Dating and Marriage From A Deep Place of Self

2:46 If marriage is just an intense level of commitment, then we see the natural progression of that is that people get together. They meet each other. They have some form of chemistry. They decide to live together. Maybe they even have a family together. They sign some sort of document that says they're married until they don't. So it's just a commitment. The truth is, you don't really need anything ceremonial for a commitment. It doesn't seem to be the Jewish idea. I think one can probably draw a straight line from the diminution of godliness in the world. The secular notion of being removed from this notion of a godly soul and a godly self I think you can draw a straight line there to the number, the increasing numbers of divorce in America. I think they say in California it's about seventy percent right now, which is just an absolutely extraordinary number.

3:44 When you frame marriage as the reunion of the soul, you're clearly talking about something more than commitment. You're talking about a process of self-discovery. That is to say, a person on their own cannot be complete. They can be whole As we'll soon see, they cannot be complete. There's something transformational that happens in the context of marriage. That transformation When done well It's something remarkable. It's profound. It's life-changing. And it cannot happen outside of the context of marriage. There are things that naturally go against the grain of who we are that force us into positions of self Which I know we haven't defined yet. But just as an example Raising children. There is nothing in your life that will transform you like raising children. From the very early stages of levels of dedication to a child that cannot take care of themselves To the later stages of raising teenage daughters I have, I had at some point, Baruch Hashem, now I'm a grandfather myself, but at some point I had four teenage daughters at once.

5:12 Your laughter hurts. That's not a joke. When we were designing our house in Eretz Israel, I helped my wife design the house, and I thought that bedrooms were more important than bathrooms. I did not pay attention to what would possibly happen if you have four teenage daughters and only two bathrooms. That was not a smart decision. Teenage daughters have a way of saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. That gets under your skin in ways And it's different for men and for women. If you've ever done the following, you owe your mother an apology. If, as your mother is walking out the door, you ever insinuated something like, "Are you wearing that?" If you've ever done that, I want you to know you caused a tremendous amount of pain. The ability, by the way, from the look in the room right now, about 50% of you need to apologize to your parents.

6:25 But it forces a person to be able to notice their triggers and what's coming up for them. To be in a posture of rectification. There is no doubt parenting will transform you. But it's nothing compared to marriage. It's nothing Because I can be whole But I cannot be complete without you. And learning to soften my edges. Learning to make space for you in this relationship is the single most challenging thing you can ever do. The Jewish notion of marriage is so far beyond the idea of commitment. Commitment is the baseline of what marriage is, because we're so deeply committed to each other. We'll now engage in the process of marriage, which is not something that just happens once under the chuppah. Chazal even go so far as to say that your zivug sheni is your zivug hagum. The simple explanation of that is a person who gets married for the second time.

7:30 But the Balyashkafa very often point to that Gemara and suggest that it means the second iteration of your marriage. Marriage goes through many stages. That beginning stage of your marriage can be very difficult. Learning to live with another person. You reup that marriage three to five years in, and you reup that marriage five years later. Smart people are re-upping their marriage all the time. The challenge of marriage is that the contract changes. People are in evolution. How do I not just stay married, but how do I be married? How do I go through the process of completion with this person 10, 15, 20 years out when they're not the same person that I married anymore? I can share with you from my own personal experience. When I got married, my wife came from a very Lithvish Yeshivish family, a classic Lithuanian Yeshiva family. I came from a more classic modern Orthodox background.

8:31 And I was a staunch opponent of Chassidus. As far as you can go on the opposite end of the spectrum. For a variety of reasons, about three years into my marriage, it was very important to me, and I went through an evolution myself. And I discovered chassidus. I want you to know that's not an easy thing. Especially because the chassidus that I fell in love with was chabad chassidus. And if you know anything about besnagdim, you know that chabad is on the other end of that spectrum. It's not an easy thing. Every couple has to go through that. My Rabbi Shlita, 96 years old, should be zecher rafu shleima. My Rabbi told us a story. He was at Columbia University doing his master's degree in mathematics. And his intention was to become a math professor. He was married at the time and he finished his master's degree. To do your master's degree, you really have to know something and explain it well.

9:33 I failed math three times, so I just want you to know I have no idea what any of this means. But my rebbe. Whatever it is that he chatted two o'clock in the morning, he understood the formula. And he said I got it, and in that moment he had an epiphany and he said what do I have? What did I accomplish? What did I achieve just now? So he finished his master's degree, and he told his wife, I said I think I want to learn in Kol I don't know that I want to become a math professor. And she supported him, and I think he said he was in the first YU Kol ever. They started the YU Kol for him, and he learned in the Kol for a couple of years, and then he taught, and eventually became one of the great Rashi yeshiva of YU and Landers. And when he told us this story, one of the guys in Shir said to him, Reb, your wife must really love Taira to give up that life of being the wife of a chosh of a professor.

10:28 And my Rebbe smiled at him and he goes, No, she just loved me. And it was a very and my Rebbe didn't say lines like that. He was a real brisker But there was something. That really touched me when he said it, not because of the emotionality of it, but because it really helped me as a young man formulate what marriage was. I'm married to this person. This person is going to evolve. How am I going to stay engaged as this person goes through their evolutions and the contract keeps changing? How am I going to keep going through this process of staying in a state of completion where two souls are one? It's not easy to do. And you really don't know what life will throw at you because I'm giving you the easy examples of someone who switches a job or someone who falls in love with a different type of sefer or a different mahalach.

11:17 But it gets difficult when people get sick. Difficult to say the least. When people go through mental health issues, crises in the family The notion of a Jewish marriage is two people who are working, two whole people who are working to stay in a state of completion with each other. That's the definition. Let's go back to the other side. What's the definition of self? It's a fascinating. It's a fascinating thing. I had the opportunity last year to take a course with a woman whose name is Ainat Bornstein. Have any of you ever heard of Ainat Bornstein? Has anyone here ever heard of IFS? My home country is a people airfield. I've heard of it a lot. So you've heard of IFS. I had the opportunity to take a course with Ainat Bornstein. Einat is the Hamidamu Heket of Richard Schwartz, who's the founder of IFS.

12:11 So it was a two full day, twelve hours a day course, an amazing course. And Einat herself is a traditional. I think she would probably identify as a secular Israeli, not observant. Though, to be quite honest, she's definitely deeply connected. The morning that we had our first session or our second session, she came in and she said. I davened, Vasekin this morning at the hotel. I'm looking at her, going, "I think you're from, and you don't know it." So when she started talking about this idea of self Which in the IFS world is like at the center of everything So I was very curious to see how she was going to do it. What does that word mean? How do you point to self? How do you define self without God? And Aynat gets up and she goes. When we're talking about self, you know what it means. You know the godly soul, the chelak al kamimal. And so they're going, "Oh, that's how you do it." Meaning you don't.

13:14 It's very, very difficult to explain what consciousness is without talking about a soul. We've mapped the entire human brain. We know where everything is. The only thing we don't know is where consciousness itself is. It's a fascinating thing. It's one of the greatest indicators of God. That there's something called you and I, and we have no idea where it is. We can't point to it. We can't identify it. It seems to be this transcendent and yet immanent thing that exists within us. It's both beyond us and within us. It animates every aspect of our being. This self is what's being married. And the key here is that we don't spend a tremendous amount of time on what we're going to call self. Most of us Not consciously, but most of us spend a significant amount of our life in survival mode, whether we realize it or not.

14:14 It's something that's becoming tragically pervasive Even in the Jewish community. And we've given children access to things that are At worst Have really deleterious impact, and at best have some functional impact. We give, for example, I don't mean to speak not nicely about the Jewish community, but it's worth having an honest conversation about what's happening. When you have seventh and eighth graders, that, and I'm I'm speaking about a specific example, but I'm not going to get into any details, so I don't think it would be the right thing. But when you have seventh and eighth graders that are in a camp this summer, that are buying not insignificant portions of marijuana in camp. From counselors And you have teenagers walking around, know that no, it just makes a good time better. What these are survival things that these children are doing. You're looking at me with open mouth. This is a real story. It's a real story. By the way, I'm only giving you the slice of it.

15:23 One slice of it. We have 16-year-olds. We have a 16-year-old who came to me this summer and said, "I spent most of this past summer, most of this past year rather, in his high school." Drunk. "I said, 'How did you spend so much time drunk? Wouldn't somebody notice?'" And he said There's a thing called an Irish coffee, where you put alcohol in your coffee and nobody smells it. That's my breakfast. This kid is in survival mode. He's not anywhere near self. And we should be honest about the coping mechanisms that exist in our community because of the fact that we're not in self and kids don't know how to cope and they're not being taught good coping mechanisms and the negative impact when you play that out five six seven years later. Those are the easy low hanging fruits to touch on. When we start talking about the impact of technology, it becomes a much more sophisticated question because you get an open mouth when you say drugs and alcohol but you're not going to get the same open mouth when you say How many hours a day are you on your phone And just look at kids' screen time. So there are kids that are on their phone eight to ten hours a day, and that's not even so unusual.

16:34 Eight to ten hours a day of YouTube Shorts, eight to ten hours a day of just scrolling through TikTok. It's not functional for them. It's an escape from the world. By the way, when you do the math with these kids and you say, if you're on your phone eight hours a day. How many? How much of a year are you actually living, considering the fact that you're only awake for 12 hours a day? It means you're basically getting a third of a year. That's what you're actually living. This is real stuff that's happening. This is, these coping mechanisms exist because there are parts of us that are ensuring our survival. They're helping protect us. They're helping us manage our lives. And in extreme cases, like the cases that I'm talking about just now, they're basically here to make sure that we don't feel this pain that we have in our lives that we don't want to feel. I'll do anything I can to numb out.

17:26 The problem is it only works for a certain amount of time, and where it really doesn't work is in relationships. Because if I don't know how to be in self, if every time some pain or some discomfort comes into my life I do whatever I need to do to mitigate that pain, but I don't really allow myself to be in self and process those feelings. Which self is going to be capable of showing up to be whole enough to participate in the process of completion? The challenge of marriage begins when we don't do the work when we're younger in order to be in self So that we could be whole enough to be complete. Does that make sense? There's a line from the Chafetz Chaim that somebody came. Somebody came. They just had a baby, and they said, 'Rebbe, when should we start learning the sukkahs of chenochabanim? The child is three or four years old.' The Chafetz Chaim said, 'You're at least nine months too late. You have to prepare for these things before they happen.'

18:33 Probably there's going. I imagine that this will be one of the next evolutions in the Jewish community, but there's probably going to need to be real curriculums developed. Not just about dating and marriage, but really about serious mental health conversations. Because when these kids are 14 and 15 years old, and even that's late in the process, but when these kids are 14 and 15 years old How in the world are they going to be capable of 20 and 21 and 22 years old if they just spent the last four years numbing out and checking out of any pain that they had because they don't want to actually be in self? Being in self can be a very uncomfortable thing. That's something that's coming soon to a theater near you. We can only hope in Davin. And it's very, very difficult to sit and talk to guys at 18 years old sometimes.

19:27 There's nobody home. We've got only a couple of years now to be able to do some real healing about the things that you've gone through. In order to get you ready to be a mensch, to be married. What does this look like in the process of dating? So By the way, before I move on, any questions, comments, or reactions? When there's no questions, comments, or reactions, that means one of two things: either I'm doing a phenomenal job explaining this Which I'll choose to believe from a deep place of self Or there's a lack of vulnerability in the room. I'm going with option two. The thing about vulnerability, girls, this is one of the core features of self. What's your name? Where are you from? Chavi from Farakway. Where in Farakway? Right on Beach 12, off of Beach 9. What's your last name? Jacobs. Grew up in Farakway.

20:26 The line before the Chavetz Hayim story. Will you repeat the line? I want you to know I forgot the line the moment it went out of my head. I already know. If you remind me, maybe I can do my best. I don't remember. That's why I want to. There's a recording. What's your name? Where are you from? Rachel Ybenziken. I'm from Baltimore. The things that you're describing about how people feel and people go through life—it's really scary if you're on the other side of it and now you have to choose somebody because you don't know what. And let's say, what if you're going out with somebody and then you find out that they have all of this trauma? Then what do you do with it? That was actually exactly the segue to get to the next part of the conversation. So that was perfect. But before I do that, are there any other questions? That was really excellent.

21:18 What's your name? Where are you from? Bailey. I'm from Hamilton, Canada. I've heard of that. I actually have heard of Hamilton, Ontario. Do you know Toronto? I knew somebody who once tried to start a yeshiva there. It did not work out. Rabbi Saffer, who's now Rabbi in Mevaseret, was part of a cohort of rabbis that tried to start a yeshiva in Hamilton, Ontario. I do know somebody from Hamilton. His name is Jeremy Greenberg. Yitzchak Greenberg. He became a baal tshuva. Now he lives in Edison. New Jersey. That was excellent Jewish geography. Is there a time that you can get back? If a person is so out of their sense of self through their whole childhood, is this just forgone, or can you? That's a superb. That's a superb question. I want to say two things about that. Number one The nature of self is that it is forever and it's pure and it's untainted. It's always like when we say every day in davening, Elokeinu Shama Shana Sato Be Tahori. The fact that we spend so much time out of self in no way diminishes self.

22:32 That's number one. So you're not you haven't. It's not like you can lose this thing called self. By the way, that's really good to know in your life. If you ever need to recover from anything, the baseline knowledge that you are forever and always okay. That's huge. The baseline knowledge that you're forever and always enough, that's huge. Number one. Number two, like it says in Tanya. When the Gemara says that tshuva, and the Alter Rebbe explains that we're talking about a tshuva me'ava, we're talking about a very powerful type of tshuva, but that tshuva can make your averos into schuyos. Sometimes we leave self in order to discover self. I'm not sure that we could have received Matan Torah without ever going through Mitzrayim. The idea that I have to sometimes move away from self in order to rediscover self, I think, is a

23:25 I think one way, perhaps, of looking at this is like that circle. You're always moving back towards that initial point, even though it appears that you're moving away. You're always moving back towards that initial point. So even when we're out of self and we're behaving in ways that are not necessarily working and that have negative impact, at some point, God willing, that negative impact, we become conscious of it and we start to choose to do things differently in life because it's just not working. And that's where self sort of rises up to the occasion. And there's this beautiful Again, a transformational process that occurs. It's why 10, 15, 20, 30 years into your marriage, you're a fundamentally different person because every time you acted out of self and it didn't work within the context of the marriage, it illuminated new parts of yourself that you didn't even know were there.

24:13 So if you've taken some time off, which I think is natural and normal Especially when you're a teenager, because teenagers are very often in survival mode. I think it's a beautiful thing to know that A You're okay, and B, you're actually in the process of self-discovery. So this isn't necessarily all bad. Not at all. It could be messy and really uncomfortable. But I have a tremendous amount of hope for people. Yeah. What's your name? Where are you from? I'm from Sharon, Massachusetts. I love Sharon, Massachusetts. I went to Onset every single summer of my life. Onset, Massachusetts. I knew the Hauser family from Sharon, Massachusetts. It's okay. Could I move this gender? Please, is that your question? Yes. Nia, what's your name? Where are you from? Sheerpelt from Chicago. If you're saying that it's starting so young that kids are in survival mode, how do they ever really know if they're getting back to their self if they don't really know where it is in the first place?

25:11 It's such a great question. There are core features of self that we all have. I'm not going to list them all now. There's like all these different acronyms for them. It's like the eight C's and the five P's, whatever it is. But there's some things that you'll know that you'll always have when you're in self. The things I would want to talk to you about today are clarity Creativity Curiosity Connectivity. Those are all core features of being in self. And then there's the unique personality that we have when we're in self, and that's sort of unfolding over time. And so you watch children when they're very young, and children are especially before they learn that social acceptability is more important than self. So that three, four, five-year-old like very innocent child who just lives with reckless abandon. It's beautiful to see. And then what happens is these tragic moments when our children go to school and they all of a sudden learn, which is beautiful. They learn that they have to be part of this community, but then they have to sacrifice aspects of themselves to be in community.

26:15 And that's really hard. My favorite story to share on this topic is a painful story about my daughter. She loved unicorns. Her life was unicorns. Talking about some girls who just love unicorns. That was my daughter. And as a father, I'm a girl dad. I have five daughters and one son. Five six daughters. He's the youngest. He's the youngest. You know what I'm talking about? He's the type of kid that comes down the stairs when he's sick at five years old and he goes, "But I'm having a feeling." " Oh man You are gonna get bullied in school. My daughters are all very emotionally aware. So you have to validate them. I'm like, So. I don't know why I say these things. The day my daughter came home from school and she said, "Abba, for my knapsack next year, I don't want you to get me a unicorn knapsack." I was like, "Why not?" She said, "Unicorns are for babies." I said, "You love unicorns." She said, "Unicorns are for babies."

27:29 I knew she still loved unicorns, but she didn't want to be the girl that had the unicorn knapsack. It's tragic to watch that. Sometimes I think that we're kind of in the process. Of moving from one end to the other. There are a lot of similarities between the elderly and the young. The elderly just don't care anymore. Talking about that guy who got off the fashion train at a very specific stage of his life And he's like 73 years old now, and he just doesn't care. He's just living his life. He's kind of like that five-year-old again. He's moved past caring what people care about him. So I think that sometimes it's like you think of self as this thing you have to become. I think it's more like internal. It's more about the process of allowing it to unfold and rediscover what you already were. Does that make sense?

28:23 Yeah. Hi, my name is Leila. I'm from Atlanta. You follow instructions well. I didn't even have to ask. I'm also a unicorn lover, so I can relate to that. I appreciate the validation. So I guess it's a common occurrence, but a lot of people lose their sense of self in their teenage years, especially with the COVID pandemic and with technology being ubiquitous. And it's like it's a really jarring and very offsetting experience. But how do you come back from that? How do you regain a sense of self once you strayed so far from it? What a powerful question! It's a phenomenal question. I just want to note your use of the word ubiquitous in the sentence, as if it was like, I just say ubiquitous. Really superb. It's a David bashkem level word, right? I don't know if it's a David bashkem. It's not. It's a David bashkem.

29:36 It's a devash level. Thank you. Certain seminaries that I go to, the girls have eight cups. I'm not a camel. We We watched because that was such a complex time during COVID And none of us really know what to do. None, we were it was new for all of us, a global pandemic. We definitely made a lot of mistakes. We didn't know what the right thing to do was. Please bear in mind that what I'm about to say, I say with a tremendous amount of sensitivity. I lost my grandmother to COVID. Pesach time, so I'm not at all insensitive to the negative impact of COVID. My grandmother was like a second mother to me. The other side of the equation is the amount of damage that we caused to children by locking them up for a year and a half was far from insignificant. After COVID, I went to America to do interviews, and I interviewed a young man in Hafter.

30:45 And great kid, and I said, "How's it going? How's your twelfth grade year?" He goes, "Terrible." I said, "Really? Why?" So he said, "My grade is all NPCs," and I didn't know what an NPC was. I'll explain in a moment, and I try to stay very relevant with like the language of the boys. This is very important. I'm gang like that. I can glaze with the best of them. I literally spend my life with 18 year old boys. I have to be able to speak the language. So I didn't know what an NPC was, and I was feeling very out of touch. So I said, "What's an NPC?" So he said, "It's a non-playable character in a video game." In the video games, they just have people lined up on the side, and they don't actually participate in the game. You can't do anything with them. They're just there. He said, "That's my grade. After class is over."

31:41 Everyone just pulls out their phones and sits in the corner, and nobody talks to each other. Nobody wants to play sports. Nobody wants to like. Nobody wants to run around. Nobody wants to hang out. Everyone just like they're retreating back into that survival mode that they had for a year and a half, where they didn't leave their rooms. I remember back in the day, Mr. Richie Altobee Who was a major educator in the Five Towns. If anybody here went to Halb He wasn't in Halb in your time. He was in Darche in my time, and he ran a camp called Simcha Day Camp. And Richie's big thing back in the day—I'm talking about the 90s—he used to say, if a kid was a ball player, he wasn't nervous about it because he had energy, he was out, he was doing something. He's just pointing in this direction. He's got to take that energy and point in that direction. What's terrifying—and I remember when he said this to me when I was a teenager—he said, "What's terrifying is when kids have no energy at all and they just do nothing with their lives." And that's really what we saw. We saw kids who really retreated.

32:37 And not for insignificant reasons. It's understandable. I'll add a layer of complexity to your question. If we really think about the world since COVID The illusion of control really kind of went out the window for the last five years. I even think about what it's been like to be here in Israel over the last year and a half. Right. So you were your shanabet, right? So you were you know October seventh was real, right? You were here for it, and I mean. In that time, Hamas, Hezbollah, now Syria—in a ten-day period, like the entire Russia, Ukraine. It's almost messianic. It's a wild time to be living in history. And I think a lot of us feel like we need to be in survival mode. How do we reclaim that self? I think generally, what happens in these types of cases, and this might not be an exact answer to your question because I think it's a layered question that probably is unique for every single person. But generally, what happens is things stop working.

33:39 Systems fall apart when they don't work. Anytime you have a rift with reality, reality will come back and bite you. So if you try to show up, for example, to a marriage And you don't know how to be in self, you don't know how to process your own feelings, and you don't know how to be deeply connected to another, let alone be deeply connected to yourself. That system is not going to work very well. And then you'll start to see friction in the marriage. You'll see friction with the children. You'll see friction in a person's job. They're not able to hold down a job. They don't have that grit and persistence necessary to make it in life. And so what generally starts to happen is that as the negative impact piles up, a person is almost forced into a posture of looking at themselves. Now this is not always the case, because we all know people that are so in survival mode that it doesn't matter how high the negative impact is.

34:29 Their survival. They feel that for them to move out of this way of being is so dangerous that they can't. Those cases are tragic. But by and large, most people in their evolution, when things are going south They're able to say, "This is not working. What do I need to do differently?" And then remember that internal self that's always been here and has always been okay. It's that place you rediscover from within. Maybe the last question, because I do want to get to your question. The topic of today's share. Hi, I'm steely shrum from east brunswick. Last name. Shrum. Steely shrum. So I know shrum. What if you think you're in self, but you're really in survival mode? That's the hardest thing, right? Because it's hard to parse out, especially in relationships, exactly like. Everyone is sort of convinced that they're right. Any fight between a husband and a wife, each side thinks they're absolutely right. And if assuming that they're psychologically aware, people probably both sides, on some level, think that they're in self. The truth is, it's really hard to have integrity around this. It's really hard to be able to say, "I thought I was acting in self, but there is a trigger there that I wasn't paying attention to."

35:46 And I did hurt you from that place. And it requires a being an authentic person, b being a curious observer of self to know that I have stuff coming up, and then c the recognition to put that out there in the world and say this is something that I need to work on. Work with me while I'm working on it. Does that make sense? So I want to back segue back to your question just because I do feel it's a very important question. Would you mind asking it one more time? In the context of dating, I think you asked it In the context of dating, if you're going out with somebody and they don't have a sense of self, that can be really scary. And how do you like deal with that? So there's one thing I want to say about your question before I actually answer the question. Did everyone here notice the emotion word that she used?

36:33 Scary, right? That word is a really important word because of fear. While it's not a feature of self It is an important tool in our toolbox. It's a part of ourselves, and we need to know how to harness that tool. One of the worst things that you can do when you're dating is get advice. It's probably the worst thing you can do. And if you go to somebody who gives you advice That's not a person you want to go back to twice. There's a difference between going to somebody and saying, Hey, something is coming up for me. Can you help me process this, or can you give me some information that I might be lacking? If you go to somebody and you say, well, I'm in a relationship with someone, and you know, I'm noticing some stuff is coming up, and I'm getting anxious in this relationship. And if you hear a response like You're just nervous because things are getting serious. You'll be fine.

37:33 That's terrible. There's a reason that part came up. That sort of alarm bell went off in the system and said, "Hey, pay attention! Something dangerous might be happening here." There's nothing wrong with that part. That's a very beautiful part. The question is really, what's driving our car when we're dating? Are we in self using that part, or is that part in the driver's seat? And the self is in the passenger seat? And so, what we want to do in the ideal is date from a place of self. And there's a couple of reasons for this. One of the core features of self that we mentioned before is clarity. People who are in self are looking to date and pay attention to the person that they're actually dating. And I know that sounds obvious, but believe me, it is far from obvious. Because when you're dating There's this thing called infatuation.

38:26 Infatuation is a way of being way out of self. Infatuation is when I'm too scared to see you for who you really are, and I'm too scared to allow myself to show up as I really am, which means there's no authenticity and no vulnerability in that relationship. But she's amazing, he's amazing. And the problem is, what comes next? What comes when that veil of infatuation comes crashing down? I cannot tell you how many people over the years have told me Like guys or girls, I really like him, but. I don't know. I'm just not infatuated. That's a good thing. Deep emotional connection is not about infatuation. That romantic Hollywood feeling is not necessarily a feeling you should be looking for when you're dating. One moment, we'll just finish this. I'll get to you. When we are dating ourselves, we're paying attention to who the other person is, and we're paying attention to how we're showing up.

39:26 And when we're in self. The intuition that we have, and you all have used this intuition before in your life, the intuition tells you who is the person I'm sitting across from And I'll tell you what I mean. Do you remember when you were on the plane coming to NY for your shanah? Do you remember when you looked around the plane and said I don't know if I'm in the right seminary. So not everybody has it. Some people are very sure. About 50% of you again just went like this. I remember when I went to Mivasaret many, many years ago. I was on the plane saying I just made a huge mistake. I'll be very honest. I had met these guys from Ramaz in my senior year, and growing up in the Five Towns, I hated Ramaz. I was like a shorts and T-shirt type of guy, and Ramaz they had blazers that they wore to school with the school crest.

40:25 This was like the exact opposite of everything I believed in. And is anyone here from Ramaz? I just want to know who I offended. The I really didn't like Ramaz, and I met these four guys on the basketball team midway through my senior year, and they're like, 'Where you going? You're in Israel?' They're like, 'Oh, us too. That's awesome.' And I'm like, 'Oh, I made a big mistake.' And then I'm like, 'No, but I still decided to go.' And I'm on the plane, and I'm looking around, and I'm going like, 'Oh man, I blew it. I blew it.' And I'm like, 'I don't think I'd be friends with him. I don't think I'd be friends with him. I don't think I'd be friends with him.' I didn't know that I was in the right yeshiva until at Ben Gurion Airport. This is crazy. One of the guys got on the baggage conveyor belt and lied down like a piece of luggage and waited for someone to claim him.

41:12 And he kept going around. So the bit only got better, and I was like I am in the right yeshiva. And Beviser had always had a way of picking their guys. The even back then You went to schools, you went to camps, you went to sem. How did you know who your friends were going to be, more or less? And I'm not talking about the judgmental aspect, but you probably showed up right away and said, "I think that would be the type of teacher that I like. I think that would be the type of friend that I like." Where'd you know that from? That was your deep sense of self, calling on your intuition to say, 'Hey, I see you.' And I'm not sure that's a place that I would feel comfortable or that I would feel safe. Does that make sense? So you've employed this tool before. The key is that when you're dating, date consciously.

42:00 Pay attention to what's actually going on. And then when you're dating consciously, it comes up, then you're able to process it. And if something comes up that's beyond what you know about. Let's say he shares with you something that you're like, that's huge, right? So then you have what's called information deficit. So now go to someone who knows more than you and say, 'Help me understand what does this mean? What does it mean that he went through this? What does it mean that he went through a why? What can I be expecting? What type of questions would be valuable for me to ask?' Also, pay attention to your own internal sense of what you want to know here and how you feel about this. Because you're right; these are big decisions. Because I need to know if I can be complete with this person, and if this person, for whatever reason, is not capable of being in a complete relationship. That's not going to be a pleasant relationship to be in.

42:49 So these things can be scary. There's nothing wrong with them being scary. When self is in the driver's seat, you're making good decisions. Now I'm not going to lie to you. The inherent nature of all relationships is vulnerable. That's the beauty of all relationships. So if what you're asking is, well, how do I mitigate that vulnerability? I don't know that there's a good answer to that question. I think the price we pay for love is vulnerability. But. I think that we can learn how to engage that vulnerability in a healthy way. When we're operating from self, we can deeply connect with another person or we'll be able to notice that we can't. What does infatuation mean? What do you do when you say infatuation? What is that? There was a colleague I had in Mivasyaret many years ago. One of the Shnallav guys was talking to him.

43:45 About his girlfriend And how he wasn't able to concentrate in yeshiva because he was constantly thinking about these issues with his girlfriend. The guy was making fun of him, which wasn't the nicest thing to do. Let's say the girlfriend's name was Sarah. So he's like, the kol guy goes And every time the wind blows, it whispers the name Sarah. So I was hurt when he said that to me. And the girl's name was Eliza, and I married her. I think what he was highlighting was that there are aspects to our emotional being where people get deliriously high sometimes from these relationships. She's amazing, she's the best. She's a human being. Right? She's she's a human being And he's a human being, and everyone has their stuff, and that's okay. I think when we're infatuated, the key feature there is that we're really not paying attention to who they are.

44:59 Usually, it's more about what they represent. When we're infatuated, I'm infatuated with them because they represent, if I grew up and I wasn't a cool kid growing up, and now I'm dating the guy who was part of that cool. Where are you from? So I'm dating that guy who was part of that cool chavra, and he went to that cool camp in the summer. I don't know exactly which, like what What version of that I could describe for you, but it could be the. I don't want to do it, but you know, he went to MTA, and then he went to Shalvim, and now he's in. I heard he's very serious in Shulman Shiren Wayu, right? And so it means something to Marry that guy. So it's not about that guy anymore. It's about what he means to you. And now I'm just deliriously high that I've gotten that validation that I was missing growing up. So now I'm in a state of infatuation, as opposed to actually paying attention to the guy in front of me, which generally happens much less when you're in a state of infatuation.

45:56 Where does that come up outside of if this is a problem that's everywhere? In relationships, there's an infatuation of other. I don't think that what I'm about to say is true, but I do think there is truth to it. Somebody said to me, 'They said everyone is just living out their childhood pain.' I think that's extreme. I don't think that everybody is just living out their childhood pain. I think there's other things going on also. But I think it's fair to acknowledge that for many of us, we went through things as children, and we're trying to heal ourselves as adults. Sometimes we'll take jobs, just as an example That might be really. They might be a choice that could have a massive amount of negative impact that we're not processing, but it means something to us. I give you an example of this: to be the CEO of a company requires enormous amounts of sacrifice.

46:55 Think about the hours and the decisions that you have to make and the stress, the toll that it takes on a person. Why would somebody become a CEO? What exactly is that need? So maybe you'll say, again, I'm just making up a story. Let's say a person had a childhood where he felt powerless. They choose to become a very powerful person in their adult life. And they're not paying attention to the fact that they might be a CEO and they might be making millions of dollars. But two things could be true. Number one, maybe they're not spending any time with their family. And maybe when they do, they're coming home as that very powerful CEO who dominates people in a boardroom and maybe dominates people at their Shabbos table. And that's a really unpleasant way of being. I don't know if you ever had the opportunity to read Walter Isaacson's book about Steve Jobs. It is a terrifying book, a really truly terrifying book. It's about this thick, and Steve Jobs definitely transformed the entire world. He was a real revolutionary in technology.

47:54 But he was a disaster of a person. And he left a trail of devastation in his wake, and he was so infatuated with Apple that it didn't matter what he did to people. It didn't matter what he did at home. It didn't matter what he did to employees. So I would call that perhaps a type of infatuation. Is that a fair example? So it's not relationship specific. It's not. But we see it play out in a lot of areas of life. I think the word infatuation is probably specific to relationships. But that concept could play itself out in a lot of ways. How are we doing so far? Any other questions, comments, reactions? Let's say one more thing, and then I think finish up. You're finishing your shana benaf, and shana benaf's half. It's like we're done halfway through the year. Most of the girls in this room are going to be leaving.

48:48 Most of them. I want to give you some practical things to take away from this. Over the course of the next couple of minutes, things that you could be working on over the next six months, year, year and a half of your life, as you're either starting to date or thinking about starting to date, these are some actionable tips that I think are really important. The first thing, and I've said this line several times already today, but in order to be a mensch, in order to be a person It starts with curiosity. How do I show up to the world? How do people experience me? Try seeing yourself from the perspective of another. The really courageous people actually ask other people how they're experienced. That's a really hard thing to do But start to get curious about the way that you show up in the world.

49:45 What are some things about parts of myself that perhaps I was unaware of? Not because I'm a bad person, just because everyone has their blind spots. What are some ways of being that I have that might prove challenging in a relationship? For example, I'm 19 years old now, and I know that I have some fears around relationships. Start paying attention to that. Because I don't want to be dating from that place of fear. A good example of this might be I've been hurt before. I'm concerned that when I enter into a relationship, I won't allow myself to be wholehearted in the relationship and I'm going to hold back because I don't want to allow myself to be hurt. Which is probably not going to work in the long term. In order to be in a relationship, you have to be in the relationship. Get curious, recognize that fear exists, be conscious of it, be aware of it.

50:42 Another example of this: pay attention to the "I am not enough" There's inner negative beliefs that we have about ourselves. I am not smart enough. I am not from the right family. I am not from enough. I am not attractive enough. I'll be in a relationship, but I won't be capable of participating in the relationship in a healthy way. I'll be in a marriage, and it'll be a failed marriage. I won't be a good mother. Start paying attention to the 'I'm not enough's. Those are your fears, right? And then step number two. Is to meet those fears from a deep place of self And what that looks like is something like this. First of all, we can always do a reality check on our fears. Because a lot of times the fears were born when we were how old. Sometimes our fears were born. Take a second, even now as you're thinking about seven, eight, nine years old. Certain fears that we had, they're very young.

51:42 Even a fear that's born when you were 14 or 15 years old or 16 years old—I know it only feels like three or four years ago—but those are young. A teenager is a young child. So the first thing we can do is a reality check: Is that fear that I have an old fear rooted in a very young child that perhaps is no longer true about myself? The second thing we can do is parent ourselves from within. And this is something that's really important. As you're in the dating process or before the dating process, tend to those parts of yourself that are operating from a place of fear. And what that looks like is Number one Acknowledging that those parts are there Giving them space to express themselves Making sure that you clearly understand the role that they play in your life. Appreciating the role that they play in your life.

52:41 Really like acknowledging that you're not trying to get rid of those parts because there are no bad parts, and as we said before, fear might be a really important part when you're dating. But then ultimately Parenting that part by letting it know I am capable And I can manage this, and I don't need you to manage this anymore. So when we show up to our dates with whatever stuff that we have. I want you to know I got this, and I'm going to listen to you because you're an important voice in my life. But I am capable. I am a person who is connected. I'm a person who is capable of being in a whole and connective relationship. And that type of really important work that you do before you start dating is a really good way to answer your question because the more you're aware of your own stuff.

53:35 The more you're going to be aware of the way another person is showing up. Rav Avshi Weingard had a line that he said this past Shabbos and Svat. He said it to the Rashi of Mevaseret. He said, in Kabbalah I was not in Svat. Mevaseret was in Svat. A couple of shirim. We sent a couple of shirim at the time. They were in Svat. MMY was there this past Shabbos as well. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Mevaser does like tzvat, only by a couple shirum at a time. We don't like to take over. You guys don't go to that place. What's called Kman? Isn't there a place outside of tzvat that you always go to? I don't know what. Mtsuda. Mtsuda. Was nice. Where they It's tzvat. It's beautiful. Most of them stay someplace nice. Five of us were. If you'd like, we can unpack the trauma. We will.

54:35 It's pretty much how every shabbat meeting goes. I wanted to know how much self-control was in this moment right now. Thank you so much for saying that. She said that's how every shabbat meeting goes: unpacking the trauma. This is why I work in yeshiva. How do guys process their feelings? I go, 'How's it going?' Good. That's the whole thing. That's the whole meeting. You guys like it? It was chill. If it was good, it was gas. That's the whole. But that's the whole. What were we saying? Ravashi Weingard had this line that Rachelimenu in Kabbalah is called the Alma de Isgalia. She's the revealed world, and Leah is called the Alma de Iskasia, the concealed world. And Ravashi had this line. He said. And I think it's true for men and for women. He said, 'Everybody marries a Rachel, but they really marry a Leah.'

55:37 Everybody thinks they know what they're getting But there's always somebody like Leah, a concealed world that's underneath. I think that's true of men and of women. I think that's true of both. And I think knowing that we are okay And that we can be married, even under difficult circumstances. And we can make things work, and we can come back to each other repeatedly and work through things. That's what a healthy marriage is. A healthy marriage is two whole people who refuse to quit on each other. And the more you work on that, the more you access that infinite power of self. I think the more likely it is that you're going to be able to have a healthy and enduring marriage. There is a fair amount here that you can control because you can control at least fifty percent of the equation. And the more you are in self, the more you are focused inwards and building yourself up, the more you have the opportunity to be in a healthy and enduring marriage with another.

56:33 I'm Vanessa from Skokie. And I was wondering if coming back to yourself is such an individual process. How do you advise that each person does that themselves? Because it's such an enormous question, I'm going to just point you to a book that I think would be helpful for you. There's a book called Self Therapy. It's a really good book, and basically, it's an opportunity. There's a lot of questions in the book that'll really help you on an individualized level. Return to self. That's the short answer to your question. Who's the author? I don't remember offhand. I don't think that it was Schwartz that wrote it. Early maybe. I can look it up. That might be. That might be the. It might have been. I have to go back and look it up, but we can it's called self therapy. I'm sure you can find that online. But even was that J Early? Maybe, but I might be making that up. I have to look.

57:36 But I think perhaps a longer answer to your question is you're right. It's an individualized process. But again, it's well before Dick Schwartz ever uttered the letters IFS. Human beings existed for thousands of years, and we are all on this evolutionary process of returning to self. You see people that they're in their They're in their 40s and their 50s and their 60s, and you see they're different. How did they get there? They got there because life is an amazing teacher. I think that's why they say that Binyamin. Rav Avram ben A Rambam says that Binyamin's name was Ben Yamin. He was the son of days, meaning because he didn't have a mother, life was his teacher. This is what the Rav Ramban and Rambam say. Life itself will bring you back to self if you allow it to. Meaning, if you stay open, if you stay authentic, if you stay curious, and you say that's not working. How would I want to be different? How would I want to show up differently there? What would it look like to me to be less engaged or more engaged? Those types of things. I think just in general, if you're a growth-oriented person.

58:43 There's value in the analysis. There's value in all the questions and working on yourself and coming back into yourself, but also just in a very natural way of being a human being in process, and that's beautiful. If you're paying attention, you'll sort of learn. If you think about it, haven't you already done that? Think about who you were even five years ago. Are you even remotely close to that same person? Remember when you were in eighth grade, choosing to go to high school, and you thought you were big. You ever see eighth grade boys? It's the funniest thing in the world. We rule the school. The teachers are terrified of us. I'm like, no, they're not. You're 13. They could punt you. Like you're kickable. Like. It's like And they're also just in that Stage where their face is breaking out in acne and their voices say, 'Hi, my name is.'

59:37 Nothing about you is tough. And then you see that kid a couple years later. And he's a tenth grader in high school, and he's been humbled. Like you're already changing. So allow yourself to unfold. We'll stop here for today. Thanks so much for the opportunity to be here. I do want to point out, girls, very interesting. I've been working a lot off of therapeutic.