The Surprising ROOT OF ALL SIN

0:13In the name of G-d, we will do and we will succeed. A Torah lesson, a special lesson today, Baruch Hashem, for a complete healing for Michael Ben Saralea. He will have a complete healing, the healing of the soul, the healing of the body. Also, a complete healing to Levana Bat Sara, to Ovadia Ben Levana, Doris Bat Jorah, David Ben Isria, Dvora Bat Mercedes, Elisheva Chaya Bat Sara, David Ben Rut, Sharon Bat Rivka, David Ben Esther, Yocheved Bat Bati HaTzadika, and all of Am Yisrael, b'ezrat Hashem, will have refuah shlema, refuat hanefesh, refuat haguf. Today I was working on an article. We're going to try, b'ezrat Hashem, if you pray for me. Maybe your merits will help me. We're going to start writing weekly, bi-weekly, b'ezrat Hashem, hopefully weekly, articles with different chiddushim, different short insights from the Torah.

1:40mostly general, sometimes in regards to the parasha. Most of the time, we're going to try to just use different parts of the Torah, go over different parts of the Torah. Both Rabbi Reuven and I, as well as always, we're always going to try to have at least one or two guest rabbis that we know, who are Talmidei Chachamim, join us and write different articles. Each one is mostly in Hebrew, with the exception of mine. We're also going to have... Rabbanit Sarah, Rabbi Reuven's wife, she's also writing one, and b'ezrat Hashem, my Rabbanit b'ezrat Hashem will also write one. Each one will bring different perspectives of what they got that week, what they think we need chizuk in. I was working on an article today because, for me, speaking is a lot easier than writing. Hashem gave me the gift of gab. I like and enjoy writing, and I've written quite a bit in my life, especially in the business world. I used to write long, extended papers and analyses and stories and so on. I never wrote a few articles in the Torah world, but each one, for me, is like giving 20 lectures because writing is very different from speaking. You don't write the way you speak, and

3:05have to make sure that each word flows and is comprehensible. The more you read, the more you realize how most books are never read, not because the content is not interesting, but because it takes a really long time to get to the point. You know, if you see most books today that are written, in reality, the whole story could be told in two pages. Most books reality. Most of the points—and it doesn't matter what kind of book it is—most of the main points of the book could be covered in two, three, four, or ten pages max. So what's in the other four hundred pages? Four hundred pages to justify a twenty-five-dollar price? But the real chachamim, and what we try to aspire to be, will make sure to write each and every single word carefully to make sure that you get something out of every page, out of every

4:05Sentence and so on and so forth. There's a lot more work going into it, especially if you value your own time; then that means you're gonna value other people's time. So, with that being said, I wrote about Shema Yisrael, started writing about Shema Yisrael, and this has to do with our shiur. We're gonna talk a little bit about Tisha B'Av, preparation for Tisha B'Av, and try to figure out what it is that we need to do. Is it a big deal? Is it not a big deal? Is it just that we fast for a day, do a diet, and that's it? We're finished? Or is it something more? Rav Nissim Yagen, זצ"ל, used to say that every Tisha B'Av and Yom Kippur, he would feel like he's going to a nursing home. When he goes to Beit Knesset, He felt like he was going to a nursing home. Why? Because there's a bunch of people in slippers asking, "Where's the food? When's the food? Where's the food?" And that's Tisha B'Av, unfortunately, in many places. And that's Yom Kippur in many places—a bunch of people in slippers asking, "When's the fast over? When's the fast over?" In the book of Isaiah, chapter 58...

5:34Am Yisrael complains, saying, "Look, we just fasted. We fasted, so how come our prayers are not being answered? We fasted on Yom Kippur, Tisha B'Av, the Seventeenth of Tammuz, we fast on Ta'anit Esther. How come you're not answering our prayers, Hashem?" So the prophet Yeshayahu comes by the word of Hashem and he says to them, "This is a fast? You think Hashem cares if you eat or you don't eat? Instead of fasting and getting closer spiritually to Hashem, what do you do? You fast and spend the entire day saying Lashon Hara. So you go to Beit Knesset, Instead of talking to Hashem, what are you talking about? You're talking about this guy. See, this guy didn't come. He's late. He's late to the prayer. Yeah, the guy never cares. Yeah, he's not really chassidish. He's like a half a chiloni with peyos. No, him? No, no, he's divorced. No, him? You see what kind of business he has? He's probably in business. He's working. He can't take off today. He's got a business. He's got a house. He's got a building. Everybody's talking about everybody else. It becomes, instead of a Beit Knesset, a Beit Lashon Hara.

6:50This is 3,000 years ago. Nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. Same thing now. I remember when I lived in New York, there was a Beit Knesset that I would go to, and every year it was the same thing. Especially, you know, when I was secular and I knew nothing about nothing. I was one of the people, but it always amazed me that the people would come once, twice a year, To be Knesset just like me, but they make it such a big deal. At least I tried to hide. I knew I was supposed to go more often. They make such a big deal. The old tzaddikim. Old tzaddikim. But when they want to make sure, everybody knows they are tzaddikim. Why? So they drive their brand new car and they park it right in front of the shul. And they come out with a club outfit. And they talk, and they're outside the whole time. So why did you come to shul if you're outside the whole time? Well, you don't know what you're doing. You don't know you're doing it wrong. Nothing's changed from the time of the prophet Yeshayahu until today. We go to shul, sit on the floor, and pretend like we care about the Beit HaMikdash. But in reality, all we care about is for the clock to be over so we can eat. Now, Hashem told us to fast several times during the year because these are special opportune times for us to connect to Him. These are special opportune times to...

8:14For us to reconsider where we stand. In reality, we're supposed to do it every day. In reality, if you read and understand the words that you pray every day, whether it's shacharit, mincha, arvit, whichever one, if you actually understand what you say, every single one of the prayers should be the best mussar shiur you've ever heard. If you understand and you actually think about what's being said, You should be able to do teshuva every time you pray. Why don't we do teshuva every time we pray? Because we're busy. We're busy doing other things. Rav Galinsky, alav ha-shalom, used to use a pasuk from Tehillim that says, the goyim, "eleh barechev ve'eleh basusim, va'anachnu b'shem Hashem."

9:15There's a pasuk in Tehillim that says, "Eleh barechev ve'eleh basusim, va'anachnu b'shem Hashem Elokeinu nazkir." In essence, what the pshat is supposed to mean is that the goyim use all these carriages and horses to win wars, but we win in the name of Hashem. Rav Galinsky, alav ha-shalom, said that people use carriages and horses to get to where they want to be, but we rely on Hashem. They use carriages. They use horses. We, we just use the name of Hashem. As soon as Hashem's name is mentioned, our mind goes somewhere else. Tefillah, you say, okay, Shema Yisrael, we're already thinking about the work we have to go to, and the office we have to go to, and the meeting we have to go to. Immediately you say the name of Hashem, Shema Yisrael, we're thinking about something else. We have to go somewhere else. How come you're in synagogue? Why don't you think about Hashem? Nothing's changed. So, if you look at Shema Yisrael, Shema Yisrael, anyone that's lucky enough to talk to Hashem every day, prays every day, and knows that there's a halacha in our Torah in the Shulchan Aruch. This is a biblical mitzvah that Hashem commanded us in the Book of Devarim, chapter 6, verses 4 and 5, and it continues...

10:34He says that you have to say Shema Yisrael no less than twice a day: once in the morning and once at night. Really, you should say it before you go to sleep also. The reason why you say it in the morning and at night is that there are specific times during the day you're supposed to say it in the morning and there are specific times at night after sundown when you have to say it. The reason why you have to say it before you go to sleep is also because it is actually a verse in the Torah. So, it is good to go to sleep with a verse of Torah right before you go to sleep. It is supposed to be the last thing you say; it helps destroy all of the demons that... ...from our sins, and so on and so forth. We had a shiur about this some time ago. But Shema Yisrael also means something else. Shema Yisrael is a way that Hashem tells us, "I want you to call out to Me. I want you to scream out to Me," figuratively speaking: Shema Yisrael, Hashem Eloheinu, Hashem Echad.

11:52Hear O Israel, Hashem our God, Hashem is One. Here, every single Jew that says this is recognizing the Borei Baruch Hu, that He is our God, his God, meaning that Jew's particular God. He's recognizing His Malchut, His kingship. He's recognizing the King as the King and... He's recognizing that he's the only one and there is no other. No other King from avodah zarah whether it be Yoshke or it be Buddha or it be Muhammad, and no other type of King like his boss or his wife or the competition, and so on and so forth. God is the only God, even his money. Any hobby that he has could be a false god. This is why when Yaakov Avinu saw his son Yosef after 22 years for the first time, the Torah says that Yosef hugged Yaakov and started crying, but Yaakov didn't hug Yosef. Why didn't he hug Yosef? The Torah says he didn't hug Yosef.

13:19Because he was so passionate about how much he loved Yosef, he was so excited to see Yosef for the first time in 22 years when he actually thought he was dead, that when he saw him he was overwhelmed with passion, overwhelmed with love, overwhelmed with excitement. And then he realized, before he hugged him, no, no one in the world deserves that much of my heart. he said at that moment, "My heart only belongs to God. No one in the world, not even my son, deserves that much of my love. No one but God." The Avdi, what about our money? How much time do we spend talking about our money, thinking about our money, planning our money? How many people have planned their retirement? Almost every American has some type of retirement plan. Some have $500 million in their retirement plan. Some have $5 in their retirement plan with a dream. Either way, everyone plans for their retirement. I remember young kids coming to my office in the old days, 18, 19 years old, and they would ask me sometimes, "Oh, is there a retirement plan?"

14:4018, you're not gonna retire for maybe 40, 50 years. What do you care about retirement right now? Who says you're gonna make it to this retirement? Everybody worries about retirement. They work so they can stop working. So just stop working now. Go to the street, stop working with the rest of the bums if you want to stop working. Everybody wants to plan for retirement. Everybody has a retirement plan because one day everybody expects to be retired so they can do nothing and... Dream is to work really hard so they could do nothing. What a dream that is! Imagine you work your whole life really hard, overtime, seven days a week. You work overtime, you work, you work not 24 hours, you invented a new way to make more time in a day. Now you work 48 hours a day, not 24 hours. Why? So one day you'll have to work. Just stop working now, then, if you don't want to work so badly. I... But people plan for their retirement. They want to retire. They want to do nothing. They go on vacation permanently until they run out of money, and they have to go back to work. But everybody plans for their retirement. People are so worried any time they lose money, like, "Oh, I lost my retirement." How much did you lose? "I lost $3,000." I'm like, you're going to retire on $3,000? That's one month's mortgage, one month's rent. What's $3,000? What are you going to do with $3,000? $3,000.

16:05You have to work for it if that's all your retirement. I had a friend whose retirement was these two medallions, taxi medallions in New York City yellow cabs. In the early 1930s, the city of New York made a taxi and limousine commission and said in order for you to operate a taxi and pick up people off the street, you have to have something called a medallion. made a Taxi and Limousine Commission and said in order for you to operate a taxi and pick up people off the street, you have to have something called a medallion. And this medallion was going to be controlled as far as the supply and how much the city was going to release. And every year they would release just a few more, but supply and demand says that if you have a limited quantity, gonna be higher demand if it's a good product. In this particular case, the population of New York continued to increase, which meant that the value of these medallions continued to increase. For example, in the 1980s, the medallion was worth somewhere around $50,000. If you wanted to operate a yellow cab, you had to buy a medallion. If you wanted to operate a yellow taxi, you had to have a medallion.

17:24You had to buy a medallion or you had to lease it; you had to rent it from somebody. In the beginning, people just got their own, but then the value increased rapidly, all the way to the point that by the year 2013, one medallion was over a million dollars. One medallion was over a million dollars. I remember my father, God bless him. He says one of the biggest regrets that he had was that when we first moved to America in 1990, he was able to buy a medallion for a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and he never did. He had the money at the time, and he never did. So by 2013, when it went to a million dollars, he was like eating his heart out. Good news, Abba. It's back to two hundred thousand. Why? What happened? What happened to everybody's retirement plan? What happened to everybody's retirement? In five years, it went to nothing. What happened? Everybody and their mother bought a medallion over the last 10 years. Even though it was $300,000 or $400,000, it continued going higher. Why did it continue going higher? Because everybody said, listen, there's only 13,000 of them.

18:32We could buy this medallion, then we can lease it out to somebody. Somebody's gonna pay me $1,000 a week. My mortgage is only $2,000 a month. They make $2,000 a month profit or even more. It became a big moneymaker. So everybody, including my friend who had two of them, thought this was their retirement. How could it go wrong? Well, they forgot that God runs the world and... In 2013, it reached a little over a million dollars. But at that moment, there was a tiny little company called Uber. It said, "We're gonna go into the market, and we're gonna do it differently. We'd be more expensive, and we're not gonna pick you up off the street. You have to call us, you have to use an app," and it sounds kind of annoying to use it and so on and so forth. And I would not have really paid attention to them. I A recent report came out: Uber is officially bigger than the yellow taxi cabs, to such an extent that there are entire streets in New York full of yellow taxi cabs parked, and no one is ever going to drive them. Why? Because all the guys who used to drive the old taxis and lease these medallions are not leasing them anymore. Why? Because they are using their own cars to pick up people.

19:47That way, that medallion that was worth over a million dollars dropped 80% in the last couple of years. It'll probably go to zero. There's probably no value to it ever again. There's no value for it. There's no point. First of all, the old taxis are disgusting. I'm telling you from experience. They are disgusting, filthy, disgusting. I used to befriend them. You're in a cab a lot of times in New York. You befriend these people. I know how much money they make, how they do. I actually considered buying one myself at some point. And I always ask, how come it always smells? It goes out. We never leave the taxi. So what does it mean you never leave the taxi? They do their stuff in the taxi. It's disgusting. They use it as a bathroom. It's disgusting. So first of all, it's disgusting. If I didn't say it enough, it's disgusting. After that, you get over the fact that it's disgusting. After that, does it make any sense? Does it make sense to use it? Why? Because you have to fight for it in the street. It's freezing. You don't know what's happening. You have to stand there like a moron on the corner. No one comes, and finally you think the guy is coming. You tell the guy, "Okay, I want to go down to the shul." "No, no, I'll go only to the airport."

21:09And the guy doesn't want to pick you up and he leaves. Or better yet, the guy comes right next to you and then he says he's off duty. Off duty. So you just waited an hour and a half freezing in New York weather. And the guy, so it doesn't make any sense. Whereas with the Uber, you just press the app, he comes, he tells you when he's downstairs, you come downstairs, you're finished. Finished, perfect. Jackass refuse, so listen, if he's in New York, he's most likely a criminal, but what can you do? It's a risk you have to take when you take a cab. Joking aside, the point is the value of everyone's retirement that was in that business went down 80% in a business that everyone was absolutely certain was their retirement. Many of us have planned for retirement. How many of us thought that retirement looks rosy because I just got a raise, because I just invented something, because I just sold the house, and I just got married because of this and because of that? And then all of a sudden, Hashem shows us that He's the one running the show, and our retirement plans get foiled and go into the garbage with all of our dreams and hopes. We go back to work, all you know, with a long face like a horse. Why? Because you realize we're not going to retire. We're never going to graduate to actually become these people to do nothing.

22:11I just got married because of this and because of that, and then all of a sudden, Hashem shows us that He's the one running the show, and our retirement plans get foiled and go into the garbage with all of our dreams and hopes. We go back to work, all you know, with a long face like a horse. Why? Because you realize we're not going to retire. We're never going to graduate to actually become these people to do nothing. Which, by the way, from experience, because I used to deal with a lot of rich people that retired, as soon as they retired, they usually die. Seriously, the people that are wealthy, that made their money actually working, not just being retired, most of them died shortly after they retire, and that's because they're not used to doing nothing. Working actually kept them alive. Retirement is not healthy for you. That's why in the Torah life, there's no such thing as retirement and... On your deathbed, if you're able to read, you are obligated to do so. It's not like, "Oh, it's nice, you're a tzaddik." No, you are obligated to. On your deathbed, you know you're going to die in 20 minutes. Can you read? Yeah, learn Torah. "Adam la'amel yulad" — a person was created to work, not to retire. But let's get back to the point at hand. Most of us have or will try to retire.

23:37To plan for retirement. The question I have is, how many of us that plan to retire in this world, how many of us plan for what happens after retirement, after this world? How many of us put something aside for Olam HaBa? We plan so much. Oh, no, no. Retirement, I live here, but in retirement, I'm going to live there. Okay, good. You have the house over there. Fine. Yeah, but now I have the bank here, but when I retire, my bank is over there. Okay, so the bank is over there and the house is over there. And the car, this car, I have the car here, but the real car is in my garage in the house over there with the bank over there. Okay, the car and the house and the bank are over there. Fine. You made all these plans for retirement. What about Olam HaBa? How many of us actually started planning for Olam HaBa? Because Olam HaBa can happen before retirement. My cousin's Olam HaBa arrived at 23 years old. He never got to retire. How many of us planned for it? When we learn, we're supposed to learn with that type of kavanah, that this learning is for that retirement plan—the retirement plan in Olam HaBa. Our prayer is trying to wake us up to realize...

24:59This is what you're supposed to be doing: planning for retirement in Olam HaBa. Now, first and foremost, we have to scream to Hashem because we have a lot of problems. No one leaves this world without a lot of problems. No one leaves this world without a lot of suffering. If you're expecting a life without any suffering, it's the wrong life. Come back next time. Everyone has suffering. There's no such thing as a life without suffering. It's called death. No one leaves this world without suffering. Everyone has suffering—some people financial, some people relationships, some people this, some people that. Everyone has suffering. No one leaves this world without suffering. I'm sorry for all the young folks, killing your hopes and dreams. Trust me when I tell you, you will suffer in your life. There's no escape. Make good use of it, at least. I'm telling you, I'm telling you the truth. Why? Because at least now that you know you're going to suffer, make good use of it and... don't say, "Oh, I'm not going to suffer." You're going to live. You're going to suffer. At least make good use of it. Okay, what can I learn from this suffering session?

26:03One student, I teach him for three years, this one, that one, questions, night, day, this, that, personal family, mother, father, problems of the family, all types of questions, all types of hours, 2 o'clock in the morning, 12 o'clock in the afternoon, whatever. No question unanswered. Every question answered. Three years, everything possible, I did. Decided he didn't like the last answer after three years. He doesn't like it, so what's he gonna do? He's gonna spread lashon hara about me, tell people not to come to the shiur because he didn't like my last answer. Yeah, but what about the other three thousand answers over three years? No, no, no. We don't think about stuff like that. It's only "What have you done for me lately?" That's the mentality of this generation. What have you done for me lately? So, about... We scream to Hashem, Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad. In reality, we are accepting Hashem Yitbarach as the king of all kings. We're accepting Hashem Yitbarach as our king that could bring us not only the national salvation for our nation, our brothers, our sisters,

27:24Parents, our children, but also bring us our own personal individual salvation for all of the problems that we have. Why? He's the one that gave it to us. Yes, where does my problem come from? Hashem. Where did the Holocaust come from? Hashem. Where do the promises come from? Hashem. Good and bad come from Hashem. So now... We're saying "Shema Yisrael." We're, in essence, recognizing that He is the source of all good and the source of all what we think is bad, and so on and so forth. We are starting our day by recognizing the King. We are starting our day by saying, "Hashem, You are in control. I am here today to work for You." Good, so far, so good. That means if we're going to start our day already, we should start on the right foot and not lie to Hashem, right? It's not good. You're asking Him to help you and then you're lying in His face, right? It's not good. Oh, can you give me the answer for what is this, this, and this? Oh, yeah, sure, sure, and then I have to use that answer to go talk against Him. It's not nice, right? It's not a nice thing to do, right? Right, so Hashem, much more than some guy that thinks he's a rabbi...

28:42Yeah, Hashem is Hashem, right? So now, Hashem, Hashem, imagine Hashem. Imagine Hashem. You are the only one who can solve my problem. I have a lot of problems. Like these problems. Problems. You can fix it. So you're not going to lie to Him, right? Who's going to lie to Him? Raise your hand. No one's going to lie to Him. Okay, so now I have a question. After we say Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad, we say. That's what you say. The verse goes, verse 4, chapter 6, verse 4 in Deuteronomy. Then, verse 5, the next verse, continues. That's what we're reading. It's continuous. What does it say? And you love Hashem. Your God, the same one you just said, the same one, not a different one, the same one. Say to Him, and you love this God, love Him. That's why we are here. If you hate this God, is He going to answer your prayers? If you lie to this God, is He going to answer your prayers? He's not going to answer your prayers. So you say, why are you going to answer my prayers, Hashem? Because I love You. What's my proof that I love You? I love Hashem with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all of my resources. That's what we say every day, no less than two times a day.

30:05let me ask you a question: between you and me, which one of us actually means it? You just said in the morning, you woke up in the morning, and you said, "Hashem, help me." That's what we said in so many words. Why? Because I love You with all my heart, with all of my soul, and with all my money. Now, how many of us really love Hashem with all of our heart, even when what He said is against our own opinion? He says that we have to be modest, but we don't really feel like it because the neighbor is going to make fun of us because we have a hat on and she's wearing a wig to the floor. So she'll make fun of us because we have a hat, because we look like Sarah Imeinu and she looks like Korach's wife. She's going to make fun of us. Hashem said to wear a hat or mitpachat. Hashem said to wear a hat like Sarah Imeinu. Wait, did she wear a wig? Sarah Imeinu didn't wear a wig. Rivka didn't wear a wig. So, how many of us actually love Hashem so much that it doesn't matter what we think or what the neighbor thinks? How many of us? How many of us actually care more about Hashem in our heart than the neighbor? All of our heart. Let's say half a heart. Half a heart is sometimes. Half a heart is when we're sick. When we're sick, we love Hashem a lot.

31:24When he's not sick, our whole heart, the whole of our heart. That's what we say; we start the day off. How many of us love Him with all of our heart when we know that in reality we have a non-kosher business? We're not allowed to operate it, so we have to close it. How many of us know that it's an opportune time to say lashon hara because it's so spicy and so delicious to say this lashon hara, but it's against Hashem? It's against Hashem. Hashem doesn't like lashon hara. I'll tell you in a moment how much He doesn't like lashon hara. How many of us? It's hard, right? Now all of a sudden the love is questionable. Okay, so let's go into step two. Step two said, with all of our souls. What's all of our souls? How many of us really dedicate our entire life to do His will like He wants? Meaning, how do we know what Hashem wants? Does He talk to any of us? Does He send you any text messages? Jacob, did He send you a text message today?

32:24He sent you? To me, He didn't send. Anybody else get a text message other than Jacob? Nobody else got a text message. Only Jacob. Only Jacob was lucky enough to get a text message. The rest of us didn't get a text message. Why? Because He gave us a different instruction set. Why? It's called Torah. So how many of us dedicate our souls, meaning our entire life, morning, day, and night, Living based off of this instruction set, living off of this love letter from Hashem called the Torah. How many of us, not sometimes three times a week when there's a shiur, but the whole day, every day, all the time? Of course, you're allowed to work, you're allowed to eat, you're allowed to go to the bathroom, all the things you need to do, you have to do. But meaning, to do all those things, no one's telling you you're not allowed to do them. What we're saying is, how many of us are doing them with the instructions of the Torah as the manual? We're using that as the manual of how to do them. To work, I'm only going to work based on this instruction set. Can't work on Shabbat, can only work a kosher business, you know, so on and so forth, in regards to modesty rules, so on and so forth, in regards to negiah, and so on, and all the things.

33:32Lot to work, a lot to eat, but you only want to eat kosher food even if it's a business meeting. How many of us are living our lives with this instruction set our whole lives? Now we're getting a little more difficult. It's an easy one, the third one. We call me'odecha — we love Hashem so much, we love Him with all of our money. How many of us have made Torah our number one investment in our portfolio and... Many people in the world have made Torah their number one investment—financial investment, theoretical investment, not time investment—money, cash. How many of us have made Torah their number one resource, their number one asset? Most people, their number one asset is their house, retirement... current house, future? How some people have more money in their parking lot than they have in their bank. Honestly, if you ever want to know why people go bankrupt, just look at their parking lots. People spend three, four, five, six thousand dollars a month just on leasing cars. It's unbelievable! The level of stupidity in this generation in financial matters is mamash hitting new highs.

34:50People can barely pay their mortgage, but they have $4,000 in the parking lot. I see it all the time. Every Shabbat, we walk around a little bit with the kids. We walk around and see the houses. Everybody has the same house. It's all like little Legos. Everybody has the same house. But some of the houses, you have, mamash, four brand new cars. And you know, just from knowledge, this one is $1,000 a month. This one's $1,500. This one's $700. You see people, they have $3,000, $4,000 a month in cars. Even if you have the money, why are you wasting so much money on a car? And four of them. It's unbelievable to me. People, mamash, they barely have money to eat. They're living much like if they don't get paid on time, they're stressed out. But they're going to spend seven hundred dollars a month on a Lincoln or something, or an Infiniti or whatever one of these expensive cars. Just get a regular car. Why do you have to spend so much money on a car and have four of them, nonetheless three of them? Why can't you borrow each other's car? Why do you have to have four? No, no, it's my car. It goes. It's not your car anyway. It goes back to the lot. You're leasing it.

35:59It's not your car anyway. People don't know how to share. We get mad at the little kids. "No, share, share." You don't know how to share yourself. Why are you getting mad at the four-year-old? You don't know how to share yourself. When was the last time you shared your car? "No, it's my car." Oh, okay. So when you learn how to share your car as an adult, the four-year-old is going to learn how to share his big alley. We don't know how to share as adults. Now we have a problem. Why? We said we love Hashem. That's why He's going to answer our prayers. Everybody always likes to talk about how much we love Hashem, love Hashem, love Hashem. Okay, let's see. You're starting your day with love of Hashem. Okay, let's see. Which one do you love? Which way? You love Him with all of your heart, which means that you're going to follow everything He says, regardless of whether you like it or not, regardless of whether your neighbor likes it or not, regardless of whether you fit in or not. Already we have a problem. Houston, we have a problem. Okay. Second. Soul, your whole life is Torah. Your whole life, meaning morning, middle, day, the whole day is Torah. Houston, we have two problems. Okay, what about your money? We're not even going to ask that. Houston, we crashed. So, Rabotai, I'm not saying I'm doing it. I'm not saying anyone here is doing it. I'm just saying the next time we cry to Hashem,

37:20Instead of crying to Hashem, let's just do a little reflection. Where can I get better? I'm not saying tomorrow we're all going to wake up and say, "Oh, tomorrow I'm doing all of it." It's going to take time. Pick one. Pick one. Okay, you know what? This one, today I'm going to do good. This one, the heart, today I'm going to be all Hashem. Today, I'm going to be all Hashem. I'm going to talk about Hashem, think about Hashem. I don't care what she says. I don't care what he says. Whatever Hashem says, I'm going to do. Tomorrow, the other two—the money and the soul and stuff—we'll get to that. But pick one, Ribbono Shel Olam. Pick one. Pick one tomorrow. If it's the money, it's the money. If it's the heart, it's the heart. Pick something. Why? So at least it's not a complete lie. Because at the end of it all, you're asking Hashem for help. You're asking Hashem to give you a miracle so you can arrive home from work. And a lot of people don't make it home from work. So here we see that our prayers, if you actually delve into them, give us a lot of mussar. Now after Tisha B'Av, in the yeshiva world, the Torah world, it's called Bein HaZmanim, meaning that the talmidei yeshiva, the kollels, take a three-week break.

38:49take a three-week break. You've been studying all year, morning, afternoon, night, non-stop. You need a break. No one says you need a break from Torah; you just need a break from that particular schedule. A lot of people use this time to go away, see nature, relax, hang out with the family, and so on. Now, it's known that everyone who really cares about Torah takes some books with them. But you can't carry all your books. Not everyone likes to carry all their books. So usually, you carry, you know, one Gemara, one Masechet you're going to learn, maybe a few interesting things you have. But the one thing that is very easy to forget is Mussar. It's very easy to forget the Mussar book. It's always heavy, the Mussar book. It's always heavy. So Hashem is doing us a favor. Every year at this time we start Sefer Devarim. And Sefer Devarim is an entire Sefer, the book of Deuteronomy, the whole thing is Mussar. The whole book of Devarim is all Mussar from Moshe Rabbeinu, the number one rabbi of all time. Every single verse is Mussar. Every single verse is rebuke. As Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said,

40:19When Moshe Rabbeinu went to Hashem, he said, "Hashem, why are You so mad at them? Okay, so they worshipped an idol, but come on, they're just people. They're like two little children. They don't know what they're doing. Right, left, they're playing with the statue. Next thing they worship it. They didn't really know. They were playing with it. They didn't really know. They didn't know Hashem. They didn't mean it. They're kids. No, Hashem, You're infinite in age. They're just, what, 20 years old, 30 years old. They don't know anything, Hashem. They don't know." Hashem says, "Okay, okay, go down to them." Then he goes down. Moshe Rabbeinu comes from Mount Sinai. He says to the people of Israel, You made a really big sin. Look what you did, you despicable people. Despicable people that are not smart. What do you mean? You just said to Hashem, you didn't do a big deal. They're misguided kids. What happened to that? Because to Him I said it. To you, I have to tell you the truth. You have to do teshuva. I have to convince Him. If I told Him the truth, if I told Him what I really thought, then what do you think? He's going to kill you. But really, in reality, we made a big sin.

41:26From here, our sages teach us that when you go to Hashem, you pray for your students, you pray for your people, you pray for your parents, you pray for your kids, and so on and so forth, you pray in their favor. Even if they're not necessarily the biggest tzaddikim in the world, you pray for them. But that does not mean that you make pretend like they're really tzaddikim. And tell them, no, no, you're a tzaddik. What tzaddik? The guy's a mechaleil Shabbat. The guy's a tzaddik? He donated money to the Red Cross so they could fund Christianity. What, he donated? No, he's got a big heart. Yeah, a big heart thinking about girls all day. What big heart? What, he's a teddy bear? You cannot lie to people just because you want to make them feel good. Now the problem is that many of the leaders today are making the same mistake we've been making for the last...

42:272,000 years and they think that just because you tell people the truth, that's going to make them question themselves. It's not a good way. So the Gemara teaches us, "Who did this? Who didn't do it?" The Gemara in Bava Batra says, what was the significance of Iyov and my love job job The Ramban, in his commentary at the beginning of the book of Job, says that anyone who reads the book of Job, if he's normal, has to do teshuva. Why? You see the amount of suffering that he went through just during the first two pages of the book, not the whole book, just the first two pages. The amount of suffering that Job went through, and... Anyone that's normal has to do teshuva just to know that it's even a remote possibility that it could happen to you. That alone should scare you worse than the Gehinom itself. The book of Job is so scary and so full of mussar. Of what could happen to a person in this world — forget Gehinom, just in this world.

43:47that it's part of the small amount of Torah we're allowed to learn during Tisha B'Av. During Tisha B'Av, there are certain restrictions. You're not allowed to eat. You're not allowed to drink. You're not allowed to bathe. You're not allowed to be intimate with your wife, with your husband. There are a few things you're not allowed to do. But one of the things you're also not allowed to do, aside from not being allowed to rub oils or creams on yourself, is being happy. That's the fifth thing. But one of the other things you're not allowed to do is be happy. Why? Because Tisha B'Av is the time when both Batei Mikdash were destroyed. Both of them. The first one and the second one. Tisha B'Av, all of the major disasters in the history of Am Yisrael happened on Tisha B'Av. Not just the Beit HaMikdash, not just the first one, not just the second one. If you look at all of the major disasters that ever happened to Am Yisrael in history, they happened on this day. If it's the Meraglim, the spies that said Lashon Hara about the land, the spies that said Lashon Hara about Hashem, they came back and

45:17They made the entire nation cry. Hashem says, "You cried for no reason today. I will give you a reason to cry for eternity. Forever, in this world, on this day, for a real reason." That was officially when Tisha B'Av was created during the Meraglim. For that, the generation was punished that not a single one of them, with the exception of Yehoshua bin Nun and Kalev, not a single one of them, will have the merit to enter Eretz Yisrael. All of them will die in the desert and... Why? They cried for no reason. Tisha B'Av was also when there were historically horrible dates, horrible times during the pogroms and inquisitions, the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms, Kristallnacht during Nazi Germany times. All of the different things that happened throughout our history, the horrible things, the horrible events happened on Tisha B'Av.

46:19So anyone that delves and thinks about those things easily cannot be happy. Easily, you'll be sad. But there is something that can create a lot of happiness in a person even if all the sadness in the world surrounds him. And that is learning Torah. So Hashem says you're not allowed to learn Torah on Tisha B'Av because learning Torah will give you the ultimate happiness. You're not allowed to learn Sefer Bereishit. You're not allowed to learn Sefer Shemot. You're not allowed to learn a lot of the Torah. What are you allowed to learn? You're allowed to learn things that are relevant to the destruction of Beit HaMikdash. All of Masechet Gittin, all the things that happened during the destruction, different Gemarot, the end of Masechet Berachot, has a few stories of what happened to the Tzaddikim, how They killed Rabbi Akiva, peeled off his skin, Hashem, all types of horrible things that you're allowed to study. The Book of Eicha, the Prophet Jeremiah wrote what happened at the destruction of Beit HaMikdash. Anyone that reads it in a language they understand and not just makes the sounds immediately becomes very, very sad. A lot of people make the sounds, a lot of people know how to make sounds.

47:46Hey, can anybody know what Eicha means? Eicha means "How did they get to this?" That's what it means. I thought my whole life I thought Eicha was a name. Yeah, Prophet Eicha. Prophet Eicha. Eicha means "How did they get to this?" Oy vey. That's what it means. But we don't know. We just make sounds. You have to read these things in a language you understand. It doesn't make a difference what everyone else is doing. It makes a difference what you're doing. you learn it, you learn it in a language you understand. And if you learn what happened during the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, and you see that before the Beit HaMikdash was destroyed, what level of starvation we got to, to such an extent that the mothers had to eat their own children. Hashem Yirachem. This is not the first or second time this happened in history. This happened many times throughout our history. This is the punishment that Hashem promised us, if we disobey Him, will happen in parashat Bechukotai and parashat Ki Tavo. Twice in the Torah, no less, it says that Hashem will punish us to that extent that we'll get to such a level of starvation that mothers will eat their children. And this happened multiple times throughout history.

49:01First Beit HaMikdash, Second Beit HaMikdash, and even during Nazi Germany. This is part of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that people don't like to talk about. I brought it in a shiur a year or two ago and showed people proof that this actually happened. The point being, when you learn these things, it's very easy to get sad. Now, one of the things you're able to learn on Tisha B'Av is the book of Iyov (Job). Why? Because the book of Iyov, anyone that actually understands the words, understands what happened to Iyov, immediately becomes sad. Why? Because he knows it's possible that it could happen to him. He knows it's possible that it could happen to her. Why? It happened to a human being. It happened in this world. It's all things we could understand. The guy wakes up in the morning, a multi-billionaire, ten kids. By the afternoon, all ten kids died. That happened to people in this world.

50:04By the afternoon, all of his money is gone. That happened to people in this world. By the afternoon, he became sick. That happened to people in this world. Today, you go to the hospital healthy with a cold, and you come back sick with some disease because they used the wrong needle. Two young kids from South America, Jewish guys in the 1980s... went to the hospital because they had hemophilia, not a deadly disease, but not something comfortable either. The hospital said they had a cure. They were going to be part of a study. They went to the doctors; they went to the hospital, and mistakenly, one of the nurses who was doing a different study and Injected these two boys with a needle that had AIDS in it. Both guys got AIDS. Young Jewish kids had a little problem, but not deadly. Now, it became deadly. It's a different disease. You wake up in the morning with a cold; you now have AIDS in the afternoon. One of the kids realized, "We're gonna die."

51:34I'm gonna meet my Maker soon. I'm gonna do teshuva. His brother didn't decide the same thing. He said, "I'm gonna live life to the fullest." He wanted to go party. He wanted to enjoy life. This is recorded in a shiur, maybe 20 years ago, by Rabbi Amnon Yitzchak. They showed up at a shiur, testified. One of them testified. The one that went partying, partied, partied, partied, then died from AIDS. The one that did teshuva did real teshuva. Continued going to the doctor. One day he goes to the doctor and they ask him, "Okay, nu, what's the trick?" "What trick? What did you do? What did you do with the blood? What did you do? Come on, let's do a blood check again." He goes, did a blood check. "No, no, no. Nu, what did you do?" "Nothing. What did I do? What are you talking about?" He said, "Are you serious?" I said, "I'm serious. You don't have AIDS."

52:36incurable disease disappeared. To think, until this day, 30 years later... It's an incurable disease. Yes, there are ways that you can live for 20 years like Magic Johnson and other people like him that have a zillion dollars. But the average person dies or at least lives a very, very miserable, short life. It doesn't disappear. Unless you're a Jew and did teshuva. So, Job woke up healthy. In the afternoon, he's sick, but sick to such an extent that worms are leaving his body, not coming in. He became like rotten meat, with abscesses all over his body. I felt like I was dying with two or three at a time; he had it all over his body. The Gemara in Baba Batra asks what was the significance of Job? What was so special about Job? It says Job was a tzaddik. Why? He tried to relieve all of Am Yisrael from their responsibility, all of mankind from their responsibility to their Maker, to their Creator. What? He said to Hashem, Ribbono shel Olam. You created the cow, and You created a donkey. One has hooves that are split,

53:58has hooves that are not split, meaning You decided why this one has hooves that are split and this one does not. There's no actual real scientific reason or logic that makes sense of why one would have and one would not have. There's no real reason; it doesn't make sense. Okay. Why can't we just eat a donkey? It looks delicious. No, don't tell me it doesn't look delicious. Why does the cow look delicious? The Arabs love it. That's why they sell it to the Jews thinking it's cows. But anyway, they sell the meat. That's what they do. They sell the donkey meat to the Jews in Israel that are not really so makpidim. They sell it to them as if it's cow meat. The point is, rabotai, Iyov comes to Hashem and he tells Him, Hashem yitbarach. Meaning, You run nature. You decided here it makes sense, here it doesn't make sense. Meaning it's Your rules. You created it. Yes, You created the evil person, You created the good person. You create kapat of a note also. You created a good person, You created an evil person. Meaning some guys were just born with an inclination to be tzaddikim.

55:20They should have a good nature. They were born or came into this world, unless they're humble already automatically, they're humble, they're good-natured, they're giving. They're the good-natured people. You created these tzaddikim. And some people are born not exactly tzaddikim. Some people like to play with fire. Some people are pyromaniacs. Some people like to kill animals for no reason. Some people are a little crazy. So you created them too, Hashem. You created them. You created good, you created bad. So Hashem, who can beat you? Meaning, what Job was trying to say is, Hashem, You created all these things anyway. So for any of us to be able to do teshuva, we have to go against Your creation. Because You created them bad. Because You created them with inclinations. You created them with an evil inclination. You created them with this. Job was trying to get everybody to be tinok shenishba.

56:24Everybody doesn't know. And that's why his friends came to him, the Gemara says, and rebuked him. They said, "Oh, Iyov, you're making a mistake. What's the mistake you're making? You're making a mistake that yes, even though some people have an inclination to do something bad, Hashem also gave them at least just as much power to do something good. Even though he has an inclination to see blood, he doesn't have to use it to murder people. He could become a surgeon." He can become a butcher. He doesn't have to become a murderer. Even though you have an inclination to look at certain things, that's fine. Don't look at that. Look at something that's kosher. Hashem gave you an evil inclination; He also gave you a good inclination. That was the mistake that Iyov made. And unfortunately, that mistake is being made today. Iyov did teshuvah. That's why there's a book in the Torah written about him. I'm sorry, Hashem. I have questioned You, and Iyov did complete teshuvah and became Kodesh Kodashim. There's a book called the Book of Job written about him. What about the people of today? What about the people for the last couple of thousand years since Iyov? Not so much. So the Gemara in Masechet Shabbat gives us some things that we need to chew on because people have heard...

57:51The Beit HaMikdash was destroyed for a few reasons. The first one was destroyed because of avodah zarah, shfichat damim, and who knows the third? You're looking at me, so I'm seeing you want to complete it: avodah zarah, avodah zarah. idol worship, shfichat damim (spilling blood), and gilui arayot (sexual immorality). Now, most people think that these are the only three sins, but the entire nation, millions and millions of people, only needed these three sins. Everything else they did was perfect. That's the mistake. The three sins are not only three sins, there are three... There are three descriptions for the main category, but it's not all of the subcategories. Because every time in the 12 times that it's mentioned in the Torah that idolatry—that I'm sorry, that chillul Shabbat is...

59:14death penalty right next to it in all those 12 times. You will see that idolatry is also a death penalty. He was talking about a death penalty, and Avodah Zarah is a death penalty. From here, the sages teach us that Hashem considers desecrating Shabbat the same thing as idolatry, and Chazal teach us Masechet Shabbat that the reason why the Beit HaMikdash was destroyed was because of Chilul Shabbat. So then they ask, wait a minute, where does the Gilui Arayot come from? Where does the spilling blood come from? How are they all connected? And isn't it true that Am Yisrael saw so many miracles in the Beit HaMikdash that It would be crazy for them to worship an idol. You're seeing fire come from heaven every few minutes. But the fire is not like a fire you're imagining. The Sefer HaKedoshim described the fire as the shape of a lion. The shape of a giant lion is coming from Shamayim to Beit HaMikdash, and you're going to go worship an idol?

1:00:38Doesn't make any sense if you remember, I told you the Gemara in Masechet Sanhedrin answers this question: How could Am Yisrael worship an idol? Didn't they know it was nonsense? The Gemara says, of course, they knew it was nonsense, but they also knew that as soon as they were classified as idol worshippers, no one would even try to get them to do teshuva. People would just give up on them. If they gave up on them and considered all these people as idol worshippers, then they could do whatever they really wanted to do, which was sex crimes. Then they could walk around immodestly, then they could walk around and go to the prostitutes. That's what they really wanted to do. They wanted to give in to their yetzer hara. That was the real reason why the idolatry started. But here, the Gemara tells us how this map started. We will go from the end to the beginning and...

1:01:38page 120a and 119b says Yerushalayim was destroyed only because I'm sorry, Yerushalayim was destroyed only because people of emet, of truth, had disappeared from it. So the Gemara continues and tries to delve into this sugya. What do you mean men of truth? There's no men of truth. There's no men of truth. And one of the commentaries at the end, in the beginning of 128a says, No difficulty here. What do they mean by no men of truth? One of the meanings is that the Prophet Jeremiah tells people, "Hey, go into the streets, go into the markets, go find me a man of truth." Meaning that even in their own world, we got to such a low level, such a low level of Kedushah, that even in the secular world, in a secular world, there were no men of truth. Meaning you go into the market, go find an honest businessman.

1:03:01Go find one person that's going to take the retainer from you and actually do the job. Go find one doctor that's going to actually diagnose you for your real problem and not just give you a bunch of pills. Go find one person that's honest. Forget, of course, Torah and mitzvot; they're not keeping. That's a given. He's saying, even in their own world, they're not succeeding. They're saying, no, no, we don't need Torah. We're going to be good. Without Torah, we're fine. We're fine. We don't need Torah. I can figure it out on my own. I'm a good person. I'm a good person. Everybody today says, I'm a good person. Nobody says, I'm a Nazi. Even the Nazis said, I'm a good person. I'm a good person. I'm good at heart. I have a big heart. Okay, but then you see the guy is cheating in his business. You see the guy is overcharging people. You see the guy is stealing from his customers. You see the guy is stealing from the government. People are liars. The Prophet Jeremiah says, before the Beit HaMikdash, that's exactly what it was. People were liars. In even their own world. They didn't even meet their own definition of good. The Prophet says this, the Chachamim say, Rava says, oh, this, this was the last straw. When Hashem saw that they were not complying with Torah, that was already bad enough.

1:04:23But when He saw what happened as a result of it, they weren't even able to fulfill the seven Noahide laws. They weren't even able to fulfill just being human beings. They weren't even able to be decent human beings without Torah. Hashem says, there's no way for them. There's no way for the world to continue. Reish Lakish teaches differently. Another subcategory from the three things. Another subcategory. Reish Lakish says the world only continues to exist in the merit of the breath that comes out of the mouths of school children when they learn Torah.

1:05:24Rav Papa and Abaye said to Abaye, he says to him, wait a minute. What about you and me? We're big Talmidei Chachamim. What about our Torah? Tannaim, Amoraim, each one is able to revive the dead. What about us? School kids, little 5, 6, 7, 8-year-old little Yehoshua right now learning Torah. The whole world exists because of him. Why? He's 8 years old. Abaye is a Mechayei Meitim. Why? Abaye says something scary. Abaye says, breath that contains a taint of sin cannot be compared to breath that does not contain a taint of sin. Meaning, even though we're gedolim baTorah, We made some sins. We make some sins. Our Torah automatically is not the same level as the eight-year-old learning Kriyat Shema. The little eight-year-old learning Kriyat Shema is more significant than the Tanna. Why? He hasn't made sins. So significant is the Torah of the little kids,

1:06:37The Reish Lakish says we're not allowed to divert the school kids from their Torah studies, even if it was for the sake of building the Beit HaMikdash. Meaning, if they told us, "Breaking news, breaking news! We have to go build the third Beit HaMikdash, Mashiach is here, Rabotai, Mashiach is here. Tisha B'Av is canceled, everything is canceled." Fine, kids learning. When he finishes school, after he finishes school, then we'll go help you with this Beit HaMikdash of yours. Yeah, no, no. Mashiach is here. No, no, no. My kid, yeah, he finishes at three o'clock. It's only 12. It's only 12. He's learning. When he finishes school, I go pick him up at three o'clock. I can't build you Beit HaMikdash. That's how significant little kids learning Torah is. That's how significant it is. Now, Rav Hamnuna says, Yerushalayim was destroyed

1:07:58Mishum only because little kids were in the street instead of the classroom. Why was Beit HaMikdash destroyed? Why was Yerushalayim destroyed? Because the parents, instead of sending them to go learn Torah, sent them to camp to go play with water. They sent them to go play baseball. They sent them to go play football like the goyim. That's why Beit HaMikdash was destroyed. All these camps with rabbis there that go camping with them together, if they teach them Torah, ashreichem. But if the whole camp is based on them climbing mountains and going on slides, we have a problem. Why? Because the Torah of the little baby, the little 7, 8, 9, 10, 11-year-old, that Torah is the only reason why the world is still here.

1:09:10Now, there are other reasons. Rabbi Yehuda says, Yerushalayim was destroyed only because they demeaned Torah scholars. It is written at the end of the book of Chronicles, Divrei HaYamim 2, Chapter 36, Verse 16. It recounts the last years of the monarchy of Israel and its destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. Babylon is today Iraq. And the verse says, "And Hashem, the God of their fathers, sent to them messengers." ...and repeatedly because He had compassion for His people and on His dwelling. But they mocked the messengers. So, love you, that says. This was the last straw. Hashem sent messengers to Israel. He sent them kiruv rabbis.

1:10:28Go do teshuva. Why did He send them? He said He didn't want to destroy them. Hashem loves them. They're His kids. It's His house. He doesn't want to kill them. He didn't create us to kill us. There are much more creative ways to destroy us if He wanted to simply destroy us. He says, I love you. You're My kids. I love you. You say Shema Yisrael every day, right? I know you don't really mean it, but you say it though. I love you. Yeah, I love you. I love you. So I don't want to destroy you. But there are rules. You don't know the rules? Oh, okay, fine. I'll send you messengers. He sent the prophets. He sent the Gedolim. But they mocked the messengers of God, despised His words, and scoffed at His prophets until the wrath of God rose against His people, until there was no remedy. This was the final sin of the people. because once Hashem saw that they were mocking the people who were there to help him, He realized that there was no hope for them to do teshuva. Once a person, a sinner, is shown that he is making an error and a person comes to help him do teshuva, if that sinner has fallen to such a level that

1:11:56sin that he actually starts mocking the person that's trying to save him. There's no longer any hope for him. His wound has become too severe to be healed, says the Maharsha. We learn this here that once Am Yisrael starts going against Klal Yisrael, Hashem says there's no hope. Why don't we get into teshuva? Yes, but what about the regular rabbi? What about the local rabbi? What about the nice rabbi who says, "I love you"? What about him? Continue. We'll continue. Rav Amram, the son of Rabbi Shimon, it says the whole lineage of how it got to Rav Amram. who got it originally from Rabbi Shimon bar Rabba in the name of Rabbi Hanina. It says Jerusalem was only destroyed because they did not rebuke one another. It says in Lamentations, the book of Eicha,

1:13:22first chapter, verse 6: Its leaders were like harts that found no pasture. So the Chachamim learned from this that Hashem is using an analogy to define the rabbis of the generation. The rabbis of the generation were like these harts that walk in a herd with the head of one behind the tail of another. Did the Israelites of that generation bury their faces in the ground to avoid seeing the wrongdoing around them? Therefore, they did not have to admonish each other in so many words. The leaders of the generation were up each other's butts, is what it is literally saying here, and hiding their heads in the sand. Why? Oh, he drove to shul. I didn't see him. I didn't see him drive to shul. I didn't see him. No, no, you remember, he drove. It's his car right there. I didn't see it. I didn't see it. He's cheating on his wife. No, how do you know? It's lashon hara. It's lashon hara. You don't have to say he's cheating on his wife. No, no, but I saw him. He came to my house with his girlfriend. No, maybe it's his daughter. No, she's 20 years older than him. No, no, it's lashon hara. It's lashon hara.

1:14:40Don't say lashon hara. Everyone is just removing themselves. No, don't say it. Don't say it. Why? No, no. Why are you saying lashon hara? But Am Yisrael. Why is saying Am Yisrael is Mechalei Shabbat? One time I said, you know, statistically, Pew Research came out and said that over 90% of American Jews are Mechalei Shabbat. Ninety percent, Hashem Yirachem. If you have six million Jews in America, 5.4 million drive on Shabbat. Now, that's bad enough, right? The other part of this research says that 94% of American Jews think it's okay to do business on Shabbat. Meaning that 40% of the ones that keep Shabbat kind of work on Shabbat. Meaning even the even the 10% that actually keep Shabbat, they're not so good either. Now, I said this one time in a shiur, that oh, why Lashon Hara, Am Yisrael, Yo Yo Yetzer Hara, one guy called me Yetzer Hara, Satan himself. He tells me, I made these people Mechalei Shabbat. Why say Lashon Hara? So we're gonna hide from it?

1:15:52This is what happened at the time of the Beit HaMikdash. We hid from the truth to such an extent. No, no, don't say Lashon Hara, don't say Lashon Hara. This liberal mentality is not new. This liberal mentality was even around at the time of the Beit HaMikdash. Rabbi Yitzchak says here in his Gemara, Jerusalem was destroyed only when the small and the great were considered equal, meaning everyone gets a participation award. Yeah, but he's the winner. He's the smartest guy in class. He won the competition. No, no, no, it's not nice if he gets the award and no one else gets it. They're all gonna feel bad. Yeah, but they should; they lost. It's fine. Maybe they'll fight harder next time to get a good grade. No, everyone gets an A.

1:16:53Yeah, but they didn't answer any questions. One of the guys didn't even come. No, but if we give him an F, he's going to feel bad about himself. It could traumatize him. Chas v'shalom. Chas v'shalom. You're traumatized. Yeah, but he's going to be illiterate at 25 years old if you keep going this way. No, he participated. What do you mean? The zvuv participated also. The fly came participating. You're going to give him a diploma also? That's what's happening. Not new. Shlomo HaMelech wrote in the Torah, "There is nothing new under the sun," seven times. Seven times he wrote it. Was he joking? No. Nothing new under the sun. Liberalism was alive and well at the time of the Beit HaMikdash. If that was not enough, Yerushalayim was destroyed only because they had no shame for each other.

1:17:54What does it mean they had no shame? That even when a person would go against and hurt another person, they would literally do it in their face. Now, why is this so bad? Why is it so bad not to have busha? Why is it so bad not to have busha? Because the vast majority of us don't make certain sins we want to make. There are certain sins all of us want to make. All of us have evil inside us. We have yetzer hara. All of us have yetzer hara. That's a reality. Reality. I'm included here. I'm also human. Believe it or not. So, it doesn't matter what everybody else says. I'm human. So anyway, all of us have evil within us. All of us want to do evil things. Why don't we do them? It's not really because we're scared of God. Bottom line, it's not really because we're scared of God. Yes, there are certain things we're scared of God for. We're scared of being known. We're scared of losing money. We're scared of getting sick. We're scared of a lot of things. But there are certain sins. Sometimes we don't really care what God says about those certain things. But we still don't do them. Why? Because we're scared of the neighbor.

1:19:02Scared of the community. We're scared of somebody that's going to think something. The guy has a lot of money. He wants to start a new business, and he says, somebody tells him, "Listen, it's this great business. What is it? A nightclub." The nightclub. Now, the guy that's religious, he's going to think twice. Why? It's like, yeah, if I open this nightclub, they're going to kick my kids out of yeshiva. They're gonna kick me out of the community. Why? They're gonna say, what kind of Jew are you? You have a nightclub for the goyim, for all the sins there, the prostitution, immodesty, all that stuff, that's what you have. So it's not that he's not opening the nightclub or the strip club or the bar or all that stuff because he actually cares about Hashem. No, it has nothing to do with Hashem. Because he's scared of the neighbor. He's scared of yeshiva. He's scared of this one. He's scared of that one. That's why in Israel, by the way, there are certain communities that if they see that you have a smartphone, they kick your kids out of school. Some communities are so strict and...

1:20:05I think it's a little overboard, in my opinion, that if they see that the parent has a smartphone, they kick the kid out of the kindergarten. They don't let them in, don't accept them because the parent has a smartphone. Why? Because if he has a smartphone, it must mean he's looking at pornography. In some places, some people are a little bit cuckoo. If they see another guy, they don't know him. They don't know the guy. This actually already happened. I know a few stories that happened. They see a guy carrying a smartphone. They take the smartphone out of his hand, smash it on the floor, and start yelling at him, "Rasha, Rasha, what are you doing, Rasha?" Now, here's the problem. A lot of people say this rule in the name of Rav Kanievsky. Rav Kanievsky never wrote anything. Whether he said it or he didn't say it is a different story. I don't know. I wasn't there. But until somebody writes something, it's as if it never existed. We don't learn halacha from hearsay. That's not how we learn halacha. We learn halacha from what's in books. If it's in a book, it's emet. As long as it's not in a book, it's your opinion that you said his name on it. But the reality is, what is worse?

1:21:20Someone having a smartphone in their hand, maybe he's making a sin, maybe not. Are you taking his goods? That's not yours against this world, which is gazing and destroying it. Which one is worse? Of course, it's destroying it. Why? Because you're assuming he's making a sin. Maybe he's not. You're assuming he's making a sin, but maybe he's not. And even if he is making a sin, he's making a sin alone. He's not involving you. He's not involving anybody else. And... Whereas you, taking his goods and destroying them in public and then embarrassing him in public, you just lost Olam Haba. Why? Number one, you just embarrassed another Jew in public. Number two, you stole. You cannot enter Gan Eden until you return the money. Number three, sometimes people forget what the Torah says and let their emotions get the best of them and they lose their mind. They lose their mind. Now, here's the thing. Sometimes a person is going to have a really good reason to have a smartphone. Why? He's doing kiruv with it. It's for his job or whatever it is. Sometimes he doesn't have a really good reason for it. Either way, you have no right to take the law into your hands. But the bottom line is that there are a lot of things that we do because we want to do them. There are a lot of things that we don't do even though we want to do them because they don't want us to do them.

1:22:50So, Ullah says over here, Yerushalayim was destroyed when there was no distinguishing. Why? No one ever stopped doing something because somebody else was not going to like it. Even that last measure of protection that you have—fine, you don't have embarrassment in front of Hashem, which is already bad enough. Now you don't even have embarrassment in front of each other. So there's no protection whatsoever, meaning all hell is going to break loose. The same generation here, the same generation as Noah. Same generation as Sodom and Gomorrah. No difference. Why? No busha. Today's generation, Rabotai HaKedoshim, unfortunately is not different at all. People have no busha. They do their business in the middle of the street, whether their business is to relieve themselves or their business is to make kids in the middle of the street. They're proud of it. They make movies about it. They write stories about it. They tell people about it. This is the world we live in. There's no busha. Meaning that Mashiach has to come very soon. Now if that wasn't enough, Rabbi Abahu says,

1:24:18Shabbat, look at Shabbat a little bit. Yerushalayim was destroyed because they neglected to recite the Shema in the morning and evening. What we started the shiur with is that Shema Yisrael was not recited anymore. Why is Shema Yisrael that important? It's important, but it's not important enough for Hashem to destroy the Beit HaMikdash. So, what's the real reason? The real reason is why they didn't recite the Shema Yisrael. The prophet Yirmiyahu says, "Woe to those that rise early in the morning and pursue old wine, that linger late into the night till wine inflames them." The real reason they did not say Kriyat Shema is because they went out partying at night and...

1:25:18So they didn't say Shema at night because they had a couple of drinks. They were too busy having a couple of drinks at K-Space. They wanted to have a couple of drinks. Shidduch party. Instead of going to shiur Torah or to go to tefillah, they wanted to go and have a couple of drinks. Okay, what's the problem? You miss one Kriyat Shema. What's the bigger problem? You're going to wake up late tomorrow. You're going to wake up at noon. So that means you miss two Kriyat Shema. And once it becomes a habit, you forget that you're even connected to God. Everyone goes off the derech. Jerusalem was destroyed only because they desecrated Shabbat. Now, what does one have to do with the other? As I said before, Shabbat is the equivalent of the covenant that is between us and Hashem, and without it, there's no purpose to the world. The Gemara says in another place that when a person keeps Shabbat, he's acting as a witness for Hashem, testifying that Hashem created the world in six days.

1:26:39rested on the seventh even though he wasn't there. He's testifying. I believe, and that means that when someone violates Shabbat, he's testifying the opposite. He's saying, "No, no, You didn't create the world." In fact, he's running in the middle of the street saying, "No, Hashem, I don't believe You created the world. I don't believe." And this, Rabotai, the Gemara says, that when a Jew violates Shabbat... considered 100% like an idol worshiper. He's considered 100% like someone who worships Buddha or someone who worships JCPenney or someone who worships money or someone who worships a rabbi or a wall or a motorcycle or any of those things. But it’s just that he drove on Shabbat. He didn’t do all those other things and He didn't worship the rabbi. He didn't do all those things. He just drove on Shabbat. What's the big deal? The big deal, Rabotai, is the fact that if you believe in the blessing that you say, then you'll understand why Chilul Shabbat means so much. When you say, Baruch Atah Hashem, Elokeinu Melech HaOlam, when you say any blessing starts the same way, blessed are You, Hashem, the King of the world,

1:28:02Now, Rav Dessler, aleha hashalom, used to say, the stupidest thing in the world for a person to do is to make Hashem king over everyone else except himself. "Baruch Atah Hashem, Melech HaOlam," except me. What would happen? Because if everyone did it, if everyone says, no, no, Hashem is the king of the world, except me. Except me, I do my own thing. If everyone said, the king of the world except me, except me, except me, he would be king of nothing. King of nothing. So when you say, "Baruch Atah Hashem, Melech HaOlam," that means that He's your king. If He's your king, that means you have to comply with what He says, not what you think. So by violating Shabbat, you're going against His rule. Now, He actually says there are 39 different restrictions on Shabbat, but there's one specific one that's literally written in the Torah. There's only one that's written in the Torah, and that is don't light a fire. Everything else we understand from the Torah.

1:29:14the building of the Bet HaMikdash, but there's really one specific thing that's written in the book of Exodus that Hashem says not to do on Shabbat. And what is that? Don't light a fire. And that's why the same Gemara says Rav Yehuda, the son of Rav Shmuel, said in the name of Rav: Fires are not common except in a place where there is Shabbat desecration. Anytime you will see a fire, You'll also see Mechalel Shabbat. One connects to the other. Why? This is measure for measure. This is measure for measure. And that's why the Beit HaMikdash was destroyed to the point of extinction. Burned to the ground, to ashes. Why? Because there was Chilul Shabbat. Once there's Chilul Shabbat, there's Chilul Hashem. Once there's Chilul Hashem, there's nothing. There's simply nothing. Now, here we see that desecrating Shabbat is a much bigger deal than what we thought, to such an extent that Hashem destroyed the world, or at least the spiritual aspect of this world, by destroying His own home, His own house here.

1:30:32But we see that it wasn't just one sin like we thought most of our lives. Oh, yeah, they just committed some sex crimes or worshiped idols. No, no. There's a lot more to it. You see how each one of these big topics has subcategories, and there's much more that goes into it. But you get the point now. If that wasn't enough, we're going to go into slightly more detail. Avot de-Rabbi Natan says there are three things for which a person can lose this world and the next world. These happen to be the same three sins that destroyed the Beit HaMikdash: someone who worships an idol... loses this world. Why? Your whole world, your whole life, you're praying to the wrong God. Imagine, imagine, chas v'shalom, a person literally prays every day, "Buddha, help me. Buddha, help me. Buddha, help me. Buddha, help me," and Buddha is not saying anything. Why? He's a statue that you just bought from China for $15. "Oh, but Jesus, help me. Jesus, help me. Jesus, help me. Jesus, help me," and then, "Jesus, help me, I'm in Gehinnom. Why would I help you? Help me, I'm in Gehinnom. Take me out of here." You're praying to Jesus the whole time, and the guy's in Gehinnom. Oh.

1:31:57We're gonna help you. All your life, you spent praying to this guy. Imagine, imagine what a miserable life. You go up to Shamayim and say, "What happened to you? How can we worship it?" "I know, I worshiped Jesus." They go, "Yeah, you see all the boiling feces over there? That's his department." No, how come you never asked any questions? Imagine your whole life, you're in this world seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred years, and you're praying to the wrong God. So, the Rabbeinu Tam, the saint, says you lost this world and you lost the next world. Also, if you spill blood, spilling blood has multiple meanings, one of them obviously being murder. Anyone that murders is never going to be able to forget it, even if the murder was accidental. You see a lot of the soldiers, God bless them, that they protect the country, whether it be the U.S. or Israel or anywhere that Jews live... soldiers, unfortunately, after they leave battle, have something called post-traumatic stress disorder. A lot of them have this traumatizing experience that destroys their life. Why? They killed somebody or they saw their friend being killed. In reality, these people suffer for the rest of their life, and it's not enough that they suffer from seeing death.

1:33:22Their own former bosses, the government, don't even give them any benefits, don't even give them any real financial security. Many of them are homeless, homeless in the streets. These are the people that actually protected the citizens of this country, and they are homeless in the streets. Terrorists, on the other hand, are at least put in jail and given a place to eat and sleep. They give their families welfare. They give their families benefit plans and money and so on. But the people who actually protected the country, they leave them in the street to die. It's the craziest level of stupidity in the world. It's no different in Israel. Terrorists' families get money from the government every month. But a Jewish soldier who leaves the army gets nothing. Zero. Many of them go broke, go crazy, go... ...of an upside-down world. But from here, we learn that when a person sees, when a normal human being, who was created in the image of God, meaning he's able to decipher right and wrong, sees blood on his hands from another human being, his state of mind is forever traumatized. I remember my mom used to tell us a story about my grandfather, עליו השלום, and...

1:34:51Sabba Gavriel. Sabba Gavriel was a tzaddik. He was living in Tripoli, and his family were giborim—they were heroes of the town. When the Arabs would kidnap the Jewish girls, the Jews were afraid to go into the Arab camp because they would kill them—the Arabs would kill them. So Sabba Gavriel, my grandfather, And his brothers would go into the Arab camp dressed like Arabs, become friendly with them, and take the girls out and save them. Now, also when the war broke out and there were bombs everywhere, and there were dead people everywhere. One of the worst things in the world is the aftermath. Why? It's not just that people die. You have to bury the bodies. Sometimes the body is in a few places. Sometimes the arm is over here, the head is over here, the finger is over here. What do you think? Everybody dies like they go to sleep? This is what happens. So my grandfather would go and take the bodies and bury them. Give the Jew the respect to get a burial, a righteous burial. And he would bury them at night. He would bury them. So he would tell my

1:36:19my mom and her sisters and brothers, these stories on Shabbat. He would tell them how he buried these people. And he would tell them, "Listen, all the people that I ever buried, I see their faces on my hands." Blood was everywhere and apparently part of the neshamah. This is some supernatural stuff. I don't understand; I'm just telling you what I heard. He says, "I would see their faces for the rest of my life. I look at my hands, I see their faces on my hands, all of these people, all these neshamot that I buried. I see their faces on my hands." Shem yirachem, just saying the story, I get scared. So my mom asked him, "Abba, aren't you scared?" "Aren't you scared seeing all these ghosts? He used to tell me he saw ghosts and neshamot in the cemetery. It was at night. All types of things that are beyond this world. And she says, Abba, aren't you scared? He says, Biti, my daughter, only be scared of living people, not the ones that are dead. Because the living ones are the ones that can hurt you. Such is the wisdom."

1:37:30…the previous generation as we're scared of the ghosts, we're scared of the things that we can't see, we can't touch, we can't anything. But we forget that the biggest enemy could be sitting right next to us. It could be the guy that's giving us a paycheck. It could be the guy that's getting a paycheck. So we see that when a person sees another person's blood, obviously it makes an impact on them… A person could literally lose if they're not right in their mind, if they don't have enough Torah. They could literally lose this world and the next. The next one is gilui arayot, someone that commits a sex crime, whether it's incest, which is obvious that everyone knows about, or even something as simple as wasting seed. A lot of people think that... Wasting seed is a victimless crime in reality. They don't realize that the biggest victim, the biggest victim is not only the person that's wasting seed, but also his potential wife. Many marriages are destroyed because of wasting seed and no one knows why. People get divorces suddenly. "I don't love you anymore." "Why don't you love me? What happened? How can you love me for 10 years? How can you love me for 20 years? Why don't you love me now?"

1:38:54The love was dying for a long time. Why? Because he has a new girlfriend. Who's the new girlfriend? Himself. Once a person gets to such an extent of addiction to wasting seed, he starts to lose respect and love for his spouse, and he starts feeling like he doesn't need her and... Because the feeling that he gets, or he thinks he gets, he gets in two minutes without what he thinks is a headache, and a this, and I'll have to deal with it, and so on and so forth, and he literally, systematically destroys his marriage with his own hands. So, wasting seed is not just a shiur you give to 15-year-old kids so they don't go to Gehenom forever. Yes, of course, you're supposed to teach the 15-year-old kids so they don't go to Gehenom forever because this is one of the three sins that the Reishit Chochmah says if a person does this b'mezid, he goes to Gehenom and he doesn't leave. Mashiach comes, saves everyone else except him. So, wasting seed is a big deal.

1:40:14Of course, we're supposed to teach it to all the young guys: teenagers, those in their 20s, those in their 30s, but it doesn't end there, Rabotai. It doesn't end there. The Shulchan Aruch does not call it the biggest sin in the entire Torah for nothing if it was only because it's a problem when you're not married and... it would be a sin, but not the biggest sin in the Torah. It's called the biggest sin in the Torah because the addiction can last an entire lifetime. Even if you're married with ten kids, it doesn't make a difference, and If you don't understand the significance of the sin, both in this world and the next, you will be addicted to it, and you will destroy yourself in every way, shape, or form. Once a person wastes seed and becomes addicted to it, his Torah becomes nonexistent. He has no interest in learning Torah. Even the Torah that he learns, he doesn't understand. He's bored of it constantly. He goes to sleep constantly while learning. He has no energy for it. He has no energy for kedusha. He becomes an atheist. He becomes arrogant. All of the worst middot in the world become glued to his neshama, even if he's married. And that's why a lot of the couples

1:41:28come to me for advice for different things. Part of the things that I try to find out in a nice way is where the husband stands in regards to this addiction. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the husband has an addiction to wasting seed, and that is part of the big reason why a lot of marriages have problems, unfortunately, in the religious world. some of the so-called religious husbands forgot to learn this halacha, and they get to such a level of addiction to watching pornography and doing all of those things that they feel there's really no need to be intimate with their wives anymore. Why? Because they feel like if they're intimate with their wife, they're going to have a kid, and they don't want to have another kid. "Kids are a headache, more money," all this nonsense that people put in their head about why they don't want to have a kid. I don't want to pay for another kid. I don't want the headache of another kid. I don't want this of another kid. So, they decide they don't want to have another kid, but they still need to fulfill their physical desires. So, what does the guy do? He makes the bathroom his new girlfriend. And that's what happens. So many of these wives, many of these wives actually contact me, and I'm sure other rabbis, and they say, "My husband does not want to be with me." So first I try to find out if he has a girlfriend, and...

1:42:54It's one or the other. Does he have a girlfriend? Does he have a boyfriend? Is it something else? Today, you have to ask: boyfriend or girlfriend? You have to ask. Sometimes it is, believe it or not. Most of the time, there's no boyfriend, there's no girlfriend. Most of the time, it's the bathroom. Most of the time, it's because he's addicted to pornography, and he's so addicted to it that to get him back into the bedroom with his wife, you need what? How much? How many shiurim? A lot of shiurim. That's why sometimes he wants his wife to do unusual things, things that are against the Torah and all types of things. Why? This is all due to lack of education. Lack of it. It's not that we're evil people. It's not that they're bad people. They're all wonderful people. They're all the children of Hashem Yitbarach. The problem is the teachers skip this chapter, so many people don't know it's a problem until it's really a problem. And that's why Avot de-Rabbi Natan says, this giluy arayot, this wasting seed, this sex crime, is something that could cause a person to lose this world and the next. So now we see that all three of these sins are sins that could literally destroy our lives here and the next world. But there's a chidush that Avot de-Rabbi Natan wants to add. What's the chidush? Lashon hara

1:44:22is worse than all three combined. Saying Lashon Hara is worse than Giluy Arayot, Shfichat Damim, and Avodah Zarah. Why? How can such a thing be? The first example is the fact that we see that these three major sins were the reasons why the first Beit HaMikdash was destroyed. Seventy years later after the destruction, Hashem built the second Beit HaMikdash. The second Beit HaMikdash was destroyed because of Sinat Chinam, baseless hatred. And Avot de-Rabbi Natan says this baseless hatred, and he's not the only one, many of the sages explain what is this baseless hatred. This baseless hatred is Lashon Hara. What does it mean, baseless hatred? You're going to not like him, and you're going to tell people how you feel. Oh, no, no, he doesn't know what he's talking about. No, he doesn't know. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Don't listen to him. Don't go there to assure him. No, him? No, I think he's Ashkenazi, Sephardi. I don't know. He's not from us. He's not like us. It's not like us. Don't go there. Don't go there. He's not like us. He's not like one of us. It's unusual. It's unusual.

1:45:49Al-Teshuvah, you know, about those Baalei Teshuvah, you know, they can always turn back. They always turn back. Oh, convert. Convert. Okay, good friend them. You can invite them to dinner, but you're not gonna make their kids. You know, it’s converts. It's like a, it’s like a half a Jew. I had somebody tell me this. He says, "I love your shiurim." He tells me, "I love your shiurim, your story is amazing. You know, wow, I don't know why people, you know, these that or the intermarriage, it’s crazy. Wow. Yeah, I would never marry a convert. It’s like a half a Jew." He's telling me this and... This is the stupidity of people. But this, Rabotai, this is sinat chinam. This is lashon hara. This is constantly happening every single day among our people. People say lashon hara. Now the Gemara Masechet Nedarim, page 64b, says there are

1:46:58four types of people that are considered dead. Four people that are considered dead: someone who is poor, someone who has tzara'at, someone who is blind, and someone who cannot have children. So here we see the Gemara tells us these four people are considered like they're dead. Ephraim explains and says, if you notice, no one talks Lashon Hara against those people. Anytime you say Lashon Hara, the guy tells you, "No, no, he's poor." Oh, I'm sorry, sorry. Poor, skinny, just lost all of his money, home. He's scared. Yeah, you're just saying that you hate him. No, no, no, not a different guy. Behind him, find him. He's lost all of his money all of a sudden. I I said, "The guy, you know, the guy who did—oh, no, he has a sickness, cancer." Oh, I'm sorry. Not only his skin, his skin all of a sudden—no lashon hara on the cancer patient. It's a lot, yes, disease. Say, "Oh, why is he looking?" No, no, he's not looking, he's blind. Oh, a tzaddik, yeah, he's probably like one of those tzaddikim, he sees kulo. You were just saying, you were just saying lashon hara about two seconds ago. And the same thing, you tell the guy much. I heard a story myself one time as a talmid.

1:48:23There was a guy, did teshuva, became talmid chacham, yishtabach shemo, something amazing. And I asked, I'm telling you my own story, this is my own shame. My own shame. So I tell, I asked my rabbi, like, wow. I heard one of his lectures, the guy's talmid chacham, really sharp. I'm like, how long has he been doing teshuva? It's only been 10 years. Wow. In 10 years, he knows all this stuff. And he's popular too. He says himself, he has, I don't know, maybe four or five lectures a day. Each lecture he gets maybe like five, six hundred dollars. I mean, the guy is not only successful in Torah, he's also making a lot of parnassah. So me, I'm like fired up a little bit. I'm like a little jealous. A little jealous. He knows so much Torah. Wow. And on top of it, he's doing okay. Wow. Amazing. I'm feeling myself. I'm telling you my own shame. I'm feeling myself. And then my Rebbe told me, he goes, yeah, and he also has an autistic son.

1:49:25All of a sudden, I'm like, wow, what a tzaddik. Wow, wow. All of a sudden, I and my yetzer hara go down and become a loser again. Why? I say, why can you be jealous of a person? I'm like, it's not worth it for all of that. It's not worth it. What kind of difficulty it is. All of those parents that have these special kids, first of all, they should realize anyone that's autistic is a tzaddik, is a neshama of a tzaddik inside. Inside that person. Why? They have a limited tikkun. They have a limited tikkun in this world. Not like us. Hashem is limiting their ability to make sins. But the parents themselves, also, obviously, they have a certain significance that they can overcome and so on and so forth. But that's not a tikkun that Hashem, that I could ever say to myself, that I could ever do. But I see my own shame. I say to myself, oh, he's successful in this, successful in this, successful in this. And I'm thinking to myself, I didn't say anything. But all of a sudden, as soon as he said he has this tikkun, I'm like, wow, what a tzadik. Wow, what a tzadik. why? Because as soon as somebody has such a big tikkun, you're like, no, he won't say lashon hara. So here we see, we learned from this Gemara, if you notice, any time you mention something about somebody that died,

1:50:37No, come on. You can't talk about them. Why? Because it says somewhere in one of the books, somewhere in a library, that if someone died, you don't say lashon hara about them. Yeah, but the guy killed 80 people on the way out. No, no, he's a tzaddik. They don't talk about him once he died. Meaning, once they're dead, you don't talk about them. If they're alive, you can say whatever you want about them, but if they're dead, they're all tzaddikim. See, this is the thing, notice. If someone died or is considered like he's dead, there's no lashon hara. But if he's alive, there is lashon hara. There's non-stop lashon hara. Why? Because the reality is that the root of all lashon hara, the root of all lashon hara, is jealousy. You do not say lashon hara against someone that has less than you. You do not say Lashon Hara against someone that has something you have a thousand more of. Who do you say Lashon Hara against? You say Lashon Hara against someone that has something you don't have. So if he's blind, no Lashon Hara. Why? Because you can see. If he's poor, no Lashon Hara. Why? Because you have more money than you can count. If he's dead, well, he's not my competition anymore. He died.

1:51:59He's not my competition anymore. He doesn't want my job. He doesn't want my wife. He doesn't want my kids. He doesn't want anything. He's dead. He's not a threat to me anymore. He's not a threat to me. Who am I gonna say lashon hara against? Against the guy that could potentially be liked by others more than me. Against the guy that could potentially take my job. Against the guy that could potentially get more attention than me. Against competition. The root of all lashon hara is your ego, your jealousy. That's lashon hara. And that's why Avot de-Rabbi Natan says it's worse than everything else. Because one of the chiddushim that I learned, just in the last few days, I guess it was your merit, is that if you notice, ...pride. Hashem said in the Torah that when there's an arrogant person, He cannot be in the same room as him. The Gemara says it. Shlomo HaMelech says it: "Pride will come before the fall." Hashem is disgusted by a person that has...

1:53:20Gavah (pride) has pride to evade the shame called valive. Anyone that's prideful is considered disgusting in the eyes of Hashem, and Hashem literally says that a person that has pride cannot be in the same room as Him. If you notice, Hashem detests pride. If you also notice, the root of all atheists is pride. Every single atheist that exists in the world and ever existed in the world is an arrogant, prideful person. Hashem says, "I cannot be in the same room as them because they're prideful." The arrogant person says, "There is no Hashem." He's right—in his life, Hashem is not there. Hashem cannot be next to him now. What's his pride about? What does he have so much pride about?

1:54:21The pride is he doesn't want any rules. He doesn't want any rules. The root of atheism, it's not that they don't really believe that something created everything. It's not about that. It's about having so much pride that you make your own rules and no one's going to tell you what to do. You're not gonna submit to any system, to any rule, to anyone. Everyone is below you or, at the very best, just like you. No one's above you. Everyone's the same or less than you, and no one's gonna tell you what to do. That is the root of all atheism. That comes from pride. Pride is worse than everything else. say Lashon Hara, you're only saying Lashon Hara because of your pride. Because there's no way that I'm going to let him take my job. There's no way that I'm going to let him take my attention. There's no way that I'm going to let him take my time. There's no way that I'm going to let him do anything because maybe I want to do it sometimes. So what do you do? You destroy him. There's no way that he's right and I'm wrong. There's no way that he's right and I'm wrong. So you destroy him.

1:55:42That's why the Torah says that it is worse than everything else. That pride leads to Lashon Hara. That Lashon Hara will lead to all of the sins in the world, to idolatry, to sex crimes, to wasting seed, to every sin in the entire Torah. Because once your pride is at the steering wheel, Nothing is going to control it. Nothing's going to stop it. You're going to make every sin on the way to Gehenom. Every single sin. And that's why they say that resha'im, even at Petach Gehenom, even at the gate of Gehenom, do not do teshuva. Even at the gate of Gehenom. Why? Because their pride is so big that even at the gate of Gehenom, they cannot admit, "Yeah, maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I should do teshuva." No. Even at the gate of Gehenom, they're still saying, "No, no, I think I was right. I think there's maybe something wrong with the system. I think I was allowed to do that. I think I'm going to find a way out." They're so prideful, they cannot see the wrong in themselves. And that's what we learned.

1:56:46last week or the week before that, a person. The Gemara Masechet Shabbat says a person does not see the wrong in himself. It's not that there's no wrong, it's that he can't see it in himself. He could only see it in everybody else. And that, Rabotai, is what caused all of the Lashon Hara in the world. of all of the wasted seed, all of the disaster that ever existed from the beginning of time until today is all starting from pride. All of it. That's also the reason why teachers Failed time and time again. Why? They have too much pride to say, "By the way, I was wrong. You're not allowed to drive on Shabbat. By the way, I was wrong. You're not allowed to marry her; she's not Jewish. By the way, I was wrong." They have too much pride to admit they were wrong. They have too much pride to say, "Listen, we have to change."

1:57:56So what happens? The kehillah invites me. They want me to come. They say, oh, send us some CDs. I send the CDs. The rabbi gets them and he hides them. And they call me three, four, five months later, like, oh, how come you never sent us the CDs? What do you mean? I invested $1,000 in your kehillah. I sent you $1,000 worth of merchandise, CDs, Asher Yatzar cards, books—everything I sent. I sent it, made attention to your rabbi in Australia, your rabbi in Montana, your rabbi in Genova, your rabbi wherever he was, I sent it. Every single person that ever asked for something, I sent. We paid for the shipping. The shipping cost a ton of money. The CDs cost a ton of money. Everything cost a ton of money. We sent it. You didn't want to send the money, we sent you the stuff. Whether you send the money or not is up to you. Well, how come nothing ever happened? Because the rabbi was too arrogant to say, "Oh yeah, maybe there's something else you're going to learn from this." Oh, what do you do? You throw it in the garbage. You throw it in the garbage, you hide it, and it's not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, not five times—a bunch of times it happens. I can't get there. I can't fly everywhere with the CDs. No, I ship it.

1:59:14I ship it to people. I send it to them, and then sometimes they never get it. Why don't they get it? Because the rabbi is throwing it out. Even a kehillah here in Florida—Rabbi, I gave the CDs directly into the rabbi's hand, next to his congregants. I gave it to them, and then, you know, a few months pass; people forget. They get busy with life and so on and... And I asked him, did you ever give my CDs to your kehilla? I asked the people. He goes, no, no, I don't think anybody ever saw it. I said, why not? I gave. Remember, I had the shiur at the house. We had the shiur, and I gave it to the rabbi. He goes, yeah. And then one of the people goes and checks the rabbi's house. The rabbi was hiding the CDs. The rabbi was hiding the CDs. Why? Chas v'shalom. Somebody's going to do teshuva. Chas v'shalom. Chas v'shalom. Somebody's going to do teshuva. So all of this comes from pride. All of this. Everyone's worried about Lashon Hara, everyone's worried about Chilul Shabbat, everyone's worried about Giluy Arayot, and Shfichut Damim, and all of these, Avodah Zarah, and so on. Yes, you're right, all of those are problems. They're all problems. But there's one thing we can do to solve all of them. Learn Mussar, learn Yirat Shamayim, and eliminate our pride.

2:00:28Once you eliminate the pride, by default, the rest of them will be eliminated like a domino effect. But if you work on Shabbat, okay, so maybe I convinced you to keep Shabbat, but you're still going to curse your wife out every Shabbat on the way out. Oh, you didn't care? Oh, what happened? Oh, the food wasn't hot? Okay, so that deserves all the curses? The fact that she gave you food that's edible is enough. The fact that she gave you food is enough. You're cursing her? Oh, because I got you to keep Shabbat, but you're still an animal. Oh, another guy. Oh, no, I stopped wasting seed. Everything is good. Yeah, but you're still cheating on your wife, though. Your girlfriend's not the bathroom, it's a different girl now. Wait, what is this? It's all, I guess, you made one same reaching with something else. Oh, no, he's keeping Shabbat and he's doing this and that, but all day he talks against me, all day he talks against somebody else. All day, lashon hara, like bullets come out of his mouth. Instead of kiddush Hashem, he comes out with chilul Hashem on people. No, lashon hara goes, so what would I talk about? If it was lashon hara, what would I talk about? If it's not about people, what would I talk about? So that's the thing about time. All of those things are problems and...

2:01:34Shabbat and this and that. People love to talk about lashon hara. But the reality is you cannot solve that problem without getting to the root. The root is pride. The root is pride. Once we realize Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad, once we realize that Hashem is the King of the world, He's the only King and we submit to Him. Already, pride went down 50%. Then we learn more and more about what it means that I love Him with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my money. What does it actually mean that I love Him that much? Do I really love Him that much? Do I really, really love Him that much? With all my heart, that everything I do all day is based on His opinion and not mine? Everything that I do all day is based on what He wants and not what I want. Everything that I do all day is based on His Torah, and all my biggest investments in time and resources are only based on His Torah. It's not based on the car and the house and the days of the Lamborghini, and I'm not planning for retirement, all of that. That's after, like if I do all that, once I realize the meaning, then I realize, oh, pride went down another 50%.

2:02:51then we can become little Moshe Rabbeinus. But until we do that, we can solve a problem here, we can solve a problem there, we can solve a problem elsewhere, but the reality is, on the grand scheme of things, this disease is still there. So you put a band-aid on a heart attack. It's nice, looks good, looks like you did something, but you still have AIDS. You still have a problem. You're still dying. And that's what's been happening for 2,000 years. We've been trying to solve one thing, and another thing, and another thing, It's nice. We need to solve the core problem. The core problem is we are too prideful. All of us. Starting with me. And that's what we learn in Mussar. Mussar is gonna teach us how to evaluate things based on reality, not based on our warped reality, but on reality. And how we're supposed to look up to the tzaddikim, not the Michael Jordans of the world, not the LeBron James of the world. We have to look up to Moshe Rabbeinu, not like this rabbi from England that said, "Oh, yeah, the best leader that I could think of today is the soccer coach."

2:03:57Soccer coach, that's who you want me to look up to? A soccer coach? Okay, this is the head rabbi of England; go tell him that. The point is that the root of all our problems is pride. Once we learn Mussar like we're supposed to... We can start doing because Mussar is not something that you just learn. Oh, it's nice, entertaining—you delve into it. You think about it, you write it down, you meditate over it. You say, "How does this affect me?" You start looking in a mirror and look at yourself instead of everybody behind you. And that's how you start doing teshuvah and you recognize the evil in yourself, too. Why? Because the only way to remove it is by identifying it first. Any questions? Okay, I told you guys a story three weeks ago. And, uh, knowing the shiur and, um, the shiur in Hollywood, I said this story about a month ago. So you have to watch the shiur. Okay?

2:05:12Why can't we cut paper and saw it? This is one of the things that's considered a melacha. Now, ripping paper. Ripping paper is considered a melacha. But you should know there is a leniency if you're doing it for kavod gufo. So a lot of people are overly strict with it to the extent where they think that you're not allowed to rip any paper. Now, in general, you should avoid ripping all paper. ...should avoid ripping wallpaper, and you should prepare your household to avoid ripping wallpaper. But if there is a need, and let's say you go to the bathroom and you need toilet paper... then you're able to rip the paper, the toilet paper. Why? Because, yeah, you should do it, but in general you're allowed to do it, you're allowed to do it simply because this is the honor of the body, for the sake of honoring the body. A person should never think that for the sake of not ripping paper, they're allowed to not wipe and then cause themselves to be disgusting and walk with filth. And by the way, when you have any filth on you, you're not allowed to pray.

2:06:39Now to learn, you're not even allowed to be next to people. So people, sometimes they don't learn the details of the halacha, and they think, oh yeah, I'm such a tzaddik, I'm not going to rip the toilet paper. But in reality, you're an ignorant rasha, because you're making a chilul Hashem. So, not allowed to rip paper because it's considered a melacha. It's one of the things that they did during the building of the Beit HaMikdash, or the Mishkan. But nonetheless, you are allowed to do it if it's for the kavod of the guf, if it's for the honor of the body, for the sake of cleanliness. In general, what we do in my house is we prepare even toilet paper or things like that, or paper towels, we prepare it before Shabbat. It's one of the things you do before Shabbat. But if it happens that you forgot, you're allowed to rip it according to Rav Ovadia. But in general, you should prepare before Shabbat. So one thing that you could do also is use wipes. Use wipes. They're already pre-cut. It's also more hygienic. In general, it's better to use anyway. Next question. Yeah? He said that story about the student with his ear. I mean, he said it like... You want the story?

2:07:51Okay, okay, so I'll tell you the story. The story is that the Gemara says that there was a young rabbi with a young wife. One of his students in the kehillah took a liking to the wife and... But yeah, he saw, he found, he found, he found a pretty woman. The Gemara, Sanhedrin 18a, page 58, he found a pretty woman, but still he knew that she’s an eshet ish. She's married to somebody, so he can't do anything. But one time, the rabbi asked for a loan because he needed some money, and the guy was willing to lend him the money. When the time... I'm sorry, when...

2:08:52The guy was willing to lend him the money, and he lent it to him. When the time came to collect it, the guy says, "Okay, I'm gonna pay you. Send your wife to my house, and I'll give her what you need." He sent his wife to the guy's house, and she never returned. One day, two days, three days passed. After a few days... Rabbi asked the guy, "Have you seen my wife?" He goes, "Yeah, well, she came by my house and I gave her what she needed. Then she left, but I heard that the young guys, you know, the criminals in the neighborhood, had their way with her. They were bothering her or something. So if she hasn't been at home for three days, that definitely means they probably did something. And if I were you, I wouldn't take her back." Yeah, but the problem is that I have a big ketubah. You know if I divorce her, I have to give all the money. He responds, "Don't worry, I'll give you the money." "Oh really, do me the favor of giving the money." "Yeah, yeah, I'll give you the money." So he lent him the money. He got divorced. All this time, he doesn't realize that the wife is really at his house. She's at his house, and of course he's convincing her to be with him.

2:10:13Manipulating people and those with slick speech, sweet talkers, are able to get other people to do what they want. Needless to say, they can get women to do what they want, especially young women who are naive like this woman was. Nonetheless, this guy lost his wife, but that wasn't the worst part of the story, and... The worst part of the story is that this guy's ego was so big he did not see the wrong in himself. He did not see that there was anything wrong with what he did. Why? Because he said, "Listen, I didn't touch her when she was married to him. I only touched her after they got divorced and I got married to her. He had a chuppah, kiddushin, everything." So one day he came, and the rabbi was supposed to pay back the loan and he didn't have the money. Still a rabbi. Still barely makes minimum wage. So the guy says, "Listen, you owe me the money. I need the money. I need the money. I need the money." He goes, "Yeah, I don't have the money." He goes, "Okay, so you can work for me." Okay, what could I do? He goes, "Yeah, you could be my chauffeur. You could be my servant in my house." Okay, I'll show up at your house later on. What time? "I'll show up at 8 o'clock in the morning." So the rabbi, young rabbi, misken, that lost his wife and is now in debt.

2:11:24...goes to work for his talmid, who he thought was his talmid, and makes him coffee. He comes to give him the coffee, and he sees in the bedroom the guy with his new wife. And who is his new wife? His ex-wife. His sorrow from seeing all of this and now realizing how everything just happened literally caused him to cry on the spot. As soon as both of his tears touched the tea or the coffee, Hashem says, "For that, I'm going to destroy the world. I'm destroyed about my Beit HaMikdash. Why? Because if the evil of the people has gone to such a level, then not only... Did you steal somebody else's wife? Not only did you steal your own rabbi's wife, but you don't even have any busha. You don't have any shame about it. There's no saving. That's what we saw. We saw in Masechet Shabbat that the Beit HaMikdash was not destroyed until the nation did not have any shame anymore. They lost all of their shame. They would make sins in the open and...

2:12:27Without thinking that there's anything wrong with it. They thought the guy says, "Why, I did a mitzvah. I helped him. He needed a loan. I lent him the money. He needed a loan. I lent him the money. You know, his wife wasn't with him. So I told him, 'Get divorced.' The fact that she was with him, he's saying that he closes his eyes to his own sins, and I helped him. I gave him the money for the get. I married a woman. I made a mitzvah from the Torah. I married a woman. I did chuppah, kiddushin, puru u'revu." No, why? I'm doing a tzaddik. And that's why the Ramban, the Ramban says a person can follow the entire Torah and be a naval birshut haTorah. Still be considered despicable in the name of the Torah, with permission of the Torah. and lose Olam HaBa. Even though he follows the entire Torah, MeAlef ad Tav, he can still be considered despicable. Why? Because there are the obvious laws that Hashem writes, and there are the laws that you're supposed to simply understand. And sometimes people think that if you just do what's written, that's enough. And that's the root of most people's mistakes, is that once you put your pride on the Torah, the Torah says, "Your Torah is no longer from Shamayim."

2:13:41Why? You're tainting it with your pride. Once you're tainting the Torah with your pride, you can learn the entire Shulchan Aruch by heart, backwards and forwards, like the Gaon MiVilna. The Gaon MiVilna knew the entire Torah from the beginning to the end, and from the end to the beginning. End to the beginning, beginning to the end. He knew the whole thing by heart. End to the beginning, beginning to the end. You can know the entire Torah from end to beginning, beginning to the end, and it still won't help you. Why? Because your pride destroyed it. And that's why people, people that have pride, that's why they say lashon hara. That's why they do all these big sins. Because they don't see wrong in themselves. They don't see wrong in themselves. They think that what they're doing is a mitzvah. They think that, oh, no, no, I'm just telling somebody not to come to you because you made one mistake in five years, and it really wasn't a mistake according to most opinions. But in my eyes, it was a mistake. So therefore, I'm warning people. From what? Something, what is it? Not really sure, but I'm warning. It's like you didn't find anything else in the world to warn him about. But this, this is pride. This is pride talking. Every single time that I've had problems with students in general, it's only because pride got in the way, and...

2:15:01Every single time it's never been any other thing. Every single issue that you'll ever see, it's only because of pride. There was one time there was a guy who was supposedly a very big fan. Eventually, one day he wrote something that was against the Torah. I told him he was wrong. He decided to make a movie against me. Why? Because he didn't like that I told him he made a sin. It's not allowed. Many people did. You should look up my name. You'll see. Oh, I share many people. Yes, yes, many people do lectures and movies on me. They like it. They've spent a lot of time investing into my life. I didn't make anything. I'm just saying that they made movies. But then another guy, with a student, thought I was the new Messiah. Don't waste your time. You should learn Torah. thought I was Mashiach, everything is good, everything is kadosh, everything is this, needs halacha for sukkah, needs halacha for this, a million and a half questions. One day, tell him, listen, by the way, you know, you're rebuking your son, and this particular rebuke wasn't the right rebuke. You're supposed to just let this one go. Why? Because in reality, you didn't do anything wrong. In reality, you're wrong.

2:16:14Reality, you're wrong. He's not wrong. He's right, the kid. So just let it go. You don't have to make a big deal of it. You don't have to necessarily apologize to the kid. He's a kid, but still, you're wrong. You shouldn't have done it. You can destroy the kid that way. What, I became Korach? I became Korach, why? I'm no longer Mashiach. I'm Korach. Why? I rebuked him this time after time after time after time, every single time. That's just the way it is. Everybody loves the truth until it affects them. So the point, rabotai, is to understand that if you want to do full teshuva, you have to work on your middot, starting with pride. As long as there's pride, you have not completed your teshuva; you have not even begun. Because pride is a very, very dangerous satan. It's the beginning of all evil. Once you've worked on your pride, once you realize you have it, it's already half the battle. All of us have it.

2:17:14And the reality is you have to identify it. Then we have to start realizing, okay, am I doing this because of my pride or am I doing this because of this? I don't feel like doing it because of this. I don't feel like doing, you know, you have to start asking yourself these questions. You have to do cheshbon hanefesh. Why don't I feel like doing it? Why don't I feel like listening to him? Is it because he said it or is it because I disagree? Is it because it's wrong or is it because he said it? You have to do cheshbon hanefesh. Cheshbon hanefesh is looking and doing self-accounting. We have to— we're full of it, all of us. We’re full of it. Stop being full of it. That's just the bottom line. Why don't I feel like doing this? Why don't I feel like waking up in the morning? Why don't I feel like changing careers? Why don't I feel like marrying this one or having this one? Why is it? What's the point? What's the real root of the cause? Don't tell me it's money and all the superficial stuff. Bottom line: why not? Now, why don't you want to go to this one or that one? Why don't you want to? Why? Why? Okay, you have to identify the root cause. That is real cheshbon hanefesh. If you're doing that, then you're doing teshuvah. But until we do reflection and self-analysis and start calling ourselves out—yeah, you know, on this one, I'm a real loser—but I'll put you back. I

2:18:31Yeah, this one, the worst. Not like just give up because you're a loser at something. But at least you're identifying, yeah, here I'm good. I'm good at this. But here, this section, loser. But identify where you're a loser. Why? Because that has to be on the to-do list. Don't tell everybody, no, no, no, but you know how many mitzvot I do? You know how much I give? You know how good I am at learning? I could sit there for eight hours learning. I'm like Moshe Rabbeinu of the generation. Okay, good. All those things are good. But what about the section you're a loser in? So that's the thing, we have to identify, where are we weak? If you could identify your weaknesses, you could work on them, and you could really become something. You can really become something. Any other questions or are we finished for the night? Ken? Ken? Ken?

2:19:50I'll tell you this when I give an example, maybe about a year ago, using my... as an example that I saw, I learned this from her. Because I, first when I learned this, sugya was baffling to me because I agreed with Abaye and with Rabbi Abbahu who were saying, what about our Torah? So I said, how could it be that a little kid's Torah is more significant than Rabbi Akiva? How could it be a kid's Torah is more significant than even an average talmid chacham in today's age? How could it be? Until I saw my little daughter at the time, two years old. Now, she didn't know how to speak a hundred percent, but she knew that you're supposed to do a blessing. And you see her, it's unbelievable. She, you know, she follows my wife, God bless her, and she sets up these little candles, and she has three wine cups, and she has all these candles, and she has the Chanukiah also, and she has plates and cups.

2:21:16...everything, and she puts on this little apron, and we kiss, we wash, and then she goes like this, and she was like this with the candles, and then she stood like this, and she starts doing the blessing. Oh yeah, you don't understand a single word, except once in a while you hear "Hashem, Hashem," and she knows "Hashem." Hashem. You understand, we are parents, we understand what she says, but as a stranger, you come, you see this like it's... you don't know what you're saying. But it's kodesh. Bottom line is she puts her entire self into this blessing. You must think Mashiach must be coming from the ceiling. Why? All she knows is this one blessing, and... All she knows is, she doesn't know the whole Torah, the whole Gemara, the whole Tosafot, and Rashi and this. She doesn't know all that stuff. She knows one blessing, Rabotai. She knows one blessing, and when she does that blessing, her entire being goes into that blessing. Aleinu.

2:22:17Why could we do it? Why? We do blessings. We're doing Hashem a favor. You ate already? Oh, I have to bless for this? I meant it in the morning. It's like you're doing Hashem a favor. We're good to eat for three hours, but we don't want to do Birkat HaMazon. Reality is that when we do blessings, when we do Shema, we do all the blessings. It's like our head is somewhere here, over there. Yeah, it's like a tree with branches: stock market, baseball, football, girlfriend, boyfriend, car, shidduch. It's everywhere, like our heads are branches. But the little babies don't have all that garbage. You tell them, "Listen, go do a blessing," they stop the world, and they're doing a blessing, and... And the whole world doesn't exist. It's just them and blessings and Hashem. You cannot compare the two. You cannot compare that two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight-year-old to anyone else in a generation. Why? Because for him, he has all this other stuff going on that even if he has a lot of kavana, he still has a lot of stuff going on. For the little kid, that's all they have.

2:23:39That's it. It's all they have. No comparison. And that's why the Chachamim say there's no comparison. The whole world exists because of them. The whole world is saved because of them, and the Mashiach will come because of them. But that's also why the Beit HaMikdash was destroyed. As soon as Hashem saw that instead of them doing blessings and learning blessings, they were playing in the streets, playing football. Once He saw the kids are in the street playing games instead of being in school learning blessings, He said there's no hope for the next generation. I must destroy it. So for all those parents that think that they're doing themselves a favor or their kids a favor by sending them to these chugim, these extracurricular activities, by dance and soccer and baseball and all the studios, you're not doing them a favor. reality, at the best-case scenario. The best-case scenario, your kid is going to be someone that is not interested in Judaism 100%. The worst-case scenario, your kid is going to be going... Why? Let’s say your kid, you find, okay, you send your daughter to dance. Okay, you send this five-year-old to go dance, right? Okay, send the five-year-old to go dance. Let’s say the kid's talented, she has both. Of course, sometimes Hashem is going to make a talented...

2:24:59Of course, Hashem is going to make a talented kid, so the kid wants to continue dancing. But if she wants to be a Jew, she can't do it. Why? Because to be a successful dancer, you have to dance in front of men. Ballet is not as exclusive to women. You have to dance in front of men. So what are you going to tell her when she's 15 years old and she became an expert dancer? "Oh, I'm sorry. It was just a hobby." What do you mean, hobby? For you, it was a hobby. Yeah, I'm a career dancer now, and... So what are you going to do, best-case scenario? What's going to happen? Oh, soccer. Oh, it's grass, a winner. Oh, yeah, send your kid to go play soccer. Okay, so the kid says, "I got a game tomorrow. I got a game tomorrow. I got a little practice with my friends. I'll go practice with my friends." Yeah, but you're not going to be a professional soccer player. You can tell it to your kid: "You're not going to be professional." You destroy his dreams. What's going to happen, best-case scenario? The kid's talented, he ruins his entire teenage life, becomes a guy until he's 25-30 years old, realizes his whole career was meaningless because he's still a short little Jewish kid and he's not going to be a professional soccer player. But now he's also not a Jew either, so now he has to do the same difficult work we had to do at 30 years old. Who is at fault? It's your parents' fault.

2:26:22Let's send him to go play soccer. Why? Because they want to learn with him. So that's the thing. Parents who think that they're doing the kids a favor by sending them to these extracurricular activities should ask themselves, what's going to happen because of this extracurricular activity? Where is it going to lead to? Okay, now it's getting the kid out of the house and off your head, and you don't have a headache anymore. Fine. But what's going to be after? They'll come away to know, lad, that's why someone who sees what will be born out of this, what will happen out of this? Okay, so the kid's playing soccer at five years old. All kids are cute. All kids are cute at five years old, whether they're playing soccer, dancing, flipping, or playing with mud. They're all cute at five. What about if you add a one to it? Now it's 15 with zits... What's going to happen then? What's going to happen then? Now the kid still wants to play soccer. He wants to play baseball. He wants to play basketball. But he wants to go to a yeshiva. He doesn't want to go to a yeshiva. He's not interested in a yeshiva. Why? The best yeshiva guy is sitting there all day. The best one is sitting there all day. Going like this. All day they sit in the corner. The best guy. He's...

2:27:31Him, the best guy, is the guy that's getting all the girls' attention and the news attention and runs really fast. Meaning that the best guy here in a yeshiva is the epitome. It's the opposite of what he thinks is the best. You understand? So what would you do? Would you kill the kid? He's destroyed. Destroy the kid. Why? He thinks that he's supposed to be the next Michael Jordan. He thinks he's gonna be the next Messi and... He'll be the next athlete. It's his idol. His idol is a guy that kicks a ball. Moshe Rabbeinu is old news. You kill the kid at five years old. So that's why Jewish parents need to understand. You're not doing your kid a favor by sending him to all these extracurricular activities. That doesn't mean that they should not be active. Let that not enter your brain and manipulate what I'm saying to the point where I'm telling you that the kids should be sitting down forever and never get up, and all the way to becoming paraplegic. Okay, I'm not saying that. Kids should be active. They need to be active. They actually have to be active because they cannot sit like an adult. They cannot be a Rav Elyashiv at six years old. I

2:28:43But don't make a hobby out of it where it's every day, and it's organized sport, and they go and they're on a team. Okay, they want to play with their friends here and there a little bit. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. Every kid needs a little shtuyot in their life. Every kid needs a little fun nonsense in their life. But don't make it organized. The only thing that should be organized is learning. Everything else, unorganized. Today it's basketball. Tomorrow it's, I don't know, some other ball and this ball and that ball. Every day it's something else. Don't ever think you're going to be a professional in this stuff. This is just for fun. Just for fun. That's good. That's fine. That's fine. You need some activity to move. You don't want your kid to be 900 pounds at eight years old. You want him to move a little bit. That's fine. No problem with that. But once you make it into a whole thing where they are on a traveling team and all this stuff, you're killing the kid. You're killing the kid. And by the way, I don't know about you, but how many really successful athletes are Jewish in history anyway?

2:29:53There's one guy that did Teshuvah after he retired from sports. He was actually on a Super Bowl team. I forget his name. He was on a Super Bowl team. I think it was the Dallas Cowboys. He actually became a speaker. There was a story written about him in Zman, maybe 15 years ago, something like that, 10, 15 years ago. But that's after he retired from the sport. Aside from that, in general, it's virtually impossible to be a successful athlete as a Jew, number one, because our physical ability is not like the goyim, and number two, because you cannot be a religious Jew and keep all these, you know, all these sports. Just not possible. Yeah? Bill Goldberg is not a religious Jew. Yeah, Jewish, but yeah. Huh? Yeah, Goldberg. Yeah, he's not exactly religious, but yeah. So that's the point. So, at best case scenario, the guy's a goy. That's the thing. At best case scenario, the guy succeeds, and he's a goy. So that's when you've just destroyed your kid spiritually. Yeah? You said before, like, there's this guy who said he's keeping the brit, but he's cheating on his wife. How can he keep the brit, you know?

2:31:09keeping his brit, meaning he's not doing it himself but he's replaced the girlfriend he has in the bathroom with an actual person, meaning he's violating his brit in another way. Of course, he's not; he's violating the brit. Of course, he's also going because the rabbi was naive himself, right? He thought he was learning all day... Listen, the wives are allowed to move. They're not necessarily bound to be inside four walls. She wasn't supposed to go inside his house. She was supposed to go to the house, pick up the money, and then leave. Just like you send your wife to go pick up groceries. She goes, picks up the groceries, and comes home. We're not Muslims. Right? The yetzer hara enticed her to do other things. Everybody has a yetzer hara. Everybody has a yetzer hara. Everybody has a yetzer hara. What the details of her yetzer hara were, I don't know. All I know is that she fell for it. He fell for it. Everybody fell for it. And that caused the Churban. The point is that the Satan pays cash. Satan has a lot of money. Satan is going to convince you that your sin is a mitzvah. That's the job of the Satan.

2:32:29Satan is going to convince you that your sin is a mitzvah, that your lashon hara is a mitzvah, that your pride is a mitzvah, that everything is a mitzvah. That's what the Satan is going to do—convince you that everything you're doing is a mitzvah. The reality is that unless you acknowledge that you have evil within you, that you have a yetzer hara, you've already lost the battle. We already lost the battle. So the point is that we learn all these shiurim, and after these shiurim, you reflect, you start analyzing yourself. Where do I stand? What's the most difficult thing for me to deal with? What is the one thing that I know for sure is not the will of Hashem? By the way, this was a secret of how I stopped smoking. I smoked cigarettes for over 20 years. And when I first started doing teshuva... I learned that, you know, you're not really supposed to smoke because you are supposed to protect your body. But my yetzer hara told me, "Yes, but there is a leniency that they write, that if you're already addicted to it, then you're allowed to smoke on certain holidays." So, if you're allowed to smoke on certain holidays, that probably means that you're allowed to smoke...

2:33:52So then, when I learned a little bit more, I realized, wait, yeah, but it's still hurting your body. You're not really supposed to smoke. But I said, yeah, but how am I studying at 3 o'clock in the morning? Smoking cigarettes, that's how I'm up. It's helping me stay up. It's helping me stay awake. My yetzer hara was very creative, by the way. Genius. I'm like, if I didn't smoke at 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning, I wouldn't be able to study. And if I'm not studying, how am I going to learn Torah? If I don't know Torah, who's going to have this? I have to smoke. It's a mitzvah that I smoke. It's a mitzvah. It's for the honor of Am Yisrael. Hashem will remove all the sins because it's for the honor of Am Yisrael. I'm doing kiruv now. I made the smoking into a mitzvah. Smoking became a mitzvah. Why? Because it's helping me study in the middle of the night and ta-da-da-da-da-da. Tachlis, bottom line, the more I analyze, the more I realize I'm all full of it. Full of it. Nonsense. Nonsense. It's not the will of Hashem. If it was the will of Hashem, He would create me with a cigarette in my hand. It's not the will of Hashem. So that's when it got real.

2:34:55So I said, okay, so I'm doing this whole thing. I changed my whole life. I left the business. I left this. I did this. I did this. I did this for what? For the will of Hashem. But yet at the same time, doing it with a cigarette in my hand, that's not the will of Hashem. And I said, I don't want to quit smoking. I like smoking. I don't want to quit smoking. I want to smoke. I like smoking. I enjoy it. I care less about the disease. I already have enough sickness. I'm good with disease. Good. I don't want to stop. But the problem is, it's against Hashem. That's the problem. The source of it, it's against Hashem. You're supposed to protect your body. You're not supposed to do things that are going to put your health at risk. But the key is when I realized that this is not the will of Hashem. He did not create me in a world to smoke cigarettes.

2:35:55And I only realized this after students made a comment, even though I generally wouldn't smoke in front of people. Because I realized there was something wrong with it. I had one student or two students say something about it. "Oh, you smoke? Wow, okay, you smoke." And I realized, oh, this is not good. And little by little, I started realizing, okay, I have to stop. to stop. Why? Because it's not the will of God, and that's what the Gemara says. Rabban Gamliel says in Gemara Masechet Menachot, a person should never say He doesn't want to eat milk and meat or he doesn't want to eat it. He doesn't want to wear shatnez because in reality, he probably likes milk and meat. In reality, he probably likes the jacket that has shatnez. So, you should never say he doesn't like it. It's not true. It's not true. What should he say? He should say, "I want to eat milk and meat. I want to wear shatnez. But what can I do that my Father in Heaven said no?"

2:37:00It's not that I don't want to eat pig. I want to eat pig. But my Father in Heaven said no. It's not that I don't want to be with this one that I'm not allowed to be with. I want. But what can I do that my Father in Heaven said no? That's the reason. That's the real reason. It's not that we all become so pure that we don't want to sin anymore. We all want to sin. But we don't sin. Why? Because it goes against our Father in Heaven. That's the key. That is the root of teshuva. That is the root of teshuva. That's how I quit smoking. That's how I quit a lot of other things. And the reality is that's how we continue doing teshuva. We realize it's not the will of Hashem. It's not the will of Hashem. Once you realize that it's not the will of Hashem, already that changes the price. So B'ezrat Hashem, just give us some chizuk to get prepared for the holiday, the fast. We have a few more shiurim beforehand. We have another shiur on Tuesday here, and then Wednesday in August in Miami. We'll have some others. We'll have the Pirkei Avot shiurim. And B'ezrat Hashem, we'll continue. Unless you have any pressing questions, go enjoy the food. You have?

2:38:09Seder. Baruch Adonai l'olam. Amen v'Amen.