Project Inspire Convention 2022 Rabbi Dovid Orlofsky It’s All About You 1

i brought my own clock it doesn't work but at least as a prop it's very effective a quick word to the cameraman you don't ever have to give a side view of me we know what i look like i'm just saying i want to start off by saying what i think everybody feels at this point wow what an unbelievable convention i don't know if i inspired anybody here or if i'm gonna inspire any secular jews but boy was i inspired by this shabbos what the most amazing thing everyone is here i mean everyone and we don't appreciate it when it was said at the beginning of the convention that anybody here could have carried the entire convention it is by no means an exaggeration we had josef mendelovich here if you're not in my age group you don't appreciate what that means when i was a high school kid we used to go out demonstrating at the russian council in glen cove demanding that they free jose mendolovic two four six eight let our people immigrate we were out there cheering um swaboda yeah we were we were out there praying that maybe the refusal to get a chance and then i heard him the first time in the young as well woodmere in 1980 and he just came out of siberia i mean what does that mean what a what an unbelievable uh individual i discussed for the first time this shabbos just for a few minutes to meet tivya singer he's one of the most famous people in the jewish world you can go online and see him debating every christian that ever lived you know i think he got 20 minutes over the convention you know um uh i i have to say on a personal note and and it's uh it's a little sensitive and that i had this course of having my rebbe ruby foyer here uh i had an opportunity to develop a cache with him he would come to our family simches and he is one of the greats of our generation that is not tapped enough and the fact that we had this course to be able to have him here for shabbos that alone raised the kedusha of the event i once said this over at yeshiva where he was speaking from time to time and they never invited him back so he said don't praise me too much. so mr schmuck look at the fun of not only uh the unbelievable personalities here everybody this is claudiuselle what you're seeing at this convention is the best and clyusel our friends at tour anytime are here kazakh is here my my good friend mendel berlin who puts out the tourist suites that was given out is here everybody is here it's just the most amazing thing and of course you've seen the staff but they have to stay in the background because there are so many other people here that they have to try to fit in but when they said that anyone could carry the convention they're also talking about themselves i remember seeing matt trop in a room with a thousand teenagers and the work that he was able to do you don't see that you see him running around with a walkie-talkie you know what i mean a waste of talent you know haim samson so incredibly talented only invites me every five years because of the trauma that i remind him of when we went to england he had to drive me and they have roundabouts with 35 exits and we kept getting lost and whenever i see him he goes there's no roundabouts in stamford you know i was like i'm sorry i'm sorry i traumatized you he said that's not how you traumatize me when you got up and said uh kaim samson is still single will some nice girl please marry this guy that was traumatic so much talent and the most import i have to tell you and i'm saying this with everybody here the greatest part of this convention is you the people who came here this weekend is unbelievable people the convention is sold out i couldn't get a room i'm in a holiday inn in bridgeport i just you don't know that hallway keeps going you just keep walking and walking this morning i took a bus it was great there's no rooms it's it's completely packed you know why do you think that everybody fell time all these classes in the middle of the night he doesn't have a room you know what i mean they keep them up till five o'clock in the morning so they won't notice and then put out the coffee you know oh which reminds me i have a little note here uh from revgov please mention me okay but i have to tell you uh the the participants who are here i had a chance to talk to many of them many of them and i have to tell you that really worked out well because sometimes i go to one of these conventions and i eat so much i'm sick this time i didn't have a chance you know i said to my wife i'll go get your food i came back an hour later she says where's the food i said i was talking to people i every every two steps somebody else wants to talk to me and every person is more fascinating than the next what a a collection of unbelievable people you have people with canes and people with walkers and people in wheelchairs and people with seeing eye dogs which is unusual because i always used to go to the mall and i see that sign that says no dogs except seeing eye dogs and i thought who is that for i i have confidence you i'll give that another couple of seconds to move around you see even the people who don't get the joke are laughing because they know i'm funny so they understand it's like they surrendering themselves if they didn't get the joke because nothing with me and such amazing people and i look forward to be able to maintain that i know that when i see you even months years from now you'll still have to be wearing your eye tags i'll be able to identify you you know i said oh hi uh fred you remember me yes of course you're from brooklyn no i'm not oh yes you are everybody's from brooklyn anyway so uh i do have some content luckily my clock's not working um everybody's been talking about care of this weekend i want to take the negative approach i think it was woody allen once who said i want to leave you with a positive thought i don't have one so i'll give you two negative ones instead if you throw salons used to tell his bakram in yeshiva in eastern europe learn stark so the jews in paris don't intermarry was meant it means that the stronger you are the stronger the balabatman the town will be and the stronger they are the stronger the next town will be and the next town and the ripple effect will be such that by the time it reaches paris they'll at least have enough sense of jewish identity that they don't intermarry and the message i think is tremendous and that is that at the end of the day the strongest impact depends on how much you work on yourself and the more you work on yourself the greater is going to be the experience that you can do would of course be invited to many khasanas and he would stop in and he saw there was a bakr from his yeshiva almost every night was adakasana so finally he goes over to the bahrain he says don't you have knight seder and he says yes rabbi brothers mitzvah i want to do the mitzvah he says your mitts for now is to be sitting and learning she says florida resheba you go to weddings every night so he says i stop in for five minutes he says i'll also stop him for five minutes he says i could be missing in five minutes because i spent all my night satan is learning if you sit down and learn you can also do that in five minutes the stronger you are the greater the impact is that you're able to have when i was talking in the class about how to answer questions i say the hardest question to answer is the one you can't answer for yourself and the stronger you are the stronger your shabbos table is the stronger your home is the more people come uh stephen covey in the seven habits of highly effective people talk about your circle of influence what does that mean the world is filled with unreasonable people right your parents are unreasonable your children are unreasonable your spouse is unreasonable your neighbors are unreasonable your boss is unreasonable everybody's unreasonable except for me right everybody is unreasonable and if my happiness is going to be dependent upon people doing what i want i'm going to be unhappy a lot the only person that i have control over at the end of the day is me and the more i expand myself and my sphere of influence so it was a time when my wife noticed that my daughters weren't really darving men so as you know children listen with their eyes not with their ears so what did she do she would go out instead of davorning middleton outside in the living room where all the kids were you know sitting on the couch waiting for someone to clean the house and um and one by one all of my kids joined her because they saw they saw she was able to expand that circle of influence and who she is and what she is so at the end of the day and uh will be a prime shapiro spoke about this friday night you know arvis supposed to be davening harvest a ravis what does that mean responsibility and that's really the point that i want to make here this morning we have to take responsibility and that's very hard because and i tell kids when i teach all the time you're at a disadvantage you've never seen an adult you've seen me and my generation we never grew up my parents went through the depression they went through world war ii you meet holocaust survivors you see all the things they went through you know and my generation didn't grow up dave barry who was a humorist with the miami herald wrote a book called dave barry turns 40. and he says now that i'm 40 i have to begin to realize that i have more in common with june and ward than the beaver now for those who don't appreciate the reference there was a tv show called leave it to beaver about an eight-year-old boy which means that at the age of 40 i have to begin to recognize i'm not an eight-year-old boy but until then it's it's obvious someone said to me you know am i obligated to to support my children so i said well the gemara says you have to support your children till they can stand on their own how old's that five they're a little slow six is that then you bring them in you say son it's time for you to make it in the world good luck yeah so the person looked at me shocked they said well it's different today i said yeah today it's about 45 you know and that's only because they're expecting the urushi you know what i mean so you know but there was a time when you stood up and took responsibility my generation took responsibility and therefore they were adults when you're an adult it's an entirely different attitude and if you in my age group you remember would you ever call one of your parents friends by their first name it was unheard of it was dr this and mrs that and mr this you never called anyone by that first name today you know if one of your children's friends come in and say oh hello mrs so-and-so oh i feel like you're talking to my mother-in-law call me shawnee okay shawnee now what is the kid supposed to do at that point there's no adults i used to teach in seminary and sometimes the girls would bring their mothers and they would sit in the class to be fair there were some mothers they traveled a lot they had better attendance than their daughters did you know but i'd see them sitting in class and i always it was easy to tell because you know they were both dressed exactly the same way so you know so the mommy's bulls are dressed like an 18 year old girl so you know at some point you got to suck it up and become an adult and it's very hard because our generation doesn't see those kind of role models we remember them but we were raised to be children our parents suffered and they wanted us to have everything and so they gave us a sense of entitlement and it becomes very difficult then for us to do something so the point is we have to start to accept responsibility don't you love that when people say why doesn't somebody do something and i always tell them i am if i have to save clients all by myself i will you want to help well there will be two of us you know what i mean but it means we accept responsibility it's not their problem it's my problem i have to deal with it i'm the adult in the room but we don't see this today i think one of the last adult presidents was president reagan yeah i remember when a car bomb went off in lebanon he got on television and said i'm the commander-in-chief the buck stops here i'm responsible when bill clinton who was the first baby boomer to be elected president was caught lying under oath he said it's not my fault they shouldn't have asked me the question if they didn't ask me the question then i wouldn't have lied that's reassuring but this is the problem you understand where is okay i don't know if you remember when i was a kid you know you walk down the street you slip you fall you break your leg this doorkeeper comes out and yells at you stupid kid why don't you watch where you're going he calls your dad your dad said stupid kid why don't you watch where you're going takes you to the hospital the doctor says stupid kid why don't you watch where you're going after that you watch where you're going now you break your leg and right away you think who can i sue this has to be somebody else's fault it can't be my fault i can't be held responsible you know i give her an award each year in honor of the woman who sued mcdonald's because she bought a cup of coffee held it between her legs it spilled and burnt her and she crashed and she said it's not my fault they should have written that the coffee is hot and that is why to this day when you go any place and buy a cup of coffee it says caution contents might be hot did it end there no of course not every year someone wins an award a guy was driving his studebaker and put it into cruise control which in his mind meant automatic pilot and he went in the back to get a drink and of course it veered off the road and crashed and he sued winnebago because nowhere does it say you have to continue to drive the car while it is in cruise control and he won a new winnebago and now it says caution must continue to drive the car because you can't expect me to figure it out and that's why on a power saw i saw a warning label do not cut wood on your lap now that's a good idea on a lot of levels i saw on a hairdryer do not use underwater i saw a superman costume it was written on the supreme costume does not allow wearer to fly my all-time favorite is planters peanuts the jar is shaped like a peanut the uh mascot is mr peanut who is a peanut with a top hat and a cane if you look under ingredients it says peanuts and on the side there's a warning label caution may contain peanuts but everything's too hard for us it's somebody else's fault during a particular dark period of my life i was a mash and yeshiva talk about trauma robbie sampson tell you about that we have a victim once victor miller once said i knew i'd be the doorman i didn't know i'd be the doormat anyway so i had this one boy in yeshiva who was much more mature than everybody else i know this because he used to tell me how much more mature he was than everybody else because everybody else came right after high school and he had spent a year in college and so he was much more mature so one time when he's telling me this i said you know maturity means responsibility darvening starts at 7 15. you don't get up to 11. sometimes you don't get out of bed until 12 why do you think you're so mature and without meeting a beat he said maybe you should be asking yourself why you can't motivate me to get out of bed because at the end of the day this is your failure rabbi isn't dead so there's no problem that's so big you can't blame it on somebody else why should i take responsibility i heard whatever zev left the rubber motion of matasya once he's talking he says today people are willing to be mice in that fish for torah moisten their fish if you buy them a house you buy them a car and you support them you know then i'm serious now fish he said what's the mysterious nephesh they'll get up every morning and go to kohlel i said this over a few times to coal light and they said not every morning but certainly many mornings he said i had people who who used to learn by candlelight because they couldn't afford the electricity i knew somebody who had pasta every night because they couldn't afford anything else and i'm talking about in cleveland ohio i'm not talking about new shell i am this is mostly nephesh what does that mean is sirius nephesh it was it was a great article once where somebody wrote this article in the in the paper about they went to yankee stadium or shea stadium but they made a mimika minion hundreds of people what a kid is hashem and someone wrote in he goes i thought that was like dying for your beliefs not daviding minha like in a ball game you know i mean you know such a kid is joshua you know but uh everything's hard for us everything is hard for us and that's why i'm i'm speaking as as a regular person i only speak about myself like if you've noticed that uh it is one of my favorite topics but anyway you know i wasn't really great at getting up in the morning we had a very late family yeah i was number five out of six all my brothers were older nobody went to sleep my parents were always working you know most second graders didn't watch johnny carson back then but i did i was up very late and so getting up in the morning was never one of my strong points you know and uh sometimes i'm up late because i'm just a late person and my wife says to me you know you should really go to sleep or you're going to whimper in the morning i said what do you mean because you don't hear yourself i set the alarm to wake up my wife like all husbands because i can't be expected to get out of bed i wake up my wife it's her job to wake me up and she says something they wake you up and you go it's not easy getting out of bed you know sometimes i'm so tired i don't know how i get out of bed i go to the bathroom i wash up i get dressed everything takes forever i get my feeling i open the door and i'm still in bed i dream the whole thing and my first thought was oh no no i got to do it again if you were in my age group did you ever hear your mother say i can't make pesach no i can't make money my parents made pay stuff and they both worked you know i mean they had six kids all of them were dysfunctional you know what i mean and then you know you make basics you make shoppers because you have to make shabbos you never heard them i can't i can't today it's hard for us everything is hard for us and i'm not saying that you know facetiously it's true we're generation we're standing up and taking responsibility is so difficult why can't somebody take care of this why can't somebody do this you know my father he had to leave school after ninth grade during the depression to help support his family you know and he used to have an expression and he'd say do you need a hand person say yeah look at the end of your arm one of my brothers when he says that over today he starts foaming at the mouth he's so he's okay how could he say that to me because that's what he did nobody helped him you know and the idea is we have to take responsibility and we look around and we say it's that one's fullness that one's fault and why isn't anyone doing anything what but you understand that's us we are them whether them that we keep talking about so let's talk about us that is the challenge of our generation to be big to grow up to set examples and it's not easy my kids used to get a big kick out of it you know because um i am you know at the time when i was teaching and things like that and i was considered you know a rabbi or some renown you know for people who didn't know me you know and like they get a call and they say he's a parent on the phone so one of my kids said use your rabbi voice hello yes this is rabbi olofsky yes yes and all my kids are giggling and i said one beckon hold it down there's a real person here yes it's hard it's hard for us to be responsible of us to take care of things and to feel that sense that we are in charge and we have to teach it to our children you know well somebody had asked a question about kids going off the derrick why do kids go off the direct i'll give you the answer i think it's very simple i started in the hebrew academy of nassau county in which was 20 years before i was born according to my revised biography i figure if superman can have three reboots so could i anyway and i when i went orthodoxy was dead in america everyone knew orthodoxy was dead and when i went they made it you feel like a hero because you were going to an orthodox school they couldn't throw you out there weren't enough of us you know so if you were really bad they'd send you to the office and right fendell would sigh says i'm so surprised i know you're family they're such nice people go back to class and i hope i never have to have this conversation with you again now every kid gets a message yeah sometimes explicitly and sometimes it's implied we don't need you here step out of ryan you're gone i got three kids waiting to take your place yeah and so everybody feels like nobody needs me people walk around scared when people tell me my kid is he's not off yet he's he's he's on the edge i said get him involved call the people at project inspire say i have a teenager i want him to learn with somebody i want to get him involved i want him to do something let him stuff packets let him feel like he's needed in a world that says we don't need you somebody once said to me you know what do we need all these bali chuba for we don't have enough places in our yeshiva's eyes they are there's no parking we need more from jews where are they going to park something to be said for that halaway that'll be our problem we'll have so many people that we won't know what to do with them we'll have to open up mostos and most of us practice inspire school network all around the country you know that there'll be so many people coming in demanding a jewish education we we have to we have this out but it's up to us well we say we say it's a problem yep we have to take responsibility what does that mean first you have to love yourself first you have to make yourself into somebody you have to be somebody that somebody wants to be like does anybody here really want to be a role model yeah i was a role model once for an onion roll but that's a different story it's a long and very complicated story i don't want to go into it but you know but the but the fact of the matter is you are from jew everybody's watching you and you know it whether you know it or not you should know it you know they see you and they and they right away they they know that you're from jew and they're thinking and i always make an effort when i see somebody i say hello to them i try to share a thought i i you know i i was in a supermarket with checking out you know and it was it was just a mob scene and then you could see the cashier was stressed out and i said wow you're doing such a great job could i get you a coffee would i be you know because i have a few minutes she's like no no that's okay i have a break coming up i said it's it's a bad house over here i don't know how you handle it you know that was it the whole thing took me two minutes she walked away feeling better than she had before i got there and that's all that's that maybe all i can do you know all i know how to do is talk but i do that pretty good so talk to people say a nice word a smile doesn't cost you anything yeah we have to build ourselves and we have to share it with others and i want to end with a great story and uh i i'm under the impression i may have said this at a project inspired convention eight years ago now that's not a problem for most people but people tell me that they watch my videos over and over again i know how they feel i do too so um it could be you've heard this story already but a good story is like a good song you know and uh when uh burke chad and my good friend revieble was singing last night and was like i heard these songs already boo yeah a good song is a work of art what a beautiful beautiful thing so um i share the story uh i was running ncswire and i took over a year to go learning eric's trail when i got married and i used to train uh advisors leaders and i used to tell them this story the a gooda convention 1929 so the time got up and said everybody has a fear of to do ki river hiking this was in europe in 1929. you have to reach out to people you have to work with people fine later in the convention he said um i want to speak again now it was packed it was packed almost as packed as the project inspired convention it was there almost you know so they told you you know uh you know you know you could you move off to the side here the time wants to speak again you know um sorry and he gets up and he says people said the government didn't mean me when he said everybody he didn't mean me i'm not smart enough i don't know enough i'm not that interesting i'm not this so he says i'll give you a muscle he says there was a nobleman who drove around investigating all the little villages in his tract of land in his area and uh he comes as one village they order from a drink of water he spits it out he says it's sandy you can't you can't drink this it's terrible because but that's how the water is here because i'm making an edict not to use any water until you boil it fine a few weeks later he sees in the distance of fire gets into his wagon he runs out and the village is burning down he says why don't you put out the fire he goes we're going to we're waiting for the water to boil he says when i said to boil the water i'm talking about for washing and for cooking but when there's a fire you take any water that there is and you throw it on i knew the story so after i got married i took over here i went there to try to learn and the learning went better than it ever got and i was on leave of absence from ncsy i was supposed to come back and i didn't want to go back i wanted to stay and learn so i went to maishuchait who was uh i was learning khabichain and he says look um i'm the guillermo i'll send her a scheinberg like scheimer's going to send me back to nc as well yeah i was there for a half an hour on the one hand claw yourself on the one hand toyota on the one hand glass finally he said if you don't have anybody take your place you have to go back so i went back to retreat he says now we go to rebel yoshif now rebel yoshi doesn't have time for this you know he has hours everybody lines up there's roshashiva sitting next to him as a woman with a chicken you know i mean and me and we're waiting online and we go into rebel yoshif it was less than five minutes he says is there anyone to take your place i said not now it could be at some point he says mitzvah ev shall be even fine you have to do it and marry chad's gabay was with him and he said would you say that he's mchughiev so elijah says marutza yeah it's the right thing to do and people kept asking me what do you want to do and i said i don't know i'm really torn because there's my obligation to client soap but i really want to stay and learn now that purim which came after this story they had just come out with kosher french wines when i grew up the only wine was extra heavy malaga came in a gallon jug you had to cut a slice of it and put it in the cup it was like when the gemara says i drank the arbicosis and i had a headache till schwarz it was extra heavy malaga there's no question about it so they came with these french wines you could actually drink it and i drank too much and i actually became tipsy now i didn't know it but the mashiach from a canaric saw me crying i didn't know it there were tears coming down my face and he calls me up he says dubbed what's the matter i said it's not fair because i can help other people i can't stay and learn for myself so he says to me abdavid i'll tell you a story and he tells me the story with the khabib skyam at the convention which i had told already a dozen times so i wasn't that drunk you understand i was able to follow the story and i was already ready with my punchline with my zinger you know and he says when there's a fire you take whatever water there is and you throw it on and i said rebbe but the water is still not fit to drink baby can eric escape with the mirror from europe he uh he was in shanghai he came to its shell he looks up at me and says rib david halaway we just put out the fire amir hashem we are the ones to put out the fire thank you very much thank you rabbi yolovski reaching out to people [Music] has a little bit of a sense of a byproduct and the byproduct is is what we do for our families and how it enhances our families our children and let me leave you with this and i'm going to introduce the following speaker topic for the next speech is finding family i would imagine i mean i haven't heard the speech but maybe that's something about family that's lost because it says finding family i would venture to say i just say what keeps me going as a human being one of the reasons why i do this i feel a sense of ahris responsibility but i probably will never meet my great great great grandchildren i don't think anybody in this room is going to meet their great great great grandchildren a levi that's the matias or dover but we live in a very turbulent world so how do you know that your children your great-grandchild your grandchildren great-grandchildren your great-great-grandchildren are going to go in the derek usher said hashem says to the jewish people when you take care of my children i'll take care of your children let's be a barack of