The Shabbat Show - Episode 18: Full Interview of Rabbi Dov Ber Cohen

so dobre thanks so much for being on the show it's an honor to have you on now you've got this incredible personal journey right you know you've written about it you've spoken about it i've read about it i've heard about it from from asia to israel give us if you can uh i know there's so much more it's such a a detailed interesting tale that i would recommend everybody to to to hear about in depth but give us if you can sort of a little bit of this journey of thank you yours much i grew up in england normal uh stakeholder sky lots of sport and music and partying and i went to university and i started looking around me and i saw that not many people seem to be living with such vitality and joy and depth and meaning in life so i decided i really want to work out what it's all about what am i really living for and i started looking in the east eastern philosophies and lots of martial arts films and bruce lee films and and started meditating so after i finished university i went to asia for six years and just did martial arts and lots of silent 10-day silent meditation retreats and hiking in the himalayas and taekwondo aikido and kung fu i just immersed myself in basically trying to train my mind and my body in order to live a healthy happy meaningful life wait wait wait i have to stop you what was it like to be quiet for 10 days like what happens to you because i i have a hard time like you know i can't i don't do 10 minutes like what happens to you you know in day four when you're just like wha what what goes on in your brain when that happens funny actually because as a birthday and day four i wanted to run away because it's crazy as you say most people can't even sit for one minute we're distracting ourselves the whole time with programs and and video games and what's up and stuff but on about day six you find the piece that's there that's behind you and then on day seven you want to run away again uh they a is it the whole roller coaster eventually it comes to a settled feeling of of peace and clarity wow so how'd you end up in israel i actually was not going to come to israel i was going to go to south america i wanted to canoe down to amazon but i just thought i'd stop for a couple of weeks to see some friends and that was 12 years ago so what was it about israel that made you stay it was really two things firstly someone said to me why didn't you study judaism after you know i was teaching buddhism in universities in thailand and what you know why do you study judaism and i said because it's not very spiritual it's it's nice i i like the rituals it's okay but it's not really a path to enlightenment or well-being so someone said no come and come and come to this class i went to a few classes and i really very quickly saw that the judaism that i thought was judaism and i didn't like so much isn't actually the depth of judaism and i saw that most of the ideas that i've learned in the east we have in judaism in a very very deep way um and the other factor really was i'd always ask people how do you know this is true because i love buddhism i love the other religions and the practices but i always wanted to know you know everyone says a different thing how do i know which one's actually right which one's true and i've done philosophy at university and the only way you can really know something is is evidence really what's your evidence do you have rational empirical evidence so i'd ask my buddhist masters and my hindu masters and my muslim masters and i'd ask everyone and they just said because this is what buddha said or this is it feels right or my meditation i never got a good answer until i came to israel and and i thought i'd stump the rabbis i'd say come on what's your how do you know it's right and they said well we have evidence that there's no way a human being could have written the torah so i started studying it and because i didn't want it to be true i want to go south america but i saw the evidence and it was very compelling so i put it on atheist websites and atheist forums because i as i said i didn't want it to be directed you know i want to refute this and well well i was thinking about it there's a trail in israel called the israel national trail it's a thousand kilometers i think that's about 700 miles so it's a walking trail from the north of israel to the south so i took 40 days and i walked the whole length of israel in 40 days but really thinking about the evidence and arguing and atheists and at the end of it i really couldn't refute the evidence but also as i said that scene that is also beautiful and spiritual and deep and sweet and so it was a combination of of intellect and and spirituality and emotion and once you walk the whole land of israel you really connect to the land it's the holy land the land i really felt is my way my ancestors kind of lived and and lived their spiritual life so i chose to be here wow what a great story um let me ask you a question because even as you're speaking the the concept of spirituality especially i guess through a western mind could very much lead to something that is not physical so health and fitness could be like non-spiritual things like you can go out and work out but that's not spiritual what's your perspective i guess from especially your background and seeing it from different perspectives what is your perspective of the torah and spiritual perspective on staying healthy being fit eating well and really the the body that you know keeping your body at a certain level yeah says it's really always to do with your intention why are you doing what you're doing why why do you want to have a good and healthy body so is it because you want to show off and you want people to think you know look how strong he is if you're getting your sense of self based on your body look at look at even your clothes and and my muscles then that's that's not the jewish perspective on body but we believe that true spirituality can only come through embodied practice and what do i mean by that in the east it's very uh to be spiritual you have to separate from physicality separate from physicality so i fasted once for seven days for example we had add two cups of water a day so it wasn't a whole fast and three of the days i had a small size of papaya but in the east it's don't get married and don't eat a lot of food and don't touch money just get rid of just detach completely from the physical world and england where i grew up and i guess america it was the opposite it was all physical and all you like and it's all get my sense of self based on my money and my body so judaism i think actually this is why israel's in the middle of the east and west says there's a balance and the balance is moderation so we see in everything even with with money in the east don't have money this is big uh generalizations in the west is a lot about money jesus says you can have money it's okay but what are you using it for using it to help people so the same with the body so are you improving your body in order to just look good and feel good are you improving your body because you want to live in this world with vitality and you can't have vitality if you're if you're not healthy if you're smoking if you're eating too much if you're not exercising you're not going to be able to live a spiritual life so we we say that the body serves the soul it's like it's like the space suit we're really in essence we're a spiritual being and the body is the space suit that we need to be in the physical world and judaism says we should uplift physicality not detach from physicality so all of the mixes for example are really physical acts lighting candles giving charity putting on to fill in all of these physical acts but we're we're using the physicality to be in line with our soul and therefore you want your body you want to be healthy you want to have energy to to do to get up early in the morning and to a passion to live a life of passion if you're dragging us out of yourself up out of bed at 11 o'clock in the morning and you don't have energy and fitness is not going to work so so our body is our car you it's the car we want to go fast you want to have the best car you you can get to get where you need to go um but it's it's not the purpose the car is in the process the car is taking us to our purpose so the healthier our body is um the better we're going to achieve our spiritual purpose which is really connection to divinity to hashem to god to ourselves the other if i may carry on it's very good for your mind going to the gym is just very good for your mind to have some physical uh focus as well to ground yourself often spirituality is very like very nice and hippy like meditating and floating around all day but for judah says we we need very physical grounded spiritual practice as well so we need strength and health and body to really achieve that incredible incredible last question i'm i'm curious as to you know i asked how you stayed quiet for sev for ten days and were you going crazy on day four so now you know having fasted myself you know throughout my life you know you're like counting down until it's over on day one so what what is it like what what goes on in your mind when you're mid-week on these week-long fast so you are you recognizing a power that you didn't think you had before are you going out of your mind like what takes place in your mind when you're in day four and you've got three more days of a slice of papaya and two cups of water you really look forward to them by the way you're still jewish right you still got that gene so what goes on so really it's about self-control and in judaism self-control is the soul the soul being in control so you're going to watch hunger but not have to react to it just because you're hungry doesn't mean you need to eat just because you're tired doesn't mean you need to sleep you don't have to do you don't have to believe everything your mind says and you don't have to do everything your your heart tells you you want to do and you don't have to do everything your body is telling you to do so yeah you start actually getting energy from from your nest from your soul overriding your mind and your your body obviously you don't want to do that for your whole life judaism says that's not healthy you've got to have both you're not meant to be fasting so much but you have to be able to to override those things amazing well as i said the ultimate is to uplift it all to bring it all with us and apparently at the end of days eventually we're going to be a soul in a body that and the body becomes a perfected almost a spiritual entity in line with the soul so you have to be trying to do that in this life amazing well dober thank you for the time thank you for the the light that you bring to the world it's much appreciated thank you charlie