A Spiritual Ailment Requires A Spiritual Cure

I'm depressed. Yeah, you're depressed because you are not feeding your soul what it needs. You're only feeding your body. The problem when you eat food, your soul does not get satiated from food because your soul is spiritual. It requires something spiritual. So if all you're feeding yourself is basketball, football, money, girls, boys, toys, trips, all of those different things that may satisfy your body for a certain period of time, but your soul is not going to be nourished. Why? Because your soul has to be nourished by getting closer to Hashem. How do you get closer to Hashem? By learning Torah and following the instructions of what it says to do. So you're depressed not because your body is not having fun playing basketball, watching movies. No, your body is doing the same thing it always did. Your soul is miserable. Your soul is starving. start feeding it what the Torah says and you'll see that you'll become happier than ever even without all of the basketball and football and the things you feed your body. Yes, the Torah is the Torah literally means instructions. Torah is what instructions God gave us in order to follow his will. There's nothing. There's the written Torah, there's the oral Torah. In order to understand the written Torah, we need the oral Torah because we cannot understand the laws of, let's say, for example, Shabbat, God tells us that there's 39 laws, but the written Torah doesn't say what the 39 are. And yet 12 times in the Torah, God says that if we break Shabbat intentionally, then it's death penalty. So obviously we need to know what these rules are. There's a lot on the line. So the oral Torah which is the Talmud the Mishnah that is where we get explanations for everything that's in the written and of course there is explanation to the explanations as far as what the details of the laws are which is the but the point being is the Torah has two parts. as the Torah has the oral Torah. Now the problem is when people do not understand the significance of this unity of how they're are one, the oral Torah and Torah are one, they choose to pick one over the other. Like somebody told me uh was it yesterday or today that he chooses to just follow the Torah. There's I've heard this before and each time I respond the same way that there's literally not many people that are bigger fools than you for thinking for for thinking that that's an option because you're not even able to read the Torah without the oral Torah because the vowel system in Hebrew is part of the oral Torah. And if you're going to say, "Well, no, I'll take that." Wait, so you're choosing which part of the oral Torah you're going to take and which part not and then people end up in even different religions saying no we have the Torah and then we have uh something else we have a new testament but this is not from God this is from people man-made it's full of mistakes it contradicts the Torah so a person has to understand that there is a very very clear instructions that Hashem gave us on Mount Sai it's both the written Torah and the oral Torah And the more a person understands what it says and how it applies to their life and actually applies it to their life, the happier they're going to become, the more successful they're going to become in life. In life. And at the end of the day, that's what every person desires. They desire not a lot of money. They desire success. Success to one person is different than success of another. If you ask people that are interested in the um in the investment business and investing in the stock market or or things like that, then who is the best investor? They'll tell you things like a uh Warren Buffett or or other historical figures that uh that made a lot of money. But the reality is if you look at the personal lives of every single one of those people that are extremely popular, you'll see that they were miserable. They're horrible. Many of them ended up committing suicide. So a person has to understand that success in life is not necessarily a dollar sign. Success in life is getting to a point where you're completely happy. You're completely connected. Why? because you have a purpose that is in line and synchronized to the purpose of what Hashem gave you. It's not a purpose you're reinventing every few years when you get bored. It's a purpose that Hashem gave you. So the more a person follows the Torah, the more they're going to understand their purpose in the world. We are meant to be a light unto the nations, not to follow their misguided practices. Remember, every Jew has to remember that he's a Jew and she's a Jew. We don't celebrate non-Jewish holidays, even if they seem harmless.