The Laws of Tshuvah (Hilchos Tshuva Series 8) (Rabbi Dovid Gottleib) (Jewish Philosophy)

R laws of Chua so the top section from the outline here is from chapter 3 and then below that is something LE chapter now maybe I should have put it on the outline the mishna says in the last or next to last chapter and there two ways of organizing the tractate call Isel all of Israel has a share in the world to come and the next words are and these are the ones who don't have a share in the world to come so if you are an alert reader and you know you have attention span longer than 10 seconds you think so wait a second you said everybody has and I say some don't have and some of the people in the list are Jews what it means roughly is that the norm the expected the appropriate outcome for each Jew is to have a place in the world to come yes under exceptional circumstances with extraordinary effort a Jew can actually forfeit there place in the world to come so it isn't Universal and absolute that he has a place in the world to come but is the norm the expected outcome and certainly the appropriate outcome we have mentioned I think on a couple of occasions that when you have General statements in rinic literature they are expected to have exceptions they're not expected to be absolute Universal statements that's one of the Cannons of abic literature that that's what it means it's not as if it's a mistake or there's something wrong with it that's what that's way they write it so in the uh the second half chapter three and chapter fouram outlines which categories of people do which categories of people do not have a share in the world to come what kinds of crimes should they commit that disqualifies them for the world to come and he has a long detailed list and he starts that section with the words of how individuals do not have a portion in the world to come at the end of the chapter he clarifies what he means when does the statement that these individuals do not have the portion of the world to come apply aha even these particular cases when I say they don't have a share in the world to come that's not absolute when they die without having done chuva these are crimes which can cost the person the world to come if he doesn't do chuva however such a person does chuva from his Wicked and dies as a chuva he will Merit the world come for nothing can stand in the way of chuba period that's an absolute statement and he comes now illustrates it even if if he denies God's existence throughout his life it's an atheist and repents in his final moments he merits a portion of the world to come as is implied by verse of Isaiah peace peace to the distant and to the near declares God I will heal him now if he says I will heal him that means he's sick don't worry I'll take care of him and he can be distant and near there are people who are close and make a mistake temporarily a few mistakes and there are people who are distant and totally cut off doesn't matter there is a condition under which I will heal it and that is when he does Chua if God would heal him without Chua that would mean that there's nothing in the statement that a soul can be cut off for the world to come we nothing in the statement that someone could lose place in the world to come it has to be that it's possible to lose it and also possible to have it any wicked person apostate or the like who does Chua whether in an open revealed manner we see the change in his behavior we can see the change in his priorities by the way he conducts himself or in private where nobody knows he's on his death bed and he hasn't got much Behavior left chance so we won't know he will be accepted as is implied the in Jeremiah return faithless children meaning maybe at a certain point in time you qualify for the title faithless children it's not over it's not over you can still return we may infer that even if one is still faithless as obvious of the fact that he repents in private and does not and not in public which one should do one should repent in public still he say he's not completely faithful not completely committed his CH will be accepted now in chapter four he has various categories we introduces with the following terms now these are translations I put the translations in quotation marks because as you'll see at the end these translations are not correct but they are very often used I'm mentioning them here because you may come across them and you may be misled by them there are 24 Deeds which hold back Chua among the 24 there five days which cause the paths of Chua to be locked before Those who commit them among the 24 fire trans which it is impossible for the person who commits them to repent completely so if you're careful you say oh well maybe you can do it partially also 255 which is unlikely that the person who commits them will repent these statements especially since there are five of them give the impression that sometimes you just put yourself in a corner where you there's nothing you could do but at the end of the chapter my says the following all of the above and other similar transgressions though they hold back repentance they do not prevent it entirely so don't read hold back and don't read locked and don't read impossible as if he can't do it because they don't prevent it entirely should one of those people repent he's about Chua and he has a portion of the world to come remember is quite clear no matter what a person has done that alone the fact that he's committed that crime or crimes and many crimes will not prevent him from doing Chua and if he does Chua that is the cure for any failure as as awful of failure as you can imagine whether it's murder or idol worship or U inducing others to commit ID worship which is in a certain sense even worse and could be for a period of time for decades doesn't matter person actually does Chua then he gets released from from the liability for all of those actions yeah how can be so easily accepted sounds really easily accept um I'm not quite sure the sense of the question you're asking what in so to speak character traits motivates his accepting it so so absolutely you said you murder idol worship those are two of like the biggest sins how can you just feel bad about what you did and say sorry What I've Done forgive me and then you're forgive you're forgiv well um it's not a question of just saying it it's a question of meaning it now in chapter two where we studi this ra says doing Chua has um three basic components one is to um separate oneself from the transgression which he explains to mean that you stop doing it now and you put it out of your mind and you resolve in your heart never to go back to it again and he says you have to be so sincere that you could call God as your witness that I really mean it and then he has to has to regret it so now when this person whom you picture you're saying gee I'm sorry see you um I would ask him does it pain you that you did it do you think back to that time and shudder have a Sinking Feeling pit of your stomach and say oh no I did that how could I have done that does it make it hard for you to sleep um you know if you committed a terrible crime so if not then that's not really regret regret means I would give anything to live it over do it differently he's got to regret from the from the bottom of one's heart um maybe I can make this Vivid with an illustration I use in an entirely different context it's not directly relevant here but it makes the psychological Point imagine someone uh two parents and a son who get separated in the Holocaust and each think the other has died the son thinks the parents have died the parents think the son have died and the come to America separately and the son who's intelligent and resourceful and energetic work gets a business and works his way up and ends up Beverly Hills and he has a charity account and Hees charity uh the money comes in each month on the third of the month charity account and he gives it out as long as it's there people come to his house because he's well known parents on the other hand are older and more difficult and more rigid and they end up as beggars and they travel the country begging and they arrive in Los Angeles on July 30th and they go from door to door and they know he has a reputation and he comes to the door and they ask for a contribution he hasn't recognize them and they don't recognize him and he says I'm awfully sorry this is July 30th and the July allotment is used up if you come back on August 3rd that's when the new allotment comes I'll be happy to help you and they said we on July on August 2nd we have a free ride to San Francisco we can't pass that up he say well look this is how I give out the charity and other people will come and they'll get it I'm sorry but that's that's how I do it so they leave and on August 2nd they have their free ride to uh San Francisco and on the trip there's an accident and they're killed and some investigative reporter gets interested in the case does some background and publicizes these are Mr Mrs so and so from Czechoslovakia who are in the holoc they were saved and so and so on they became Beggars he reads this in the Los Angeles times and he figures out they were his parents how are they going to feel about that oh well you know I'm just keeping my rules and to bad I don't think so he turned away his own parents as a result of that they died I think it's going to really bother him that's a measure of the kind of really bother that one has to have especially if when was an atheist or one worshiped Idol come to realize this was going against the creator of the universe the whole purpose of my life the life of the Jewish people the life of the and the everything exists in the universe it's got to feel like his life was wasted that he that he made a Monumental mistake and that uh he feels crushed by what he's done that's not just sluffing it off I mean that's you know that's what uh what is you have a question yes um when you rep right and repent that this person's been s life and then is he just forgiven or is there still like a stain there that doesn't really go away until he really like is there a way to completely get forgiven so the rum writes hope we'll get to it writes that Chua uh removes all punishment there are certain crimes that when a person commits them they cause damage to his spiritual life to his soul and that damage may need to be repaired but that's not the same as being guilty and being punished it's not like a person who stole drugs and used them and became addicted they say well you stole it you owe it he say I'm terribly sorry and I I wish I hadn't done it and uh so s and they say okay we're not going to charge you for it you don't have the money for it we realize that you're under bad influence and you will will let will let you go but he's addicted he's got to work on the addiction otherwise he going to have a terrible life that's not punishment that's just a natural consequence of what he did without being held guilty anymore he's just damaged and he has something that's needed to rectify the damage some crimes the ra Bas quoting says require suffering afterwards but not as punishment because guilt has been wiped away with with Chua the Chua does take take away all the guilt thought so the r discusses that in an earlier chapter which we we saw it depends upon what kind of crime it is if the crime is interpersonal then the chu should be public if the crime is between man and God then should not be public should not be publicized okay so that's the absoluteness of of Chua now I want to introduce here kous case which if we doing it in sequence we'll get to it again but uh in this context the Torah tells us that in when in Egypt that at a certain point God hardened Pharaoh's heart Moses is coming to him after each plague and saying let them go for the first five from the text anyway it's clear he just said no I'm not doing that but 68 and N um it says explicitly that God hardened his heart most commentators say say and also just have to mention it there what do he mean he hardened his heart man says he hardened his heart because he wanted them to be punished and because nothing stands in the way of chuba no matter how great the crimes are if far will do Chua then he'll Escape punishment which is again your your your question and God doesn't want to escape punishment therefore the only solution is to stop him from doing so first of all how does that square with his saying all of the be and similar transgressions let me hold back repentance don't prevent it entirely so the answer is this there's a difference between saying you committed this crime and this crime has this and this consequence that you can't do chuva there are no crimes like that but there can be a cumulative a record of crime which can prevent and that's because at a certain point punishment is necessary for that person and then Chua has to be stopped because because cha will wipe it away and the way that D describes it is this I'm I'm putting it in my terms but it's his thought um first of all let's ask this question how much how much has God committed to our ability to do Chua how how how big is the commitment is the commitment Limited in some way way or ways well think Free Will in general how big is God's commitment to our Free Will is it limited in some ways how about death you're not going to have free will forever when you die it's gone and then 30% of your lifetime you're asleep which case you don't have free will so God's commitment to our Free Will is definitely Limited now a person can come to a to a point in his career where God says I gave you this number of chances and this much inspiration and these examples to follow and you didn't it's over that's it that's amount of life that I've allowed for you and you failed end doesn't owe him any more life everyone's life is going to end sooner or later now suppose God says you know what you your life is over I don't owe you anything I gave you all the chances that you deserve but I have use for you I have use for you so I keep you alive but as a robot with no free will after all without that external value of keeping him alive his life would have been over because that's the end of the turn that God has allotted for him so keeping him alive as a robot is not a contradiction to the purpose of human creation uh a failure of realizing the potential of human creation because Free Will is what makes us what we are no it's just the fact that because death is a Capstone for all life this person reached the Capstone and just for some reason God kept him alive that's what he says about Pharaoh Pharaoh by the end I'm putting in the particular point in time which could be discussed but at the end of the fifth plague after five times saying no to Moses freely God says that's it I give you five chances that's enough it's over but I want people to realize that the cost of too much crime the cost of too much consistent failure is that you really do lose I'm going to do that by taking away your free will so that you can't escape punishment and then project you in that condition without free will to show what happens to people who accumulate too much crime so the the picture there again is that cha will definitely overcome anything that happens and so to speak therefore God's only strategy is to prevent it from doing Tru now let's back up and clarify this because there's a chance here to make a terrible mistake and and if you get it right then then there's no no trouble at all what do you mean this is God's only way out this is the only thing he can do how could you limit God at all surely no matter what the circumstances are he can overcome them nothing can be a boundry on what God can do so what do you mean he's the only way out who can imagine how many ways out he might have and let me put it even stronger because this actually happened once manasha was a wicked king king of the northern Kingdom and he instituted idol worship throughout the country and the end of his days he did Chua and removed all the idols when he died the angel said to God we know your commitment to chuva we understand that it's very important but not from manasha like masas is just too too far out and God said no making a mistake it's not too far out now why isn't it so to speak of the available for God to say well yes Chua is very important and Chua works a lot but there are exceptions leave Pharaoh with his own free will and let him do Chua and say for him it's too much and he'll do Chua and I won't count it why can't God do that why do we say that his only strategy was to be able to to to stop him from doing Chua the answer is we're not talking about what God can cannot do we're talking about what God decided to do he decided to make Chua absolute he decided to make chuba Universal given that he decided that then consistent with that decision the only way to make sure that Pharaoh gets gets punished is to stop him from doing Free Will so it's not an some kind of external power limiting what God does it's simply the consequences of his own decision he didn't have to decide that he could have set the world differently there's no end to the ways in which you could have set it up so whenever you say that this is what God must do or this what he has to do you have to trace that back to some decision that he made and this follows from that from that decision now and that's and that's what what this R emphasized that this this decision that he made is absolute says that five things were created before the creation of the world now if you're you know if you've had a coffee recently and you're thinking about this how could something be created before the creation of the world before the creation of the world there wasn't anything and before the creation of the world isn't meaningful anyhow because there's no time outside of the creation okay I'm just putting it on for a so what does it mean so it doesn't mean forign time but it means that the creation and running of the world leans on these things without these things it wouldn't be able to accomplish what God wants it to accomplish and Chua is one of those things Chu has built it that it has to be so the reason for that I shouldn't say the reason a reason for that which I might have mentioned before is that failure is very very common indeed the beginning of chapter 3 I'm out says every person has merits and failures trans every person there's a whole literature on this especially in shabas so if everybody has failures that means what everybody's a failure and that means everybody is going to just simply have to say that although I had some successes I also had failures the answer is no even if you have failures in your historical past you could leave the world with a 100% clean record because chuba clears the record chuba means that you can overcome the failures of the past so they aren't permanent and that means that chuba is the way in which a person can deal with his faes I think that there's a there's an obvious religious idea here and there's also a very deep psychological idea here uh I don't keep up with the twists and turns of ological thought and and unthought and undoing and redoing there was a time when I was a student about 300 years ago when guilt was the enemy one famous social thinker uh talked about Surplus guilt there's too much guilt and one School of Psychology or several School of Psychology made it their business to make sure people didn't feel guilty how do you make sure that people don't feel feel guilty for what they do there are two prongs one is you didn't really mean it you couldn't help it it was beyond your control it was the environment that that influenced you it was your childhood it was your your uh addictions that you that were fored on you you're not you're not guilty because you really not responsible for what you did that was one PR and the other prong is what you did isn't wrong you thought it was wrong you were convinced of a certain obligation which restricts you which prevents you from living a full life and you have to realize that there's nothing wrong with it perfectly all right result of that is you R reduce a great deal of guilt on the grounds that you're not responsible for the bad things you did on the one hand and other things aren't really bad but let's see is that a is that a healthy thing is that a realistic thing I'll give you a related related idea which could be which could be asked the same thing there was a Israeli child psychologist who said when you are trying to inculcate in your children appropriate forms of behavior don't say it's right or wrong don't say it's good or bad don't push on him judgments that he has to live up to be honest be honest what's really going on is you don't like it right isn't that what what's really going on bothers you disturbs you irritates you you don't like it so be honest say to him you know I don't like it when you do that and you can through example initiate him into the knowledge that it's probably not a good bet to irritate your parents because when you do things that they don't like then they do things to you that you don't like how about that so you know for you're own good be careful when I tell you you're irritating me be good for you to stop that's honest that's straightforward because that's what's really going on you're just being bothered by it is that a way a complete method of bringing up children is that a really realistic and and appropriate way of bringing up children so my first wife said to me how does that child ever learn values some things really are important and other things are less important your having the chocolate isn't as important as having to pain him by taking it away from him it's not as important something's really arguing something's really are bad how is a child going to learn values this type of child psychology is a a a an expression of a postmodernist attitude that nothing's really right or wrong everything's only a power play I why don't you be honest and say I have the power and if you disturb me you're going to lose out because I have the power but that's just not true that's not the way the world is the things there are things that really are good that really are EV and you're not going to teach it to them that way so if you don't invest and then of course you'll have to explain why it's important he'll be able to judge you on the basis of your consistency in living up to the things that you say are important which by the way if all you say is that you're irritated you have no commitments at all just don't irritate me what will irritate you tomorrow I don't know you'll find out tomorrow you know sometimes this bothers me sometimes that bothers me you as a parent have no respons abilities at all everything's in your hands that's supposed to be realistic and and and kind to the child so [Music] um the same thing is true when you talk about guilt if you reduce guilt one of the chief differences between human beings and everything else and yeah there are chief differences and we are exceptional is that we can evaluate our behavior and we can judge it and we take responsibility for it including feeling guilt for what we've done when in fact we are guilty now there are cases of misplaced guilt There Are Places of pathological guilt children who suffer the loss of a parent at a young age let's say 7 years old you have the following type of of um psychological problem child will say okay mean they say I killed my father really how did you kill your father because two weeks before he asked me to get him a glass of water and I said no and that's what killed him I killed my father that's the kind of thing that a child be after all his father died at this time for seven years he was there now all of a sudden he isn't there why is that what changed ah I remember he wanted something for me and I didn't give it to him now that needs therapy correct that's Surplus guilt because it's misplaced guilt but to say for example someone who says you know I work on an semv line and I put in the brakes in the car very boring break after break after break day after day week after week after year so every once in a while like every 250 shots I putting the brakes upside down you know how am I going to keep my sity if I keep putting of course the car won't stop but you know I did and the psychologist says sure you are entitled to your your peace of mind you don't have to drive yourself crazy for the job job isn't everything no problem don't feel guilty about it or having an affair in marriage everybody has ups and downs and people need Solace and so for and so they sell you these this bill of goods they make you more and more into a squirrel and if they do the job thoroughly you become a squirrel you're no different from an animal but that's only by blanking out a key element of human existence which is one of the things that makes our lives superior to the lives of animals that we can evaluate what we do people talk about evolutionary um explanations for Behavior they talk about men's sexual behavior versus women's sexual behavior they talk about this the the competition for reproduction and so forth and so on what they forget even by their point of view evolution is punk but I'm doing that now but even from their point of view what they forget is that not only did Evolution program the human being below the neck but they program you being above the neck where there's a head where there's a brain where there's a mind where a mind can evaluate and say yeah maybe that will give you increased Offspring but it's evil so it shouldn't be like Stephen J G said I tell the jeans to go to leave me alone that's what the genes want that's not what I want I don't have to want what they want even if they did want something which is wrong also but you know so reducing guilt is as a as an end to itself reducing guilt is simply a way of erasing the difference between human beings and and animals which is part of the ideology anyway is part of their commitment anyway the whole schools of thought the the latest thing in the rights of nature now is that human beings and scum on ponds have equal moral weight to their interests because all life has equal moral weight that's the new fantasy that's going around by the way I haven't heard anybody say that um bacteria ought to have equal weight don't kill bacteria it's a life form they cells what do you mean that you're killing them cancer cells in the body killing them they have their way they grow and multiply why are you stopping them from multiplying that's their nature they haven't gone that far but there's no reason why they shouldn't if their logic were straight so you don't want to eliminate guilt Al now how do you deal with guilt so guilt is healthy if it Spurs a person to think about doing better guilt is unhealthy if it causes him to give up if he feels that it's hopeless I've gotten to this point there's no hope for it and you have to distinguish between those two different types of guilt one way to distinguish is to give a way to expiate the guilt you did it yes you feel guilty congratulations are you lost no there's a way out there's a way out you can do Chu with the same free will that you choose to you chose to do the wrong thing you have the free will to choose to do chuba then that way you can erase the guilt from guilt from so that you can end up guilt free um didn't don't remember if I when I said this to you I want to mention because I think it's a very important Insight took me some time to get to it um my oldest son said to me number of years ago that everyone dies with regrets and when I thought of that like that's probably right I've done things that feel terrible about and that's not going to go away so I certainly regret doing that um and that means I interpreted that to mean when you die you have this Pang of OI I failed just recently I figured out that's not the right attitude regret is part of chuba if I have regret that means I'm spiritually alive I'm not giving up not saying I can't help it no I regret doing it I I hadn't done it I certainly wouldn't do it again I should feel happy about the fact that I regret it because that's part of my chuba and that's part of how I can push off the guilt I can push off the responsibility for what I did so that's the the idea of chuba being a necessary part of the the way the world works now I mentioned to you um some time ago ra writes that one of the things that about cha does changes his name as if to say I didn't do that um I didn't say it them but I want to put in this qualification now because it's it it could be misleading does it mean you know let's say stole money or damaged somebody's property or insulted somebody in public or something so there's the thing on record there's a video of it you know it happened but it's not me like you know magic dust turn me into a different person so yeah it's there it's just not me that's not quite right for example when you do something wrong and you do Chua comes y Kipper and Y Kipper you confess your sins and you ask God for forgiveness for some sins that's enough simply doing Chua and going to Y Kipper is enough the question arises next year and Kipper if you have not repeated the sin between should you confess again those sins that you did in the previous year and it's it's a matter of discussion of of of debate one side says why should you you did chuba you said and you went to ker it's over it's finished especially if you read it the way the ra does that you're not the same person who did it what are they confessing next year somebody else's sins it's not necessary and not appropriate but the r says you should well it's not me what do you mean I should one explanation is this since you did that that shows something about your character you have a weakness there you should keep that in mind you should take precautions that that weakness shouldn't recur okay so on my record it's a symptom of my psychology I should take precautious but wait a minute we just said I'm not the person who did it Philip did it or Anonymous did it Pony almoney it's not me so it's not quite right to say that I didn't do it what's right to say is I bear no responsibility or liability for the crime in it I have nothing to to fear in terms of uh punishment or condemnation or loss no all of the responsibility for the negativity in it is taken away but I did do it so it's not as if it's a kind of magical erasing the the the history or making me into a different person it's it's a moral point it's a moral and spiritual point but the psychology is still there and psychology has to be dealt with so you look at your past in in an entirely different way and I think that that's that's a separate issue okay are we are we together so far okay so now um there are levels of Chua we we we spoke about this we've been talking about doing Chua for a crime crime of one time type or another the bov the founder of the manic movement said sometimes you have to do chuva for a Mitzvah and indeed some times you have to do Chua for chuva say now wait a second MIT is a good thing to do why would I have to do Chua for a Mitzvah and why would I have to do Chua for doing Chua and the answer is mitzvos can be done in Better or Worse ways in more thorough and deeper and more consistent and more exalted ways and less and maybe you did the Mitzvah but you did it barely and you have the capacity to do a better job then you may have to do Chua for the fact that you didn't do the best job that you could do that's something which requires more subtle thought than okay was it cheeseburger I know I know well that's objective and it's on the books no cheeseburgers but put on Fillin was I thinking about that fillan was my mind distracted something else I really appreciate the fact that I do it with joy because like I got a special opportunity to do something precious or do I do it as routine there are many many ways in which you can evaluate the quality of what you do and the same thing's true with chuba itself sometimes people have brought to do Chua through a jolt life's going on and happily and things are cooking and things are developing and and there are challenges and successes and so and so on and that caused him to be self satisfied and to feel that he's doing okay then there's a jolt you know one of the companies he's invested in goes bankrupts was a health issue or this social issue whatever it is and he thinks why did that happen maybe maybe there's something wrong maybe there's something which isn't quite right we spoke about when thing you see things going wrong when pun suffering comes examine your actions to see what what might have gone wrong later says about you have to ask yourself why did it take that jolt to get me to rethink about what I'm doing if I had stopped to make his personal accounting before the jolt wouldn't I have seen that there was a failure there yes I would have well why didn't I why didn't I because things were good yeah things were good but still don't you get a regular Health checkup even if things are good yeah I do I guess checking this wasn't that important oh really wasn't that important well maybe it should have been that important maybe it's not having been that important something which you should think about and think maybe that there was something there that wasn't ideal this is doing chuva on the Chua that you that you have done when it wasn't done ideally this is a much more subtle area of applying shua to your life seeing where it could have been improved not just by correcting out and out failures but by correcting things which weren't out and out failures uh um second one more thing I wanted to add um okay I'll tell you something else instead of that I should have read it that um when you think of improving it's natural to think of correcting failures but the truth is that's not the only type of self-improvement when you're doing something well you can improve by doing it better if you are really talented at putting a medium-sized Bowl uh ball through a hoop and take a stick and hit a little ball into a hole something which you never succeeded doing you don't become a golfer you become a basketball player you take the things you naturally counted that and you work on improving them to become as excellent as you can become that's also Improvement how should one start what should be the program of starting on a program of self-improvement many people have a list of things that need to be improved but it's overwhelming there are 132 things in my list okay okay some selection has to be made I'm not going to work on all of them at once so there is a strategy by certain sources always start with improving the things that are already good and only after that move to the things things that are bad that needs to be that need to be corrected psychologically the difference is is gigantic if I think of improving the things which I'm already good I'm very comfortable this is very self-reinforcing I'm really talented at this and I could become even better I have no psychological hesitation I'm looking for an escape to avoid becoming better at what I'm good at I enjoy doing that correcting failures is another story there you know I'd rather take down in the garbage thank you than do that well one of the strategies of of of self-improvement is get started get started make some progress register the progress if you have a tremendous aversion like almost all human beings do to facing your failures and if you don't have that aversion to improving your successes start by improving successes when you do that and you're invested in some self-reflection some self- evaluation and creating strategies to move forward then once you're in motion then you can apply that to the failures also whereas if you think this you got to start by improve by correcting your failures you may never get started now the great objection to this idea is a famous verse by King David Turn Away From Evil and do good that certainly sounds like giving the lie to God Le say wait a minute David says start by correcting the failures and only then you do good it's not so simple because although he did say Turn Away From Evil and do good he didn't say start he didn't say there were steps those were steps one and two maybe there steps two and three maybe before that there's a step of do good which is compromised yes blemished yes because there's still some good in the person some sorry evil in the person but do it do a a good a compromised good a blemish good but it's a good and then with that strength come to turn away from Evil and then do good what King David is telling you is perfect good will only be done after Turning Away From Evil but you may start by doing an imperfect good and if someone says okay Rabbi you just made that up you know that's he put in an extra step which he didn't mention put it before his steps and made his verse talk about two and three instead of one and two then you can point him to the fifth blessing in the where it says bring us back to your to your Torah and bring us back to your service bring us to your Torah bring us to your service then enable us to Do complete CH before you first Torah then service and then Chua Chua comes third in that blessing well that means that the authors of the prayer put improving the good before rectifying the evil so I think that there's there's I wouldn't say everybody agrees with what I'm saying this is certainly theic approach when I asked my rebi about making a self- evaluation which some people do not just rasher they do it periodically during the year he said it's a good idea with one condition let's say you're thinking about the day how did the day go what were the ups and downs start with an up take something you did during the day that you feel good about you feel happy with you feel proud of and you know look at it see yourself in the glow of that good thing and then when you feel basically good about yourself then look at the failures and say okay I'm basically a good person I'm basically trying basically want the good things here's something that I'm not doing well let's work on improving that let's work on correcting that start with the good and then after that go to the rectification of the evil all of this is part of the Jewish program of how to use guilt psychologically and spiritually positively rather than simply avoiding guilt and making your life as animalistic as possible okay okay tomorrow is open Q&A and then we'll continue with this on on Tuesday thank you