Leadership Series 2022 Session #5

okay so let me uh let me begin uh so we're in the the one of rashiva's harry weinberg's classic presentations and this was called the five levels of free will um rabbi sampson last time i think went over the five uh the five levels of pleasure and if you didn't didn't hear that you really must really must do it because it's pretty amazing um so so i would definitely get in on that record but the mission in perkiavos says mission 3 18 third chapter 18th mission that says haiyahu o mayor he used to say have adam how precious is a man should never but sell him that he was created but selam and in god's image so it really is an extraordinary thing you know right in the beginning of the bible it says that man was created in god's end so the rabbis many of them learn that we just like god is a creator and he willfully chooses he has free will so he gave us this incredible power to create literally to create worlds god forbid to destroy them to be able to obviously transform the world that we live in and the amazing ability that allows for human beings to do all the amazing things that we do in life is this power of free will then the mission that goes on into something quite interesting the mystic continues and says sarah it's even more precious to never patella and he let us know that we were created in his image and then he quotes the the verse in the torah that let us know that's perplexing like what what we have to we're going to pat ourselves on the back that god let us know how now i you know and he used to give an analogy great analogy says imagine you know we've all been unfortunately in this situation in large cities i remember manhattan you know you see see the the uh homeless person with the cart and everything in their life you know it's kind of in that car imagine one day a person you know walks by and the guy is sleeping next to the car and he feels his heart tug and he wants to do something for this guy so he takes a check for fifty thousand dollars and he puts it you know he puts it in a little bag and he puts it underneath he didn't want anybody to take it he puts it in the bottom of the shopping part now the it's the guy that now the homeless guy's got good news and bad news the good news is he's rich fifty thousand dollars can change his entire life the bad news is he doesn't know he's rich so he's living in the same poverty the same despair and the same hopelessness though holly visera was even a bigger gift than giving us free will and god said he pointed it out to us he says my dear children this is the key to your greatness free will is indeed the key to your greatness now most of us think really free will i would ask you it's just the ability to choose to make choices but i think when you think about it a little more deeply choosing vanilla or chocolate ice cream yes of course it's a choice but it's not what what i mean or what the mystery is when it's talking about free world choices animals can actually have preferences between kind of food and other kind of food cold warmth and so on and so forth it's significant choice right free will is really the ability to make significant or meaningful choices i think when you do when you dig down a little bit deeper most people think that free will is the choice between doing the right thing doing the wrong thing doing something meaningful versus something less meaningful by the way this was the second level of third level of free of pleasure that rabbi sampson spoke about really before was meaning incredible pleasure of meaning which involved free will at its core now if you think about it i remember when i when i was thinking about the idea of free will it struck me that how many significant moments can i remember during each day where i had moral choices to make where it was a real significant moment you know where i had an option to do something nothing something and you know i might i might look at my wife when i get up give her a kiss before i go have a tender moment see my children perhaps i i go and i give some daka when i go to david in the morning you know perhaps later on i'm sensitive to one of my co-workers like when you think about it if i have to have i add up 10 really truly quote unquote what i would call meaningful moments that would be a really pretty good day i had ten moments that i could remember and point to but i realized if god is giving me a power us all of us a real incredible significant power it must be that that's in play 24 7. and god doesn't do anything less than perfect so it's perplexing let's dig a little let's dig a little bit deeper now i want to actually go to the torah and how the torah defines free will that's a little bit not what you and i might think so in the book of davarin the last book deuteronomy which we're in now we're going to get to this chapter and you know close to rosh hashanah so it's a very very famous chapter and and the third says see i placed before you today and i place death and evil obviously time is good death is evil so i'm placing life and death before you good and bad before you and a little bit later on after it mentions a few other things a little bit later on it says and you should choose life the monteria so you'll live very interesting very interesting how the torah is defining free will it's actually defining free will as the choice between life and death there's a fascinating thing i don't think i would have thought that's the torah how that would be defined doesn't even seem to make a whole lot of sense because if you think about it when part of saying life or death is the choice of death always in front of us i mean thank god you know most of us aren't choosing to take that option how is that the the choice and how is free will defined in that way and and the target's saying but hard to behave because if you don't choose life somehow somehow you're actually choosing death so rabbi weinberg used to give an example now i just want to apologize because it is sensitive meaning it's an idea of someone god forbid that takes their own life and we know people are in that situation but i have i want to use the example because it really defines the torah's understanding of this in the best way possible so please forgive me if any of you know any please forgive me i want to go ahead with the analogy so unfortunately when someone is in that situation incredible pain feeling tremendously overwhelmed and and thoughtful it decides to take that object so typically what it is is that the person can't really see beyond the incredible pain that they're in there's there's there's much to be grateful for there's much out there but their perspective is so caught in the situation there is they see nowhere they see no way out now what we see is it's an escape the idea of of saying i don't want to live anymore is really an escape and you might say but again rabbi that doesn't apply to any of us i mean are we escaping and rabbi weinberg would always say did you ever say you want to kill a little time right kill a little time he says you know what you're doing when you say you want to kill a little time says you're killing a little life because time is the context for which we live our life killing time dead drunk i'm just zombing at i'm chilling right as the kids say so what is that that is what he would call used to call death in installments death and installments we're not as we might not be escaping the final solution but we're escaping the choice and the struggle of being great that's really what we're escaping because we have one thing in common with the person that took that option that we want to avoid pain at all costs i just want to bring you back to something rabbi sampson probably said in your last class because it's incredibly important rabbi weinberg used to always ask people and he would say what is the opposite of pain and most people 9 out of 10 people would say the opposite of pain is pleasure and he would say no it's not pleasure the opposite of pain is no pain or as we like to say comfort meaning real pleasure is not just taking away pain i was in my car today my air conditioning is really bad that the compressor is really going and it's painful if someone were to fix my air conditioner i'm not really getting pleasure i'm just comfortable i'm avoiding all pain every great pleasure in life raising children starting a business being a good friend using your power free will working out entails a great amount of struggle a great amount of sacrifice near do i say pain but we look at pain in a very pejorative sense it's to be avoided at all costs you have to know this your friends about yourselves and about all humanity we are pain avoiding machines but realize if all you do is avoid pain meaning your whole life is geared to comfort all i can tell you is you will never get great pleasure in life because the greatest pleasure in life comes at the price of struggle effort and near do i say okay that's very important because that's going to be at the essence of free will so the pain that we're all escaping is that difficulty of struggling and being great it's not the final exit we take the route of death installments we take comfort over pleasure a few quick examples when i was a kid i used to um like to go like i was a competitive tennis player i used to try to go jogging early in the morning and there was one part of me that said what are you crazy we're gonna we're gonna go out we're gonna die our heart's gonna blow up if we take another step if we do three miles the other side said shut up we want to be great we want to live we want to be amazing you how we have these two sides in us one that wants to go to sleep one that wants to take that ultimate step and one that wants to thrive this is the pivot of this is the pivot of free will now how we resolve this conflict is going to be what makes us great there's a famous medrush which mentions a battle and a sage sees these people come back from a victory and they're flushed with excitement and he and he says to them ah that's a puny war that you guys are fighting when man human beings fight a war and they even lose so you know what if they run the enemy will regroup maybe they'll have a week maybe they'll have a month maybe they'll have a year before they come at them again and even if they come at them if you run far enough away far and wide they won't come after you this enemy not only is he right after you he will run as far as you run imagine you had an enemy right within your very camp that would be horrible that would be the end the enemies in your camp this is the battle that we have inside between the body and the soul the battle the battle of free will is the body and the soul but i wanted to get up when i was 16 to go jog my soul was saying you want to be great you want to get that edge in that pettis competition get going my body was saying hug the pillow hit the snooze alarm some of you remember when you went to college maybe you wanted to go to medical school and there was this great party on saturday night you had to decide am i going to go study right or am i going to go to the party tough decision do i listen to my desires of the moment what my body is interested with my body's after or i delay that gratification and i do i live into the aspirations of my soul this is the war between the body and soul and this war my friends is constant because every one of us has the ability to access this any moment of the day right now you're saying hey rick this is heavier than i bargained for maybe i should just kind of tune it out i should multitask while i'm speaking right now the other part saying no you gotta listen this this could be one of the most significant pieces of torah that you'll ever learn when you're at work you could be thinking maybe i should like you know just kind of go on autopilot like i've been doing for the last 10 years but no you know what i need to get a new skill i need to give my employer their money worth i need to learn a little bit more torah so you can see this definition of free will but unlike what i posited in the beginning is operative 24 7. am i going to be engaged with life or am i going to escape from life engage escape comfort true pleasure gauge escape comfort true pleasure so there's five levels of free will first two levels actually expand our range of free world julia is the first step because you want to have a broad canvas which to paint your life story okay now there are two aspects to it the first one rabbi weinberg used to call periscope up and when he met by periscope up he said a lot of our free will uh choices are kind of dead to us because we go unhappy we just go we're habitual creatures you know there's a good side to it because if i had to sing every single time reassess every single decision i ever made i'd probably go crazy but the downside to not reassessing your meaningful choices is that you tend to go on oil piling so he would say the first step of free will is get on top of your choices see how many they just like catalog them see how many of them are on autopilot same breakfast i do the same thing in the morning i might put on the same radio station on the way to work maybe he said maybe you should reconsider perhaps you should listen to a courage here on the way to work perhaps you should think that that a problem he used to have five problems on his his fingertips at all times when he was in a like transition between two places in a meeting he would think about one of those problems fascinating maybe you want to call some good friends to do a mitzvah to connect and connect them relationships there's so much we can do but the first step is to just notice that so much of our life just goes on autopilot and therefore if it does this it doesn't you're bypassing free will in that moment you're really going on a decision you made you know one year ago five years ago 20 years ago the first step is get curious it's a great word in life i think in a lot of aspects of self-help get curious think about the different things you do start assessing why am i doing it that way why they do it this way you know and then what happens is the canvas of your ability to really uh create those moments of your life more meaningfully they just start to absolutely sprout and and and that in itself could change your mind okay that's step number one periscope up step number two and rabbit weinman would say this and it's very interesting he would say don't be a puppet of your society or your past beliefs similar to the first step means to say is we're also not just habituated in choices we've made we're also very dumb you know habituated on ideas that we have about life and that society has given us now i remember you know he would always say that one man's social conditioning you know social condition our children in certain values certain things about our country about our system of government and our views and values it's social conditioning but one man's social conditioning is another man's brainwashing right if it's not the truth it's brainwashing it is the truth of social conditioning it would always say you have to always think through the ideas that you hold in life through it and examined it now not even in issues of truth but just you came to a conclusion about a certain thing five years ago every once in a while if it's significant you have to revisit it and you can't just go cookie cutter i i you know it's funny my kids at this point in my life they're about they're getting to their 20s now you know and i went through the last you know 10 years of the team the teen years and i listened a lot of ways to kind of cookie-cutter advice about my kids and i think i realized as i went after the first one or two that you know what i know my kids probably better than anybody and i really do have to listen to what people that are qualified rabbis and rabbits what they have to say but i can't i can't give up my intellect right and because i in the end of the day know those children and i have to bring it all together you know robert weinberg used to say there's a mix from the torah called which means listen to the wise men and he said it doesn't just mean listen unthinkingly it means listen and if you don't agree or understand go back a hundred times so they can give you clarity meaning give them the benefit of the doubt that they know a lot more than you in other words don't be arrogant have some humility but we all have to we all have a misfit because we we all have the midfield to know there's a god that means we have to examine our beliefs and we have to periodically read that so that's level number two level number one is periscope up start getting on top of your choices in life and it himself will change your life and an aspect of that is look into the things the ideas that you've kind of been also putting on autopilot some of them which you may have come up with 10 15 20 years ago okay now the third level of free will this is the one i want to focus on this is the most important part of this class this third level of free will and the third level of free will is the conflict between the body and the soul it's the war that we described before the internal war that we all have to face now you might have you might have known seen from that war we have two conflicting sides man is made of one part rock one part animal i would say and one part angel we have one part that's an animal and one part of it has an age very interestingly neither an animal nor an angel according to torah has free will all right think about that for a second animals go in our free will they have instinct don't have free will to make moral choices to transcend their their station in life not at all angels you you might find interesting to know also do not have free will you know we call angels in the vernacular the angels are god's yes men that's what the angels are mean they're pure they're holy they only have one leg because they only have one choice you know man and woman we have two legs and they say that two legs give it it symbolizes free will we could go right we can go left that's why we say stanium kipra one of the reasons we stand is we want to be like the angels and that's how we put our feet together when we govern shimona esri that the embedded the uh standing prayers like outside of prayer so we can with our free will become angels and give our will up to god but angels and animals don't have free will mankind is the unique combination it has a body that has tension within its soul and that tension between the body and the soul that's what creates free will so let's go back to some of those examples we mentioned one about the jogging versus going to sleep so what is the what does the body want to do the body wants to ultimately sleep you know that mystically the body we're gonna the ashes and even gravity right locals down to the earth the body actually has a death wish heard about that the body wants to really sleep its ultimate ideals in hawaii on a hammock with a pina colada in hand just about sleep you know it's funny because the talmud says that sleep is 160 is the best 160 is the death it's related to death because death is the big sleep right so that's what the body wants the body wants comfort the body wants his desires the body wants to eat to drink to be merry and it wants it now what's the soul want the soul is aspirational you know just like the body the gravity everything in life brings uh materially goes down because of gravity when you take a candle which is the symbol of the soul what happens to the candle no matter how you hold the candle the flame always is going up that's the symbol symbolism of the aspirations of your soul the body is never going to do anything but what it's meant to do it has it goes like the animal everything in it just wants to sleep the soul is the aspirational part of human being you know what a midlife crisis is a midlife crisis is nothing more than the soul getting really nervous that half of his his or her life is up and he didn't accomplish the job he or she was put here for to be great and he wants meaning any and he feels he needs a change unfortunately if you don't know that's what's going on you most people give it a porsche divorce a wife and get another one they stuff it with more materialism but the soul doesn't want that materialism the soul wants spiritual food and god unfortunately it gets drowned out that's what a midlife crisis is so the advice is to know what free will and this struggle is all about so we don't have to go through this midlife crisis that's interesting you can look at the jewish people in the religious community you don't see a lot of that because we solidly understand that we're in the summers and that we and that will never give up you know that the body will remember why we say great he says you know the horse could be trained by the rider to take the rider wherever he wants to go that's the analogy but soul and a body body's the horse the soul is the writer the soul will never give up but the body will so what does the soul want to do soul wants to be good the soul wants to be sensitive the soul wants to be loving the so every the soul wants everything you would want i said to you at 11 o'clock at night write down what you really want when you're sober or before you're about to go to bed everyone knows what they want everyone knows what they're about if you dig deep right when you're not caught in the throes of your physical desires the raven willingburg would take a step further give a very practical definition which is i think one of the greatest contributions he's made to torah for literature and torah teaching this is what he would say he would say free will listen to me carefully i'll repeat it a few times free will is the struggle between the body with the body feels like doing versus what the soul wants to do free will is the struggle between what the body feels like doing and what the soul wants to do so when i first heard this i'm like what are you talking about feel want you're playing word games he would say carefully listen carefully the body feels like eating now the body feels like getting all its desires gratified the body feels like quitting it's a visceral it's a now feeling fueled by desire it feels like doing it the soul rather wants things has aspirations wants we call them not desires desires as of our feeling soul wants to be great the soul wants to be loving the soul wants to be compassionate and giving and rabbi weinberg said free will is a struggle between what you want to do which is what you feel like doing he said the greatest human beings in the world all they have to focus on is doing what they want more often than what they feel like going to the gym more often what i want to do i want to get in shape i'm going to do i'm going to go to the gym which is what i want to do more often than hitting the snooze button which is what i feel like i'm gonna try to be patient with my mother which is what i want more often than snapping at her which is what my body feels like doing in the moment you can get any any free will struggle would fit into that incredible true paradigm the righteous person that sadly the great person the transformational person is the one that does what they want more often than what they feel like mind really is a mind blowing practical beautiful definition of free will now he would say that he would use this analogy as well he would say that that all of us have uh certain free will struggles which are more primary like i have a struggle with food you know and my wife doesn't my wife just stick thin and doesn't think about it at all and i'm always you know thinking about the new diet you know which did what to do how to do it and that's one of my favorite struggles i have a free will struggle to be patient you know but when i'm with you know again with my mother i do our finances and it's a struggle each of us probably has five or six like essential free will struggles that hit us again and again and again now he would say imagine you're on a boat a cruise ship and you're on the cia you're part of the cia they're another ship you're going across the ocean you have a job to do in wherever the the court of call is that you're coming up to and you have no idea but there's a russian agent he's just used to say this back in 1990 there's a russian agent on the ship looking out for you he's gonna ambush you you don't even know he's there that is a bad that's a bad plan that's a that's a tough thing he would say that's us he says if we don't unearth and know what our free will struggles for we get ambushed and it's so true but if i don't go on a call when i'm you know i'm gonna go advise my mother on why these things she's let us you know say what she thinks or whatever and i'm rushed and so on and so forth if i don't accept myself and remember that hey i'm going into the lion's den here i've got a free world struggle coming up more than not i fall in because we're habituated often and we're body oriented so we're going to habitually fall in to that freewill struggle but imagine that you know these are my five or six essential free will struggles and you unearth them you you actually say hey i'm going to look out for them then you can be incredibly proactive about these struggles that you have as i said before being great is nothing more than doing what you want more often than what you feel like so a few things first of all find those free will struggles that are specific to you and unearth them so you're not ambushed and also get curious as well and spend time really thinking through what is it that i really want what are those those aspirational things that i want because if if we have been acting more like bodies over the last you know some of us are 40 50 60 30 right if we didn't know this a person doesn't know this they could habituate it into acting a little bit like a bot but now we're kind of like a new consciousness we're trying to act like souls the problem is they're acting like souls but we're very habituated like bodies so you have to almost re-catalog what is it that i want in life what are the things the more the practical things i want to learn uh certainly now i want to maybe do it for me for the for the you know the better the whoever involved i might want to learn hebrew or go through the sinner what are the things that you want to do what do you want to do in your personal life with your relationships like too often our relationships go on autopilot so make paddle up what is it that you want and then what are the things that get in your way like what are those feel like situations that actually get in the way of you doing what you want then you'd be able to have a game plan right you could take up again you can't do it all at once rome wasn't building the day but then you could have a game plan to kind of decide okay you know what i know i know what has been going on a little bit with me kind of unbeknownst to me or not so on the on the front burner maybe to the back of my head but not in the front of my head but just to review and i'll open up for a few questions the first step of free will and by the way free will is the power to be great you want to be great you'll do what you want more than what you feel like do that is if there's one takeaway that should be to take with first step is periscope up get on top of your choices don't let your choices run you you have to run your choices because then you're running your life and that's number one and that would even include reconsidering past decisions past ideas past philosophies that you may have taken on for whatever reason okay number three which is really the most important thing is to realize that you have this war internal struggle going on all the time 24 7 and no you're not schizophrenic i remember i had you know the read the book simple when i was young and and i you know thought i was schizophrenic no you're not that's the human condition schizophrenia is built into the human condition it's called body and soul war and and then kind of unearth what those funeral struggles are and at the same time try to you know really kind of hone in on what you want out of life and then you can start making a game plan um someone actually asked me a question yeah so what do you what do you do with limiting beliefs not feeling enough right not feeling enough limiting beliefs okay so again that those things like a little different those are the things you have to kind of work through like why does a person have living limiting beliefs you know are they really true are they not true is that more of a self-help you know that's a they have to work through usually limiting limiting beliefs are things a person has to work through because they don't believe that they're an unlimited soul they don't believe that god loves them and that can do anything for them in other words usually living usually living beliefs are a limited perspective and they don't really see the wider perspective so you have to really follow that's a i think it's a different type of a whole different type of uh class but it's like you have to bring them over to a bigger picture rather than being caught in the little picture i mean that's that that's we talked about being stuck in a little picture okay this is trying you have to try to get up to a bigger picture and there's a great book that rabbi um israel tauberg what's a jew and he talked about the first five chapters in that book how a jew is so great and what he should be thinking when i read this book i'm like it really it really gave me a um upgrade in feeling great about myself and kind of the natural limiting beliefs that people haven't i've had to help move it away so that was one example of how you can deal with some limiting beliefs but i think it's a little separate a little bit of a separate topic okay anybody have any questions about the free will about the rabbit weinberg's um philosophy on it any comments you'd like to add um you know i i think also like i said before the idea of pain is like very very important to realize that it's it's life is not just about avoiding pain you know our whole society you know america is all about retirement and what retirement and nutshell is is i want comfort you know i don't want my life my life has been like this forever i want it to be like this now you know i want it to be straight smooth i remember rabbi wolbe one of the great ethicists of the 20th century said hey you don't want it you don't want it like that it's like you know healthy cardiogram goes up and down this is called flatline he says that's not what you want you know if your whole life is about comfort like i said before that's never going to bring you true pleasure that's something you have to constantly go back to this idea of you know and i i say reframe it my kids love like chess i don't like this and the reason i don't like chess because i find it painful i find thinking ahead five moves i don't like i'm between patient and i find it painful and i realized that if i wanted to enjoy the pleasure chess i'd have to reframe that from that from painful to struggle or effort to get the pleasure of like you know right so that was kind of how i how i looked at you know one man's pain is another man's another man's pleasure annie anything else anybody anyone to make a comment okay ladies so what we're going to do then is um we are going to uh two weeks time i'm going to do the next two levels the last two levels of the five levels of free will okay and uh i hope you enjoyed it i found truthfully this idea about what you want versus what you feel like i've never seen it anywhere else in torah literature and i i never found anything as practical and as as so spot on true that rabbit weinberg's understanding of the choice between what you want versus what you feel like feelings rooted in desire of the moment pulling at you very visceral versus wants or things which are long run which are a little more intellectual a little more uh you know thinking about going to med school versus the party on saturday night that's the usually the difference between the body and the soul one's a little more mature one's a little bit more impetuous right and you have to realize you know you think about a child a child up to the time they're you know 6 15 16 17 18 19 is almost all the body right all the things i talked about i want it i want it now you know i'm gonna you know throw a tandra if i don't get it it's all the child it's all that you know young child but we think that child goes away that child doesn't go away that child just doesn't throw a tantrum the way it used to get what it wants that child never goes away because that child is really that aspect of you which gives you free will it's that tension between your immature young self so to speak as an analogy versus your more mature aspirational godly self and just kind of another way to look at it right okay ladies great to see you and uh we'll see you again next time