Are You Looking For Answers Or Excuses (7 minutes)

0:02I have one guy that I've been trying to help him do teshuva for over a year now. Baruch Hashem, many, many people have done teshuva, but this one particular guy is someone that's a kafuy tovah, ungrateful person. And, you know, I sent him a package, sent him CDs, introduced him to this, answered a million and a half questions. And he decides that he's going to start criticizing my lectures, publicly. He's going to start criticizing my lectures, write his little comments.

1:32I said, "Well, the emails and this and that." So, I said to him, "You know what? Let me ask you something. Do you keep Shabbat?" "Do you keep..." "No." "It's hard for me." "Do you keep kosher?" "Whenever I get a chance." "Do you lay tefillin?" "Oh, no, I don't own them. I don't own tefillin," he tells me. He said... What mitzvah do you keep? I'm nice to people. Okay, we'll send you a cookie. Fine. I'm trying to understand what qualifies you as a professional or an expert critic on kiruv or Judaism when you don't practice either one. You don't keep any mitzvot, so you can't tell me you're an expert on Judaism. You don't know anything about it. You're still violating Shabbat as a Jew. Obviously, you don't know anything about Judaism. No one that actually knows and believes violates. Some people know and don't believe, so they violate. But the rest of the people, the vast majority of the public, violate only because they don't know. So we have to teach them. So this guy says that...

2:59He's going to tell me how to do my lectures, how to do Kiruv, how to help people do Teshuvah, which, Baruch Hashem, there are new people doing Teshuvah every single day. Just yesterday, Baruch Hashem, a young kid who was an atheist maybe four or five months ago, just started going to Yeshiva. An atheist four months ago, now, Baruch Hashem, going to Yeshiva today. It's the same Torah that you're reading. If you say it, you'll do the same thing. It has nothing to do with me. But it's the right way. It's the full Torah or part of the Torah. Part of the Torah doesn't work. The whole Torah works. So I tell him, how are you criticizing me? And you don't do anything. Do you make anybody do teshuva? You don't do teshuva yourself. Can you tell somebody how to do it? Not that I'm an expert, but what are you doing to make yourself think that you're that way? And that's the thing that people fail to understand. They have such a big yetzer hara that if you go to a doctor... And the doctor is going to tell you, listen, I see this is the diagnosis that you have. I think you need to do these three procedures. And you're going to say, listen, doctor, I don't know. You know what? The second procedure, I don't agree with. I think you should go from the aorta into the... He's going to look at you and say, what? Are you telling me how to be a doctor? What do you know about this? Where did you go to medical school? Oh, I didn't go. Where did you study medicine? I didn't study.

4:25So how are you telling me, as a doctor, what to do? You go to a lawyer. You tell him, "Listen, we're going to fight for this case. You're going to win these first three cases. The fourth case, you're going to lose because we're going to do this. And this law is this, and this law is that." He tells you the whole report. He says, "No, you know what? I don't think you're fighting the right way. I think we should fight for the fourth one and not the other three. And I think this is illegal and that's legal." He continues... know anything about law? Are you a lawyer? No. Do you study law? No. Have you ever been in the courtroom before? No. What'd you do? I watched some cases on TV, in the movies. I saw Tom Cruise saying, "You can't handle the truth," so that makes me a lawyer. Lawyers, okay listen honestly, I don't want to defend you anymore. I think you should claim insanity. Because that's what you are. You have a chip on your shoulder. So now, with law, with medicine, with everything else, people, they don't go into the doctor's office and tell him that. They don't go into the lawyer's office and tell him that. Why? Because they're paying him $900 an hour to hear what he's telling them.

5:43But to me, when I'm doing it for free, they want to tell me everything to do. No, you've got to say this, you've got to say that, because it's free. If they actually paid me $900 now, maybe they wouldn't dictate what I should say. So maybe I start charging you guys. So, blame him. You have to be qualified. If you're going to judge somebody, you have to be at least at his level. That's why when somebody says, "Oh, I don't agree with the Rambam," or "I don't agree with the Shulchan Aruch," it's crucial to have the necessary knowledge and standing. Rabbi Yosef Karo, I don't agree with Rabbi Akiva. I don't think he's right here. You don't think he's right. He was able to revive the dead. You think your opinion matters? He was able to go from one place to another, to a different city, in an instant. You can't even go to the bathroom in an instant. You're going to agree with him, disagree with him. You're still trying to figure out how to read what it says in Rashi over here. You're going to agree with him, disagree with the Rambam, and you're going to disagree with Rabbi Akiva. That's the thing—people don't know the value of Torah. So they say they think it's open to opinions, open to whatever your interpretation is. The reason why this all happened is because you have people like the Reformers and the Conservatives who made it popular.

7:08to criticize the Torah and use our own limited opinions.