Even the Koreans Understand | Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair

I come from the world of music and the arts. By the time I was 26, I'd co-produced a record that has sold over 5 million copies to date, Baruch Hashem. One of the things that intrigued me when I became Torah observant was that I met frum people who were fascinated to know what some of the so-called stars that I'd met were like. I sensed a... an ever so slight tinge of FOMO. It's like, you know, we all know the Torah is true, and there's a Ribono shel Olam and Olam Haba and all that, but... I'd love to get some of that glut Olam Hazeh... if it wasn't אסור. Gentlemen, let me tell you. I wore the T-shirt. I wove the T-shirt. You're missing out on nothing except what it means to be a Yid. The Kotzker used to say, If you really knew what it meant to be a Yid, you’d jump up and down and start dancing the Kazatska. Sometimes it takes a message from far away to make us realize exactly what we have. South Korea is one of the most tech, fast paced countries on Earth. Robots bringing food to your table. There’s technology the world hasn't even seen yet. There's an education system that's one of the most intense in the entire world. But believe it or not, in South Korea they learn Talmud in their schools. About 25 years ago, Korean educators were fascinated by the success of the Jewish people. Here was a nation that had been through exile after exile, pogroms, holocaust, bloodshed, torture, and yet somehow they’d managed to produce the most influential, radically transformational people on the earth. Nobel Prize winners, scientists, doctors, business leaders, thinkers, way out of proportion to their numbers. And the Koreans asked the same question that the rest of the world has always asked, and that is, How is it possible that people running for their lives seem to have lived the most fruitful of lives? But unlike other nations that nurture the poisonous illusion that the Jew conspires to control the world, the Koreans came up with a much more honest conclusion. They said, Maybe the Jewish people are more successful because their guidebook to life is wiser than any other guidebook. They said: We want to understand the Talmud. We want to know why the Jews are so smart, why they're so resilient. The Torah says: כי ברכך מכל העמים. The Jewish people will be the most blessed of all the nations. The history of the Jewish people shows that we've lived far richer lives than anyone else. The next time you feel like you want to give up, that you're fed up with having to control yourself at every corner, that you feel you're missing out on a good life, that life would be just so much easier if we didn't have to always be on guard, remember, our guide to life has been tested and proven, generation after generation. Sometimes it takes other people looking from the outside to tap us on the shoulder and remind us that we got the gold, and what the world has is just so much... Tinseltown.