One Frame Before Anxiety

In 1918, a Soviet director named Lev Kuleshov [music] conducted an experiment that shook the world of psychology. He filmed a famous movie actor with a completely neutral face without any expression, [music] and then he worked his editing magic. He took that exact same face and combined it into three different films. Once, he placed the neutral face immediately after [music] a picture of a bowl of soup. A second time, after a picture of a coffin, and the third time after a picture of a small child playing. When the audience watched the films, they were beside themselves. What a genius actor. What deep hunger you can see in his eyes when he looks at the soup. What heartbreaking sorrow in front of the coffin. What compassion in front of the child. But here is the shocking truth. The actor didn't move a single muscle. It was exactly the same shot. The viewers' human brains invented the [music] emotion. The Kuleshov effect scientifically proved that an event by itself has no meaning. Meaning [music] and emotion are created solely from the context, from the image we place right after it. Friends, this editing room is our life. Reality throws neutral faces at us all the time. The boss said a dry good morning, a deal didn't go through, a traffic jam, a door slammed. These are dry events, but we take that event and in the editing room of our mind, we immediately attach it to images of our deepest fears. He hates me. I'm a loser. [music] I'm a failure. And suddenly, the gray and neutral event takes on the face of a horror movie. We ruin our own lives because of poor editing by our minds. Thousands of years before the invention of cinema, Jewish giants like Nachum Ish Gamzu and Rabbi Akiva developed the ultimate editing software. They called it Gamzu Letova. This too is for the good. We always thought that everything is for the best was just being nice, naive optimism of people who repress reality. >> [music] >> But it's not naivety, it's insane psychological genius. Judaism tells us you are the directors. When a painful or senseless event happens [music] to you, you have a choice of what image to attach to it in your mind. >> [music] >> This too is for the best is an editing directive that tells you, "Take this frightening event and immediately place it next to the image of the creator who loves me and manages reality with perfect precision." The moment we put these two images together, the face of reality changes its shape. A financial loss, when [music] placed next to faith, suddenly looks like salvation. A door that slams shut, when placed next to faith, looks like a guiding hand preventing us from entering a dangerous place. We didn't change the event, we changed the editing. So, the next time something happens to us that doesn't go our way, and our mind [music] rushes to play a movie of anxiety and despair, let's stop the screen. We won't try to change reality, we'll change the frame [music] that follows it. Let's place faith there, and we'll discover that we're living in an amazing movie.