MindFlex: Josh Brody, Esq. - Always Work for The Boss

started my career i was an associate at a large international law firm and for those of you who aren't familiar with big law firm life it's suffice it to say that it can be pretty intense the hours if nothing else are very very long work starts every time in the morning routinely in the office until midnight or later and certainly working almost every single weekend but obviously i had the benefit of having shabbos and not having to work on shabbos and for the most part people were pretty respectful of the fact that i was not available on saturdays they may not necessarily have loved it but nobody ever said anything you know at the beginning having shabbos was really something that was fantastic because it meant that i had that time to recharge my uh physical and spiritual batteries and at the beginning it really wasn't more in terms of work than you know making sure that the taxi desk that my firm had to order cars for attorneys when they had to travel for work that they had a actual schedule of when shabbos ended every single week so there was a car waiting for me as soon as shabbos was over to take me back to the office over time though it started to get a little more intense and work started encroaching more and more on my non-work time a little of it that i had in fact i remember one time sitting at my shabbos table during charlottesville during the third meal and the phone rings and this is back in the days of you know regular answering machines we're sitting there and there's somebody leaving a message on the machine one of the senior associates i was working with asking me making sure that i was coming into the office that night so here i was on shabbos and i couldn't get work sort of out of my mind because it was sort of encroaching on my time and it really came to you know a you know a head in some respect when one year i'll never forget this i'm sitting in shul any kipper during the elah it's the holiest time of the holiest day of the year all we're supposed to be doing is davening and all i can do is think about the fact that i had to go to the office that night and i was worried that what was gonna be waiting for me on my desk when i got there and would i have time to even stop and eat something when i got back home before i had to get into the car and as i'm in the car on the way to the office it's just like thinking to myself i i can't keep doing this there's no way that i can continue balancing these two different competing interests my life my religion my relationship with hashem my relationship with my family i know that that is the most important thing but on the other hand my career is important to me too and i know that i have to work to feed my family if nothing else and yet work just kept seemed to encroach on my life and i knew there was no way i was gonna be able to keep doing this because it was just gonna get worse and worse i had to figure out some way to actually make everything work together you know as it happens i'm not the first person to really ever grapple with this issue you know the jewish people when they were in the desert they spent 40 years pretty much living in a bubble they had the clouds of glory surrounding them and all of their needs were taken care of by hashem they had the mana falling from heaven they had a well that surprised supply them with water their clothes would grow with them their physical needs were 100 taken care of they didn't need to lift a finger all they did and they needed to do was focus on their spirituality focus on their relationship with hashem and when those 40 years ended and they're on the border of the land of israel moshe spent the last 35 days of his life he knew he wasn't going to be joining them when they began the conquest of the land of israel and he spent those last 35 days preparing them giving them a pep talk you spent all this time in the desert and now you're leaving the bubble and you're going to work and there's a lot to be learned from the words that moshe uses from the messages that moshe tries to impart to the jewish people in thinking about how we as jews are supposed to approach what it means to be out in the workplace and how to fuse those things together [Music] one of the themes that comes up throughout safer devarum is the idea of devekas which literally means to cling the idea of clinging to hashem now to say that we're going to cling to hashem we can use that word some colloquially and say that it means to be close to hashem but it's always important when we're reading through the torah that we look at the specific language that's used because the words themselves can tell us something very very important and give us a much more nuanced message than we might otherwise think so all the commentators grapple with what exactly it is that moshe is referring to when he says we should be dave to cling to hashem we're physical beings how can we actually cling to hashem so the ramban nahmanidis explains that really what mosh is referring to here is to have hashem on your mind all the time to making sure that you're really always thinking about hashem you know i don't know about you i have a difficult time thinking about the same thing for more than an hour i don't know how moshe would actually expect us to think about hashem 24 hours a day but how are we supposed to approach that i mean maybe for a great sadiq a big rabbi they could think about hashem all the time but but all the mitzvahs in the torah are for everyone it's for every single jew to be able to accomplish that so how we supposed to think about what it means to be thinking about hashem all the time so one of the things that moshe actually said and this goes back to last week's parsha and for those of you who subscribed to my whatsapp chat i talked about this a little bit last week moshe said tishman now those words translated mean and it will be because you will listen to the torah and follow hashem that hashem will keep his covenant with the jewish people but the word akiv is kind of again a strange word because it comes from the root meaning heel like the heel of your foot so what does motion mean he says that it will be because akev referring to your heel that you will listen to the torah so the see the shalom the rabbi from slanum explains the following a person has three parts to his physical body that actually relate to three different parts of his spirituality so for example you have a person's head which is his brain relates to the way he thinks his philosophy his personality you have your heart which is a person's real strong needs and wants and desires but not just physical it means you wanted a life and then you have your limbs and the limbs refer to your physical desires your basic physical needs the word akev again meaning heal what moshe was telling the jewish people is that if you will keep the torah all the way through your heel through your most basic physical desires that's the way that you will be able to actually cling to hashem meaning we don't split up our spirituality and our physical existence we try to fuse them together we don't check our spirituality at the door when we leave shoal we take it with us you know it's similar you know when i actually again go back to my first firm that they told us that you always remember that you are an associate at weil gotcha and when you're out in the streets keep in mind that you're representing the firm even if you're not necessarily involved in something that's work-related but at that time you're representative of the firm and so you have to carry yourself a certain way even when you're doing things that don't necessarily involve for a business with torah it's the same thing we need to bring torah into every aspect of our lives and we don't just think about splitting it into okay so when i'm serving hashem and i'm davening or i'm learning torah so that's spirituality when i'm out at work i'm out at work and the two things don't necessarily have anything to do with each other that's the wrong way to think about it being at work and being not directly involved in spirituality doesn't mean you can't infuse the spiritual into the physical now it's a mistake to think that that just means that we should always be in our best behavior that's one way to think about it is you know you represent your firm wherever you are and just make sure you don't do anything that's going to land the firm on the front page of the new york times it's actually much much deeper than that there's something interesting again about the hebrew language all the words that we use that describe spiritual endeavors torah mitzvah avodah which means spiritual work kedusha holiness all of those words have a vow and a hay in the middle when it comes to words that actually relate to physical things that we do achilla eating shtia drinking lena sleeping halica walking all those words have a yud and hay now and hey together is hashem's name that seems a little bit ironic words that relate to spirituality no mention of hashem whatsoever words that relate to purely physical actions have hashem baked right into the middle you'd think would actually be the opposite so to see the shalom explains it's easy to have spirituality in spiritual actions of course our goal our job is to take basic physical things that we do and infuse them with spirituality i mean not to look at eating as just i'm eating because i enjoy it but i'm eating because hashem wants me to enjoy the planet that he created i'm eating because i want to have strength in order that i can do the things that i need to do to make a bracha before i eat something and to thank hashem meaning to take something that on the surface is just a mundane action it really doesn't seem to have any spirituality in it whatsoever and making it into a spiritual action [Music] what moshe was telling the jewish people was look you've been in this bubble for the last 40 years all you've done is have to focus on the spiritual you don't need to worry about the physical at all hashem took care of everything directly you didn't have a care in the world except to work on becoming greater spiritual beings but that time's up you're leaving the bubble and you're going out into the real world and hashem is not going to be with you the way that he's been up until now you're going to have to do it on your own he wanted to make sure that they took that spiritual training that they had that intense spiritual boot camp if you will over the last 40 years and didn't forget about it and didn't just leave it behind but they used that as the focus of everything that was they were going to be doing even when they were only focusing on you know war and trying to conquer the land and setting up communities and planting and harvesting all these things require a spiritual element to them as well you can infuse the spirituality even into the basic physical things that it is that you're doing now of course this is easier said than done but there's a flip side to it you know in a lot of ways it's not a big deal to serve hashem and if you try to become close to hashem when all you're doing is spiritual stuff right it bothered me so much that i was thinking about work on yom kippur because i knew that it's yom kippur and yum kippur is really supposed to be about serving hashem and so if you're able to focus that's not necessarily all that big a deal in order in order to use the spirituality you're tapping into it that's exactly what you're doing but to bring hashem into our regular lives to be doing basic everyday stuff to you know you're commuting to work you're and you're in the office you're in a meeting and to bring hashem in there with you so you're focusing on hashem as part of your everyday life that's a big deal that's not so easy to do you know hashem doesn't get tremendous nachas or pride from the fact that angels do what they're supposed to do like the angels are serving him of course they are they're angels they don't know how to do anything else but for a human being who has regular physical desires to sort of take and overcome them and to use and bring the spiritual into the physical that's huge you can make sure you can put into words how much hashem gets when he sees a jew sitting at his desk and he takes out he gets a cup of coffee and he doesn't just mumble a blessing or bracha he stops and he thinks he thanks hashem for this cup of coffee and he's thinking about the fact that he can have spirituality in his life you know how awesome hashem thinks that is how amazing it is that a jew can do that in his regular life to focus on spiritual when he's involved in regular physical activities this isn't that we have the opportunity to do every single day of the week during work but the truth is it's actually much much deeper than that you know there's this american view of work that it's something almost sometimes can be viewed as a necessary evil you know we work so we can get to the point where we can retire but even if you really enjoy what it is that you do people often look and they think about the future when they're not going to have to work anymore and they're able just going to be able to lie on a beach or spend more time with their family or focus on their other interests you know when i was sitting in sri lankan kippur and it bothered me that instead of davening i was thinking about work and i wasn't concentrating that bothered me simply because i knew that davening at that time was much more important that focusing on hashem was what i was supposed to be doing and i wasn't supposed to be focusing on work it never bothered me when i was sitting at my desk thinking about what my upcoming shabbos was going to be like or thinking about the upcoming holiday or even thinking about an interesting torah thought that somebody had taught me and the reason it never bothered me was because i knew that really that was more important you know things in our lives like our relationship with hashem like our families we know these things are more important than work and so we often view war as a little bit of a again a necessary evil but the reality is that for the overwhelming majority of us we're going to spend most of our lives working that's not an accident it's not just coincidental that hashem set things up that way that we need to work in order to support our families in fact play something interesting there's a blessing a bracha that we make after we eat certain foods the blessing of bahrain a fashot and the words of bahrain of ashot are bless you hashem but reignify both who created many different souls and the things that they're lacking things that we're lacking are not just it happens to be we need something hashem specifically created the things that we're lacking as needs for us these things are not just random i'm a human being and i happen to have needs for stuff hashem created the needs the same way that it created me and so working this is not just something that we have to do hashem set this up he wants us to be working supporting our families going to our job every day that itself is serving hashem it may not be the same direct serving relation that's obvious to us like sitting in shul and davening or learning torah but it's what hashem wants us to be doing at that moment in time it's something that hashem created and built into the fabric of the world he doesn't want us to split our lives into two different parts my family my religion and work these are all one thing all one part of our life that we should view as one whole sometimes we're serving hashem in a direct way where it's obvious and sometimes we're doing things that are not as obvious but equally as important you know you ask anybody who's in sales for example you know there's closing the sale where you're obviously about to get paid and then there's the spade work that you do with the clients when you're kind of you work them over and you talk to them until you actually get build the relationship and when you're doing that initial work you're not seeing any actual results and it may take some time and who knows if you'll ever see results but it doesn't make it any less important in fact we know we have to do that kind of work these are the things that actually enable us to have success when it comes to actually closing the deal so it's so important to recognize that when we go to work it's not just about something that we have to do that i'd rather be doing something else that's what hashem wants us and because it's where hashem wants us it's every bit as important and every bit as spiritual as the things that are obviously spiritual you know it's kind of funny one of the things i've been reading about that as a result of people working from home from covid is that spouses are recognizing that their husband their wife or their wife may have a little bit of a different personality at work than they do at home and i was after i was reading somebody was saying how you know everyone is an example everyone this woman was writing that you know everyone knows and hates that guy who when a meeting's starting to wrap up they could raise a new issue or try to circle back something that had already been decided everyone starts to groan and someone was writing i'm listening to my husband on a conference call and i'm realizing that my husband is that guy because his personality at work was different than his personality at home but that really just sort of is you know feeding into this idea that work and home are two different things and i'm maybe a different kind of person one that i am at the other it's all the same it should all be focused on recognizing that hashem has a plan for us and hashem has things that he wants us to do and that work doesn't have to be any less a spiritual experience than sitting in shoal now again this is thing that is definitely easier to say than it is to do and i think that part of figuring out and changing that mindset requires i think recognizing and understanding how exactly our livelihoods work so we i think generally have a view as the way the world views it that we work we get paid we put in more effort we get paid more we put in less effort we get paid less and but the rallies teach us that every year on rosh hashanah hashem decides how much money we're going to be making what our livelihood is going to be for that year so all the work and the effort that we put in number one doesn't really necessarily doesn't really decide how much money we're going to be making but number two all of our success comes from hashem right moshe tells the jewish people and say for devarum that one of the biggest mistakes we can make and this may be one of the reasons why hashem created the world this way is sort of giving us the opportunity to grow by saying we think it's my work i did this i don't need to leave hashem out of it i'm the one who took care of this that's a mistake we have to recognize that all our success in life everything comes from hashem you know it's sort of like the you know guys looking for parking on a busy brooklyn street and he realizes that he's not going to find a space and he says hashem please i hope you can help me find a spa oh wait never mind i found one over here [Music] right we think that the effort of things that we do are the success we have is from us when the reality is we have to recognize that everything comes from hashem now when you start to realize that you start to look at life a little bit differently because you'll actually start to notice things that happen in your career and in your life generally that you don't even realize you start to realize like hey i can't believe hashem set this up for me the right way so give one example i was working as an associate and you know in the bankruptcy courts where i practice so judges always prefer that the parties manage to work things out themselves the judges don't like to have trials if they can avoid it and part of that being a good bankruptcy practitioner means cutting deals so i'm in court one monday morning for a hearing and there was another hearing that was going on before me and one of the associates from this other law firm who was handling this hearing says to the judge your honor i know we had a trial scheduled for today but i'm happy to report that the parties have come to a settlement and i want to describe the settlement to your honor the judge stops and says um council are you an associate or a partner and the guy says i'm an associate he says okay have you read my chamber rules associated says no the judge says when did you cut this deal so it says sunday morning and did it ever occur to you counselor that perhaps i was in my office all day yesterday preparing for a contested trial and the associate's like uh i i you know kind of like got a loss for words so you know my chamber rules say that if you cut a deal over the weekend you're supposed to call chambers and leave a message and let me know i ruined my sunday yesterday because you didn't let me know that you had cut a deal and there wouldn't be a trial today and i'm sitting there like oh my gosh i never would have considered that and actually it happened to me like a month later in front of the same judge that we were starting to get something close over the weekend and i made sure to tell the other people working on it we have to call the judge's chambers if we're getting a deal done and we think the trial is not going to happen on monday morning this is something where i had a success in my career and success i mean i avoided a major embarrassment and only because i happened to be sitting in court seeing this happen to somebody else and hashem set things up for me to enable me to succeed in a certain instance and it was all because just hashem wanted for whatever reason for the actual issues to succeed at that point and if we pay attention and we look out for these sorts of things we'll see that happens all the time you know sometimes when things are going tough for us they're difficult it's easy for us to dive in hashem but one of the challenges of life and one of the different areas we can focus on and improve ourselves at work is when things are going well not forgetting that everything comes from hashem and that our successes are from hashem and we need to thank him and daven even when things are going well recognizing where all our successes come from now of course this may lead you a little bit of a question if my success and my livelihood is all being decided by hashem in advance so maybe i don't even need to bother why put any effort at all hashem will just make sure that it works out for me sort of like the story of a guy who's riding his bike along a cliff and he falls over and he manages to grab a tree branch and so it doesn't fall down you know 100 feet and he's hanging there and he's dominating praying hashem please save me and a helicopter comes along and it can't really get so close but they try to lower a ladder and he can't really quite reach it and he's like no you know don't worry about it i'll someone else will save me helicopter flies off and ultimately the guy falls and he dies and he makes his way up to heaven and he looks at hashem and he looks at the ministry angel and he says i don't understand why didn't god save me and god looks at him and says what do you mean i sent you a helicopter you chose not to put in the effort to try to grab it in our lives it's all about the effort hashem wants us to work for it he doesn't want to just give it to us yeah the success ultimately comes from hashem but the effort that we put in that's all us in order to grow we have to work at it to improve we can just come into this world and kind of coast through life you're never going to get anywhere it's all about improving the way we are you imagine you have two different guys first guys calling brad and he's good-looking he's smart he's even-tempered he's got a good work ethic just a generally good guy and he's very successful because everyone likes hanging around them he's very smart he does a good job and he goes through life really just killing it right he gives he makes he becomes very wealthy he gives a lot of charity does good things in his community everyone likes hanging around with them from our perspective life is fantastic then you have a second guy calling jim and jim is you know he's kind of an irritable guy he's not very good looking he's not that bright and he goes through life kind of not really getting anywhere you know he's kind of stuck in a dead-end job and his life home life is not great either he fights with his wife and his kids don't really respect them you know he tries a little bit you know he tries to buy a self-help book and he puts in some efforts and maybe improves a little bit but he doesn't really get much from the outside jim's life doesn't look all that great and so brad and jim after uh their lives end they make their way up to the uh get great court case in the sky and they're standing in front and they're looking at you know everything that's going on and god looks at brad and brad's like look my life's great and i did everything and brad's got to see you did a great job you know things were good you fantastic and jim says wait a second look what you gave him my life wasn't so good but what did i have i started with you gave me nothing and god says yeah you're right you know brad you did a good job i'm not gonna take that away from you but you you're basically the guy who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple jim your life i gave you very very little to work with and you put in the effort did you succeed maybe yes maybe not but you improved the thing that i gave you i gave you a soul and you took that and you made it better even if it's just a little bit but you put in the effort to make it better and i'm not gonna take away from brad's accomplishments but at the end of the day he was given such tremendous tools to work with hashem's actually going to expect more of him see from hashem's perspective he gives us the tools the question is what do we do with them some people have greater tools than others but if we don't put in the effort and work at improving ourselves we're not giving hashem back the thing that he gave us that's better than he gave it to us everything in our lives is about doing the work it's about trying to work at improving ourselves and whether it's obviously spiritual stuff like we're sitting in shoal or being at work and recognizing that hashem wants us to be there and trying to be the best person that we can and trying to focus on making sure there's spirituality in our lives and trying to make sure that we act like a mensch that's what hashem wants from us hashem wants us to put in the work and improve ourselves and make ourselves into better people now of course as you're listening to this it may actually start to sound a bit scary you think oh guess what you're going to have to work the rest of your life you know part of the reason we think that is because we're just not used to the concept we have to recognize that work isn't just about work it's about doing everything we can to have that deep spiritual connection with hashem it's what can actually help us get the most fulfillment out of our lives is doing that work in order to enable us to come closer to hashem but there's another part of it too you know why jonathan sacks points out something really really interesting in safer devarim as moshe is giving again this pep talk how does he give them how did he get the jewish people prepared what does he tell them well what he does for the most part is he reviews all the mitzvot in the torah now you would think that from the jewish people's perspective they feel like okay enough we you know we know what the mitzvot are already you know you're not necessarily going to get us excited and guess ready to go by just reviewing do this don't do that do this don't do that but my saks point out something really really interesting in the entirety of the first four books of the torah the word simcha happiness is used four times one in each of the first four books in devarm an entire safer divarum moshe uses the word 12 times moshe's message to the jewish people is that finding true happiness not just meaning but happiness is by keeping them at fault by doing the work nobody was ever became happiness and felt fulfilled and certainly long-term happiness by sitting on a beach doing nothing all day it was nice to go on vacation and recharge but to have him do nothing to not do anything meaningful nobody finds happiness in that there's somebody who happens to win the lottery or have some massive inheritance so they can just sit back and do nothing we all know there's no happiness there maybe you think on a day-to-day level will be a little bit easier but you're not going to find any happiness in that the path to happiness the way that hashem set up the world is that by doing this work by actively trying to make ourselves better to bring ourselves closer to hashem that's where happiness comes from and if you want to find that meaning it's in recognizing that everything that we do it gives us that opportunity to bring us closer to hashem and when you have this perspective it can completely change what your life is like on a day-to-day basis what we think of as like the drudgery of going to work the commute and you know if you're in new york certainly pre-covered you know being on a packed subway or sitting in traffic or dealing with difficult people all of these things are not just a you know a byproduct a related issue of us going to work all of that is part of the opportunity that hashem gives us in our regular day to become closer to him to improve ourselves to make ourselves into better people so now you can start viewing these mundane actions this day-to-day life being part of the rat race is a deeply spiritual experience it doesn't have to be something that's separate from the rest of your life there is no rest of your life it's all the same whether you're an insult whether you're at work it's about serving hashem and about making yourself into a better people to a better person and once you have those difficult things that come up you don't view it as a difficulty you wish you didn't have to deal with it's an opportunity it's an opportunity that hashem's giving you to make yourself better to overcome that challenge and to grow you know a number of years ago i read this story that somehow just stuck with me about a guy named clayton prince he was a soap opera actor probably never even heard of him and he actually at the same time trained to be in the guardian angels back then this is i think in the sort of the late 80s was when it was the guardian angel was really becoming a big name and this guy tells over a story about how you know he was an actor he was making a nice living he didn't have a need to join the guardian angels and put himself in danger but he felt the need to give back and what he did was he said this is this crazy story where he's basically on the subway and a guy pulls a knife and is threatening to stab him and clayton princess tells over the story where in his mind he says you know i had just taken a month of intense martial arts training including just having learned how to disarm somebody with a knife and the only thing i could think when this guy pulled a knife on me was ha ha pop quiz i'm ready a terrible challenge things could be very difficult to deal with and you view it as an opportunity and this is especially true when it comes to dealing with a difficult boss you know again one of the things that being a lawyer in a big firm is partners at a big firm have a reputation as being difficult and very very demanding and certainly when i was a young associate i saw examples in this all the time one story that really stuck with me is one day we were preparing for a trial for a big hearing and where a bunch of us were in the office till very very late we got in there very early and we're getting prepared to get all our files together to go downtown to the bankruptcy court and it's you know sort of imagine a lot of hustle and bustle and people kind of running around and one of the paralegals this guy named dan had a few boxes that he'd stack one of these hand carts and he took one of these bungee cords and he's going to wrap around the boxes and hook it in and we tried to hook it in because he didn't really get out all the way and the cord snapped back up and hit him right in the eye dan goes down and he's lying on the floor just arriving in pain and we're sort of all kind of stunned to see what happened and someone's going to you know call 9-1-1 or whatever it is and this one partner who's running the hearing comes walking down the hallway and dan is lying in the doorway of somebody's office this partner looks down sees him steps over him to talk to the associate in the office and we're all looking at this guy like what do you think he just couldn't believe it and he looks at us just like i stepped over him what's the problem we all have people in our lives at work who are unbelievably difficult to deal with especially that's your boss but now when you realize you don't work for that guy you work for hashem in fact some respects you get to work for yourself by using the opportunities to make yourself better and bring yourself closer to hashem suddenly all these different difficulties and challenges that we have at work this is true in our lives generally these aren't just challenges these are specific opportunities that hashem is giving us in order to help us reach our purpose to improve ourselves and make ourselves into better people and become closer to hashem you know something else starts to happen as well because when you have this attitude if you really can't internalize it you kind of don't get phased by anything the challenges and the difficulties and when things come up you're able to stay calm and relaxed and just look at it as okay here's another challenge i have to think about how to deal with it and when you're around somebody like that it makes life way easier because all the challenge things happen at work things come up things get messed up there's problems this client's unhappy this thing got delayed how are we going to deal with it people make mistakes but instead of getting worked up and upset okay new challenge i need to figure out how to deal with it i remember this one time again when i was a very junior lawyer the the head of my group was a guy named harvey miller who was really the father of modern corporate bankruptcy practice and he was basically the guy everyone knew who he was he was the number to call if he were if you were a company in financial distress and a friend of mine was working on a massive deal with him that happened to be had a very strong governmental aspect to it in part because there was a potential chinese investor and it was very secretive and everything needed to be kept under wraps and this associate sent an email to a lot of different investors and she was supposed to keep all the investors on bcc so nobody could see anybody else's name and she didn't do that and lo and behold the next day it's on the front page of the new york times business section and she was just i mean absolutely mortified and she happened to notice it herself when she was looking at the paper and she got into the office and she she the first thing she did was she went over to harvey's office to basically throw herself on her sword because she was the one who messed it up and she went in there and this made a huge impression on her she went in there and said harvey you know look i i messed this up and harvey stopped [Music] okay well let's at least make sure they spelled my name right and then we'll figure out how to deal with it and she was expecting to get yelled at or fired who knows what and his reaction to it was just no this is a challenge it's something we have to deal with and we'll figure it out when you have that attitude your career will become better you'll find yourself becoming more successful because the fact is everyone likes being around that person who's calm and relaxed and doesn't get worked up especially over things that aren't such a big deal but even the big things if you can keep your head about you and it's much easier to do when you recognize hashem's running the show he's pulling the strings it's just our job to react to it and the reaction that hashem's looking for the opportunity that he's giving us is that we should be able to stay calm recognize that he's running things and just figure out the best way that we can proceed so this attitude makes your career actually give you more ability to be successful because of the fact that you're going to keep yourself calm in every stressful situation and then something else starts to happen you know whether we like it or not as jews in the workforce whether you're obviously jewish or not whether you're wearing a yamaka or not we're ambassadors we're hashem's ambassadors hashem expects us to make an impression on the people around us in a good way [Music] and that can be true when you're dealing with jews who aren't quite as aware of the need to be have a relationship with hashem you know it's interesting the single most important event in the bankruptcy bar in the distressed investing community is the uja lunch no joke every year 1500 1800 people show up to this event you know working in corporate bankruptcy world everyone's jewish i mean firms i've worked at were closed on rosh hashanah and noon kippur because that was just a huge part of the the culture so the opportunity to connect to other jews was massive and you can make an impression on them your behavior will make them realize that this is how a jew behaves and that can have just an incredible far-reaching impact and you can connect to other jews i remember one time i was working on a deal and it was the one of the lawyers involved who were on the same side both representing the same company and i i pretty i knew he was jewish i wasn't 100 sure and he was you know kind of not an easy guy to deal with and we had a very very long complicated bankruptcy hearing and the hearing was on friday in baltimore and obviously i have a sister lives in baltimore so i knew i'd be spending shabbos with my sister but the hearing's going on and getting later and later and everyone knows i've even warned the judge that come five o'clock i'm just i'm gonna have to leave because i knew how long it would take me to get to my sister's house and at one point we were worried that the hearing was going to continue to monday and my client did not want to wait he wanted to get everything done and how we're going to figure out he's kind of looking at me can you can you stay longer and ultimately we managed at the hearing wrapped up and we got the judge's approval for what we wanted to do and i'm basically wrapping up when i start throwing myself in my bag so i can leave and as i'm walking to the door this lawyer looks at me says josh you enjoy it have a good shabbos like there was that connection with another jew because of the fact that we were both jewish we just realized this connection and because partially of my behavior com people look at how you are and they use it as an example and usually connect to other jews and this connection by the way can come up in times where you would never ever expect it a number of years ago i was representing a company that had financed the construction of a prison in chickasha oklahoma uh if you've never heard of chickasha oklahoma you could you're to be forgiven um getting there is basically means like flying into it was oklahoma city and then driving for like three hours and before we went down there for a meeting we were on a conference call with them and during part of the call one of the lawyers for the other side who happened to be the for the prison itself who you know was sort of the borrower they didn't use an outside law firm it was the district attorney for grady county in oklahoma and at one point i don't know what made him say this but things were getting a little bit heated and he says we're not going to let you fancy new yorkers with your fancy mbas come down here and tell us what to do now lo and behold we have to go down there a week or so later two weeks later for a meeting we travel all the way down there and you know i've always worn my yamaka at work i just you know never considered taking it off everyone should you know do what they is comfortable for them but for me it was never really a question about not taking my yamako off except this one time i thought you know going to the middle of nowhere i just felt a little bit uncomfortable so i actually took my yamaka off for this meeting and we're sitting in this meeting you've got the mayor of the town you've got the warden the district attorney and the sheriff turns out the sheriff i don't remember his last name but he grew up and spent a number of years living on the lower east side of manhattan he was someone who had interacted with jews all the time and they're in the middle of chickasha oklahoma i had the opportunity to interact with somebody who you knew what it meant to be jewish never would have expected it but when you view your work life and your life life as all being the same thing it's all about connecting to hashem it's all about using these opportunities that hashem gives us in order to improve ourselves both by connecting to him and connecting with other jews suddenly work is just completely completely different there aren't two different sides to us it's all the same it's all about taking the opportunities that hashem is giving us using those opportunities to grow and to become a better person the reality is that's the path to simcha that's the path to happiness because when you know that you what your mission in life is and you're actually getting closer to fulfilling it there's just no greater simha no greater happiness than that because you can spend all of your time you're not at work you're fulfilling your life's mission you're impacting other jews you're impacting yourself you're impacting your family you're having a relationship with hashem suddenly the whole world is different everything about what you're doing in your life has a goal and nothing about it is mundane nothing about it is just i wish i didn't have to do this they're all challenges and opportunities that hashem is putting in front of us to help us reach our potential and just to end with one last thought you know starting next week begins the month of ello now the month of ello is typically associated with the high holidays with rosh hashanah yom kippur as you think about his preparation for the days hashanah the day of judgment you know keeper of the day hashem will forgive us and so there's a certain element of it where we feel like we're approaching something that's important which is obviously true but the balatanya the first the bhavata rabbit said something really really fascinating you know the days of rosh hashanah and yom kippur those are days where hashem we interact with him like a king but it's with interacting with a king in his palace when the king's in his palace and his royal garb it gives a certain level of fear because just he's the king a certain level of awe but when the king's out in the field when he happens to be traveling when he's out in vacation he's more relaxed it's more easy going easier to relate to the month of ello is the time when hashem leaves the palace and comes out into the field where we are it's the opportunity that hashem gives us to relate to him in a way that's more relaxed i remember one time when i first started learning in the certain yeshiva the head of the issue with the roshiva was a very regal person and he just gave off a certain sense of almost royalty he was tall long beer very well spoken and so when i first started in shiva you have this your relationship with him because you view him as he's he's the roshi yeshiva it was that first time i got the opportunity to spend a shabbos meal with him in his house we see him in a more relaxed environment and it's easier to relate to him in that environment hashem does that for us during elo he comes down to us in a more relaxed environment and makes it easier for us to relate to him and so just give us all a blessing that as we get closer towards the end of the summer and we're going to start the month of ello to use that opportunity to recognize that everything that we do in our lives all has the same goal we're all working for the same boss we're all working for hashem and trying to do our best to come closer