How to Channel Negative People (Without Going Insane)

Nobody's perfectly bad. And when you talk to the version of that person that isn't bad, you focus on the good, the bad becomes a lot less relevant. Why push away the negative behavior of disrespecting yourself when you could just welcome the positive behavior of respecting yourself? Why push away the dark when you could just literally welcome in the light? This week's para Torah portion is a double Torah portion. the portion of Tazria and the portion of Matsra, they're not always together. Sometimes they're separate, sometimes they're together. These paras one thing that the Labava used to really focus on when it came to a para was the name. The name of of a para has a lot to do with the overarching theme. Just like the name of a person, your name has a lot to do with you. Your Jewish name says a lot about you. The name of a para says a lot about the para itself. And if you wanted to discuss, if you wanted to reduce the whole para into one word, that's the name. The name tells us the overarching theme. And what's ironic here is you have two separate parhas, the para of Tazria and the para of Morra. Two separate themes. And we're bringing them together. But they're not just separate themes. They're dichoto dotimist. There we go. Dichamus themes. I was hoping I could get caught my words like a half hour in. I don't know. I didn't think it would happen that quick this time. Dichomous themes. There's they're contradicting themes. The first para the para of tazria talks about birth. It says when a woman will reproduce and it talks about the laws and intricacies of child birth and the necessary steps the necessary sacrifices and corbano and gifts that were offered by the mother when there was a bas mikdash when there was a temple. It talks about circumcising the child. It talks about inhabiting this world essentially that's the par of tazria making this world an inhabitable place a place that's you know being productive it's about productivity then you have the para of mitsra the next para that we're reading together back to back as if they were one and what is mitsur mitsur is from the word sat the leprosy that would appear on somebody's skin it's not actual leprosy leprosy apparently is specific type of illness. This was some sort of variation of leprosy, but it they translated as leprosy, but it was saras or some sort of skin ailment. And where would the skin ailment come from? When one would speak lush on har, you would know, you'd know somebody's talking about you because it would appear on their skin and they would have to be isolated and quarantined, separated from the community for seven days. And if it didn't go away, two weeks, and then they would have to purify themselves and bring a sacrifice and reboot themselves. And it's really about the opposite of what the previous para is. It's not about productivity. It's it's uh it's counterproductivity because lashara evil talk about other people is like a fundamental okay this might be a big word but or or a big statement but it's it's a cardinal sin. It really is. It it's it's one of the hardest sins to refrain from because it's so much fun, but it's it's probably one of the worst if if you were to look at sins as like if you were to put them on scales. Not that we usually do that, but it's probably one of the worst. Uh there there's a book called authored by Rabbi Israel Mayor Kagan the mid 1800s and he wrote a whole series of books discussing the laws and ethics of lashara of evil talk in what circumstances would it be appropriate and what you know he goes in detail like in the application the hakic application and as in introduction he goes throughout history discussing how almost every destructive moment in history, at least with the Jewish people, had to do with Lashanhara. Starting with the snake convincing Eve to eat from the fruit tree, the snake spoke badly about God and started like, you know, blaspheing God and saying that, "Yeah, don't don't don't worry about that." Um, the second temple being destroyed because Jews were talking badly about each other and it led to incredible hatred and there's I mean there's a whole story behind that. The spies speaking badly about Israel, delaying our trip for 40 years, wandering the desert for 40 years. Lashhara destroys relationships. In the famous story where Moses saw Dan and Aram fighting and he says, "Guys, don't fight. Come on. And they said, "Are you gonna kill us like you killed that Egyptian?" Remember Moses killed that Egyptian. He looked here, he looked there, and there was nobody watching, although they were watching. And you know what Moshe says? It says in the book of Exodus, "Oo, you know, like when you're busted, you go." And and he was afraid. And Rashi says, "Why was he afraid?" There was different reasons why he was afraid, but one of the reasons why he was afraid was not for his own life. Like, oh no, now I'm going to get in trouble. He was afraid that how are the Jews going to be redeemed from exile if they're speaking lash and har? It happens to be about me, but that's a separate issue. The fact that they're talking lash and har amongst each other, how are they ever going to be redeemed? How are we going to get the Jewish people out of exile? They're not united. Mitsurra, this leprosy which is the result of lashhara. This para seems to be about the opposite of productivity. It's counterproductivity. It's destroying relationships. It's about isolating people when they have this skin ailment because they did something that they really shouldn't have. In contrast to the para of tazya which is about productivity and we're pairing these two together these two opposites together somehow insinuating that these two very different themes have one message. What is that one message? I was reading a talk from the labavator recently from 1988 and it it's a there's different styles of the Reb's talks. You have two in general you could put into two categories edited and unedited. A lot of his talks were edited and put footnotes and stuff and then there's a lot of unedited transcripts and when you read it it's there's a certain warmth and passion. and you feel like you're kind of there, you know, when and in this talk the Reb was talking about how the word Tazria or the theme of Tazar productivity in Mitsurra which is counterproductivity can be reduced to two very direct and clear messages. What you should do and what you shouldn't do. That's the bottom line, right? If you were to really like distill the message, the message of Tazaria about productivity is focusing on what you should do. You should do more mitzvah. You should be more kind. You should give more charity or you should study more Torah. There's 613 opportunities of things or no, there's 248 opportunities, right, of things we should do. And then you have mitsra, the things you shouldn't do, which is essentially what it's representing. And there's 365 opportunities to not do this, to not do that, to refrain from, to refrain from uh uh whatever it might be, right? There's there's countless examples. And usually we try to tackle these things separately. But having the portions together teach us, and this is so liberating, and you'll soon see why, that you don't have to tackle these separately. You don't have to. You could do them both at the same time. You know why? Because if you're focusing on what you should do, you're automatically avoiding what you shouldn't do. So you don't have to focus on not doing it. It's an incredible, incredible liberating concept, right? A little bit of light dispels a lot of dark. So you don't have to focus on the darkness. You don't have to focus on problems. I I'll give you a couple of examples. And by the way, this is not just a psychological tip, which I'll share with you soon. psychology, modern psychology is catching up with this groundbreaking work. It's incredible. But I'll I'll share it with you soon. But it's not just a psychological tip that's going to help you. This is actually a messianic mindset. This is the Msiah mindset. This is how we usher in this new phase where God is going to be relevant and meaningful to this world. Not through running away from the world and trying to run to God. not running away, focusing on running away from what we shouldn't do and exclusively focusing on what we should do, but merging the two, bringing God in the world. I'll give you an example. Just a couple of weeks ago, we celebrated Pes and the first and second night of Pes, we read through the Hagada and we spoke about the four children. I got to tell you a great story. I'm sorry. I I knew a guy. He was at somebody's seder and this guy is leading the seder and he picks this guy to read the wicked son and the guy got all offended like what you want and he walked out. I'm sorry that not nice but I just think like it wasn't I'm sorry it wasn't his intention. He wasn't trying to pen this guy as the wicked son, but I guess there was history to that relationship. Um, whenever I see this person, whenever I run into this person at a sader, that's like the the running joke like, "Oh, me? You want me to read this?" Josh, you're so easily amused. Doesn't take much. Okay. But so we have the wicked son and if you want to you could call him the cynical son, right? What is this service that you're doing to you? He excludes himself. And what's our reply to the wicked son? Blunt his teeth. Smack him. Right. How often does that work? Why are we doing that to him? A lot of commentaries are bothered by by this response and there's a lot of beautiful answers that help us understand the true intention of of what the Hagada means to say. I read one this year which to me was just so revoly. What is the word? It translates as teeth. But what else could the word shav mean? Shinav could be plural for shin. Blunt the shin. The letter shin. Where's the letter shin? Well, you have a rash a shin and an ion. And wedged within the r and which spells brah bad. Wedged within that bad, you have a shin. So you have this evil, this cynicism, this confusion, and maybe it's to no fault of his own, but you have something that's not good. Rah, wedged between the ra and the eye and the rah is the shin. And rather than trying to address the rah, address the negativity, address the evil, blunt the shin, make the shin more apparent. Well, what is that shin? I don't know. But it's something that's not bad. Let's redeem it. Let's talk more about that. Maybe shin stands for sima. Maybe shin stands for I don't know. It could stand for a lot of different things. Let's In other words, nobody's perfectly bad or at least most people aren't perfectly bad. And when you talk to the version of that person that isn't bad, you focus on the good, the bad becomes a lot less relevant. I'll give you an I'll give you a practical example. I was working with a fellow who was going through a very difficult time in respecting himself. And when somebody doesn't respect himself, it's going to be hard to operate properly in a marriage, right? It just doesn't it's very difficult. And that was his issue. So he says, "How could my wife respect me if I don't even respect myself?" This is what he asks. So I said to him, "There's two routes you can go here. You can explain why you shouldn't disrespect yourself." But I didn't take that route. I said, "What do you respect most about yourself?" He says, "I don't respect myself. How could my wife respect me?" And I said, "What do you respect most about yourself?" Which was a very gentle and polite way of saying, "I don't believe you, man, I do believe that he doesn't respect himself, but I don't believe that's entirely true." So I said, "What do you respect mostly about yourself?" and he starts going into this rich description of very meaningful qualities that he possesses and accomplishments that he had done. I was like, "Wow." This is exactly what we're talking about in this para. Why push away the negative behavior of disrespecting yourself when you could just welcome the positive behavior of respecting yourself? Why push away the dark when you could just literally welcome in the light? And and there's th this is not going to be popular to to in but but this is just the fact. This is true by the way when we're addressing trauma as well. There is this notion that talking about trauma is helpful. I I'm not saying you should pretend your trauma doesn't exist and sweep it under the rug and just hi everybody. Okay. I'm not saying that. But unleashing trauma. Uh there is no conclusive research that shows that that works. Um I'm not saying that people you shouldn't be available for people to vent either. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying I I hear so many people and especially practitioners going around talking about special moments where they got people to talk about their trauma. Like what did you do with that? You just left them. You just sliced somebody open and walked away. Like no surgeon would do that. But there it's it there is research that shows that talking about hope actually heals trauma. If you have a traumatic situation and I get you to talk about it, I'm putting you in a position where you're talking about pain and you're going to feel pain because I'm forcing you to think about it. But if I get you to talk about hope respectfully and and empathetically where I recognize and validate that you do have trauma, that you are in pain, and if that pain wasn't there, what would you hope for instead? and you were to talk about that there would be a neurological response to your bo in your body similar to that of trauma almost there's no word for it in in the clinical world but a positive trauma that your body would respond to. It's fascinating because the Torah literally tells us a little bit of light dispels a lot of darkness and it's true on a clinical level. It's true on a relationship level. It's true on a behavioral level. It's true when we're addressing the Yates. The Talmud says track that a person should get the Yates to angry at the Yates. Rile yourself up against that Yates. Remember how bad he is. Put it Put the Yates in its place. Now, if you take that statement for face value, you could hurt yourself. because you could get so caught up in trying to run away from the Sahara that you're just getting sucked in. Um I there's numerous letters from the Lava addressing teenagers, male teenagers going through various struggles as they develop. And the Reb addressing them, telling them, "Do yourself a favor and stop fighting. Just do something else. Stop trying to fight your Yates. Just do something else. Focus on who you want to become instead. Because the more you fight the Atahara and the more you focus on attacking the Atahara back, the more you're just enraging it and empowering it. Just do something else instead, man. It's an incredible obviously this has to be done with sensitivity but I saw a letter from the where somebody had suicidal thoughts and and I'm paraphrasing but the because I don't remember the exact quote the Reb said in this letter like what what would you rather have like what's your purpose in life what's your meaning in life there's a lot of research behind this modern research that posted the rebbit about this and posted a lot of these talks about this. So to me it's just fascinating. But going back to what our relationship with the Saharaas but the Talmud says you should be angry at the Sahara. The alterba the author of the Tanya writes he writes this not in the Tanya but in one of his other books when it says get angry at the says don't get angry at the get the angry at the which is effectively saying empower your yates to empower your godly soul. The way you fight your animal soul, the way you fight the negative tendencies, negative thoughts and all the baggage that that comes with is by not fighting it at all, but empowers empowering the divine soul. Empowering who you really are and who you really want to become. There's literally less space for darkness. When we have tazria, the productivity, we're addressing the msorra. We're addressing our uh fight against counterproductive tendencies. This is literally the messianic mindset because Messiah is described by Yeshayahu, by Isaiah as this period in time where the world will be filled with the knowledge of God. We're going to get to know God right here. Which means it's not about dying and going to heaven and escaping and knowing God, but it's about having our own personality, our own stickick, our own tendencies, our own passions, our own drives, our own interests, and with all of that making space for God in there so that those could be channeled in a positive way. The Hebrew word for exile, gola. The Hebrew word for redemption, ga. Similar spelling with the difference of an alf. Gula, redemption as an alf. Alf representing God. It's not about escaping exile, moving on to redemption. But if we could look for God and look for positivity within the darkness, which means I'm recognizing the darkness is there. I'm empathizing with it. I recognize that this challenge is here. I'm not dismissing it within that. If light were to appear, how would you notice it? Look for it within the mitsur, within the the way we attack counterproductivity, which might be the might be the animal soul, might be many different things, is by discovering the productivity within. We could do them simultaneously. You can attack darkness just by discovering the light. Okay, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.