Rabbi Yom Tov Glaser: Mastering Free Will 2.1

Shalom and welcome to practical spirituality here at Asia tour in the old city of Jerusalem overlooking the Temple Mount maybe soon rebuilt what we're doing this week is were we're talking about mastering freewill and I know this is a terrible beginning to a class but I'm hot you make a lot of choices and and basically your whole life's gonna come out positively or not so positively based on the choosing of your life and one thing's for sure is you ain't no victim yeah you are not a victim and if you've been playing the victim card you're gonna lose the game of life so I don't know who dropped kicked you when you were a kid but you know as a rabbi you know obviously my job is to comfort the afflicted so I'm sorry you were dropped kicked and you know I feel really bad for you and it must have been hard and but the other job is not just to comfort the afflicted it's also to afflict the comfortable and some of us have gotten comfortable with blaming our upbringing and blaming our parents dynamics and blaming all kinds of stuff and and kind of making our choices from that that lousy place of that complain about our background about our childhood about stuff that happened and obviously the whole point is to free ourselves of that and to move forward now the yesterday will be handled in free will of the five ways of mastering free well what we handled was constant choosing and we did a lot of nice work yesterday and just being in the moment and making that choice so let's practice that everybody everyone I want you all to pretend something you're in your hometown and someone just handed you a pill and said if you take this pill you wind up in Jerusalem I want you to choose to be in the city right now not yet I don't care that you woke up here I want you to pretend you got the choice all over again ready one two way close one two three open your eyes choose it choose it choose your mom choose your dad she was your spouse choose the person sitting next to everyone look at the person next year choose that person and it choose to sit there with them choose choose the group look around the group choose the group I'm teaching this class you know I don't want to just be on a schedule I want you to choose to be with me this hour choose to be with me okay that's that's constant now we're on number two number two is reevaluation reevaluation is I think it's obvious to everybody that if you can't really previous choices you're not much of a master of free will this class is on mastering freewill well if you can't really a previous choices you know good luck mastering freewill that means you're robotically held to previous decisions and that's that's robotic and it's a slavery to the past no re-evaluation though it takes a lot of courage it doesn't mean you're necessarily gonna change anything like for example reevaluating my Judaism the huh it's highly likely I'm gonna stick with it but if I don't really eat it if I don't look at it fresh and ask myself am I in on certain specific days or maybe even every morning when I go into that mikvah because am I really a Jew when I go into the mikveh in the morning I like to do it this go meditation where I go under the mcfinn I'm a boy and the truth is every day we make a blessing shallow a sunny [ __ ] that did not make me into a Gentile why why are we making a blessing why didn't you say positive say the positive side share sali Yehudi then he made me a Jew why do I have to say that he didn't make me a Gentile it sounds negative again about Gentiles and the answer is that it's the morning time we'll see if you're a Jew we got another 17 hours to go to be able to say a blessing like for making me a Jew but a Jew is someone who chooses every day and chooses every minute and is involved in a constant choice and so yeah I'm not a Gentile but only at the end of the day we can see if I was a Jew and when I go into that Mick fine because that's where Gentiles become Jews is they have to convert through going to mikvah and taking on the commandments so I go to make for every morning so when I'm under that make [ __ ] I do this this like who says I'm Jewish Dunc okay I'll die in here coming out okay life going down I'll die in here what's life about connection I'm dying here what kind of connection connection to God and then well Gentiles can connect to God this time I come out with a big giant why on my t-shirt super you hoody bridge a super Jew yeah and then I then I live the day as a Jew but we got to re-evaluate that stuff we also got to reevaluate our marriages and reevaluate how we're how we've been interacting with our parents we got to re-evaluate career raise your hand if you ever known anyone who switched careers later in life wait if you don't know and I wonder don't want to nail on one of above they raise them up high come on do some aerobics today okay raise hand high now keep your hands up if they were happy they did so okay put your hands down what you just saw and you didn't get to see that live but they were about I don't know maybe 20 hands up and everyone's hands stayed up because it went well it went well and yet so many people millions of people billions of people locked in two careers that are not their career it's just they're not in the right spot they're not in the pocket of what they came here for and therefore they've learned to monetize themselves with some career but it's just not their spot and they'll stay there until they die but they probably will die way before they die physically because they're involved in hours and hours and hours and hours a day out of the zone and therefore reevaluating may mean a change for example all the people raise their hands for those people who really ate it and changed their career later in life that did bring a change and they're happy that they made that change even if it meant relearning something there are two pitfalls for reevaluation pitfall number one for reevaluation is is you know what we just discussed is momentum momentum of past choices robotically just going in the ways of how we had gone till now so that's the number one pitfall is to just keep keep doing what you were doing you got to be able to reevaluate and again I'm telling you you can stick with it I'm not I'm not meaning me reevaluating my marriage doesn't mean not being married anymore or Miria valuing my Judaism doesn't mean that I'm not gonna be Jewish anymore it just means that I'm hitting the refresh button and I'm kind of reproaching things like new angles that perhaps I hadn't thought of before or perhaps there's the aspects of my relationship to God Torah wife mitzvahs neighbors whatever it is the neighborhood I live and that's a macro choice is this the right neighborhood for me I got to re-evaluate that thing and then it is fresh pitfall number two and reevaluation is the pitfall of looking good looking good is the second pitfall of reevaluation because because you really don't care that much about your freewill what you do care much more about is how you look and when I say look I don't mean physically I also mean physically but I'm talking about like what I mean is how you're coming off is that clear how you come off for others that's really important to you and I understand that it's very important to all of us all of us are a little insecure and we'd like to know we you know we need that pat on the back we need that that encouragement from our family friends community and so but we really get help bent on looking good to the point where we won't even reevaluate and in fact reevaluation you'll notice does ruffle the feathers of our people that that are our they are what would you call it what's a good word for the the people but yeah but much more our supporters the people who support us we're think about it ladies and gentlemen we're we're highly insecure people I mean I mean just think of your own identity and is there anyone here willing to raise their hand and tell me they know who they are and then explain it you know I'm willing to do that raise your hand tell me who you are and then explain who you are to people beautiful we'll start with Kasim Yosef who are you I don't mean your name but who are you and explain it i spaced your name what's your name no he hadn't know me what's your last name hamburger Bamber why November okay good noemi's turn who are you know me and explain it amazing amazing they nailed it and I'm sure all of you were gonna say that too but if you weren't you're in some kind of constant identity crisis where you need constant encouragement of who you are um can I just tell all of you something if you weren't the people who raised your hands and said that like like those two participants you must get there or you're gonna have a hard life if you want to spend your life dependent on people giving you feedback on how you're doing it's gonna be really hard I mean your life will be hard and you lose give me a lot of disappointment a lot of sadness and it's gonna be nerve wracking because you can't be guaranteed that someone's gonna pat you on the back along the way all day Oh more you know every morning so you need to get to that soul space because when you generate from there you're what's called self generated from try that term self generated you did a lousy job except for you did a wonderful what's your name again Aviva did a great job everyone please say self-generated okay what's the opposite of self generated others generated hey which one you want to be you want to be self generated and by the way self generated means that you're coming from the soul which means what's really generating you your God generated once you're self generated meaning you're from the true self which is the consciousness of your soul that's in you and you're actually aware of it right now so once you're generating from there you're in true self which is really generated by God and that's that's a wonderful place to be and you need a hell of a lot less makeup when you're God generated and you don't need to have as much you know it's just cheap as long as the car gets you where you're going you're good and that includes your body includes your vehicle includes your home you can just keep it simple and and you'll be happier if not happy which is a lot better than happier anyone want to be happier this year no you want to be happy you guys all fell right into my trap which by the way since you fell in that trap we'll just talk about that for just a minute is the fact that many of you actually fell into my trap of wanting to be happier you have to realize that you don't really want to be happy otherwise you would have said no you don't want to be happier see the words happier means I want to be unhappy but less unhappy than last year but for some reason unhappy really works for you I don't know what it's getting you is maybe getting you more attention or more love or you know someone's someone's helping you out by you being unhappy in some way so it obviously serves you but be careful those traps anyone want to be on anyone want to be happier next year no say no no we want to be happy say we want to be happy participate I want to be happy try together one two three [Music] and want to be healthier next year a lot of people sabotage their health you get a lot of attention if you're sick or you got a headache stomachaches catch colds people start rallying behind you but in the end you're just a victim have a cold so what's the point you know it's not like fever I'm gonna rally behind you when you're doing great you know people are happy to rally behind you even when you're doing great it's just a kids way of letting busy parents know that you're still you still exist but many people let that follow them into adulthood and they keep catching colds and sabotaging their immune systems keep serving them as adults just as a funny aside husbands learn quickly when they get married don't ever get sick because husbands are very excited to get sick for the first time after they get married cuz they've been like missing their mom forever you know however many years you've been out of the house you've been missing your mom and you finally got someone inert and like nurture you so you like you're so excited to have your first call and your wife just kind of looks over it and she's like I married a lemon and she gets like all insecure and like she literally I still like she almost has to look it up on google sick husband if a child sick she's right there I mean it's like all the nurturing just comes out husband's sick you're gonna have to google that figure out what what do you do with that and so husbands learn really quick never get sick like six just not part of your repertoire cuz it's just not gonna be worth it and the and let's get a poll here everyone think about your fathers okay raise your hand did your father get sick like did he catch colds meaning often or or maybe he got like a cold a year when he just his immune system got wiped out from some trip or something okay raise your hand if your father got sick raise your hand if your father just did not get sick that's about half in here anyway but the one thing I realized later in life that daughters are amazing if you get sick daughters are just all too excited to take care of you cuz daughters are always in this massive competition with their mothers for their father's attention and the mother always elbows you out but when your father gets sick you got a chance there cuz mom's just the more sick he gets the more insecure she gets whereas if you're the daughter you get to like just totally take care of him it's it's wonderful but I feel so bad for girls cuz they finally get their own man they finally get their own man and all he wants to do is conquer the world outside the house cuz you're cut you're conquered already you're wearing a wedding ring so like he's done with that now he's gonna go like get rich or get known or be this like you know big guy and you're still competing before you compete it with your mom now you're competing with his career and so it's like that's why we have another brother that's shallow asani Esha and then I've been translating that on my live feed what I'm gonna do it anyway so we say every day that God didn't make us a woman so so then why don't we just say for making me a man if it's such a good thing and the answer is that to be a man is tough it's hard to be a woman go-to man it's tough cuz you got to go out there and man up in so many ways to like feed the chicks at home and pay for the mortgage and there's like all this like you know the world out there is pretty dangerous it's for I don't mean physically dangerous I'm talking about like you it's just scary out there and men have to go do that but if you've noticed have you noticed like men keep getting like tighter and tighter pants and they're like and they're like they're starting to wear like knickers and like like pink convertible socks and stuff and and then they're like they're never getting married because that would be too scary and so they're just kind of staying in their parents home into their 30s and and they're like meaning meaning really deep down every man just wants to curl up into a little ball and be held and not have to go do that not have to go out there and and so we really are when we wake up in the morning the first thing we want to do is go back to sleep us men because we just don't want to go out there and deal with it and and so we really do want to stay at home we want to be home husbands and so we wake up in the morning as women and we make a blessing well shallow asani Isha we have another 17 hours to figure out if we can be a man got a 17-hour man contest we get our you-know-whats out of bed and go do something out there and move our bag of bones around and maybe someone what pit actually pay us for it scares the daylights out of men especially Millennials especially young people from this millennium super freaky you can watch Jordan Peterson for that one and and then the since we're on this Cholewa Sonny of it he didn't make me a slave well that's mastering free will cuz if a slave doesn't have free will slave isn't a master of choice slave does what he's told but a human being has free will and can make choices so you have 17 hours to see how you choose to be a free person but we don't say who mate we don't bless God for having making us free we bless him for not having made me a slave but now let's see if we can be free today make good choices so the other one is looking good we're in a constant pattern that was like a really long parenthesis for how much we need others to like support us in who we are except for two two participants in the class witches no me and Kesem Yosef okay now I just want to show you on a chart how this works so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a kind of an interesting chart not much of an artist but I'll do my best how many lines did I put my let's go for ten okay nine right now so is there a center to this is that the center one two three one two three four five whoa not much of a center okay that's more or less a center okay so let's call this the center and we have another quote around here thank you all right everyone watch this this is freaky I'm putting an X there why because you're from X neighborhood or an X community so your parents and your you know this is your like immediate family their exes and then maybe there's a best friend in there if you have a smaller family right here I mean think about it your parents sent you they had a lot of choices of schools if you grew up in a city they thought like what city looks what school looks at the world the way we do you understand X because there was Y way of looking more than the Z way of looking we're an ABEC I've got a lot of ways to look in the world there's multiple levels of world views but your parents sent you into education system X based on your family's worldview which is quite random unless of course you're raised in Torah which would make it not random maybe a little random for you but but it's actually it's way more than random it's something special any of it that's a explain but chances are your parents move to us to a neighborhood full of X's so that's all the friends and acquaintances in the world of X's in your city and then of course there's just kind of people you peripherally know around there and like the bigger area I'm like wasting Asia tours Inc here okay looks warm and snuggly you've got yourself perfectly surrounded with everyone who looks at the world the way you do and which was very interesting because I had mentioned that there was I had a BDS explosion you guys know PTSS it is the anti anti-israel camp that tries to get it companies to divest and stuff they're like Pro PLO it's usually I'm kind of a left-wing liberal stance you know like like the is like usually the OB gtq community likes likes BDS which means to boycott Israel which is really interesting because the palace how long would a and would an LGBT to last in like the Palestinian territories you know well right now they do very well but but what if like they actually succeeded and this whole country was overrun with radical Islam how do they feel about them how do feel about left-wing liberals which it which is just so bizarre because it's like you might as well just put a swastika on your forehead because because if you're willing to side with the people who would kill you just to be against the Jewish people put just wear swastika t-shirt like why do you just be real about it you know you're a Nazi and so and so it's like it's a very strange movement that they don't notice that it's about themselves like for example Airbnb are BDS so they they any disputed area of Israel which are all like biblical lands anything disputed Israel they won't list those addresses now they will because they got in so much trouble but whatever they weren't gonna list those addresses meanwhile it was proven that BDS lists addresses and all around the globe no matter what disturbs puted territories and they're like seven major disputed territories whether where they would never even dreamed of moving listings from they would never have dawned on them oh but Israel hmm there we're gonna we're gonna come out against thee the evil Zionist Empire meanwhile they're gonna do all this on their smartphones developed in Israel now that's that's people who live in the excellent and I don't think any of you on your first day of school you know when you're in kindergarten your parents we're gonna start your schooling in X school I don't think any of you like stopped at the doorway you know your mother's taking you in none of you stopped at the doorway and said mommy I'd like to speak to the teacher and your mommy brings out the teacher and you say to the teacher yes I was wondering what it is you'll be teaching me and how do you know it's true do you do that kindergarten it's my kind of girl except you were probably three or four but I'm happy to meet a rebel when did you finally stop going to school help you oh you stayed in school yeah no I left one is a living I lived I left at eleven anyway the which is why I'm up here and you're all sitting there now watch this watch what happens here that was it oh you can turn it from down there the clip will slide a little bit and watch this teeny bit you got it so watch what's gonna happen here imagine the ex young lady or young man like I don't know bumps their head one day and decides they're leaving the world of X they're buying themselves a plane ticket they're gonna leave what was the true and shows little town there I forget what it is called but what happens when X is gonna leave sunnyville and he or she is gonna go out of there and go discover something about the world yeah everyone's gonna be like don't go dunk these don't go cuz it's like scary you know where are you going what are you gonna be discovering cuz like can't you just keep it normal please it happened to me I mean I remember I remember my first trip to Europe when you go to Europe people like they think America is like the biggest joke in the world and they've got a lot of America jokes like lots and lots and and also jokes about the president I don't remember who the president was at the time I was George Bush Senior all of us sholom so it was so there were like lots of jokes about the president lots of jokes about America lots of jokes about capitalism it was like now my first days in Europe I was just like because they weren't saying him to me that I was just fooling with Europeans and they were telling the jokes with each other and cracking up over beer and spliffs and they would and they were but they were just like don't I was like couldn't believe what I was hearing and I wasn't involved so much because I didn't want to like suddenly get attacked so I just was kind of like that's interesting so I finally did talk to a few of them and then two weeks later and guess who was telling jokes about America me because I just didn't realize because I lived in X and suddenly I was in Europe which was why and all of a sudden I got this perspective about the US that things that US people take for granted are not to be taken for granted so much they're they're not Givens it's just a given if you live in excellent which America is part of X in certainly anyway but you discover why and then all of a sudden you become a Y well I'll tell you this much stay at X land if your why cuz it's not gonna be very friendly when you get back stay out of X land that's why you're not gonna be like people aren't gonna be like so excited you came back they'll be excited for like a couple hours but then after a while they're just gonna start getting uncomfortable because wise aren't welcome in excellent think about it there just doesn't secure about who they are as anybody and so having Y come back there's a little weird so let's put Y here all of a sudden it's time to go home and so Y comes home and now you're why in the middle of all those X's you know what happens when you come back as a why you get attacked you come back as of why you get attacked no do they know what they're talking about tell me all the people tell you they have any idea what they're talking about were they with you were they with you in while and no they were not with you in Wyland at all they have no idea what they're talking minute are they're gonna attack anyway yeah it's a little weird you know you ever got in an argument with somebody who had no idea what they're talking about actually happen to me earlier yeah you're gonna get attacked for being a why by people who don't even know what they're talking about and let me give you a little hint if that ever happens the way you do it it's kind of passive-aggressive but you say things like gee like this is amazing since when did you become an expert in whatever Y is and they'll be like well I'm not really an expert in it well you certainly argue as if you are like as if you really know what you're talking about here another thing you can say is the views that this is really harsh but you say you say um you know it seems whenever Y comes up you get really uncomfortable maybe you'd like to talk about it and if not with me perhaps you'd like to go see someone professionally but like put it in their court if you're getting attacked for being a why just throw it back I don't like it like put in their core you didn't do anything wrong for reevaluating your life that's not wrong it's good to reevaluate your life and if they can't handle it so it throw it right back at them yes in the back I forgot your name I haven't seen you in months what's you know uh yeah you know asking such an anomalous question is I'm not gonna answer that right now but I'm happy to discuss any anomalies with people who have anomalies happening to them okay now the so you come back as a why they're all going nuts now someone raise your hand and tell me what's their problem with you know next okay what's the problem with that yeah what's the problem what's problem go deeper yeah I can't hear her okay insecure keep going build that that's your right what's up [Music] excellent so let's go back again people don't know who they are people don't know who they are at all so people will just like grasp at anything to become someone and so they live these characters that work for their communities and that's who they are but it's not built on anything it's it's a it's a deck of it's a house of cards it's a sandcastle waiting for the next wave to come in it's an in secured position and so because they're you know they've got a life fall of standards and all kinds of ways of being and ways of looking at things that's a happen that's a house of cards that can fall at any minute and then you waltz in as why the issue for them is they don't know who they are you see this ex person here this ex person here needs these ex people so you're probably focusing on you in the middle but every person's an X in the middle of their system each X ism in the middle and so they require everyone to be X for them to be themselves and so when someone plays the Y card the exes lose their sense of self they lose their identity and when someone's losing identity they go crazy they start actually arguing stuff they know nothing about they'll actually pretend to be experts I mean for about 30 seconds because they don't know what they're talking about they were never in the while and so they can't really have an argument but they'll try anyway or maybe just to make you feel like a fool or or embarrass you in some way or somehow knock you down publicly or something we're in front of the family because they're just desperate to keep their identity which means nothing anyway their identity in general and again when we're talking about Torrini identity this holds true only as far as customs family customs you know communal customs because go to the next observant community in the next tour observing community it's got totally different customs so really is X and ye the same but the very base level of like keeping tour keeping Shabbos keeping kosher learning Torah praying doing mitzvahs that that's not the XY game but all the outer fixings of it all that's definitely the XY game in the Torah community and by the way min hunks Kaddish Minox code is you better be very careful if you're gonna take off a min hug even a little min hug I had guys at my house on chaves chaves night and someone debunked cutting off the ends of the hollis you know when you got your brand your collar you know people cut off the ends of the house so someone debunked cutting off the end of the holidays really just much more superstitious than based on any real and and the and then I said to one of the guys who said his father did it I said you keep doing it just keep doing it not that he really really needs to keep doing it but you better think twice before you start messing with your family's tradition your family's tradition isn't up for grabs not for sale these artwork part of a tribe and there's these little local tributaries of the tribe that have developed customs over over millennia and so don't be such a don't be so arrogant as to think you're gonna drop a tradition women have this easier because you when you marry you automatically go to your husband's tradition you go into his tribe so there it's easy you don't have to worry so much but there are certain things your mother did that you should do you shouldn't drop that's them that's the mother to the daughter grandmother to mother to daughter all that chain you don't want to miss with that either don't mess with that stuff you know okay if you're forty years old or something you've just like that particular not forty but let's say you're in your thirties and there's a min hug that's just causing you to break out in hives okay so speak to a rabbi don't just drop it speak to Rabi tell me you break out in hives every time you try to deal with this families this family custom your family's been doing forever don't just drop it cuz you're breaking out in hives go to the rabbi and say I'm breaking out in hives and see what he says about it don't mess with the customs of tribes that's not to be missing National Geographic is always trying to protect tribes and their customs like why shouldn't you protect your tribe your customer now the now I'd like to hear from all of you what kind of character does it take to be a why amongst exes we haven't gotten there like okay why reevaluate it they didn't worry about looking good for everybody they came back as a why and lived amongst the exes tell me what kind of character traits does it take to be fun to be why amongst the exes yeah I just just answered it right now you just want the answer that question what kind of care