Rabbi Shais Taub on "Getting Off of the Emotional Rollercoaster"—Sfas Emes on Chayei Sarah

all right all right officially starting so this is uh thursday night challenge we have real talent i finished mine already i finished mine before this year everyone else eats theirs staring and share you can watch this on youtube but you can't keep the challenge on youtube charlotte because we chill and also we do something different every single week we mix it up keep it uh keep it diverse and exciting when they say variety is the spice of life okay so this week we have for you alter the samus is a collection of thrushes of the sermons that svasemes gave and it's called svasamis it was published posthumously because the last russia is fresh what's that in english 19 what was it right because it was january so it would have been already oh no no it would be 19 uh 1905. all right yeah yeah okay yeah yeah right okay it was partial he and the last words of the rosh of that year was emma so they called the whole thing's facades which means language of truth lips of truth and that's what it's called okay so the the particular mimer that we're learning here obviously is partisan because that's the parsha this week it's from puff res nun which would be what 1890 6 although probably it was 1895 still because it was like this time of year where it's like not yet the next secular year so it's like the autumn of 1895. okay here we go the days of the to how we're going to translate to me it doesn't just mean righteous or upright or you're good people but it means whole complete intact the people who have fullness that's a it's a by word for tzadikim but it's a special word and we're going to see it has significance okay so hashem knows what david says until hashem hashem hashem knows the days of the complete of the intact you know it's interesting because in lubavitch the yeshiva is called which is named that the rabbit was a contemporary of this fassemus a name that the rabbit ashab gave to the yeshiva it's actually from the uh from the uh from kastera so we say uh so uh the ship is called temperature and the bagham the talmudim are called really long like meditative slow david a long time and he finished chakras chakra sanchabas like later in the afternoon and so that now he has to go make kiddish so he was like scrounging around looking for some wine get a reviews wine he was trying to find you know everything to to make kiddish and uh specifically as you see in the story he needed mishna so the two two khalas two shlaimus the inhalation is supposed to use a schleimer means complete intact it wasn't broken or cut from so um this baker is walking around the uh the zhao trying to find the uh the the two uh carlos and mendo fotefast was for branding and he was getting distracted by this bachelor and finally the mendel stopped he looks at the box and says he says schleimest i'm looking at that's i'm looking for slaves means complete intact hollow rolls sort of without missing a beat says atomim meaning a talmud of time atomium is a slaying he was saying you know in the ashkenazi pronunciation you slur the last syllables like a schwa so it sounds the same so he said [Music] atomic don't look for schleich means i want to be perfect i want to be you know i want to be a big deal no just look for integrity just have integrity be aligned that everything should be one straight shot you know your beliefs and your ideas and your emotions and your behaviors it should all be integrated no fragmentation no hypocrisy no uh you know double standards anyways that that's means complete everything is complete and what what we're going to see here and it's also what this fast hemis is saying tamimus means a certain consistency through and through with no variation okay let's take a look so like we're saying the major says just like these tsaddikim these righteous people like the obvious and the emojis are to me they themselves are called their years are intact or whole or perfect or complete what does that mean that their years are whole or complete or whatever well let's look what rashi said ashley is the foremost commentator the commentator he says is the simple literal concrete meaning rashes says the years of saudi's life were all equally good because he's he's answering a question they said she was 100 years and 20 years and seven years these are the years of of sarah so he says he explains why does it recap these were the years so that you shouldn't think there's a hundred years there were this like this and then there was 20 years there were like another way in the seven years or even though the posix says at the end even though the puzzle says that different groups of years but at the end it says these are the years of the life of sarah to tell you they were all equally good couldn't shove in later they were all equally good and this fascinates says what does that mean all of her years were equally good because as he's about to say i don't know i know her biography i read a little bit of hamish and didn't seem like all her years were equally good so this faucets explains i'm talking subjectively taking i'm talking about how she took it how she took it shove in here equal means me this is equanimity equanimity means you know the the seventh doesn't say this here but the the says and the pastor can tell them to tell them i've placed the lord before me at all times means i've placed i place the lord before me at all times that means i'm god conscious i'm constantly aware of hashem so uh just a little side story because garrett comes from comes from kotz so i'll tell you a katsuka story there's a katsuka story about a baker who is from a non-hasidic yeshiva and he ran away and he went to kotsk and then when he came back to town his old roshiva caught him in the street and he's like hey why'd you run away what'd you learn in kutz that i can't teach you you know i could teach you whatever you want so he's like um well if i tell you one thing they taught me that you can't teach me would you forgive me he's like yeah sure if it's true i mean you got to tell you got to back it up he said okay they taught me to be a dearmachalvis they taught me to read minds clairvoyant so the old rosh yeshiva from the non-hasidic old yeshiva he says to the buffer he says that's an outlandish claim you can't just go and say that you learned by the siddha how to read minds you got to prove it you got to read my mind he says fine i'll read your mind think something you got to really concentrate and if you really concentrate on something i will tell you what it is so the roshashi was like okay yeah go ahead i'm thinking it's like no but you're really concentrating yes i'm really concentrating you really you got it clear says yes i'm thinking very quick okay you're thinking right now chavisi hashem and negdy summit i have placed the lord before me at all times i am always god conscious rosh yeshua says i'm not thinking that at all the bachelor says i know that's why i ran away to cuts okay so anyways shivisi hashem negri-same like the gosh that when it comes to gash mirrors i'm talking nothing about ruknia is like oh it had a bad davening but yeah good diving that's all the same it's all charlotte no it means and about says whether people are nice to you or they're mean to you whether you eat nice food like the challenge that we have here or you eat plain food whatever you would normally eat if you wouldn't come no i'm sure you have good food at all but the point is whether you are experiencing pleasure or the opposite of pleasure emotionally you're supposed to be even keel and that's called me this equanimity okay so this fascema says how can rashes say that sorta's life was all equally good when we know that she had ups and downs he says well subjectively the way she took it she had such equanimity or the philosophers might call it stoicism although i hate the quote other isms lahavdil because this is not not an ism but that idea of i'm not going to be reactive not going to be reactive to my environment and the changes changes of my environment okay so and and in this fast semester he attributes it to the crave speaks about this idea of stavos especially in shadow talking about being unflappable whatever happens you know it's all good just write it out and uh don't don't be so uh reactive all right vahu lege de la lies adam amid bitte me musay the whole masha ever olaf this is a great virtue to be able to basically um remain the same that's how he's translating or that's how he's using the word to mimos timos is you're able to just be complete and whole in any situation so the situation's changing you're not changing you never change you know i heard one time someone explain it like the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat some people are like thermometers some people like thermostats a thermometer tells you the temperature in the room a thermostat tells the room the temperature so there are people who are reactive that's like a person who's a thermometer if it's hot so the mercury goes high right his wife yelled at him today and then you see he looks all grumpy he's yelling at people on the road he's road raging right because he's reactive and then there's someone who's like a thermostat he wakes up in the morning said my dad and he's full of gratitude that's it even though his wife also yells at him by the way do you think that was no but it didn't bother him it was fine and he didn't road rage and he didn't didn't take it out in any way because he was good okay vegeta is says look man life's always going to be hard there's an asylum of wealth and there's a an assailant a test the tribulation of uh of poverty refers to says poverty and then he says wealth but the point is being poor is a test being wealthy is a test everything's a test everything's difficult [Music] in kosher in the beginning of her life she had some hard times objectively speaking what the outside observer would see what the what the biographer would see she had some hard times vein with a famine remember when they first did their lachlan they came to edits canaan which was recalled back then they had a famine le padre bobby melech and then when she got kidnapped not once but twice she got kidnapped twice once by party and then by every melee okay so she had some hard times uber safiya meha then at the end of her life hoyo lehem cole tuv they meaning of ramen soda had all goodness not just wealth they were very wealthy but then they were blessed with yitzhak they had a child at an old age and yet they did not change in response to all of those changes so the their situation around them was changing but they were not changed the uh i think yesterday was the yard site first york site of uh jonathan sachs although so he has a great story he says that when he was in cambridge so he basically scammed the free trip to america by saying he's going to interview uh jewish leaders so they paid for his trip to uh go to america and then he had to interview jewish leaders who had different and he made sure that the jewish leaders he was interviewing one on the east coast one on the west coast he he planned out an itinerary so could uh you know see america anyway so one of the jewish leaders he interviewed was the laboratory so he asked alabama to have about leadership he says that he flipped it on him he's like no he started he started asking jonathan sachs about jewish leadership like he flipped it on like no you're the leader you're the leader now jonathan sacks you're saying of course he was a leader a jewish leader or a chief rabbi this is long before he was interested in being a rabbi at all let alone a chief rabbi and he certainly did not see himself as like a leader of jewish activity on campus and the devil flips it on him and he's like what are you doing for a jewish life on campus and he he was like so take him back so he tried to like dry out of it so he he says he started constructing this convoluted sentence and he's like well in the circumstances in which i currently find myself like trying to give an excuse and he said that evan did something at that point which he thought was quite uncharacteristic for that ever he cut him off mid-sentence and he said you don't find yourself in a circumstance you create your circumstance so this is what we're saying here yeah life changes there's the vicissitudes of life sarda's life we know she had hard times she had good times but the point is that sora and avram were tamim which means that emotionally they were even keel the whole time they were thermostats not thermometers and this is what it means in the mission when it says there were 10 tests avraham was tested with 10 tests of and he passed all of them and the reason he was tested was to illustrate so hashem could show the world how beloved was pirush what does that mean because of his great love for hashem i'm saying not how beloved was but rather the great love that avraham had for hashem called me all the winds in the world could not make him budge from his place in other words he had an interesting life he had 10 tests but he internally he was the same he was rock solid he stayed complete he stayed intact he didn't even feel what was happening to him now what does it mean he didn't even feel it you'd ask him what's happening i'm sure he understood he could tell you what's happening right i'm being thrown into a fiery furnace right now but the point is he didn't say oh no i'm being thrown into a fire it's like okay then i was throwing to a fire furnace and then then i had lunch just that's life you know stuff happens okay uh lei kederhanoshi this is not like your regular human way this is not the normal human nature normal people experience many shinoyam not just in a lifetime but on a daily basis they are experiencing emotional fluctuations so they're up and then they're down they're out there oh the light turned green great i'm making such a good time and then all of a sudden like city garbage truck pulls up in front oh no no i'm stuck behind a garbage truck no i'm depressed okay so regular people they experience these fluctuations constantly on a daily basis like repeatedly throughout the day the heme kolcheny say him but they of raman saw all of their years their whole life lay nice of them shinily they did not change whatever was happening they stayed the same you know we're talking about we're not talking about somebody who's oblivious we're not saying that they don't know what's happening to them what we're talking about is somebody who's internal mental and emotional state is not dependent on the circumstances around them so the regular human way he calls it the regular human way i mean he said he's admitting that sora and avraham are doing something superhuman they're rising above human nature but also he's recommending that we all do the same but or is going to say that you know we should we should all strive to do this the point is regular human nature is of course you're going to be reactive so uh if you experience pain you're happy you've experienced pleasure i mean if you experience pain you said you've experienced pleasure you're happy but what he's saying is it doesn't have to be locked in like that doesn't have to be it doesn't have to it doesn't have to be that because i'm eating ice cream i'm happy and uh you know if i'm stuck in a traffic jam or get a paper cut the i i like to use like very benign examples of bad things i just figured like god forbid in case i'm putting anything out there i just want it to be like the worst thing is traffic jam and a paper cut that's okay anyways but so you would think i'm eating ice cream i i'm happy i'm uh i got a paper cut i'm sad yeah of course you can be aware of the fact that something is happening to you or maybe even that it's causing pain or it's causing pleasure but that shouldn't have any bearing on your emotional state shouldn't have any bearing on your emotional state your your emotional state should be a constant it could be a constant state of symptom not to uh i mean it's not that we need to have a secular basis for this because we have the farsemus we have the balchemte but uh you know this is what viktor frankl wrote in logotherapy he was a holocaust of arus and auschwitz and he said basically he came to the conclusion that you cannot control your circumstances but you can control your reaction to circumstances that was the whole basis of logotherapy okay so this is far samus you know 50 years before before franco let's say the same idea that your circumstances can change and you're not in control of your circumstances but your emotional state can be a constant tell you a story by the way that is related to frankl i don't know how related it is but it has echoes of frankl i heard from shmuel that one time he was sitting with mendel futafast second red medal story of the night so schmuler was sitting with mendel foterfast you see when alabacher teaches far semester you get two red medal football stories anyway so you have uh schmulu sitting with uh mendel in in in london amanda lived in london for a while and uh so they were talking i don't know how it got to this point but amanda would sometimes speak about his experiences in uh the gulag and like the the slave labor camp where the communists sent him so he was telling shmuel about this professor that was in the camp with him and you know like it was weird because like there were political prisoners like like him and they were like uh common criminals most of the people that were just comment criminals and then there was this professor he was there because he was an intellectual a lot of times the communists were suspicious of intellectuals they actually have a joke they had a joke why does the kgb always work in groups of three because you need one who knows how to write you need another one who knows how to read and then you need a third one to keep his eye on the two intellectuals okay so they were suspicious of intellectuals so this professor got thrown in this gulag because he was an intellectual anyways i do not know when or if uh this professor saw frankl but it's very interesting this is in the 60s the latest in in the soviet union so i don't know if they had frankel or if someone smuggled in a copy or something like that but he said that at mendel he says i'm studying the people in this prison and i'm seeing i'm like forming a theory here because i see like a lot of these guys are healthy and young but then like they in the morning one day they'll just say i can't get up off the cot like to go work and we come back and they're dead and physically they should be you know they're young and healthy they shouldn't be dropping dead but i then i see you and you're like you are so you know you're like the healthiest guy here and i really think it has to do with like your attitude i really think like the mental uh factor so mendel agreed with him he says yeah he says but i'll explain it to you he's like see these guys that you know are dropping dead these young guys even though physically they're healthy but he says you have to understand something these guys are cost sex things these guys are low lives cossacks are low lives for them all of life is just three things it's um a horse a rifle and a bottle of vodka that's life that's all that's that's their whole life so when they come to this place they have those three things taken away from them they don't have a horse anymore they don't have a rifle and they don't have a bottle of vodka well those things are life and those things were taken so life was taken so it's only a matter of time until the body will get the memo from the brain that you're dead already so just so just die he says but me what did they take from me here over here being here they didn't take anything from me because what's life life is you try your best to serve hashem so my life is really very similar here to how it was at home like nothing really changed he says in fact in some ways it's easy it's even better because like you know at home i'm working in my office he used to work in office forging passports get to get jews out of russia polish passports after the war on the polish because the war the war front was always moving eastward so if you could say you were polish you would get deported so to speak you know quote unquote even though they were really from russia um which they wanted and then from there they would go to like france or for their so anyways um so remember says you know back home i'm sitting in my office and the sun's going down oh you have to dive in you have to dive in because you know i go you go he says over here it's the same thing i'm working not in an office your work they were chopping wood just working on chopping wood oh the sun's going down got it now there's no shell to go to and in fact you can't even daven out loud or they'll shoot you in the head but while i'm chopping wood i'll i'll silently you know i'll dub it uh in my in my thoughts and in fact while i'm dominating i'll think to myself you know in all the years since hashem created the earth i bet no one stood on this exact spot and said his praises so in some ways my life's even better over here you see they it kind of improved my life okay so it's the difference between defining a good life based on the stuff that changes meaning material circumstances pain and pleasure that kind of stuff stimuli which are always in flux always changing or you say no life is about serving hashem and that's a constant so whatever situation you put me in no i'm always able to so hashem and therefore emotionally i'm solid i'm intact i'm tommy okay so let's keep going so about them about of ramen sora who lived this way it says and this is from the asia's heil right tell me if you recognize this the malasso te veleira well he doesn't quote the the part of it he just says hulu etc curl you may ha so what does that mean that she does him good all the days of her life it means kayla called me in venice it means that all of the days of her life whether she's going through tests of poverty or tests of wealth whether whether it's a high high or a low low she considers her whole life good equally good equally good there's no fluctuation there the um and it says right the measure that we quoted in the beginning says just like they that the righteous just like the righteous are perfect complete intact so to their lives the days of their lives or the years of their lives are perfect completely intact now he says another dimension to it another way of describing this is that they're above time like how can they be impervious to the ups and downs of life you know time itself is change what is time forget which philosopher said time is the way that god keeps everything from happening at once like what is time time is change that's that's that's what it is in fact a year a shauna is from the word shinoi which means change that's what time is so the fact that they don't change is because they transcend time they rise above time is like it says you know who said that i woke the dawn the dawn didn't wake me so simple meaning is i woke up before the sun i woke up before the light most people the light wakes them up no i woke up before the light you know who said that david malik i woke up before the light the light didn't wake me up i woke the light up okay so what does that mean here that every day brings something new every day brings new experiences you're gonna meet new people you're going to learn something new it's true every day is going to be new so there's a change every day and every year for good or for bad that's that's true there are good days or moments of the day there are good years or parts of the year and and vice versa they're above that they're above the changes of time the hey mev and they bring completeness into time in other words their completeness which means their unwavering mental and emotional state they bring that into time how do they bring that into time by having the same attitude toward life no matter what's changing around them in time okay and this is also the meaning so as fast amis is going to unpack a passage from kehalus from it says happy or fortunate is the land whose king is a free person whose king is like a real kink not like uh a vassal or like uh not somebody who's you know a puppet who's uh controlled by someone else so what does that mean happy is the land whose king is uh you know uh autonomous let's call it happy is the land who has a a ruler who is truly autonomous za jerusalet what that means is someone who has the ability to be autonomous to go out of nature and time meaning to rise above the the the properties of nature and time which are which are in general like we're saying uh always changing but he's not subjected to that he's not subjected to that so uh he's called the ben hayden he's called free he's called autonomous he's emotionally autonomous because even though his life is changing he doesn't have to be reactive to it so he's emotionally autonomous he's a ben okay then the the posit continues actually i think actually this is the previous possible i think he quotes the second passage first the first possible second uh the ace so it says or maybe this is that no this is the continuation of this passage and then next he quotes the previous basic they eat in the right time it's talking about the sodom it says the king is autonomous and the and and the ministers like the cabinet officials uh eat at the right time so he says they eat at the right time who ace kavu allah this means the time that is set for them i think that means that um they are set meaning they're not reactive to what's changing and the previous plastic says ilock edits woe to the land whose king is a well this is like the opposite of a uh ben he's uh the the the in context the puzzle means that he's uh he's uh no worse than that because it it it means he's uh he's a lackey he's like a henchman he's not a real king he's not really autonomous he's like uh beholden to somebody over baker and in the morning they eat the sodium that's like sad that's the first one was good that the king is autonomous and the ministers eat at a fixed time then the sad one is the king is lackey and the ministers eat in the morning so what does that mean meaning in the morning it's a specific time so they're set under time as opposed as opposed to being the same no matter what time they are subjected or they are subject to time and that's why they experience changes internal changes based on the changes around them in time okay uh then there's a whole part here which is about maybe i'll read one more line but then it goes into a different concept about mata samakhela and about uh ghanaid and different levels of ghanaian but yeah it goes into a different subject but i'll just read one more line here the ikeratomimus who liaised the main concept what does it mean this integrity or this complete intact state is to be cleaving to your source on high before hashem so the way he's reading it is you want to be a tamim you want to be this emotional rock who's like not reactive then it's you have to connect to hashem because hashem is unchanging hashem is eternal so if you're anchored in hashem then you'll be atomium then you will not be reactive then you won't be a thermometer he called lavish like everything that is below has a source above so when you're experiencing something instead of reacting to it as it's manifesting down here in time and space which is changing and in flux stop and say hold on a second this thing that i'm experiencing now this situation this encounter this uh well this uh situation this whatever it is that's happening yeah in down here in the time space continuum on the lowest plane it is in flux but it comes from a higher source it's choirish it's root and in its root which is hashem it's unchanging how is it unchanging because hashem is uh that's what you'd give up he means so anyways what he's saying is when you're experiencing anything in life and you're experiencing it as oh that was good oh that was bad stop a second and realize no it's all it's all hashem and it's all the same and you don't have to go on an emotional roller coaster that's what it means to be a tummy a tummy means there's no emotional rollercoaster okay fine i'm going to uh we'll stop it over here we have a minion for mine is that possible for people who want to die