The Secret To Crafting The Perfect Answer (Ep. 268)

hi this is D olowski and welcome to the Rober olowski show whether you're watching with our friends over return any time wherever you watch or listen to your podcast as always thanks for coming we would not have a podcast without you I know some very talented people more talented than me smarter than me better looking too and uh their podcast never took off nobody ever listened you know so if you uh you want make a podcast and nobody watches you know it's very very depressing after while it's going to stop I know for myself when sometimes you look and you see oh somebody's talking about a topic that's interesting you know and you look at it and it's like 83 views you're like it's not worth my time so the fact that so many of you come and those of you who subscribe and share and like and comment so that more people find out about it almost every week I meet somebody who says I didn't even know about the show I just discovered it and they start listening and it's because of you who listen and make comments and do all those kind of things that pushes it up in the algorithm I think I don't really know how the algorithm works but apparently uh you know now that uh now that all the tech people are uh making nice with trump it could be it'll change so uh I told him I sent a message to to him that he should push the rabbi olowski show and I don't know if I want to have him on per se because I don't know that he has any Torah content yet but maybe I'll have Jared hav't come in and say about Tor although I didn't see this but the apparently the prime minister of Brazil the president of Brazil uh um I forgot his name he got up to speak in the Parliament and he says let me start with a dvat Torah for the par he's not Jewish so it's a catching on cuz the times they are changing as one Jewish kid sang Once Upon a Time um that was Bob Dylan for those of you who are not familiar his actual name is Robert Zimmerman and uh he uh you know it was uh he was really uh pioneer in music because he until that time only people who had a good voice could sing and he showed you no anybody can cuz I would not feel so long yeah you get the idea okay so uh we have a sponsor sponsored by Sim Shalom rowski hi I would like to dedicate the thank you they should have you should know how many people get uh from this show and one of the main reasons I do it is for the that people give and the fact that you are other people I ask all of you to have him in your so all the that we get should be him and he should have an them her am okay um I used to teach a uh a course in orola it's not really clear what my course was I had to develop it you know one of the things about or is they don't fill a job they look for a person and then they build a job around that person which uh um is definitely intelligent intelligent thing if you if you're looking for good people anyway they brought me in because of my experience in cim and they brought me into the Ora program now at the time Rabbi Le was teaching and his course was about ronus they had a Moy who was coming in and teaching about Mila even if you weren't going to become a my just have the basis and background to it um they uh the head rabet who was a m to teach about and they had different people when they brought me in um as far as I could tell my role was to teach about kirim and uh maybe the better way to put it is informal Jewish Education Mel ISAC shom who was the principal in ohav sholom of Mer's uh Hebrew school for many years said that the BJ uh the board of Jewish Education had done a study and found that informal Jewish Education is much more effective than formal Jewish Education and that's why he was a big supporter of ncsy which I was at the time and uh and he said that this you know this can be so much more effective in a child's life than sitting in a classroom and learning so uh sometimes when I would be teaching I'd be teaching the idea of informal education I.E a shabbaton a shabbaton is an unbelievable opportunity to be able to teach people um about chabas in an informal way you learn it by actually doing it in fact I remember we would get our food primarily from Meal m and so we serve to get filter fish and chicken soup and roast chicken and potato cougo and you know chent all all that Jewish food and uh somebody said to me why don't you serve food that the kids like you know spaghetti and meatballs you know stuff like that so I said two reasons uh one is because then I'll have to buy more food like this I know at least half the kids aren't going to eat I save money on that I said but there's a bigger reason I want to teach the the part of teaching chabas is shabus food and there's a reason why we eat what we eat right gilter fish was developed because of the iser of Bor that uh when you eat a piece of fish it has bones and people are going to pull the bones out of the fish that's M so what they would do is they would debone the fish mix it up with some stuff stuff it back into the fish and then cook it up so that real gilter fish I've never seen it in America but you can buy it here in errell is essentially a slice of fish usually carp with its fish around it and the gilter fish is in the middle and um eventually someone came up with the idea of leaving out the fish entirely and just taking the filling and making them into like Canad you know matz BS and dropping them in the water and boiling them that way and uh that became geil fish but the term geil fish is Yiddish uh the way you say fish in Yiddish is fish and the way you say to fill something is to geill it so a geil fish is a f fish that was geil and the whole reason that geil the fish is to avoid um uh to avoid having to you have a problem with B yeah uh chant is because you wanted to have hot food on uh chabas so they would have food that could sit on the stove for a very long time like um Busa Shore the gamar brings an example Ox meat or beans which boil for a very long time you know that if you just boil up beans they're going to come out hard they have to boil for a very long time till they become you know soft and edible so someone told me and I don't know if this is true but like I say I'm not peson I should have a ref I just repeat what I hear and uh that in French sure is hot and lent are beans like lentils so sh lent is hot beans I don't know if it's true or not but um um that's why we eat chin so there's a reason for Jewish food and let them um let them get used to what uh what y eat and uh that's one of the reasons that we have such a high percentage of heart disease you sit down to a shab as lunch and you have a chant and you have kishka and you have cgle and you have chop liver and then you go straight to the hospital your cholesterol is coming out of your eyes you know it's shooting up this way but um but be that as it may you know it's a experiened and we would have discussion groups right they would call them educational sessions as opposed to classes and um they were more often than not discussion and on topics that the kids would be interested in and um you know it was uh very positive experience yeah so um that's the uh uh that's informal education uh one of the classic forms of informal education was the uh model seder that they would have in Hebrew school where instead of teaching these kids about a Seder they would actually have them act out a Seder and see what it's like that's informal Jewish Education never chance to see it um I had when I was teaching Hebrew school Mel Isaac's had the whoever was teaching the oldest class had left and he asked me if I'd fill in so when it came time for the model seder I mean these kids are already Barbed by Mitzvah age I wasn't going to do another model seder for them instead I had them come in and prepare food for the Seder now most of these kids didn't come from House that were even koser for PES and I taught them how you makeas and how you uh I brought in a broiler we broiled the eggs and the and the and the and the bones you know I I had them check the lettuce the Roman lettuce I had them grind up the mo you know the horseradish and they just came to life in ways that they never did in a class because it was an informal Jewish Education so uh when I ran ncsy I would make every year a ski trip up to some ski resort um and it was almost always sold out yeah 4:00 in the morning everybody standing there some of them had their own skis Etc and someone said to me what's the purpose of this trip you know I mean you're essentially a cur of organization I said because we have a three-hour drive up and a three-hour drive back and I brought a lot of advises along who could just sit and shmoo with the kids I have a captive audience for six hours they stuck on the bus besides the fact that while everybody was out skiing I would sit in the large and uh sip a hot cocoa and uh you know as the kids would come in I would sit and shoo with them um you know I would take the injured kids to the hospital and gave more time with them you know so uh uh you know it's an opportunity an informal educational opportunity to be able to affect people so so I taught a course on how to run a shabbaton and how to prepare an educational session and things like this and part of the course was how to answer basic questions on Judaism because I find this is one of the scarier areas that people encounter when they consider getting involved in K of rokim they say to me what do I do if someone asks me a question that I don't know the answer to and they're terrified of this so uh so I would first give them an introduction of how to answer questions and then I would go through sample questions in different categories that people get asked most often and how to give an answer to them it's not a definitive answer um uh I remember Rabbi Josh Hartman was teaching um hash issues to the guys and at one point uh he was going to deal with the question of how can you have free choice if a k already knows everything and the guy said oh RAB alasi already answered this he said like this s hutman looked at them and said I understand but you know other people have spoken about it because what I did was basically you know Snappy answers to Snappy questions I did not by any means go into it in depth yeah I bring an example that I was doing a question and answer um in Texas and one of the girl advisors and the questions were not for the advisers it was for the participants one of the girls advisor says to me do you allow girls to learn gamorra now I don't know if you could pick up the hostility in that question but obviously she felt that girls should learn Gara I guess she anticipated that I was going to say girls shouldn't learn gamar so instead of asking a question like do you think girls should learn gamarra she says do you allow girls to learn gumar so from the hostility in the question it was obvious that she wanted uh to paint me you know as a flag burning Stone throwing woman hating K extremist and uh I decided not to play the game so I said me I don't allow or disallow anything so she tries again does it bother you when women learn gamor now that's not a question what are you my therapist does it bother you when women lar so I said no it doesn't bother me but both things don't bother me maybe things should so she finally comes up with a question and she says if a girl would ask you should she learn gamorra what would you tell her I said why you obviously don't care what I think she's like what I said you think girls should learn gamar right goes yeah I said yeah I figured that out from the way you asked your question so what are you asking me for you don't care what I think you think girls should learn Gar so my opinion means nothing to you no no no I'm just curious no you're not curious you don't care what I think so why are you wasting my time but by now some of the kids caught on and they're like no we also want to know like oh they could care less these girls couldn't learn gamar they can't learn kage you know but okay so she she forced the issue I said the mishna says that for a girl to learn gamara it's tius now however you want to define the word tifus it's not good he goes I know but when the gamar said that it was talking about a different time they didn't understand girls they didn't understand women they didn't understand the way they thought they were you know stereotyping them they were this that all kind of things I said oh so when the gamar said that they didn't understand women right they didn't have proper respect for women right they didn't understand what was going on right then what do you want to learn it for now she had nothing to say now one time I was driving r Shapiro someplace with AMI Cohen D Cohen's son and he told this over to R Shapiro now I never tell any of my stuff because I'm oh I'm gonna just get killed you know so he tells him over the whole thing and ra go says you understand that's not the real answer and I said of course it's not the real answer I wasn't trying to give the real answer I wasn't getting into the topic because I was dealing with someone who didn't want to hear what I had to say sometimes the gamar has what's called a is not an answer I just push away the question and the answers that very often you give and that's what you'll see sometimes they'll give an answer to it saduki and then theor will say okay that's what we said to him but what's the real answer because we didn't give the real answer to the saduki we just eliminated his question most of the time in my experience most of the time and I'm generalizing but there's two types of people those who generalize and those who don't but generally when a person's asking a question that's not really their question so you want to just get the question out of the way so the person uh can get down to the real topic uh I had a friend of mine from Toronto uh Scott Goldberg and uh he came to Israel the same year that I got married and he went to learn in ASA Torah to study the proofs of Tor I said okay anyway he was there for six months at the end of six months I said so how's it going goes I'm still not sure I said one second you know rberg always has a rule you know be a judge and not a lawyer you're just judging the evidence what did they say that you found problematic he says I'm not sure I said well what are you not convinced about what are you still not sure he goes I don't know I said you don't understand it no one's going to answer this question for you because you don't care about it he said what I said nobody cares about it nobody lies awake at nights thinking was there mad har wasn't there mmed harai the question that you really want to know is how come I'm not happy and looks at me and says yeah how come I'm not happy so uh he looks at me and says so I just wasted six months I said yep I said so why didn't you tell me right away I said because you want to believe me you were so sure that was your question you were so invested in it I when I used to teach gar sometimes a kid would ask a question they'd build up the question it was a very simple answer and they right away no no that can't be it no my question is so good it can't possibly have such a simple answer but most people just ask questions to ask questions posing questions that would cross a rabbi's eyes interesting No in fact um uh there's uh there's places where they used to haven't asked the rabbi question session now they call it stump the rabbi that's that's ridiculous what do you mean stump the rabbi if I have an honest question don't I want an answer to it the answer is no I'm just asking the question to see if I can catch the rabbi a gcha question H how do you answer that so um so I'm working with the Assumption okay so let's let's take this apart there's three types of people who ask a question the first one are people who's enti entire life have been dedicated to this question the odds of you saying anything that's going to answer their question is slight Dem midling because they're so invested do you really think anyone's going to explain the Holocaust to Eli weisel oh guess I shouldn't write any more books there's the answer no and I always bring that as an example you can't answer the Holocaust for a holocaust Survivor because they're too invested in it and the in the question they'll get too upset and it doesn't even matter whether your answer is correct or not it's not going to do it for them having said that I remember I was once in San Diego by rert walant and this woman said Rabbi I survived the Holocaust how do you explain the Holocaust and I'm like oh my gosh my biggest nightmare right so what could I do I couldn't I couldn't weasle out of it so uh so I said what I heard from m B MTI burer was in John's Hopkins and uh the priest who was teaching the class noticed he was wearing a yamaka and at some point he says you know I've never understood why Jews have a problem with the Holocaust I as a Catholic have a problem with the Holocaust because everyone agrees that the Nazis were pure evil come down to the world whenever they want to depict somebody as evil they say a Nazi Hitler right that's the epitome of evil so the epitome of evil wants to destroy good so if Judaism is the true force of good in this world that God appointed I understand why the Nazis wanted to destroy them but I believe the Catholic church is the true good in this world Hitler didn't want to destroy the Vatican didn't want to kill the pope didn't want to destroy Catholics he only wanted to destroy the Jews so if I was a Jew and I believe that I was the force of Truth and goodness in this world I know where the Nazis wanted to destroy me but as a Catholic I can't possibly understand it and this lady said Thank You Rabbi that gives me that gives me perspective well that was the best I was able to do obviously but someone whose whole life I remember this reformed Rabbi put out a book how nobody can prove that God exists and someone wrote me a letter with the blurb and said why don't you contact him and prove to him that God exists and I said you think he's gonna be honest and and then turn around and and say uh you know um oh you're right I better recall all the copies of my book he wrote a whole book about it he's not going to suddenly change it just because I give him an answer he'll ignore it and that's why you have to know know if a person who's asking the question even wants an answer so sometimes a person will say to say nothing anybody says will convince me there's a God go ahead you know how many people I see who fall for this bait not me they say nothing anybody says is going to convince me go ahead I said no no I believe you you're completely close-minded and nothing that anybody says will change your mind no no let me hear what you have to say no you don't want to hear what I have to say you're convinced that no body is going to prove to you there's a God and I believe you and so I'm certainly not going to waste my time now because it doesn't matter what I say at the end you'll say you see I'm not convinced so why should I waste my time so sometimes and this is very important when someone asks a question you have to differentiate between what's a question and what's a statement when this woman said to me do you allow women to learn gamorra that's not a question that's a statement when someone says I think Judaism is unfair to women or I don't think the Torah is relevant to today's world or I think all of these Orthodox Jews are crooked none of those are questions and when someone makes a statement well I don't want to acknowledge it I don't want to be that I said well yeah I hear what you're saying anything like that my go-to is oh oh and for most people that's enough because they didn't want to hear an answer they're not interested in an answer they're just making a statement so why would I engage with someone who clearly doesn't care about what I have to say and the older I get the more convinced I am that most people aren't interested in what you have have to say most people just want to hear what they have to say as Dale conie says and How to Win Friends and Influence People key people can listen to themselves talk about themselves for hours they don't really care so people will come over to me and say something and I'll be oh and they're perfectly content with that on rare occasions people say do you agree and then I'll say no why not oh there's a question then I have to decide whether I want to engage with this person or I will say as I said to that girl in Dallas what do you care what I have to say your mind is already made up so I have to make that decision on the spot but if I do give an answer the answer is going to be to get this question out of the way cuz sometimes people don't care about the question the question is just a question right stump the rabbi I've had people's all this is people say to me can you prove there's a God yes I thought you can't prove there's a God yeah I can really yeah oh want to hear it no how come Judaism is unfair to women it's not really yeah I thought it is nope oh how how come uh you know people are keeping Judaism is outdated and I said it's not it's relevant today it is yeah all the Mitzvah yeah wow you want to hear how no sometimes they'll make some kind of outrageous statement and I'll just give a quick response to it you know uh uh circumcision is barbaric no it's not barbarians don't do it huh [Laughter] and that's enough once in a while almost never someone actually read National Geographic instead of just looking at the pictures and they say no there's a tribe in Africa where they also do a circum okay fine now we'll talk about it but most time people don't even care just ask the question that you may have experienced this sometimes someone asks you a question you actually know the answer and as you start giving them the answer they get this bored look on their face sometimes they even say stop preaching to me and you're like but you ask me that's because you made the mistake of thinking they care about their question they don't care about their question they don't want to hear your answer now that's some people right that's a minority of people who really are dedicated then there are people who are serious questioners they'll ask you a question and you say that's very interesting there was a whole book written on this would you like to read it yeah I'd like to read a book on the subject you know there's a whole class on this do you want to come to the class or I have a I have a recording of the class yeah I'll listen to that that's the second category the remaining 95% of people ask questions don't care at all about the question and so the more time you invest in answering their question the less productive it is for you and for them they don't care about the question so you just need a to get the question out of the way so they can deal with whatever the real issue is that they're asking and figuring out what the person is actually asking uh AR Khan when I was in Discovery we were on a question and answer panel me and aric KH and mty perer and he told me you side once he says don't ask answer the question answer the questioner figure out why this person is asking this question and what it is they're trying to arrive at that goes a long way to being able to answer the question um Rabbi Brickman who runs the Der Yeshiva and or he told me that uh R Le was once doing a question and answer for the boys and one of the boys said um how do you understand laich and he says the first thing he said is is anybody here a laich and right Brickman said to me that was such a brilliant question because if there was he would have probably answered the question differently because he knows that there are people who are sensitive to it and so you have to take those sensitivities into account when I was asked to speak for a time which are people who have been married for a long time and are childless so um you obviously have to answer the question differently than you would for people who have children how do you deal with childlessness when somebody asks you about the death of a child and they've lost a child then you understand it's a very emotional issue and you have to answer it differently so you answer the question for the person who's asking the question therefore the biggest most effective to tool you can develop is the following phrase what do you mean because a lot of people answer the question that they think the person is asking as opposed to answering the question that they're actually asking so there's an old story where a little kid comes to his mommy and says Mommy where did I come from now of course she's been dreading this question you know have to explain about procreation where do children come from and so she talks about the birds and the bees and brings out charts and big bees and Little Bees and explain everything she can to avoid answering the question and when she's all done she says does that answer you question and he says no Bobby says he comes from Philadelphia where do I come from so if she would have just said what do you mean she would have saved herself a lot of time a girl once asked me a question about women's role in Judaism and I went into a whole explanation and she was annoyed because I didn't answer her question I didn't start by asking what do you mean so the next time a woman asked me why is Judaism so unfair to women I said what do you mean they said they have this Big M and I can't see the service I said why don't you sit up front she said what a great idea thank you that was her whole question so it really helps a lot if you can figure out what they're really asking now I was speaking once at a forum answering basic questions and I gave this introduction and I said okay are there any questions that you anticipate being asked so a guy says yeah what about daving I said okay like I said let's define what the question is are you asking why do we dove in in a set form why can't I just make it up why do we D in three times a day uh why is it in Hebrew uh why do I DAV doesn't already know uh everything that I need what's the different forms of what's your question and he goes I don't know I didn't think about it and people just throw out questions without even thinking about it what do you mean so I probably have told this story before um I was listening to the radio once before Tish and there was this English uh fellow who had a program on the English news you know on uh Co Israel on the English Pro program and he had a reform and Orthodox Rabbi uh whether or not uh Tish of is still relevant today so uh he asked the Orthodox Rabbi and he says yes because the temple was destroyed for for worthless hatred and don't we see hatred among the Jewish people today and so it's still relevant and they asked the reformed Rabbi and he says no of course not yeah he says why would I mourn a building that was destroyed 2,000 years ago the Jews have come back to Israel we're rebuilding every place you live we're building there's houses there factories there's life TI is totally irrelevant so then he said to the Orthodox Rabbi so you want to see the rebuilding of the temple and he said yes I do with animal sacrifices and you could hear the rabbi literally gasp like you could hear it on the radio and then he began to discombobulate well of course one has to understand when we talk about these things I mean there is a view that there'll only be uh offerings from the vegetable Kingdom of course that's not a majority View and and he was literally melting like the witch at the end of Wizard of Oz and he turns to the reformed Rabbi he says you want to see anal sacrifice of course not ha ha every was laughing and new ta Rabbi was dying and at the time the story has to be almost 35 years ago I didn't ever think about it and I realized that for the grace of God so would go I I didn't think about it and there's a general rule when it comes to answering questions and that is fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me if you get asked a question and you don't have a good answer to it then go back and think about it and work on it and talk to people till you get an answer that does work and take time work it out make sure that it's something that you're comfortable with that actually works someone asks you a question and you get an answer and the answer doesn't work for you be very wary you know the the the guys in the program would always say to me what question can you answer I said a lot of them has to do with I'm talking about how wonderful Torah is and they point to Torah observant Jews who are not so wonderful so like they say how could you explain Orthodox Jews who smoke when we know today that it causes cancer and empyema and heart disease we know it and I always said I don't know how to answer that question so one time one of the guys said because there haven't been any studies done on people who smoke for six days and rest their lung for the seventh okay I'll try that and next time the question came up I gave that answer and a cardiologist stood up and said I have the numbers for you rabbi by they die like everyone [Laughter] else somebody said to me how do you explain um these uh you know when people say these Jews and may sh who throw rocks at people so a guy says I've I've been asked this and I said do you know anyone who's ever had rocks thrown at them it's an urban legend it's never happened I said okay I'll try it so the next time someone said to me I says it's an urban legend you know nobody May charm throws rocks at anyone so guy says I was on the remote Road when people were throwing rocks I said but it wasn't May shm right other guy said I brought a group and someone threw acid in one of the girls' face I said but it wasn't a rock and I realized I was stuck in defending the indefensible it's a bad place to be you don't want to be in that position so don't give an answer that you're not comfortable with and work it out and work it out I had this problem when people would ask me you know women who wear Shad why is that okay needless to say that if a woman was covered up from the neck to the waist and all the way down to her wrists with a seethrough outfit that would not beat sonua so how is it okay to put a head covering on so uh I had different answers that I tried and they would always get slugged up it took me years to I could come up with a right answer auna was another issue that took me a very long time till I could come up with an answer that I was satisfied with the other answers didn't work for me so you have to have an answer that you're comfortable with but the first thing you ask is what do you mean make sure you understand what the question is so I had heard this uh question about animal sacrifices and I sat down and I thought about it what would I say and I spent a long time on it six months later I was in a question and answer and sure enough someone asked me the question not that anybody cares about it nobody cares about the answer and this guy says okay Rabbi what about animal sacrifices because whenever a rabbi gets asked that question they G like the guy did on the radio but I'm prepared I've worked on it says okay Rabbi what about animal sacrifices I said what about him now he wasn't ready because he had never really thought about the question he just knows that rabbi's gag he goes you're killing animals I said are you a vegetarian no how do you think they get the meat think they go over to a cow and say could you spare a rib well I'm not there when it happens I said no problem you can appoint a hit Cohen to take the cow out for you you don't have to do it yeah but uh but uh it's barbaric why because barbarians do it barbarians eat lunch they eat lunch not everything that The Barbarians do are barbaric you know so the guy was stuck he didn't know what to say cuz he had never thought about the question he just knows if you say this rabbi's gay and I put the onus on him to explain what his question was I said you know what let me see if I can restate your question I understand it's okay to kill animals for a purpose like eating them is there a purpose to animal sacrifices was that your question uh yeah oh that's a great question okay the ramban asks it at the beginning of a yikra let's go into that but I refined the question by getting him to ask it I'm almost positive I've told this story before but it's one of my favorites in 1995 um there was a Shabbat by uh yavi yavi is a worldwide Collegiate organization that mostly exists in Europe I don't know today if it's still around but and they would have uh at the end of May what they call the Shabbat and every campus would have a Shabbat where students would come it was a major event and most of the time uh you know would depend on the how many Jews were there how active they were but the largest yava branch was uh in Leeds University and in fact Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs was slated to be the scholar in residents for that shop because it was the biggest one but as it happened May 1995 was the 50th anniversary of VE Day victory in Europe and the queen asked the chief Rabbi to please join her for the ceremonies so he cancelled on them and it's pretty close now they've already used up all the good speakers so they're kind of stuck so they call me would you please come to our Shabbat and leads it's the largest one I said okay but first I have to call the Queen and cancel so I canceled on the queen and I went down to Leeds University and I spoke I think I went over well but they had a much larger turnout Friday night than they did shabas day but shambas day as we're sitting at the meal a guy comes over to me and says You Know Chief Rabbi sax was supposed to be here and I said I know he says if he came I wouldn't have come and I said why is that that and he said because I'm a progressive Jew and Rabbi saxs doesn't like Progressive Jews now if you've been paying attention till now you know what my answer was oh and then he said to me what do you think about progress of Jews and I said look I'll I'll tell you the truth I don't know what it is um we don't have it in America is it like reform he says no it's not like reform I said is it like conservative he says it's not like conservative I said what is it and over the next five minutes we came together to a few conclusions he had no idea what Progressive Judaism was but he knew that he was one and he knew that he didn't like Rabbi saxs because he didn't like Progressive Jews and he liked me because I did not have a position on it because I didn't know what it was and neither did he and by the end of the meal he decided he was going to keep shabas but why do I have to answer the question what do I have to provided for you're telling me what's my position on Progressive I don't know what it means and I say you explain it to me I don't know what it is you know I've had situations where people make these statements they use this very fancy jogging to ask some kind of question and I say I don't know what that means he goes well if you don't know what it means I can't explain it to you I said give it a try I'm a pretty bright guy he says no no no if you don't know I can't explain to you one time I kept pushing the guy it came out sounding uh sounding too argumentative so now I just say okay and I turn to the crowd and I say one of the hardest questions to answer is the one where the person asking the question cannot tell you what the question is so when you figure out how to explain to me what your question is I'll be happy to answer it until that point I'm really not interested in answering it because there's no question here other than the fact that you're insisting I have a question that you can't answer so uh so I always like to put the the onus on them so when it goes to answering a question you have to figure out first of all is the person sincere number one number two how invested are they in this question number three how much time are they willing to give you number four make sure you know what the question is that they're asking and where the question is coming from and then you can spend your time answering the question in as short a period as possible like I say if you have part of the 5% of people who are actually interested in hearing your question and will actually spend time on it okay now you have to get your sources but I have developed a series of short answers for uh people who are not interested in hearing a long answer that are essentially theas that will technically answer the question without you know getting too deep into it so that if a person's really interested hopefully they'll study more but at least it'll solve the initial problem and uh we're not going to have time to do that in our context obviously if you have been listening to my podcast when we come to the question and answer section that's part of what I do some of these questions are questions that are there but I have a more massuda way of doing it and uh I uh uh I have been asked a number of times can I do this as an online course and teach people how to answer basic questions on Judaism so I didn't get much response to the idea of starting a pavos course but perhaps this is something that interests people and if uh you can write to me on my website RAB ali.com if there are enough people who are interested in such a course course I will offer it to them to go systematically through all of the different questions that people ask the basic questions uh in Judaism and how to answer those questions so again you know how to reach me and you know how to find me and uh that's the that's something we might do and as would seem appropriate that brings us to the question and answer portion of our program and we have a sponsor for this week's question and answer sponsored by Jeremy spiegelman thank you rabi for the Torah and the my pleasure it should be a to find the for myself Yim Ben ranana and my friend B Zev Ben Rosa kava oh you should be and since uh there are a lot of people who watch this podcast I know there are single girls out there who are looking for a quality guy what could be more of a quality guy than someone who sponsors a question and answer session in the RAB olowski show so I'm going to ask you uh Mr spiegelman that for you and your friend please send me your sh resume because I'm sure I'm going to be inated by young ladies who say tell me about these guys how old are they what are they doing and maybe we can facilitate that not just the BR and the but maybe we can find you a wonderful young lady who's looking for a guy like you okay by Yehuda W can you please translate the BR of bur thank you I assume you're not just looking for a translation because you can get that in the art scroll um I said this those of you who are on my online UHA she when I started at the beginning I said you know one of the problems with daving I say is that people don't know what they're saying people say to me no I have an odd schroll and I say so it used to be you didn't know what you were saying in Hebrew now you don't know what you're saying in English if you want to transl you can just go to one of the translations obviously you're trying to figure out what the understanding of the braa is that we say if the food that is not fruit of the tree which gets its own braa because fruit of the tree is very important as we will hear when I speak about tuat um and it's not about bread or wine or the shim all of which have extra special meaning it's not talking about even vegetables which have a extra level of of stuff like milk and eggs you know things like that when you eat them instead we make the so let's try to get a little insight this is a very important because someone did a calculation how much it would cost if you had to make a roast beef sandwich on your own you would have to have land and you would have to plow it and you would have to seed it and you would have to harvest it and winnow it and thresh it and grind it and everything necessary to make the flour to be able to bake the bread then you'd have to have a cow and you'd have to raise the cow and then you'd have to sh the cow and then you have to Sal and soak the cow and you'd have to go through all the process necessary to get the meat and then if you want to put some lettuce and tomato on it forget about it it will turn out to be $1,000 easy to be able to make one by scratch if not more whereas a rast beef sandwich is much cheaper than that if everybody joins in together so if the farmer does his job and the and the uh flower Mill does their job and the baker does his job and The Herder the Rancher does his job and the sh does his job and the butcher does his job yeah and then the restorant gets all of these things and puts it together for you it'll be much cheaper everybody was born with lacking it's almost impossible for somebody to make it completely on their own Jules Vern wrote a fascinating novel called mysterious island where these people escape a Confederate prison camp in Richmond in a balloon during a storm this is quite a storm because it blows them all the way across the entire continent of North America out into the Pacific Ocean into a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific that's some storm really unusual especially when you consider that the winds in the world Blow from west to east and this was a storm that took them from East all the way across the Appalachia mountains across the Rocky Mountains out into the Pacific Ocean quite an unusual storm but anyway they land on this island and they have nothing and there's a guy there named Cyrus who's something of a scientist and he figures out the most amazing things but even Cyrus can't do anything there's a guy there pencroft who is a um a sailor and he knows certain things that other people don't know and everybody has something to contribute to it so even though Cyrus is very very smart he can't do everything himself and so you can find somebody you know the old expression jack of all trades master of none you can find people who know a little bit about everything but of course certain people are going to be more expert in different areas and uh be able to speak about it in a different way so uh everybody has their job and a farmer probably is not going to be a weaver he might know how to weave a little bit but he's not going to be a weaver he can't be a weaver and a tailor and a doctor know and and and be able to do everything even a self-sustaining Farm has to buy their equipment they're not doing Metallurgy to be able to make their tools everybody needs people in this world and so after we have eaten we say you've created many different people with many lackings yeah in order to Keep Us Alive it's all of us working together no man is an island yeah a person can't do it on their own it takes a village yeah keeps the all the different types of people in this world alive everybody has their contribution and through the benefit of Commerce everyone can work together to be able to survive and that's why when Yakov ainu comes to sh it says he made an improvement Rashi says he either made a shook a Marketplace so people can do business or he created coinage so people didn't only have to relate on barter to be able to do business when everyone works together we can make the world a much easier place and that's it for this week if you you want to find out more about the show you can go to my website rabi oli.com and you can sign up for one of my online shurm you can express interest if you want the question and answer series uh you can uh there are shorum and things to download over there uh you can leave a comment you can ask a question you can sponsor an episode sponsor a question and answer sponsor parure and five yeah all of these opportunities are there you can uh still find the link for the uh Torah live discount where you can sign up for Torah live Rabbi sitter and uh be able to get all of that uh um premium uh material at a 10% discount and that's it for this week until next time I am d ravski and this has been the rabbi olowski show it's the rabbi orlovski show Tor and S ready to go the rabbi orsky show knowledge and wisdom will help you grow lots of fun in every episode and we don't have to ride no we don't it's the rabbi orlovski show on Rabbi or.com T anytime you and more it's grab or lski show Torah and ready to go the rabbi or show till next time till we meet again it's the rabbi Orlowski show it's the rabbi Orlowski show it's the rabbi Orlowski show