Noach - Staying Whole In A Fragmented World

2:27 That's not obvious. After the sin of Adam Harishon After the sin of Adam Harishon, there were no tools. Nobody had a tool. Nobody was able to do anything. So imagine that you now had to work the land in order to survive. First of all, let's start with that. Imagine you had to work the land in order to survive. You don't get to go shopping. That's not the way life worked. There were no supermarkets. You don't get to show up and flash your credit card and walk out with an entire bingo-sized shopping cart full of stuff. And in America, I know you have Costco. In Israel, we don't have it, and you have space to store stuff. It's very different. Did you ever stop and look at the shopping cart that your mother walked out of Costco with? It's like you have those. For me, growing up, I loved Costco muffins, and I'm talking about it's the beginning of this journey, right? That's not a good thing. But even the size of the muffin, that's not a serving size. That's like four serving sizes per muffin.

3:28 And each tray of muffins comes with a group of 20 muffins, right? And your mom buys three of them and keeps them in the freezer. That's a snack. That's not a snack. That's a meal, right? It's like a. I fight for every single person in this room. I want every one of you here. So I'm going to hold us all accountable. Because you can't drill a hole under your boat and think that it's not making a difference to every one of us. We're all contributing to the environment in the room. Those that are here, those that are not here, those that are talking, those that are locked in. Every one of us is making a contribution. We're keeping it here. Imagine if your survival depended on getting down in the dirt and digging with your hand and planting that seed. What's the feeling you might have?

4:23 I would imagine the feeling you would have is a tremendous amount of anxiety. A tremendous amount of anxiety, because you're literally doing it with your hands. We live in a generation where we have a lot of anxiety, but I don't think we understand this type of anxiety. If you plant, forget. Let's go even. Let's go after tools for a second. What if you plant And you have a bad. You don't have a rainy season. There were famines. People used to die for real. There is enough food in the world today to support the entire world. There should be no famines in the world. We actually pay farmers to throw out food. Back in the day, if there was a famine, everybody died. That was real. Kal v'chomer, if you lived. After the sin of Adam Harishon, when Adam Harishon was born, he went not to the fruit of the tree, but to the tree itself, and he was able to eat the tree. The tree tasted like the fruit.

5:22 Food was everywhere; nobody needed to work for it. But now you're living in this condition, and you know it's unnatural. You heard the stories that Adam Harishon lived in Gan Eden, and Gan Eden gave you everything that you need. That you had an abundance mentality. Listen to the psychology of it. You have an abundance mentality because I can get whatever I need in this world. That's the nature of other Marishon. That's pretty good. And now you're living with the impoverished mentality of if I literally don't dig the ground by myself, I will die. That's a tremendous amount of anxiety. That's the world Noach was born into. Noach was born into a post sin reality where there was a. Again, I'm using these words because they're 2025 words. Perhaps they didn't have this language back then. But there was an actual trauma Not like oh my god that was so traumatic, not hashtag trauma. No actual, what in the world is going on here? This is not working. The world was in such a state of frenetic anxiety because everybody was living with this impoverished mentality of what if we die because we can't get what we need? Does that make sense?

6:32 Comes along a person and he's named Noah. What does the word Noah mean? From a lashon of menucha, what does that mean? He's coming to comfort the world. He's coming to bring a sense of serenity. Why? Because it was understood when he was born that he was going to invent the first tools. That's a very big deal. We don't think of it as a big deal because we all grew up with shovels. We all grew up with a plow. We all grew up with these things. But there was a point in history where no one had these things, and the Medrash and Bereshis Rabba said that Noach invented farming tools. That's what he did. Until that point, they worked the ground with their hands. What does that mean? Listen carefully to these words. Noach was the first person in the world to move from suffering to structure.

7:25 Noach was the first person in the world. Who rather than staying in the suffering, and by the way, that's what a lot of people do. A lot of people are going through things in their life where they have an impoverished mentality, where they're showing up to the world and they say, "I don't know if I can get what I need here. I don't know if I'm capable. I don't know if I can work this ground with my hands." I don't know. I don't know. Imagine you're 20 years old. You're 19 years old, and you're going for your first job interview. It's scary, right? What's scary about that? You show up to an interview, you're quaking a little bit, right? Even though you know it's a layup because your father knew somebody who knew somebody, and they've already told you you're going to get the job, you're a little bit quaking. Why? Because you say, "I don't know how to do this job. How could I know how to do this job? I've never done this job before. What if I don't know what I'm doing? What if I fail?"

8:17 And the failure means something to you The failure on some level means I'm not adequate. I'm not enough. In a certain sense, it's a type of a fear of death. What if I'm not able to self-actualize? What if I'm not able to come into the world? And many people Many young women who have come to Torma Devora shrink in the moment. They shrink in that moment and they say I guess this is who I am. I guess this is who I am, and I'm just going to have to learn to manage this suffering. I'm going to learn that this feeling of inadequacy will never go away. I have no capacity to rise above it. And I'm just going to play the game of life very small because I was born into this chaotic situation. And make no mistake about it: everybody in this room, in their way, on their level, has some sort of chaotic situation.

9:07 And even if you haven't had it yet, at some point in your life, you will encounter this chaos that you feel smaller than, that you feel like it defines you. And some people take that chaos. That feeling of anxiety, that I'm inadequate, that I'm not going to be able to get the sustenance that I need, and they make tools. There's something that they use that chaos for. That chaos itself becomes the opportunity for invention. Does that make sense? There, some people, I'll give you an example of this in a moment. Some people are looking at this struggle and they're going, I guess this is who I am. And some people are looking at their struggle and they're going, there's an opportunity here to invent not only myself but to reorganize the entire way the world thinks about this chaos. There's something that I'm meant to invent to harness the power of this chaos.

10:03 Noah created a tool. That's a very powerful thing to do. He moved from helplessness to innovation. From suffering to structure. There's a line that gets thrown out. It often gets thrown out as a defense mechanism. I'll tell you what it looks like practically now. It's a line that gets thrown out as a defense mechanism. Something tragic happens to someone. They lose a loved one. They go through an illness. Someone loses a job. They're in a family where they can't provide for themselves. And then that young man or young woman They go like this. But it made me the person that I am today. No. You don't just get to say that. You don't get to throw that out. That's not one of those cliche lines that you get to just put on the front of your laptop. It made me the person who I am today. You got to earn that moniker.

11:00 If you want to become someone that you could say made me the person that I am today, that I went from that feeling of helplessness and I innovated. I rose above that struggle and I became a person. You should know that's years of work. If you're just like six months after the fact and you're like, yeah, but it made me the person that I am today. If you didn't do the hard work of looking inside of yourself and being in a real relationship, everyone could benefit from therapy. But not everyone has to go. If you went through something real and you say, no, I want to use this as an opportunity to really innovate and to really cultivate the person that I am. I want to change the world with what I went through. That's how great institutions start. There's somebody who sees somebody else die helplessly on the side of the road, and he goes, "I'm starting Hatsala."

11:51 There's somebody who has a special needs child, and they say, "I'm opening up Ohel. I'm opening up Ask. I'm opening up Shalva." There's somebody who's going through cancer, and they say, "I'm opening up Chai Lifeline." There's somebody who says, "I don't want Jews to be stuck on the side of the road anymore." I'm opening up Chaverim. There's somebody who can't pay for Shabbos, and he says, "I'm opening up Tomchay Shabbos." Suffering is the birthplace of innovation. Not feeling that you have enough is the birthplace of realizing I actually have an abundance, but I have to create the tool in order to harness that. The difference between the people that make it in life and the people that don't is not whether difficult things happen; it's how you respond after the rupture. It's what happens after everything in your life falls apart. I don't even remember what I said. Once I say it, it's out of my mouth.

12:47 The difference between those people that make it in life and those people that don't is not whether or not they go through hard things. Rupture will always happen. It's how you handle after the fact that chaos. Some people shrink. Some people rise above. Noah changed the entire world. Because when everybody else in the world was living with that existential anxiety that we're going to die, everybody in the world was living like that. Only one person came along and said, "But what if we made tools?" It sounds obvious to you now because you live in a world of tools. But if you think about it, people are innovating those tools all the time. Sometimes it's as radical as making the first plow. Other times it's taking something that's great and making it even greater. There were a lot of people that spoke about making electric cars. It took an Elon Musk to be the first person to make that innovation. And there's innovations that nobody in this room has even thought about that are happening all the time.

13:47 There's a piece of technology. It's actually also from Elon Musk. There's a piece of technology that they're working on developing right now with a chip that they will insert into your brain. It exists already. It's not theoretical. I know we're talking like it's futuristic. This exists right now, where you'll be able to control a computer just from your thoughts. You'll be able to play video games just from your thoughts. Now that's not the most impressive innovation. The most impressive innovation of this they actually think that this is going to be able to cure Parkinson's disease. That's an unbelievable innovation. Do you know that right now in Eretz Yisrael there's 20,000 amputees from this war? 20,000 is an enormous number. We talk about the people that La Alena lost their lives in this war. There's 20,000 people that lost limbs in this war. I was talking to a Talmud of mine today. We recorded it and shared it with the world.

14:43 A very dear Talmud who spent the last two years and is an Israeli soldier said that a member of his pluqa, a friend of his, was hit with shrapnel when a katusha rocket fell. And they literally had to pull shards of rocket from his body And he's still. It's not like they sent him home after that. He had shrapnel pulled from his body, and then he continued to stay in the fight. He's part of the plugar. He's not even considered one of the 20,000 people who are amputees. He's just a guy that got hit with shrapnel. What would happen to us if we got hit with shrapnel? So now these 20,000 amputees, there's a piece of technology they're bringing it here to Israel. They're talking about now being able to make robotic limbs that automatically connect to your brain, and you'll automatically be able to walk again just with a robotic leg.

15:38 Even now, they have unbelievable technology. My closest friend in the world, he's an amputee who lost his leg to cancer when he was a child. He has a leg. And one time I did steal his prosthetic leg, but whatever, this is a different story. He had two. I just stole one of them. I stole the extra and used it in Permsville. It was amazing. He had to step on his heel to bend his leg, and when he walked, you could tell that he was stepping on his heel, and that's how his leg was bending. Now he has a leg with a microchip inside the knee that calculates his rate of ascent and descent every one millionth of a second, and naturally moves his leg along with him. He had to ask a massive shayla, 'Am I allowed to wear that leg on Shabbos?' And the halacha is that he is allowed to wear that leg on Shabbos. He has to have, and this is pretty crazy. He plugs it in, like with a C charger.

16:37 He plugs it in, and he has an attachment in his car to plug his leg in. That's pretty crazy. And soon we're going to have even more than that—it's going to be attached to your brain. These innovations come from chaos. They come because somebody's suffering and somebody stepped up and said, "We don't have to live like this. We can rise above the suffering and create structure and change the world and bring a level of comfort and serenity to a place of tremendous anxiety." That is the role that Noach plays. So the external tool if you're focusing Means that there's a level of internal consciousness. That's what's really happening. When Noah creates a tool, it's an expression of human agency. I am not bound to the chaos that I was born into. I have the ability to transform function into form. I can make something in this world. It's another way of saying.

17:41 I can self-regulate because I'm capable of acting in this situation. Let's think about what anxiety is for a second. Don't raise your hand. I'm assuming the answer is everybody. I'll raise my hand on behalf of the group, and I'll certainly include myself in this. I struggle with anxiety. Most people probably don't know that. There are times where I'm really anxious. It took a long time to understand what to do with my anxiety. And now, Baruch Hashem, I've actually come to a level where I deeply appreciate my anxiety. My anxiety tells me that important things are happening in this world. But it's my responsibility when my anxiety comes up to know that even though I feel anxious because I don't know that I'm going to be able to meet this moment where it actually is I am capable of self-regulation. Because I actually do have enough to meet this moment, and this moment is pregnant with possibility. I might be able to do amazing things in this moment.

18:48 Is a little plug for something a little bit unrelated, but a little bit related. This is why, when we give our children everything, they never learn that they can self-regulate and they never learn how to develop tools and develop coping mechanisms of actually growing from tragedy when hard things hit. Adults look and judge the kids. Really, you're going to judge the kids? Where were they raised in your home? When COVID hit You girls were in seventh and eighth grade when COVID hit. When COVID hit, there were a lot of teenagers. That just like totally went into hibernation and did not know how to come out. I don't like the terminology that I'm about to use. It's not your terminology. It's not my terminology. I don't think it's nice. Nobody should use these words. I remember the first time I heard this terminology. After kids were allowed back in school I flew to America to do interviews for Mevasser, and it was a mess to fly back then. You had to wear a mask the entire flight, and it was uncomfortable. A 12-hour flight, a 15-hour flight to L.A.

19:55 And you're wearing a mask the entire time, it's really not pleasant. And then you show up in the schools, and they have to test you for COVID before you walk into the school. It's a mess. I walked into one school, I'll never forget this. I was talking to the kid and I asked, "How's senior year going?" And he goes, 'It's terrible. I hate my school.' So I'm so sorry to hear that. Why? He goes, 'This grade is full of NPCs.' No, I didn't know what the term NPC meant at the time. What's an NPC? I'll explain. An NPC in a video game. Is a non-playable character. It's just somebody who's like the scenery on the side. You can't engage with them. They can't do anything. They're just there. They're a non-playable character. So he, as I said, what's an NPC? He goes, it's a non-playable character in a video game. So I said, what does that mean that you have a group of NPCs?

20:42 A lot of kids just didn't come back after COVID. I said, what do you mean they didn't come back? They're here. He goes, no, they're not here. Because if you spend two years in your room doing nothing all day long, just being on Netflix all day long, these people literally did not come back into humanity. And as soon as the class is over, they just plug in and go to the side of the room and are back on their phones. And you can't have a normal conversation with them because they literally just shrunk in that moment. And there was a whole group of adults with this really judgmental attitude and go, "Kids these days have no grit and resilience." No kidding. Because we, not the kids didn't do anything wrong. Because we, the adults, made sure that kids didn't do anything hard. And if you don't ever do anything hard, where do you learn that you have the capacity to actually make something of difficult situations? There's a transition point in history we can talk about, but I can tell you, I know, and I won't say the name of the yeshiva, but I know one.

21:47 When I went to yeshiva in Israel, I'm talking about something much more regular. When I came to Israel for the year, we slept on Israeli mattresses. There was no air conditioning in my room. There was certainly no heating in my room. When it got cold in the winter, they gave us a box. It was like this big. It was on the wall. It was the heater of the room. It did not work except to suck all the moisture out of the room. So you woke up with a dry throat every single day. The food in yeshiva was terrible. And the yeshiva really provided very, very little. So you ended up going to the beis medrash because there was nothing else to do. There was no email. There were no cell phones. Actually, Ma'ishan Alef there was email. There was a computer room. We had a hundred plus guys in the yeshiva. There were four computers. And you got an email because what do you want to do on your computer? It's not like everyone had email back then. Everyone was keeping in touch with you. And anyone that you were going to keep in touch with was in Israel anyway.

22:47 We had dorm phones. We had actual dorm phones with cords on them. Do you girls know that phones used to have cords? You had to press buttons that made noises when you pressed them. Old people had those like rotisserie phones. We have to dial it for 10 minutes. At some point, you're like it's not even worth it to call this person. If you've got two eights and a nine in your number, we're never going to speak because I don't have to wait that much time for it to click back. Four computers. You got an email with the scores of the Knicks game. Guys would print them out in the bathrooms of yeshiva. There were stacks of paper, like fax paper, stacks of fax paper, and that was how you got your scores. You didn't have anything in Israel. And we would show up and complain. And then we would adjust, and then you started thinking to yourself, "Whoa" This is awesome.

23:36 But then, at some point, there was a yeshiva that went ahead and said, 'No, we're going to give American mattresses, and we're going to give central air, and we're going to give the most amazing food and the most incredible.' And you know what happened? It became a business. Now if I have a choice and I'm a young man who's going to Israel for the year, or a young woman who's going to seminary for the year, I don't want to go to the place that has the Israeli mattresses. I don't want to go to the place that has the box sucking the moisture out of the room. I don't want to go to the place where they serve like a real Israeli breakfast. And I'm not talking about Israeli breakfast in the Bal Hotel or in the David Citadel. I'm talking about the Israeli breakfast where you get a hard-boiled egg Like old-school Merkaz Rav cook. Like serious, serious chaval. We did that. We created a downy, soft generation, and then we wondered how come the kids don't have grit and resilience?

24:23 Don't take hard things away from people. That's where they learn to become themselves. That's why kids who take risks need to be celebrated. Because that kid who's doing that crazy trick with the skateboard, where they jump Down the bar in the middle of the stairs, and it's like the mother's in there going, "You gotta break your neck." Maybe. But what else happens when that kid learns that I can do that cool trick? They show up more capable in life. That's an amazing skill. We sat in judgment of all those kids. Those kids didn't do anything wrong. We sent our children to $10,000 a summer camps. What do you think they're providing for them? You think these $10,000 camps are providing a hard-boiled egg or a continental breakfast? Used to be, we went on RivLab buses. I shouldn't say the name of it. I don't think it exists anymore. Rivlab buses. If you grew up in the five towns back in the day, you knew what a Rivlab bus was, and that meant that if you were on a school trip, there was a 50-50 chance that you were going to actually make it to the school trip.

25:30 But more often than not, if you were on your way to Shea Stadium, Olav Ashlam, on the Van Wyck Yimachshemo, you were going to break down on the side of the highway. And then that was going to be what your day was. Your day was like, how was camp today? It was awesome. What was awesome about it? We sat in a tin can on the side of the van, Wick, and we just had the sickest time ever. You remember that? You remember going on the bus and sitting on the back of the bus and just bouncing up and down? And Lons like, unless you have a coach bus, I'm not going on there. I have to have somebody fanning you while you're doing it. Don't turn around and complain that your kids are incapable of handling life if you made a situation in life where they never have to handle everything. There's something even more subtle, and I want to point it out because I think it's valuable. There's something even more subtle than this: not being okay with your children feeling their feelings.

26:24 Trying to find the silver lining. It's okay for kids to go through something hard. There's a gift that you can give your kids if your kids come and say, "I'm in a lot of pain. This is really hard." You want to hear a real gift? Sit with that child and be okay with the fact that they're really having a hard time, and don't solve it for them. Don't call the teacher, and don't call that friend's mother. Don't do that. Just sit there with them. Let them have an honest-to-goodness painful moment where they're just sitting there going, 'This is hard.' And you go, 'Yep, it's really hard.' And then you know what? You know what the kid learns? I'm allowed to have hard feelings. Hard feelings won't kill me. And then they're capable of doing things. It's okay that it's hard. It's good that it's hard. It means that you're growing. I'll give you an example of this.

27:12 I have a daughter who, at some point in her life, and girls do this, guys do not do this. Guys just punch each other in the face, and I would choose that every day of the week over this thing. Do you ever have a situation where either it happened to you or you saw other people doing it where a girl got excommunicated from the group? Do you realize how vicious that is? She's not part of our chevra anymore and there's backtalk conversation. It's awkward because she wants to be with us, but we don't want her to be. We don't know how to say it. Do you know what that girl is going through when she's been excommunicated? She's been put in chayyim from the group. Do you remember the trauma of ninth grade when you're trying to figure out who your friend group is? So I had a daughter who was going through it. She had switched. She was in elementary school with all these girls. She was friends with a lot of them. Ninth grade, she went to a different school. We decided to pull her and put her in tenth grade into a different school. She went back with a lot of her old friends. It was a complex social dynamic.

28:13 The leader of the group said she hasn't been with us for a year, and now what? All of a sudden she's going to come back and be in our group now. And it was really hard. And she came home one day and she sat. I'll never forget that she sat on the edge of my bed and she was really crying. She's a mother now herself. She was really crying at that time. And I wanted. And I've never had a bone in my body that wanted to hurt another human being, but in that moment. I didn't just want to kill the girl. I wanted to kill the whole family. Now it's many, many years later, and my daughter is a mother now. And Baruch Hashem, she's happily married and she's living her own life. And it's awesome. I have to tell you. Whenever I see that girl Who's married now herself and is a fine person, but deep inside the recesses of my heart, a shadow is lurking.

29:07 And if something ever happens to that girl, I fully expect that the police will come looking for me. As for Shalom, I would never do anything like that. But the hardest thing in the world is to sit there. Watching the people that you love in pain and allowing them to have a really difficult experience. And in that moment, all I could do was sit on the side of the bed with her and say, "I'm so sorry. This is so hard." That's an awesome gift to give your kids because you know what the next sentence is? The next sentence, and that next sentence doesn't get spoken sometimes for a day or a week or a month or six months or even years. But you know what the next sentence after that is? Whoa! I did a really hard thing And I actually grew from it. I can actually say about myself that I grew from it.

29:56 How does this happen? Where does the chaos of Noach come from? I'm living in a world where I have to plant my own seed and dig the ground, but I want to take a step back. Noach is born into a world that not only has to plant for themselves but has that impoverished mentality. There's something even deeper. Noach is born into a world where the self is already fractured. That's what happens when you sin. The impact of sin is not that you're a bad person. The impact of sin is now you're fragmented, you're fractured. I don't know who I am anymore. Do you remember that time Summer after tenth grade, where you crossed the line that you promised yourself you wouldn't cross? You know what I like about you? You're so honest, you can't help it. Saw it on the Shabbaton too. You gasped all the gasps that a lot of girls in this room were not willing to gasp out loud, but you spoke for a lot of people. Don't be embarrassed.

31:19 Good for you. Do you remember after you crossed that line for the first time, the feeling? I don't even know who I am anymore. It's like a certain distance you have even from yourself. It's like after you cross that line, you don't want to see the people that you love. Why is that? What happened in that moment? It's not God judging you. Who said shame? It's you judging you. It's like you lost a piece of yourself in that moment. You got fragmented. There's you, and then there's this person you're acting like. Deep sense of being fractured in the world And the more disconnected a person becomes from their inner world The more that inner world you're disconnected from starts to control your life. This is a real thing that happens. Every one of us has a poison box. You know the poison box. You all know the poison box. The poison box is all the things that you don't want to think about, so you lock it real tight in that box and you shove it deep inside of you. You never want to talk about it. It's that thing that you know is there, but you don't want to acknowledge that it's there. That's fine, except for one problem.

32:30 You're living from within yourself. The water inside of you is being poisoned by that box, and so you keep nourishing yourself from this box. What do you think happens if over time you don't acknowledge that you have something inside of you? What type of chaos do you bring out into the world? And then we turn around and we go. It's our husband's fault. It's our children's fault. It's my boss's fault. It's this friend's fault. It's this seminary's fault. It's this country's fault. The reason we externalize and blame everybody else is because we don't want to take ownership over the inner chaos that's occurring in our life. And then we're showing up to the world in a way that hurts other people. It's not by accident that Noah's generation was a completely lawless generation. That's a product of the external chaos manifesting itself from the internal chaos.

33:23 Do you know that there's a law in California today that if you steal under a thousand dollars It's decriminalized? I walked into a CVS with a talisman of mine. I walked into a CVS and this talisman turned me. I had no idea that this law was here, and I got the thing that I wanted to get. It's under lock and key. Half of CVS in LA is under lock and key. Because if you just walk out with it, they can't do anything. And I didn't know this, so I'm walking to the register with this Talmud, and as a joke, he said to me, 'Goes, are you paying for this?' And I looked at him and I said Is there a system I don't know about? I'm definitely deeply Jewish. If there's a system I don't know about, if there's some dance deals where Jews are allowed to go into CVS and just take what they want. Sign me up, I will sign whatever fraudulent thing I need to sign. I'm gonna be there for that. And he says he goes, no, they can't do anything to you now if you walk out with it. I was like, what do you mean they can't do anything? He's like, they can call the cops, and if the cops get here on time, the cops can say put it back, but they can't do anything.

34:31 That's an insane amount of lawlessness. Now why? Why? Why are people behaving this way? Why are people in the times of Noach behaving this way? It's a very simple equation. Because if I'm fragmented from the time of Adam Harishon and I'm living in a world where I can't get what I need, I'm going to externalize that chaos in my life. I'm going to take my pain out on other people, and then I'm going to blame those people and I'm going to blame the system for exactly what's happening inside of me. People do this all the time. It's why marriages fall apart. It's why relationships with children fall apart. It's why people can't hold down a job. The moment your boss comes to you and says Can I give you some constructive criticism? Now, why does your boss want to give you some constructive criticism? He wants you to be better at your job.

35:19 I was talking to the Rasha Shiva of Mevasseret today. He shared this story with me, and I think he would not mind if I shared it. He said the rasha shiva of Mevasseret was a lawyer before he moved to Israel and became rasha shiva. He was a lawyer in one of the top five law firms in New York. It's called Wild Gotchel. Before that, he had some summer internship, and I can't tell you the name of the law firm because it was the waspiest name ever, and I couldn't remember it. But it included the words O'Connor, so it must have been a deeply not Jewish law firm. I'm sure all the lawyers were Jewish. Not the people whose names were on the top. He said that it was his first, like it was a very chashuv internship that he got. And they asked him to write a draft, and he wrote a draft, and there were spelling mistakes and grammar wasn't correct. And they called him in for his midsummer review, and they said, 'This is terrible. We did not expect this type of work from you. You're coming from NYU with unbelievable grades. We thought you were going to be a superstar. This is pathetic.'

36:19 And he said he was so grateful for that. He said he did so well the second half of the summer because he said, 'Now I know what game I'm playing.' And because of that, he ended up getting this amazing job offer from them, from the same company that Midsummer said we don't know why we hired you. Constructive criticism means that somebody cared enough to pull you into an office and say, "Hey, this is what we're looking for from you." But if you're in so much pain that you can't take any feedback Not from your boss, not from your husband, not from your children, not from members of your community. If you can't take any feedback because you've got a world of chaos going on inside of you, you're going to end up hurting people a lot. And that's exactly what happens in the times of Noach. That's the generation that Noach is born into, and that's the generation that Noach is meant to comfort.

37:10 Without integrity Morality always collapses. If you don't have enough integrity to live from a deep place of self. The moral code of any civilization will always collapse. So, what do we do? Practically, in an actionable way, what do we do? I want to tell you Noah's response. He built a teva. When you were younger and you heard about Noah building a teva, what was the story you heard? Noah built a ship. You probably had some pretty obvious questions. Noah built a ship. It took him 120 years to build. There were lots of animals in that ship. How did they all fit? I don't understand. If the entire world, remember that point where you realized the story was deeper, but you didn't know what to do with it. Like, does the story of Noah actually make any sense? The entire world was destroyed, but somehow Noah was on that ship, so it didn't impact him. Even the Titanic, which I'm imagining was a better ship than the Teva.

38:12 Even the Titanic was sunk by an iceberg. If there's a flood that's raging that destroys the entire world, what are the chances Noah's Tefillah was going to survive? Did you know I saw a clip? There's a guy in India who's building a Tefillah right now. It's epic. That's like amazing. And the whole world is making fun of him, and even I'm making fun of him, but a little bit. I'm going, wait, is he right? Because they also made fun of Noah, and then everybody died. So I'm thinking like, maybe I should move to India. But if I don't What does it mean that Noach built a teva? It means And I think this is again, the Torah is so profound and it teaches us so many important lessons. It means that I can live within the flood of this world and not be consumed by it.

39:03 It means that I have a place that I can go. Where no matter what's happening around me, when I turn inwards, there's a tefah inside of every one of us where I get to make boundaries, and the chaos of the world remains out there. And I'm okay in here. At a He's not exactly a Talmud. Originally, he was my camper many years ago. He never taught him Torah. But we had a good relationship. And a couple of years ago, we had a conversation. He was learning here in Eretz Israel, and I ran into him on the street. I said, "How you doing?" And he said to me, "He said I'm doing good." Did I tell you this story? I said, "I said you know I'm doing good." I said, "That's good." He said it in a way that invited a little more. I said, "That's good."

39:58 Seemed like something's going on. He goes, "Yeah" I'm learning that I'm a house. " And I'm. I'm like, I can sort of relate to that, put on a little holiday weight. Also, what do you like? What do you mean? What do you mean you're a house? I'm about to start shaduchim, and I realized I'm a house and I have a basement. I don't like to visit that basement very much, but if I'm going to invite somebody to live in my house with me, I've got to know that there's a basement, and I've got to be willing to explore that basement. It's a good thing to learn about. That's pretty good. And he goes, I also need a label maker because I need to label all of my stuff so that when somebody else moves into my house, I know what's my stuff and what's their stuff. And I'm like, okay, that's pretty good.

40:50 I need to know that my house has a door and that door has a lock. Just because somebody knocks doesn't mean they can walk in. They can walk in when I invite them. And if they're not behaving in a way that I feel comfortable with, it's also okay for me to sometimes say. I need you to leave. This isn't working for me. And I said "Seems like therapy is going really well for you." And he said, "Yeah, it is." I like that, Marshall. I like knowing that when everything is chaotic around us We can rise above and find a safe space within ourselves to really. I don't mean this in like the therapeutic type of way, but to really just." Be okay. I can be whole even when everything around me is not. Remember that first question that we said all the way back in the beginning. What does it mean that Noah was ish sadik tamim?

41:45 You know what I think tamim might mean. Tamim might mean that when everything in the world is falling apart I live with the deep knowledge that I'm whole and I'm okay. And even though around me there's a lot of chaos, and even though everybody around me has this impoverished mentality, I have really strong boundaries that are able to keep the flood out of my life. And within those boundaries, I have responsibilities to take care of things. That's why all the animals were in the teva, and that's why Noach's job in the teva was to take care of everyone in the teva. Because that's what we do when we build strong boundaries. Now it's true Noach fell short. Of perhaps a larger aspiration That larger aspiration that Noach didn't do was he didn't bring the entire world into his teva. And we have to know that that's possible. We have to know that when we're so okay that we can even live with people in our boundaries that are not okay.

42:50 And there is a lofty goal. That's a very lofty goal to be able to say that I'm okay with myself. Even when other people aren't okay around me, it doesn't mean that I have to push them away. That was Avraham Avinu. That's why Avraham Avinu was a greater tzaddik than Noach, because Avraham Avinu was able to look at the most wicked people in the entire world and he was able to daven for them. That's why his name was Avraham. He was Av Hamon Ga'imon. All the people in the world—if you were from stone and you were wicked—he was able to say That's okay. You have a place within me. The biggest tzaddikim in the world have such a deep sense of self. You know who they love the most. They love the rishayim of the world. That's why all the stories of the Balshemtov were that the Balshemtov was madly in love with the people that weren't the top level people.

43:39 But say there you learn in yeshiva. Good for you. What about the guy that doesn't? What about the guy that can't? The biggest tzaddikim they want everybody to be in their mechitzas. They want to expand their mechitzas. Risholm of Freifeld Zeichertzadik Levracha was defending Rishayim of Shayaoshov. He was a tremendous person. When he was younger, he was sent on a mission by the Gedolei Hamoreh in America to go to Eretz Yisrael. Shlomo Freifeld was a Talmuder of Huttner, and Rav Huttner told Rav Shlomo Freifeld, "When you go to Eretz Yisrael, you must go to the Chazon Ish. You must visit the Chazon Ish." And Rav Freifeld had a diary. At the end of every day, he wrote in his diary what he did that day in Eretz Yisrael on behalf of Rav Huttner. And he went to visit the Chazon Ish, and the entry that day in Rav Freifeld's diary he wrote, after seeing the Chazon Ish. A gadol is a circle. The larger the gadol, the larger the circle, the more people he encompasses. When you go to the real tzedikim, you know who's there. It's not the elite.

44:35 It's everybody. When you went to the chasenish, it was everybody. There are stories of the chasenish that are amazing. My favorite story of the chasenish is about these old, fantastical stories of people who asked him questions about surgery and somehow he knew. I don't like any of those stories. The story I like is about two Russian immigrants, a married couple, who came to Israel. They needed to open up a makolah to survive. They didn't know how much they should charge for food in the makolah, so they went to the chazanish. Everybody went to the chazanish. They went to the chazanish, and the chazanish said, "Come back later." They came back later, and the chazanish sat with them. They made a list of everything that they were going to sell in the makolah, and the chazanish told them exactly what to charge. Girls, the chazanish was the gadol hador. If you read the teachings of the chazanish, they were astronomically brilliant. And he never learned in yeshiva. It was all self-created. He was off the charts brilliant. The biggest tzaddikim loved the simplest Jews, and nobody was out of their mechitzas.

45:37 Because if you have a deep sense of self, then you don't need to be judgmental of anyone else. And everyone's always like, "But aren't there people that just can't be?" Yeah, sometimes that's true, but not because of them, but because of us. Because if we were truly okay, there's nobody that we couldn't invite in. And let's say areenu. And I'm saying this because I'm sitting with a group of future Jewish mothers and leaders of Klal Yisrael. If we keep holding hands really tight in that wedding. And we're protecting the kallah because only the best friends are in the inner circle, and we don't let anybody else into the inner circle because we don't want a chassid shalom to have a negative influence come into our inner circle. If we keep holding our hands very tight Then we don't get to turn around and wonder why people are not wanting to be at the wedding.

46:27 We need to create situations where we loosen our grip and invite people in. I was thrown out of elementary school in fifth grade. And Rabbi Bender took me in. And people would say today, how could you take a kid that got thrown out of Haftor in Tadarche? How could you go from a co-ed school into a black hat school? Aren't you afraid that Berg is going to have an influence on those kids? Could say that. Or you could say what Rabbi Bender said. You could say maybe Or maybe the influence will go in the other way. Maybe everybody will grow. Maybe everybody will see something different, and maybe it'll be amazing. And it was It was amazing. It was amazing for me. I'm sure there are kids in my class that were exposed to things because of me that they otherwise never would have been exposed to. Some kids in my class didn't have a television; they came to my house to watch TV.

47:22 Nobody went off the derech from coming to my house to watch TV. But if I'm here talking to you today It's because I was in class with those guys. And you might say, "Come on, you're exaggerating. You were in fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. What type of impact could they have had on you, girls?" The greatest gift that I ever had in my life is in my lowest moment. Rabbi Bender opened up the teva and he said, "Come on in. There's a flood outside. You should be with us." And then I learned Hey, there are people in this world who take you in when there's a flood outside. Become someone who's okay enough to take other people in. That's the world we're trying to create. Noach was a big tzaddik. He was whole even when the world was fragmented. He just wasn't as whole as Avram Avinu, and that's the difference between Noah. There is a covenant of Noah, but there's also a covenant of Abraham.

48:10 A Jew is different than a Gentile. Why? Because many, many years ago, our ancestor, the first Jew, said, 'My teva is so strong that wherever I go, everybody is welcome into my tent.' That's an awesome teva to build. Yiratzum from the avinu shabashamayim that we should be zeiched to be okay enough to know that I have all the resources that I need within myself to be able to be a tava for everybody else in Klal Yisrael.