Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: Preparation for Yom Kippur - The 10 Days of Teshuva

[Music] it's [Music] okay hello everyone uh first i want to wish you all a sweet year a good march we know on rosh hashanah we are given a preliminary judgment then we have the 10 days of repentance and the final decision is made on yom kippur which is called katima the signing the ceiling of the verdict so on rosh hashanah and before rosh may you it be inscribed and may you be sealed in the book of life after rosh hashanah the inscribing whatever it was was already done so we no longer wish you ekiti vatovah 5780 has been certainly a very very difficult year and we hope and we pray that 5781 will be filled with blessings in fact there's a remarkable thought that was unearthed from the writings of the hassam sofir who is a great great rabbi who lived more than 200 years ago in which he actually wrote this is quite amazing much more so than nostradamus which is usually vague and silver wrote that 5780 will be a very very difficult year for the world but 5781 which is the same letters tough shin pay aleph are the same letters as ashpots ashpot means a dong keep or a garbage sheep and it says and to heal him in halal mayash pot yarimev young that god will lift up the impoverished from the garbage sheep that's tough shin pay aleph that it's going to be a very very good year a year of blessing a year of redemption now i have to say i always have a little bit of hesitation about those thoughts because a person might get the wrong idea a person might say oh it's a good year i don't have to do chiva i don't have to pray i'll just stay in bed it'll be a great year no that's not the way it works there is a tremendous potentiality in these years but whether we can actually access that potentiality and actualize it depends very much on our prayers our repentance our good deeds our loving kindness so one should not look at this as an excuse for complacency the other way around one should look at it as a call and a spur for action uh in good positive spiritual directions uh the whole period of time from rosh hashanah including rosh hashanah through yom kippur a total of 10 days are called asarat you made shiva the 10 days of repentance and as maimonides tells us although god loves and accepts chuva the whole year round but this year he's or this time of year he is especially accessible and therefore art shiva so to speak just like they have donations you know that could be quadrupled or whatever it would be there's a certain multiple to our chuva during this time of year in which god accepts it with great alacrity great enthusiasm and therefore it will be a tremendous tragedy if we were to squander we were to waste the particular opportunity that kurdish barco has given us in fact rabbenu yonah writes that sometimes not doing shiva might be a bigger sin than all of the sins for which you have to do truvad for him let's imagine a person that doesn't make up a number a person has a hundred serious sins so a person might think all right if i don't do chewbacca i'm stuck with a hundred sins which is pretty bad robena yonah says no if god gives us a wonderful opportunity and we simply turn it down we're spitting in god's face the arrogance of turning down the opportunity of juventus might be equal to a million average meaning much worse than the hundred they wrote for which i have to do juva so we have to look at shiva as a great opportunity a treasure that god is giving us an opportunity of a second chance to start again new beginnings and thus truvia itself encapsulates a certain paradox on one hand part of the service of chuvas is to be hypersensitive to my failures to my mistakes the language of the rambam again taken from the gomorrah is that shiva involves regrets remorse rabbeno yonah takes it further you're gone you're gone is sadness despondency crying begging for god's mercy on that level shiva could lead us to the path of sadness but at the same time ralph cook writes over and over and over again that shiva is fundamentally a joyous liberating experience even if i have to engage with those difficult parts of my personality and those parts of my past even the most recent past that i would rather forget and i have to confront some ugly corners in my life and i have to shed light on some of the darkness that i would prefer to leave in the darkness so that could get a person upset in many ways but what you're doing is you're cleaning out the swamp you're draining the swamp you're getting rid of the filth and that's a tremendous joy that even as i recite on yom kippur many many times i have sinned i have done this bad i've done this bad i've done this bad but every single time you're getting stronger cleaner purer better and therefore side by side with all of the cries that we shed as we recount our average there is the tremendous joy of renewal that is why and again i may have mentioned this a few weeks ago so forgive me but that is why rav cell of a chick records a custom that in some of the german congregations in berlin that he remembered and perhaps these people still do this when they would recite the al-qaeda when the congregation would recite the litany of all of their sins they would do so to with a jaunty a tune a kind of joyful tune yes i've committed adultery i've murdered i've stolen but this is the way we get forgiveness this is the way we get renewal this is the way we get stronger so in effect shiva requires both the honest appraisal of my depravity and my sin and an awareness of my inner greatness and my goodness and the love that god has for me because if all i had was my depravity i would feel i reached a point of no return if all i had was a sense of how great i am i would be arrogant filled with hubris so chuva really compels the simultaneous maintenance of almost two opposite emotional states a total and honest awareness of my failures and a total recognition of the inner greatness and goodness from which i can be reconstituted in the language of kabbalah and khasidas this is expressed in terms of the neshama of a person that sin can damage a person in many many ways it distances us from god it takes away our spiritual sensitivity it creates as the rambam writes a majitsa a wall of separation right in the world of covet we're familiar with all sorts of walls of separation but the kabbalists teach us that there's a part of my inner soul that is not affected by sin it remains pure it remains untainted when we say every day in dominic the soul that you have given me is pure that's not a past statement that's not simply saying the soul that god gave me was pure it is pure right now there is something within the inner recesses of the jewish personality and perhaps even the human personality that is impervious to sin and evil that remains healthy and vibrant and good and precious and radiant and that is what creates the possibility of chuva because the good within man has never been destroyed has never been affected just as a human body could recover even if there's only a little bit of flesh that hasn't turned dangrinous so too chuba comes from the panimyut from the inner core of a person that is incorruptable and that is why the word chuva is such a beautiful word we translate it in english as repentance but the real definition of chuva is return you're returning to a place that you once were now who are you returning to on one level you're returning to god because the abecha created a mushrit a wall of separation you've torn down the wall but in a psychological existential transcendental mystical metaphorical way you are returning to you we use in shiva you see the vocabulary of change operationally we change i'm changing my behavior i'm changing my attitude so when we think of chuva we think of becoming somebody different and externally that is indeed the dynamic of chuva i am changing but in the deepest spiritual sense you're not changing you're simply becoming what is already there in a sense it is becoming what you really are what you truly are you're not changing that's why the balatanya writes in tanya that no jew has to learn how to love god how to revere god loving god and revering god is already in our nisham our godly soul we have to learn how to access it we have to learn how to connect to it but it's already there and that's why rashner zolman writes that you'll find jews even if they're very very far from tehran mitzvahs they will be willing to give their lives for the jewish people because that godly soul comes out so therefore over on in all although truvad does involve regret remorse sadness even sobbing tears it ultimately involves joy reconciliation being connected once again and that's why it's no accident that our sages have said very very explicitly that yom kippur is the happiest day of the year now some people don't look at it that way got to fast for 25 hours you know protecting usually for 25 hours uh i got to be in synagogue all day you know i got to stand up a lot my back is hurting my feet is it my feet are hurting i'm dehydrated yeah physically there may be some hardships but that gift of forgiveness reconnection rediscovering and coming in contact with my true self instead of the fake personas that i put on can be so sweet it can be so liberating that hazal say there is no joy as great as the joy of young people and i'm sure you know even on our low level i think we've experienced it i don't know if i could speak for everybody but often i think many people say they're a little they're a little sad when yom kippur is over because yom kippur kind of took them out of all of the stuff in this world all the rivalries all the fighting all the fakery it gave us a kind of moments 24 hours of authenticity of truth and in a way it's a little painful to kind of come back into a world of sheker actually it's what samus says that's why god gave us a little bit we have this holiday really right after the yom kippur to kind of be in god's home a little bit it's a way of a halfway house before we transition to the cruel and fake so-called real world of course it's not a real world at all it's a fake world but uh we think that's the reality young kipper is the real is the real reality and that's why we hurt a little bit when we have to leave it because there is a certain joy in yom kippur uh okay so now what i want to talk a little bit about is that since we are of course before in the days before yom kippur and we are in the aseret you made shiva let me talk about some practical ideas which i'll illustrate with stories and vignettes about the types of things that can go through our minds and our hearts most importantly uh when we do chuva first and foremost let me start off with the basic halacha and this is a halal that i'm sure uh all of you have heard and it's worthwhile to restate it that is yom kippur and the chuva that we must do to get the forgiveness of yom kippur only gives us an atonement for the sins that we committed against god i didn't keep shabbos didn't keep kosher didn't davin ate traif so i do shiva i do you go through yom kippur i get forgiveness but the sins of bain adam lahave between one person and another person even with your chuva and even with your yom kippur there is no forgiveness until you try to make amends with the people that we've hurt and we try to do so with sincerity if we're truly sincere and they refuse to to forgive us then god forgives us and it's actually a sin on their part but we have to be sincere and we have to make the effort in fact some some opinions it's a minority opinion i don't want to scare anybody i actually take the view that if you have an interpersonal sin for which you did not seek forgiveness yom kippur does not atone for anything meaning you lose yom kippur 100 even for the sins between man and god they learned that if there is for which there was no atonement yom kippur is canceled that year that's a very strict view most views do say the main adam lama come the man in god you do get atonement but you don't get the atonement for it so it's very very hard it's very hard to ask forgiveness it's very hard to move forward to acknowledge that we're wrong it is very very hard and you know i remember when zalman arbach uh who was a remarkable person a god obatora and an exemplar of about israel but in my personal opinion the most remarkable statement i ever heard from him was at his wife's funeral when his wife died after i think 60 years of marriage so he said that his wife slovaya it is customary that we ask forgiveness from the deceased when you know when they die he says but i have nothing to ask forgiveness for my wife and i we never did anything to each other to hurt so there's nothing to ask forgiveness but wow which married person well at least i'll speak for myself i don't want to go and impugn anybody else but how many people in the world could make such a statement and mean it and it'd be true remarkable so for all of us there's a lot of hurt that we may have inflicted again most of the time our motives were not evil it's not a question being evil inconsiderate not thinking in fact i just heard if i could quote from maybe a non-religious source you know uh ruth bader ginsburg uh passed away the justice on the end have to be jewish not religious she happened to pass away the first night of rosh hashanah that's why there's a big debate in the u.s if trump will be able to fill it before the election but uh ruth bader ginsburgs mentioned that when she got married to her husband her mother-in-law said i want to give you the secret for a good marriage so rude said i want to hear it so she said sometimes you have to be deaf make believe that you're deaf you just don't hear certain things and if you act as if you're deaf sometimes you can be a lot happier because people say things but that's good in terms of the person receiving the hurt perhaps but we have to be so sensitive so but let me just mention that even in this issue about asking machila there are many complications you know the khafi zhaiyan where we saw mehra coming wrote his book on the laws of los angeles uh in i think the 1870s and he was like 30 years old and he wrote it anonymously in fact that's why he became known as the based on the verse who is the person who desires life to guard your tongue from evil so he did not put his name on the book uh he wrote it anonymously he was known as the huffitt's hand he wanted the book to be reviewed by ruby swell salander who was towards the end of his life who would give it a hammer he would give it in that prevention and ravi saw cilantro loved the book he said baruch hashem hashem has prepared a leader for the new generation that will teach people medos and abbas israel and guarding your tongue and speaking good of people wonderful wonderful thing but he refused to give a has come into the book because there was one halacha in the book that he disagreed with that is time says the following let's say i spoke lash and horror about you let's say i said something nasty about you i sinned against you so the khabit writes i have to ask your forgiveness but you're entitled to ask what i did because you don't have to forgive me and let you know what i did so the time says i have to tell you the negative adverse remark i made about you if i said uh like this guy is the stupidest guy who ever walked the earth i have to tell you i said this about you because otherwise i have not fulfilled my duty of asking forgiveness and if i haven't fulfilled my duty you don't have to forgive me this is in the habitat reversal hunter strongly disagreed with that rule because he said you're going to tell somebody about a very nasty thing that you said about them you're going to make them feel worse you're going to hurt them more so you want to be exotic you want to be a righteous guy to fulfill all the laws of asking if you're going to hurt a person and cause extra pain so in such a situation where we saw cilantro said you are obviously putter from specifying the hurt you either ask a generic forgiveness or you don't do anything at all and pray to god that god should forgive you because there's nothing you can do you cannot be righteous at the expense of causing another person pain this is the famous statement that review used in a lot of contexts it's the same even in yiddish in english it goes don't be a sadiq on somebody else's question a resource launcher used that idea many many times now although obviously i cannot tell you in a much locus how do we follow but reverend cutler did say in all matters of interpersonal behavior rabbi israel solanter is considered to be the definitive authority even over the time which means that in asking makhila and asking forgiveness you have to weigh the consequences are you reopening wounds that will be so painful to the other person that you're causing more harm than good that's a subtle question now you have to be careful not to be dishonest sometimes the way it might work is i'm embarrassed to ask forgiveness so i convince myself uh i better not bring it up because it's going to hurt them too much but that's not really my motive my motive is it's going to hurt me but that's not legitimate the fact that it hurts us that's our duty we got to make amends but if i can honestly assess the situation that's going to hurt them more for me to bring it up then indeed i don't have to bring it up and i shouldn't bring it up sometimes this could help by having a third party talk i'll tell you where this comes up a lot just as a practical matter not so much in la shanhara it comes up with often broken engagements or broken relationships it's sometimes the case that a relationship is broken off and there's a great deal of pain you know you may have broken off something in such a way that the other person is humiliated hurt but they've managed to go on they've managed to make something good out of their life and here comes in this nightmare from the past right so uh talk to a rabbis it's not so simple on one hand you do have an obligation to seek forgiveness on the other hand you can't do it if that's going to cause a lot of pain right so you need to weigh it and discuss it very carefully so that's that's one thing i wanted to uh to share with you another idea and again these are just kind of almost like a laundry list of things to think about in the truva process that one of the first steps of chuva is to kind of identify what your priorities and goals are in your life because you see if chuva involves moving towards a certain destination you got to have a sense of what your destination is what type of person do you want to be what type of person do you think god wants you to be because only then can i assess you know movement is movement but movement can be in the wrong direction too i gotta have a sense am i moving in the right way so that's kind of a cognitive level that's not so much an emotional level that's the level of thinking things out what are my goals what are my priorities what is my life about in this connection there's a beautiful mushroom that robled hussman gives it's very cute mushroom he says there was a polish peasant who was coming to the big city for the first time and he was told that if he buys a ticket and sits in a room a motion picture theater in other words he will see animals and people coming out of the wall amazing so he bought a ticket he sat in the room and i had never heard of a movie before the room is totally dark and all of a sudden it gets light and animals people horses cowboys indians because westerns were very very popular in poland so my parents told me were coming out of the wall and it looked so real to him he couldn't believe it he had walked by that wall when he entered the room he didn't see any doors so what's going on trick entrance so he took his big big shiny flashlight that he had just bought and he's shown it on the wall to get a better picture of the doorways but of course what happens is when you shine a light on a motion picture you can no longer see the picture so people were yelling at him shut off your light we can only see when it's dark revlon says this is a marvelous machel for this world when you sit in darkness all sorts of things that are not real look real the picture looks real when you turn on the lights and the other way around when you're sitting in darkness there could be a bag of diamonds right next to you and you're not even going to notice it so the nature of darkness is twofold it obscures from us true reality but more than that it convinces us that many things are real that are in fact delusions when you turn on the lights both of those mistakes are corrected you see the reality of the diamonds on the chair next to you and that which was fake disappears so the concept of living a true life is really turning on the lights because there are so many things in life that we think are real and significant and they're really illusions honor glory the rivalries we have again i'm i'm not simply standing on a soapbox and talking about you know forget about you know getting a good job you know those things are important i'm not demeaning them but we have to know that the rivalries the grudges the resentments that we carry we think they're so real and i'm talking to myself we think they're so real we think they're so significant but really they don't amount to anything they're just nothing at all just we're so grabbed in the moments of anger and frustration that we can't let go of things so one of the things we need to make time for is to turn on the lights because when we turn on the spiritual lights we get to see what is real and enduring and we get to dispel that which is fake and transient and the funny thing is that we really don't have time to do that on yom kippur so much this is really pre yom kippur work because yum kippur has a long service in fact the truth of the matter is it's very hard to do a full shuva in yom kippur the idea actually is you should enter yom kippur in the state of juva and then god cleanses you on yom kippur because if you think about it i don't have a lot of time on yom kippur to think about the particulars of my life i'm kind of engaged in a collective ritual without the israel okay so the chuva work is really a premium kipper activity and the first idea is turn on the lights idea number two is take responsibility now this is a very very important idea we live in a culture which is largely a culture of victimization we're always blaming other people other things other factors other institutions for our failures chuva is predicated on what you might call radical responsibility for your life because i'll say hakobi deshamayan everything is in the hands of heaven god determines healthy sick wealthy poor that's up to god quits except me retro the fear and the reverence i have for god god does not determine if i'm righteous or evil god does not determine if i live a moral life or not a moral life that's up to me i am the master of my faith i am the captain of my ship that's an extraordinary idea but that is why i must do chuva because if god made me good or evil where's my responsibility so i must do chiva because i have that responsibility and it is also the reason why i can do children because once again if my personality were predetermined how could i change so it's both the reason for the obligation and it's the reason for the possibility that is why if you study the rambam you will see that the rambam's major discussion of free will and how do you reconcile it with the number of verses in the torah is in the laws of repentance because free will is the foundation of juva without bachira there's no truth in this connection let me share with you a famous story in massachusett involving what we would call a very very habitual sinner maybe in modern parliament he would be called a sex addict this was a man whose name was el lazar bendurdia and the rabbis describe him as a man who had visited every prostitute in the world he was totally shakua totally enmeshed in that decadence and then he had heard about one zona that he had not yet visited very far away and he traveled long long distances to be with this stone with this zona and apparently more or less she was so disgusted on him the fact that this guy traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to be with her this turned her off and at that point he realized how low he had sunk that was kind of the shock when the prostitute rejects you for being decadent that's kind of a real wake-up call and the governor of odazara tells us he started engaging in a very strange dialogue he first turns to the mountains and the hills he says mountains and hills pray for me and the mountains and the hills answered we have to pray for ourselves we cannot pray for you and then he says heaven and earth pray for me same thing and then he says then he says sun and moon pray for me same thing and finally he says stars and planets pray for me and every time he asks these entities to pray for him and they say no and he finally says hmm no more excuses ain't had davor talloy ella b i'm the only one who could fix this and he cries out to god with repentance and remorse and his agony is so great that he literally dies and a voice from heaven proclaims rabbi al-azhar bin durga he got paths ordination is set aside to the world to come and when the rabbis would recount this story they would cry because they would say yes you see that one moment of sincerity can give you a little can change everything and yet we go through things year after year and we never have that epiphany we never have that change all you need is that second now the commentaries have a lot of problems what exactly is he talking to when he says mountains and hills and heaven and earth and sun and moon and stars and planets who is he talking to and what are they saying back to him that's another problem so one of them of fortune of aaron levine the raz in a great pre-holocaust rav in poland offers a beautiful explanation when rabbi elizer bendurdia at that point he wasn't a rabbi yet when elizabeth got finally confronted with the enormity of his sin because he could no longer deny it the prostitute itself herself was repulsed he immediately has a plan b plan a is denial i don't even think about my avails plan b is when i can no longer deny it but i look for an excuse i look to put the onus put the responsibility on somebody else and here's the thing if you make a laundry list of the different things we can assign blame to so the first might be my parents my parents raised me the wrong way they didn't put me in the right school they were abusive they were unkind they didn't take care of me they didn't teach me values they exemplified bad values that is the meaning of mountains and hills pray for me because we find throughout biblical imagery biblical poetry that fathers and mothers are called the mountains and the hills so what he's saying is okay i'm a bad guy i can't deny it but mountains and hills mom and dad it was your fault why should god hold me accountable but what he hears in his mind's eye not a conscious speech his mom and dad are coming from across the grave and saying we may have made mistakes and maybe we have to answer to them but that's not an excuse the human being can transcend a difficult upbringing a human being has free will a human being can grow and rise among the most adverse conditions and if you can transcend the adverse condition then you must you see this is his greatness he's identifying an excuse and then he realizes in the depths of his heart it's not going to wash so mountains and hills are blaming parents then he says heaven and earth what's the heaven and earth quite literally our environment that that surrounds us of nature or nurture a person might say bad environment bad friends bad school basketball bad boss right all of my environments what happened i can't be expected to have been a good person in the environment that i was in shamayim bar it's heaven and earth same answer maybe we messed up but you've got to take responsibility sun and moon so the racial rev says in an agricultural the sun and the moon are primarily economic indicators right you need the sun for the ripening of crops and the moon also can the reflected light of the moon also helps in the growing of crops so a person might use his economic situation a person might say i was so involved in my business and professional life that i didn't have the ability to cultivate moral and spiritual values or a person might say i was so poor that i was struggling just for a piece of bread god cannot hold me accountable like the rich person has an excuse the poor person has an excuse remember the gemara actually says that when we go to shamayam and we say i was so poor i couldn't learn torah god's going to say to us were you as poor as the great rabbi hillel who cut wood and spent half of it just to get into the beta meadrish and when he couldn't get into the baked medrush he went on the roof and he was covered with snow and he almost died are you that poor and if you say i'm so rich i didn't have time to learn i had to manage my massive affairs so that mentions an enormously wealthy tana who became a great great scholar as well you see what's going on this is a very very important idea that this is a mental operation of honesty that's what's going on here parents environments economic circumstances and the last one stars and planets that refers to the idea that ghazal talked about that the stars that you're born under determine your personality to some way so a person who's born under the planet mars will love to shed blood now you can look at those gemaras and you can laugh at them and you could say primitive astrology but there's a much bigger point here it's a much bigger point and that is khazal considered astrology to be responsible for the hard-wired part of your personality that you were born with so we don't believe let's say we don't believe in astrology whatever whatever you want to say but we have an equivalent of astrology we call it dna and in fact as the human genome is being mapped and sequenced we are finding more and more aspects of human behavior that can be genetically linked and philosophically this raises some very important questions does a human being have free will if they're born with certain genetic propensities a person might be born with a genetic tendency towards violence towards anger you know homosexuality is a big debate i don't want to get into that a person might have the axe murder or gene and rest assured that there are lawyers in california that are working on getting their clients off on genetic defenses what do we say to that we say genetics is not destiny just as the gemara says the guy that is born under the planet mars will be a shedder of blood but he can choose to be a murderer or a shochet or a mother you can take your tendencies and direct them in good and positive ways so genetics is not an excuse we do not first of all the truth of the matter is to assume that anything genetic is deterministic in a 100 way is simply uh superficially uh incorrect i mean obviously genetics interacts with environment and with choices and with education and with many many other factors so so now you understand what your elijah majority is doing he's trying to look for some excuse that will salvage him let him keep his self-esteem bad parents bad environment difficult economic conditions bad genetics the devil made me do it i was born that way but what is his greatness his greatness is he doesn't allow himself to accept those excuses everything depends on me that was his greatness and for that moment of greatness he was admitted to oldham despite all of the sins and all of the availables that he did a lifetime of sin was erased by taking responsibility so the lesson for us is once again take responsibility for our lives all of us have difficulties all of us have excuses all of us have rationalizations why we have not lived up to the standard that perhaps we should have done but the glory of the human being is their freedom to choose in victor frankel's magnificent book man's search for meaning describing how people even the holocaust always had the capacity of choice he says we have very little control over what happens to us we have very little control of what other people do to us because after all they have their free will things are going to happen but the one control that we have is how do i choose to respond i can respond with anger with hatred with depression with despair with paralysis where i could respond with resilience and with courage with strength with goodness with compassion with love that is my choice and all of us know you know hitler had a difficult young adulthood what are we going to say but that doesn't mean you have to grow up and kill six million people six million jews and many more people even besides the jews because you couldn't sell your paintings as a starving artist in vienna and the truth of the matter is barak hashem we have many many examples some people famous and some people not famous of people who had the worst conditions and they became great and strong and moral and righteous precisely because they made those choices and they took responsibility for the life that god gave them so that's kind of the second lesson so besides turning on the lights and thinking about where you want to go there's the notion i take responsibility i don't blame others a third idea which is really related is we shouldn't limit ourselves by some artificial picture of what we can become you know all of us i think psychologists often use this meta this muscle all of us have kind of an internal audio or video in our minds of who we are and because of that picture which could have started very very early it could have started in kindergarten or even pre-kindergarten that picture is kind of a break or a limiter that doesn't allow us to go forward because we kind of define ourselves as a certain type of person so here let me tell you a story with rav nachman of breslif actually is the news particularly this week as you know uh uman in the ukraine is the great great great gathering place for thousands and thousands of jews who go there for rosh hashanah that's where nachman is buried and this year because of corona there was a lot of problems i i didn't hear the final story i know that a lot of people were actually detained in the ukraine and whether in jail or in the airports because they were going in violation of the covet uh regulations i hope and we pray that anyone that is stuck there should be able to uh get back safely but i'm not going to talk about uman but i want to talk about rob nachman we know that drew nachman taught by stories and he didn't always explain the meaning of story he often said teaching by stories is wonderful because if you get the deep message that's fine and if you don't get the deep message you have a good story see if i if i teach by a torah thought so if you get it that's good if you don't get it you don't have anything a story you always have a story so he felt that there was a certain advantage in teaching by stories and one of his famous stories involves the prince who thought that he was a chicken or a turkey i'm not sure if it would be a turkey because uh i don't know if they had turkeys in europe then maybe they did uh and uh he took off his clothes and he started eating table scraps crawling on his knees and nobody could convince him otherwise till a wise man came and said i will cure him and the wise man took off his clothes and started crawling under the table and the prince who apparently could still talk that's a good question said to him what are you doing he says well i'm a turkey or i'm a chicken also we're the same we're the same okay fine so these two human slash turkey chicken they're crawling under the table then eventually the wise man puts on a pair of pants and the prince says what are you doing he says who says a turkey cannot wear a pair of pants so the prince puts on a pair of pants too because it's not a contradiction to being a jerky and the story goes on and on there's a lot of detail that there's a shirt who says a prince can't wear a shirt or a turkey cannot wear a shirt so at the end of a few months the prince was sitting at the table he was dressed like a regular prince would be dressed he was doing everything a human being does now if we ask the question is he cured it all depends on what you mean does he still have the delusion that he's a turkey yes so psychoanalytically he's not cured he's still laboring under a psychotic belief but behaviorally it doesn't make a difference because even if he thinks he's a turkey he's doing everything a human being does and is behaving appropriately this is rabbah's story now ruth nachman as i say never tells you the meaning of the story but i think the meaning is very very profound we are often limited in life by a certain image of ourselves in fact even the expression i'm a turkey i'm not a capable person i'm not capable of going over to a stranger in show and wishing them good shabbos right something like that because what if he doesn't you know respond you know i'm going to be devastated and delayed so it's that image that limits us in so many ways you know some people i mean i'll give i'll give trivial examples some people really like to sing but maybe they don't have the greatest voice so they're embarrassed to sing even though they would love to sing so they're depriving themselves of something that would really give them a lot of pleasure because of embarrassment because they have an image that i can't do into whatever it would be so sometimes we think in order for me to be successful i have to overcome the self-image which is almost impossible rav nachman is suggesting an opposite approach instead of changing the internal video and then changing your behavior change your behavior meaning to say yeah you're a turkey but you can wear pants you can wear a shirt you can greet the person who's a stranger on shabbos you can sing you're a turkey but what happens is you live long enough like a human being then at some point the perception changes as well so if nothing is saying don't wait until you change the self-image you'd have to wait a very long time for that act and through the action the change comes and of course this is what the separation says uh many times adam nifal kefi a person is influenced by their actions we often think actions are the outgrowth of emotion i feel therefore i act and of course that's true when i feel a certain way i act a certain way but sometimes you got to work the opposite way the actions create the emotions actions if i love somebody i'll give to them but it also works the other way in the process of giving i will come to love them in fact this is actually a staple of marriage counseling husband says your wife says i don't feel love towards my spouse so the counselor might say act as if you loved and then you'll see that the feelings may come as a result of the actions the body the actions can educate the heart it's not just the heart controls the actions but the actions can educate the heart make the heart look at things in very much of a different way so that's my my third point do not limit ourselves by some artificial internal dialogue or video or audio tape with a what they call a loop that keeps on going around and around and around telling you the same thing just don't listen to uh to quote uh ruth ginsburg in a different context sometimes you got to be deaf to that interior voice that's pulling you down that's why when we say in shmone esri you know kinda sword the last paragraph of the amida that all the thoughts of those who want to destroy me may they be nullified that's not just referring to other people's thoughts that's referring to the thoughts within me that dragged me down i can be my worst enemy what's the famous uh quote in pogo a famous comic strip but we have met the enemy and he is us we can often be our very worst enemy when it comes to positive changes uh i mentioned going again i'm just going down my list here i've mentioned uh before the obligation to seek forgiveness and you know that's very very important and to acknowledge our mistakes but i want to talk about for a moment just for for a moment or two the opposite idea the importance of learning how to forgive we have to know that forgiveness is not only a gift to the one who is seeking forgiveness forgiveness is a tremendous gift to the one doing the forgiving because you see when i live with resentment and anger in my heart it becomes like a weight that is just i get paralyzed i just can't move forward it's like an albatross or something around my neck that doesn't allow me to move and when i can get rid of that resentment when i can let it go when i can understand that people are not perfect then i can move on i become liberated someone has to understand that part of our avodah on yom kippur sergey mitchuba is asking forgiveness but also learning how to forgive and by the way in that forgiveness is also forgiving ourselves because once again if shuva is about moving forward then we have to have the belief that if god will forgive me i can forgive me as well i can't allow myself to be so consumed even with guilt that i can't move forward right so there is forgiveness and there's even self-forgiveness now self again i i have to add of course self-forgiveness is not a matter of complacency it's not a matter of not taking my average seriously i take them seriously and i make amends and i try not to repeat it again and i think about the ways of not repeating it again but then i have to forgive myself and say god is giving me a second chance i give myself a second chance as well because otherwise you're going to be stuck and if you're going to be stuck you'll never get to the place that you need to go you cannot be mired in the past you have to look as the t-shirt says today is the first day of the rest of my life and ruben ryona who didn't have this t-shirt because this is the very same point you have to look as if you were born today and all of that is behind you that's not part of you anymore you can move you can move on uh let me just end uh with a story involving the german jewish philosopher franz rosensweight uh this was towards the end of the 19th century early 20th century and franz rosenstein actually very well known in the academic world he wrote a number of books but his most famous is the star of redemption which is a book in modern jewish philosophy and let me tell you a little bit about his his history and background which was very interesting uh franz rosensweight was born into a totally assimilated german family he had no jewish education whatsoever he was a brilliant student of philosophy and in those days in order to get into a university you officially had to be a member of the lutheran church which was the state church of germany now you didn't have to be religious the germans were not that religious anyway uh you just had to sign a paper they didn't care if you went to church they didn't care what you did you just had to sign a paper that i am a member of the lutheran church i think you actually paid some taxes because the state supported the lutheran church so most people signed that's why thousands tens of thousands of german jews in order to get professionally advanced or educated signs papers so people talk about mass conversion to christianity it really was not a conversion to christianity they didn't they didn't believe in that either they didn't believe in judaism they didn't believe in christianity but they signed it as a social way of getting ahead rosensweig was a man of some so much more integrity so he said listen i probably will sign the paper but i don't want to sign the paper until i go into a synagogue once in my life just to see what it is i'm rejecting so he chose a day at random where you can go to astro it happened to be the day of yom kippur he'd never heard of yamcha and the synagogue he chose at random because it was the only synagogue he saw was the only hasidic synagogue in berlin so it was a much more emotional worship than a regular orthodox synagogue so he walks in he was expecting to stay 15 minutes and then leave he walked in he's overwhelmed by a primeval spiritual power everybody is dressed in white like angels and they're crying and they're sobbing and they're praying and he was overwhelmed with a sense of power he felt the presence of god and he resolved at that moment and his parents were quite upset that he was not going to sign that paper he was going to explore what this judaism was and although hashem the german policy changed so he was able to get his doctorate and professorships and the like but he devoted the rest of his life to learning about judaism and although he never became a completely orthodox jew part of it because he died relatively young of multiple sclerosis he became more and more traditional with kashrut and davening and shabbos many aspects of shabbos and the like he and martin buber actually translated the whole tanakh the whole jewish bible in german and i'm told mohammad leibowitz said there was a very very fine scholarly accurate translation and in many many ways he became a balchuva although he never quite completed the process because of his death so at some point some of the jewish kids he grew up with who became you know big academics in their own right they thought he was crazy they thought he was nuts they could not imagine how a sophisticated german intellectual could go back to medieval primitive ways remember the german jews at that time looked down at the polish religious jews same thing in the united states the same issue as kind of ignorance fanatics and the ultimate insult they gave rosensweig was i bet you even put on filling which is the most insulting remark you could make you put on those black boxes with those leather straps and derozan swag looked at his friend and he said not yet and i think dennis prager makes the observation i think it's bro prager tulluscan they wrote a book the nine questions people ask about judaism it's a co-authored book they they tell this story and they make a very strong point that not yet is a very different answer than no he could have said no i don't wear it's filling he was not wearing filling in those days but not yet it's very different not yet is the idea that life as the t-shirt says is a journey and not a destination see when you say no you're kind of saying i am what i am and that's not going to change that's it not yet recognizes the fluidity of life the idea that what i am today doesn't have to be what i was yesterday and what i can become tomorrow is not limited but what i am today i'm willing to explore i'm willing to grow i'm willing to engage in this process so maybe i'm not there yet but after all none of us are there yet right the most righteous person there are areas of life in which he must continue to grow the point at which you arrive then you have no more purpose in the world hashem might as well take you you've done everything nobody has really done everything but theoretically you've done everything it would be no purpose in your life right so this is what you was about not yet god knows we're not perfect and god knows we're not going to be perfect in the coming year and god is not going to hold us to a standard of perfection but god does expect us to try god does expect us to at least be a not yet person saying okay if i'm not there yet at least i'm on the road i'm looking at it i'm going towards it and in that way rosensweight was able to leave this world as a real baltimore as the rambam says even if a person does chuva right before they die all of their avenues are forgiven and that's kind of a thought that we can take with us as we enter yom kippur and again my hope and my prayer is that hashem should extend number one we should be motivated to turn to hashem with joy and with enthusiasm and with passion hashem should accept our truva hashem should accept our prayers the prayers of all of um israel and bring blessing to the jewish people to average israel and really to the entire world which is going through so many difficulties and perhaps we should merit to some sofa's prediction that the year will be a year of bracha a year of yeshua a year of goula good morning thank you for coming [Music]