A Couple's Journey to Share the Beauty of Judaism, Part 1 - on MindFlex

evening and welcome to this week's edition of mineflex thank you so much to project inspire for having me back uh my name is arvish shlomov spam and we are coming to you from silver spring maryland this time i'm privileged to have my wife together with me the holy rabbinic holy daughter bucksbaum um and tonight we're going to speak about a topic that is very near and dear to us the topic of this week's mind flex is inspiring others inspiring the people around us to grow whether it is spiritually jewishly in values for them to be to be growing in in really whatever aspect we want them to be growing but to view ourselves in somewhat of that leadership role that that motivate a role that influencer role um and and how to do that um the the class is called life lessons from the outreach trenches our journey to share the beauty of judaism uh my wife and i and and very we'll share in a moment a little bit about what we do but um we have built an organization here in the greater washington dc area that is very much about spreading the beauty of judaism to others really from people from all walks all walks all jewish backgrounds we've been been privileged to deal with through our classes through our our mentoring through our coaching and what we're hoping to do in these two sessions we have part one tonight and part two tomorrow is to share with you some of the stories that um we've encountered in the field of what people call jewish outreach we prefer to call jewish engagement to share our stories and to share some of the lessons that we have learned about how to how to how to inspire others how to move others in their growth yeah so um tonight we're going to share with you a little bit about ourselves a little bit about our background this project inspires has asked us to share some of that to know where we're coming from and then tomorrow we'll share more of our our stories being on the ground and and what i call the five priceless principles of creating deep growth in in other people yeah i think to start everybody has to view themselves as an influencer that's i think the starting ground is that you look at yourself and you look at your life and you wake up in the morning and you almost think to yourself how am i going to leave a positive impact on somebody that i'm going to meet up with today now if you're more in your home now because of the pandemic there are still ways to make this happen but the idea is that every person that you are encountering any time of the day you always want to make sure that you are putting forth that light that you are being that source of light that you are igniting that source of light in somebody else and i actually had this experience yesterday i told you about this that i i came back from a run i love to run and um i must have been like a little bit out of breath and i was just turning the corner onto a new road and i hit somebody who was walking his dog and um he probably knew who i was you know i was in my full running gear and he just said to me now that's impressive that's impressive and he just repeated it and i can hardly even like you know i was very out of breath in that moment and i just said thank you and i continued and that was all i needed to continue the rest of my run like i came i finished up my run and he gave me that extra you know umph in my run just to feel like come on get out there do something and i think that um when we think about just constantly being in that role whether it be you know the cashier or somebody that we're we're walking down the street and we bump into we constantly have the opportunity to share light to share love we are ambassadors of light and love and we always have that opportunity and i think that's why when we opened up our we started this new organization we decided to call it the live experience it came very naturally that we were going to call it love because we were when we were discussing like what should the names be and it was a very exciting discussion we brought our children into this discussion and we were like back and forth and when we got to the core of what we were trying to create and what we were trying to accomplish through this new organization it was about connection and bringing that heart to heart connection so very much you know lev means heart and it represents just how are we connecting to your heart we feel something we see something in you you know what is it that we can make that connection and so many people all over everywhere they're all searching for connection that's what everybody wants today we are both big podcast listeners and i just i can't get over how many podcasts we flip on and how many of them but i don't even think it's gonna be anything related to you know connection or god or or you know just spiritual and somehow it just comes up in almost every single podcast because people are searching for that people are looking for that connection and whether it be texts or phone calls or emails or something you know multiple times a day from all different ages really and sometimes they don't even realize that that's what they're saying but people are looking for connection and we all have the ability to create that connection absolutely and when when we began our organization which again the love experience it was it was about leather was about hard it was about an emotional emotional connection to growth we were seeing through the podcasts but through the social media outlets how the world is looking to to find something to find greater meaning here we're standing in the beginning of at a time when just the headlines of the news um especially you know at the time that we're having this discussion the headlines of the news are rattling everyone you know everything from what kovid has done to the world from what politics has done to the world people are ready to embrace uh life with uh with with a wholesomeness without with a freshness and they're just looking for something that will inspire them and an emotional connection to judaism has given so much that's why we've seen really over the last year through the whole kobe we've seen more and more people starting to do things for shabbat for shabbos right even if it's just friday nights together with their families spending more time with their families whatever it is because people are very much looking to looking to grow and uh and and there's a there's a term that's used sometimes in our uh in our profession called kirov if you're not familiar with the term what kirov means is it comes from the hebrew word likharev richard means to bring closer because we're always trying to bring people closer to us closer to their roots closer to their heritage closer to to to who they are to their jewish identity to the jewish heritage i almost think that's the core of it you know closer to themselves closer to the dormant potential that's sitting there that they just need to tap into and allow it to explode exactly exactly and that's very much um what what what we're trying to do and what we want to share um with you a little bit in tonight's presentation and in tomorrow night's presentation um on that note just before we get into our own stories if i could share um with you all tonight just a short torah thought we'd like to we always like yeah exactly to open it up with a bit of a torah thought and that has to do with these torah portions that we're reading now uh we're the torah portions that we're reading if you look into the torah we're reading now about the exodus we're reading now about this time period in history where this this family of abraham isaac and jacob their children now go in to become slaves in egypt and then they experience this wonderful this incredible exodus which eventually leads them to stand at mount sinai and receive the torah and if you take a look at this whole time period very of the the time period is referred to in many texts as showdom which is actually an acronym for the the the names of the torah portions shimot va'ara bo bishallah spatum if you take the initial letters of each one of those words you put them together you get the word shove of them and show them comes from a verse in the tanata verse in the bible that says show them return people return and because of that there's a focus oh there's a tremendous focus during this time of self growth which works out really well because we're always reading these two portions kind of right around the beginning of the secular the solar new year and it's interesting to have those two things align because there is this sense of growth in the air growth and renewal in the air now what people are are what what is often discussed is this idea that when when the jewish people are born into slavery they're born into into egypt they undergo not just the physical slavery but a spiritual slavery as well the point that the commentaries say that when the jewish people were at the point that god was ready to take them out they were really on the lowest spiritual levels possible and in fact the very word the hebrew word for egypt mitzrayim is also read as maitsarin absolute constraint they were they were in in in a tumultuous state spiritually and yet it's specifically from there specifically from egypt that god says these are the people that i want this is the nation that i want you're right if you look at them now they might not necessarily look like they have everything in order they might not necessarily look like the most inspirational generation they might look like they have troubles but this is the generation that i want and if i can add one more thing the capitalists say that if you look at the early stories in the torah okay the first 2 000 years of humanity as it's recorded in the torah we see one disaster after the next right they have to go through the world is destroyed by a flood in the times of noah you find people that they're building a tower to wage war against god and it seems from there if you look at these generations it seems like you know these were like the worst the the the worst version of humanity possible but yet the commentaries say something absolutely fascinating they said that all of these early generations that went through this these difficult times had so much potential they had these could have been the holiest generations to ever walk the planet but when a holy generation is there when there's a holy soul that's present in the world that also means that there's potential for them to struggle because with greatness comes those challenges and if you take a look at everything that the jewish nation went through in egypt the decree they should be thrown into water well that sounds familiar we had a nation thrown into water before right the early generation of the flood let them build let them find bricks and build things well we had another generation that had to build that decided to build things the generation of the tower of babylon early on and that's why the cabinet would say that the torus is pointing to a soul connection a spiritual connection between those early generations that struggled so much and this generation that was put into egypt to tell us to teach us that the souls that go through this struggle with spiritual struggle have the greatest have the most unbelievable potential this is the generation these are the people that god choose and god says you're gonna become the jewish nation and we're talking over here about some of the kabbalistic soul connection obviously time wise it was much later but the lesson over here is that when we see a generation that is struggling to find themselves as we find today the jewish people in america and we're talking about from every from all backgrounds right no matter where you're coming from even even within families that one might think this looks like the mo it looks like they've got everything in order right they look like everything is everything is perfect they're connected but yet this one is struggling that one is struggling you don't even know this one might just present themselves in a certain way but who knows who knows what they're struggling that is our generation our generation that is that is dealing with this is an indication of the fact that there is so much potential and i truly believe at least in our line of work i truly believe that we are seeing this we're seeing this awakening we're seeing a generation yearning for something more across the board jews and non-jews alike and here we have a beautiful heritage that we're able to share with them beautiful i think another similarity that's just interesting if you want to look at where you're comparing the generations if we're similar to that same generation you know we're told that in the merit of the women back in the time of the exodus of egypt it was in the merit of the women that they were redeemed from egypt says yeah so i just if we're comparing generations over here then it will it will then again be the talmud goes on to say that it will then again be in the merit of the women that we will be redeemed at the final redemption will come through women and um we just find that the women really so much of the time are the driving forces behind it um even with our new organization when we started lev like it was really like the women cheerleaders that were like standing there you know with the with the flags and you know come on come on we can do this and um they weren't actually cheerleaders but they were like like cheerleaders yeah a lot like exciting like better moves much better moves so we i find that a lot of times when when a family is looking you know to grow and you're looking they're looking to connect to something and they're wondering like how is this going to work and there's it feels like yeah i you know yikes but a lot of times the women can just make little subtle things in their house they can do subtle things that that seem subtle you know when we say them they seem really subtle but suddenly they're making all the difference you know when somebody wants to just tap in we've seen unbelievable over covered time you know people being much more tapped into the power of shabbat you know just it's such a great time to be home where are they running anyways so people are really like they'll set their table a little bit nicer they'll spend the time making the challah um you know do a little something for the meal maybe they'll make kiddush whatever it is but most of the time it's the women saying you know let's just make this happen let me just start with making challah you know and then suddenly like the smell it smells so good the house smells so delicious and everybody's like wanting a little bite of that fresh delicious kala and like week after week when the women are tapping into that you know that really is it makes the family feel like you know this is really something to look forward to and that's the start of it the women will start it and then it kind of goes from there and and the family starts to go along on whatever journey their journey looks like but it's a beautiful thing to see how the women many many times are the ones who are the initial ones to ignite the spark like king david said king david says in one of the chapters of psalms king david says i am your servant the son of your female your maidservant right but he he attributes so much of his growth to his mother and i think that we see that many times um even even when we're finding that there are teens because we deal a lot with teens younger teens older teens even college kids yeah who are trying to figure out where they stand spiritually where they are spiritually often we find that it's going to be their mother who will really have a sense as to what it will take to inspire them exactly exactly and they're often the one saying hey you know can you reach out can you say israel i think that if you would say this or whatever because they have that certain understanding so i think that that's just that that is it's a a wonderful wonderful point just about who we are and for everyone you know who's who's watching this just to have that that that awareness as to what speaks to our generation so we hope to be able to share with you a little bit more about that and again some more principles as to what you can do to inspire the people around you but first because project aspire did ask us a little bit to share about a little bit about our background so um we both come from very different backgrounds in terms of everything everything but especially in terms of leadership and therefore you know we're not necessarily the most likely to have found ourselves in this in in in this role yet you know through hashem's guidance and clearly you know showing us uh placing us exactly where we needed to be for our life mission we found ourselves over here and i guess verbally we'll start with you because you have much more of a fascinating upbringing in terms of jewish leadership just to be able to share a little bit with um who we are and where we're coming from so i did grow up like my husband mentioned i grew up in denver colorado and um i'm still a true denver right at heart that is for sure and um i'm very very blessed and i this is not something that i take for granted this is something that i that i think hashem for every day of my life that my biggest role models in my life have always been and continue to be my parents thank god and i really grew up in a home that i would say i'm going to focus on three particular areas and they're going to be the areas that we're going to continuously focus on but i grew up in a house just for just for starters um it was a tremendously joyful home and i just have memories from the time that i'm i'm very very young you know just that the house always being filled with with song and music and laughter and lots of love and and decorations and excitement it was always like that from the time that i was very young um you know i don't remember at exactly what age it was but i have memories thinking that it was from the time that i was quite young that my home was always filled with all types of people so it was from the mishu lachem who were coming from israel and needed a place to sleep to you know the yeshiva bathroom who needed a good hot meal to the base apple girls not at the same time but you know who were living around the corner and they just needed just a listening ear or something and they were in my home and then there was also all of the um all of the people who were not from and they were somehow just also coming through at different times and so even before my my parents started doing you know official cure of organization work there was always this feeling of kirov to the world and um it was something that very very much was was integrated into my heart and um i attribute a lot of the um emotional connection that i feel to people because that was kind of just the way that i was raised it was just kind of the way that we give and the way that we love all of claudia straw and it was a tremendous thing for me um when i was you know in my early teens already the work that my parents were doing turned into a formal organization and it started off just you know my father teaching torah in trailers with horses like right outside you know you could just imagine in denver colorado that's what it was like make great students finally they do make good students um this was not just the horses though although he wasn't sure who was gonna show up so maybe that's why he started a trailer just thinking if nobody else shows up i got the horses with some cowboys but yeah but they got it was actually very full and it grew and it grew and grew until they found a small storefront and ultimately grew into a larger building and i'm really not here to tell their story of success i'm here to tell how this has impacted my my role and i always felt a tremendous amount of acharas towards the work that my parents were doing even from the time that it was very mom and pop you know like all the mailings that would come home that we needed to get so there was a certain amount of excitement around the programming that was going on and we were the ones that were like putting the envelopes together and putting the little mailing labels on and the stamps and we were getting it out and you know there was that excitement and then when my mother used to go to school um and have to run the little group for the children you know she always would engage us as we were also able to be somewhat teachers i mean we i wasn't you know a young girl but i was new more than those kids and i was able to teach the groups with her and there was always that tremendous acharyas that we loved in a good way and i think that the point to really mention over here is that the the idea of authenticity that you know it was so it was our yiddish kite was so real to us who we were um my father you know came from baro park and and he had gone into kirov but he was always telling us about his upbringing and about his and where he came from and his connection to hashem and the authenticity of of torah and yiddishkai was so true and it ran through um it for sure ran through my parents veins and they were able to transmit that to us and i think that that feeling of just when we have such authentic relationship with our religion you know with yiddish kind itself the people that we're working with can feel that authenticity and they they know they knew like this is the real deal and i think that that that lent itself to us being able to create deeper more meaningful more enriched relationships and um you know then as i grew up from the time that i was very young you know high holiday experience we did not have a center that was big enough and thank god my parents drew a large crowd so it meant packing up and going to a hotel for every rosh hashanah and yom kippur and it was a privilege you know um i'm not the one who was organizing at all i can't speak to that end of it but just the way that we looked at it as a privilege and this was something that we were lucky to be able to do it never felt like it was a burden and then we had a shabbos house for 10 years my parents were living in the from community and for 10 years we traveled every single shabbos to this other house and you know some of my friends were like oh it's like like a shabbos house it felt like a resort you know i'm not gonna say it was all easy um there were times even and i wasn't the one like doing the massive schlepping and my mother would have to bring the food over and it was a whole balagan but somehow it just we were very proud we were very very proud to bring our friends over and to engage in those relationships with all of the guests and the people that were coming through and it was just something that i really look back at with the fondest of memories and um and i guess the last piece that i just want to speak about is is the piece of of love you know so we have the the joy that that we grew up with the authenticity and then the third piece would be just the importance of real true and that is that when you can meet another jew and this was something that i i saw and i i hope that i'm continuing to uh to live but when you see another jew and you know this person is a jew and you care for this person and you want you know the best for this person it's not a matter of you know oh i've got something for you i've got this great package to sell you and you know i'm gonna pull you in it's more like and we're gonna get to this a little bit more you know soon but it's more just like i love you and i care for you so deeply like what is it and how can i help you and how can i help serve your need in that way and i think that when the abbas israel is so great um kameyama you know i think that the other people that are receiving that love can can feel that love and i think that it ends up you know just just reciprocating in a most beautiful way so that was a huge piece of of my my upbringing those three values of joy authenticity and love and i would also just want to say something very interesting my mother actually just sent me on my um on my birthday i won't say which number but just now this year happy birthday she sent me a picture and she goes i thought you'd get a kick out of this i actually carry this in my briefcase every day and she took a picture and i'm like looking what this is i see that it's a letter that i wrote to myself in ninth grade i didn't think my mother keeps a lot of my papers but this paper she apparently carries in her briefcase every day and it's dear devorah you know dated all the way down and it's we were supposed to say what where we saw our life going in 20 years from that point or maybe it was 15 years whatever it was um it was actually unbelievably astonishing to me to see how many of those details have thank god that i've been blessed have lined up to today thank god thank god but what i think is even more incredible than that is how many of those those traits and those feelings that i was getting from my home and from the way that i was raised were impacting the way that i wanted to to lead my life um and i think a lot of them had to do with these three ingredients so it's a pretty incredible thing that is an incredible thing um and my upbringing was not anywhere similar very differently yeah in the sense that i mean obviously all of the the joy and the love but i grew up in flatbush in brooklyn and i'm sorry i'm sorry we did not have that sort of exposure although i need to say though that being a student of yeshivator vidas did have somewhat they had um young russian boys would come in once a week so i i think that i did have some exposure but i think when i was in earth israel learning in yeshiva and israel afterwards i think that if i can try to pin back the very very first moment i'm thinking there's a friend of mine who had his parents had an apartment in the old city and um they were the family was somewhat they were supporters of asia torah and they had this apartment and my friends we were in yeshiva together um he would have these uh shabbatons in his house or even just friday night meals in his house and sometimes he would invite us from yeshiva say come over i'm having some ash guys you know you know we'll come together and and i remember those shabbat at least one of them again not having grown up with any of this i don't think even growing up i think in in my upbring thinking that like most jews most you know normal jews are from and then you know there's some this thing called you know a non-religious but it's probably like just some minority you know out of town or whatever and for me when we were driving to new york it was like oh my gosh there's there's a yamaha over there on the street you know but then um we were in israel and we're having these shabbatons and we're having these shabbos meals and you have these yeshiva guys and you have these aish guys um and it was this feeling even if they weren't religious it was this feeling it wasn't even a feeling of like what can i do to bring them closer it was this feeling of we're sitting around the shabbos table and look at the diversity wow look what's happening over here there was something about that to me that felt like this is right this is right like this is the way it's it's supposed to be and again obviously there was a thing of what's my role in bringing them closer but it wasn't even that it was i want to be in this situation like i i want to be present i want to create these environments where you'll have these from and not from singing together learning together philosophizing together is that a word debating philosophy right together there was something that was that was wonderful that was beautiful about it um i married obviously into a a great a wonderful kira family and and i think that that gave me more of an opportunity and and um as i got to see the age world a little bit closer because that's where i ended up getting my smear i came over from the mirror uh 2h and um it was right after abner passed away i was there i was actually at ash when wonder of north passageway if you're not familiar with riven off-weinberg here again this is not sponsored content but uh this is a wonderful biography of ravnaf weinberg who was a revolutionary in the world of bringing other people closer and uh i i got to see her of gnoc and i was very moved by abnormal but after abner passed away when for about a full month afterwards every single day at the yeshiva more of his students were coming closer and saying was like a father to me or not was and realizing this kesha this bond that a review that a teacher can make with someone that they're reaching out to to me it's like i i want that i want that and i think that was very much a part of what moved me forward what pushed me into this i remember once being it when we when we spent some time in denver and my father-in-law had asked me if i could uh give a share give a class for some people who are you know non-observant people which is you know something that i'm passionate about so i was just starting out i didn't have like a whole repertoire of you know exciting classes but there was one sugiyah one concept that i was very into and that was the mishkan i was very into like the the mid parches chuma the mishkan and seeing how the different parts of the mishkan correspond to our own inner world and how the koji shot conduction was like the mind and this and that right so like okay you know listen i'll share it it was based on the mountain so it ended up was over the course of the summer and i gave it a couple part series on on understanding the the maldives and how and how you understand the mission not exactly like you're you know like a hot cure of topic you know i don't know i don't know you know even mine flex would bring me up and there was this elderly fellow over there who's no longer with us passed away he came over to me after he was probably in his 80s at the time from oh he was originally from omaha nebraska and he was living in colorado and he put his hands i wasn't even a rabbi yet he put his hand in my shoulder he said he called me said i wish i knew you 50 years ago he's like you would have made a jew out of me and those words i'm like that meant so much to me i said you know what maybe i missed i mean listen i told them you know you know it's never too late whatever it is but he said if you really believe that you know then i'm gonna make my effort and i'm gonna see you know what i can do what i can do to spread you never underestimate the power of your words right that's right good old byron wherever you are you did it so um so that's sort of when we made that decision that we were going to move in this uh in this direction of of kirov but but just to go back and and reiterate because i do want to wrap up this part one we do have a lot more to say that we'll continue in tomorrow night's session and i hope you'll join us again um but really what my wife touched on and that is that these three concepts of joy authenticity and love if we can carry that with us when we have that in our back pocket people want to know what is it what do we have because everybody's looking for joy everybody that's that's what what's driving people says i think they say in psychology that everyone is driven by either running away from pain or running towards pleasure which is really the same thing but when we see when the person sees that somebody else has something that is so special to them that it brings them joy it makes them happy they want to know what it is sometimes people say so people will will look at um you know someone who's more observant than and and in our world people that we reach out to and say you know they didn't seem that happy and and and they wonder about that they wonder what why shouldn't they be so happy and again no one could judge what's going on in somebody else's life or the mood that they caught them in but the overall idea whereas when somebody encounters somebody else and they say they're joyous i want to know what they have when they see that they're authentic about it authentic about their own growth their own tour their own judaism their own selves i don't have to be anybody i'm just i can just be me i want to know what you have if you can just be you i want to know what that is you must be so confident with what you have you can be so authentic and then finally love when you're loving somebody else when you're showing that love people feel it the people that went to your your parents school and i've seen it because we've been there so many times they feel they're they're they feel that they genuinely love them they genuinely care like you said kameyama upon the hearts reflect so those are our three things and here we are we're in the time of shove of him we're in a time when chubb is in the air in a couple of weeks from now it's going to be two bishops right falls out specifically in shogun and tu b'shvat is sort of that moment the beginning of the blossoming of what looks what seems to be a dead tree and the tree's not dead the tree has very very deep roots and it's just a matter of time until the tree is going to come back to life it's just a matter of time until claudia's soul is going to come back to life all of these people that are that are not connected to torah all of these the kids that are struggling the adults that are struggling the this is it's it's it's their roots are deep in the ground and the rabona shalom god hashem is doing his thing and we're coming closer to that time of redemption it is going to be this tuba spot the trees will come back to life and we have this beautiful opportunity this beautiful ability to share that with people with joy with authenticity with love and we should grab it we should hold on to it and to sort of break down those lessons a little bit more we're going to share with you in the upcoming session five priceless principles they call them five priceless principles of reaching out to someone in a very very deep way and we hope that you'll you'll join us again for that so thank you all for joining us this evening thank you tomorrow for joining us thank you for having me we're very humbled for being on this call yes and there are so many so many wonderful mcarden and we're we are very very humbled that we're just doing our little teeny share and we appreciate being able to share with all of you so thank you so much for joining us and