Rabbi Benzion Klatzko - Covid, Tznius, and Responsibility. 15 Minutes of Real Enlightenment.

this brings us to a great and awesome difference between um between the the way the jewish people look at the world and the way that the secular world looks at itself and i'm going to try to spell it out and i'm going to tell you a very sort of a personal story i'm i'm hoping it doesn't rub you the wrong way but i like to be like really very upfront and you know those who have been on my trip lexi can tell you i don't pull my punches so you know we just we say things the way they are and um you know and i hope i give you the benefit of the doubt that uh intellectually you'll you'll at least hear where i'm coming from okay so we had a an incident on one of our trips years ago uh we had we had a number of which we do on on our trips and some of the some of the major himachal were married newlyweds so it was a very unique situation i love when uh i meet a a male who has a lot of energy and is able to really deliver as a madrid and he marries a soul mate who is also a powerhouse so they become a power couple and those are the those are the ones that end up in in vanderbilt and uh hopefully one day you know and or end up in uh in ucla or end up in wherever and they change the world because they're really in sync with each other they're a team and that trip i had a lot of these young either young single guys as much or new newlywed couples and there's it's near sort of near the beginning of the trip we do it we go to tsvat and then after that sunday we end up doing something and then we go to a winery so anyway so sometimes we go on a beautiful hike and sometimes we would go we would go um kayaking i'm sure you've got if any of you have gone kayaking in israel it's not quite kayaking it's sort of a very tame little river and you know it's got that one little bump where you hold on that's it's just it's just very relaxing honestly unless you throw each other in the water and then it becomes relaxing and also a little bit crazy and i had an epiphany that trip and i just decided to sort of put my neck out on the line and i got up on the bus and i said the following um a lot of a lot of times on when there's an uh an event like this like kayaking so people get in their swimsuits and sometimes you know we this it's not a religious crowd and sometimes you you'll have people who really uh wear things that are quite sparse and i made an announcement on the bus the announcement went as follows you can tell me whether you agree or disagree with this announcement but i said like this i said i'm not going to tell you what to do you know this is a free trip we're very open-minded however there are a lot of young couples and young guys they they are religious and they probably won't be able they probably won't want to join uh if everyone really strips out because these are these are the same people who don't go to mixed beaches and they wouldn't want to go on a kayak or kayaking where everyone is in a two-piece they just wouldn't want so you you could decide on the bus uh whether you know if it's worth putting on like an over shirt or something just so the major kim don't feel uncomfortable now personally i don't even go on it so it wasn't was it wasn't for me i meet them on the other end but i knew speaking to the major kim they were asking what should i do rabbi so i ended up making this announcement a few trips and the truth is almost every time like i felt bold like oh rabbi you're telling us what to do and almost every time uh everyone was was more than happy to you know put on like an over shirt or something because they want the modra kim to come because it's funner when the trip leaders are there one of the times one of the young ladies on our trip had a issue with that statement and she came over to me afterwards and she said rabbi why is it our fault if they you know people get turned on right they should watch their eyes we should be able to to dress however we want i said i agree she said you do so why did you make that announcement so i explained something that is incredibly profound i think it's profound and it's a game changer in understanding judaism and here's how it goes i have a iva house and i have a backyard and behind our house before the fire of course behind our house was a is another house the backyard and there is a shortcut that you could take through my backyard to get to the block behind me what do you think in american law do i have the right to say i don't want you walking on my property what do you think hannah i could say don't walk on my property right it's my property don't walk you know i just plant the new grass and i don't want to step on my grass um and what happens is in america the way that we are protected is through a concept called rights that's with the bill of rights i have rights i have the right to congregate i have freedom of the press i can say what i want as long as you know you know it's not if i'm slandering so then i can be taken to court being sued for slander whatever it is but in general i have rights and i have the right that i want you to walk in my property and you're the right to know what to walk through your property that's how it goes in judaism we don't have rights it's a very interesting concept we don't have rights it doesn't work like that judaism works with a concept called responsibilities now the upshot is the same meaning in american law i have the right to my private property you shouldn't walk on my property have the right in jewish law i as the walker have a responsibility not to trample through your yard so what's protecting the rights versus the responsibility now the upshot is the same no one's going to walk through your yard but in american law no one's walking because i have the right not to be trespassed and in jewish law i have a responsibility not to trespass what do you think is the difference between the two the underlying soul of the difference between these two so i'll tell you what it is when i have rights then it's really every man and every woman for themselves i have rights so i live in my bubble you live in your bubble and we all have rights we're protected with through it with a cocoon of rights and as long as i am within my rights i can do what i want in judaism rather than create individuals with individual rights we create this community of responsibility which creates a very unique dynamic and let me let me give you a um an example of how this dynamic works i used to live in l.a i was the rabbi in ucla and i would drive my kids to hancock park anyone here from la no okay so i drive my kids to hancock park it's uh the religious community i lived in in on the college campus and i would drive them down beverly boulevard and beverly boulevard there's this one intersection which is a crazy intersection there's the hard rock cafe the very famous one right at the corner there and there are eight streets that intersect so it's not just like this but it's eight streets so you've got red light green red light green letter so you have to wait your turn for the green light and it's a long line it's like a five minute light until all the lights give a different right of uh right of way okay so advertisers have taken advantage of you having nothing to do sitting there for five minutes and they put up ginormous billboards right behind the light that you cannot not see if you're looking up at the light you're gonna see the billboard and this is la and every one of those billboards are incredibly provocative uh airbrushed models victoria secrets you name it humongous so my lovely children when i would drive we had a little thing i would put my eyes down and my daughter would say okay tati the light is green then i would just pick up enough to be able to go this way i wouldn't be staring at an 80 foot model now here's a story there's a guy and he's at this beverly boulevard crossing and as it happens he is in a marriage which he's not so happy with you know his wife maybe had a few kids he doesn't feel so attracted to her she's become more moody he's he's thinking of excuses of going away from home and even in his mind he's thinking thoughts he shouldn't be thinking right he's thinking of infidelity but i couldn't do it to the kids but it's somewhere it's already crept into his mind and he had a really tough morning that morning and as he's driving he's like at the edge he's on the bubble and he gets stopped the light turns are red right when he gets there and he spends five minutes looking at an impossibly beautiful lady thinking what do i have at home and look at what i could be having and that was the straw that broke the camel's back and he went out and did something that he later regretted because his wife found out his wife asked for a divorce the kids are now part of a broken marriage and it was the billboards that pushed it over the edge so i'm curious like the guy who put up the billboard i want to have a talk with him so i look up his number you know that little number at the bottom look at his number and i you know track down the guy who is in charge of putting up the billboard not so hard so call the guy i said i got to tell you a story you put up this billboard it was incredibly provocative you know that there are many people who are in marriages that may be not doing so well and the last thing they need is for somebody to dangle bait in front of them to do something in the heat of passion that's going to destroy lives i said how could you do that i said in judaism we actually have a law it's called don't put a stumbling block in front of a blind person putting up a big billboard like that is a big fat stumbling block people who want to be you know want to have their minds in the right place um and you just put up and he says back to me i have the right to do whatever i want and boom it just bam that was it that just there you go yeah you do have the right and in a world of rights there are a lot of wrongs that happen all in the name of rights i have the right to free speech so i'll make up fake stuff online i'll i'll i'll say covet is bogus or it's not real and then i'll go and i'll i'll get somebody sick and then i'll kill them right i have the right yeah you have the right but it doesn't mean you're not going to kill somebody doesn't mean not going to kill a marriage responsibilities say even if i have the right to put up whatever i want online on a billboard out there in the public but i have a responsibility not to put a stumbling block that's huge and it became glaring to me what the difference was between rights and responsibilities so i told this young lady on the trip i said it's true you have the right to dress however you want however judaism works with responsibilities and there's a number of major kim on the trip who are married two months and we have 25 or so young ladies on the trip and if they all get dressed like that how do you think his wife is going to feel if he were to go on the boat you have the right but judaism goes a step further we say but maybe you're responsible not to be too provocative in front of a newlywed couple i want to tell you my daughter i have a daughter it's a cutie she was under 10 years old at this time and my wife drove her to a concert and it was like one of these concerts and towns whatever and and my wife said we're picking up another young lady who's going to come to the concert with us just you should know her uh her mother passed away so we're going to be nice to her and she's going to come with us so my wife picked her up and she came in the car and she she was there she spent the whole evening with my wife and my daughter and then they dropped her off and right after they dropped her off my daughter who was 10 years old then she goes ah and my wife says what was that why did you sigh she said it was it was hard for me tonight my wife said what was hard she said it was hard for me because there were so many times i wanted to ask you something i wanted to call you but i didn't want to say mommy because i was afraid every time i would say it i would remind her that she didn't have a mommy and then she would feel sad so i every time i wanted to say something i kept quiet because i didn't have a way of calling you so i wouldn't make her feel bad it's the difference between rights and responsibilities i could call you mom i'm you know you are my mom my responsibility not to make you feel bad my responsibility not to spread lash and hara even if it's true so that's going to be my talk i know i'm a little bit over but that's my concept this idea of rights versus responsibilities now the truth is of course we do have rights within judaism i'm being a little bit facetious we have what's called opsmious we have individuality and that that really does come into play really what we have is not only rights but also responsibilities and the responsibilities is what makes us it's what makes us a living and breathing organism a nation that transcends space and time