ARE YOU PASSIONATE or ANGRY? (15 Minutes)

1:41No one's going to listen to you and understand what it means—what anger could actually lead a person to do. One of the big Mizrahi Rabbanim in Israel, Rav Gossman, I believe, visited him. I think it's him. I may be wrong on the name again. I'm not very good with names, but I believe it's him. I went to visit somebody in jail when he would regularly go to jail and visit people. One time, he visited a specific person, and he saw that the guy seemed composed, religious, and was learning Torah in his cell. A really nice, almost amazing guy. You look at the guy and think he doesn't belong here. He doesn't belong here. He's a religious, nice guy with good middot. What a remarkable discovery! Looks at his rap sheet. The guy committed murder of his best friend on Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur! You look at the guy, you look at the rap sheet—they don't match. They don't match. It's like the guy is a mini Moshe Rabbeinu, and here, you have Hitler. How could it be?

3:05He goes to visit him. He sits next to him and tries to get to know the person. Maybe the person is crazy, maybe this, maybe that. After a while, the cellmate says, "You're probably asking yourself, 'How could it be that I killed somebody on Yom Kippur?'" He said, "Oh, yeah, no, you could tell me." He says, "I've been religious for a while and..." That time on Yom Kippur, one day, we went to synagogue. We prayed, and then there was a break for a couple of hours between the prayers. It's a long day, but you usually have a break of about an hour and a half to two hours in the afternoon. So my friend and I went to my house, and we just, you know, he said if we're gonna go to sleep we'll probably miss prayer. So, let's just talk. We started talking and debated about some nonsense issue, and then started disagreeing. one thing led to another, and he started really getting me angry. I went into my room, I took the gun, and I shot him. This is my best friend, called Rav. I haven't stopped regretting that day. But at the moment of anger, when the Torah says, the Ramban writes in the Iggeret HaRamban that when a person gets angry, all of Gehenna takes control over him. He says, I saw it. I

4:36I let myself get so angry, mama. I lost self-control. I took the gun, and I killed my friend. I've been trying to escape it ever since. Meaning that when a person gets angry, the Torah, the Gemara specifically says, all types of Gehenom take control over him. Why? Because all of these sins that he's made throughout the years, they all gather on top of him, and they push him to go a step further, go a step further, say another word, say another curse, make another thing, push. He loses his mind. Loses his mind. Depends on the reason, depends on the reason. There's a time and a place to have it; there's a time, and every person is going to have anger. There's no such thing as a person with no anger; even Moshe Rabbeinu had anger. But a righteous person, a righteous person, is going to know how to use that anger for the sake of Hashem.

5:47so for example, when he sees a person at some college, he is going to get angry to the point of using that anger to tell that person something, not to get angry and go beat up the guy or throw a rock at him. Instead, use the anger constructively by addressing the situation where no one has taken action until now. Go and be the person like Nachum Ish Gamzu or Shimon ben Shetach, becoming zealous for the sake of HaShem at the right time, not just any time. Using that anger to tell that person something, not to get angry and go beat up the guy or throw a rock at him. But to use the anger to get upset at the situation when no one has done anything about it until now, and then go and do it. Become the person who is "M'kaneh Kin'at Hashem Tziv'ot." Each become zealous for the sake of Hashem at the right time, at the right moment, not just any time. But again... Anger itself is one of the things that a person needs to control more than anything else because if he lets the anger get out of control, it's a hundred percent a sin. So, anger is something you're going to experience. The question is how to control it. How do you control this anger that you're inevitably going to feel? How do you use it for the right thing? You need that fire; it is necessary. If you see somebody teaching Torah that's against Hashem, and if it doesn't get you angry, then you're most likely dead. You should check your pulse. You should check your pulse. If you see that someone is teaching Christianity, if you see someone is teaching things that are against the Torah, if you see somebody that's committing open sins against the Torah, like being in one of these gay parades,

7:09Or if that kind of stuff doesn't get you angry, you have to check your pulse to see if you're still alive. If you're still alive, of course you're going to get angry about it, but it doesn't mean you're going to go out there and start shooting people. It doesn't mean you're going to start yelling and screaming. So, there are a few things that a person needs to know. Getting angry at the situation is allowed as long as you're going to do something good about it. What's good? Let's say you saw a bunch of people organizing a gay parade. What are you going to do? You're going to actually have a shiur to teach people why the Torah says it's not allowed to have a gay parade. This means that anger can create enough fire in you, enough zealousness, that you're going to do something about it in a positive way, in the name of Hashem. If you see somebody teaching Christianity, let's say, or some other form of avodah zarah, you're going to go and become an anti-missionary. You're going to fight the sheker by exposing them, by showing that these people are teaching lies. It's against the Torah and so on and so forth, meaning you're going to use that fire that you get from anger for a positive purpose. But if that fire gets out of control, then we have a problem. So now, how do you know that fire is out of control?

8:30If your behavior after you got angry has led you to curse, using some type of derogatory language that's a curse word, your anger is now officially out of control. Out of control, why? The Chachamim teach in the Gemara that if a person was decreed in Shamayim for 70 years of good, meaning a whole life of good, a single curse, a single curse, could cancel it all out. A single curse. It doesn't specify English or French or Aramaic or Hebrew; any curse word. Why? They're not curse words. I don't understand. It's a curse. A dirty word is a curse. Yes, same thing, same thing—foul language is a curse. It's a curse. It's disgusting. The more you understand what it means, the more you understand how much you're disrespecting the creation and the Creator.

9:45The mouth of a Jew should never have a single curse come out of it. Trust me, this is more difficult for me than for most people because, for most of my life, I thought exactly what you're alluding to—that it's just a way of talking, it's normal. Everyone says it; it's just this, it's just that. Nonsense, nonsense. Civilized people do not curse. You do not see successful people in life curse. Unless they're obnoxious and disgusting human beings, in which case we're not measuring ourselves against them. We're measuring ourselves against the Torah of Hashem. So a Jewish person should never curse. No one should ever curse. But the point is, if your anger has led you to say the four-letter word or one of these disgusting words, then you know already officially your anger is now out of control. If your anger has led you to become violent, either with another person or against yourself or against an object, you take a piece of something and you throw it,

10:46You take a rock, you take a piece of plastic, a pen, a wall, you punch something. You've become violent, your anger is out of control. You have a problem if your anger has gotten to the point where you decide that the only way for you to get relief is by publicly embarrassing the other party. Your anger is not only out of control; so is your next life. Because the Torah says, a person who publicly embarrasses another has no share in the World to Come. Here we see that anger can easily be something that causes a person to lose their Olam Haba. It's not—it’s not—it's not a small matter. It's a big deal. Each one of the examples that I gave you are everyday habits that people have: embarrassing people in public, cursing, yelling, throwing things—these are things that people do every day. I know I did.

12:05So now, how do you stop yourself? Ask the question. What's your question? Are you allowed to take an idol and break it over him? What? the Gemara in Masechet Megillah says it is because he actively went against Avodah Zarah. was Mordechai. Why was Mordechai called a Yehudi? Because the Gemara in Masechet Megillah says it is because he actively went against Avodah Zarah. And anyone that actively goes against Avodah Zarah is called a real Jew. So there's a special condition here when it comes to desecrating and making fun, mocking all types of Avodah Zarah. This is something that's for Kiddush Hashem. It's a mitzvah.

13:26we're not talking about that. We're talking about somebody seeing a Jew doing something he doesn't like or saying something he doesn't like, and instead of telling him to stop or talking to him in a civilized way, he decides to take the first thing he can grab and smash it on his head, or he decides to curse him out, or he decides to publicly embarrass him and... Like, for example, there's one person that says he used to watch my shiurim, and I don't think he's watching my shiurim right now because he wouldn't be doing this if he was. Even the walls are doing teshuva, Baruch Hashem. So, I don't think he could watch these shiurim on a weekly basis and not do teshuva. But, apparently, he decided that he disagreed with some local rabbi that he was attending a shul with. disagree with them on something, not that the rabbi was teaching things against the Torah, but because the rabbi was not saying enough about the people who weren't observing all of the mitzvot. He wasn't saying enough, so he decided to publicly embarrass the rabbi in front of everyone. And he thinks this is a mitzvah. He thinks that he's right. He wants to, you know, get support for his actions. He thinks he wants my support. I want him to watch my shiurim so...

14:43when a person is exercising his zeal with a sin, such as cursing people out or mocking them in public in a profane and disgusting way, he's intentionally going against the person instead of against the sin. The goal should be to hate the sin, not the sinner. Then we have a problem, because in reality, your zealousness is not zealousness for Hashem. Your zealousness is just an excuse to practice arrogance. It's not a mitzvah at all. You're not helping anyone. All you're doing is making people disgusted by the Torah because they associate it with you. So you're becoming a Chilul Hashem. In reality, you haven't learned anything, and your teshuvah is fake, and you're a faker. That's really what it is: if you're yelling at people and cursing them out and angry at them, and so on and so forth, you're doing everything we just said. It would have been better if you never observed Shabbat.