Shaar HaBitachon Lesson 26 with Rabbi Shais Taub

all right good evening we are still in Chapter four pedicle adieu yesterday we were discussing some errors in thinking that people make about wealth specifically people who who think that wealth will bring them validation they want the image they want the I don't know the reputation of being a wealthy person they think that's gonna make them feel good about themselves and we spoke about that ok and we also spoke about the fact that because they're chasing that that self-esteem that they end up doing foolish things to make a living that really doesn't help them at all and they would have made the same living whether or not they did those things either way ok so we're gonna continue now we're still talking about the issue of making a living trying to straighten our straighten out our thinking regarding parnell so let's look inside the text the yeh xie mut Seba cloud neva chiama main one finds among those who seek wealth mee-shee Agia me Meno l poq list i vas a vendetta Casa baya shares of our knew that one person attains all that he desires of it through the means that we have mentioned what does it mean the means that we have mentioned the mera pehla nefesh says the this means the various forms of work and labor that we discussed in Chapter three or to use our facility rhinology the Kalin the vessels that one uses to receive shams blessings for par Nosa ok so that's the right way of going about it so there are people who get the wealth they need in the appropriate way just by making a vessel in the way that we explained already at length who may ham and there are others me Xie Jia I love Madera higher Usha maja day Melissa some people received their wealth through inheritance and the like and it's interesting the yak shave and he thinks or each one of them thinks yeah see base he will lie I said that the cause is what mandated it meaning velu Lehane la jolla Maggie I love me monochrome without the particular way in which they made wealth David they want to receive the wealth and therefore uma shabbiha hashiba me ballad a Hamas a brave they praise the means through which they received the wealth and not the cause cause with a capital C Hashem who brought it about in other words they get very fixated on the way in which they received the wealth and they think that that's what that's what it was that had so one guy worked for another guy inherited it and each one thinks I only could have gotten it in that way couldn't have gotten it any other way why because that's the way that he got it but that's not true if you wouldn't have gotten it through that way would have gotten it through another way it's like I used the muscle earlier actually I got nice feedback from someone who says it was a helpful muscle I was talking about the the kayla is like the the you UPS guy so the UPS guy brings you a gift from your mother your mother sent you the gift it's not the UPS guy right so if it wouldn't be this guy if wouldn't be this this drivers shift it would be another driver chef time the day that it was delivered okay if wouldn't come from this clear would come through through another clean but it's not about like he says one guy worked for one guy inherited it okay so that's just the way it happened to work out but it was a Hashem who made it that this guy should get it to regular work and this guy should get it through an inheritance by the way you know the one about the two greenhorns they arrived at Ellis Island around the same time as each other on the boat and they didn't see each other for years and then one day they're walking down the Lancie Street and the Lower East Side and they run into each other and that one looks like he's struggling and the other one looks like he's he's really made it so the struggling one asks the one who looks like he made this his ankle we both got off the same in Ellis Island and it looks like you made it in this Medina and I I'm still struggling what's the difference between me and you so Yankel says i'll tell you i am the truth is it was a combination of good old-fashioned hard work and a bit of Mazel yeah hard work and a bit of Mazel that's right hard work and a bit of Mazel I'll explain I was down to my last nickel so I took that nickel and I bought an apple and I spent the entire day polishing that Apple and then at the end of the day I sold that shiny Apple for 10 cents next morning I took those 10 cents and I bought two apples and I spent the whole day polishing those two apples and the end of the day I took those shiny two apples and I sold them for 20 cents the next day you know what I did you bought four apples that's right I went out and I bought four apples and I spent the whole day polishing those four apples and at the end of the day I sold those shiny four apples for 40 cents and every single day for a month that's what I do I continue this system I buy a more absolutely Wow those apples and then I would sell those apples and I finally finally I accumulated a profit of over $10 that was the hard work and then my wife's American uncle died and left us $10,000 that was the bit of Mazel okay anyways let's continue here okay so a bit of a highest says that this person who assumes that it was the cleat it was the particular way in which he received his livelihood to which he owes thanks to which he owes gratitude he's making a big mistake he's being a big mistake so he explains here let's let's continue the cam who'd a member gsella Adam shoe by me but what is he like he's gonna give us a Marshall a parable what is this guy like he's like a guy in the desert hibbe-dah love hot summer who's suffering from thirst Oh matzah maíam Shana Mizuki embed buyer Akkad he finds water that's not sweet he finds that nice water brackish water that had gathered in a pit the summable have simcha they love another man he's so happy about this and he slaked his thirst with the brackish water and that nice water Vic I share holic ma'at and then he goes on a little further in this desert where he is Oh matzah mayan Nevaeh Miami so kyun he finds a wellspring bubbling forth with fresh water sweet water dog al Masha Qadam maecius I say am ia motor Shane iam or a vase a mayhem he regrets the fact that he had drunk of the brackish water and slaked his thirst with it you know about the guy in the desert by the way this guy was walking in the desert similar to this muscle here he's walking in the desert he was so thirsty so thirsty he was looking for water and he's walking he's walking he's walking he saw an oasis so a guy there person in the middle of the desert and he comes over and says oh please please give me water I'll pay anything he says oh I'm sorry I don't have water here this isn't the an oasis this is a Thai store I sell pies who'd have thunk right in the middle of the desert a haberdasher selling pies he says I don't need ties I need water sorry just have ties so he goes continues walking and walking and was walking through the desert and he's walking and he's walking he's so thirsty and then he sees another looks like an oasis another guy runs over to him Oh an oasis I'll pay you anything for water he says sorry I don't have water here I don't sell water I sell pies like that other guy you know yeah I guess so he also sells ties oh I don't I don't need to tie him in the middle of it does it I need what I don't I don't I don't want to ties as I'm sorry that's all I have it just sell ties okay fine forget it and it keeps walking and walking he's so thirsty and he's looking for water so Thursday's in the desert and he walks he sees another looks like an oasis he sees a guy up and he runs to him he says Oh an oasis you have water he says yes really please sell me water some water at any price he says I'm sorry sir but to be served here you have to be wearing a tie okay you know once upon a time people actually had to wear ties to go to a fancy restaurant you know about the guy tried to get over this is totally unrelated but I mean Union the guy tried to go to a fancy restaurant he walked in and the maitre d says to him I'm sorry to get into this restaurant you have to be wearing a tie so he ran out to his cars looking for time I can't find anything you opened up his trunk he saw a pair of jumper cables so I was like you know what the heck I took the jumper cable he tied around his neck like a bolo tie you know like those western ties you know Cowboys wear and you got a pair of jumper cables around his neck jumper cables you know so he's wearing these jumper cables around his neck and he says can I come in now it looks and says yeah okay fine but don't start anything okay anyway these are good these are good jokes alright so okay oh I got a note here by the way about the shiny apples if he doubled his money every day starting with five cents would he not have $100,000 after 30 days yes when I tell the joke next time that way I will remember to tell the appellate correctly yeah it's amazing when you double it's like the story about the chessboard everyone knows that one right but the chessboard the guy invented chess supposedly and then the King wanted to reward him who says what's your reward he said I want one kernel of wheat on the first you know I'm upon the chessboard of the first square and then the second square I want two kernels a week and then the third square of the chessboard I want four kernels a week and each square of the chessboard just double the amount of kernels a week it's like okay the guy wants to sack a wheat for inventing a game no problem and then he did it and he realized that mathematically if you keep doubling it each each time it ends up like being all the grain silos in the entire kingdom and he became like the wealthiest guy in the country and you can go figure that out mathematically I don't I don't even know how many boxes are on a chessboard I don't know I'm more of a Stratego guy by the way so an it'll or having by the way a Stratego tournament I am I'm having a Stratego tournament I like Stratego I like some of the bombs flag and you know the eights can assign the bomb and the spy is interesting that he can kill the Wang but everyone else kills him but he attacks he can even kill the one anyway okay so you'll figure out how much we the guy who invented chess got in the made-up story about the guy had made up Jess okay but yes you know in with the shiny apples he had $100,000 at the end of the month that is correct okay fine what else yeah Oh yeah so this is we were in the middle of a Marshall that the guy who credits the means of making a living is like a guy wandering in the desert and he gets to the the water and he the first hit of water is not nice water he drinks that and then he keeps walking it's like oh then he finds like the nice water is like I wish I would have waited I wish I would have waited you know it's like you know you eat you eat a bunch of crackers and comas and then you find out that they ordered pizza ah I wish i I knew they were ordering pizza I want to eaten crack crackers of comas okay pain malamar main shaggy I love becae but you do uh so it is with a wealthy man who acquired his wealth through a certain means and what does that mean the table of one and says either through working really hard meaning harder than he has to because he was mistaken about that and the possum says unethical means that he broke rules he shouldn't have broken but he thought he had to either the point is at this part of the metaphor it's clearly talking about a mistaken a mistaken course of action so the table of Anand says the mistake he made as he worked too hard and the past lakum says the mistake he made is he did immoral stuff to make his money but either way the point is somebody who makes a mistake chasing the money when he didn't have to Aloha saw him NASA sabahi me men who are you massag a CBC Bob Harris if those means had not been made available to him he would have acquired the same thing through other means kai-shek Domino like we already explained like we already explained okay and again the table of on and says without the difficulty and the past lakum says in in an ethical manner both of them say consistently with what they said but he thinks no no no because I had to work that hard to make the money what's the proof I worked that hard to make the money or I had the break rule in order to make the money what's the proof I broke rules in order to make the money right that's not a proof that's inaudible he would have made it the same way by the way somebody sent me a text and I would give out my number for texts but I don't see 90% of my texts anyway the best thing is the email the email address that I've been giving out rabbi at Seoul Ward's org I generally get all those emails and we'll Bleen either respond and if you ask a question about shadow but talking bleeding out there I'll try to respond in the class but somebody sent me a text this morning actually and he said what about stick you know what that is stick is stick means stuff that's not not clearly unethical but it's like yeah you know you being creative is that stuff that you should do maybe that's a khlifa pronoun so that that Hashem is presenting you with and I can't tell you what's over the line and what's not over the line but you know the story last night that was it last night or was it two nights ago about the Jew saw the the pile of gold and he says you know in our shadow if you want to give it to me give it to me a straight way without any questions so I think it's clear that making a living shouldn't really be agonizing and if you're agonizing over the morality of what you're doing that itself is just way too much mental effort the whole point of it is yogya capital you get a capella is supposed to make a living with your hands not yogya of the the MOA or of delay if you're not supposed to be toiling with you it with you with your head in your heart and if you're sitting there agonizing over whether its moral or it's not moral you know what I'm not a Roth I can't poss can I can't tell you whether this the stick is is okay or it's not okay but if it's keeping you up for even a minute at night how is that any better then staying up at night worrying about you know having to work harder neither of them are kosher you're not supposed to stay up not at night worrying how you're gonna work harder and it's not supposed to we'll stay up at night worrying with whether what you're doing is is ethical or not so that's really the answer to me the answer is if it's taking up too much headspace and too much headspace means any any headspace outside of the time when you're working then it's just it's no it's it's not okay and you don't need to do it you're torturing yourself because your partner so the same process of whatever was meant to get to you is gonna get to you all this extra exertion does it increase the bottom line favors the lover says clearly it doesn't it doesn't and he says oh but my proof is that I made all this money from this but that's not how you made it it would have come to you anyway now how do you prove either assertion I don't know how to prove either of them because the guy was gonna say the proof that I needed to do it this way is that I did it this way which is circular logic and then the counter-argument is no you could have done it another way how do you prove that though you can't prove yet either of these so it's not about logic neither my point is neither position is logical okay they're both faith one is just faith in the pseudo logic of well it had to be this way because it was this way you know I had to do it this way because this is how I did it all right and the other is the faith of believing in Hashem the creator of the heavens and the earth so either way it's it's faith it's not logic kamesha Amma and like it says he ain't lhasa Matt's or Alicia but of I Bernard nothing can prevent Hashem from saving whether by many or by few Hashem is gonna get to you whatever he wants to get to you and you don't have to be fixated on the idea that there has to be a certain clay now the the Marbella nefesh explains a little bit more about this about this Marshall this extended metaphor he says that basically this thirsty man in and our parable that he had no faith that he'd find fresh water so what happened is when he found the not nice water he felt like he had no choice and he had to drink it because he doesn't know he's gonna do any better than that right so you're like you got a lock-in at the the mortgage rates but hold on what if the rates go even lower oh they might not go lowers he got a lock-in so you got a drink there anyways but if he would have been guaranteed fresh water if he knew okay skip the brackish water because if you just wait it out and you go a little bit further down in the desert there's gonna be fresh water okay then he would have obviously would have waited so here's the deal somebody who believes that his sustenance comes from a shop he knows Hashem is gonna find an appropriate way for him to earn it therefore he knows that he's not gonna have to do any stick he's not gonna have to do anything unethical and he's not gonna have to overwork himself he's not gonna have to be you know emotionally attached and become a workaholic so he has to know that there's gonna be fresh water and if he has the chance to make money but it's not fresh water it's brackish water so to speak he has to have enough faith to say no let's keep going until we hit the you know the good water just like a person who knew like imagine you or you look on your ways and you saw you look at this gas station oh I don't like this gas do there but there's another one coming up in one mile so let's wait a mile and we'll go we'll go to the nice one okay the same thing he hits an opportunity this is how the marple inefficient the whole muscle he hits an opportunity to make some money yeah it would work but there's something to it that either he's gonna become too emotionally invested or he's gonna have to compromise his values yes to say to himself just just wait and fresh water will be available and I'm not gonna lose anything by by waiting it out that's really that's that's uh that's the muscle okay we have a private chat since this all sounds very well and good but how do we live by these teachings of the famous love office reality just doesn't seem to work this way okay so I would ask you what does it mean reality doesn't seem to work this way like what what evidence do you have that it doesn't work this way because like I was saying before because you saw that people did work very very hard and become obsessed with their work and they ended up making money yeah okay but the assertion is he would have made the same money either way and we know people who fall backwards into wealth and they didn't work so we say reality doesn't work this way why do we think reality doesn't work this way this is based on a lot of assumptions that we're making about how people actually get their wealth in other words what do they say in science correlation does not imply causation is that the stat the lotion somebody send that somebody sent me here that's Nick Donovan invest need Halden yeah sage advice right that's very inspiring right if you don't steal you won't have and the fact that such words are formulated in Yiddish is painful to say the least okay if at least the word English you could say you know it was from a foreign source but the fact that it's in Jewish language look there are a lot of Misiones and they all have one thing in common fear every test is about fear some people fear not having enough money some people fear being lonely and having nobody some people fear being unloved some people fear violence pain everyone has different fears the nefesh obamas the animal soul is the survival instinct and it's job is to listen to your fears and tell you to get away from things that are scary problem is that sometimes it works as a survival instinct sometimes it doesn't and what I mean by that is if you're walking through the woods and you see a bear and you get an adrenaline rush oh my gosh there's a bear and so you get the fight-or-flight response probably don't fight the bear probably not a good idea although they do have a mnemonic about the different kinds of bears you want to know it in case you ever encounter a bear in the woods they say black attack brown lie down white good night never heard that black bears are little bears generally speaking so if you really have to you can fight one brown bears you better lay down because if you lay down then you make yourself less threatening because there's no way you can fight them and white goodnight white is a polar bear and there's nothing you can do with a polar bear although they say if you run from a polar bear if you throw something behind you he'll get distracted with it and while he's looking at it because they're very curious while he's looking at it you may be able to get to safety do you know that in the town of Churchill Canada it is illegal to lock your car doors because they have no theft there's no crime there but the reason that it's illegal to lock your car doors because they have they don't have car theft but they have polar bears wandering the streets so a person may need to run into a car for shelter from a polar bear and so therefore car doors have to be locked so that any car you see you're able to run in close the door and be sheltered from the polar bear and anyway what was I saying you're in the woods you see a bear you have a fight-or-flight response that's your survival mechanism working for you okay because that's something that's actually happening in your immediate environment and there you know your your brain reads this stimulus oh I see a a bear and it makes interpretation very very quickly run get out of here you know you have to think it's like the nervous system it's the you know it's a gut reaction automatic right okay that's all great and that's when fear works for us right or uh you know you just you you you step onto the curb and you see a car swerving toward you and you you panic and you jump out of the way that's that's again that's when the fear serves us well okay but then there's fear that's not a response to anything that's going on in front of me it's fear that's generated by thought I'm lying in bed awake at night thinking about financial pressure thinking about being lonely thinking about being unloved thinking about violence that could happen to me I'm just trying to remember the different examples again before okay now none of those things are happening right now in front of me but in my mind they're happening I'm playing that movie in my mind and you want something funny about the survival mechanism the fear the fear response it doesn't know the difference it doesn't know the difference between something that's actually happening in front of you you have to jump out of the way and something that's just a movie you're playing in your own head so it's telling you run run run run where where are you gonna go wherever you go there you are the thing you're afraid of is something that you are telling yourself so there's nowhere to go so here's the thing financial and security or any other insecurities we have nobody likes me nobody wants to be my friend everybody laughs at me all the insecurities we have or you know some peril you know some terrible violent things gonna happen to me all the things you could worry about all the things you could stay awake worrying about those are meditations toxic meditations and there's no relief from them because they're not a response to something that's actually happening if it were something that's actually happening if a guy jumps out of the alley swinging a baseball bat eventually I run away from him and when I finally get home and I lock the door behind me and I call the police and say got out of the alley with a baseball bat okay and then it can calm down and you know now I'm safe but if the fear is that I'm sitting awake at night telling myself you're gonna die penniless and lonely and a failure where where am i safe where am i safe or no we're not safe anywhere so this is what I want to tell you that oh somebody wrote here about shidduchim very very very good Shido comes the same thing it's the same thing and that by the way can touch a nerve in a way that's even worse than our insecurities about about money yeah and you can stay awake at night meditating yourself into terrible fear the cave is all above us the approach is do the natural thing okay so on par no so that means have a job in healing that means go to a doctor in shidduchim that means call a shotgun and if the shot condom are working for you call a friend make one call a day about you they'll help okay but don't become overly emotionally invested in it because it's just the vessel through which a Shem is going to deliver his blessings and certainly don't become fearful so that you're gonna think to yourself god forbid that you have to work harder than you really need to work or make compromises and your values that certainly you don't have to be making but like I said earlier it all comes from fear the antidote the fear is faith faith is the antidote to fear you know what fear is false evidence appearing real question here what about rook Gnaeus fear what do you mean by rottenness fear fear that I'm not I'm not enough of a mensch I'm not serving a sham as well as I can that's that's a valid fear you know why because that's something you can actually do something about how could be this you mind puts me you to show mine is that what you meant fear about kids worrying about your children yeah you see I'm a man or I would have mentioned it yeah you could stay awake at night worrying about money and stay awake at night worrying about shidduchim stay awake at night worrying about your children there's all these things we can stay awake worrying about it's not real it's not real respond to the situation take care of the situation make ackley but data have a do the normal responsible thing and then secretary Shalala Mita I lie down and go to sleep and have city shackle a mice