Q&A - Rambam's Health Advice, Simcha, and Computers (Rabbi Dovid Gottleib) (Jewish Philosophy)

light the pilot became incapacitated and the passenger was panicked but the radio was on and he's you know they said we'll talk you down talk you down all right so um then um and they did i actually gave him instructions how to fly the plane and he landed the plane safely i imagine that in the middle of the process there's some static and then someone breaks in on the line and says ha they're going to talk you down we're going to talk you into a crash and then the static goes back and forth and now you don't know which voice you're hearing you know is this the guy who's talking you down to land safely or is the guy talking you down to the crash right well what's your alternative the alternatives to die for sure number one so if you have sixty percent probability that it's a guy who's talking down to land and then at forty percent it's gonna do a crash you'll go with the sixty very carefully with a lot of attention and a lot of passion you'll do exactly what he says because it's the chance that you'll save yourself so it depends on what your alternatives are now you hinted at something else you're into the fact that that it costs a lot it's it's a very difficult matter of the great deal of christ's elite to have effort and i consider that in my book a person says if i'm going to put out that kind of effort i'm not going to do it for 60 40. i'll go for 80 20 i'm not going to do it for 60 40. i can't convict a person who takes that attitude in general in life of making a philosophical mistake i think another person david takes a different point of view says look the truth has value independent of probabilities and i always go after the truth i don't think there's anything wrong with that either i can't say that either one is a philosophical mistake but i think that in the case of living a jewish lifestyle the difficulty of the uh of the and the cost of the effort is greatly exaggerated first of all people don't take into account the cost of not doing it there's a raft of statistics of the kinds of disasters that people end up in where they don't do it including drug addiction and drunkenness and violence and divorce and victimization not to mention cancelization nowadays and all the rest of it and lack of community support uh so that uh if you talk about the cost of keeping kosher the cost of keeping shabbos versus a much higher probability of divorce it's not obvious there's a big gap there and that there's a tremendous investment on this side and a trivial investment on that side i don't think that's that's the case um so i would say that uh it's not in fact i i know people who have adopted jewish lifestyle without believing it just because they think it's so beneficial i know people in who've come to have doubts and said i would never leave it i have to be crazy to leave it i know one fellow i know personally but i have friends who left because of various problems that he had and after a year reported back to my friend he said i want you to know that only after i left jewish life with all the problems i had with all the objections i had only after i left the jewish life that i contemplated suicide so i think that the idea that it's so costly it's so difficult now if you're passionately committed to running guns to the palestinians then you'll have a problem there's no question about that but very few people are passionately committed to uh professions or activities which can't be integrated some way into the into the the context that we have i think it's exaggerated yeah um why have so many tragedies that fall on the jewish people throughout history that's a good question so many tragedies be following jewish people throughout history i think that first thing you need to do is measure it against the enormous joy and the enormous richness of jewish life throughout throughout history it isn't it isn't a one-sided story uh some one historian said if you go back to medieval europe to europe of 400 years ago the only places in medieval europe that you would regard today as civilized was the jewish ghetto the rest of the country and the fuel system and the brutal dictatorships and and under uh vicious um unlimited royal power and so on and so on they were living horrible horrible lives so if you talk about the tragedies of the jewish people that's something has been measured against the also the enormous benefit in terms of the quality of life um secondly you have standards for behavior based on the abilities of the person you're engaging and the greater his abilities are the higher the standards are so it's not unfair wrong criminal to have different standards for different people whatever the mob says and that being the case if we have much higher standards it's because we have much higher capabilities and we're therefore we're held to a higher standard positive said the lord says god is exacting with those who are great in spirituality morality to his breadth and other people not so one of the reasons that we have had the tragedies that we've had because we've been held to a higher standard if you take a look for example when the time of conquering the land of israel until the babylonian exile is something like 900 years you show me a 900-year republican anywhere in the world okay they had wars and ups and downs and so on but they had a 900-year continuous republic that's pretty good i think you know in historical terms um so i i think that it's it's a it's a um it's a mixed and a mixed bag of history from our point of view the charges that we suffered were because of our own dereliction and uh and they're meant as correctives and if you take into account reincarnation so then it gives you a much broader perspective it's not just the history of the not just the quality of that of behav of performance of the people who you see in front of you but previous generations whom they embody one person said to me oh you're so tricky you always have that answer to our objections you know as if to say you have a phony system because you always have an answer to our objections about frankly i'm proud of that if i can answer your objections and you can't answer by the end of my system i think that makes a good system i don't think you have to apologize about that so when you talk about the responsibility of the generation and take into account that other generations previous history can be embodied in this generation it's much more difficult to draw the conclusion that something unjust is taking place there's some considerations yeah if uh basis for faith um and judaism is more like a feeling like experiencing god as opposed to rationally proving it is that valid okay you're asking about experiencing god rather actually proving it now first of all i'm against the word proof you will not hear me use the word proof except to denigrate it a whole chapter in my book is dedicated to weaning people from the knee-jerk reliance on proof to reason reason and proof are quite different that's why i call my book reason to believe uh so i wouldn't i'm not contrasting anything with proof i think proof is off the page uh but you mean being rationally justified you're believing it rather than experience it well one problem is this how do you know you're experiencing god experience is a private event without maybe without any external verification so how would you know that you're experiencing god it's very interesting the princes came with their offerings to establish the the tabernacle and aaron was devastated that he wasn't included so the uh shamish will explains all the princes had an inspiration to bring gifts they all came simultaneously with exactly the same gifts down to the nickel that's not an accident obviously were having some kind of divine inspiration because otherwise they wouldn't have you know you have 12 princes who each of whom had exactly the same formula so that's an external verification that's coming from some kind of external source that's you know that has power and knowledge and all the rest uh but if you just had a private experience how would you know that you're experiencing god rather than something else i mean let's say somebody like through prayer and the way when he follows the laws of judaism he feels like this special connection so can that be a reason for him to be uh see i think it's very tricky because again how does he know that it's not the result of external circumstances that uh that produced it he was so enthused in lukhadi so was everybody else they were all clapping and singing and he was pulled along by the emotion i mean i think it's very difficult to use that kind of internal internal experience and you know when shmuel was first addressed by god heard his name being called he didn't know who was calling it he ran to elliot and said what what do you want this is not me second time after the second time at least listen if he calls again say i'm here i'm ready to do your will right now. but he even identified as god it was god calling him he didn't even identify as god so i think it's very difficult to to trust that kind of experience if in the experience you hear the closing dow jones and justice tomorrow will be such-and-such that's the hundredths it comes out to be exactly the there's hundreds okay okay if you hear the voice again make some investments that's too unlikely to happen by chance but it has to be some kind of verification of it otherwise the experience doesn't carry doesn't work it's uh nature and it's on sleep especially since the midrash tells us when jacob was fighting with the angel um which was representative of esau the evil inclination um the midrash says that part of the time the angel looked like a an armed robber and part of the time the angel looked like a torah scholar wearing the turban of a torah scholar sometimes the eight comes and says bacon cheeseburgers mcdonald's has a two-for-one sale this week you'll keep kosher next week but this week sometimes the yetzer hara comes a person says this is right you believe look what it says right here it says right here well it doesn't tell you is the next page it says due to the third thursday of the fourth month of each year one day a year then tell you that just shows you the page where it says do cue but he's coming with the she doesn't always wear a sign i'm terrible i'm criminal i'm i'm i'm defiled no sometimes it comes with a with a veneer of uh of trying to convince you to do something that's right so and then ich lujar is very careful distinguishing discrimination and consulting with other people talks about novi sheker there were talmidium of the naveem there were disciples of the prophets who were working to become genuine prophets and they had experiences which they themselves confused thinking that it was prophecy they themselves confused it then it's a type of false prophet because they should have taken counsel with the graduate prophets who were who were guiding their development and they would have told them what you heard and felt had these and these characteristics and the wrong characteristics of prophecy that's how they could have saved themselves but they didn't so it is to rely make make it the basis an internal subjective experience i think is very difficult no i don't deny it i have a whole uh there's a wonderful uh a collection called aspaklaria i know if you've heard of it 30 volumes each volume is about 600 pages put together by a swiss doctor in the 80s before computers were available to do it and it's an encyclopedia of jewish philosophical subjects from taken from 60 different forms from teres moshe down to destroy including hasidic works and severity works and encyclopedic works and both talmuds and the zohar and uh so i looked up the moon in there there's 52 pages which people translate in in english as simple faith [Music] i want to tell you i have it if you send me an email i i've summarized the sources in english all but one say that a moon shooter is trusting the tradition to deliver to you the actual facts of our history it's believing in the messiah it is not it inspires me and it makes me feel so confident i feel one with the universe and my blood pressure goes down and i sleep well and and i have good digestion it's not that at all it's not a subjective experience at all it's trusting it is negative against maimonides and other such works of jewish philosophy it would accept the kusuri like the guru did because it's based on on history but it's not just feeling because it makes you feel good that is not the moon of truth there's only one source who said yes and that was the album but all the other ones said that it's a belief in the messiah a mood of truth that means reason reason evidence intellectual but not philosophy not philosophy so i think that uh certainly not against the world of truth but i might tell you i have this on my blog i have at least eight different sources of michelin who say that if you add intellectual understanding to your amuna your moon is much much more much more uh acceptable it's much much more valid and these include may be surprising they include the mapit they include the maharsha they include the shlo not spanish mystics as the stupid academics will tell you because they belong to the spanish philosophical tradition and therefore they are influenced by the spanish for last verses and so on another mashable was a polish communist and this law was a german mystic and the bits wanted to be shown him uh they all say that adding intellectual understanding to your to your belief system improves your belief and proves your performance of what because broca wants you to do by the way the roman says the getting the bishop the torah that the responsibility is to know not to believe but to know that there is a first being who is responsible for the existence of everything and if you are scholarly enough to know that in the cipher of mitzvos it's usually translated to believe you have to know that the sabre business was written in arabic and when you read it in hebrew it's a translation and miller from before the war and translation that really should say to know there as well and if you still admit acacia and say no it really means to believe but the bishop was written afterwards so at the worst he changed his mind he first said to believe and then he said to no so the rama says to know knowing means having reason knowing he's not just believing no one means to have reason writes to believe and to know to know antibody so you have to so then he represents the capitalistic tradition so they're all on the same page as far as this could say yeah was it the rambam who wrote a lot about health general health and physical health what are some of those sources that he has and what are some of the health advice i i never studied the rambam's writings on health but he he some of them are our statements in the talmud some of them are not and he never claimed any of them has a religious responsibility that you have to believe them um conditions change for example one of the things that he writes there that i happen to see is that you shouldn't drink this unless you're thirsty and for an american living in israel that's extremely dangerous now he didn't have americans living in israel so he wasn't writing for them he said oh but the rambam it's got to be universal no no it doesn't he's a human being like anybody else i know because i experienced this myself several times because americans don't feel the thirst we're not used to the dryness of the air here you become dehydrated and you faint and pass out and it's dangerous right so he wasn't dealing with that kind of person that kind of reality that the remedies in the talmud all the governors said you can't trust the remedies in the talmud now because the time is wrong because we don't understand what tom was talking about our vocabulary isn't the same our conditions aren't the same so health matters are are something which have to be taken on the basis of human observation you could learn from the rama an item which he should investigate if he said he saw that it was helpful maybe it is helpful maybe nobody thought of it even checking it but if your investigation shows i'll tell you one more thing then i'm going to go into somebody else there's a certain condition of animals and the human beings called traefer crava means it has a physical condition where it can't live a year right the definition of trait for an animal is based on aloha via sinai a law going back to moses there are eighteen traifors in the mishnah it's a matter of absolute that these are the eighteen animal conditions the same word and the same concept applied to human beings maimonides says trevor for a human being is what your medical professionals tell you at your time an entirely different definition completely divorced it's not part of the tradition at all it has no mosaic authority at all whatever your medical professionals tell you it's a fatal condition that's what counts as a fatal condition for the law for the laws that are applied in your time so things are not simple they're complex people make the mistake of thinking we are committed to the truth of everything that's said in the talmud that's not true what do i do if someone in the talmud says one thing and the next day says i was wrong which one am i supposed to believe both of them if the talmud traces something back to prophecy then it's absolute and they treat it as absolute if don't chase it back to prophecy they don't treat it as absolute either indeed one of the amiroyum did an experiment to see whether the ants have a king tyson's on the spot says that he wanted to find out how solomon knew how did he know well i'm doing this experiment this is where it was good then he probably did an experiment that's how he found out i mean solomon also made an observation from the natural world right okay i could go on like this for a long time yeah i was just wondering we have such a concept that to you have to be basinfo and that clearly comes from the heart right it can't be like what other symphonies there so i was wondering for because we know like different directions you face when you darven the mission world talks about you can gain different things so i was wondering if there's anything for the heart i know faces south it's like and then north is like for well is there also a concept like to have more you guys want davening for joy darling for simpler the the rule of diabetes is you talking for everything you have to be able to breathe by the way people ask me how can i ask god to to to heal me when i'm not sick the truth is it's not true that you're not sick it's true that you haven't been sick you could be sick instantly number one and number two there the broker happens to be talking also about preserving health well faith in hebrew as rashi says can mean preventative medicine not just healing that's why i think in the art school they titled that health and healing which is very good not just healing people who are sick so of course if one of the requirements for full service of god appropriate service guys you do it with joy and like everything else that you want to have or accomplish in the world you pray to god for help for help but like my rebels said to me once don't don't you know don't don't dictate to god how he should run his world you know what you think you need for the sake of serving him better ask him for it don't ask him how to get it and so on and so on now is this something you could do for simcha um one thing you could do which i think is very powerful contagio emotions are contagious when you are around people experiencing an emotion you experience it much more vividly that's one of the reasons people bother to go to sporting events when you sit at home with the right electronic equipment you can get a much better view and analysis of the game than sitting in the stands but when a score of a gold scored and 50 000 people jumped to their feet screaming you won't feel that with a quadrophonic sound at home it won't be the same so being around people who express joy is definitely a way to develop your own sense of joy and then to read the stories of what people have gone through what people have done which people have have experienced uh and to see how they dealt with the with the things that they faced in life can have a tremendous tremendous effect there's a real masterpiece called holy woman about a certain rabbison the author lives in the old city of jerusalem and she she witnessed her parents being shot in the holocaust and someone asked her how could you how could you stand that how could you how could you live through that how could the grief the grief my parents died in the highest possible way that he would be could die they're as close to god as a person can get they were killed because they were faithful to god they killed his martyrs grief now she lived on a different level from most from from almost everybody else but she couldn't understand the question she couldn't understand the question you read about people like that and you think well what am i focused on what am i concentrating on what's important to me and you think well maybe if i shifted my values a little bit shifted my my emphasis a little bit maybe you know um one of my children was i believe large families and she went to get a pregnancy checkup and she turns out to be pregnant and the person asked esther how many children do you have she said six well can i lead you to give you a friend if you've got abortion team link no you can't give me a face without an abortion i mean are you okay i mean you are you all right yeah i'm very happy very happy she couldn't imagine it and having told you that i'll tell my very short story one of my daughters had a cmv which is a condition which can be dangerous for the baby and the baby was born with cmv she went to a six month checkup and they saw this in the records of the child the doctor said you had cmv why didn't you have an abortion she said we figured i'll give birth to him and see how he is and if he's no good i'll kill him then this happened in this country so the doctor said kill a child and she said really and what were you proposing because he's inside the womb it's not killing he's not a child so if you when you hear things like that and you wonder where people are coming from and you see that's how people can maintain a sense of joy when things are difficult if you read about people who do that it's also it's also an aid to but this question is a question that you should ask other people as well it's not one one that has a single answer it's really a psychological question ask other people what to do to develop joy tattooed a book called living inspired which is probably close to that and he writes about his own life yeah my question is about going into computers as a career so i know that everything in the physical world can be used positively or negatively and there isn't it's not intrinsically it doesn't have an intrinsic moral state um however some things do have far more far more potential let's say for danger the danger can outweigh the positivity sometimes so is would you say that a person who goes into computers is risking that his handiwork is adding um negativity to the world more than it's enhancing positivity okay you're asking your question very carefully and i appreciate your your your care with the with the words that you use you're asking about going to computers as a profession and uh many things can be used both positive negatively and you asked whether uh what the person is doing is risking that what he's working on should be used more negatively than positively even if i said yes that wouldn't necessarily mean you shouldn't go into it there may be many things like that how about engines engines are used in generators that keep hospitals working when there's a power outage and engine is used in fighter planes i mean which is more but if they're necessary for something useful that may be enough reason to do it even if i'm balanced to use for more evil than good but you can't live without the good so uh i i don't think that's going to make me mean the difference number one and number two to a certain extent hopefully you should be able to choose the context in which you work do computer work where the context could be a positive context so far as i know all large-scale jewish organizations use computers so if you're in charge of maintenance and an upgrade of computers of yeshivas for example i think that would be definitely positive there the probability that your work particularly is going to be you if something negative more than positive would be very minimal let's say you're manufacturing you know the cpus where you don't know who's going to be purchasing it and using it if you're going to be manufacturing generally i mean i first of all i don't think that has to be the practical question computer work has a gigantic amount of a variety of why must you go into the manufacturing to how to make a living a computer indeed manufacturing cpus isn't isn't isn't computer work it's manufacturing work right now might as well use your sweaters it has nothing to do with with with with the fact that it's computers but uh well but then you can choose your businesses right there are people with with from businesses that need help and they compete to contribute to to to charities and so on or medical medical things which depending upon where it is there are hospitals that run out and the yolanda hospital must have a thousand computers that they use for their medical and that's when according to the law the hospital is going according to it so if you would work on their staff guaranteeing their their computer facilities there's no question that what you'd be doing would be very valuable excuse me one second can't talk about medical okay okay gotcha very good yeah um jealous god and uh jealousy is one of the characteristics that takes us out of this world it's not a good characteristic for human beings so uh it's a two-part question uh what explains this jealousy that hashem is a jealous god and for human beings what are some things that we can do to help us overcome okay you are a victim of the english translation and i think you should be aware of this that you should always first thing check the translation even if it's in a book that's otherwise considered to be a legitimate book mistakes can be made the dictionaries are full of mistakes anybody here knows from hebrew yeah a little bit what's a nacho a river right so the servants of of isaac dug and the knuckle and found water oh they did did they they were digging in the water they found water that sounds a little odd no because a wadi thank you awadi is a river bed which is dry ninety percent of the year and then when is the time sometimes sluices of water come and then it's dry it's not a river uh mabu what is a marble flood right so the torah says the marble was water on the face of the earth and the reader says yeah that's the bible saying those funny silly things you know every six-year-old knows what a flood is knows is water the word bible doesn't mean flood the word bible has no connection to water whatsoever if anything it's something that enterprises it vastly and rapidly increases entropy that's disorder and destruction right and you could have a model of fire this marble this destructive force happened to be water on the face of the earth and that's why at the end god makes two promises one that there won't be another water on the face and there won't be another mammal of any other kind also so you have to be very careful about about translation kinah in in hebrew pirkhas two weeks of departure right is praised for the fact that he was mekane kinase hashem he he applied kenneth to the thing that uh to according to what happened to the insults of course so it's not jealousy it is really much closer to zealousness where you are attached to something committed to something and willing to follow it and and achieve it at great cost with great focus and determination and with great emotional passion um now as the roman points out that verb is only used with respect to the college broker with respect to idol worship and so are uh the verbs of anger and hatred only used to speak to other worship because that is a catastrophe it's a spiritual catastrophe so those are the only things where god is described as responding to them in that way now as far as using it positively everything well some discussion about everything but the vast vast majority of human traits can be used possibly it can be used negatively means brazen faced just you know as i say brutally self-determined right goes is going to get him going to to divine punishment right and then it says you should be as brazen as a leopard to do the will of your father in heaven so it's good to be also bad to be biased that's not how you use it right so the same thing is true uh like elijah said kano kinesi na chaven's vocals that wasn't the admission of guilt the contrary he used kenner in his passion to represent god in the world and that's a positive thing to do so in the case of each of these character traits you have to ask how it should be used in a positive way i just hesitated before because rambam talks about a balanced middle between two extremes with two exceptions one is anger and the others is pride guyver and uh there he says you should uh eliminate them to the uh to whatever extent possible even down to zero and he makes it very clear the idea of a balance be with a middle between two extremes is found in aristotle notice i didn't say he took it from aristotle it is found in aristotle with no exceptions hermione says anger is an exception that's clear from the oblique writings and guyva pride is clear from sukim and that means that whenever a philosophical idea contradicts either the written torah or the oral torah it's wrong it could be aristotle plato whoever you like if it contradicts anything in torah it's wrong he never hesitates with that the other ones it agrees fairly well with what torah would say and therefore he uses it so but but kin is one of those things which you should you have to you have to look look at the positive expressions of it with pencils look what the commentators saying those verses there you'll get some some uh idea of how to do it i haven't done that so but that'll be a good good place to start yes in the case this is about the allah so in the case you have a certain food that is already cooked there is a rule that there is no cooking cooked food right like that's the law let's say what happens if certain types of foods let's say either get crunchy if you cook them again or get toasted if you cook them again like would be already considered i don't know i don't know i i should say i'm not trained in halacha if you ask me question and by accident i happen to know the answer i'll be happy to answer but but you're asking a good question if it's edible but it's improved i think it's called bits to make the tovalo if it will still be improved then i think you are guilty of cooking and if it's if it doesn't improve i don't think i don't think that you're guilty of cooking something out there right i don't know what the durables would be after i saw the idea of the ice cooking deraisa let me just say one word because people can be misled by this the definition of the forbidden activities on shabbos are dif is in terms of what they accomplish not what the process is so if you water a plant on shabbos in the soil you're guilty of planting planting well putting a seed in the ground is a way of causing plant growth that's what you're doing right hiding it from robbers you're putting it there to grow when you water it you're watering it to grow so nutella or zorrea is defined by the purpose the purpose of cooking is applying heat to something to improve it so if you heat up a piece of metal red hot and then you can do something with it that's also called cooking what i mean cooking rabbi i'm not going to eat it because cooking is the application of heat to something to improve its condition that's why some say that in when you had light bulbs with a filament that actually heated up to the point where it glows they'd be guilty of cooking we don't have that we have now the led and the rest is not the same thing but at those times those times it was so here if the added additional heat is going to improve the taste of it could very well be that you are you are guilty of cookie yeah in your book you write about indirect proof or a reason let's say um to the parts of judaism that cannot be um like evidence for let's say like prophecy and the prophecy of moses i didn't understand it because you were saying like somehow how like if there's this unified like idea that there's this god who has a connection with the jewish people it's further expression of that idea okay this is this the summary conclusion of a 300 page book so uh i'll just try to indicate the idea in in in in simple terms um let's say you you believe in evidence you believe in gathering evidence um now let's suppose you're very hard-headed there is a famous philosopher of science who made a very radical idea nancy cartwright she said that all the laws of nature that we know we know from testing them in laboratories so why don't you call them laboratory laws that's where you test it in you think of yourself as an empiricist you're trying to observe things and understand how the world works well you understand how laboratories work because that's what you tested you tested laboratories but you didn't test it outside of the laboratories so why do you think it works outside the laboratory you're not she calls it a a a laboratory a normal logical machine neurological machine means a machine that makes laws and in the laboratory that's what happens who says it happens outside she's a very strict empiricist by the way she has a phd in physics also so she's can talk about science from the inside um so um back to where we started from you asked about oh so now that's why spumbly says newton has a law of gravity where well for the whole universe past present and future the whole of it a law of gravity really sir isaac how much did you test what percentage of the whole universe did you test well 0.000 and i'll keep going till tomorrow morning one percent and you drew a conclusion about the universe as a whole how did you do that isaac wasn't that really sort of you know reckless to take a very tiny sample and draw a conclusion about the whole so then if you think about surveys there are 360 million americans approximately let's say 250 million of them are are adults how many people do you use in the test in a survey 10 000 out of 200 million isn't that oh but there's a science of of surveying so as richard feynman one of the nobel prizes winners in physics also jewish said if your testing is unbiased you take tests from different directions and different times because when you look at a star you're seeing what it was years ago millions of years supposedly millions of years ago and so on and so on and you and you don't bias your testing in any way and you get the same results then you have two or two choices maybe it's all scattered and i just happen to get the same results 50 times in a row which seems to be very unlikely or it's really a uniform so that's that's how you do it so when you have a body of information the information is uniform and you test a small amount but the test isn't gerrymandered into one corner where it might be different in other corners then you draw the conclusion that they that the information is is genuine across the board that's a general way of reasoning about the world so i divided the torah's descriptions of the world into two categories those that can be directly observed and those that cannot be directly observed and i say those that can be directly observed have been verified so they are verifying the basis of what we actually experienced well the observations that we made and then he asked about the rest i say well it's a reasonably unified body of information i didn't have this in the earlier editions but one of the students objected to it and i realized i need to put it in it's a reasonably unified body of information so that if you have various pieces that are directly verified then they lend credence to the whole because it's a reasonably unified body of information now what does unified mean well for example if you take a newspaper from beginning to end the unification of the newspaper is about zero you have sports pages and economics pages and op-ed pages and uh you know fashion pages and so on and so on there's no uniformity in the information whatsoever if you take gravity on the other hand it's the same force everywhere in the universe everywhere that's i would put on a scale of zero to 100 that's 100 unified on a scale of zero to 100 like that i would say that the jewish picture of the world is has a unification of about 80. i'm just making up the numbers but it's it's very very unified it's a single story there's a creator he created the world for a particular purpose he guides all of the events in the world towards that purpose he's intelligent he's unlimited power and he's involved in the everyday lives of everyone that that lives on the on the planet that's the stories not a you know a story with and in this century he went on vacation and things were given over to some subordinates and it's a it's a unified picture now a substantial amount of that unified picture is verified and i think that runs on screens to the whole because it's a unified body of information that's how i drew the final conclusion from of my book yes we say this twice it's the only baraka that we say twice and is it the simple meaning that we're trying to aim towards because a pure person really like someone who's ready to move on from this life into again edin or whatever they've already been so purified that they're not knocked by the yetzer heart so there's yet so hard is it not contradiction victory or what is the uh what is the meaning of this this verse in the vida and the last part isn't is not clear to me first of all you the return fee uh the words of my mouth that's not thoughts at all that's what i say the words that come out of my mouth thank you only be the meditation of my heart should be pleasing me for you okay now words are something that i do it's an action that i do and i want because we're all going to be pleased with that action i really want it with respect to everything else i'm saying this after this ministry when i spent my whole time talking i spent five minutes or eight minutes or ten minutes talking i want i say it because i hope you're pleased with my talking now hopefully my mind was on board when i was talking i wasn't you know just reciting it i wrote so i had thoughts going through my mind and i hope that he's pleased with those thoughts as well it's a very natural thing to say at the end of a long speech we're supposed to be talking to him this has nothing to do with the world to come i'm talking about what i do three times a day plus the times when i speak to other people i speak learning doing the other meditations that i have i'm asking that my efforts in this in these dimensions be pleasing to him so i don't see what this has to do with with the world to come because it's hard sometimes for it to be favorable to hashem it's completely favorable you know so somebody who you know on such a high level maybe but as long as they're aiming towards the goal i think well i think that of course morocco's standards for accepting what you have with favor takes into account your limitations he like i said before guys exacting with those who are close to him to a hair's breadth and for the rest of us we get a while a mile's breath you know he has sliding standards for people based on what could be expected of them i when i say it should be pleasing i don't even 100 perfectly pleasing oh that's your question no of course not i mean pleasing in respect to what i'm capable of doing of course of course that has to be taken into account always yeah um what are some practical ways uh in which hashem could potentially bring us in from the four corners of the world when moshiach comes and what do you think the emotions of people will be i i don't know why you're interested in practical ways why must be practical they say that they say that the miracles that will happen when the mashiach comes and the in gathering the exiles will make the miracles of the exodus look insignificant so i don't think we have to worry about you know will there be enough space on 747s to take us all over i don't think that's uh that's that's the issue that's the issue and the emotions i'll tell you um the best description i have of this is a midrash you have to picture joseph's brothers they come down to egypt because of the famine they confront joseph whom they don't recognize because he's pretending to be an egyptian and he treats them brutally and and puts them in jail and and and and with with the terrible cruelty and then he sends them out and they come back again and then and then they're plant they play he plants as a as if it was a theft on them and he brings them back and they're going to go to jail again and you know just awful absolutely awful and then judah gives his great speech you know don't take benjamin as a slave take me as a slave and joseph can't hold it back anymore and he yells at all the egyptians should leave him alone and then he says to his brothers i'm joseph. put yourself in the position what would you do what would you do i think you'd be frozen in shock what could you do this is joseph this egyptian who's persecuting us this is joseph how could that be and the measure says the astonishment when the mashiach will make this look like child's play when we say insurance we were we were as if dreamers one of them before says not that then i'll look back uh no the the person of shadows will be like dreamers when the mashiach comes and the whole world turns upside down it'll be like we're in a dream it'll be something we can't accept this reality so what the feelings will be i i think shock and astonishment will be even if you believe it you know there are some things which you're holding the lottery ticket and they're calling out the numbers on the radio you know what really 10 million dollars i can't believe it now what do you mean we say you can't believe it you think it's phony you were going to throw the thicket away i don't think so but emotionally you can't accept it you can't you can't deal with it you can't adjust to it so i think that will be a large a large part of it i also make this this comparison moses comes to the jews in egypt you know 80 died in three days of darkness moses comes and says the egyptian empire is nothing pharaoh is nothing the egyptian overseers are nothing nothing they're killing us right and left they're punishing us right and left for 90 years we've been slaves three generations have been born here into slavery and then many died under slavery they're nothing that's right they're nothing they're zero that's a hard message to be upset to accept it seems like 80 of the jewish people didn't get it even after eight plagues they didn't get it it's hard it's hard to reorient your whole your whole your whole picture of how the world works i would give you a comparison you know they said the beginning of the second temple they prayed that the spirit of idolatry should be taken from them because we failed and terribly and terribly if it's five percent it's terrible i'm not don't don't misread my words the five percent where why the worship was a terrible failure and we felt that we couldn't handle it so we asked that the the um spirit of the idol should be taken away and there's no record of iron worship in the second to the second temple which is very interesting because the whole world was still worshiping idols so one of the amaroyam was talking about menasha who was a great king who instituted idol worship throughout the land of israel later he dichuva but in the meantime he did that and he and this um amura was talking about him in an overly familiar fashion as if he was an equal so menashe came to him in a dream he says how i'm your friend hey i'm equally let's talk about this what about this in this mother said i don't know and i should say well here's this so the mother said if you knew so much torah how could you possibly how could you possibly worship idols and manager said to him if you had been here you'd have picked up your garments to run to the idol says marshall we didn't run but you would have run meaning you have no clue no clue what it meant to be under the under the influence of that terrible terrible pressure okay so now that's out of worship nobody today would take that seriously so here's an example how about nationalism the nation the importance of the nation independence of the nation people die for that who was the great 19th century prophet who predicted the end of nations karl marx class consciousness will replace it national divisions will become irrelevant because you really identify with your economic class it didn't turn out that way did it right when the soviet union broke up it didn't become one with the working class all over the world broke up to a whole bunch of little tiny nations czechoslovakia became checked at slovak you know nationalism is just as strong and powerful if not more so than it was in in marxist time right tell somebody today imagine no nations no nations well then who are you what are you how do you organize things so that he won't be able to relate to it nationalism today i think occupies a position similar to what worship did at that time it's just it's it's everywhere it's everywhere everything's organized around it and your consciousness your commitments your status as a citizen of a nation is a very big part of your identity so you can't you can't just just uh turn these things off that's what i the analogy that we give yeah um have you read the book of torah for that science but meisner i know you're trying to look at the introduction see whether i read it i went through the material with him for three years before he before he published it and he gives me gratitude for that we've been lucifer for more than 40 years in uh um in one of the chapters he writes that he quotes i think the taurus ola which i think he says from the remark that all the um that all aristotle's knowledge all of the good things were that when the i forgot which nation um took over jerusalem at one point they took slo-mo amalek's library and aristotle went in and then aristotle took a lot of wisdom from there and then he and then he added in some of his own bits and he published it and that the good parts of their style the parts that we would consider intelligent and wise and so forth uh come from schlongwell and the parts that we um would not consider intelligent our own bits so are you aware of this i assume you're weird i'm not aware of it the book is 900 pages long and i don't remember all 900 pages but i will tell you this i my own research i've i read about a historical incident which says that aristotle had a long conversation with a jew and the instant incident records that afterwards aristotle told his students i learned more from him than he learned from me okay now i saw two historians on this incident one jewish and one non-jewish can you guess the jewish historian said for sure it never happened it's only a fantasy it was only made up and the non-jewish story said look we have the letter from the student students reports that arizona said so no reason not to think that it's true talk about self-hating jews you can't accept it so that is an incident that's tested too by a student of aristotle so that there's some connection there we have something about it meaning shimon azadek uh which is which is something so i i don't i don't know actually alexander met but alexander was aristotle's student so it's it's very hard uh for me to tell i i'm not a historian i can't evaluate the source i have the book at home of course i can look it up in the index but um [Music] and then the question is who is the remote quoting right so i don't know that leads to another question which is if the ramallah writes something we 500 years later do we consider it canon in terms of uh taro meaning or do we have to say what's his source and then what's his source and then i guess at what point do we it's never canon it's never something that's that's written in stone you know i i had this out with someone who might otherwise respect and he said well of course you could never criticize anyone of you in a previous generation sit down with the shahinah okay i'm sorry of yours one of the greatest scholars of his time author of the most voluminous commentary on the tour the most loomis commentary on the on the on the casa on the um the rambam and then he took a digest of his commentary the tour made it to the north and look what the commentators say there's one place where if i'm not don't misremember it's the shock it says says this i'll show you every source every source and i'll show you that he has no source for what he's saying and he's wrong any passing that he's wrong when does it become canon never becomes we say that gomorrah we spoke about that before that's because of two things i didn't speak about it here i spoke on the previous thing the reason why you can't disagree with the hillary and the governor is because as the rambam says in the beginning of the of the mishra torah and the paterashima paterashimashinayas because the hills of the world has two unique factors one is that gomorrah was circulated to all known jewish communities and they all accepted it and number two he says that the editors of the gamora ravine ravaged were sof balayhatoka latik means to copy something accurately not just word for word but concept for concept proposition for proposition meaning for meaning and there were people who who had that as a so to speak a qualification and they were the end after that you didn't have it anymore so since the gemara has these two features it alone stands with this characteristic that it can't be challenged but the mission was challenged and rejected by the mri rejected by the rumba in many cases there's no such thing as becoming canon and and beyond beyond critique and democracy the only things we would consider like you said are the gemara well and when the governor says only when the gomorrah pass kenza and says this is allah you can't challenge that but everything else is up for grips well are we are we challenging tomorrow or are we trying to find an interpretation of it again meaning we would never say that was wrong again the only thing that can't be challenged is hilkasa because that's what they were pascant anything else for example the governor says that uh it gives a question and an answer right i can possibly like the question against the answer i can say the the question's better than the answer and therefore i don't trust the answer people do that possible can do that they did that i'm not doing what you can they did it actually those words appeared in the gemura about four times they currently will be showing him 15 times they gave an answer but the answer is too weak and we don't accept the answer we go with the question the only thing that's binding is hokusai because that's what was accepted and the about the mishnah had the american against the mishnah the university and his and his president decided this is the law and say no it isn't no we disagree we're not asking like that mission what about can we say is untouchable well tanaka is is is a prophecy or it's of course that's untouchable as a vegetable but the vast vast majority at all okay i have to go teach another place