I Got Lost In A Hong Kong Toy Market - Va'eira On Fire

A Torah Anytime original series. >> You ever get home after a crazy day and you fall into your bed and you let out a deep exhausting sigh and you think, "What in the world happened to my life?" Have you ever been so drained and so overstretched and so buried under other people's expectations that you start to wonder, wait, am I actually living my life or am I just managing chaos? where every day feels like a checklist and not a choice. Where you're running from task to task and crisis to crisis and errand to errand and somewhere along the way you feel like you disappear and you catch yourself thinking like remember when I used to have passion and dreams and energy and a pulse and then you look in the mirror and you think like what in the world happened to me? I've become a full-time secretary to my own life. Well, I want to share with you a perspective that I think can change that. And it's a perspective that comes straight from the story of the the para starts off with the Jews being in one of the lowest places the Jews have ever been. We're worked to the core. We're beaten to a pulp. We're terrorized and abused. The Jews have seen some pretty dark times in their life. This might have been the the darkest. So you would think that when Mosher Rabenu approached them and declared that there's an all powerful God out there who promised their grandparents that he would make them great and give them their land and make them into this holy chosen people and free them from Egypt. You would think there would be an outpour of relief. You would expect like this tremendous celebration. You would think that the Jews would eagerly tune in to listen to every word that Moshe says. He's trying to get them out of this brutal Egyptian workload and oppression, right? That you would think. But what ultimately happened is puzzling. In paragas, it says that when Moshe went over to them and relayed this message, they refused to listen to him. And the puzzl explains that the reason they didn't listen to him is because which literally translates to mean from their shortness of their breath and the difficult of the difficulty of their work. Now, why would that be the reason they did not listen to Mush? Shouldn't it be the exact opposite? Shouldn't precisely the overwhelmingly difficult work regimen and brutal conditions propel them to listen to any glimmer of hope that they could possibly find? Weren't they desperately looking for a savior to release them from their misery? Well, wasn't this it? Why did Mosha's words fall on deaf ears? Even stranger in peric bay pasakovkiml it says that when parro died the Jews cried out in pain begging for a savior why why did parro's death prompt tears suddenly shouldn't they have celebrated perhaps a new king would replace the old parro and bring peace why did pyro's death lead to cries and pain from the Jews they should have been thrilled how do you explain this pretty bizarre emotional behavior from the Jews living in those times so The swirl comes along and says something that flips the whole story on its head. The Jews didn't ignore Moshe because they didn't believe in him. They didn't think he was some fraud. Didn't roll their eyes and say, "Yeah, right, buddy. Nice pitch." They ignored Moshe because they were too busy surviving to even think. Their lives didn't give them a single free second of mental space to stop and ask, "What if this is true? What if our life doesn't have to look like this? What if there's more to life than bricks and work and exhaustion in Manhattan and Wall Street? They couldn't even process the question. After years of brutal labor, something worse than slavery kicked in. It's called normalization. They developed a kind of spiritual Stockholm syndrome. When you suffer long enough, you stop calling it suffering and you just start calling it normal life. You tell yourself, "Listen, this is just how things are. Life is hard. Don't get your hopes up. nothing really changes. And so Moshe shows up talking about freedom and destiny and a loving God who wants relationship with them. And they're like, "Sounds really amazing. Sounds interesting and inspiring, but I'm late to work. We don't have time for profits. We don't have time for meaning. We don't have time to imagine some better life." Because when you're drowning in busyness, you don't reject hope. You just don't hear it. Not because you don't believe in God, but because you're just too exhausted to believe in anything. They aren't spiritually rebellious, these Jews. They were emotionally bankrupt. They weren't saying, "Moshe, you're wrong." They were saying, "Moshe, we are too tired." And that says the Sarno is why the words of redemption just bounced right off of them. Now the HCDover comes in and drops a bomb. When Pyro died, Egypt declared a national day of mourning. And for the first time in forever, the Jews got a day off from work. No bricks, no whips, no screaming task masters, just silence. And that silence was terrifying because for the first time, they had something they hadn't had in years. And that was space and time to think and time to breathe and time to realize what their life actually looked like. And that's when it hit them hard. Wait a second. What if life isn't supposed to feel like this? What if this constant exhaustion isn't normal? What if there's more to existence than surviving until bedtime? That realization didn't just didn't bring joy. It brought tears. Because once you taste the idea that life could be better, you suddenly feel the full weight of how bad it's been. It's like being numb for years and then finally getting back to feeling yourself and realizing how much pain you were ignoring. They didn't cry because Pyro died. They cried because they woke up and they suddenly saw their life that they were living and that the life they were missing out on. And once their eyes are open, you can't unsee it. And they cried not out of weakness, but because for the first time in forever, they understood what they had lost and what they were still might be able to find. Sometimes we do the exact same thing. We get so caught up in the game of life that we forget there's more to life than just playing the game of life. We let life get in the way of life. We are forever running and scheduling and chasing and optimizing, so busy surviving the week that we forget to actually live inside of it. The hustle, the noise, the endless to-do list slowly steal the meaningful parts of our life. And we don't even notice it happening. We tell ourselves, you know what? I'm going to slow down tomorrow or I I'll enjoy it later. I'll be present when things calm down. But tomorrow is always busy and and later never shows up. And so many people are are so obsessed with what's going next and what's happening next week and next year and next stage in life that they never make space for today. There's no mental room for now. There's no space to breathe and to notice and to appreciate and only much later. Only when the people we laughed with are gone and the people we cried with are no longer around and the moments that already passed us by are gone. Do we suddenly realize the truth? Wait, those were the moments. That was the life. Those ordinary, unremarkable, blink and you'll miss it moments were the ones we were supposed to cherish. And the tragedy isn't that they ended. The tragedy is that we were there, but not really there. If only we had given ourselves the mental space to notice them while they were still ours. Someone once asked the son-in-law a simple question. What was your father-in-law's most impressive trait? His most impressive mida. And you're expecting the obvious answer. I don't know, his mastery of his ironclad commitment to never speak a word of lasharo or his saintliness, his greatness. But that's not what he said. He said the most impressive thing about the was his ability to stay mentally calm in a world that was anything but. A life filled with pressure and people and wars and problems and responsibility. And yet his mind was settled. It was clear. was present, unrushed, not frantic, not reactive. And then comes the great Reb, and he sharpens this idea. He says, "The Tyra's word for the most spiritually impure creature is a sharet. Those creepy crawling insects that make your skin crawl." And he points out something fascinating. The word sherets can be said slowly to means. It's always running. It never stops. constant motion coming and going and buzzing and scattering and panicking. And he says that is the root of so much spiritual failure. Not evil intention, not lack of belief, but the inability to stop and to pause and to think and to reflect and to take stock and to sit quietly for yourself for five minutes without needing the distraction or motion. Because when a person never slows down, there's no space for growth. There's no room for clarity. There's no chance for meaning to sink in. A mind that's always running can't hear anything deeper calling to it. And that says the disrael is how people miss entire lifetimes without ever realizing what they were running past. And here's where it gets frighteningly relevant. Because we are living in the fastest paced world in all of human history. There is always something new. New content, new news, new shows, new podcasts, new opinions, new outrage, new trends. And the saddest part of all is that the untold damage this does to our brains. Our addiction to constant new information has made us deeply uncomfortable being alone with our own thoughts. People cannot drive for three minutes without listening to something, a podcast, music. People cannot sit in the bathroom without reading something for two minutes watching something, scrolling something. The silence terrifies oursel being with our our own thoughts. Thinking scares us. In earlier generations, people used to take walks by themselves. They would ride a train quietly and just think. That world is long gone. And with it, much of our ability to be happy with ourselves. And that loss is a tragedy of epic proportions because you cannot access your imagination and your creativity or your uniquely personal spiritual world if you're constantly chasing the noise of others. The lesson of the Jews of Mitzim is the urgent need to create mental space in your life to think your own thoughts to hear your own voice because that is the difference between a life spent chasing noise and a life calmly lived with yourself. Listen to this idea. Ever wonder why Hashem made human beings age? Why did he design us to slow down and become weak and lose energy at the, you know, as the years go on? Why don't we live with the strength and the stamina and the energy of a seven-year-old until they dabby die? Especially when that's exactly how the animal world works. Animals do not spend a second half of their life slowly deteriorating. A lion doesn't slowly fade as it gets older. A deer is not losing energy the second half of its life. For the most part, animals live with the same exact level of energy they had at age one all the way until the very end of their life. So why are humans any different? Here's the surprising answer. It wasn't always this way. Aging, as we experience it, wasn't part of the original plan. It entered the world much later because human beings asked for it. Aram was the first. He lived deliberately, slowly, thoughtfully. He wasn't frantic. He wasn't running. He was a man who had the mental space to think about life a lot, about existence, about meaning. And that's how he found God in a world that wasn't looking. Endless youthful energy didn't fit that kind of life. Running around chasing your tail wasn't exactly conducive to thinking about life. So he asked Hashem that old age look different than youth. So people would be forced to slow down and to be taken seriously. Followed and he asked Hashem for struggle in life. Not to curse people but to refine them, to soften them, to prepare them. YaKob followed. He asked for illnesses, not to be cruel, but as a warning so a person would know the end is coming and finally stop running long enough to put their life in order. That's why Hashem made people age. Aging exists because without it, we would never stop. We would never sit with our children or our grandchildren. We never reflect. We'd never take stock. We'd never notice the small, beautiful moments that actually make life meaningful. We just keep running, busy, productive, exhausted until life completely passes us by. Aging isn't a flaw in the system. It's the system forcing us to finally live. The story of the yidenry teaches us the great lesson of taking life slow to live with depth to live with meaning to stop skimming across the surface of your own life and to step back once in a while not to retreat but so you can actually move forward in a way that matters once came to Mosha of Kabrin and he asked him for a braha not I'm not asking for a big braha I'm not asking for wealth he said I'm not asking for children I want one small thing. All I'm asking for is a little Yeshua. And Raisha laughed and he said, "That's what you call a small braha. That's the biggest blessing there is." And how right he was because money doesn't give you peace. Success doesn't owe you give you clarity. More doesn't give you meaning. Only a settled mind. Only mental space does that. The lesson of the Jews in Mitraim is that redemption doesn't begin with miracles. It begins when a person finally stops running long enough to hear their own soul. If your life is so loud that you never get a chance to think that no matter how successful you look, you're still enslaved. Because freedom is about isn't about breaking chains. It's about reclaiming your mind. Here's one final story. Not long ago, I was in Hong Kong for a few days on my way to Vietnam. And being that jet lag had my kids waking up at 3:00 in the morning, it meant that by 9 in the morning, we already lived a full day and we'd seen half the city. So, we're smooing with some locals asking what else there is to do. And one guy says, "Oh, you got to check out the toy market." Now, the millisecond my kid hears the words toy market, he explodes. What? Yay! Let's go to the toy market. Let's go to the toy market. No discussion. We were going. So, we go and I quickly realized that unlike America where you have a toy aisle in America, which is, you know, a pretty dangerous place to take a kid or you have a toy store if you're feeling sort of reckless, in China, they don't have toy stores. They have toy districts, entire neighborhoods devoted just to plastic. And the best part, a toy cost $2 in America. It costs 30 cents in China because you've removed shipping and packaging and any remaining parental hope. Now, here's the real problem. When your kid is smart enough to understand basic economics and he heard his parents amazement that it's so cheap, but he's not smart enough to understand self-control, you're finished. So, we go to the toy district and my kid just sees the streets and streets of toy shops one after the next and he stands there for a minute just transfixed with a glazed look over his eyes. And then he runs to the first store and he picks one thing. But then he walks three feet and he's 10 more stores and he suddenly he wants everything and he can't decide what what does he want. He's not sure if he should get this or if he should get that thing. And so he sees one store, he goes in, he drags us to the other store and we got to go to that store and back to the first store where he is 100% positive. He saw the toy he's always wanted his entire life and whatever hours. And the irony is that the more options he had, the less happy he became. He was over stimulated, overwhelmed. Nothing satisfied him because something better was always 10 feet away. And eventually it got so frustrating for him that we had to just put our foot down. We picked up the closest toy. We got out of there as quickly as we could. The funny part is, you know what would have been much better? You know what would have been far simpler and would have made us both all happy? If we would have skipped the toy district entirely and went to a fruit store and on the way some little Chinese guy sold us a Rubik's cube for 30 cents and that was it. One thing simple, memorable, finished. That is life in a nutshell. We are constantly running from one store to the next, one upgrade to the next, one distraction to the next, convincing ourselves that happiness is just around the corner. I just need to check out one more toy store. But all it does is make us restless, unsatiated, overwhelmed. Because when everything is available, nothing is enjoyed. Better to slow life down, pick fewer things, notice them, savor them. Because at the end of the day, it's never the endless options that make us happy. It's the small, simple moments we actually stop long enough to live.