Practical Spirituality

all right let's get the recording going hi everybody welcome to practical spirituality with rabbi yomtov in the house um welcome to everyone if you want to watch this live i sent a little link on uh i'll put a hit link if you wanna join me live so um yeah um today we're we're talking about are the are the disgruntled disinterested teenagers right are they right and and the answer is they're right and they're wrong but let's break down the topic let's get into it and see what we can discover and uh avi welcome uh welcome to the session and if you could put your camera on that'd be great and the uh also resend me again that that thing you had sent me originally of two months ago i never got to see her a month ago something about uh i don't remember what it was it was something about the jewish community and i don't remember anyway avi are you a truck driver no i'm a locksmith but in between jobs i'm in my car going from okay let's get moving um so here we go um we're talking about the disgruntled teenagers and uh and their their uh deals like this you know today i was i was i was playing a song in a band i i'm the bass player and backup singer of a band and we had this song that uh um it was about the future in the past and the elderly what represent the past and the young represent the future and the the young represent progress progression like moving forward in life the elderly represent uh conserving the the past and the you know the what we've learned from the past you need both and but what can often happen is that the is that the the those that represent the past meaning the the people who are older and usually in control um they they often wind up being they wind up overstepping their authority now young people are over are often unruly you know they're they're testing the waters they're they're messing with the boundaries the borders and and that that's kind of their job you see all young people do it you know if you tell your kids not to do something they're going to do it and they and they want to see if there's consequences if there's consequences so then they'll they'll know that was a real border you set up if they see you didn't really have there were no real consequences and they they start to wonder where the the actual edge of things are and it's our job to be creating real edges to things and and uh you know setting up the structure of society but meanwhile young people's job is to tear down uh whatever we build to see if there's anything real there and what can happen in the power of those that represent tradition those who represent you know the past and people who represent um you know the guard of all that's true you know what can happen is you take um you can become presumptuous and think you have a patent on reality and and once you once the older generation starts kind of wielding this patent on reality to this power that they feel they have once the the elderly start to when i say the elderly i don't mean senior citizen i'm just saying that the people who run the system you know 40s 50s 60s 70s maybe the uh that once you decide that you have a patent on reality the teenagers just call it out they're just like you know meaning young people are just like you know they don't buy it they don't buy it they they they they don't think it's real you know they they they're they're not interested you know it doesn't it's not true that you have the patent on reality and and and it just so happens that there's let me share with you like this there's there's dynamism see how my hands going dynamically there's upstairs downs that's dynamic and all systems are dynamic just like your heart rate goes up and down and there's winter and there's summer and there's you know and the the human body goes through cycles especially women's bodies and everything's cycling everything's in a cycle of up and down and that's the dynamism of life that's why you can't market something one way uh you know in in 2012 and then market it the same way in 2022 because they won't buy the product it's things change and you have to be you have to be really on it yeah you have to be really honored hey philip how you doing welcome to youtube live um anyway you got the picture basically basically things have to be dynamic now now what goes wrong is the people who are at the top of any system they the dynamism of the system meaning the recycling because if you think about waves you know they're really like if you look at water waves it looks like they're you know it looks like water is moving right in the ocean doesn't look like the waves are moving guess what they're not moving any water it's amazing the waves actually are not moving water what's happening is the water itself is spinning in a circle as it goes so like for example let's say there's 10 foot waves that are just rolling through the deep ocean and you pour red dye into the ocean the red dye stays right there it doesn't move and you just see the waves come through it you know so you'll see the waves will be it'll be blue water and then it'll be red you know and then it'll be blue again it doesn't go with it so waves are cycles and things are cycling on themselves i imagine it's true if jordan peterson said it because he's so well researched but he he when he he talks about the the one percent that the progressives hate you know meaning the elite wealth people he says that that even though that always exists he says it turns over like every 30 years it's like no one stays at that position because because what i'm saying is that the people at the top get nervous about the dynamism of life they don't know how to handle the percolating the coming up of new and the but the new always comes up and the news supposed to come up and that's the that's that's the way god created the world there's very few people in leadership who can accept the flow of of life and the dynamism of of a business or an institution or of a government or of a society in general and they don't know how to deal with it and so in order to remain in power you feel threatened by the the younger and you wind up just uh you know knocking them down you know like uh so you don't like it go away and and and they go away and they create their own business and they take your business down with with as you lose in the competition and so so it's really uh it's really god's way of keeping the world fresh and and and that is exactly how the world goes and and to be a good leader means to be a good percolator now he also creates personalities like my own where we mess with the system just like teenagers only we're adults and so um we question everything and they're they're rare individuals that will do that but if you notice um if you notice i have no students now you might be saying what do we chop liver yeah we're not your students you are you are you're my soldiers meaning your your job is to go you know take what i'm saying and go uh assert it in your own lives in your own world but i don't have like actual students think about rabbis rabbis throughout history they have students devoted students but the people who have this unique personality it's called it's called a dynamic assertive their jobs just to be rattle rowers rousers just to make trouble and uh and that's that's that's my job to be a troublemaker now you have to do it very carefully and i've learned how to do it carefully and sadly teenagers don't know how to do things carefully so they try to blow up the whole system and but they wind up uh you know getting them they themselves wind up they themselves wind up getting uh kind of ostracized and find themselves without community and not good not not healthy because we always got to be able to play both individuality and we have to be able to play um group you're always between individuality and group all the time and the group is again structured by the elders and the individuals are often the younger look at a school like a high school it's you know [Music] 98 populated by the younger and and then there's the two percent that are running the place but the kids don't buy it because the the elderly ossify they they lose their plasticity plasticity for yiddish speakers means flexibility you when you think plastic you don't think very flexible but but the fancy word plasticity actually means fluidity mahmoud ben mignon said i like that name he says wise mind is agonized by the deep thinking of his or her reflective mind while the stupid man finds himself basking in his indifference due to his ignorance okay that was very deep and right now this is called practical spirituality so right now we're on a very practical level um let's see how spiritual we get um anyway the so the teenagers are calling you know i don't want to use uh i don't want to use uh swear words but they're they're saying am i allowed to say bull am i going to say shimmy can i say bull yeah yeah you guys you like say whatever you want so the teenagers the teenagers are saying bowl and our job is to say is to say to ourselves well if the teenagers are saying this is bold so then so then it must be there's bull i mean we we just had in the talmud like that anyone who's you'll like this piece this is really crazy crazy piece of tone that i'll share with you that um another one just that i happen to turn to is that a man's words may inadvertently contain some prophecy of the future so one should therefore avoid the mention of anything undesirable that could happen in the future lest his words carry a prophetic message which once expressed is likely is less likely to be reversed be very careful of any negative things you say because there might be a touch of prophecy in you and it'll be hard to reverse stuff that you said um that's kind of an interesting thought also but what i want to share with y'all let's see if i can find it here [Music] um where did that go ah yeah listen this one um you know recently recently there was a um there were accusations of a man for having uh having done uh you know pretty nasty things uh uh likely true that he did it but we don't know i mean but it likely true that he didn't anyway he was accused and he was and then he he was uh he committed suicide actually and left a whole generation of people who had been reading his books um kind of completely baffled and don't know what to do with themselves in their whatever the real disaster i i never even heard of the guy until after he committed suicide i i was just all of a sudden called by a ton of people what do i think about this whole thing and how do we look at it and it's a real disaster but i'm listening to this little piece here it says it says i'll do it all in english just because we're on youtube as well here so it says and rav who was the name of a rabbi said in the name of rabbi reuven the son of it's [Music] sounds italian he said and some say it was todd and bryce said so rav ruvving the son of rebbe reuven the son of ribby eats to really said this is what he said a person is not suspected of something unless he has done it how crazy is that a person's not suspected of something unless he's done it now obviously when the talmud gives statements like that you got to keep reading and if he has not done all of it he has done part of it and if he has not done part of it he has thought of doing it so can you imagine like stuff you think about can wind up biting you in the in the rear yeah you might get you might get associated with that publicly for having even thought of doing it and then it goes on and if he has not thought of doing it he has seen others doing it and you know and he was like deep in his heart he was like wish i could do that you know meaning he was like he it wasn't like he saw others doing it and he was like oh that's terrible he saw others doing it he was like yeah they're enjoying themselves you understand hey greetings from belgium i love the international scene on youtube very cool and uh so [Music] yes let's keep cruising um this gets challenged by rebbi yaakov he says that um there's a verse that says the children of israel imputed things that were not so to to hashem their god thus you see the people capable of entertaining suspicions that are completely unfounded meaning they were suspicious of god and that's clearly unfounded so you see that people can have an intent um really they were just trying to provoke god's anger for some reason in that story and they knew they knew that it had no basis so it says that that the people were jealous of moses in the camp and of our own god's holy one and it turns out they all accused moses listen to this crazy it teaches that every husband formally warned his wife against secluding herself with moses thus moses was suspected of a transgression of which he was purely innocent they did this because of their hatred of moses um by the way leave it to jews to be so honest in our own books about you know like no one talks about people hating you know their their saints you know and here like the greatest rabbi of all time the greatest leader the greatest most saintly man the talmuds very clearly sing they hated him by the way you know why they would hate him they would hate him because he his job was to bring down the law and the law means that someone is not going to be able to do whatever they want to do so anyway there's a whole long story here i'm not going to go into it but the the bottom line is uh back to i i don't remember how we got on this i'm a little embarrassed that i that i even brought that up because it's a it's a class in it of itself about accusation and what's the truth behind things meanwhile let's get back to us so so when you have when you have the kids saying that thing this isn't real this isn't true and you have the adults saying they have the patent on things and the kids are calling them out the kids are right and the adults have to have to back down but how do you back down when you're a principal heading back down when you're the the teacher how do you back down when you're the the uh you know the the people in charge how do you how do you move so fast to the dynamics of the world and and are they and and there's a lot of things that that really are true that you're that you're that the world needs that you are putting forth in the jewish world um it's a specifically a problem because the in the jewish world we have an endless torah and we have a endless god with no definition so when the when the powers that be give some kind of definition of god well that's automatically wrong because god cannot be defined and when the powers that be you know stake their claim on on torah torres and it's endless the wisdom is endless you know so who are you and then and [Music] and what they'll often do if they're really far gone is they they will make torah into an idolatry meaning instead of having the service be of god they'll make everything about about the study of torah when in fact you know this the study of torah is one of 613 commandments it's one of them but if you make it all about that and some kid who's a little more instinctive a little more physical you know he doesn't he doesn't have that that natural connection through study that's that's you know and now we've made all of judaism torah i mean think about it the 612 commandments are all about stuff to do so instinctual kids love doing things they love building thatched huts and stuff which during one part of the year is a commandment to dwell in it and so and so if you make it all about the study and that that's what makes you a good jew for example it's going to be with 45 percent of the population because 10 of the population likes to sit on books and then there's a breakdown of 45 or interested in people and 45 are interested in things and uh and so so the so you can really lose people by doing that making me like holding the the when the old elder generation who control things make a a they start defining god and they and then they of course make torah the the uh the end instead of a means to an end so that that's gonna send teenagers for a loop they're gonna be like nah not not part of that but sadly they they're not getting who's going to tell them how holy they are just going to tell them that god loves them who's going to tell them that that god created the world for all of us and who's going to tell them that that that the torah is filled with with mitzvahs for you to enjoy and be part of and to connect to you know all they're going to get is disenfranchised they're going to wind up smoking weed and drinking alcohol and and uh you know falling they're having their earth kind of fall out from from under them uh i'm gonna check my chats over here on youtube real quick we've got a few things here um someone sent love that's nice oh that was brandon it's one of the sixteen how did you explain the guess about yamabula someone asked why but it says you should be constantly involved in taurus study so how do you explain that so the the you're supposed to constantly be involved in mitzvahs but the problem is we can run out of mitzvahs number one um for example if you put your filling on well you're at it you're done yeah you're done you know taurus studies a mitzvah that you can do at all times and so you can keep being involved with it it's also it's a very high a very high um endeavor to be involved in torah study you're studying the mind of god and so that's that's for sure you want to be involved in that you also you have to you have to decide what you're doing with your mental real estate so if you're not involved if your head's not in tower well where is it so you're allowed to make a living you know yeah you got to go use your brain for for making a living but you can have your head all over the place so at least if you have your head in torah it's you got your head in the right place and then the other question is well what about the statement of our sages that says that that the study of torah is equal to all of the commandments and the the answer is is that the that it's a really big thing to study towards really big and really important and also how do you do all the other commandments if you don't study the torah you can't you can't do them you wouldn't know what to do you know there's the actual five books of moses explains like none of them doesn't explain any of them i think it's my holy wife all that hey mommy you're you're live on uh on youtube tour anytime and uh and uh zoom um are you ready for me to pick you up okay i'll call you soon i'll be i'll call you in a minute bye she wins anyway i see i'm really jet-lagged tonight that's funny i arrived friday and i sunday monday went fine but now i'm all jet-lagged whatever i it goes in waves you know it can just hit you like a ton of bricks and i just got hit by a ton of bricks anyway blessing everybody and uh we got one more my mahmud ben minyan he said a wise person asked a question what is the difference between the ignorant and the apathetic a man answered i don't know and i don't care that's cute you hear that that was a wise person to ask okay shalom everybody blessings all the best i was just staying consistent today i didn't want to leave you guys hanging because i had a meeting uh for my child's you know schooling okay all the best bye-bye