I'm Not Perfect (and that's OK) (Ep. 183)

hi this is deborah dolofsky and welcome to the roberto lavsky show [Music] and whether you're watching with our friends over at tony time or wherever you watch or listen to your podcast a lot of people listen apparently we have over a thousand subscribers on spotify of people who just listen i don't know what any of that means but it certainly sounds impressive and uh it's amazing how many subscribers are just on different uh platforms and things but anyway wherever you listen or watch your podcast as always we're happy to have you along well it's ellel and um a service that a particle provides for me somewhere around the end of and the beginning of ello to help get me into the mode i'll give an example i remember how many years ago this was but it was towards the end of i was driving and for some reason uh this uh cop pulls me over i i wasn't doing anything let me see your license registration you know fine yeah you're hitting the winning stuff she says your insurance was never paid you've been driving for almost a year because i i take care of it in september so at the end of august you've been driving for a year without insurance i said no when i went to america and i gave it to somebody to pay she shows me says it was never paid that's like a major ticket to go to court that's not you don't just pay it fine and uh afterwards i asked the person they said oh yeah i forgot to do it and uh and then i said i gave you a check and i think i said yeah i never cashed it so okay so i have to go to court now uh and i've been driving for a year without enjoy i said i said the judge why would i want to drive without insurance i get into an accident you know anyway it's a terrifying thing to go to court a terrifying thing but that's down here with when it doesn't mean anything imagine you're going before me you're going to be judged on your life there was an another august when my brother was visiting and i was literally not figuratively people say literally when they mean figuratively i was literally on my street two houses away from my house and my phone rings i didn't have my phone in the little speaker you know today it's it's all bluetooth back then you had to put your phone into the little speaker slot you know because i was just coming back from shawl and uh i see my brother's calling and i pick up the phone and i hear a siren there's a cop right behind me two hours away from my house and i uh pull over and he uh and i said to him i said look i have a speaker here i just was coming back from sure my brother just called me he's in from america you know he says i have to give you a ticket now i have never in my life talked my way out of a ticket nothing nothing in fact if there's a whole line of cars that are parked some place you're not allowed to park and i park there too i'll get a ticket nobody else will but i will coach marco works hard to keep me on the street now and i remember this was just before elo says you don't have to give me a ticket you can give me a ticket the power is in your hands you could say okay i'm gonna give you a ticket you did something wrong i see you're two houses away i see that you just picked up the phone then i see you weren't using the phone you know but i could be a stickler and i could ask for din and i could ask for din i said but when you do din it's didn't for me it's then for you it's thin for your family it's them for lovely so i think the last thing we need now in israel at this point this was during the lebanon war shows you how long ago this was the last thing we need now is more din do we need more judgment i said well you have the power to do rokham you could say i see that you made a mistake i'm going to let it go i'm not going to give you a ticket but the power is in your hands you have then you have rokhanim you can do whatever you want you don't have to do either one and the guy said okay i'll let it go don't do it again the lady cop who was in the car goes i burst into tears i couldn't believe it because i never talked my way out of a ticket and i thought now i'm going to go into russian china i have to talk my way you know out of i got to give him the same argument so you can imagine how these things tend to set the tone well yesterday uh i had to wash my car sometimes you want to wash your car you could wash a car but i had without realizing it parked under a tree and uh many of the birds that nest in the tree do not understand uh good hygiene and uh they used my car for uh as a bathroom and i had to i had to wash my car now that had happened a week before when i got gas but the line was so long and i said you know i'm not going to wait online but now it was a week i'm sitting with this stuff you know this acid in this stuff and pigeon droppings and bird droppings you know it it it burns away a lot of people don't realize this um during the 70s during the economic crisis in new york so they cut back whatever they could and one of the things they cut back on was bridge maintenance so every year they're supposed to scrape off all the old paint and then prime it and then paint it so instead what they did is every other year they would just paint it without scraping it first the problem is that there's a lot of pigeon droppings and pigeon dropping has uric acid in it so they just painted over all of it and eventually it wore away the cables and they had to rebuild the williamsburg bridge it's a lot more expensive but so i got this stuff in my car anyway by guess there's like four cars in front of me and i'm waiting online and this what i would normally call an older fellow but now he's probably my age you know i'm just i don't think of myself as an older fellow but probably about that you know and he indicates to this younger guy if he could cut in front of him and he said yes and so he pulls in okay so the two cars go before him and the guy who's in charge of the car wash uh says go back to the end of line and he says no the guy let me in he says no you cut off other people go to the back of the line the guy says no he says then i'm not washing your car he says okay and the guy gets out and he stands there and the two guys go into their little hut where the car washer people you know turn on the loan machine 40 minutes in a 100 degree and the line is getting longer and longer and longer this guy won't move his car and the car wash people won't wash it 40 minutes and everyone keeps coming over what's going on what's going this was that nobody's budging no one's going to make a move finally after 40 minutes the uh the uh car wash people you know they uh they cracked first and they washed his car and then the line moved through i was two cars behind him this made a deep impression on me because you know this guy could have turned around and gone to the end of the line it would have cost him less time the car wash people could have just washed his car and they would have done another 10 cars in the 40 minutes that they were sitting there waiting i couldn't leave because i watched my car i had left the week before because the line was too long i'm sitting there for 40 minutes 100 degree temperature and i realized that kurdish baruch who was sending me a message what was the message i think because baruch was sending to me before the yom narayan i know as a mchotzeph and so stiff-necked to say we didn't do anything wrong but i'm telling you up front that us and our parents and our grandparents have done things wrong why are we dragging our parents into this because very often you know people uh do things because that's what they do my daughter has this wonderful routine she she teaches in seminars and she's like i don't know this what we do in my house you know in my house everybody makes fun of each other i mean it's what we do it's what we do in our house you know everybody curses you know that's what we do in our house i don't know that's what everybody does [Music] we are not so stiff-necked i may have mentioned this once upon a time but there was a takufa when people told light bulb jokes this was back when you were allowed to say offensive jokes today of course you'll get canceled and blocked on twitter and facebook and and all these other kind of things i don't even know them all but uh um but uh people used to tell what were called polish jokes because polish people have reputation for not being uh particularly intelligent and uh so people would tell polish jokes you can't do those anymore of course but once upon a time you could and one of the jokes that they used to tell was you know how many polish people does it take to change a light bulb and the answer was four one to hold the light bulb and three to turn him around that was the joke i don't know why this caught the popular imagination but it gave rise to all kinds of light bulb jokes yeah um you know in poland they tell a joke how many americans does it take to change a light bulb one you know how many this does it take i mean that doesn't take change the label all these light bulb jokes they were even from ones that they that they would do you know how many jewish american princesses does it take to change a light bulb two one to get the diet coke and one to call daddy okay there were different ones like this you know um how many jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb none i'll sit in the dark you know um how many uh breasts of a hacienda does it take to change the light bulb that's it there's only one light bulb when it goes out you don't change it [Laughter] a whole bunch of these but there was one because there's always wisdom you have to look everywhere for fine wisdom how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb and the answer is one but only if the light bulb wants to change it's it's uh it's a brilliant observation yeah i remember hearing a schmooze from a three kusalevsky during ello when the posix says it's not too far from you says rashi it's talking about torah terror is not so far you don't have to climb a mountain you don't have to go and search of the truth the coach marco makes it very close and very easy for you the ramban says it's talking about chuba tube is very easy to do so ask to see kusalevsky but it's not you see it's not it's hard it's hard to change so he brought the difference between sean and david the way the torah presents the stories david's story was much worse than show of course gemara says anyone who thinks that david was making a mistake so you can't understand the simple way but the way the torah presents it is that he sleeps with a married woman and then has a husband knocked off which is pretty serious yeah show didn't kill the king of amale because he wanted to leave this house for sure navi to be able to do it that was his great and yet show is not forgiven and he loses the malchus and dovid is forgiven for what appears to be a much more serious crime so he says read the story over there in small small comes to shul and shall says to him you're here i did everything that hashem said he says you did everything he says yeah he says i don't know i should have told you to kill everything including the animals i hear animals okay the people wanted to take you know some of the best of the animals to bring his kobanos i was going to tell them no but but i did everything that hashem said the answer is that when sho was confronted he said i didn't do anything wrong i don't i don't even understand what you're talking about i i did everything hashem said nelson another he comes to dovid he said there was a poor man and he had a little sheep and he fed the sheep from his table and he took care of him and then this rich man had lots of sheep but he took the poor man sheep and he and he killed it so he says wow that's that's really rotten that guy deserves to die but but instead the halacha is that you have to pay four times and nothing evie swings at david in front of everyone and says that's you david you're the one you're the man who did this now mr david knew the gemara that said david didn't say what are you talking about first of all he wrote her a get before he went out to battle so she wasn't married second of all he was a murderer malchus third of all he had plenty of explanations and said he says hatosi and there's a seek a seek in the middle of the puzzle the puzzle stops in the middle of the why because he was supposed to say khotosi avisi prashanti but he was so pained he couldn't even get out the words but you got a lot of explanation i know but a navi is coming to me telling me i did something wrong so i'm going to try to talk my way out of it so said rip speed doing chuva is easy recognizing you have to do chuva is the problem and he told a famous story with his guy's share where he sees the book during hello and he says so you're doing shoe races yeah of course it's hell he says uh what are you doing trouba for you know you know famous like what he said well you know i mean i'm sure i've done a various you know he says well let's go down the list i voted zara no i never did it did you ever kill anybody um lush and her well yeah i mean i have spoken russian heart but it was always for it to alice it was for a useful purpose huh bitter yeah but i mean i always had a husband what i had to do and he goes down the line until the guy has no choice he recognizes done things wrong he goes no quotes the posse there's there's nobody in this world who's attack and doesn't do something wrong i mean everybody does something wrong so repeats like isaac's looks at him and says russia you're never going to do juva because you've never done anything wrong he says krishna you never embarrassed somebody in public that's murder you know right has you never looked at something you weren't supposed to look at so shame says that's guillerias you're a mavato tyra you you spoke lash and horror and the only reason you didn't serve a voter zora is because the andre that's a good one avatar the title for it or you would have done that too but you're never going to do truth because you never did anything wrong only if the light bulb wants to change you have to recognize that i've done something wrong we're not so brazen that we're going to stand there and hold up a line of people for 40 minutes because i won't turn around my car and get back in line i'm not such a sheariff i'm not i'm not such a i'm not so brazen i'm not such a merchant i was uh learning in a coilover in the morning and there was this older fellow he was a rav he had been uh but saturday for many years and he comes in he's very upset he goes i don't understand you americans he says i had to go get something at the store there was no parking so i double parked i wasn't there for so long and i come out and this guy is waiting in the car and he starts yelling at me he says you blocked me in so what so you had to wait 15 minutes what's the big deal he didn't even stop to think maybe i inconvenienced this person gesellsmann is also called guzzle you stole 15 minutes of this man's life he had to drive his kids to school maybe he had to go to a doctor's appointment what's he getting upset at me for i may have told this story i wasn't sure i sit up front because i i want to be able to hear the darwinian and i know the talkers go towards the back anyway this young guy looks like he had just gotten married his friend who's a bakla comes over and they're schmoozing they're schmoozing through the mushrooms they're schmoozing through burgers after when the half tourist starts they're still schmoozing i can't hear the after i said you know i can't hear so the baka goes back to the back you know where he sits and the avrik turns and looks at me and goes oy vey i was definitely old enough to be his father i don't know if i was old enough to be his grandfather but definitely old enough to be his father looks at me as is upon him ivey i said to him us partner look at hennem it says i'm picky of us go to hell he turned around and my son-in-law was in shul they said to me afterwards i was darvening that he would turn around because i saw you were just warming up and i was i had a lot more to say it's bad enough that you sit there doing that go outside and talk how do i care i don't care if you're different i don't care if you listen to laning i don't give a listen after i don't care what you do but i'm telling you that it's bothering me i used to teach in seminary i had three rules i said make sure your phone is turned off because when it rings it's very disturbing to everybody there's no talking and there's no gum chewing and i said because the i said i don't care if you if you put your head down and go to sleep as long as you don't snort i don't care if you're doodle i don't care if you walk out of the room and don't sit in the class i knock you in for attendance go outside you guys want to talk go outside and talk but you have to sit here and talk we're not so brazen-faced and we're not so stiff-necked and stubborn that we would hold up a whole row of people for 40 minutes for a principe i asked one of the people who was ahead of me there was only two cards that i said why is there a problem with the machine it goes principe that's the principle what's the principle he cut the line they won't wash it he says i'm not moving you're going to wash my car we were going on vacation with the kids once and for us a vacation is a major big deal you know going to a hotel you know hotels are expensive you know the time is important so this guy comes and uh we get into the van and it stalls out and and so of course it's 100 degrees outside i got a bun little kids in the in the van and it's hot and they're crying and that and somehow he manages to pull over to the side and he's waiting for a tow truck the tow truck comes he says he wants him to give him a charge to charge the car battery the guy says okay i want such an amount he said i'm not going to pay you that so the two of them sit down on the on the divider they slid out of a cigarette and they're just sitting and we're sitting in the car with a bunch of screaming children so after 10 minutes of this i held down a van i said how much do you want to take us to i think it was there at sea out at the time he says okay i said fine i took out luggage i got in the car he started throwing the luggage at me and screaming yelling i said you give us a van that's broken you won't even get it fixed you're gonna sit there and honda with this guy and just sit here to wait each other out well me and my children are sitting here sweltering in the van principe it's an amazing concept and so we come to kurzberg and say well you know i did anything wrong okay i'm not perfect i know but he's perfect everybody makes mistakes and everybody what do i do before like like i did bad stuff is anything wrong with me i'm a great guy then then means that we get judged and it means that there's a recognition first and foremost that i did something wrong and that's the hard part of chuva is admitting that you have a problem once you can recognize you have a problem then you can start to address it then you could then you could uh you know try to come up with some way to solve it but if like the young man said to him it's a guy's a shower i never did anything wrong everything i did i have an answer for i i i can fam far i can give an answer for it until then what happens with mr shapiro once there was some issue and he said to me david out here action he said to me don't be stubborn yeah dig in your heels so that's what we have to say that's what we have to say before krishna if we want to do chuba with not some and so stubbornness to tell you we never did anything wrong yeah we've done things wrong and therefore we have to uh figure out how we're going to change this but the first step is a hakora that we made mistakes we've done things wrong yes we have sinned once you do that then you can start to change but without that recognition you can't do anything will soften our heart and unstiffen our neck and make us a little less brazen so that we can stand before our kurdish barracuda and say we have done bad things and we want to become better people and once we have that recognition we can go in and do it okay and that brings us to the question and answer portion of our program banish benjamin asks do personality tests like dr young's measure the actual meadows that a person is born with do these tests correspond at all with jewish hashgaffer so there's a woman miriam atahant who put out a book um about personality types and assessments and um uh she uh she said that she did it based on a note in young's journal uh that he used to set a different up and it's basically you assign people letters and people are combinations so you're an introvert or you're outgoing you're this you're that there's all kinds of different things and you assign letters to it and she's very careful to stress um that uh this is not an absolute method this is just a way of trying to understand people however my wife went to some emmett meetings and people would talk about their husband or their children they go oh he's such a wd-40 he's such a you know uh you know c-3po i don't know what it was you know they would they would immediately assign them these shorthand things now the gemara says clearly that there are certain traits that you're born with it could have to do with your mazel it could have to do with what hour of the day you were born and it gives an example if you were born under mars which is the blood planet so you have a tendency towards blood and so uh you know you um you know if you're an average person you'll become a butcher if you're a sadik you'll become a male you know if you're a russian you'll become a murderer yeah so the fact that you have this particular meda it means you can use it but definitely people are born with certain medias there's no question about it whether or not you can determine what those medos are through some method i'm not sure there was a time when you could there there were people who understood what we today call astrology but but today you know uh my birthday is january 12th so i used to think i was a capricorn and people i knew who were into astrology says well that makes sense because you're such a capricorn and they listed all the reasons of the capricorn at some point i realized that my hebrew birthday is schwart so i'm really uh an aquarius so i told him as it turns out i'm really an aquarius he goes well that makes sense you're such an aquarius and they listed all the reasons my wife uh who had the book on you know personality uh traits she started doing it with me and when she was done she says this doesn't make any sense you have all the letters [Laughter] because i'm a complex individual and to try to reduce me to a bunch of letters is really very difficult yeah um because people are complicated i always say when i try to understand people i say that you know because i'll say if you save one life it's like you saved an entire world because a person is an entire world i said that means that people are as complicated as the hardest sugiya you ever worked on on a piece of gemara you have to learn people up you have to find the caches and try to find the root zone and understand what the savaras are and why people are the way they are to try to reduce them based on these kind of things is very hard and that the problem is as i saw when my wife went to this meeting is once you do that it's very easy to label people with those labels that you give them so is there a method of being able to understand that of course there are you could see there are certain people who are lazy and certain people who are hyper and certain people who are phlegmatic and certain people who are angry and there are certain inbred medias that a person has to work on but you'll i think to come up with a method shorthand to be able to figure out is going to be a lot more difficult anonymous asks i was wondering if the rav can explain the concept of kiddish with messengers especially on rosh hashanah did that mean that everyone was working as if it were a regular day and then the come and suddenly it became yandeff and everyone has to blow chauffeur no um suffice they would keep the day as a junta if it turns out the messages didn't come then they would keep the second day as jantav and that's why that even in erzhrel there are two days yantif that's the reason why second day yandev of rosh hashanah is not like any other day because if you're in khuslarits and you have two days yantif why because the messengers did not reach it and if you live someplace where the messengers were not going to get to you by er of yontif then you had to keep two days as a suffix because you just didn't know so um uh so when they um uh would do it so you know first day soccer second day circus schmidty at sarasota first day pace of seven day pesach on both days there's no question but you know rosh hashanah is a suffix is it considered two separate days or one long day and that's why we always have the new fruit thing that you have to do in order to say shakuniano on the second night because uh you know we're not sure if it's one long day but uh they definitely kept it well maybe i'll say a quick word on this says almost never happened that they they didn't know when rosh hashanah was during the first place in mikdash they kept one day rosh hashanah they knew what it was and he says the reason is because the first day of rosh hashanah is for the adam shawling the person who's the perfect person that you're judging and that's the person who gets judged in the first erasion but when clay israel started to drop in the time of the second base of mikdash so we had to be metakaine that we ended up with two days of rosh hashanah and the mr milio says that the second day was to see if you were ready to be meshamesh the other mashallah if you could help out the other michelle that's why i'm always careful to uh bid for the coinalia on the second day because i know i'm not the other one showing him so i don't need the lead of the first day but the second day i want it somebody said to me was look i'm clearly not the other michelle said why do i bother going to school the first day i'm not being judged then only the second day i said because on the second day you want to see if you're ready to be mishamesh the other macholine if you can serve the perfect person how do you think the perfect person is going to feel when he shows up to show him there's no minion because everybody stayed home and said well i'm not there you want to show kurdish baroque that you're there to help them out that's got to be your your goal in that case anonymous asks upon entering a news mind can you give some insight on how to avoid burnout especially when starting with so much enthusiasm goals you have to have goals now there's a famous expression i don't know who coined it or where it goes from but a mossman is not somebody who learns 24 hours a day hamas is somebody who learns 60 minutes an hour meaning when i'm learning i'm learning i don't need all extra things necessarily but what i have to do i have to do if guns tells the story that he brought his son to the stifler to get a bracha that uh before his bar mitzvah he said i'll give you a brother but how are you going to become a tumultum what's your plan for kid's 13 years old man the staff said i'll tell you what to do you need x amount of time to dive in x amount of time to sleep x amount of time to you know to go to the bathroom and wash up and to eat your meals he went through everything he says that leaves you with 12 hours a day he says i guarantee you that if you spend 12 hours a day learning from now until you get married you'll be atomic now a person's got to be honest not everybody can handle 10 hours a day so if you do four hours of a morning saturday and four hours of afternoon saturday and two hours of a night said that might be enough for me i started yeshivadola i was coming from a coed day school where we had an hour and a half of gemara and now i was suddenly thrust into a situation of doing a whole day of gemara so for me my goal was just to see if i could sit there and not just run out of the room i was working on what they call zitzflage just sitting there of course with my add which had not been diagnosed and my dyslexia and everything else was very hard for me to learn but at least i'm going to stay here that's my goal i'm going to sit in the basement for the amount of time that i'm supposed to be here but i tell you i was watching the clock it was hard for me so make sure you get enough sleep because people in dorms don't because they stay up schmoozing make sure you get exercise when you have a break go for a walk if you're in better shape go for a run like get out a little bit get some fresh air exercise it's good for your body it's good for your mind it's good for your soul and uh and don't eat junk eat healthy as much as you can and uh and that's it and if you see that you're starting to crash so switch to something yeah do a little homage to do something else that that gives you a chance to rest your mind i heard a story i don't know if it's true but they say if gifter when he was really exhausted and he couldn't concentrate in his learning he would do infinite mathematics that's what he would relax with what's infinite mathematics how many points are there between two and three infinite how many points between three and four infinite how many between two and four two times infinity and you can multiply infinities i don't know how it works that's not what i do for uh enjoyment and entertainment yeah but uh listen to music to do what you need in order to maintain yourself now this is not a leap year so there's only one other you know and like i say keep your eye on the ball what do i want to accomplish this month how do i want to get there and try to work on that uh i will do one more hanaji asks if an adult is doing something you think isn't safe i.e young people playing in the front yard without supervision ignoring doctor's recommendations for a young child uh nutrition uh is it ever your place to get involved with a parent or an in-law or a sibling if so any suggestions how to do it in such a way that it'll be received oh boy the first answer is yes how the best way to go about it is i'm not sure i was at the iguta convention and there was a atrium so the uh the talks were taking place and the ballrooms were two floors up and there was this like uh atrium like a um an overhang a balcony whatever you want to call it there and there was um plants and and things like that so that you wouldn't get too close to the edge and this kid went into the things and was playing right up at the edge i saw at least five people tell the woman who was talking to somebody your kid's too close to the edge it's okay i'm watching him sure enough he fell a lot of hot solid people there they ran over i don't know what happened in the end i didn't i didn't follow up on it but five people told me your kid is playing right at the edge i didn't care she didn't care um i've seen this i've seen this where people are irresponsible i live here in harnoff if you know harnoff at all so scholes and there's a drug store in a hardware store this woman double parked her car to go into one of those two stores with the car running and a bunch of little kids in the car now when i lived in far rockaway we had a garage that you know you came into the driveway and you went down to get into the garage and we had been away and we came back no kids were in the car and uh the car was running you know and uh neighbor came over to say hello so i got out to say hello to the neighbor one of my kids climbed in the front seat and moved the car into the drive so bark it was just going into the garage and it smacked into a pole and my water main broken okay but nobody was hurt you hear you have a car running with a bunch of kids in it right in front double parked i said to her when she came out i said this is unbelievably dangerous one of your kids could have put the gu okay so if you think a kid is in a dangerous situation that there's some form of abuse that's taking place or serious neglect i was running ncsy so one of the chapters you know we did a region-wide fundraiser where we got these chocolate bars that you sell and you get a certain commission from it etc and you know it was a fundraising anyway this one girl um she was given x number of bars and she told the chapter advisor i didn't sell them i ate them she says but we gave you like 12 bars you know says yeah i know there's no food in the house so they check out the mother's an alcoholic there's a string of guys who come into the house it's serious neglect so we went to social services and we had to take it out of the house and put with a firm family in foster care and she said you guys saved my life there's a horrible book it's a series of three books it's called the child uh called it second one is called lost boy the third one is a man named dave about one of the worst child abuse stories in america this mother starved and beat him gasped him stabbed and burnt him i mean which he didn't do to this kid and eventually the school was able to get him out of that and into foster care but uh but he said you know he ran away from home once because it was so horrible and the cop brought him back home he says one time my mother like kicked me in the teeth and i fell to the ground i was all bloody and and i saw in the window the neighbor was watching no one said anything no one did anything but eventually there was one teacher who became proactive and saved this kid's life so if it's you're the person who wants to go and yell at the candy man who gives a lollipop to the children i think you're being over zealous but if you see a dangerous situation then i think you're making it to say something okay that's it for this episode if you want to find out more about the show you can go to my website at alaska.com you can leave a comment you can send an email you can sponsor an episode you can sign up for one of our online shirum and until next time i am david olowski and this is the robbie allenski show it's the rabbi orlovsky show torah and simply 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 it's the rabbi orlovsky show on rabbi orlovsky.com torah [Music] till next time till we meet again throughout my orolowski show it's the rabbi yolowski show it's the rabbi orlowski [Music]