Rabbi Reuven Kigel - 2 Short Lessons on Rosh Hashana

hi everybody it's great to see everyone here and since you know roonberg is going to be up here thank you everyone maybe we should take a second and thank rob rudenberg um you know i'm i'm a firm believer that everybody you know needs a coach or a rabbi and one of the reasons why i'm always so motivated is because riley runeberg really keeps us motivated you know like if we try to say oh you know let's let let's uh maybe this week we won't do so much rad roomba always called said hey let's have this let's have rejuvenation then tomorrow let's have rejuvenation for couples then we're gonna have a shovel tone so it's like it's amazing so working for uh room burger rabbit craft keeps me motivated keeps my eyes open and that keeps me excited and i just want to thank thank you for that so um i forgot what i was going to speak about but i thought of a really great title i sent him mrs muscat i forgot about uh so i want to just tell you two lessons two two little lessons and one is just just to uh add a little bit to what delta was saying the first lesson is this someone asked me today someone asked me today what what makes a person happy right and i said you know what makes a person happy when they don't have doubts right doubts is what makes us so sad and i and she's like what do you mean so i said i can give you an example right i may have told you the story once or twice before but if you were ever in a subway like a couple years ago you get down to the subway station i spent a lot of times on subways as valerie mentioned you get down to the subway station and the people there were like mad and everyone would like peer over like this you know seeing if when the train was coming trying very hard not to actually fall into the tracks right peering over when's that train coming was that train coming anyone would look no you don't they don't see that one headlight come back oh no train you could see there was so much tension people were so upset they didn't know when the train was coming then about a year or two ago they made these boards right the boards in a lot of subway stations tell you exactly when the train's coming you know the six train is coming in two minutes the extreme is coming in four minutes so now everyone stands there and they're happy because no one's peering like risking their life to see that one headlight because the sign says the train is coming in two minutes you have nothing to worry about the train's gonna come no matter what the question is whether you have doubt in the train or whether you're sure the train's coming we have those signs you're sure the train's coming and you remove yourself from doubt and when you remove yourself from doubt you get very happy you get very happy in life and by the way that's why guilt is not really a jewish concept right guilt means like you don't know what to do you're not sure maybe maybe not should i shouldn't i i'd like to change but i can't it's not a jewish concept jewish concept is you do as much as you can right you do as much as you can and if you can if you can't do any more it's okay and if you can do more try harder but there's no reason for guilt now there's a trick though here's a trick this is going to be a shameless plug how can you do this you need a rabbi a rabbitson right you need someone you need a coach you need a rabbi you need a revit you need someone who's going to be able to help you determine what for you is right and what for you is wrong a lot of times one of the things we talk about a lot in emmett is sometimes we have to slow people down sometimes we have to speed people up because when you're trying to think about doing things the way you want sometimes your sahara your own personal evil inclination could very much get in the way when you have a rabbi rabbits in helping you out by saying you ask a certain question then it's so much easier you remove yourself from doubt and actually it says in perky i vote that if you have if you make yourself a rabbi you will remove yourself from doubt and when you remove yourself from doubt you're going to be very happy in this world so it's something very we have poop we're going to see so many rabbinic speakers could be amazing and we have amazing lady teachers too i think we're the only cure organization with a with the real women's director mrs muscat i know she's here she hears this she'll see it on the videotape so and you know we have all we all have lives that you have access to uh so now you have such an amazing opportunity to get close to somebody you know and then you really will truly remove yourself from doubt and you're going to enjoy this world a lot more so that that's my first thing i want to say and the second thing i want to say was like uh rabbi dumb was telling us the power of yom kippur one of the greatest powers is taking something on right taking on extra mitzvah making a change in your life that you always want to change now there's a special time to do this right and that is called the ila right that's the final prayer that's the fifth prayer that's the only time of year where we have access to our the fifth level of our soul right where our soul is four five levels we're dealing with three constantly the fourth one mustafa and shabbat and the fifth one we actually can attain anyone right and so that's when the gates are super open and that's when you have the greatest ability to take something on so how do we do it right so i have a teaching from my rabbi one of my rabbis rabbi kelman right and he said like this he said think of something you want to change right think of something that you really want to change in your life and you feel like you can do it right it's it's within your grasp you can do this you know you can make this change and and then just contemplate it imagine it say okay i can do this i can make the change then whatever change it is divide it in half and then divide that in half and then that's what you can stick to because we tend to a lot of times exaggerate things in our own mind so i'm going to give you a personal example they'll bring things home last year when my wife and i were sitting before you on campus we said what should we take on so we decided now this is not going to be so easy but we decided we were going to try to light shabbat candles like a second before the 18 minutes right usually especially when we're having a trouba toast we love using the 18 minutes right because shabbat candles are at 18 minutes before sunset to give ourselves a little bit of a cushion but really you should like shabbat handles on time you don't want to be late for shabbat so we decided we're going to we're going to try our best to light shabbat candles one second before at least one second before candle anytime right seems great seems easy but when we reflected we realized in the last year we may not have done it exactly so many times i'm not going to give you the exact number but it wasn't so many times so so we thought to ourselves okay what can we do we went back and forth of course i said every week right why was it okay that can't help then finally we decided one month right you know once a month we're gonna light shabbat candles before the candle anytime we're gonna be early once a month right so okay great we can handle we can handle it yes yes okay then we did the secret we divided that in half right so now we said once every two months and then we divided that in half once every four months right so now we got so three times over the last year we had to light travis candles a little bit before calendar time you know what and reflecting back we did it right we accomplished our goal and we were and now what so for next year we're going to try to double that i'm going to try to do it six times right and eventually i don't know if we could always get there eventually maybe we'll do it every time maybe you guys the bus will be pulling up and i'll be like you know sarah b i can't drive anyone right now i'm shabbos i'm in shabbos mode so when you make like rabbi dumb was saying when you make reasonable goals right you're able to achieve them so now this goal please check it out the rabbi robertson think of something that you can really do divide it in half and then divide that in half and then don't go back on it keep it no matter what and if you're able to do that then you're going to have a super successful year and hashem is going to let you do even more next year because remember the biggest privilege in this entire whole universe is to be able to do a mitzvah and we're so lucky that we're living in a great place in a great country and a great time where we're allowed to do as many mitzvahs as we want so i want to wish you all a good mar tov which means that our seal should be awesome and we should have an easy meaningful fast on yom kippur and that we should continue to grow and learn torah together thank you