#40: Behind the Bima - Special Guest: Joey Rosenfeld

from boca raton florida rabbi's ephraim goldberg philip moskowitz and josh brody are taking you behind the bema the brs rabbis schmooze about contemporary issues and talk to special guests who give a behind-the-scenes look at how they got to where they are and what keeps them going welcome to behind the bema hello rabbi moscow it's rabbi brody welcome everybody it's wednesday night 9 p.m and that means it's time to go behind the bma behind the beam you know i really look forward to wednesday nights the weeks are chaotic and busy and stressful and uh hanging out with you guys you know the beauty of this platform is you can't see anybody else so you don't really know are people listening not listening but we have fun nonetheless and i always enjoy our conversation and catching up in our banter so it's good to be together again and i want to actually come right off the bat [Music] with right i've got some breaking news coming right off the top of the show tonight very very exciting very exciting news for you tonight are you ready it's a good thing that you're both sitting down for this news early by the way i'm very excited about it i have to be honest with you it's a big big big day for me and my whole family yes so some some of you know that um i'm not announcing it i'm not going to say it's as exciting as that but i will tell you it's exciting so i've spoken about before that during corona my daughter estee and i planted a garden in our backyard and tonight i ate the red pepper from the garden and i have to tell you it's a very special feeling and we're going to talk to our joey about this because a very mystical feeling to plant something and take a seed a nothing a garnished negligible and you put it into fertile soil in the ground and you nurture it and you watch it grow and you pluck it my daughter plucked it and it's cut and you eat it i said to my wife we both know the experience now of giving birth to something children we've both we've both carried something right and we both know the experience of birthing it and um go over so well the comments didn't go over so well that did not go over so well with her but i will tell you that it was an amazing amazing experience is to you put a seat a wee little sapling we did get a head start from home depot thank you home depot but you put that in the ground and i'll tell you why it's particularly meaningful for me today because i saw a quote earlier today in an article from tim ferriss about the time he almost committed suicide and he had a quote in there he says it's um like a cherokee quote i googled it it's unclear whoever said it it really doesn't matter the quote is a fantastic quote which relates directly to um to this feeling to this concept and it is they tried to bury us they didn't know that we were seeds they tried to bury us but they didn't know we were seeds sometimes someone knocks you down they try to bury you but they don't realize you're a sea seed and you're about to sprout and you're about to grow and it's really all coming together tonight because i ate the pepper for the first time saw that quote today they tried to bury but if you're a seed all they're doing by burying you is making sure that you blossom and grow and tonight's rosh chodesh rashford and we've begun the countdown to tu bashvat and that's all about seeds blossoming growing regenerating coming out of the darkness of winter believing in the bright future and hopefully we're coming out of this dark winter called corona and there's a bright future of blossoming and growing so the pepper was was it was beautiful it really uh it's hard to eat it i understand the mitzvah room you take the first thing that you got and you don't even get to eat it you bring it to jerusalem you got to give it to god you say god everything belong even all first they belong to you so i'm not saying i'm a farmer i'm not saying i'm not but i'm saying i relate a little bit more to the concept of bikurim and it's amazing how much of that was because you wanted to try the pepper and how much of that was because you were anticipating the article you were going to write once you were able to taste the pepper it's it's a great question my children have said all along that the only reason that we have a garden is so i have joshua material and i'm not gonna lie i've referenced i've used it twice i have gone to the garden and i will continue to go to the garden and maybe it began as russian material but it's turned into a love affair and um it needs more it needs more work to garden it definitely needs more work a little love there's so many lessons about a garden i mean this revolb is planting and and building about raising children but you know sunlight and air it needs attention nurturing but that's not neither here nor there i just wanted to share that excitement that'll be the next the next cover of mishbaka will be about planting a garden oh boy i think we're i think we're past that once like it was today's doff don't forget i don't know which you had rabbi rosner brings in if you bring something to the base of mig dash that's not part of the shiv aminum for becoming become hectic right isn't that so you bring your pepper do you have you ever grown something do you either of you relate to that experience well so for me it's not planting i i planting and i don't go well together but but there is something called the ikea effect where when you are involved in investing in what you're building it means a lot more to you right so because we build alongside ikea we value that more than if i just went to a store and bought it so the reason why you like that pepper tonight was not just because it was a delicious pepper because you invested your energy into that so i have experienced that like when i get one of those things from ikea or a different store and i'm building it i feel like you know i'm like manly at that moment in time so that bookshelf like that that's part of me afterwards like that's a different type of bookshelf than if i just get it delivered that's that's sort of destroyer the desolate the whole world on the idea that parents love children more than children can ever love parents because when we invest a piece of ourselves into something we love it as an extension of ourselves so i i love that pepper i'm not i'm not ashamed or embarrassed to say it now if i love it why did i eat it maybe i love myself even more but it was a struggle i really wanted to not eat it but then it would just rot and disappear so i was really excited to eat that pepper now by the way i did not actually see the pepper come from the garden into the salad i ate when i just got home it's possible it's like a publix pepper and my fa and my family just wants me to feel really good but i'm pretty sure it's a pepper i tasted the love of the garden in that pepper and um what do you think about that quote any reaction to that quote they tried to bury us they didn't realize we were seeds i love that quote i think it's an amazing quote it's a great quote right there's a great one basically bounce back right you could see yourself as a victim or you could view that as part of the growth process i actually wrote about that in my weekly article this week anyone can read it but the whole notion that the obstacle becomes the path right that whatever adversity you're facing actually becomes your path to greatness your path to success your mission your calling your purpose right for sure tell us more about the article what inspires your article let's talk about this for a moment we're going to bring up joey rosenfeld on shortly it's a lot of excitement i want to thank our sponsors tonight nini and donnie ross for their foolish lima of a good friend of so many of us daniel bentova basha the shibashi have a complete speedy painless fast and whole recovery or a foolish complete recovery and also sponsored in honor of the menal the principal the reshashiva of drs a good friend of the show behind the bema a former guest and a good friend of all of ours rabbi yesi kaminetsky a long time friend of each of us personally end of our show it's really great that it was sponsored in his honor and again they should have refused and a huge thank you to the rosters for for sponsoring so we're going to bring our guests on in a moment but let's talk about what what motivates you do you ever have a writer's block do you hit a wall or the moscow it's you know i've been writing for a bunch of years um although it's still each week is a new challenge and you're only as good as what you wrote recently um you have taken up the writing trust me i know that the the hard way but you have taken up writing this year and during this pandemic and really it's more power to you hats off to you i'm not going to play the hats off dude but hats off to you that you've taken tell us what that's been like that journey towards writing how is it different for you than speaking writing and how do you find inspiration each week and have you hit the wall of writer's block so it's interesting you have been encouraging me to write for many years and i've been reluctant and reticent to do so i find when you speak it's engaging in audience it's much more of a personal experience and one of the reasons i was nervous about writing was because it felt like much more of a cold experience right i put down my words and i can't interact with the person who is reading it and i didn't like that as much in retrospect now that i've tried it i love writing i find it's a it's a very different outlet than speaking but i'm enjoying it immensely some weeks as you know you hit a total block you're exhausted nothing's coming to you and you might repurpose an old russia um other weeks just like russia sometimes you're having a conversation with someone sometimes you have an interaction and it sparks an idea in your head and you write about it so that was this week i had a conversation with someone last night um and it occurred to me that that is what i wanted to write about this week and so i put pen to paper as they say or my fingers to my keyboard and uh this morning i wrote an article about it that will be published in the brs weekly can't wait everybody should read it we're actually talking about and look for it soon uh when we do our brs plus launch the beers global community and making available to the people who are part of that global community a version of our weekly which is just the articles you don't need to know the euro sites and the birthdays of our local members but the things that apply more globally we're really excited and it includes article by rabbi moscow to rabbi brodie what's holding you back from writing when are you going to dictate thoughts appear in an article so first of all i got a few things to say but first of all if anyone wants to see the articles you know rabbi goldberg or moscow just go to ace which they're going to be soon going to be renaming hbrs because basically every article on there is from rave mosquits rabbi goldberg my wife went there last week she needed a devartara and she's reading that she's like this is her great barter and she had to tell you know someone the devartara she's rabbi goldberg she didn't even realize that it's so funny i'm just saying but listen i once wrote an article this goes back probably about seven eight years ago and i thought it was cause something happened on an aeroplane it wasn't an ll flight i thought it'd be a great article so i said you know what let me sit down i even had linda go edit it i said linda can you use me favorite i want to submit this article into this website can you just edit it for me so first of all she had every sentence had had issues but i sent it in they wrote back and they said listen this is not really the type of article we we we publish on this website that's the end of my writing career but you should like right you know every week robert brody you're having interactions with the greater jewish community in our area you're so devoted and dedicated to outreach inspire yourself to inspire others you have stories that would really inspire and um the same way i pushed rabbi moskowitz i'm gonna push you and the truth is you like many other great writers out there don't even have to be the one to write you can really even voice note an idea and have somebody help you turn that into an article but it add a lot to our weekly in terms of kind of i would love that on the corner with rabbi brodie some interaction that week that you had a jew obviously so anyway if we have any volunteers if you are joining us on the many platforms we're streaming on right now or you're listening to our podcast later the number one podcast in judaism then reach out to us rabbi brewer is looking for a ghost writer we'll put your name on it don't worry about it remember when ben shapiro was on behind the bema apolitically but when he was on behalf of do you remember that he mentioned at his height he was writing he was ghostwriting 10 articles a day a day think about that right brody you can write your articles yeah well he's the one that's right for me but if he's too busy by the way then if anyone else would like to volunteer roberto would love your help to take some of his thoughts and experiences and turn it into into an article you know i'll just i'll close and bring on our guests who we are all so excited and waiting for by saying that i was once in a conference and a rabbi was saying you know i hated that my whole life revolves around looking for drusha material or article material i can never just be and i can't feel more the opposite i think my life is like everyone else is living in black and white black and white and i'm living in in color because whether you're on a plane whether you're at a cafe whether you're in a conversation whatever you're doing you're like how can i extract a lesson where's the depth in this what can i share from this and i don't think that distracts or detracts from it i think it enhances it in so many ways again with the cynicism of friends and family will sometimes say is this for joshua is it am i going to be in russia right now but it's really an empowering way of living but let's be honest it's right because we like being honest and we're behind the bema now i love it writing is a totally different genre i've found oh my gosh um i found it enormously no i'll tell you what that is that's a dress shirt that's a dresser right there no i'll tell you what that is we just caught something in the house i'm just saying oh that was a trap that just went on that was a trap a trap just went off whoa hold on breaking news should i play the breaking news again yeah they're they're caught animal in the moscow's house right now my wife is wow so um let's be honest it is enormously stressful sometimes right right i mean it's enormously stressful sometimes when you're sitting there on a tuesday or a wednesday or thursday whenever you sit down to write and you have that writer's block do you ever have that robert goldberg do you ever hit that and and you're just like that's true anxiety all the time adam grant who i'm a big fan of has a book called the originals i think in it he talks about um i believe it's in there the notion of creativity on demand creativity used to be you know you think about the past like some brilliant creative author artist they'd go to some some seashore community and spend the summer clearing their mind and they'd be struck by creativity and they'd introduce some genius and now we live in a world that's like you need a post you need an article you need to put out a speech you need to it's like on demand creativity on demand everything else in life is on demand creativity should be on demand as well and creativity doesn't work on demand so um i want to bring out joey so we can pick this conversation up another time but maybe next week by moscowitz what are the things that you need to get creative and there's i don't know if anyone listened recently tim ferriss interviewed uh interviewed seinfeld about this and he talked about that how do you schedule time for creativity what goes into writing what's the environment what's the desk have to look like what is there's a lot that goes into the setting that puts you in a creative mood in a creative place um i'd be really curious to learn what this is i'm just curious also is is there a difference between writing your russia every week and writing your article because you do write you do right yeah because a very different experience a very different experience but i'll tease one thing for me and i'm curious yours cleanliness i cannot have clutter when i sit down to write i need my desk clean i need wherever i am to be clean and neat and organized and then i have the mental space and capacity to write well we're happy to report that as of a minute ago your house is a little bit more clean you are you are in a great position to be able to uh i think you're right that's fantastic that is fantastic we are so excited this evening to welcome the one and the only the great of joey rosenfeld rabbi rosenfelder joey thank you so much for being with us and for willing to be your willingness to go behind the bema sure it's a it's a pleasure to be here so thank you so i really want to jump right in um to tell our audience and you know you're not a stranger to many there's a whole world who follows you there's a lot of excitement on social media today that you would be joining us as our guest they know the work you're doing in st louis in the addiction community as a psychotherapist as a therapist bringing a really unusual borderline unique perspective of mysticism kabbalah of jewish thought even to a non-jewish clientele this farm if you're in the articles um a recent uh mishpacha uh feature that that talked all about but so but share with us your background how did you get to that right you weren't born with a long beard and a kabbalist you weren't necessarily on the trajectory when your high school career guidance person met with you they probably didn't say joey i see i see mysticism in your future you are on track to be a great capitalist so tell our audience tell us about your background about how you got here and about what positioned you to be where you are that you're you're changing the world with your new vocabulary a new perspective well without agreeing to 95 of the the races you just do at me i will certainly try and answer the question um so first and foremost i've been blessed with with four factors that that kind of influenced my life to where i was moving towards and then an added factor that allows me to continue from where i'm at now um those factors are family my parents and my siblings my brothers um my friends my rebellion in my high school in particular and the community that i lived in so i grew up in woodmere and i went to halb throughout my life and i went to drs high school um where each and every year my rebellion rabbi emerson uh rabbi yuden rabbi gralla or by storcher by cohen rabbi kaminetsky the manager all of them were remarkable influences on me um in particular because i needed that influence you know i was certainly not a a good student by any by any imagination um but but because i i struggled with scholastically or behaviorally um so i was able to kind of get extra time with the with the rabbis and i was able to get insight with regards to how to move towards the right direction um but did you say can i interrupt you for one second did you say you struggled scholastically academically or also behaviorally i i did both i said both so it was it was certainly both um but nothing too overwhelming just uh just aware of the struggle of kind of the the normative high school scholastic experience was not what i was doing um and at the same time i was influenced my father brought me up on an incredible music you know the first concert that i ever went to was an allman brothers concert with my dad at the beacon um so from the very beginning i was interested in kind of different uh expressions of of creativity of music of insight um but i was always interested i was always interested in depth uh at that stage whether it was reading where the wild things are numerous times or trying to grapple with the the injustice of alexander the no good very bad horrible day or or the hopeful attitudes of all the places you'll go um and my older brother i was able to be exposed to different teachings and different uh thinkers at the time and different trends in music and movies so from the beginning i was always interested in something more than what i was offered and so while it was certainly not expressed towards mysticism by any means it was a movement for more or owed or something more than what was present which i believe is the very same impulse that drives a person into kind of panimia satoru so while content wise it was very different but the form of my experience was somewhat of the same pulsation it was a desire for more um but with good friends and with with good teachers and and living within the vicinity of rick weinberger shlita i was really able to kind of figure out how those drives could could propel me to arizarol which is really where i figured out the language that that spoke to me there is so much i want to unpack right now and this is so exciting um i don't even know exactly which direction to go on because there's so much but let's start with this first of all i think there's an enormous lesson that comes out of what you just said which is not every child that's struggling academically or behaviorally is because they're a troublemaker what you described and correct me if i'm wrong and and maybe help us unpack it further is that it's not because you were living so shallow and superficial it's because you were craving something so much deeper that it presented itself as um academic or behavioral challenges when really all along it was a craving and ambition for more and what a message to educators to parents to all of us in terms of our our tolerance and how much we should try to understand what's driving what looks like rebelliousness or misbehavior in people and to understand where it's actually coming from so let's start with that absolutely absolutely rough cooks has a famous uh mimer called nishamusha the souls of the worlds of chaos and in fact there's trying to find the sources that inspired his father's um inspiration so to speak well without sources rather huda and his tommy them were trying to root it in text rafcook speaks of certain ishmaels that emerge into the world and i'm not speaking of myself but a general kind of zeitgeist of i believe our generation of nishamas who are dissatisfied with what is presented to them both religiously ethically morally even philosophically speaking and that dissatisfaction results in misbehavior of of hutzpah of brazenness and unwillingness to kind of get in line and what rafcook does in the way that only roof cook was capable of doing is he reveals that that that brazenness that hutzbah of of our generation is not because we're not interested it's because we want more we have tasted something so to speak that this world does not offer and which forces a person to seek out insight and intensity in other places and at first glance that looks like a person is just not following suit but in truth it's a it's an impulse that is born within the spirit that desires something that the external nature of all things in whatever category person is exposed to to to break the ground open to seek out something underneath so i don't want to go in this direction completely now because there's so much more to talk to you about but it's worth unpacking more uh or investigating more what what should teachers particularly be looking for in the student who presents that way who's acting out or rebellious or unsuccessful but it's really not driven by um some deficiency it's really driven by by this quest for more how could they identify it and what should they do with it teachers who have 20 23 students in a class who just need to get material taught probably don't have what it takes in order to be able to interact with that student who is exhibiting that that that what you describe as that quest for ode the more so that's worth coming back to but i want to skip to something different take us behind the bema with joey rosenfeld who goes from a student struggling academically to a published prolific author and speaker what went on and what clicked in you what is still clicking in you and i relate to this a little bit my mother loves to say that i was not a great student and i didn't succeed academically and they had to chase me to write a paper or study for a test and i now act on a deadline to write every week and to speak every week and my mother chooses to be humored by that which is a healthy way but what what clicked in you how did you go from the struggling student to the really really a scholar an academic a published and prolific author um so first and foremost it was love and encouragement unconditional love um which i received from my home from my parents from my grandparents from my siblings from my spouse from my teachers so that was number one instead of punitive approaches and the draconian path which seeks to force the person who is not in line to kind of align themselves rather i was given space to kind of do my thing um and there were various individuals at certain points a story always like to recall it could bring me to tears because i didn't know that he was my rebbe yet but when my father was kind of overwhelmed with the dysfunction he he had spoken to of weinberger schlitta and rob weinberger gave it russia and the joshua was based on as fast i believe i was dragged to shul with my father um and i went to ishkoidesh and and ravweimager rewind russia about how when yaakov avinu arrived at the well that there was a boulder covering the well and what the svasamis describes is that each of us are a well and each of us have flowing waters and and what to offer and and something unique that specific point that we come to this world to bring out and very often it looks like the boulder is covering it up and a person assumes there's nothing underneath but this emma says in the words of rewindberger is that the icker physic is to simply move the the boulder away and allow a person to be tv allow a person to be natural allow a person to express themselves the way that their nashama is speaking to them so there was that and the most important thing i did in artistral i went to oj for two years i had wonderful rebellioum there i was exposed to tremendous thinkers rav gordon rabbi kennigsberg just uh just very special people um but i learned how to read hebrew i i learned how to not be afraid of the hebrew language because i knew that bhava mitsubi ian was not necessarily going to be the thing that kind of led me to invest myself into a lifelong quest of finding god and living my life according to those principles and the benefit of being an oj is that it's in harihouda so it's one of the untouched elements of heritage draw where you have fields there and usher freunds found bait mayor to be a very unique place he said that found the inspiration to write to him there was breast love already there there were the kabbalah caves so i found myself outside more plus the skill of learning hebrew and i was chutzpadek i started reading the books that i wanted to read i saw maharals on the shelf and i said well what's this um and once i stopped being so afraid of the language the books opened themselves up to me and they were the ideas that kind of spoke to me directly so it wasn't much of an effort once i started learning the maharal which was the original kind of insight that i had um it was kind of no looking back for me let me i want to let my co-host jump in so let me ask you just one more question now you describe being an oj in the in the open fields have you ever planted a garden do you ever have the experience of putting something on the ground and watching it spread out and grow and i i'm half joking but i'm also very serious because i think much of the work that you do in the recovery community which is what we should talk about also is is making people realize when they've hit rock bottom maybe they're just the seed that's entered the ground and they're going to blossom their best is yet to come so they tried to bury us they didn't realize we were a seed so have you right what's the mystical idea of eating that pepper what did i experience tonight the fruition of labor uh the purpose of creation which is bizeas we look at the transgression of adam arishon as a descent away from the ideal but in truth it's the dissent that enables the essence of what it means to be a human being a hera choosing to experience loss choosing to experience it in a non-understandable act of quite literally destruction planting a seed as the sadhikam of ishbits and radzidin point out zriya is a muna zeratim is the cedar of amuna because what a person is doing is counterintuitive completely i am giving away i am burying i am allowing a seed to die and i am closing my mind off to any hope that that seed will become anything else but it is specifically out of that encounter with hopelessness or the loss of self-sufficiency or powerlessness that throws a person into the space of emunah which is that super rational aspect that we all have in the depths of our singularity so planting i believe is is ultimately one of the greatest examples of what panima satoru is about how destruction and absence actually are the birthplace the very birthplace of growth and this is clear from the sugus of the eight sadas it's clear when the idra when the zohar refers to the havraiah the friendship that rabbi shimon bar yochai had as mahatsu they were gardeners they were those who meant to thresh the field to clear the three field out from the overgrowths and the confusion and to see beyond the acts of destruction and see the potential of growth within it so i it was a mystical experiment you're validating me it was a mystical experience i had that pepper i can't speak for mystical experience but it's certainly the ideas that our questions speak about fantastic mosquitoes yes i wanna i wanna just uh first of all thank you so much and um i wanna build upon what ruby goldberg alluded to which is your work in the recovery community and while it's one thing to hear about your discussions of rav sadok and ishbits and panimya satora in the context of judaism and talking to a couple rabbis on a wednesday night it's very different to relate those ideas to either non-religious or non-jewish people who are going through some of the most traumatic painful moments of their life what gave you the confidence to do that to translate the language of the maharal and ishbits in ravnachman who always talk so many of these ideas you've been alluding to really emerged from him what gave you the confidence to take that language take that vocabulary and share it with people um and translate into a vocabulary that other people are going to be able to understand what gave you the confidence to do that what gave you the impulse to do that and what are some of the challenges that you encounter when doing that so to just to answer the first question with the muscle the leshams of the rebbe of cook the grand the grandfather of rava yasha of spenaline who passed away recently in the recent few years he doesn't enter into a discussion about the authorship of the zora qadosh he says very simply he says that truth testifies upon itself so it's certainly not my own confidence um i'm not a particularly confident person as those who know me understand um you know i i live with a particularly strong level of self-doubt um but the the content the words of our tsadikim speak for themselves and i i believe in the words of our sadhikim and i believe in the power of the words of that sadhikim and and that's where the confidence come from the ideas speak for themselves secondly the translatability and i love that you brought up the word translation because translation is an idea that that i am obsessed with that translation is not simply the transition from one register of language onto another but it is the impossible possibility of taking something from its original form changing it yet allowing it to maintain its kernel of essence so it's it's a miraculous power of taking something that was one thing and allowing it to become something else yet believing that the secret of unity persists and and so when i found myself in this job in st louis you know thankfully my wife is from saint louis and and we moved here unbeknownst to me under the hoop that was kind of written in and it it's i can honestly say it's probably one of the greatest things that has happened in my life um when i went to my regular weinberger i asked him and he said run as fast as you can and he actually said he said he said you'll learn to give over torah um you know in a in a place of quiet um but i think that the translatability so i found myself working with non-jews people who have never seen a jew before one of the most important things i heard in my practicum when i was working in the bronx for the for the criminal justice system for severe severely addicted individuals who had committed significant crimes i remember asking my supervisor at the time who was not jewish whether i should wear my yamaka and might sit this out and she said when the clients see you they will see two things they will see suffering and they will see resiliency and they will see faith so three things and from that point forward i was unabashedly open about my faith and about my experience and i have found that people are thirsty for content people are not exposed to ideas that speak to the human condition forget about faith forget about fundamentals of faith or theology nobody has been given voice for the struggle to become part and parcel of the spiritual experience and khasidas and kabbalah and the villenegon these things are axiomatic the you know forget all my father sent me to eritsera with camus kierkegaard and and kafka and and siddhartha um and so the end result of these books are the starting point of of hasidus meaning the valshamtov was not pretending that everything was perfect the balchemta was trying to find light in a world that was profoundly imperfect and so i have found that the language of imperfection and validating it just speaks to a very inner point and plus they don't my clients don't know the difference between namin of bratzlov the 17th century mystic who spoke of psychological syndromes or abraham maslow or you know or any of the theorists freud lacan all of the different philosophical or psychological language by making the names anonymous the content speaks for itself i want to ask a question within the recovery within the course it's very much on my mind you alluded to it before in terms of uh confidence or self-esteem is very much on my mind we were talking before you came on about writing articles put yourself out there so you know we're writing articles we speak we put ourselves out there and the larger the platform the more of a target you paint and the more of imitation of feedback you get whether you want it or not solicited or unsolicited um desired or not desired i woke up yesterday to a text from one of my daughters in israel that said abba did you see what so-and-so posted on her instagram page about you uh which i didn't and i could care less and i'm not checking and my daughter didn't know firsthand either someone had something said unto her so why am i bringing it up with you because correct me if i'm wrong in recovery i don't know if it's one of the steps or but certainly the language is a phrase that i've always appreciated but i'm trying to now decide is a part of the jewish lexicon which is what other people think about me is none of my business and there's such value to that and i think there's such truth to that don't be consumed and don't mold yourself and don't try to conform to what other people want on the one hand build up your self-confidence your self-esteem what other people think about you is none of your business and on the other hand judaism says we have an institution called marasayan you can't give the wrong impression israel you have to try to be above board because the impression we leave on others it matters and it's important so combining your recovery expertise and your torah knowledge what would you say how does judaism feel about that how would you counsel me right now live in front of everybody should i is what other people think about me none of my business or is it my business and i should care about it this is the second week in a row that we've had a therapy session for every goldberg i'm just getting it out the last week bill we got was huge so i'm okay with that the the the prayer so to speak that is utilized very often in uh in the rooms of twelve step is uh is grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change the cards change the things i can and the wisdom to know the difference rav cooks actually in midos has a very different type it's possible that there was historical overlap um just rooted in the christian theologian who actually penned that prayer it's possible i am not claiming that that's true but cook basically phrases it differently hashem grant me the ability to fix what i can fix to accept the things that i cannot fix and to rest with the courage to know the difference um so first and foremost i would say if a person is walking around like a lunatic um or and i'm not talking to you rabbi goldberg you know if a person is walking around and and making a mess out of themselves so at that point the avoid is not to be macabre and say okay i am for myself i don't have to care about what anybody else is doing these are the basic fundamentals of cognitive behavioral therapy as well cbt does not say all of our thought patterns are true they say that we have to check the evidence of those thought patterns meaning checking evidence implies the possibility that perhaps everyone in this room is looking at me in a funny way but once once we have clarified the distinction and it's something that we feel is essential to us and that we can't turn our attention from it at that point i believe the words verbenachmann are instructive in in two places number one in in between the two volumes of the teachings of there's a remarkable teaching of avraham was singular abraham was one which meant that afraham quite literally ignored every other aspect of existence other than his own inner dialogue with akaddish baruch i remember reading in a mish baja magazine very many years ago that revolves son who also works in addiction used to come to the ariakov in his uh army fatigues i believe or dress differently and the yeshiva brachum would look at him and they would kind of say you're embarrassing your father and he once went over anything else i don't care about i care about the letter of the law whatever is the trapping or the form or the shape basically you do you a person needs to be able to find comfort within themselves now this thankfully this insecurity that we all have goes back to all of that sadikim as the roshami says that rabia ki rabbi shimon was struggling i'm sorry rebbi akiva was struggling and ibrahimovic says is it not enough that me and your creator recognize your greatness is it not enough that we recognize you you don't need any other affirmation to feel valuable and validated about what you're doing ibn ahman says in the in the fifth teaching of that a person needs to see it as if they're the only person in creation and they once we recognize that we're the only person in creation the next step very randomly is let me find the deficiencies in the world and let me learn how to fix them so there are some basic steps there that review is taking for granted our job is to recognize that it's just us and hashem and once we recognize that things are broken and let's fix them as long as a person feels that what they're doing is bringing more light in the light of akaddish torah then then i think that the the naysayers or the responses the stupidity of people knows no bounds uh you know people will people will say things that are ridiculous and i find it safer to assume that it's the revelation of their own heart rather than the expression of the truth just to push back a little bit on that you know just to build on it that's easy to write about in a safer it's easy to talk about in a podcast but you know robert goldberg looking at you you don't have that luxury you don't have the luxury to say that what i'm doing is correct and everyone else is going to have to get in line or you know figure it out for themselves as a communal leader your job is to either bring the people along and you do have to be concerned about public opinion public policy how things play out in the street you can't just do everything that you want you do have to be concerned about public perception a little bit i remember a story i heard from refined waxman when i was in high school that rav shmuel schmelke of nickelsburg when he became a kahilarov and i'm not a killer rob so i can't speak but but i'll say the story that before he brought the board into his office he had them mount his walking stick on the wall and when the board came in they said reba why do you have this he said just to let you know that i can walk out of here at any second that is a good policy that's a good policy yeah yeah so rabbi brody please yeah no just wondering you know for for decades drug addiction was obviously something that was swept under the carpet in the jewish community and then i would say in the last number of years we've been putting a lot of emphasis on it there are a lot of people that are getting more involved rabbis like robbie mosque with robert goldberg are talking about it regularly and we're we're doing what we think is is a better job i'm just wondering what do you see out there is the jewish community doing better is it something which we've still got a long way to go is it getting worse and we don't even know it it's a it's an incredibly important question i'm also stuck it with being able to answer it because i live in a small jewish community right now so just the sample size itself prevents me from kind of really grasping what is going on plus with covid i i just don't see people anymore so um but i think we're certainly doing a much better job in terms of recognition and acknowledging that a shikkar is not a and that addiction and alcoholism are very much entrenched within jewish culture both from uh you know an active sometimes exposure level of kiddushes and things like that or a romanticization of substance usage as well as just the oh the awareness of trauma and mental health which certainly does not spare the jewish people it might be found more prevalently within the jewish people you know we've been through some trauma um so i think we're doing a really good job at beginning to be aware of the problem i think there are people like svglock menachem posnansky different therapists i mean the the model the og so to speak is rav torski who was uh just a a kid hashem on every imaginable level um and so there's voices and there's insight i mean that's not an exhaustive list of the names obviously but we're we're no longer afraid of looking the problem in the face but unfortunately what seems to be continuously strong is the stigmatization of addiction um the stigmatization of acting out um and that prevents people from paying attention until things get really bad so obviously we react when people die god forbid but we're not working from the ground level to understand um where these issues emerge from because my bias my bias is that addiction does not start with drug abuse addiction starts very often with birth you know addiction is a response to pain addiction is a response to wanting more and sometimes those substances are the only thing that a person thinks will offer them more but we have we have a reservoir of insight into recovery above and beyond the 12 steps if i can be so bold as to say such a thing i know that there are people who wanted to add the 13th step of ahava and echad i don't think that's necessary i think that the 12 steps are a gift they provide a deep structure if we properly understand the origins of the thought including william james and carl young with all of their problematic orientations i think we we can somewhat get over the fear that it's another religion you know aaa was started as a response to religious programs it was a breakaway from the oxford group so i think we have to be better at utilizing these skills i think the jewish community has become remarkable with regards to essay and sexual addictions but nowhere near as strong with regards to education prevention and and treatment in terms of drug addiction and alcoholism we're actually very proud we're going to be hosting a program soon and announcing moshiachnis who's a member of our community um and and also is really an expert in this area we are collaborating boca ton synagogue with his program onward living a non-profit facility for people um who are who are in recovery and we are partnering members of the community and and re-entry back into the religious community particularly for these members in recovery who who have left or who used to be part of a religious community so we're trying to create this collaboration between the two and we're excited about not only the success hopefully it'll have locally but being able to replicate it more more broadly but let me ask you um joey so um time doesn't allow us and it'll be an injustice to even ask you to do this but if you could succinctly at least give rashi prakim just just give some beginnings of an idea so you're encountering a person and it could be any one of us in any period of our life where there's an emptiness inside us there's a vacuum there are people in life who realize that they have a lot of things and they have a lot of money and they thought they had all the things that was supposed to bring happiness and they're not happy um so it could be precipitated by any kind of thing but there's an emptiness there's a hole inside a person's heart and they're trying to fill it with these fleeting pleasures and experiences of all the addictions from gambling to sex to alcohol to drugs so you're gonna fill it with something else where do you get started how do you how do you show them the hole in the heart is coming they can't fill it with something counterfeit and and what do you replace it with instead give us some sense i think first and foremost we have to validate the hole in the heart before we even begin discussion about how to fill it we have to normalize the experience of feeling like we're always already lacking something because contrary to many other faith systems judaism does not perceive the idea of perfection as a concept whatsoever even prior to the marishon things were imperfect that was the injunction to protect oneself to be guarding the implication is that we're susceptible to failure already not to mention that symptom the act of contraction and shattering of the vessels the birthplace of human experience is brokenness once we allow that experience to be validated as a normative space in which to encounter hashem at that point a person begins to stop trying to fill the hole and actually allowing the void to be felt to be modaid with it to face it unflinchingly many of our sadiq says that the world is a very very narrow bridge and the main thing is to not be afraid a person does not need to be warned not to be afraid if there's no reason to be afraid ibn ahman was aware he said this is terrifying guys what you're going to do as human beings being in this world where god is concealed or apparently concealed is scary and so that has to become the starting point of our encounter with hashem and so to not feel bad about not feeling but rather to recognize that okay hashem you know i'll play this game i'm here in the hastara hastarash tara the doubled concealment the hosha fulum the deviled over darkness so we validate that space then we begin to address the question of substance the question instead the typical language that has been used towards maladaptive behavior is what is wrong with you that you don't recognize how destructive this is how selfish are you that you continue doing this it's the wrong question the question needs to be what is the substance providing you that you can't get naturally and if the answer is i don't feel anxious anymore when i'm under the influence of something or i'm not scared anymore i don't feel alone anymore so then we have direction then we know what we need to try and learn how to do in a sober way something that i've always said to my clients and i believe it deeply addicts and alcoholics or potential addicts we don't use they don't drug themselves or numb themselves because they enjoy pleasure more than other people they're in more pain than other people and that pain is what propels a person to try and find relief the model of a a and i believe the model of the torah itself is that even the strongest substance in the world let's say the illicit substances that people use those things are more pleasurable my stoma than anything available but that's still not big enough and the answer is that you have to go to something even bigger and the only thing even bigger is god the only thing even bigger is richness is the idea of living with a presence of something in your life of believing in something bigger than oneself or community or whatever it is the katsukareba said it mo the katsukareba famously said that there's nothing more whole than a broken heart that it's the breaking point that allows us to encounter the shards of ourselves that allows us to rebuild ourselves which is the avodah and this is not taught nearly enough this is not esoteric this is the first paragraph guys you want to know what life is it's a battle you're already thrown into a raging war where did the war come from doesn't matter it's just a battle it's a struggle the first thing that you have to do as a human being learn how to care for things as a hero be careful be aware that there are pitfalls and and things that are difficult but that's where hashem wants us that's the teachings of our sadhikam hashem wants us down here malachim couldn't receive the torah because they didn't have sahara they didn't know death they weren't afraid i'm going to follow up with you uh offline because in tanya i was learning today with rabbi taugher who's a a great scholar in khabar has translated many of their works as a member of our community and we've been learning tanya we're the 12th american you know the the banana versus the tsaddik and the notion that in hasidis at least this view that the obvious words met that level of taliban doesn't even have an instinct or an intuition it doesn't even doesn't even struggle whereas the benign who makes all the right decisions but struggles and i said the whole institution that saddak tariq tanakh is being filled with sadiq and makes them utterly and entirely unrelatable so i'm struggling with that but we'll talk more about tanya on the on the other side let me ask you this as we're heading towards the close and we're so grateful you're spending your evening with us so joey you're learning you're growing you learn the language you're out in the mountains of ara yehuda why are you not why are you not in education why are you not in the rabbinate how did you end up in recovery instead of what might have seen a more logical trajectory based on the path that you were you were then on when i i was i was in this michael program in landers and i couldn't stop learning leshem you know so i couldn't master buffalo properly that's that's number one you know it wasn't uh doing it for me i needed to cook and the less and more um i don't know it's just uh it's uh the things that i'm doing the the way of teaching that i'm engaged in are things that if you had asked me a year ago two years ago i would have never conceived of and and hashem has been incredibly kind to me and and graceful to me in terms of giving me space to express myself um i i i struggle with responsibility i can't uh you know i can't burden uh i can't burden other i can't carry other people's burdens so much i i like sharing insight i like sharing the insight of our tsadikim and and letting the words of that sadhikam speak through me um it's it's it's a great question i don't necessarily have a a wonderful answer for it my family is is already my grandfather's my my maternal grandfather my paternal grandfather whose yard side it is who was a kadosh vinora they were all muhammad they were principals my father hatsumiha my brother is an assistantial rabbi at lincoln square my other brother was in china it's always been a mahalak but uh but but and i don't see myself as not being in china it's just a different space my favorite teachings are for reviewing teaching the world is sometimes more important than teaching those on the inside because shining the covet of the torah on the cover of hashem into places that would not have otherwise seen it transforms darkness to to reveal an even deeper level of light that's amazing joey thank you for being with us tonight thank you for all that you're doing if people want to learn more you could find rib joey a lot of shiruma online um in this half hour 40 minutes we spent together i know you gave me enormous amount to think about you inspired really all of us um just by touching on the beginning of these conversations people can learn with you and listen to you in such a real way online and the beauty of the internet today is that you could have a stellar wherever you live and st louis is a beautiful community it's a wonderful community especially if your wife is listening it's a fantastic community i wonder what's next for you do you bring your talents to a bigger community or is it daft there where you have the space and the margin to think from there you can broadcast these beautiful uh quiet thoughts out to the world who knows we'll have to have you back to to learn what's next for you but what's next for all of us is is to be able to continue to learn so everyone's invited to learn with you where can they find you online um so there's something called chef a podcast um and there's a podcast set up uh with inward with her by joey rosenfeld which my very dear friend zach kamenetz set up for me which is uh probably eight or nine series of ten shirim each uh on different on on different topics right now i'm giving a series of share them on the inner world of anxiety um and trying to show how our tsadikim spoke to that experience um my writings especially the writings on the tsadik reviews meyer morgenstern are on academia and if anybody wants any book my first published contrast is on on the suggest putsina de cardinousa the darkened flame the first instantiation of limitation so i've always been talking about the same thing so but uh you can just google my name really amazing thank you so much for being with us tremendous success in all that you're doing and thanks for for bringing so much light into the world in our world thank you so much for being with us thank you so much thank you thank you so much wow amazing amazing amazing i know why people love them you know i don't want to embarrass him and put him on the spot by asking how old he is or i should say how young he is how old is he he's significantly younger than i am and i'm a young man so that makes him like an infant he's like an adolescent um but in all seriousness he's really a young man such wisdom and and insight and it's broadened by what he's doing i think had he gone into kind of a typical it would be perhaps less experience with people in pain and not to say that the average young person doesn't have have what to share but working in that recovery community is is interacting with a lot of souls sometimes in their most raw format and real format which probably only adds to him which is which is amazing well let me take early 30s my my friend who is a big fan of rip joey says early 30s it kills him does it kill you by the way what was your thought while you're listening to him i felt grossly inadequate and pathetic no of course yeah no i mean first of all the vocabulary but uh but let me take something that he said and flip it on you now because he asked him why he wasn't a pulp rabbi and he said because he can't bear to carry other people's pain do you feel that as a pulpa rabbi you sit and again i know you probably other than your wife probably better than anyone else here um and i know that the majority of your day is is feeling other people's pain it's dealing with other people's pain and suffering and listening to their stories and and the tears and does that ever overwhelm you do you ever does that weigh on you do you ever take that home with you do you ever say to yourself i just can't bear it anymore how do you relate to that give take our viewers behind the beam of what it's like as a rabbi to sit there and listen to stories all day long of sickness of illness of tragedy and to be able to also be a human being while listening to all those stories i think we're out of time so i'm not going to talk about it um it's an important topic i'd love to talk about it it's actually been a pretty crazy few weeks so i don't want to be my first time crying behind the bema and not being able to say anything there's a lot of people in a lot of pain and and it's um if you have a heart you can't not feel that pain you know it's interesting shortly before we came on the air i was meeting with someone going through a lot someone that i love very much and um we were talking and i said to them um hashem hashem has been beyond kind to me in in ways i could never properly express or express gratitude but one of them is a capacity to compartmentalize i don't know whether i learned it by necessity or it was just a gift that he's given me and sometimes my wife asks it too but you can go and and you both do this we do this regularly that you go from the funeral to the wedding to the shiv house to the bar mitzvah from the death bed to the you know to the to the bris and um you have to compartmentalize that doesn't mean that when you're with each experience you're not genuine and real bashir husham in that moment in that experience but if you don't compartmentalize you'll be overwhelmed and and the ultimate competitive militarization whatever that word is is when you come home right because you have a wife and kids and you have you you owe it to your own neshama if you are entirely consumed by the composite of every conversation and every experience then you'll just crumble you just you'll implode you can't possibly so it's really critically important for survival but more than that for for thriving not just surviving in your own life and with your own family the ability not in a callous way but to compartmentalize and to say that's real right we have a friend who's very sick and going through a hard time and we love him he's especially shema and and and you have a text exchange and and it breaks your heart and then there are 400 other texts coming in right one about the milk fork and the flashy dishwasher another why rabbis hate their members that we haven't gotten vaccine for anyone this is a real email if you'd only stop behind the bema and try harder to get us all vaccines you'd save lives we know you're sitting on the vaccines you don't care enough to give them so you have you have a person who's really really struggling in the most real struggle that could exist the most painful the most painful struggle that could exist and then simultaneously you're getting inundated with texts or emails or phone calls so you've got to compartmentalize you got to finish that text and then go respond to the other texts and then check into your kids homework and then celebrate the red pepper and then celebrate and and if you don't if you can't complementalize not out of callousness but out of out of out of necessity you also all do it we we all do it to a certain extent then then you can't what i find and then i want to hear from you what i find is that you know the bad rabbis i shouldn't say they're bad rabbis they're great people and they're great rabbis but when you can't do that so then the coping mechanism is just to never feel is to never feel because if if i can't if i can't compartmentalize and put that aside then i have to just not even really feel when i'm with you it's a job like doctors it's not just rabbis who face this therapists people who work in recovery doctors just anybody with a feeling heart feels this but doctors you go from one oncologist right we've spoken to and robbie moscow you know this well and you've spoken to doctors oncologists go from patient to patient to patient to patient so the 40 patients and half a day and each one of them is is a world in crisis so what are you going to absorb all that you you couldn't be a doctor for more than a week you'd be finished so you have no so on the one hand you could be no bedside manner callous you care less about anybody so then you're a terrible doctor so how can you care but also be able to just set that aside put it on a shelf because you need to now next care about the next thing i don't know how do you do it that was beautiful i mean you know the part that resonated with me the most and obviously i agree with you and and for those who are listening and watching you just saw firsthand what makes uh rabbi goldberg so spectacular but in all seriousness um for me the biggest challenge is is coming home you know and you hit the nail on the head like you could have a really challenging day you could just have spoken to someone who had a diagnosis or just come from a from a death bed and saying veto it was someone but when you walk in the door your kids don't care about that and they they deserve a happy dad they deserve an upbeat dad they deserve 100 of you the second you walk in the door and i really struggled with that at the beginning of my rap and it really struggled with it and then the best advice i ever got was that before i come in the door now i pause and i just reflect upon where i'm about to go that you know there's there's the day there's the chaos there's there's the experience i have during the day but when i walk through that threshold and when i come into that house and my kids come running up to me and ask me how my day is i better be ready for them and i better have a smile on my face and be upbeat and ready to get on the floor and play with them or do their homework with them or just schmooze about the day and and that transition is the hardest transition but it's the transition that keeps us normal and i think it's what our kids ex not only expect of us but but they deserve from us as well how do you do it how do you stay mindful to do that how do you not rush in while you're on the phone and you're busy and you have no time and you're like i just let me like sit on the couch i how do you stay mindful to create that ritual to to do that before you walk in so i'm sure if my wife were here she would give a rebuttal and say that there are days that i that i i'm not successful in that and i and none of them are perfect and and there are days that you just can't do that but i really make cognizant effort before i come into the house to pause for a second five seconds 20 seconds and just to gather myself and to say whatever it is on my mind whether it's something that i have to write or something i have to take care of or someone that i just met with or something that's bothering me or a text message that just came in that's agitating me and to take a deep breath and to really reflect upon the sanctity of what i'm about to come into which is my home and and that's the the most kaddosh place outside of a show there's no sanctified place i have on this earth is my home and again there are days where i'm entirely unsuccessful and you know we're real here on the show there are days when i fail miserably and my kids will look at me sometimes and they'll say daddy is in a mood something must have happened at work today and you know what you try to do better the next day and i think that's like anything in life but you know it's also interesting you have to think about our wives also they they many times have the same experiences they're on the phone they're talking to congregants they're talking to people in the community it's like you go home you walk in and and they're on the phone you know because they're busy but but you know what i think it's so fascinating is that again maybe someone will i'm not going to say we're the only ones like this because there'll be people that are going to write and they're going to say it's not true but you know i don't know what other types of jobs there are we you don't know that next phone call what's coming in so you pick up the phone and okay it's someone in the hospital okay it's the wedding it's the baby it's this amazing story i'll just give you an example i i got a phone call from from a relative of john kroll on monday right so he says he's got a he he's living in israel he's got a relative that just moved to boca just retired from chicago and he says he has your site on on uh on thursday no not no connection to the community no connection to any jewish community can we can we get him uh connected to the shul he'll say kaddish maybe get him analia so i end up calling him i call him right away wonderful doctor like he's just like the greatest guy and he really wants to find out more about our shul so i figured you know let me call the guy in israel that that that sentence sent me the the information and maybe there's you know the more you talk to someone you need to find that connection you know if we're going to feel feel like there's there's some some connection to the show what's that peace you're not going to believe this i call the guy in israel and you know i'm just asking matt is about his his relative that moved here and he says yeah he's interesting because i said he is he sounds like svardic but i can't tell he's ashkenazi you know which minion can we kind of connect him with he says it's amazing story phil you gotta create you're gonna hear this again i could believe it he says he says his family moved to america they came from egypt after the 67 war so i said you're not going to believe this i just i never met anyone from egypt my whole life i just heard a story this past weekend that bar mitzvah you know this i said we're going to connect these two guys i said if you would have told me the story a week ago nothing i never would have thought anything of it you know he's a doctor this guy's a doctor you know sometimes that next phone you don't know and it's amazing sometimes phone calls hashem gives you are like just wow how do you how do you you may you made a great point rabbi brodie that really deserves to be um repeated and focused on and and we're out of time which is the story of my life maybe my first book that'll be the next oh you're asking that's gonna be the first book i'm out of time um but you made such an important point to a degree we have the luxury that when we're making these phone calls we have an office we have shul we have work our wives who are rabbits of the community are often counseling helping checking in listening and know my wife's been on the phone all day trying to help older people with getting vaccine appointments and some of them got vaccinated and and they have to do it within the home they don't have the luxury of stopping outside the door and saying i'm going to leave it outside they've got to balance that and that's that's a whole segment with revitons how they balance it that's complicated and difficult in in their own way how they do that that's how sweet of them i always say you know dinner time phones off afterward phones off and my wife said it's very easy for you to say right you're on your phone all day so yeah you come home you block off a half hour without a phone she said you know for me as you said there's no bifurcation there there's no like oh it stops here and it starts there it all kind of blends together with the kids and the phone calls and the community and the appointments in in the myriad of things that they're taking care of on a constant basis i will add one point which is that uh robbie summer said on on facebook that every smikha student should watch this you know what's what's unique here and again i'm not touting your own horns i'm really trying to give visit to other people what what i find amazing about my personal job and i know everybody brodie yell you'll validate this as well is that we have each other i speak to many of my colleagues who go through the experiences that we just articulated the the sadness the pain the bearing the the suffering of other people and they do it alone right they don't have someone who you know they have their spouse but they don't always want to bring that home to the spouse we are enormously fortunate that we have each other and obviously we always maintain confidentiality and when it's not appropriate we won't tell each other the names or the circumstances but the ability to call someone in the same community who can empathize with you who can understand what you're going through who can give you some advice when you need it is absolutely priceless and something that i'm grateful for on on a daily basis another one of the great great blessings in our life absolutely so um thank everyone who's still with us for what was i think are really inspiring for me you know rip joey and and our conversations i want to again thank you and donnie ross for sponsoring and again wish a heartfelt refusal to yeah daniel bentova basha they should have a complete speedy and painless recovery we should hear only good news from them and about them i'll just end it was a very serious episode so i'll hand out a light note lest anyone think all this goes to our head lest anyone think that the rabbinic ego gets inflated by the wonderful feedback that we get somebody decided to comment on a bunch of old podcasts on almost every episode these guys are larry moe and curly and that was their great that was their great feedback on behind the beam yeah they were not writing it out of love let's just put it that way that these guys are the three stooges larry mo and curly we're still figuring out who's who but on that note we'll uh thank everybody thank you our sponsors thank you jay rosenfeld for joining until next time everybody stay happy stay healthy and stay holy