Rabbi Yossi Bensoussan

okay i'm um it's okay if i can't get them quiet then uh i don't i don't deserve them to listen i have one job i'm not one for uh for long speeches it's always a good sign when nobody gets your first joke um happy someone got that one though this time i was a little bit smarter i um last time i was at kesha kashanovshi i i spoke on sunday in the closing note and i i told to one of these sessions that we were having that i i prepared on the way driving in i was preparing last time it's about a thursday i think and i was driving in and i prepared something i was very calm was a great speech it's fantastic i had it was good jokes good stories it's a good part it was fantastic and i got up and i looked down at my speech and i realized that it was great it was a killer but uh i had to lay down a monster because because i wrote the speech on thursday and then then the following two days i spent that at kashanavshi shabbas and by the time sunday rolled around for me to give this speech i realized i'm not the person who wrote that speech the asian chuseon of thursday wrote that speech and yes eventually sunday morning after experiencing kesha now she was a completely different human being and i had no right to give a speech that wasn't mine so this year i decided not to prepare yeah immediately regretting that no um i tell you that only so that you understand that i can do that i could i could speak on the fly it's fine my hesitation is not because of that it's always hard speaking after people who you look up to and admire and you realize humbly that that that you don't belong there but to speak to a crowd that you know there's so much more kadaish it's so much greater than you can ever be it's a scary thing so i'm not going to tell you about me i'm going to tell you a little bit about some other things my mother my mother used to lie to us a lot i say that with love my mother used to lie to us she used to come back from pta and she would walk in i would look at my father's face and i could tell my teachers told the truth my mother my mother would look at me would look at my brothers and she would say first of all you need to understand every single one of your teachers in rebellion are obsessed with you they think you are amazing they're at a loss they're at a loss for how incredible you are you'll see your teachers said you're so funny the jokes you say when she's trying to teach are amazing she goes home and she tells it to her husband and her therapist and they're it's incredible i don't realize until years and years and years later that she was when i started giving classes that that that wasn't true and i mentioned it to one of my brothers and we were talking about it and he said yes you need to understand something very important mommy never lied to you that's not true that is what she heard when the teacher would say all the things they would say mommy would sit there smiling and say i know that's my boy i i want to make one point and i want to do it as fast as i possibly can we spend an entire shoba speaking about how to connect to our children how to value them how to build them how to understand them and the entire time it keeps seeming like some sort of sacrifice that we're making but it's not the things we do in order to connect our children are there for us as well and we need to take that seriously when we have these ideas and these concepts and this isn't just about our children it's about our lives it's about our spouses it's about our jobs we said a line in the first in the in the first session this one goes out to someone out there she knows who she is if you're not happy with the cup of coffee you're not going to be happy with the yacht either you have to be happy with what it is that you have but what does that mean what does that mean to be happy with what you have it means to value it as plan a having a child that is struggling is not a plan b situation having a family that has difficulty is not plan b it's plan a it wasn't our plan a but it's plan a we need to value what we have while we have it because we'll note of some of these children are so high and so great we're missing out on being so proud for the view for the the the concept the idea the fantasy that we have that they're supposed to be something that they're not i unfortunately had to sit at a shiva house once for a boy he overdosed and he didn't make it i was always on the phone with the father beforehand he would always call me i always told him please call me to tell it to me before you say it to wife before you say it to the other kids before you say it to your son just say it to me first so he would call me first to tell me the newest escapade of his son and there would be no pleasantries i'd look down i'd see his name on my phone i'd answer pink here did he need to have pink here i would always say the same joke i'm like i got a new phone i'm sorry who is this what happened is he okay whoever it is pink hair he needed another piercing that's what this one needed he's doing it to get me i'm not downplaying the struggle of the father but this continued and continued and unfortunately urban and shalom took the boy back and i'm sitting in the sugar house and the father was talking to one of the robunum that were there and he was crying and he said he said to the rabbi through hysterical tears do you know what i would give to see that boy walk through that door one more time ugh what i would give i didn't say it then and i felt embarrassed thinking about this but i couldn't help myself i thought to myself which boy which boy do you want to walk through that door right now the yeshiva bahar you wanted him to be the kid in a hat and jacket that's who you want to walk through that door because you don't know that kid that kid never existed would that make you feel better if i dressed someone who looked like him up in yeshiva's garb and have him walk through that front door is that what's going to make you feel good right now when you say i will give anything to see him walk through that front door right now who are you picturing in your mind you're picturing a kid with a bunch of face piercings and a shock of pink hair now now you're somehow with that kid now we live so far into the future that we forget to live the child might not be what we planned for him but he is what we need in our life he's what we needed how many parents do i know myself included that we got what we need that we got what we need in our life because that kid acted out that we got to start building who we are that we got an opportunity to work on ourselves to be more accepting of who we are so that we can accept him and years down the line none of it's going to matter anyway none of it's going to matter years down the line when this child is doing amazing and he's great all we're going to have wanted was to say i wish i wasn't upset back then i wish i would have enjoyed him back if i would have known if i would have known so for one second i'm going to be baba bin shushan i'm a kobold now they're going to be fine they're going to do amazing how do you want to act now to them how do we want to treat these kids now how do we want to treat them now you know i i probably shouldn't say but let's do it anyway i i have this pet peeve everybody has this rabbi tranq book and surely best did an unbelievable job on the book and it's amazing and everyone's running around yelling how it's the handbook and every mechanic should read this book and every parent should read this book and everybody needs to know how to truly love them and it gets me so angry i can't begin to tell you because i was there my friends were in adelphia i visited adelphi as a kid all the time i saw it none of you were a fan back then nobody stood up singing the praises back then nobody wanted them to show up nobody wanted those boys around nobody where do you get off now showing up starting to celebrate him now shame on you a year before his patera you wouldn't have said that he had to be ashamed by everybody to be a second rate yeshiva to be a second great place and now he's the greatest mechanic to ever live and how much bigger of an effect could rabbi shrank have had if we would have celebrated them then if we would have valued it then if we were to put it out into the world then how much bigger how many carbons did we have to have for everyone to start waking up just about every kid i know that went off the dara for any reason other than extreme abuse or anything like that when they go off because they they can't handle the front kite that can't handle the judaism they always bring up an argument to me of something that we instated oh within the past 60 years they have no problem with shabbos they have no problem with dancing on samkhya's torah they have no they really even have a problem with davening initially it's the things that we decided to institute and now have become our communities through abandoned did not create all of us to be exactly the same and after 120 when we have to go up we're not going to necessarily be called to task on so many things but the things that the rabona showman trusted us with so well and so much the diamonds that he gave us those were going to need to tell him we treated properly retreated right i want to end with one story and one message i'm going to do the message first we spent this whole chavez speaking so much about how to accept and how to love sometimes we didn't have to speak all we had to do was look when you see rabbi kalish meet a complete stranger who's a yid and you see that light on his face you understand what arnold khan was talking about when he saw my shrapnel come down sometimes we just have to see the message that i feel that we're lacking though is that we cannot give our children anything that we don't have the example i love is i ask my kids this all the time i say what happens when you squeeze an orange they always say we know papa like i know just tell it to me i'm preparing here well what happens when you squeeze an orange like orange juice comes out like why does orange juice come out what if i want lemon juice what if i want grape juice why does orange juice come out they say papa because that's what's inside the orange it's an orange when we get squeezed the only thing that can come out from us is what's inside of us and if that's frustration and anger and anxiety and and worry and fear then that's what comes out if it's denial and pain and judgment then that's what's gonna come out but if we fill ourselves up with love acceptance appreciation and respect then that's what comes out i learned hypnosis one time they told me the first step to hypnosis is you need to understand you have to go first if you're not in the trance you can never put anyone else in you need to go first robert berkowitz when we used to go out to care if you said tell us all the time the greatest tool you're gonna have in care of is to fully believe it yourself is to fully be deep in it yourself our children can never love themselves if they are constantly looking at parents who can't stand themselves either we need to take care of ourselves we need to build ourselves so many parents say the line to me i'm fine everything's i just need my kid to be okay if you're not happy with a cup of coffee you're not going to be happy with the yacht your kid could be fine and you're still going to feel that way we need to go first we need to be okay first we need to be happy first we need to be full of love first we need to be connected to the rabbana shalom and have a muna first we need to go first and then our kids can follow when i was working in artstroll this goes back i got a call from a woman she said her son is learning there for the year i haven't known his rebbe he gave her my number she said can you please you know work with him she came from a very very very hesitant background they came they were very very insular community she said this boy though is going out and doing his own thing wasn't so far wasn't so bad but the tahara was it was unacceptable and she kept saying this this one line whenever she really wanted to vent the frustration to me she always said to me and i talked to him and he says yeah everything is cool everything cool cool cool cool cool he always says cool i hate that word cool mommy do you think this is cool i can't stand the cool and we're talking and she's she told me he's very into the way he dresses and it broke her the way this kid would dress finally i'm working with the boy for a while i'm working with her working with the parents and we kept hitting this brick wall where she just she just couldn't get to the point of saying i'm going to accept him as he is right now and then and build a relationship with him and then sure enough they come to our two stroll to visit their kid they're walking down the street they go to a restaurant and she was telling me the whole time she's texting me the whole time i don't want to be in this neighborhood of arts i don't want to go to this restaurant i don't want to but we're doing it for him we're doing it for him they're walking by his store and the kid looks into the window and he sees this leather jacket this beautiful leather jacket and he turns to his mother and she she saw it coming she's like please don't say it and he goes ma tati isn't that cool and she says yeah i i couldn't they continue walking and she says robert shushan i don't know what came over me y'all see i have no idea what came over me but i decided that's it this is this is the moment that i'm going to completely work on myself i'm going to go against my nature i'm going to go against hawaii i'm going to go against my instinct i'm going to go against everything she told her son she told her husband i actually forgot something in the restaurant go to the car pick me up outside she goes into the store and she buys the jacket they bring them back to yeshiva they were going back to the airport afterwards bring them back to yeshiva she hands them the bag with the jacket in it and she said sandec i just want you to know and she told me before this she said i i when i was in when i was in gula without him i saw all these things i wanted to buy from i was i tell him there and there was a set of sperm and there was i was going to put his name on it i said please don't and the whole time she was there's like but i want to buy him something and i said to her so buy him something that's not for him that's for you buy him something and she said that was in my head and mom's when they were walking by i was like that's it i'm gonna do this she said she he took it he shrugged he went inside he hugged and said goodbye she left now by the way i could sit down right now and if you don't get why that's a killer story i'm sorry this one happens to have a happy ending his rebbe calls me up and he says yes he in the neighborhood i lived right there i was like yeah what's up he's like i need you to come by i come by as i walk through the hallway i see this boy walking down the hallway and he's wearing the jacket it's the dead of heat he's sitting there wearing this jacket i see him as i'm walking by i say cyril chick looking sharp that is a jacket i've seen this kid smile a few times when i made jokes but not more than that and i was looking at the jacket because i knew about the jackets i was focused on the jacket said swirl check that is a nice sharp jacket and then i looked up at him and his face was beaming and he says to me yeah my mommy got this for me and i said i tried not to cry i said social don't tell any of the girls in town that it doesn't it's not the best uh you're doing good though i walked by him i went into the office there's rebbe and he said to me i have no idea how this happened i said i know that jacket his mother told me it's amazing he said no not the jacket he said not to check it you'll see come here i want to show you something the boys were all outside playing basketball we went to swilley's room certainly is a very non-expressive kid he was very embarrassed that he still had an accent he wouldn't talk a lot he was very afraid of people knowing too much about him he had nothing hanging in his room it was a bare clear bed a few small belongings in zell walk into this room this is where we points to the head of his bed and i almost missed it i said what i look it was a little post-it note a little post-it note on the wall of his bed taped to the wall of his bed he said read the note i bent over and i looked at the note and i know the notes this mother wrote to her child before this here's a said it to hillam i hope you use it well here's a picture of the rebbe i hope he inspires you this note read a little different it was much shorter than the mcgillis she normally wrote to him it said a few short words enjoy the jackets really because you're the coolest kid i know [Applause] there's no question in my mind that i just got fired from a case i had no more need there's nothing else i could do the beautiful part is that when i spoke to the mother afterwards i said to her and i want you to be honest with me how amazing did it feel to give him that jacket and she said you see it was the most liberating moment of my whole life because i let go of trying to control every aspect of this and i just loved him we're not going to all get to have the hallmark moment story but we can all put this into practice but it starts with us be the coolest person you know and tell yourself every single day you're the coolest person you know now what a neighbor thinks when they see you walking on shabbos with that kid won't matter anymore because you're the coolest person you know what as manal said doesn't matter anymore because you're the coolest person you know what plans didn't work out doesn't matter what anxieties come what stresses come doesn't matter because you're the coolest person you know and if you're the coolest person you know you're gonna be the coolest person your kids will ever know thank you so much for having me thank you so much for sharing your lives with me thank you so much to keshianovshi it uplifted me it energizes me for the next year [Applause]