THIS is how to be the TEACHER that students want to learn from

so as mrs monk just said this is a relationship based school and that's a it's a big concept um i've been speaking a lot lately with parents about parenting and the reason for that focus has been if i can be cynical for a moment i started getting a little uh battle weary we're trying to deal with institutions i said listen parents have to care at least parents have to care but uh from time to time there are those schools that really do also care and understand why it's so important to care and very happy to be here with kindred spirits with people who understand if i could say it as just a one-liner i think it's actually teddy roosevelt's line but he said people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care so you can be the smartest person in the world you can be an expert in your subject but nobody can learn from you if they don't feel connected so that's what that's what i want to talk about tonight about this need for connection and not just in the home with parents and children which obviously that goes without saying how important that is but also the school as a second home as a place that supplements that connection that relationship so i want to talk a little bit about the parent child relationship but also about the teacher-student relationship more so the teacher-student relationship because after all this is a this is a school so i'll tell you a story about a teacher um in fact it's a story about two teachers and it's a story about two teachers and three students um the two teachers were shama and hello and three students came to each of them both of them and they they had three similar stories the the second of the three stories is probably the most famous one people have probably heard the story about the prospective convert who came to shamai and he said teach me the entire torah teach me all of judaism and the amount of time that it takes me while i can stand on one foot and shamani told him that's preposterous and he chased them off and then the same guy went to hillel and hillel told him basically whatever you don't like don't do it to anyone else that's the gist of the whole torah and you know go learn the rest and it'll fall into place basically more or less that was the second story there were actually three stories this is all if you want to look it up this is aleph and uh ahmed base so uh it tells three stories the first guy was also a perspective a prospective convert and he went to shamai and he asked him a question and and clearly he was in 2022 we would call it trolling because like he he knew what he was asking he said how many torahs do you have and i think he expected he knew that there was a concept of the written law and the oral law so shaman said we have two we have the the written and we have the oral and so this prospective convert tells shamai well i only want to learn the written torah so xiaomi told them that's impossible we're not going to do that and he chased them off so this same guy he goes to hello and he asked in the same setup the same question and made the same request could you just teach me the written law and it says that hillel told him not only told him yeah but he converted him and he on those terms and he started studying with him the written law meaning started with homage started with with gracious with the first verse of genesis gracious bought early key message how do you read it okay so he gave him hebrew lessons aleph bass this is an aleph this is a bass this is a gimbal this is a dolly taught him how to read so uh that was day one of class and the next day the guy came back and hello said let's let's review the the alphabet and he mixed it up on him so he told that what he told them yesterday was an owl if he told him it was a tough and that what he told him was a bass he told him that it was uh a shin you know switched over the first letter it became the last letter the last letter became the first letter he flipped the whole olive base the whole alphabet on him so the guy says hold on a second that that that's that's not what you taught me yesterday so hill says well how do you know what i taught you yesterday was true he said i was trusting you so he says exactly and just like you trusted me to teach you what is an aleph and what is a base so that you could read please trust me when i tell you that the only meaningful way to extract any direction from this document is by accepting the oral tradition along with it as well that was the first story and then the story the second guy was about uh teach me the whole turtle standing on one foot so uh and then there was a third guy but but before we get into that maybe we won't even get into the third guy but let me let me talk about the first guy so i understand the difference between shaman and hello is that shaman told the guy i can't do it he rejected the whole request and that hillel accepted he worked with the guy but let me ask you something that to me is a more interesting question which is i understand that hilla worked with the guy but why did he work with the guy in the way that he worked with him in other words pretend you don't know this story pretend you heard that this happened i don't know somewhere on a college campus and there's an outreach rabbi and uh some student came in and said well i i believe in the uh i believe in a certain sanctity of the bible but i reject the oral tradition so what would you expect the rabbi's response to be probably you would try to explain it to the guy you would have some compelling proofs you'd explain to him how the document can't function divorced from an oral tradition maybe you give him a few instances where the written meaning on its own is is completely indecipherable without some type of supporting commentary you you prove it to him in other words you prove to him intellectually this is this is a logical conclusion that you have to accept the fact there's also an oral tradition and that's not what hillel did what did hillel do first of all he accepted the guy not only accepted him he made him jewish that's a whole question by the way the commentaries ask how is he even able to do that on that premise but won't get into that whole discussion he accepted the guy he started learning with him on his terms he taught him what he was ready to accept and then after he had established meaning hillel had established himself as a trustworthy source of information based on shared experiences a relationship interactions then hillel said don't you trust me i'm the guy who taught you how to read you can trust me when i tell you there's an oral tradition in other words hillel did not try to make a winning argument hill built a relationship and said based on the fact you know me you can trust me i think it's interesting because a lot of times we think that we can debate our way into convincing somebody to believe in something that they don't want to believe in as if the rules the unwritten rules are if i win the debate then fair and square you have to agree with me but we know that that's not how it works in real life you can win the debate and people still walk away saying yeah but i don't agree but if you can establish a relationship if you can win somebody's trust if you can get them to know that you as a person are reliable it's almost automatic you don't even have to convince them you just have to tell them trust me it's incredibly powerful and i think we seem to overlook it because when we're teaching we become so focused on the idea of the transmission of information that we think the information is is transmitted effectively based on its own merit and it's not true that's not how you how human beings work maybe that's how an artificial intelligence works that's not how human beings work human beings do not accept arguments based on the logical strength of the argument did you ever see anybody in today's political climate be convinced to completely change their political views from one extreme to the other extreme because of a facebook discussion no blocked that's it we're not talking ever again why because it's tribalism these are my people these are who i'm comfortable with this is who i identify with and that's it and the debate has already won or lost based on whoever i feel i'm connected to that's it so we would like i would like i would love it if the rules of reality were that if i make a compelling argument then fair and square you have to believe me because my argument was logical but that's not the reality that's not how anyone works people respond to unconvincing arguments made by people they trust more than they respond to convincing arguments made by people that they don't trust so i had this clip that was posted on social media and i spoke about parenting and i said the most important thing that parents can do is have a relationship with their child because if you don't have a relationship with your child and by relationship i guess i should define what that means that i think i gave an example i said i once heard somebody say when my kid grows up and gets in trouble i don't want her to say oh no my dad's going to kill me i want her to say oh no i better call my dad right when a parent establishes himself or herself as the go-to person as the safe person that when my kids in trouble they come to me they don't run for me they don't hide from me they come to me right so speaking about that and saying how really especially today it's a big wide open world people have options they can go online they can discover billions of people who will validate them so today it's so important it's always been important but so much more so to establish yourself i'm talking about parents especially to establish yourself as trustworthy as safe and then it's almost automatic that you can transmit your values because once your child identifies with you then almost unconsciously they will want to be like you or emulate you um but if they don't trust you they don't like you and they don't think you like them they don't think you're safe so then the best you can hope for is maybe behavioral compliance which means if i catch you i'll reward you or punish you but it doesn't mean i've actually successfully transmitted my values to you that that becomes your moral compass so that you'll make the decision that i would want you to make when nobody's looking right so anyways there was a clip like that i meant the clip was much better than i was the clip was 30 seconds and it was rocking and rolling but okay i i succeeded in making my own clip boring at any rate so it was posted and somebody wrote a comment there a psychologist wrote a comment and she wrote this is the role of epistemic trust okay so i'll tell you what what is epistemic trust so i kind of could figure out what it meant because i have heard of the word epistemology which is i think a branch of philosophy which is studying the nature of knowledge how do we know things to be verifiable how do you know that something's true so i was trying to figure out like what is epistemic trust i guess that means trusting that somebody what they're telling you is true anyways the first thing i did it's interesting just analyzing my own psychology is i saw how many followers this lady the psychologist who made this comment i saw how many followers she has on instagram she had like 100 000 followers i was like okay maybe she's got a point interesting right i was you see i i know exactly what's happening here and i couldn't break free from it i didn't immediately analyze the argument based on its own merit at first i wanted to see how many other people think this is a normal person oh hundred thousand followers okay all right maybe maybe there's something there okay so then i started googling around by the way this is how i get this reputation of having secular training and background and like i i actually don't i'll tell you a trick by the way everyone supposes they people ask me questions about like new modalities of therapy and stuff and i have zero cl i'm a rabbi that's i really i don't know any of that i really don't know people don't even believe me when i tell i don't know no but of course i don't know there is a trick by the way if i want to know a a secular idea i'll find out the book that was written in the past 10 20 years on that topic i won't read it because i don't have time for that i'll find the ted talk of the person who wrote the book watch the first five minutes of on double speed and in two and a half minutes i promise you will sound really intelligent as long as nobody presses you for more information you'll sound really good that's what i do anyways so i here's my two and a half minute self-taught uh understanding epistemic trust apparently there's an idea and from what i understand it has to do um reason the reason that people are discussing it today is in the context of trauma that somebody who is traumatized will lose their epistemic trust and they'll become the opposite it's called epistemic vigilance or maybe epistemic hyper-vigilance i can't trust people you can't trust people people are not trustworthy right and that's obviously a survival mechanism which is a response to having been betrayed by people who you should have been able to trust especially like a child should have been able to trust a parent and when you can't then that's a major violation of trust and security and then you become epistemically hyper vigilant okay but epistemic trust means that i believe somebody when they speak when somebody talks to me i believe them that's epistemic trust so this lady with a hundred thousand followers she posts and uh or she comments on my clip this is what it means epistemic trust so i did my little two and a half minute research and then it hit me and i posted i responded i said now i understand what the kuzari means when he said i don't know if she understood what that was but what the kuzari means when he said that uh anointing is the first commandment everyone understands what i mean of course this is actually mahleikas of the kuzari together with the ramban against the rambam do i have enough epistemic trust from you that you'll let me talk about this for two minutes yeah okay okay so the rambam maimonides says that the meaning of the first commandment the first of the ten commandments i am the lord your god is the commandment to believe that all existence originates from hashem's absolute existence that all existence as we know it is created and therefore conditional or contingent existence and it all comes from and is dependent upon hashem's unconditional existence or absolute existence and that that is the first commandment and that is the meaning of i'm the lord your god. the kusari who actually came before the rambam says no it's not that's not what it means it means exactly what the sentence says read the whole sentence i am the lord your god who took you out of egypt from the house of bondage it's a very literal introduction hey i'm about to give you a bunch of information a lot of that information has practical implications that will interfere with your life okay commandments means i'm gonna be telling you to do some stuff 365 prohibitions 248 positive commandments so before i give you all this information and all of these rules i just want to introduce or reintroduce myself as it were remember me remember that egypt thing remember yeah that was me i am the lord you got who took you out of egypt out of the house of bondage because if we don't have a context then where am i coming from out of the blue and dumping all these rules and ideas on your head the first thing this is kozari says the first thing i have to do meaning hashem is to introduce or reintroduce myself i'm the lord your god who had an involvement in your life you were in trouble i got you out of there and now based on that relationship i would like to tell you a few things now that i'm bond i still have your epistemic trust then i'm not going to bore you okay so that i'm not he monitors after the rambam and he takes the kuzari side he says yeah that's right that's true what the kuzari says um i am the lord your god means hashem is establishing based on the experience the personal experience of those who are removed from egypt hashem has now a context with within which to give us commandments and then the ramban actually cites a proof to support his argument from the mekilta which is a madras where it says a parable about a king who entered a land and the people of the land saw this king and they asked him oh you're the king tell us your laws in the parable the king tells the people no no no that's that's not how we do it first tell me whether or not you want me to be king accept my sovereignty and then we'll talk about whether or not you want to accept my laws and by the way what is what is that matters talking about it's actually you know what it is it's it well it's definitely related to it but it's actually in context it's speaking about rosh hashanah about the new year what happens on the new year we accept hashem's sovereignty so teshuva you want to clean up anything that might have gone wrong in the relationship where he told you to do this and instead you did that that will do after rosh hashanah that's why we have days of teshuva leading up to yim kippur the day of atonement but we don't do that first first we just make a decision in or out are you in this relationship first accept me tell me you want to be in this relationship and then we can talk about the terms what you want what i want what went wrong what could be better but we don't do it reverse we don't say tell me your rules and then i'll decide whether or not i want to have a relationship with you because that's not how it works you say decide if you want me you care about me you want a relationship with me and then we can talk about the terms so let's put this into let's put this into context of a teacher sometimes we think that we're going to win people over by giving a good lesson we know our subject matter we prepared it well we have a good lesson plan we explain it well and based on that people should listen to us and not only listen they should retain it they should care about it enough to to remember what we said and again i told you i wishes i wish this were how it was i wish this were the way people worked it would make life easier but in reality we know that it works exactly the opposite when you've established that there's a relationship when you've established that you care about a student as a person when there's some level of empathy when there's some level of personal connection then even if you're not that eloquent somehow what you say manages to sink in you know why that is because people don't care about truth they care about relevancy people aren't looking for truth truth's a nice bonus i guess but what they really want is relevancy why does this matter to me and do you even know who i am do you understand my life words you're saying here are they different than if you were speaking to somebody else or this is just your speech that you give to everybody people want relevancy you know there was a a guy in a hot air balloon he didn't have any navigational tools and he got lost and he was trying to figure out where he was so uh he looked down on the ground and he saw way below him there was a guy standing outside in a big field so the guy in the hot air balloon yells down below he says you there down below the guy on the ground looks up yeah a guy in the hot air balloon says listen i'm trying to figure out something do you know where i am the guy on the ground says yeah you're in a hot air balloon okay i know that i'm in a hot air ball he says no no i mean my location my location like in relationship to the earth where am i the guy on the ground says you're about a hundred meters off the ground right i can see that for myself he thinks yeah he says yeah thank you i'm i'm trying to get i'm trying to get my location like where am i so the guy says you're over my house the guy realizes this is this is not going anywhere the guy in the hot air balloon says the guy below says can i ask you a question sir he says yeah are you a rabbi the guy on the ground says yeah i am actually i am a rabbi by profession how did you know i'm a rabbi so the guy in the hot air balloon says because from the minute that i met you everything you've told me has been 100 true but totally irrelevant to my situation you don't score points for being true for saying the truth people would rather accept something from somebody who they think cares about them than to accept the truth from somebody who they think does not understand them doesn't understand their life doesn't understand how they spend their time doesn't understand what keeps them up at night you don't know what hurts me you don't know my story you don't know my pain so how can i trust you that anything you say is relevant to me there's a story that um parsha's kisaway which is always right before rosh hashanah we read the curses there are two torah portions in the year that have curses in them and this is one of them one has 49 curses the other has four uh 98 the double double uh 49 so the kisaway has the double has 98 curses so um the story is that the balatanya the first khabad rabbi was the balker he used to actually be the reader of the the torah reading in in show and he was a big bald dicta he knew a lot of grammar he had he was very precise in his reading which is besides the point uh but he used to be the the volcano he used to read the the torah portion at any rate there was one time when he was traveling he wasn't he wasn't in his hometown and so that shabbos they had another reader they had another reader and the balatanya had a son we had a few sons he had three sons but one of them who was his eventual successor who they called the mithler he was a child at the time and he fainted in the middle of creo cetera and they were reading the public toll reading he fainted the child fainted so after they finally revived him they asked him why did he faint and he said because of the curses because the torah reader was reading the portion and there were all these curses they asked him but this is a yearly affair this is a torah portion every year we read this you've heard this before like why why is the first why is this the first time you're fainting so he said because my father is usually the torah reader and when my father reads you don't hear curses now what do what does that mean open up any homes read that text you'll read those words at least on the literal of course there are deeper explanations according to kabbalah but i'm saying on the face of the literal translation these are scary things so how's he saying when my father reads you don't hear curses he's reading the same words and surely the mithla ebba understood at least the basic translation of those words so what did he mean when my father reads you don't hear curses so i'll tell you what i think he meant people ask me a lot um i had a negative experience in jewish schools i'm trying trying now as an adult to come back and to find my own way and i'm wondering what material should i study where i'll be able to have a positive feeling about my yiddish kite what should i study you know how heartbreaking and frustrating that question is because i think you probably understand at least intuitively i'll spell it out and then you'll tell me if this makes sense i don't think the material that they need to study is necessarily so different than whatever material was already taught it's not what words were written on the page that affected them the way that it affected them and it's not different words on a different page that will be able to heal them and bring them back and give them a new way of reapproaching hashem and torah and yiddish what makes it or breaks it is the relationship who taught it to you who taught it to you it's not the text it's the teacher and when you meet somebody who you trust not you trust that they're smart that's not what trust means because remember people don't care about that but you trust on an emotional level this is a safe person this person gets me you know the test to find out if somebody gets you tell them something marginally personal and see their reaction it's very quick to figure out if somebody gets you and you know the feeling you have when you test the waters and you experience that disappointment once again oh another person who doesn't get me just another person who doesn't understand where i'm coming from and then if you're trapped in a situation where you're supposed to listen to that untrustworthy person speak to you for an entire year and you're being evaluated on your ability to retain information transmitted to you by someone you find untrustworthy that's a really unfun situation to be in as opposed to let's frame it in a positive affirmative way how delightful and how pleasurable it is when you find yourself in a classroom with a teacher who you trust on an emotional level you think that they're safe you think they understand you that you you think that they get you and you don't even have to work hard to remember what they told you so i i think and and i'm just guessing here i'm just guessing based on my own experiences as an educator that a lot of times when we feel on our end as as the teacher that maybe things are not successfully being transmitted i think sometimes what we do our reflex is we stop we think to ourselves okay hold on a second what can i say to make this more clear like how can i present this information more compellingly well like maybe i should draw an outline on the board maybe i need better proofs what didn't you understand you didn't understand tell me what you didn't understand okay i'll tell you again i'll say it more slowly and the reality is that that wasn't the impediment the reality is that something that totally shouldn't matter is the make it or break it factor something as seemingly irrelevant to teaching as saying to a kid oh you look tired and not saying it in an accusatory way not in a like underhanded way oh you look tired are you okay did you get enough sleep last night everything is okay or i saw you come back from lunch late were you able to eat did you eat do you need more time something like that really shouldn't have anything to do with your ability to successfully transmit information and yet has everything to do with your abilities to successfully transmit information what do you think it means dead ahead it's called milotora i mean it means a lot of things but can i share with you one possible meaning that it's called military means being a mensch behaving yourself nicely with others takes precedence even over the religious teachings of tyra right that's the simple meaning that we're used to right let me suggest to you that it might also mean it's not a contradiction meaning having a rapport a genuine report not fake where you establish with somebody that you care about them as a person and that not as a as a student who you're trying to who you're judging based on their ability to retain information but somebody who you generally care about them and their welfare and their their well-being that that that deregeret's cod military is the prerequisite because you can't teach them data if they don't think you're the person who cares about them so what did hillel do that was so successful he took these people and by the way i didn't even tell you the third story about the third guy he was he was the zaniest of them all you know the third guy i'll tell you the third guy he again a prospective convert he was not jewish he walked by a jewish school one day and he heard them studying about the big day kahuna about the vestments the clothing that the the high priest wore in the holy temple and they sounded pretty cool the clothing sounded pretty cool so he came in and he asked the class who wears these clothes they said the high priest says well i gotta i gotta become one of those so he came to shama he went to shamay first and he said i want to become jewish so i can be a high priest that's preposterous like you know get out of here and he came to hell this is the third guy the first guy told you he said i want to know only the written torah without the oral torah the second guy was the one tell me the whole torah on one foot this is the third guy he said make me jewish so that i can become a high priest and wear those cool clothes says hillel converted him and he started studying with him he said we got to study we got to learn and they came to uh the part that says that a non-coin who approaches the service that is designated only for a coin will be harshly punished with the opposite of life so this he wasn't a prospective convert anymore he was jewish already at this point he says to hello who's this talking about who's who's going to be punished who's going to be put to death if uh i mean at the hands of heaven it's not a court administered capital punishment but who's going to be put to death for uh for acting like a high priest and hell said why even david king of israel who was by the way hillel's ancestor hillar was from the davidic house he was a descendant of king david he said even even david melchizero king david because he's he's not he's not the queen he's not descended from arunachalam so the guy said really even king david is not allowed to do it and he says to hillo this is i mean i i laughed out loud when i learned this gamut the first time he says so if even king david can't do it there's no way i could do it and i was like yeah probably right yeah the guy figured it out and not only he figured it out he was okay with it he accepted it now his entire conversion was based on this aspiration to wear those cool clothes and now he finds out it's not possible it's never gonna happen but he was okay with it because hell chose instead of chasing him away and telling him how ridiculous his premise was and judging him hillel said okay you want to you wanna start learning with me let's learn i accept you you're my brother now making you jewish bringing you into the fold so after this happened i don't know how much longer in the gamut it's never clear like what the chronology was it could have been like a day later it could have been like 50 years later but it says at some point after that story happened all three of these guys met up where they met me i have no idea but all three of these guys met up and i have no idea if like they knew each other before in real life or if like one day they were just like standing in line at the grocery store and they started playing jewish geography and they're like oh you know hillel also yeah oh yeah hello converted you too okay yeah i don't know how it happened but all three of these guys got together and they realized they had similar stories and the gemato says that they said shamai pushed us away and hillel with his humility brought us under the wings of the divine presence it doesn't say that hello was a better teacher or he was smarter or more eloquent than sharma it says he was humble in plain english we call that relatable approachable who's approachable in fact even if you approached him in an absurd way with some crazy kakamemi idea like converting to become a high priest he wasn't going to shame you he wasn't going to judge you he wasn't going to use that as a deal breaker he would work with you and then eventually in time you would also learn whatever it is that you needed to learn so just asking somebody and really caring what the answer is how was your day what's going on everything okay at home did you have fun at recess how was lunch what did you do on your break that's not just small talk that actually is what makes it possible for people to learn from you and if we don't do that or if god forbid we even do the opposite and betray their trust by judging or rejecting so then what do you want how are they supposed to learn they're not machines you can just feed information into them they're human beings and human beings learn based on relationships and no one is exempt from that ironclad rule of the universe even god almighty himself god could have just said here's the torah evaluate on its own merits this is infinite wisdom i think you'll be impressed that's not what he did he introduced himself and said hey we've got a thing going on i took you out of egypt i chose you i brought you close to me i made you mine now i'd like to teach you a few things i'll tell you two more stories they're related one's a modern story the other is an old acidic tail the modern story is that there was a university where there was a cocktail party for uh faculty and there was a uh a lecturer who was known he was sort of like a celebrity professor he was published and a lot of his a lot of his books had become popular uh bestsellers and he was he was known he was known as a sort of like a a celebrity on campus and at this party there was an artist and the professor told the artist he said you know i envy you because my medium is the lecture and yes of course i write books afterwards but that's really not my medium my medium where i really shine is is the lecture and it's a very uh temporal because even if you record it it's not the same the lecture is really an experience and it goes for the hour or an hour and a half that it that it takes place and then that's it and it's it's sort of it's sort of gone he says but you the professor said to the artist um your works of art sit in a museum or in a gallery and people can continue to appreciate them so i envy you so the artist said to the professor if that's what you think your medium is then i'm very happy to hear how frustrated and disappointed you are because you deserve it because you don't understand at all that neither a professor or an artist is working in lecturing or in painting that's not the medium that's not the medium any more than the paintbrush or the notepad where you write your notes for your lecture the actual medium is the human being with their own mind and their own heart who absorbs the message and is changed based on what you expressed you had something inside of you that no one else knew and you put it out there whether it was through a lecture or through a painting and now somebody else sees it and they are changed he says my masterpiece is is not a painting my masterpiece are the people who are affected by seeing something that i had inside of me and i put out there and your masterpieces should be your students not your lecture your lecture is just a means to an end for changing the life of a student so that's a modern story acidic tale is i mentioned earlier the balatanya he had a khasid named munkis and shmo munkus was known as sort of a mischief maker he was he was a scholar and he was very deep into prayer into meditation he was a mystic but he also had like a sort of uh a silly side to him or maybe that was sort of his cover how he remained humble he would play the fool at any rate one time shmoe monkeys was climbing up the front of the balatanya's house and he grabbed onto the windowsill and then he pulled up until he got his feet he got his feet up on the windowsill and he sort of like latched his heels onto the windowsill and he was hanging upside down swinging from the windowsill and people said to him schmoe what are you doing he said what he's what do you think i'm doing i'm showing people that here is a rabbit this is the house of a rabbit said this is the house of because some fool is swinging upside down from the windowsill so he says listen when you walk by the cobbler's shop you know the the workshop where the cobbler the shoemaker makes shoes there's a big giant shoe hanging out front so that you know that that's where a cobbler is and uh when you walk by the the barrel maker's shop so there's a big giant barrel hanging over the door in front of the shop you should know that's where they make barrels and you walk by the the the one who makes the horseshoe so there's a there's a big horse shoe hanging out front how do you know who works the thing that he produces he has a big model of it is hanging out front so what should be hanging in front of his house you hear that not a book by the way the balatanya wrote the tanya that's why he called it the tanya because he was the balatanya so he called his book the tanya that's my version of humor by the way okay was it to khabar the reference i'll tell you that i'll no i'll do the joke right you know why the khofitzhayim called his say for the prophet's kind because he was of its kind so he called to say for the of its kind still not funny okay at any rate no problem all right what should hang in front of a rabbit's house a hasid the accomplishment the magnum opus of the rabbit is not his form not his teachings it's the human being that he touched it all begins and ends with relationships you can't teach anything to someone who doesn't feel that you care about them as a human being and in the end after all the teaching is said and done what's the net result that you've affected a human being so it starts with caring about a human being and it ends with caring about a human being and somewhere in between we try to teach them some information anyways i hope everyone has a really amazing year connecting to their students and their students connecting to them and you should enjoy it you should enjoy it it's uh this as you know there's nothing like a teacher there's no one in the world maybe a parent okay a parent and a teacher there's nothing else in the world that has that much power in a person's life so i hope you enjoy it