How Do You Know If It's A Good Rabbi In a Tough Community? (6 minutes)

1:10Okay, I don't want to keep Shabbat, but whatever he's saying is true anyway. So I can't tell him to shut up. I can't go against him. This is what it says. I don't feel like doing it. You have a little bit of merit, a little bit of sechel, a little bit of brain. You realize, okay, this is the truth. Maybe one day I'll have the merit to actually do it. So the kehillah gets stronger and stronger, and then you start seeing there's a balance. There are some people who are righteous, some people who are less righteous, but overall there's a balance. You're never going to have everyone righteous, you're never going to have everyone wicked, or at least I would hope so. But nonetheless, the leadership of Batei Knesset is very, very critical. This is why I have a lot of problems with the whole concept of having a board of directors for Batei Knesset, which I've talked about in the past. Having a board of directors for a Beit Knesset is only an invention in current generations. In the past, there was a board made of one person: the rabbi. The rabbi was the board. The rabbi was the president. The rabbi was the vice president. The rabbi was the secretary. The rabbi was the treasurer. The rabbi was everything. He called the shots. That's why it was much easier for him to tell the truth; he wasn't worried about somebody firing him. You don't want to come? Don't come.

2:30What's the problem? Today, unfortunately, even if the rabbi is fantastic, he's a great speaker, he's only an employee. So if he says something that the rich guys running the board don't like, they fire him the next day. So now you have a dilemma. You have an honest rabbi who wants to say the truth, but he knows that he can't do it. He knows that if he says the truth, they're going to kick him out tomorrow. What is he going to do? So a rabbi like that, I heard this from Rabbi Mizrachi, and I think it's 100% true, it's the only way. He's not allowed to say what they want to hear, meaning he's not allowed to not say the truth. Never. He's never allowed to go down to their level, like they want him to say. You know, talk about nonsense. that's not going to do anything for anyone, and not talk about Shabbat, not talk about kosher, not talk about taharat mishpacha, all the foundations of Judaism, he's not allowed to do that. So, what do you do? You can't say the truth, you can't lie either. So what do you do? You say the truth in a little bit of a nicer way, but more importantly, more importantly, you bring somebody else to say the truth, from the outside.

3:54You bring Rav Mizrachi, you bring Rav Alon Anava, you bring somebody like me to come there and say the truth and wake people up. After the shiur, they go to the rabbi and say, "Listen, this guy that you brought here, this rabbi, everything he said is true?" "Yeah, it's true. He gave you the verses, he gave you the sources of everything. It's true." So people can start waking up that way. You're not allowed to fall to their level. And this is the problem a lot today, that many rabbis have this issue where sometimes they, obviously if they learn Torah, they know the truth. There's only one version of the truth. Or they say, it was this way when I came here. Okay, it was this way. You came here to fix it. That was your job. So, I'll keep it like that. Okay, I'll keep it like that. Then you become part of it. You know, the reason why a rat doesn't find the garbage smelly when he's born is because he doesn't know what's smelly and what's not. He's born like anything else, brand new. But then he goes to the garbage, and doesn't realize that this isn't the food he's supposed to eat. He doesn't say, "I won't eat this again." Why? Because after a while, he gets used to it and becomes part of the garbage, right?

5:07He hangs out inside the garbage. He doesn't know it's garbage. To him, it's a first-class meal. So this rabbi says, "No, it was this way and I'm not going to disturb anything." What happens? He becomes part of the garbage. He becomes part of the Reform shul. He becomes part of the Conservative shul. He becomes part of the secular shul where no one ever does teshuva. He becomes part of it. He may think that he's a tzaddik because he's comparing himself to a bunch of resha'im. But in Shamayim, he's actually worse than them. And the reason why is because he knows what's right and wrong, whereas most of them don't know what's right and wrong.