Rabbi Shlomo Farhi The Project Inspire Convention 2021

our topic for tonight is called redefining joy you know one of the most important things in life when a person is searching for something is to understand what it is that you're looking for because if you don't know what it is that you're looking for even if you found it you wouldn't know so it's crucial to be able to define what it is that we're looking for what are we trying to find now in the constitution of the united states of america uh those of us who have read it uh obviously those of us uh in this room i'm sure that feel that there were people in the last month that have not read it but whatever the case might be without getting into any myself in daniel hot water the constitution united states it declares in its attempt to find the most important things for the citizens of this great union it uh it declares that we should have the ability to have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness it's the most crucial thing if you would imagine that a person can try to find in their life you could have everything in your world in the world but if you're not happy you'd rather actually not be alive so when uh when the constitution demanded this for the betterment of society it makes us wonder because if it's so important to a bunch of people to the founding fathers of this country surely it would be something that would be important to a religion which is so obsessed with the health of its adherents with the fact that people should believe leading powerful important considered lives so if that's the case so let's take a look and see what our constitution says about this elusive thing called joy or happiness you know famous is the dictum that states a great mitzvah to be uh to be happy to be joyful and that's the one that's always pointed at but most people don't know that that's not actually in the torah it's not actually in the mishnah it's not actually in the gemara it doesn't appear until thousands of years later when it gets uh when it gets popularized in the rise of khasidut but there is a pasuk in the torah that does say it hashem because you did not serve hashem your god with joy and with the gladness of heart and the talmud tells us that this verse this pasuk is actually describing a time of such great sadness a time of destruction of upheaval when the temple was destroyed and they wondered why did they deserve to be driven away from jerusalem that the temple should be risen to the ground why why were they driven into exile why did people die why did they have such terrible things happen to them and the pasuk's answer cryptic though it may be is because they did not have joy clearly the torah praised places such a premium on simcha that even if they were doing everything else correctly they were doing uh talmud torah they were studying they were doing charity one with the other they were finding ways to open up him and build beautiful schools and have fantastic mikhwa everything that they should do they were doing but they weren't doing it with a smile on their face and that was enough to warrant the most terrible punishments look at how much the torah values simha joy but if that's the case my friends i want to ask you a question that shook me when i first thought of it you know how you live your life and all of a sudden you have a question and it's so powerful you wonder how is it that i never asked that question as a rabbi i find it actually annoying not just annoying to go to other rabbis classes but i find it annoying when a rabbi asks a question not a good question an obvious question because i'm upset with myself how do i not live my whole life not making speeches forget that stuff i lived my whole life talking about this thinking about this how could something be so obvious and i missed it and here's a question it's very important we all agree and yet every single morning every single afternoon and every single night we have a prayer called the shemonia the amidah the silent prayer and in this blessing we ask for many things all important and yet not one of the brahot asks for simcha how could that be we ask for brains we ask for teshuva right we ask for parnassa we ask that our prayers should be answered and we don't ask for happiness i read something today that was sent to me by email um that actually it made me both very sad ironically and almost brought me to despair it was one line one statistic that is now true during corona in the age bracket of 18 to 24 years old a full 25 that's one quarter of all young people 18 to 24 in america report having had serious thoughts of suicide one quarter you have four kids ask yourself which kid it was you have eight kids can i know her ask yourself which two kids it is you have 12 kids make a semen of depressed kids but the point is rabbotai you're looking at something which is so real and so immediate and so important that we have to figure out how to talk about this in another way how to communicate how to access simcha in another way or will have a serious problem on our hands why is it no bracha as rabbis do before i give you any closure or ask give you an answer to the first question of course i'll give you another question one of my favorite things is to imagine any other job in which you could get away with that come to the doctor you say my right arm is broken he says i'm going to fix it but first let me break your left arm no one right you know you come you busted one tire the guy's like no problem i'll fix it it's not only rabbis i'm not sure why i'm part of the problem not the solution all right the gemara tells us from the time that adar begins we start dialing up we bring excess joy into our lives and that's a strange thing on many levels number one what does that mean be joyful what does that mean right you ever woke up on the wrong side of the bed are you really tired and then someone comes with like good morning does that make you more excited to be awake or does that make you want to commit first-degree murder right what is what does that do there's nothing more annoying to a person who's not basimra than someone telling them smile be happy right like could you imagine the guy's depressed he wants to kill himself and you're like but it's odor it's right it's a strange can we agree it's a strange thing right and rabutai although this is actually a halacha and it has halachic ramifications with regards to scheduling court cases it has halal ramifications according to the urushimi that the entire month is a time which is appropriate to read the megillah we don't hold that way in fact that's what we say the mishnah is coming to exclude when it says that you can't but there's an entire month of joy an entire month of purim it's asking us to live in a different way and one thing you know about the torah they're not joking it's not like you know keep shabbat just kidding i wanted to see who would go along with it really you know i got you it's not what's happening uh first of all if you're like most jews you like pain so that's the reason but i think on a surface level it's easy to fake joy in fact rambam when he's talking actually about the joy of yom tov he's careful to point out that oftentimes what we think is joy is not joy at all rambam uses different expressions to say that's not joy that's that's your tummy rumbling and happy with the big meal that's not really joy you know that's uh just going wild having a great time that's not the torah's definition of simcha but if that's the case we're being asked to do this we are looking at something which i think is very dangerous this proclivity towards fake joy you know sometimes it's easy to see when someone's smile is fake but you know what if they fake a smile long enough they get better and better until eventually others can't tell that it's not real and if they practice more and more an even more dangerous reality emerges when they can't tell themselves if their joy is real and all of a sudden they wake up at one point in their life with this pit in their stomach and out of nowhere everyone says they just got divorced out of nowhere it's not out of nowhere it's 40 years in the making you didn't notice it and sometimes they didn't notice it a child that all of a sudden fails out of school what happened to this kid i don't know what happened it didn't just happened a long time ago but he plastered the smile on his face they were geo president because you know what sometimes it's easier to just do that and have everyone off your case so it's difficult in a world of fake smiles to be able to really address this properly but it's so important that we must do our absolute best the smiliest people you read every week in the newspaper about the suicide of celebrities of instagrammers whose picture-perfect life is shattered by the shards of glass that happen when the frame that they hold up to the world breaks and it tears everything apart what do we do when we have a pandemic of fake smiles when everyone posts a picture of themselves so happy so in love look at my kids look at my family look at my marriage everything is great my business and then poof in the new word that we use for nuclear destruction gamestop but my friends not all smiles were created equal and it's important as a parent as a husband as a father as a human being to become a connoisseur of smiles to recognize that some people smile because they're happy and that is the rarest of smiles and some people smile because they're embarrassed oh you got up for chakras they're smiling because they're embarrassed some people smile because they're mocking you we've seen those smiles remember them i remember them i didn't get here just because i learned in yeshiva i got here because of deep pain and therapy but whilst a smile of embarrassment and a smile of mocking and a smile of flattery are all there for a purpose one to try and get what they want they flat oh you're so amazing you're such a ballast i said my gosh i don't know how i would ever live without you i need another ten thousand right yeah it's amazing those smiles they're an agenda those smiles are there to get something but there are some smiles a true smile on the face of a person it has no purpose whatsoever it's not trying to get anything it just is it represents the outside when the outside and the inside are the same the maharal tells us that the word in hebrew for a person's face is panim because that is what it's supposed to be when their face their panim reflects their pnim their inside but it is getting more and more rare to have panim and pnim be the same so what do we do it reminds me of a story of a man who's in a hospital and he's very very sick and he just gets the terrible news from his doctor that he's probably only gonna survive for another few weeks anyway he's dealing with this devastating news he feels so bad he's trying to be brave for his family in the room and all of a sudden a nurse sticks her head in with a smile on her face and says be positive and the guy in the bed loses it he says you just me she said come here and she says in front of the doctor in front of everyone that's there what kind of terrible staff do you train here a person gets news like this and then someone comes and gives them this fluff about being positive is ridiculous it's disgusting it's disgraceful it's insensitive i want your name i want you fired i want you cancel culture right that's we all deserve to get at least one person fired a week that's this is our right life liberty and the pursuit of firing people this is i need to speak to your manager right this is what we want right so so the guys and he finally finishes and the nurse says are you done he's like yeah she says i was talking to the doctor he asked me to tell him what blood type you were but the crazy thing about a story like that is that actually this concept of be positive is not far off from the truth because this idea that the blood that flows in your veins that the panim actually has a correlation to being positive is something which not only is true on a torah level but also today has the scientific background and backup to be able to show what ghazal and the torah told us thousands of years ago you know there's a researcher her name was sonia lubomirski she is clearly not sephardic and she in the university of california they did a study of over 250 000 people and they tried all different ways to make them happy they gave them they told them they were getting a raise they gave them an upgrade in their hotel they did everything they could imagine you know you have 250 000 people there's a lot of things you could do i'm sure they found like the from evra they gave them challenge has anyone seen the news have you guys seen the news in bernie brock you gotta love this by the way you gotta love this there are people who won't take the vaccine because they're nervous it will cause them problems with fertility and having children they're not sure that it's been proven they think it might cause them death and then they get a phone call and they're told that there's vaccines like i don't think the vaccine is like but there's challenge is that not if that's not the most amazing like interpretation of jewish people right [Laughter] but there's challenge then i found out that the anti-vaxxer cover were giving out milking danishes across the street trying to convince you not to get the vaccine and i thought how silly are these people they don't realize that every shipwalker is first going to go eat the milk of danish and then go get the challenge that's how you rig the system so they did this unbelievable study and in this study they checked they wanted to see how do they make people happy and how does that happiness stick and they discovered that happy people are more sociable they are more altruistic they like themselves they like others they figure out they figure out ways to resolve conflict and not stay uh fighting with other people it even strengthens the immune system things that you never imagined were tied to being happy are literally it can save your life unbelievable and if that is true then the fact that people could have better relationships the fact that people could lead more fulfilling careers lead longer and happier and healthier lives it means that there's something here which unlocks mamish the secret of life and if we could just tap into it then maybe maybe there's a way of of turning this entire story around they discovered something shocking that 50 of being happy and i'm sure this will make a lot of you happy 50 of being happy is genetic so that annoying guy who keeps asking you why you don't have a negative outlook you're like have you met my parents no right you understand some of it is just genetic you were born that way be positive you had the blood in your arms it teaches you the importance of having and raising children in a happy home in a happy home okay but ten percent was related uh to what's it called to a person's specific life circumstances but a full 40 percent was derived and people's happiness was derived from the way they thought about themselves fascinating so it actually didn't matter that's a huge number 40 of your happiness they figured out was actually motivated by how you thought of yourself how you thought your life was going and i thought that that's such a beautiful thing because that research answered my question you could flip a switch and be happy yup because the way you think about yourself that can change slowly or quickly how do you change someone's mind does that go slow or fast well it kind of depends if what you're trying to change is something small then it takes a long time but if you're giving someone a paradigm shift then in a second they can change to the exact opposite of the way they were thinking before and i want to give you an example of just this idea something that happened in my cahilla in london years ago there was a a woman who demanded that her husband give her a get the guy is fighting with his wife he doesn't want to get divorced let's try and make it work that another whole family gets involved everyone's trying to convince this lady she needs to start getting her act together she needs to stop b stop being so selfish she needs to think about the kids and the woman bichella i want to get i want to get i want to get i want to get today a lot of marriages are ruined by the fact that there's a a taxi company called get but either way um rabbi said there's this is the story okay she comes she comes a little sorry she comes along and the brother-in-law asks to speak to her he says listen i'm only going to try this once i know my brother very well he's such a nice guy i know my brother really wants to make it work how could you do this how could you and she's just sitting there with her eyes like fish eyes like you know when you bring the fish to the table on shabbos and the eyes are just like like that no emotion no engagement and he's trying everything to rates iran to get some reaction nothing and he starts yelling and screaming don't you know the statistics of the children and after he finishes his whole piece his sister-in-law doesn't say one word she just looks him in the eye and she moves her shirt a little bit to the side and then she moves her shirt on the other side a little bit to the side and then she rolls up her sleeve halfway to her elbow and he could see all the black and blue marks that were covered by her clothing then she rolls her sleeve back down and she fixes her shirt again and the brother-in-law has nothing to say and in one second he goes from thinking his sister-in-law is the cruelest reshanta in the world to realizing that she's a victim of a brother that he doesn't know at all that's a paradigm shift that doesn't take a long time to see something differently when something goes in such a radical way it changes everything and how long does it take one second my friends adar is a paradigm shift it's one which has the capacity to change your mind in a second pay close attention to the words of the pasuk and the miguel the pasuk says that mordechai wrote down all of these things vaishlax to all the jewish people he sends these books with everything that happened he wrote it all down sent it out to everybody and all the king in all the cities of the kingdom in order that they should keep the holiday of purim according to those days that they were saved from the enemies and the month that was switched from yagon from uh from intense agony let's see evil from morning lyon to a day of celebration to a holiday my friends the power of the month of adar to give birth to instantaneous happiness is because it carries within it the capacity to change our minds to help us see that the worst things in our experience perhaps are not as they present themselves to be otherwise why is the pasuk in the megillah telling us you know why this month is joy me evelyn just tell me because it's a month of simcha it's a month of yomtov no that doesn't do it it's the distance between those two things the disparity between those two poles that lets someone change their mind on a dime and the minute eddar begins we can change the harim says that these words doesn't mean when adar comes in it means when adar penetrates it's not a mitzvah then to be joyful it's a result when you start to recognize all that happened in that story suddenly every bad thing in your life maybe is not as bad as you think it is so rabota how do we capture this lightning in a bottle and bring this kind of happiness into our own lives there are two things that are described after all the research of a quarter million people in the university of california i could have saved them some time if they would have sat with me and learned the ancient judaism the wisdom of judaism because we had it straight there the first thing that they discovered was that one of the most powerful catalysts to change your experience to joy is to write to write a gratitude journal to write down how lucky you are to have such people in your life to write down how good these things how good you have it even tiny things you have a beautiful house you have a fantastic wife you have an excellent uh excellent child you know what you're uh you bought a new car not only that maybe you know you have hair maybe your hair is good hair i don't know what it is that makes you smile but whatever it is however small it is to write those things down where do we see this that's what the puzzle begins with you know how we instituted a month of joy he wrote it down in a book sent it out guys read this whenever you're feeling down beginning of the month of aadhaar i'm making sure that every year you read the story so that you will bring joy once again into your lives the first thing is to be able to write these things down so that we're capable of remembering them but there's something fascinating about what happens when we write down all these things when we uh ensure that we remember them and you know what that is they realize something fantastic there were two researchers whose name were bovine and gilovich and they realized they asked the question if you had money to spend and you wanted to make yourself feel happier so you know there's something called retail therapy right what would you do should you go buy stuff right should you go buy stuff or should you spend the money on an experience i don't know on a vacation uh you know should you spend what's just gonna make you happier go skydiving right which is gonna make you happier push your wife out and skydiving which is gonna make you happier which should where should you go and they they actually analyzed this in an amazingly and aptly named book the name of their book was called to do or to have that is the question talk about truth in advertising okay now if i stopped right just stop pause for one second guys what would you think what's going to make you happier experience the minute it's over you don't have it anymore temporary a thing that you buy surely at least after you use it you still have it you bought yourself a suit you can use the suit to get it again shoes logic would dictate that you should buy things but actually in their research they realized that it wasn't things that made people happier for longer it was experiences and why is that and this is so important i call this the theory of smelling bread you walk into a room and has the smell of fresh bread hits you like a wall ah give valdic bread fantastic you know what's interesting stay in that room for five minutes you can't smell bread anymore you get used to it you walk out of the room the only way to smell bread again is to walk out of the room and walk back in the room that's the only way the funny thing about things in our lives is that whatever we have we get so used to it that we become blinded to it if you have a good marriage you don't appreciate a good marriage because you have it if you have great kids that never cause you any taurus you're not worried about that you're just worried about shidduchim you're not you're not realizing that all these other people are worrying about their kids right now in school they have a problem with this reb and a problem with that teacher and a problem here and a problem there but if you have it you don't notice it and it turns out therefore that actually if you want to know what happiness is happiness is not a thing it's not a destination the word pursuit of happiness makes no sense whatsoever because if you're running after it by definition it's not something you'll ever catch because happiness bemidjis in its reality is an awareness of something which causes gratitude one more time the nature of happiness is an awareness of something which causes gratitude so if you have the smell of delicious bread and you can't smell it anymore the only way to be happy about it is to leave it and come back that's why we always say that you only appreciate something once you lose it not because you lost it because now you notice that it's gone you don't have to lose it to appreciate it if your friend comes around and tells you about all of the sorrows of his marriage you start appreciating your wife don't you you know why not because you didn't lose your wife but because someone helped you leave the room and come back in and smell the bread or the coffee that's why it's not a braggart in the amidah two reasons number one hashem can't give you an awareness that's up to you to maintain because even if hashem gave it to you the irony is if god gave you joy you would become unaware of joy because you have it it's a consistent dedication to remaining with your eyes open focused on everything and all the brah that god gave you that's answer number one but a deeper a better answer like they say in the yoshi world he's saying good say better say better i always thought that that line right there is the source of all the self-confidence problems we have in your shiva buggering he's saying good good this is fascinating there's a better answer my first answer is that's why there's no bracha on samha on joy my second answer is there is a bracha on joy if joy is awareness that leads you to gratitude to hakaratov that fascinating think about that for a minute this time when you say that you bow in front of hashem illustrating illustrating it's different than the bowings before and the bowing's after it's its own thing you're bowing and you're recognizing the goodness of everything that you have in your life you're starting again not thanking us for my car i'm starting way at the bottom i'm thanking hashem i'm alive do you think about the fact that you're alive only in covert we think about the fact that we're alive do you think about breathing only in covid are we thinking about breath about are you with me so answer number one is the ability to draw your attention and your awareness to what it is that you have but the second thing that they discovered that made people happy happier than having anything happier than having was giving and that is the second part of the pasuk why is this a month of happiness because it's the power of being able to give to somebody number one because when you give it to someone you recognize that you had it to give away but actually i'd like to take it one step further there was a rav whose name was rav mishkovsky and if golinski remembers when he was a young man that he came to ask the children in the town a riddle he asked them if you have five candles that are burning and you put out two of them how many candles do you have left every kid three nope then you had the kid that was bad at math one nope then you have that philosophical kid bicycle right you lots of different answers but none of them were right and then the finally the kids asked them how many candles you have left and riven bishkovsky said you have two candles because if you extinguish two candles the other three burnt themselves out and you had no candles you put out two candles you have two candles left they looked at all these kids and he said to them kind of i want you to always remember that everybody thinks that you have things in your life and the way you hold on to them is by keeping them to yourself but what happens you keep spending that money usually on stupid things but if you gave some of that away it sits there waiting for you in the world to come it sits there waiting for you like that experience in your own mind remembering that you had something and you gave something and you made someone alive what a wonderful thing to enliven yourself what do you have what you gave that's what you have golinski found himself at the end of the war going from concentration camp to concentration camp to try and find the jewish kids to sign up to schools and in some places they found two children and at some they found three children and some they found five and finally gets to one place that had more children than any other place that he'd been to the man that sent him on this mission mission was of garrison liebman a rock that got the funds from uh the various hatsala organizations to be able to start jewish education again and he went from place to place to try and gather the children he finally gets to this one place okay he finally gets to this one place has more kids than any other places and he's so excited and he comes to the man in charge and he says i'm here to bring these jewish kids to a yeshiva and the man says who sent you tell me it was anyone but they are good i hate the agoda anyway he knows that some of the funds come from there good he goes no i wasn't sent by the aguta i was sent by someone by an individual which was true and the man says yes but who's funding that individual tell me it's not the agoda haiti he says no i'm i'm an emissary of hashem he says tell me the truth who sent you he says gershon libman the man's face and demeanor changed instantly he says if that's who sent you not only am i not going to get in your way i will get you every single child signed up whatever you need you'll have and if glinsky says what brought about this unbelievable change and he says i'll tell you i remember i remember back in the day when we were all in the camp together and i had regression living in my bunk in my barracks and you know what it was like back then there was no food people were dying not of gas or shootings they were dying because they had no nutrition left in their veins in their bones they couldn't get themselves up out of bed to wait online for a cup of soup and a slice of bread and they died in their bunks exhausted not from a hit not from gas not from a bullet from pure starvation and exhaustion beyond which the human body could not manage and i remember one morning he says there was a young boy a great young boy yeshiva boy whose name was avraham rosalinski and the day came when he came back from the work and he couldn't get up off the bed and they told him come you need to get up off the bed you need to get the food if you don't eat you're gonna die push yourself and he couldn't he just couldn't he says just go we all felt terrible but we had our own lives to worry about so we went we ate it online and every one of us came back with a cup of soup and a little piece of bread and we most of us had finished it on the way back to the barracks but some of us managed to eat it there sitting there every one but one person every one but rabbi garcia libman who came back from waiting online and who took avraham rosalinski who could barely sit up and he leaned him against the wall and he started spooning the soup into his mouth he was so weak he couldn't even keep his mouth open so the soup was running down his chin spilling onto his body the precious soup was getting lost and then he took the bread and he couldn't chew and he took little pieces and he helped him push his mouth up and down so he could chew and swallow the bread he says i watched rav garcia liberman go hungry that day a day where not one of us had the luxury of taking a day off from food and he gave everything for someone else that's who sent you whatever you need you'll have and i thought to myself when i read this i don't know for sure because i wasn't there barak hashem none of us were but i dare say that at the end of that day gershon libman went to bed with more energy flowing through his veins from having fed someone else than from having fed himself mishloch neither one of them had enough food to be able to give to mishloch manoth but they were desperate to do the mitzvah so what did they do i took my bread and my cup of soup and i gave it to you and you took yours and you gave it to me we both had sudah of purim and we both had mislocked my friends what the pasuk is telling you is that you could have a slice of bread and a cup of soup you don't have another one to give to anybody else that's all that you have and you could still fulfill the mitzvah and you could still have simcha in your life i think a lot of us feel that way now rabbi i'm holding it together by a thread stop talking to me about helping other people msuda take some of what you got and give it to him and let him take the same and give it to you in yeshiva we had a little musavad going on we would talk to each one another about getting better in midot and you know one of the things we decided was we tried to find simple ways where people could improve themselves and do wonderful things that didn't cost them anything so you know what we had a pact that every boy every boy would pour the other guy water because when you pour yourself water there's no mitzvah but when you pour the other guy water you got a mitzvah free mitzvah awesome right we can give to other people and the ability to give makes a person feel alive like almost nothing else i want to end our words tonight with this powerful idea in lashon kodesh the letters of words are more important than just the phonetic sounds like in other nations languages they are essential they are connected to the root of the word itself the word for simcha for joy in hebrew simcha ironically also has within it the same letters rearranged spell the word because the nature of simcha is the process as we said of being aware of what it is that you have and finding within that the ability to be grateful to hakadosh for whatever it is interestingly enough those same letters in hebrew also spell the word which means to visualize to bring something to your awareness to illustrate a person who is aware and they're living their life through their senses they see what they have they taste what they have and they're not worried about what they didn't buy what they didn't taste a person like that who's experiencing his present world sees only a world of of kindness of joy of opportunity the famous writer lao tzu wrote if you were depressed you are living in the past if you are anxious you are living in the future and if you are at peace you must be living in the present depressed people look back at their experiences and say to themselves if that's how bad it was yesterday miss tama that's how bad it's going to be tomorrow they don't take the words at the end of all those financial commercials you hear on the radio seriously past performance is not indicative of future results if you're anxious what are you anxious about about what's coming now what's going to happen i have to make about the new yeshiva i'm going to have to pick for my child right that's that's what anxiety is for a person to live in simcha they need to live in the present they need to rely not on their worries about tomorrow but about their current interaction their sensory interaction with the most magnificent world that hakadosh who created for each of us with the ability to give to one another even when we have so little and that my friends is i think how we find simcha even in this challenging to end off with rob golinski's uh powerful idea he was once in one of the camps and he saw a man get up in the middle of the night and the man got up and he reached under his bed and he pulled out from under his bed a uniform and the guy is thinking what is this guy doing and he starts putting on this uniform he was a french guy right which made him realize that that's probably why he was strange but either way he reached down the knee he put on this french uniform of a soldier with all the little falafels on the on the on this on the on the uh on the shoulder and he's walking around like this the guy is a prisoner in a concentration camp and he's pulling out this uniform he thinks he's a general the guys think never he probably stole it from one of the uh from canada you know in auschwitz he probably took it from one of the bags you know and now he's walking around fanart himself into thinking that this is who anyway he waits two days three days eventually the guy keeps doing every night so he thinks to himself if i'm going to see this show every night when i'm doing taking katsuoya's i want to know what's going on so he waits and while the guy's walking around he walks in he says hey the guy's startled he starts to rip off the jacket so they won't catch him he says what are you doing the man says shh he says tell me what are you doing he says quiet i'll tell you just lower your voice pulls him over to the side and he says you know they have me cleaning toilets here this is my life i shovel up other people's feces their bodily fluids that's what i am that's what i do i have nobody i have no food i have no hope and i was about to lose it until i started to remember that this is not who i am before i came here as a french general which if you know anything about history it's not all that impressive [Laughter] i was a french general he says people listen to me they entrusted troops to me they trusted my decisions i was important so every night for a couple of minutes when everyone is asleep i take out the clothes i put them on i walk around the room like i used to and i remember that i am not a person who shovels the stuff out of the toilets that's not who i am that's just who i am now the clothing of the general is enough to make him feel like the general again sometimes we're powerful enough to remember and to visualize to be mamrish what it is that we were when we were at our best when we were spending time in yeshiva or when we were in seminary or when our muno was strong when the business was going well we remember the suit we remember how we felt when we looked like a million dollars when we felt like a million dollars when a million dollars was enough to retire on but sometimes we're actually not even strong enough to remember those clothes and the biggest question you could do for someone is to help them remember the clothes that they once wore to help them remember that this is not who you are this is who you are right now but yeshua hashem is terrifying it comes in the blink of an eye and don't worry about what was and don't worry about what will be just enjoy this piece of bread and this cup of soup just enjoy the fact that if you're home from work because of covid you're with your family there are people who are home alone and in your weakest times when you think that you'd rather be alone because your kids are making that much noise hold off think about what that really means is that really what you want start to taste and to feel the clothing of a french general to feel the clothing of an abba of a husband of a father of a jew of a person who's alive of a person who's not on a ventilator and feel the strength come back and with that awareness comes gratitude and with that gratitude comes happiness when we redefine joy we realize that it is just a second away and that we can indeed allow other to enter into us to permeate our souls and to feel the greatest simcha imaginable thank you very much [Applause] honoring your parents that the concept of kaver it's a very strange word kabir means to honor but the word kaved also means heavy why would the word kavod and kaved be something which are interchangeable and the answer is like as an example something which is kalutrosh kovedrosh means a lightness of head or something which you take seriously is something light or is something a weighty matter okay the ultimate way that a person can show honor to their parents is by making the parent weigh something what are they today we live in a world as i said where everything is fake so also our language is fake you tell a kid oh you're amazing bestie engel such a good kid those words actually mean nothing to the child and in some cases experts tell us are damaging to the kid you know why because the kid doesn't feel amazing you're telling him he's amazing what does he feel now further from the expectations you said if you told him he's average the kid could accept it but you told him he's amazing he feels like an even bigger fraud and an even bigger imposter so what's the secret they say to find something specific that you can attribute to that child i work with sometimes young people who have very difficult relationships with their parents and oftentimes they say you know he gave me less you know than he gave all the other kids and he did this wrong and she did that wrong and i always say i get that they did things wrong there's not a parent on earth that's perfect could you think of one thing that they did that was positive that's how you start to build when you have someone who was never a general even if they never were a general they were something in general there was something you have a kid by the way the kid that never learned in yeshiva right he's always running out of the basement anyone needs any help a guest comes the guy's up like a shot from his gamora do you need something do you want to sit somewhere why because he's so mitsab on one side the guy is not a good learner masad shaney you know what an amazing thing that he's emulating his great great grandfather his elderzed avraham avinu the el habbakar ratz avraham it doesn't say the el masechette because is a beautiful thing what would avraham avinu have been doing if not for the fact that he was running to go help somebody probably sitting and learning and what did he do he got up to be able to do the mitzvah that was there and present in front of him so you have mash him you have rabbis you have parents that all they see is a kid that doesn't want to learn he can't settle down he's so yeah true but is there something you could find i'll never forget when i went to parents evening with my children in one of the schools that my kids went to which shall remain nameless my wife would hate going to parents evening with me she would always be kicking me under the table i went once and the teacher says you know your daughter she didn't come on time she didn't do the homework she didn't pay attention she didn't contribute she didn't know that she finally finishes her entire diatribe it's the only way i could describe it and i said how long has my daughter been in your class she says what do you mean like from the beginning of the year so i said six months six months she goes yeah i guess six months so i said wow that's amazing in six months my daughter didn't do one thing right not one thing i came here to hear about how my daughter did you did very well i mean aleph plus i mean guy a for effort on bashing my daughter into the ground you're amazing at negativity don't let anyone take that away from you not one positive thing oh my leg was black and blue for my wife i said to my wife after that i said honey you want to buy more shoes just softer shoes like the bubby shoes you know the bubby shoes that basically look like a cloud can we get those you don't have to wear them ever just on the nights parents evening the teacher's like oh no no of course of course she did this and suddenly she came up with things you know in jewish we say mitamo [Music] all of a sudden you found some things to say but until you pulled it out some people are like that some parents are like that some teachers are like that and sometimes as a parent as a friend you have to be the one that stands in there and says garnished nothing good nothing it was like oh my loving your question it's not nogea there's not a single person on earth you can't find something positive about so i think what most parents do by mistake because i remember this when i was young you know when you're sitting down at the table and your parents say you should really eat that you know there are children in africa who are starving and every kid says send them my vegetables win win it doesn't work to tell someone you know uh you know there are other people who are worse off than you because when we're in that ball and all we want to do is feel sorry for ourselves it's sometimes not always so easy to be able to do that and that's when it takes a creative person mechanic to be able to kind of bring somebody out you know i still remember we had someone in a student that i was dealing with as well in london who had a very difficult life and she could not find anything in her life to be happy about so she decided that you know what her life was not worth living because if this is what her life is you know so i said to her i tried every which way and she was seeing the professionals and they were getting nowhere either i said to her look you want to kill yourself you want to go go i said but until you go you're around because you make yourself useful she's like what do you mean i said well i have this girl who's actually in the hospital she's suffering from some of the same things that you did you know the matzah over there like you know which nurses you know you could talk to you know how to help her a little right you know i said look the last thing you do before you go at least maybe go and help someone else learn the ropes a little bit overnight this kid became like the hospital patient liaison and what happened secret she started feeling good about herself you see when you tell the person that their motive is is not as bad as they think they keep grabbing it back like a baby who's grabbing the pacifier the security blanket no no it's bad it's worse and anything you say you can't compare it my situation is worth you don't understand you don't understand nobody understands don't even bother fighting with them set them up with a matzah with a situation that allows them to see what they have she came back after that first meeting i said it's unbelievable you know you're so lucky so what do you mean i said you're so lucky that you have people in your life that actually care about whether or not you're here on or or not you know some people in there they don't have that and she didn't agree and she didn't break out the streamers but she heard she heard it went in it went into the gratitude journal you know what i mean that's the nature unfortunately sometimes that we need to be able to do um is you know to kind of reset that that balance to be able to smell what it is that we really have and um i think that's probably one of the reasons why when ghazal tell us more than what the rich man uh does for the poor man or the poor person does for the rich man you know what i always thought why what do you mean he gave to the other guy no the rich guy gave the poor guy a sandwich the poor guy gave the rich guy an appreciation for his steak and his pickles and his soda and his coffee and his house and his who who got more here unbelievable like you realize it that way maybe that's what the ani gives to the ashir he helps him remember his clothes so sometimes you have to set up situations for a child for a person to be able to actually see it where it's not a conversation it's just a penny drop it's one of those paradigm shifts that we spoke thank about