What's There to Complain About? | Rabbi Joey Haber

When an inappropriate image is walking on the street, why do people sometimes turn their head? I think it's because they think their life isn't good enough, and maybe if they see that, it's almost like they have a part of that. It doesn't make any sense, actually, as you say it, but in the moment, somehow, to the person who's turning his head, somehow it does. I want to tell you the attitude of an incredible person I once met. A few months ago, I had to make a whole series of speeches to the same group of people, in Manchester, England, and I had a flight scheduled for a Sunday afternoon at 6:40. It was right after Shavuot and I was coming from Jersey, and I was going to New York and from New York, from Brooklyn, I was going to take a cab to take me to JFK, to take the flight, which was a 6:40 flight. I come from Jersey to Brooklyn, to my house in Brooklyn, I open up the drawer to get my passport, and I look inside and I realize I left my passport in New Jersey. I was, like: Oh, I can't believe it. I had someone in New Jersey go to the house, get the passport. He sent it in an Uber to the airport. The Uber comes, pulls up to me at JFK at 6:25. I come racing through the airport, I hand it to the lady and I say: Here’s my passport. She says: I'm sorry. The gate already closed. The plane is leaving. You're not going on the plane. And I remember sitting there in the airport, being so I can't believe it, I'm supposed to speak tomorrow morning. And I'm always a person who tries to see, What does Hashem want? And I stopped there, in the middle of JFK, and I said: Hashem, I got it. Stop complaining. I was complaining the whole time. I can't believe it, I have to speak so many hours in the same day. Stop complaining. I get on a different flight. I end up flying in the middle of the night. It was a difficult flight. I land there, I go right to making about six hours of speeches in the same day. That night, I'm going to someone's house. I'm going to stay overnight, and the next day, I'm going to fly back to America. I walk into the house, I sit and they serve me dinner. At the end of the table, there's an older woman. And I said: Who's this person? The hostess says: This is my mother. She's a Holocaust survivor. She lived through Auschwitz. I said: Wow, you have to tell me her story. She's about 95 years old. She went through Auschwitz. She lost her father, her mother, her siblings, her grandmother, everything. I said: So tell me a little bit about her. She said: I want to tell you something about my mother. She said: In all the years since, my mother never complains. I literally sat there at the table and looked up to Hashem. I said: Hashem, I got the message. Stop talking and stop complaining. Here's a woman who went through the most horrific episode in her life, and for the next 70 years, she didn’t talk about it, and she didn't complain about it. And then they show me this woman, at the later years in her life, she took groups of college students to Auschwitz, and there she was fine talking about her story. This is the crematorium. this is where I slept, this is the infirmary. Aish.com did a video about this woman's experience in the Holocaust in Auschwitz, and they ask the woman a question, Do you hate the Nazis? And she says: Me, hate the Nazis? She says: If I were to hate them, then that would mean I have to have hate inside of me, and I don't want to have hatred inside of me. I said: One second, I'm sitting at a table with a woman whose whole family was wiped out by the Nazis, and she doesn't even complain about them? Now, that's an attitude in life. What are you looking at? Why are you looking at somebody else, something else? What are you looking at? Be content with the life you have. When you're looking all over the place, it's because you think someone else's life is better than yours. Here's a Holocaust survivor who never had a complaint a day in her life. Why would you have anything to complain about? Look in front of you. Don't look sideways.