouri he is a famous fertility surgeon he's got five sets of diet identical twins girls five pairs in which one of the girls can have babies in one count the one girl is normal and the twin sisters got no eggs but there's five sets let's just take one of him he's done this five times but it let me give you an example of one today and twin be identical twins right one has children she's got eggs in a you know ovaries the other one has no eggs well she it's called premature menopause she so now she's 30 years old she's not no eggs no children now you know that if you've got identical twins you can transplant organs from one to the other with no problem there's no rejection because they got the same genes the first transplant was ever done in 1954 one Jewish girl in Toronto gave her kidney to her sister who is in kidney failure and they didn't do no need no drugs for rejection because identical twins the sister who received the kidney died last year 1954 she the kidney from his instance he does that last year so you can transplant tissue from identical twins so what's he done he's taken the girl is fertile taking a piece of her ovary with eggs in and transplanted into the ovary of his sister and all five now have babies now who's the mother the kids look exactly like the mother and there aren't they've got the same genes as both of them right not so simple so this is what's happening now in terms of surrogacy anyway what did I tell this young lady I said to her listen to get an egg from another woman is not so simple what I suggest you do I said to her you are the marry a young man who cannot have children either then he doesn't have the mitzvah to have children or a young man who has children already let's say he's already had children done the Mitzvah he can marry you not have children the best for you again if you insist on taking an egg how logically we can allow it we actually prefer non-jewish egg or non-jewish sperm well I'll come to that one second one thing at a time but I told her the best thing you can do is if you can find a man who his wife died let's see she's got little children and then she died there's a little children without a mother if he marries you you become a mother to children who really need a mother in the world the camera says that if a woman dies the husband's allowed to marry in the same week as his wife died why should the children not have a mother he's not out of live with her intimately because he's a mourner he's got a wet lease out of mourning but why should the kids who won't be without a mother so she was very idealistic about that you know she can become a mother too why do we look for non-jewish so when we do sperm donation let's say this husband cannot produce a child so now we're looking for a donor sperm right so ideally it should be a non-jewish donor well there's two reasons one reason is they can never be mums a root monster is No so there's no problem of being among as one the second thing is gemma is sock etiquette oh we are worried that brothers the sisters memory now the sperm donor who knows who is