15 Steps to Greatness (Ep. 160)

hi this is debbie dolowski and welcome back once again to the rabbi garlowski show whether you're watching with our friends over at tour anytime wherever you watch or listen to your podcast as always it's so exciting to have you along for this journey and evidently i mentioned at some point how much the feedback means to me i got some very very special uh emails from people who talk about how the show just you know the physic that it gives them and what they gain from it and uh what can i tell you i'm just you know a nice little guy sitting here in front of a camera and uh of of extremely ordinary intelligence uh background uh everything else and the fact that i have this opportunity to reach so many people in a way that touches their lives well it is such a tremendous hus and and i hope that when i'm gone people speak about this at my schloshim as i have made clear to my children many times who do not listen to me but i'm telling them i don't want any hesped put me in the ground as quickly as possible i've gotten spayed in my whole life it's not a problem it's either hot or it's cold or it's raining no one wants to hear just put me in the ground thank you for coming my kid said somebody has to speak i said i will i'll record something yeah but uh but otherwise just move it along you know because uh you know make a slow shim put out coffee and cake let everybody talk then they could talk about the highlights we'll put out michael put out a highlight reel of uh of of the best it'll be very long obviously because i don't know how you pick out the best of even one episode so every everything is a is a jewel it's a gem a diamond [Laughter] anyway but enough about me let's talk about you what do you think of me [Laughter] all right uh sponsorship this week is sponsored by the hilceman audemars online courses i'm going to read you what he said here because i find this absolutely fascinating and you'll forgive me if i expand a bit yeah based on a going rebuttal berkowitz's schlitz cole lenas hatsedeck sheets which is a whole program that he developed to teach me the program enables growth-oriented torah jews to really understand the principles of hillcrest in depth not uh you know be nice to everybody yeah without these halakhas it's impossible to know them and behave like a torah yid this transformation will allow them to have the shalom bias at home which by the way is being admired great relationships with kids friends and at work the program includes a weekly zoom sheer and direct phone and email access to rabbi unison geffen atomic movak of berkowitz separate programs for men and women discover what hundreds of nato from six continents have found in our programs a little disappointed to hear that no one's signed up from antarctica but you know who knows global warmings and we'll have a little community there as well um men's programs start february 9th it's coming up and women's program starts february 15th so sign up now check out the links in the show notes because it's a very very long email and i'm gonna mess it up so you can go and check it out for yourself and uh go and join and sign up this is such an important thing now he sent me the outline i have to tell you just the outline itself i find so incredibly intriguing there's different sections under relationships love your neighbors yourself cisner don't hate nakama revenge onus dwarim saying hurtful things knowing how to tell somebody when they're doing something wrong all of that's in the relationships shakker fel falsehood midvashaka stealing people's thoughts like pretending like sending people an invitation when you know that they can't come kier even lift naive what's the status of a teenage shinishbo which is an irreligious jew who just doesn't know anything lift their ever you know doing things that will cause people to do a sin messiah which is other variations of that keyboard honoring honoring your parents um your friends um everything that goes with you know when someone passes away all these kind of different things when are you allowed to stop learning torah to do it although chavez aveda life related sugars when you save somebody's life and the laws that are associated with it trust me you don't want to find yourself in that situation and not know what to do and uh yoshiva tov doing things that are honest uh the laws of a machia which you'd be surprised when it comes up people even realize it comes up the fence on your roof it's on your mirror press it lo mode yeah not to desire what other people have it's such an extensive list and it's things that people need there are two luchas one has been another one welcome and what is my name and uh what does rashi tell us he says the door mabo was completely destroyed the door plugger was not why because the door flugger rebelled against god and that god didn't have to destroy them but the dwarf marble where they attacked each other there was there was no hope there's no hope and uh so these laws are so important if you have an opportunity to be able to participate this is something that you should really take advantage of okay um we started last week talking about the mishkan as i mentioned these weeks we're dealing with the mishkan i want to uh show you an interesting contradiction apparently in rashi right at the beginning of parish's truman yeah the first sukim tell you go and collect me the materials that i need in order to be able to build the mishkan and the list gold silver copper um sheetam wood have they show them avne milluem different types of gems uh it lists trellis argemon entola ashani which is different types of dyed wool easem right which is uh goat hair um it lists takash skins um it lists shamu or which is the oil that you need it lists the sum in the spices that you need it lists dyed rams hides and it lists um linen now if you've been counting along at home that's 15 things and rashi says these are the 13 things that you need to build the michigan okay but i just counted for you there are 15 things where's the missing two in rashi so the mafashi raj should give a number of different answers they say heyless argument and are all whoa they're just dyed different colors so all of that is under the category of wool you don't have to list them separately okay some people say the avnemi luam and the avne shoham don't count those jewels because in the end only the nasi embroidem and not everybody else so they're not counted other people say the basamim and the shemin the oil and the spices since that's used to make the sheminah mishka the oil that's used to anoint the mishkan so we're not counting those all right but at the end of the day you gotta admit rashi didn't have to say anything the fact that he had to say these 13 things so we had to sit down and figure out why so what's going on over there what's this uh duality with 15 and 13 and i would like to suggest that the uh idea of 15 and 13 are ideas that encapsulate the concept of the mishkan and the base of mikdash all together let us see what we mean by this there are 15 steps leading up to the base of mikdash 15 steps and on those 15 steps they would sing the 15 shia hamolos 15 being the number that leads up to the basa mikdash now this is obviously not a coincidence that there are 15 steps we're coming up to pesach dayenu that fun song that's almost impossible to sing because there are too many words yeah some of them are easy you have to pick the right ones yeah great uh you know he speaks arcade about mid-ball boy [Laughter] some of them are a little harder but okay yeah um the uh if you if you haven't noticed this there are 15 and what's the last one notice the 15th dayenu is the base of mikdash uh point out as well there are 15 steps in the seduc 15. these 15 are building up notice that the 15th step is the basa miktus interesting right now we've mentioned this in the past especially when we were giving our series on love dating in marriage we talked about this idea everybody knows that shiva brochures vart each is a yud and isha has a hay together they spell hashem's name when a couple comes together the shrine is showing with them god's presence rests upon them fine so that's the that's the concept obviously of the youtube and each and esha the yud and the hay together equal 15. letter that hovers above the line doesn't touch the line and hey is isha is this world uh bahibar um this world was created with the letter hey so with shamayim and our it's joined together that's what happens when a man and a woman get married shamayim heaven and earth are joining together where does that happen where yaakov says this is the shah shamayim this is where shamayim come together as the uh turin points out yaakov says spelled backwards is aron where the aron goes that's where the nora comes down so it's very interesting because it means that the base of mikdash represents this intimate relationship with hakadosh baruch now the gemara in yuma takes this to a conclusion decorated the base of mikdash with drawings of couples embracing my advice is don't try this in your shul even if they're easygoing it doesn't go over the same way as it did but who wrote shir hashirim was trying to explain that there's different ways of reaching a kurdish borough of ahab [Applause] [Music] you can approach hashem like a slave or like a child so a slave has nothing a slave approaches the master with a sense of fear and or and there are people who serve hakuna barucho that way i years ago i was in england i haven't really spoken in shul uh in england on a shabbos many years but i used to go it was a period of time um 30 years ago i would go for shabbos uh speak in england and if you find like a real old english school where it echoes when you walk boom boom boom yeah the people wear top hats you know the they make the the feel of the queen yeah like the real the real old-fashioned you know english english jewelry so somebody will always say you are in the house of the lord lord lord lord please maintain the decorum quorum and it would echo through there was that sense of like okay that's one level and then it's kibanam tati my king yeah you can go and uh go and watch the number one uh podcast that we made with the original waterberry boys the second one is catching up but um so uh that one they they'll sing tati my king yeah it's it's uh it's barco he's my tati a vino mao kenu tati my king yeah so like a a child turning to his father yeah that's that's a higher level but not the ideal the idea of malik wrote in shia hashirim two lovers in an embrace has made the world safe for english translations when i was growing up they had the actual translation and it made people a little uncomfortable to hear such overt references to men and women descriptions etc but that's because the ultimate relationship is ish and isha and that is where we would go to the basa mikdash yud and hey that name of god represents shamayim varets man and woman coming together that's what was in the basement mikdash the kliyoka on parshas noah points out that the number that pops up the most is 15. the water was 15 ammos above the highest mountains every floor of the uh tava of the ark was a 150 000 cubic uh ammos right because it was thirty by fifty by five three hundred so uh that means that each floor itself was only ten so it's 50 times 300 times 10. so each floor was a 150 000 cubic amuse the water stayed on the earth 150 days which is just 15 with a zero and he said the reason is because as rashi points out that they were not true to ish and isha they created mom zarim they created weird creatures they did all kinds of strange things there are those who say and i'm not getting into the topic but there are those who say sometimes you dig up these fossils and it looks like weird crosses between two animals yeah because even the animals were cross-breeding everything was cross-breeding there were there was a breakdown of that relationship between ish and isha interesting that the ghazal say that either could have been the door that was destroyed by the marble or they could have received the torah and of course the vasa mikdash is harsinai it's the torah the aroma with the torah goes in that's the source of it so the the base of mikdash could have come from that if they would have corrected that you'd and hey the name of hashem that 15 with shamayim virus comes together so of course there are 15 steps going up to the base of mikdash and of course there are 15 items that go into the building of the mishkan and it has to be so watch the number 13 picture if you will whereas rod sterling would say submitted for your approval yeah how will in the three tribes on the north three tribes on the south three tribes on the east three tribes on the west the base of mikdash the mishkan in the middle with shaved leaving because the mishkan is that number 13. think for a moment if you will of a cube six sides and that fills it in the middle is the seventh pulls it all together like a mug and duvet right there are six points and the little hexagon in the middle pulls it all together but there's another way to look at a cube and that is to count the edges four on the top four on the bottom and four on the sides that's twelve because where the six sides of existence interact that's what the schwatten represent those are the edges says the mahara so then the number in the middle is not 7 it's 13. it's the point that brings everything back together that is the power of the mishkan the power of the base of mikdash is to unite us all as one and pull us in as one thing that's 13. okay so i mentioned there are 15 steps in the seder now how does it end [Music] and then we move up to two into three into four and the five and we keep going back down to one jose right we keep no matter how far we go we go back down to one and we keep going till we get to 13 and at 13 we stop um or sameach had a publication called the ornet i don't know if they still have it but it was an online sort of weekly torah magazine and one year they did a little thing like why did we stop at 13 who knows 14. and people wrote in 14s who knows 15 who knows 16. who knows 17 and that there are numbers in in judaism for just about everything it's nothing nothing where you can't assign a number to it yeah why do we stop at 13 so 13 is interesting 13 in gemadria adds up to two words one is echad which is one right dalit that's 13. so we go up to 13 which is echad and then go back down to echo and that brings the echad the other one is ahava love love is also 13. where the two come together in love they become echad are really the same idea of becoming one by the way with purim coming up the gemara says when you drink wine sod when you drink wine secrets come out why because yayan and sod have the same value in gematria it's not like a little cute thing mr shapiro explained one's concept of gematria one of the concepts is that we know from the periodic table that elements have an atomic weight and so when you look at something you could describe its aspects and physical characteristics or you could describe its atomic number and you can figure it out from both different ways of calculating so it's something to uh it's something to consider going through something serious 13 is ahava 13 is so i wish to suggest that although there are 15 things that go into the making of the mishkan because there has to be 15 things there has to be 15 elements in order to get the yud and the hay to create that relationship but the relationship itself is 13. so when you look at the building of the base of mikdash it's 15 elements and 15 steps to get there but it's in the middle of the twelve swatim it's the thirteen it's the echad it's the ahava it's the purpose of everything that we have so when we talk about building the mishkan and we talk about the materials that go into it none of this is by chance everything that we're working with has deep significance and we have to look at every item and i mentioned this last time that uh the hierarchy begins with gold silver and copper my uh my brother-in-law of david lichman was a synagogue rabbi in calgary canada and they hosted the winter olympics when he was there and so everyone came to shul was expecting he's gonna of course mention it so he says well it's partially truma what do we start off with coal gold silver and copper i guess you could also say copper as a form of bronze yeah so there's your three metals right there [Laughter] but obviously if you look at the torah how it describes the calym that go into the base of mikdash the more holy the more gold and so the beams are covered with gold and sitting in silver sockets when you move out so they're wrapped in silver and they sit in copper sockets the caleb inside of the mish gun the aron the menorah and the shoghan are all covered in gold or in the case of them in our complete gold and the mizbeh hazard and the golden mizbeach also covered in gold when you get outside you have the mizbeach and you have the um the kyor the copper basin where they would wash their hands from both of those are made out of copper because there's a certain intensity as we move closer to a kurdish borough and make no mistake about it you can't do it too quickly there's a process there has to be a process um when yaakov avinu is in the mikdash he sees a ladder going up to heaven and the angels are going up and down the ladder now why are malachim going up the ladder they have wings it was interesting uh it was the story in old jerusalem i think i told this story some time ago i don't think it was that recently but i don't really remember um as i've pointed out many times when you get old the first thing to go is your memory second thing is anyway so i i definitely i i think i told this at some point um this guy and all you shall i am passed away and he had a whole box of him and he left in his sava that his son should be buried with him but the family thought maybe uh claudia's friend needs this so they went through abuse of himself and they asked him he said well let's take out one of these of him and read it we'll decide whether or not you know we should publish them or not in spite of his explicit request to be buried with them so they read the first one and the first one was this question why were the malachim going up the ladder when they had wings why didn't they fly he says they must have been young angels who hadn't grown their wings yet said you could bury him that's not the reason the reason is because you can't get up to shamayim with one jump you have to go by levels and so therefore when the current goggle wants to go into the kosher condoshim you don't just walk into the country ketosis there's a whole process you have to follow and if you mess up a step much like is which steps you mess up and where but you mess up a step you go back to start you want to reach into the conduction there's a process you can't just jump it's not the magic of the kosher kadoshim you know the kedusha is still there in the harebias and we know that there are yidden who mama should go into the kosher kadoshan what what according to many more fortune was the kosher today in the dome of the rock they come on a tour they go in sitting there looking at the rock which according to many uh before shrimp is the evan shacia and uh they walk in they don't have any mystical experience they're not lifted up out of this world you have to go through a process you have to go up rung by rung the steps that you need so the materials that go into the building of the mishkan tell me first is first first there's a mahna israel then there's then there's the then there's the mishkan then there's there's a process the first peric of cedar tyros caleb it says esther kadush is hey there are 10 levels of khaduja the first one is eritsel second one are cities with walls around them from the time of yoshua have a special status the third one is yerushalayim the fourth one is the higher bias and it keeps moving more and more until the tenth one is the kojoku notion so the materials that go into the building of the mishkan nothing is by nothing you take a look at uh at the ramban in parshas bamidbo where he describes the coverings that went over the caleb when they were traveling why this was made out qaelis this was made out of argamon this was made out of talashani each color of each of these wolves had particular significance so when we look at something as apparently mundane as a list of ingredients that go into the making of the mishkan make no mistake these are things that have significance to our lives and the 15 and the 13 that rashi mentions on each one of these objects and we'll talk about some of them we're not going to have time to go into everything uh unless we decide to make another series just about uh the mishkan in depth but right now we're working on that felis series we've received many inquiries we're probably not going to be up and running until after pesach but those of you who are still interested in joining we have received a lot of response it looks like it's going to be something very very special you can go to the website and uh express your interest you can uh send an email whatever it is we we uh we would like to get as many people on board for this as we can like i say this is not a regular podcast uh that's open to the public this is going to be a group where we work together i always say you know one of the problems with the podcast and uh is that it's amira as opposed to dibor right i'm speaking but it's not a relationship uh uh when you give a shirt there's supposed to be someone giving and someone getting so that's really what i try to shoot for when i give a shear so uh we uh we're trying to find a time that will be able to accommodate the maximum amount of people so please if you are interested and you haven't responded yet please respond and like i say we'll we're going to work on putting this together we hope to have it up and running uh by uh by like i said you have to pay sach that's my goal and uh we're going to go marmish through the darvening so that the words will have meaning to you and uh this is this is not a a public share this is like the da fiomi that i give online and the basilisk asharam this is a you know a participatory experience so if you're interested uh please let us know we'd like to see you be a part of that okay so that's our thought on the mishkan for this week and uh we move now to the question and answer uh segment of our program anonymous asks what do you have to say about a yeshiva who doesn't like being around vaping and it's unfortunately in most yeshivas these days so let me let me answer this question by coming around from a different point of view um i was there when my father passed away uh he was in the hospital he died on the shabbos i remember when his doctor came to visit um make a shiver call one of my brothers said would you say it was because of the smoking and he said well he had lung cancer heart disease and emphysema i'm going to have to say yes my father was born in 1925 he started smoking in the 1930s everybody smoked and uh and think about it it's incredibly addictive incredibly addictive um i did a video once for an organization that was trying to get people to stop smoking it's online someplace you could probably see it where i speak about it but um it's uh it's terrible my father tried desperately to stop i remember my father had bronchitis and he was still smoking he couldn't stop he was choking and choking and by the time when he had his massive heart attack and he stopped smoking by then unfortunately the damage had been done and they eventually found the lung cancer it's a terrible way to die i gotta say i don't know what a good way to die is quietly in your sleep yeah a terrible way to die is uh is gasping for breath and that's what was happening to my father because the blood clots were forming in his lungs so quickly that he didn't have a chance to they couldn't get rid of them and he he drowned that's how he died in the end it's a it's a terrible way and i see people today smoking i'm not talking about old people who started you know years ago when it wasn't so clear i'm talking about young people where half the pack of cigarettes says you will die where sometimes they put on pictures of diseased lungs remember when i had my heart attack and uh they said you have diabetes you're overweight luckily you don't smoke that's the only thing you got going for you and uh it's uh it's a terrible thing and of course one of the problems of smoking is the secondhand smoke in fact when they answered smoking in the mirror yeshiva it's because a guy went to the doctor he had emphysema and the doctor said you have to stop smoking he says i don't smoke he says you have the lungs of a two-pack a day smoker it was just from the second-hand smoke that he was taking in so uh it's really serious so at some point they came up with vaping which apparently allows you to have the experience of smoking but it doesn't release smoke so there's no secondhand smoke it's uh it's some kind of water vapor i don't know exactly if anybody asks me what do i think about people vaping i say you have no idea how many chemicals are in that stuff that's going into your lungs there have been studies i don't know if any of them are definitive and it could be we'll find out at some point that it's perfectly fine and it could be it'll come out at some point that it did serious damage to your lungs i don't know to my mind anytime you're going to be inhaling smoke into your lungs i can't see how in any way shape or form that's a good thing but i'm not a doctor i'm not a scientist i'm not speaking from a scientific point of view does it rattle me sure it does because it show looks like smoking and for me i has all the associations of smoking but i'm not able to go over and tell the person for sure what's going to happen to them so the people are providing the research for the future for people to decide whether or not this killed you or not so i hope to god not but um you know i i see where it uh is is disturbing but unfortunately when you go through this world there's a lot of stuff that people do that is uh upsetting and if you're not being affected by the second hand smoke and you just have to watch people that you care about possibly killing themselves um it's difficult how do you deal with it well i guess i would sign up for the hilces ben adola cavero online course to figure out how to deal with people in these situations but but i will say the following i feel your pain anonymous asks why did you stop teaching in yeshiva oh boy what a great question i'll let you know a little secret i do a number of things very well i remember some years ago my mother said to me son you can do anything i said mom i'm too old to believe that i can do some things better than most people and some things i can't do it all but i'm too smart to know that i can do anything especially as you get older uh you realize that certain things are just they're not in the cards anymore i'm coming to grips with the fact that i'm probably never going to be a major league basketball player what can i tell you you know you have to you have to make your peace i'm probably never going to have my own network tv show that's what i think yeah you know you start to come to grips with your limitations one of the great things about becoming old is that your your uh opportunities start to shrink and your possibilities become less yeah on the simplest level the types of food that you can still digest becomes smaller and smaller i used to go to this hotel and they would have uh a whole table over here with the salads and dips there's another towel table over there with the fish another table with the main course and then there was always a table off to the side of the boiled chicken and the boiled vegetables and i have to say as the years went by it looked better and better but uh but i will tell you one of the things that most people don't know is that i give a great commercial and i'm talking about teaching people how to learn kumara now full disclosure i'm limited i am limited i don't know how to teach people who don't know how to read how to read i'm not good at that i'm not even good at teaching people how to make a laning but someone who can basically make a laning and is motivated i have a very good track record of getting those people to see learning in a whole different light i was teaching a gemara in one yeshiva my father passed away i took off a year just to learn from myself and a number of my tell me them came in a delegation to threaten me that they were going to take me to based in because i'm not teaching tomorrow and how much they gained from my commercial so uh that was one another time when i was teaching i had a fellow who was very smart and he said to me afterwards he says he went on to many of the finest yeshivas he said i never had a sheer that challenged me as much as your shirt and i'll let you know in the secret why because the purpose of my sheer is to get people to see how smart they are that's why i i need someone who's able to make a laning and who's motivated because if a person doesn't prepare then i can't show them where they made their mistakes and how to correct it so when a person doesn't prepare and they just walk into sheer and assume the position go ahead say anything that you think might interest me [Laughter] so all i can do now is teach you the gemara from scratch and i'm basically an art school of gemara you're not going to learn how to learn that way but a guy goes to the bass madrish and prepares and then i come in and i show him how smart they are in understanding the gemara and understanding rashi and understanding thai stress and that's all that i ever do by the way i always say i do gemara rashii and tysons you want to do round bombs you want to do rishonim you want to do a bakayam go someplace else i don't do that i'm not smart enough come on rashing entices that's all we do and uh and we uh we do it pretty well yeah anyway in order for this to work i need a particular group of people who have the right motivation where i was teaching i wasn't getting that that student and so i wasn't accomplishing now i've always tried to be very honest with myself of where i am and what i'm doing when i started in ncsy in long island there was one paid member there was no chapters there were no events they had gone through five regional directors in the past two years the name was worse than nothing and the the one uh the one uh young lady who was a member was because she was on national board and she had to uh i i should give her a shout out because i think she watches the podcast sue for yesterday anyway so that was it that was my entire region it was one person so i had to start from scratch and and i went to learn the business you know and and figure it out and created programs and publications and all kinds of amazing things and i did this for nine years at the end i said i'm i'm not being mahadesh anything i'm just maintaining i don't have to stay here to maintain it and i left at the top of my game barak hashem and people were very surprised because they said you know you have a very successful organization you're making a good salary you have everything why would you leave it and i said because it's time to move on to whatever my next challenge is and uh and every job that i got basically came my way i i never went out to look for it so when i left the last place that i was teaching i was waiting for the next offer to come along uh that was uh eight years ago seven years ago it never came and uh one of the reasons that people say to me that i cannot understand but i it's clearly true is that people are intimidated by me they're afraid i'm going to come in and take over the ishii in fact there was one yeshiva where somebody told me that they were considering to bring me in and it was the kind of yeshiva where i could be effective and um it was on a higher level than where i had been teaching and all the remains were very excited about it about except for one guy who was not happy about it and he basically vetoed it so my friend asked him he says why what what's the problem with orlovsky he says i'm the one who's close with the guys he comes in so then the guys will all go to him now i can't even understand this robbie granovsky who i had discussed of working for for years he was on the podcast and mr sham will have him again um but he said once he says people would ask me why do you have a lawsuit aren't you nervous having you know somebody that talented on staff and he says why my yeshiva can only be better if i hire the most talented people why wouldn't i want someone who's more talented i agree there are things that i can't do and i'm thrilled to see other people who can't do it why why would i feel like i want to keep it for myself so the answer is that i basically stopped teaching where i was because i was not doing something that i felt was worthwhile at that point and i was waiting for the next option and it never came along i became a speaker uh traveling around basically just to to make a living i didn't have anything else but my dream has always been to open yeshiva and to give a gamer here and to build talmidim uh andre kanedola said and uh jantip explains you stand them on their feet make them make them mention yeah so they'll be bene toyota not just teach them i can't tell you how how it frustrates me when i see people come in who walk into a shirt to show they tell me them how smart they are i don't want to show them how smart i am i want to show them how smart they are anyway that's a long answer to a short question one more anonymous asks i have children with adhd and learning disabilities and look for ways to inspire them to grow even though they are in school which makes this challenging remembering explained how he has managed to become so learned and committed in spite of or perhaps because of similar challenges yeah first of all life's not fair right obviously my wife has always been convinced that people who are tall and thin have a higher quality of life we made a chevy broncos once for one of her friends uh who was torn thin and i uh i mentioned this and another one of her friends who was also torn then was divorced came over to me and said it's not always true but it is perception most people don't go in life and say gee i wish i could be short and fat [Laughter] but that's the roll of the dice some people got good genes people got bad genes some people are going to be tall some people are going to be short and some going to have a tendency towards obesity and other people are going to have other illnesses and other people are going to be physically strong and other people are going to be weak and other people are going to have great minds and other people are going to have terrible abilities to be able to retain information or to hop or to understand things it's never fair but for the most part there's a balance and so a person is a combination of advantages and disadvantages so in my case i have basically every learning disability that they know yeah i have add and i have uh dyslexia and i have uh focusing problems and retention problems and uh i forgot all of them there's this so every time they come up with a new one they test me and i have it yeah but akushboko made me very smart and very quick and so what i would do is get somebody else to read and then i would manipulate the information so that you know it could make sense that was the gift that i used to compensate for it but i ended up growing to a point where i couldn't do it anymore i already had smith and i couldn't read so i went around to a number of people who i admire in learning not just because they're smart but uh they're misuddar they're put together and i asked them and it's interesting all three of them gave me the same answer they said you have to learn a hundred daft gomorrah over and over and over again until you know it they all told me the same thing so i took off six months and i sat in the basement either by myself or with a cabrusa who's basically a golem to keep me company and i would read i i want you to appreciate how hard this was for me i had to get all the way down to the halfway down the almond and translate it and sometimes i had to sit there and look up every single word make sure i understood it put it together make sure it made sense and then i forgot what i learned i had to start again go over it again and go over it again and i kept doing this until i got it down and then i moved down to the second half of the oven and then i closed it over the oven a few times i turned the page i did the next one on the next one one by one one by one they told me to do it with kamar and rashi but i i can't learn without tyson's yeah so i killed myself i there was one time when i would write the whole thing over the gemara and the rashi and the tysons just to make sure that i understood it it was grueling and i could not have done this at an earlier time in my life because the confidence necessary to bang your head against the wall until you break either your head or the wall it takes a tremendous amount of confidence but now i was married and i had kids i'd run ncsy for nine years i you know i had smith i was i was considered somebody i had the confidence to face this terrible difficult situation after 40 daff of gemara i saw a major change after 60 i had it beat now i will never be my wife you know when you have one of those four page al-shah's my wife goes like this okay he's saying like this i'll never do that but i give a daf yummy every day i have to prepare a daft camaro on my own every single day and work on it i'm able to do it i have the skills so what you do not want to do is set them up for failure now i have to say somebody said to me once when i told this story over they said you had a.d.d this guy's a rush caller said you had add count your blessings i had adhd he says the kids with add they just stick in the back of the classroom and they go i don't hurt anybody but the adhd kids are bouncing in their seat and running around and going crazy and uh he says we were the ones who got beaten he says [Laughter] so what you have to do is say school is one aspect of your life you have to find areas in their life where they are can be more successful with whatever talents they have i don't know if that means music i don't know if that means art i don't know if that means uh karate i don't know if that means gymnastics whatever it is you have to give them things that they are going to be successful at because they have uh disabilities that are making it difficult for them so they have to count their successes if you can find a school that works with you matovo mannoyim unfortunately um i heard ruby oluwick say this once he says i said it myself but then i heard it from of matasio solomon a school system is an artificial uh environment shivan benchetta started a school system because the regular system of learning at home wasn't working with your parents he says but everything artificial has side effects going back to the vaping question so uh uh so it's a problem it's a problem if you can find a school that can understand the kids uh limitations and help him work around them it's unbelievable it'll be the greatest thing in the world and if not then you have to tell your kids school is not the end all of life it's a means to an end and that end is to be able to become an over hashem and to be able to be successful and not everybody's going to be successful in every atmosphere and in every uh you know institution and that's okay okay that's it for this episode if you want to find out more about the show or leave a comment you can go to my website rubyalowski.com you can sign up for the ongoing basilis asharam series i know there are people who are hesitant to join because we already started it's not a problem when new people join i sum up what we've done so far and every share stands by itself as a incalculable gem and and if you say gee why should i bother getting this diamond when i've missed all the other diamonds because every diamond is so precious daphiomi what am i talking about gosh we're almost done with my cutting we're going to be starting and then we're going to be starting you can jump in at any time stop him keep going yeah you can get on the the the bus at any stop and uh if you want to sign up for the fila series you have that opportunity if you want to sponsor a episode we're uh we're we still have some sponsorships available coming up you sponsor an episode uh i'll be talking more about my upcoming trip to america soon uh anybody wants to see me uh uh in person i was gonna say live but at least in person [Laughter] let you know about that okay that's it for this week this is devon olofsky and this has been the robbery lafsky show it's the rabbi orlowski show ready to go the rabbi orlovsky show knowledge and wisdom will help you grow lots of fun in every episode and we don't have to rhyme [Music] youtube and more it's rabbi orlovsky show [Music] show till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the rabbi yolowski show it's the rabbi orlovsky [Music] i can't believe this thing is still going on