October 11, 2023

Shalom this is Rabbi yov Glazer here in my studio in Jerusalem uh now I've got my mountain bikes with me in the studio because our bomb shelter is um unlocked which is where I usually would keep my bikes and here we are in the midst of this crisis um we're devastated this is the by far the worst thing that's happened to the Jewish people since the Holocaust in including uh obviously my whole entire experience in Israel for the last 33 years this is like by far the worst time that we've had to go through and it's um it's a really really crazy time to be here and um but we're here and we are uh together and we will uh and we're United for the first time in a long time and um as it says uh you know the people even name their daughters some times NE which is the the um initials ofare The Eternity of of the Jewish people lakare it doesn't lie meaning we really are an eternal Nation but we're only really an eternal Nation when we're together and that's the same thing in in uh Iran or ancient Persia 2500 years ago the uh when uh we were being attacked at the time with the first serious genocidal attempt against us the uh we were called a nation whose it's two languages of scattered separate and Scattered and when we're separate and Scattered so they can come after us and um and interestingly the the word Hamas um is uh means violence and um and it was specifically the weak and the it was called in the Torah when amalik attacks the the Jews in the desert on her way out of Egypt the word was uh theim from the word kalash the weak ones were attacked and uh and again the word Hamas is the word violence we know it from the uh Story the flood of uh Noah where the word Kamas comes from um i' would like to offer in these short videos a u just a stuff we can do during this time so in this particular video I I want to mention about being busy to make a difference it's easy to get paralyzed uh during these times uh we get glued to the screens we're watching the news we're constantly getting updated and and but there's a certain paralysis it's kind of like that same feeling where where your uh your dopamine your pleasure centers aren't working working anymore because you're scrolling through a news feed or YouTube shorts or or any of those other things that young people watch where you start to feel dead inside so you can feel that way and the antidote to that is to um get busy many years ago uh I don't know what year it was 2006 maybe uh when uh Lebanon started firing missiles into Israel so again we felt paralyzed and I remember my wife and I really just were paralyzed we didn't know what to do with ourselves and um eventually got word got out that people were just in bomb shelters for too long they couldn't stay in any longer but they couldn't go out either and so my wife and I but mostly she and a rabbi named Kanan Koffman a friend of ours from aaor we got busy with uh and brought in 1,200 people 850 of them were kids and we brought them out of the bomb shelters in the north we sent buses and they fed we were like fed and clothed them for 3 weeks straight in various locations here in Jerusalem and but the second we took on that task was the last moment that we felt weak and that was the last moment we felt anxiety because I didn't mention that but there's also anxiety around these things you know this could easily escalate globally um you know strong Israel means strong Jews everywhere and a weak Israel means that everyone's in trouble and uh so there it brings a certain anxiety as well these times and and so getting busy with the efforts is very important just figure out something you're good at you know find something you're good at and get busy with it even if you're not that good at it um make phone calls raise money um figure out a difference you can make everyone can make a difference in some way just think what difference can I make and make that difference and you'll see that immediately you will get back your your meaning your chemical balance will come back you'll lose that that kind of inner zombie feeling that that comes with this overload of news and uh and you also get back the um the the well-being as well of um of being active you you get back your um um oh just the the meaning of it that you'll lose your anxiety the anxiety goes away as long as as you're busy and then uh it also another added benefit is you sleep a lot better why because you were so active you get exhausted after enough hours of it so we're just like we just made our home into a command center and uh and we're just like pumping out meals out of our house um and not just meals like other needs like when now we're after tactical gloves and tactical boots uh bulletproof vest it's like it's amazing like they had such a big call up that there's there's just nothing of stuff that the Army can provide for them and there's there's um whole battalions that are you know just just eating out of cans and they need proper food so we're doing that um I'll put a link in if you'd like to be part of that but uh but rather than just donating then going back to the lethargy make phone calls about it uh how can you help in some way how can other people help and um and there's plenty of other organizations make sure they're good ones make sure the overhead is either none like ours or at least small that the money's going directly to the effort and the um yeah and obviously they're tax deductible almost every organization including ours um get busy you get busy and then you lose that inner zombie you you lose the anxiety and you lose the sleeplessness you actually sleep very well um because you're tired and you also sleep well because of the meaning in your heart that you made a difference let's make a difference m