One Thing Rabbi Yaron Reuven Can't Teach You

we've made quite a few lectures thousands of lectures thousands of uh short clips thousands of ways to get close to am Israel get Amazon close to academic and at times I would talk about different things sometimes it will be Allah sometimes musal sometimes sometimes a combination thereof answering questions uh questions about the different mid regime different confusions ideology different things that are happening in the world try to get people to stop being crazy expose the wicked people that are really crazy but nonetheless no one sees it until we bring it out so we've done well Hashem we've done but there is one thing that I've tried to teach I've tried um and I've had even a couple of lectures about it I think uh my if my memory serves me right but um the reality is is that you really can't teach this there's one thing that I can't teach you and it doesn't matter how many of my lectures you've watched and it doesn't matter how loyal of a student you are or friend or follower or even an enemy it doesn't matter I can't teach there's one thing I can't teach you and don't worry it's not Kabbalah or the other things the time will come for everything it's one thing I can teach you one thing that it's really impossible to teach and that's messy with nephesh self-sacrifice you can tell people about it you can tell stories about it personal stories stories of telekin that have done it different examples theorize to different uh situations and circumstances as the truth be told is that you cannot teach you can't convince somebody to sacrifice themselves sacrifice their time sacrifice their livelihood you can't teach somebody to do such a thing you can't teach or convince somebody to do it because self-sacrifice is not a one-time thing usually self-sacrifice is a lifestyle self-sacrifice is an ideology that is in addition to your current ideology it's like the extra credit the little extra superpower that some people possess and everyone would love to have self-sacrifice is one of those things where you either have it or you don't you either are willing to sacrifice thank you very much oh you're not willing to sacrifice there's no way that you can teach somebody about self-sacrifice and thereby that person says okay now that I know what it is I'm gonna do it that person may hear your stories may like the things you say in the examples but when push comes to shove it's either in them or it's not and even if they're able to do it one time still doesn't mean that they're living a life of mercedesh because making a one-time sacrifice could simply mean you went crazy for a moment or you simply weren't thinking or a lot of other different things self-sacrifice is not a one-time thing self-sacrifice which in Hebrews is something you program into your neshama that this is the only way to be this is why the rambang writes that when somebody makes a donation it's not necessarily a good indication of whether they're generous or not if they meet a single large donation if they made us you know if they make regular donations then that shows their generosity but if they made a one-time donation it's a very large donation it's not necessarily an indication that they're generous could simply be they went crazy that one day could simply be they had you know excitement of the moment but the next day they go back to being a scrooge the next day they can go back to being a stingy little sting and they won't even want to share a bottle of water with you the one that's generous typically does it regularly but again just because somebody donates regularly doesn't mean that they're generous why because it also has to be relative if a person that has you know a few hundred thousand dollars in a bank donates I don't know a dollar a day he's not generous he's actually a very arrogant stingy person stingy for obvious reasons donating uh 365 dollars uh you know it's not exactly a uh uh relative to the amount of money that he has so obviously he's very stingy but arrogant because he's really only doing it not because he actually believes that this one dollar is helping anybody but rather he wants to give himself the good feeling of someone that's generous and rather he wants to get the attention of someone that gives by giving every day every day the person that he gives to says thank you or the company sends them a automatic email that says thank you and he likes it he gives him good feeling but this is unfortunately not a very good uh very good indication of his generosity but the rambam does combine the two things where he says that if you want to overcome stinginess When you pray you have you just have one of those diseases spiritual diseases where you're very stingy then get yourself acclimated to giving by giving a little bit every day decide a certain amount that you can give that you could uh uh let yourself part with and divide it up into small portions and give it up over a period of time if let's say it's a hundred dollars then divide it up into I don't know let's say 100 different uh homeless people or or 50 different homeless people and so on you know sometimes I see people donate to our organization where they'll donate one dollar or uh you know in uh in stalker or sometimes maybe I don't don't push themselves and get a dollar fifty and again if this is truly what you have then there's obviously no uh no harm in doing so it's a very good idea but many times it's not many times people donate that one dollar just because they want to check out they feel like it's a stalker box now for my recommendation if you only if if you only have one dollar that's all you have to your name keep it to yourself because of the Shem Hashem will give you more blessing don't keep don't make yourself homeless don't make yourself so poor if you do have a lot more then and you simply can't allow yourself to give more than a dollar then give the dollar to the local synagogue give the dollar to the local homeless person don't donate on donate it online the reason why is because there are minimum charges that each uh Merchant Bank that processes the credit cards charges and by the time that dollar goes through all of the different banks you know almost half of it is gone that this is on not because they take fifty percent of every transaction quite the opposite usually the uh Banks take somewhere around three percent maybe four but that's it they don't take uh 50 but they also have a minimum and that minimum usually is somewhere around 40 or 50 cents which means that if you're donating one dollar that one dollar is not what uh is actually getting to that uh that beneficiary let's just say but the point being is is that if someone is going to try to get themselves to sacrifice to change their ways to to to help others change their ways they have to know that sacrifice is required for all of us it's not necessarily a suggestion but it's just one of those things where you can't teach somebody they have to simply be willing to do it you can tell them theories you can tell them stories but this is not one of those things where I teach you the Allah and therefore you'll know exactly how to light the menorah or build the sukkah self-sacrifices not like that [Music]