Feeding Your Fears

[Music] so now one of the things that when you talk to people uh is that everybody has similar anxieties and today you know it's it's there's a unique type of anxiety that has uh has become much more popular especially in the last couple of years with all of the things that are happening with corona virus and the uh you know omnicron and all the other nonsense that's uh that's in the air whether it's the monkey disease from the homosexuals or it's the political disease that every country has everybody is is concerned about some new world order or some hidden scheme behind something that the government is pushing or society is pushing or big pharma is pushing and you talk to people and you see literally how miserable their life is because they don't have a moment of peace they're constantly looking over their shoulder of who's about to get them who's about to attack them who is trying to fool them who is taking advantage of them and it's rare to see anybody having a moment of peace now if you look at the pictures they have on the internet and the world wide web altogether uh with social media and so on it looks like everybody has a peaceful life they're hanging out on the beach they're hanging out in some fancy car they're hanging out at some casino at some party everybody looks like they have peace and they have a good time and they even have you know statements where they say that they're having a good time but when people like myself talk to them and then they start you know crying to you even though they only met you 37 seconds ago about the misery that they call life and how they're worried that they're gonna be alone forever or they're worried that they're gonna be stuck in this relationship forever or they're worried that they won't have money to eat or they're worried that people are stealing the money that they have because they found that they have a lot of money or they're worried that big pharma is trying to kill them or they're worried that big pharma doesn't have a cure for them or they're worried about the government or they're worried about some other thing everyone is constantly worried and you literally see how people are clueless when it comes to solving their problem because instead of answering that worry with with something that can actually help it what did they do they feed themselves more information that makes them even more worried they're worried that perhaps the government is trying to kill off 8 billion people or 6 billion because of course they have to leave somebody to pay taxes they're worried that the big pharmaceutical companies are trying to kill all of its patients they're worried that uh this uh you know the diseases out there are real or they're not real and instead of actually solving the problem of their anxiety the reason behind their anxiety which we'll get to in a second what do they do they spend an exorbitant amount of time learning more about what they're worried about as if it's going to do anything as if you becoming an expert about the virus or the or the antivirus or the norton and the cafe virus and as if any of that is going to help you as if watching somebody whether they be a rabbi or or a medical expert is going to help you in any way shape or form in fact all it does is create more worry more anxiety more conspiracy and whether the conspiracy is not really a conspiracy or it's real and whether there's a new world order or as an old world order none of that is actually going to solve anybody's problems and the fact is it's actually going to create additional anxiety and additional distance from god because the more worried you are about men the more distant you are from the god who created man and therefore when you talk to people you can't help yourself but feel bad for them that they're on the road of el no nan and not the road of pinchas or benecoach that are that arrived at peace what's the difference between the two and then went after whatever they thought made sense they thought that you know they should protect beauty for beauty's sake and if they want to reproduce then simply get some side gig for that get something else for that but beauty has to be uh you know uh the top priority in life in today's world beauty materialism money and so on now so chasing all of that means that you're also protecting what you have or chasing the dream that may never arrive and what ends up happening with people like that is they're literally chasing their tail without realizing it's actually their tail and they live a life that never ends as far as their their anxiety until it's too late when they realized that all of their anxieties were for nothing in fact most of their anxiety was self-inflicted most of their problems were self-inflicted and they were not even close to a road of success on the other hand when people are actually chasing peace the first thing they do is realize that staying on their current road is certainly not going to get them to peace but getting to the one that owns peace getting to the one that creates peace getting to the one and only that has peace is the road to peace and thereby lies the wisdom that a person needs to acquire in order to achieve peace now if you ask the average person would you like wisdom the average person would usually say yes unfortunately the average person is not really going to know what wisdom is they'll think that wisdom is something that maybe you get with age uh even though there are many stupid people that are not wise even at 80 years old and the gemara says that people that do not know torah and their amer their ignoramuses they become more foolish as they get older not wiser whereas tamidekh the torah scholars actually get more sharp and more wise over time so in fact waiting for that wisdom to arrive just because you aged is simply a fool's errand on the other hand people that are looking into the torah and say well there's wisdom there there's enough wisdom there to make it last for the last few thousand years and outsell every other wisdom that ever existed and quite frankly any wisdom out there that has any bit of truth in it already exists in the torah so when a person looks into the torah you tell them do you want some wisdom they'll tell you yes but they won't really have much of an idea of how to acquire it one of the things that people assume is that you need to have a very good memory in order to acquire wisdom now although having a good memory is a very good thing and people always ask me well how did you go from this to that and you know i have some people that ask me strange questions and quite frankly make me very uncomfortable uh to answer some of these questions because they think i'm a whole lot more than what i really am but in their eyes i'm very smart and i'm very this and i'm very that and quite frankly if you actually ever met real torah scholars that i know you'd realize that i could only be in hopes dust under their feet but we aspire we try we learn we do whatever we can to acquire wisdom at the very least we know we're on the right path we're not deluding ourselves the same token when i look at other people that perhaps 8 10 15 years ago 10 20 years ago were in the same place that i was i look at them today and not only are they still in the same place that i was they're actually in the worst place today as they deteriorated over the last 15 or 20 years so you arrived at a certain level of peace a certain level of wisdom a certain level of knowledge you have a certain understanding of how the world operates and you're not nervous about quite frankly anything while they're more nervous than ever before even though they have more possessions they're more stressed out they're more alone they're more sick they're more everything negative but nothing really has changed for them in a negative way i mean they've acquired the possessions that they wanted or at the very least much more than what they used to have they acquired a lot of the different things that they wanted but yet their life deteriorated so if you look at the argument of if i get rich and i get my stuff then i'll be happy and you live long enough to see all of those people that chase it arrive at what they wanted you'll actually be very disappointed that despite them reaching their goals happiness is nowhere near now when it comes to wisdom those that do acquire wisdom you'll see that as they acquire more and more wisdom they actually do become happier and in fact one of the things that is important for a person to know is that although having a good memory is very good it's not necessarily within your control as much as you think it is and quite frankly it's not necessarily as critical as people think [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] you