Vayigash - Compassionate and Effective Mussar

2:12 I arrived in Los Angeles on Friday to the news that there was a rocket attack over my house. And it puts things in perspective. Things get calm. Things heat up. I just want to share with you, having nothing to do with tonight's shear, but I just want to share with you how much it means. To every single Jew in Eretz Yisrael To know that you're with us—it's not a small thing. I have I have chaverim, I have talmidim that are in the army, that are in Gaza. That are in the borders of Lebanon. I unfortunately already have people that I know that have sacrificed their lives for our country. And to know that you're with us I know you might feel like it's nothing. You might feel like it's just like Eretz Yisrael's in our thoughts. But for those of us that live in Eretz Yisrael, I want you to know it's no small thing.

3:17 And whenever we hear that there's people saying Tzilim A chaver of mine in a very beautiful way, he doesn't know what he's saying, but he was just like I'm not into this whole thing of going he's coming to Eretz Yisrael. He's I'm not into this whole thing of Visiting the bases of the Chayalim It hurt me so deeply to hear him say that because that's such a distant way of thinking about it. It's such a removed way of thinking about it. These are our children. They are children's friends. They are Talmidim. It's very painful to hear when someone says that. And I think most people are not like that. But just even by way of introduction Just to recognize that this is where we are right now in history. I want to speak about the first Rashi in Parshas Va'yigash. Pesuk says, 'Va'yigash, I love Yehuda.'

4:15 Yehuda approached Yosef HaTzaddik, not knowing that it was Yosef HaTzaddik. Va'yomer, and he said, 'Be Adoni, please, my master. Yedaber na Avducha' Va'azne Adoni. If I can speak into your ears, valyichar apcha ba'avducha, and please don't get angry at your servant. Kikamoycha keparo For you are like paro. And Rashi over here gives a number of pshatim. I'm only going to speak about two of them tonight. But Rashi here gives a number of pshatim that I think are very relevant for us. The first thing Rashi says is Kikamoycha keparo Choshev ato be'enai, kamelech. Zev pshuta. Rashi says the simple explanation, the pshat of the pasuk. In my eyes, Yehuda is saying to Yosef HaTzaddik, as the viceroy of Mitzrayim. You're like Paro; you have the same Same chashivos. Another pshat in Rashi. I'm skipping a little bit. Is the exact opposite pshat. Davar acher, Rashi says, "ma paro geizer ve'einu mekayim" Just as Paro decrees. But he doesn't necessarily fulfill his decrees. He's not honest.

5:32 Mavtiach, the ino ose, he makes hptachos, he makes promises, but he doesn't do what he promises. Af atakein So to you V'rizu h'isimas ayin Sh'amarta l'sh'mein encha alav. Is this setting an eye, as you said, that you wish to set your eye upon him? Is this what it means to take Binyamin? So we have two very different pshatim in Rashi. The first pshat is You're awesome. You're like Paro. You're a person of chashivas. The second pshat is exactly the opposite. You're like Paro in that you don't keep your word. You said bring Binyamin, and now look what you're doing. So I want to speak about these two pshatim and Rashi from our perspective. Everything that the Torah says, every word that the Torah writes, every word of Rashi is chashuv. And these are lessons for us. These are not just philosophical things. These are lessons for us.

6:37 So let's first look at the beginning of Rashi. What does it mean to give muster to somebody? And really, when I say to give muster to somebody, I don't mean to somebody else. Really, I mean what does it mean not only to speak to somebody else but to speak to ourselves? How do we speak to ourselves? This is a beautiful, beautiful pshat that I heard many years ago from Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter says, when you're giving somebody mussar, you have to be very careful. A person needs to be well enough to receive mussar. L'marshal Years ago, many years ago already, it's going back almost ten years ago. I got very, very sick. I ended up in the hospital for a month. There was a certain stage where it was mamish sakonis nefashos. Rebbe Nachman blessed me, and Baruch Hashem, I was given good care and Baruch Hashem, I'm healthy.

7:46 But I was in the ICU in Hadassah in Kerem Hospital And it's a scary thing if you've ever been in the ICU. You can tell the difference if you're in the regular hospital or you're in the ICU. In the regular hospital in Hadassah in Kerem So they have very sweet Sfardi nurses. You know I'm talking. You know like you know what I mean. Sfardi nurses like Israelis have a beautiful, especially these wonderful Israeli Sfardi nurses. They have a sweet way of speaking to you. If they're giving you blood or putting in an IV, it's like, come here in the Shamala. They're very They're very sweet. They're very kind. They're very gentle, and they're apologetic if they don't get the vein. And I was in the regular part of the hospital for the first week, but my condition deteriorated. They moved me into the ICU. I don't mean to offend anybody, but you could tell that you're in a different section of the hospital because the nurses are Russian. In the ICU Thank you very much for coming with me on that. By the way, a bunch of you just did this. A bunch of you just, and the Russian nurses. Not that they're one, they're wonderful people, they're nice people, but the Russian nurses like when they're giving me my IV in the morning, so they grab your arm and they jab you.

8:59 And I'm like, ow! And they're like, stop complaining! You're dying! And I was like, the Rav of my shul came to visit me, and he saw this nurse, and she was like, "Mamash, beating me up!" "Could you be a little bit more gentle with him?" And she's like, "No, this is important." Like it was very like. And then when I Baruch Hashem was out of the ICU, I was back to the Sparty nurses. I was like, "It's so nice to see you again." I couldn't have surgery until the end of the summer. I went into the hospital for a month at the beginning of the summer. And the doctors wanted me to wait until the end of the summer to have surgery because they said your system needs to get less inflamed. And you need to be healthy. You need to be healthy before you could have surgery. It's counterintuitive to think of ourselves that way. But we need to have a baseline level of health because when they cut you open The recovery time is very difficult.

9:52 And we see this today. We see especially when it comes to teenagers, but really when it comes to all of us. That if we give somebody mussar and they're not in a place to take that mussar and they're not strong enough and they don't have a strong enough sense of self to be able to hear Again, a constructive criticism said in a kind way. But if they're not at a certain level of health, then the mussar could Chasam Sholom kill. Rav Shlomo Freifeld, Zechezadek Levrachu, was the founding Rosh Yeshiva of Shaiyoshev, quoted from his Rebbe Rav Huttner, the Rosh Yeshiva of Chai in Berlin. And it was a Talmud of the Alter of Slabodka, and he himself had learned in Slabodka. He said the reason why Nevardik mussar in America never became popular, and Slabodka's mussar became so popular Is because in Nevardik they constantly told you that you were a nish In Slabodka they told you Gadlus Adam You're a child of the Rebbeim Nisholim And he said a person has to be a zich before they're a nish.

10:48 A person has to be something before they could be told they're a nothing. So in Europe, when a person had a baseline level of self-esteem, the Alter of Nevardeh could come to his Talmidim and say, "You're a Nish, you're a Nish." But to come to America, Rovner said, when kids have such low self-esteem, and to tell a kid you're a Nish, it'll mamish kill them. First, you have to tell them they're a Zich before you tell them they're a Nish. And we see that this is true. We see that today, La Aleinu, there are so many children And when I say children, I mean us. I mean myself. That if chas v'shalom we come to a child who's not ready to hear And we say a negative thing That negative thing if the child does not have enough of a sense of self, if the patient is not healthy, the child has the capacity to be killed by the mussar that we're giving.

11:41 And this is what's happening inside of many of us. There's something called an inner critic. And I imagine that if we pulled the room. And we had an anonymous poll, and I asked you, level one to ten, how strong is your inner critic? I imagine that for many of you, the answer would be way too strong. There's a certain sense that we have of being real with ourselves means being nasty with ourselves. What do you mean? Rebbe? I hear this all the time, Rebbe. I'm finally being honest with myself. Don't you want me with myself? You're not being honest with yourself because you're being cruel to yourself. We say avinu ha'avar rachaman ha meracheim racheim alenu. The same bili benu lahav and lahasta. To know requires recognizing that compassion is not the opposite of truth. If a person looks at themselves and they're just constantly beating themselves up, and they say, "I'm being honest with myself," you're not being honest with yourself. You're being cruel to yourself.

12:45 And if you're looking at yourself through the lens of cruelty If the glasses that you have on are colored with the tint of self hatred. That's not called honesty. It doesn't give. I know this is a dangerous word to say in America because it's used in a very dangerous way. But it doesn't give the appropriate context to what's actually happening. I'll tell you what I mean. You have a guy in yeshiva. I'll make it a guy so it's easier for everyone here. It's like this, then. It's like the guys. It's not us. It's the guys. You have a guy in yeshiva and he's staking and he's doing great. And then one night, he gets a phone call from a friend to go to a place that he knows he shouldn't go, and that he hasn't been to in six weeks or eight weeks. And in a moment of weakness, a ruach stus comes into his head, and he makes a decision to go to that place. But he promises himself, "I'm not going to do anything."

13:40 " You know how you lie to yourself? It's like a little bit at a time. You ever do that? I'm not really talking to him. I just need to check in with him. You know that move that you do? It's like a It's a little too close to home. We'll keep it with the guys. Make it a little bit easier for us. We're not really talking. We have to run an NCSY event together. But we made the darim and we're very careful about it. But now that it's afterwards, I don't know. Maybe it's shy. I'm not sure. I'm going to ask somebody. I just got that phone call today. That's why. So the guy says, "I'm going to go to that place. I'm not going to do anything, Rebbe. You'll see. I'm not going to do anything. I'm not. It's not where I am anymore." But then something happened, and he ended up doing the thing that he promised himself that he wouldn't do. When he comes to Yeshiva Sunday morning and he's talking to his rebbeim and he's like, "Yeah, I'm a shaget. I'm a terrible person. I promised myself I wouldn't do it, and then I ended up doing it again."

14:32 So, and he thinks he's being honest with himself. He's not being honest with himself because there's no compassion in that entire conversation. And if I ask him, 'Tell me, what made you go? What made you make that initial decision to go to that place on Thursday night?' So he's like, well, my friend invited me, and I didn't feel like I could say no to him. And why didn't you feel like you could say no? Because I've been friends with him forever, and I feel already like, even though I'm making this move in my life to decide to become maybe a little bit more religiously inclined, and maybe to make certain decisions. But I'm also feeling, and this is real. I'm feeling a little bit lonely, and I'm feeling a little bit scared that maybe if I make that move, I'm not going to end up with any friends, or even if I do end up with friends, but it's going to be like those guys. And I always promise myself that I'm not going to be one of those guys. And you're going through something, so I made the decision to go out of fear that I would lose my friends. And then what happened after that? Everyone was doing it, and I was feeling excluded, and they were judging me.

15:21 That's much more honest because it's real and compassionate. It's giving context to what's actually happening. The emphasis is that when we start giving musar to a person, Yehuda is about to give a fiery musar to Yosef Etzad. So the simple pshat that Rashi said is, "You're like Paro." You know that it's like if you ever say You ever say to a rebbe or somebody or a teacher, and you start off and you go "I mean this in the most respectful way possible. You know how the next words out of your mouth are atrocious. You know I'm talking about. Like when everyone comes and they say with all due respect, the next thing is going to be like every rabbi whenever they hear the words with all due respect, they brace themselves. Okay, this is going to be bad." The simple shot is he's coming and saying you're like Paro. We have a tremendous amount of respect for you.

16:16 But then the next thing you're going to say is going to be nasty. So what's the point of saying that you're like Paro? The Terez's that Yehuda was a psychological genius. He was a psychological genius. He understood. I'm giving Musar to somebody. The first thing I need to do is not butter them up. It's not with all due respect. He's telling him the way that I see you is like a paru. The way I see you is that you're big. You're massive. You're huge. You're amazing. And this behavior is ainol levichvaydo. This behavior is not you. I can't imagine that this is you. Do you know the difference? When a rebbe calls in a talmid, I'm talking about the words that we have within ourselves. When a rebbe calls in a talmid and he says to him This is not you. This behavior doesn't suit you. It doesn't fit you. I don't see you that way. You're much bigger than your lowest moment.

17:08 So the talmid, what does the talmid hear? The talmid hears, 'Rebbe believes in me. Rebbe sees me differently than the way I see myself. I have to borrow my rebbe's eyes.' Because the eyes that I look at myself with are the eyes that led me to this behavior. Because the way that we see ourselves ultimately becomes the way that we behave. If a rebbe Chas v'Shalom calls in a taliban says, "How could you do this? You're destroying the Talmud." What do you mean? How could you do this? It's understandable that he could do this. He felt like a piece of garbage, so he acted like a piece of garbage. There's a rebbe in a certain yeshiva who's a very dear friend of mine. And he had a boy who cut morning seder to go. He went to buy some sort of sporting goods thing, and he had to buy it in Tel Aviv. It was like a whole ma'isah.

17:56 And the boy didn't want the rebbe to know that he was going to that place. He's supposed to be in seder. So he messaged the rebbe and he told the rebbe, "I'm going. My uncle's making a bris, and I have to be at the bris." The rebbe didn't know any better, so the rebbe said, "By all means, enjoy the bris." But then one of the boys, like I don't know if you know this, but boys like accidentally give stuff up all the time. You know that move. They're like the Rebbe walks in, and they're whispering and she'er. But there is that one guy who has his back to the Rebbe, so he whispers the thing out loud, and the Rebbe overhears. The Rebbe heard that he wasn't by a bris and that he was lied to. So he didn't know what to do. So he walked into the Rosh Hashiva's office. Not my yeshiva, different yeshiva. He walked into the Rosh Hashiva's office. And he said to Rosh Yeshiva, 'What do I do? Do you want me to call the boy in? Do you want me to tell him that I know that he was lying?'

18:43 So the Rosh Yeshiva said. I guarantee you that somebody already messaged this boy to tell him that he wasn't where he said he was. He said so. Now the boy is feeling terribly embarrassed. Now the boy is sitting here and he's saying, "Rabbi knows that I lied to him." The question now is what the rishiva said to that rabbi: what are you going to do to tell that talmid that he still loved? And this is a high level yeshiva. He says, "What are you going to do to tell the Talmud that even though he made a mistake and he made a bad decision and he told something that wasn't true to his Rebbe and maybe he lost a little bit of trust" But the first thing is, what are you going to do to bring him in to tell him this? This person in front of me, you're not defined by your lowest moments. I see you like this. This is what Yehuda was telling Paro. He was telling Yosef HaTzaddik. In his mind, he was the viceroy of Egypt. He says, 'You're not behaving like the viceroy of Egypt.'

19:39 'You're not behaving like the viceroy of Egypt.' In our minds, the way I see you, you're massive. What do you think it would be like if we had that voice inside of ourselves? What would it be like to be able to look at ourselves, to look at our lowest moments, to look at the mistakes that we've made, and to see ourselves through the lens of compassion? And that if we do something that we're not proud of, to be able to stop and go, Lamaisa, really, I'm here But I behaved in a lower way. The only reason I behaved in a lower way is because I see myself in that way. My avoda is to lift myself up. I can't call myself a nesh despite until I'm a zir. That's the first part of what Yehuda is telling Yosef Atzadi. But then there's another part And this part is a little bit more complex. He says, "You're like Paro."

20:29 Just like Paro lies, you lie. This takes a tremendous amount of courage. How could Yehuda have come to Yosef and said to him, 'You're a liar'? What does that mean? Could any of us, let's say Lamashel Let's say President Biden Would he retract his words and say, "I'm no longer supporting Eretz Yisrael"? Do you think any politician, any member of AIPAC, or any member of the OU could walk into President Biden's office? Open up the door and look at Biden. You're a liar. You didn't fulfill your word. President Biden? Is nothing compared to Yosef HaTzaddik in that moment. Yosef HaTzaddik is not only the leader of the free world; he's the provider of everything. And Benjamin is being held hostage And this big. This is a shevet. There's much more on the line. To lose a shevet is to lose something massive for all time.

21:31 And Yehuda, in this moment, with a zachutzba, he walks into Yosef Atzadik's office and he says: 'You, like your father before you, just like the leader of your country, you're a liar.' What's the pshat here? So there's a very beautiful pshat that I want to share with you. And the pshat is like this: We all come from somewhere. Every one of us in this room comes from somewhere. And our behavior is not only a product. Of the way that we see ourselves But our behavior is also a product of the way that we've been seen, and the way that we've seen our parents and our role models growing up in our lives. I want to share with you something very important to me. It's something that I've been living with for a very long time. And I've always had this suffic in my head. Are we something independent of our parents?

22:34 Is it possible for somebody who didn't have loving parents? Is it possible for somebody who didn't have parents who were great role models for them? Are they something by and for themselves? Or are we just a product of our not just genetic makeup, but the environment that we grew up in? And I think, as I've gotten a little bit older, the answer is we're somewhere in between. There's something called the self. There's a soul, Eloka'in Neshama Shana Sat Be Ta'iridi. Every one of us is a self, even before we met our parents. Every one of us has the capacity to be unbelievable. But there is no doubt in my mind that the most incredible soul that comes down into this world is a different human being. If you grow up with parents who love you And it could very well be that even if Chassv Shalom, a person grew up in a dysfunctional home or in an abusive home.

23:30 It could very well be that you have the capacity to become somebody amazing. But there's no doubt that children who grow up in a home where they know that they're amazing, and their parents are amazing, and their parents are just like you're the most incredible thing. There's no doubt that those kids are growing up with a different sense of self. I'll share with you somebody I'm very close to. He's not a balgaiva at all. There's zero arrogance in him. But in the most humble way He's the most confident person I've ever met in my entire life. And it's a very rare thing to find someone with that level of confidence and that level of humility. And if you ask him if he can handle something, he just goes, yeah, I got it. Not in a toxic masculinity type of way, just in a very simple way. If you ask him to do something, he can do it.

24:26 I asked him Where did you get this confidence from? Where does that come from? That you're so naturally talented, you could do all these things. So he told me it came from his mother. He said his mother never had a bad word to say in her life about him. She knew that his mother was like he just knew growing up. My mother is behind me one hundred percent. She would walk into school. She would go into parent-teacher conferences. She would sit down and say, 'Knew how awesome is my son.' My mother walked into parent teacher conferences. It's not her fault. It was my fault. My mother walks into parent teacher conferences as a kid, growing like she would sit down and brace herself. You're not parents yet. I don't think for many of you. You're not parents yet, and you'll see. There are certain children. I baruch Hashem, I have kind of hard six children. I just went to my first parent teacher conferences because I only have one son. I'm not invited to my daughter's parent teacher conferences. So I'm only now, after 20 plus years of being a parent, I'm only starting to parent my children. But my wife tells me that Four of my daughters, the older girls

25:28 Like three of them. When my wife would sit down at parent teacher conferences, she would sit down banachas, tell me how awesome my kids are. But one of them, I have one child that's like me, one child that's like you sit down at parent teacher conferences and they start off by going Let's focus on the positive first. It's like certain kids and they throw out the potential, like you can tell that they have a lot of potential. I think maybe we're gonna move their seat to the front of the room, that type of kid. I love her. She's my favorite, but parents are not supposed to have favorites. She's definitely the favorite. She's by far my most talented kid. And as Hashem, only a year and a half left to school, and then we're free and clear. Everyone should daven for her. I'll give you her name afterwards.

26:16 He told me his mother every time anything. She's like, how awesome is my son? If you grow up knowing that your mother thinks you're awesome. You know the impact that has on you. You grow up, your mother, like my mother, had this irrational belief in me. I'm so grateful to her. Some kids are especially today, two thousand twenty three. I have to say the kids are awesome. One of the most amazing things about kids today is they don't lie. It's a real environment of honesty and authenticity and integrity for today's kids. In the nineties, it was deny till you die. It was like you don't know nothing. You got nothing on me. I'm going down with this ship. And my mother was the only. She was so sweet. I told my mother I had a conversation with my mother six years ago. Me and my brother sat down. We're in our thirties, and my brother was in his mid thirties. I was in my late thirties. And my mother randomly at the table said, "Like you guys would never have done that." And my brother and I burst out laughing. We're like, "Mom, maybe it's time to tell you what we did when we were sixteen." Three hours later

27:13 My mother had to stop the conversation. She said, "I can't do it anymore. My heart. Like she was in danger." Remember that summer that you went away to England for the summer? And you just said you're in charge, and I was 16 years old. My mother said, yeah. I said, remember you gave me a couple thousand dollars to take care of everyone? She said, yeah. I said, I kicked him out of the house for the three weeks that you were gone. She said, what are you talking about? I said, yeah. He went to live with Benji for the summer. He wasn't here. My mother said, what'd you do with all the money? I said, you don't want to know what I did with the money. It's like she wasn't able to contain herself. She said, you lied to me. I said, come on, man. That was your fault. You put me in that situation. But if you have a mother who, even if you're lying, she's the one that believes you. Even though all my rabbi would tell my mother all the time, they're like, "You know he's lying." She's like, "I know you think that, but I'm telling you, I can tell when he's lying." My mother, God bless her soul, she could never tell when I was lying.

28:05 But it builds a person. It builds a person. When we see a child behaving in a certain way It's important to ask ourselves Who made him that way? Why do children behave the way they do? We're not meant to grow up in a society without parents. It's not normal. It's not natural. What's happening today? Today, and it's nobody's fault But to be in the Orthodox Jewish community today, you have to make a quarter of a million dollars to be poor. That's a real thing. Play it out. After taxes, yeshiva tuition. Need to make a quarter of a million dollars to be poor. A quarter of a million dollars to just barely make it. That's why everyone's in Psy Sims. That's why everyone's becoming an accountant. Do you think all these guys want to be accountants? I promise you, some of these guys are actually really creative. But as one guy said to me, he goes, "It's very safe."

29:00 As a guy, I love this guy. He's amazing. He had a real question. He's like, 'Rebbe, I would love to be a therapist. I really feel like I have a talent for working with people.' I was like, 'Yeah, what's the problem?' He's like, 'It's just not safe. So I'm going to become an accountant.' You have a person who's like destined to help people, and he's like, 'I got to become an accountant.' It's a tremendous amount of pressure. And both parents have to work. Who's raising the kids? Who's raising the kids? There's things I don't want to say out loud. But who's raising some people we know who are raising the kids. Baruch Hashem, some of our kids are multilingual from the time that they're a fetus. The emphasis is that there's something going on in the world today. It's a terrible thing. There's something going on in the world today that kids are being raised by each other.

29:45 That's why kids are like today, and it's wild. Parents are saying this out loud. They don't even realize what they're saying. Like, yeah, but I don't want my kid to be around that kid because maybe that kid's going to be a bad influence. Why are we so worried about kids being bad influences on other kids? If your kid is growing up in a strong home with loving parents who have time and there's a deep sense of attachment that's happening in the home, why are you so nervous that the kid is going to run off with another kid? Why would he leave your home if your home is a happy place? When I was growing up, I grew up in a regular, modern Orthodox family. My parents are both baalei teshuva; they're amazing people. I'm so blessed to have such inspired parents.

30:23 But when I was growing up, we had a television in the house. My father was the president of a major television company, so we had a television in the house. But I went to a school called Yeshiva Darche Torah. Anybody here know Yeshiva Darche Torah in the Five Towns? I didn't really belong in Darche. I was expelled from a different school in the neighborhood. So Darchi was the school that would take me in, but it was like a strange thing that Rabbi Ben Dershleiter was giving shmuuzin about watching television, and I liked my father was the president of a television company. It was like a strange type of crossroads. So my brother had a friend. My brother had a friend whose name was Moshe Cherni. Moshe Cherni was Rabbi Cherni's son. Rabbi Cherni is today a very big rebbe and shayash of a tremendous tzaddik, and Moshe Cherni had very long payas. And my brother and Moshe Chorney would go rollerblading around Paraguay.

31:09 And my father would call Moshe Chorney the rollerblading rebbe because if you have pais and you rollerblade, it's very fun to watch. It's like racing stripes. And if you're really good and you're flipping and turning and the pais are everywhere. My father thought it was hysterical. Years later, many years later, I asked Rabbi Chorney I said, Rabbi, how in the world did you let Moshe hang out of my house? Rebbe Cherni didn't have a television in his house. Rebbe Cherni's house has like a mini beis medrash in his home. He has so many svarim in his home that not only are all the walls lined with svarim, but he has bookshelves that are movable because they have two levels of bookshelves full of svarim, and he's learned them all. They're all dog ear, they're all underlined. It's an amazing thing to see. So I asked him. I said, Rebbe, how did you let Moshe come hang out of my house? You knew he was watching television in my house. You knew he was watching movies in my house. That's what we did in my house.

32:00 And my attorney looked at me like I was crazy. It was one of the best musers I ever got in my life. He looked at me and said, "First of all, your parents are special people." Right away, that was like My parents are special people. Just because you don't have the same values doesn't mean my parents aren't awesome. He said, "Second of all, I was very confident in the chinuch of my home. I wasn't worried that my son was going to go off the derech because he was watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with your brother." And he's right. A parent who actually raises their child—you don't need to be so. I'm not saying there's not an influence of the community. But attachment is meant to happen in the home. And when the attachment happens at home, we don't have to freak out every time our kid is sitting next to somebody in class. And by the way, it's infected the entire Jewish community today, right, left, and center. Everybody's talking about who's my kid going to be next to.

32:52 I see it all the time. Parents ask it out loud with no sense of bousha. I'll go to a parents meeting. All the prospective parents coming to look at mivaseret. The first question: What type of kids do you want in mivaseret? What are you really asking me? You want to know who your son is going to be next to because you're terrified. If the kid next to him is doing something, maybe your kid's going to get roped into it. Why would your kid get roped into it? Are you not confident in the chinuch of your own home? You told your child what you believe. Your child knows what he believes. Why would your kid want to leave your home? You know why your kid might want to leave your home? Because maybe you weren't home. Because maybe you weren't providing the attachment that kid needs. If you're a child and you're looking at your world and you're going, I see my parents for an hour or two a day. I see my friends for nine hours a day. Which one provides more safety for the child?

33:43 It's uncomfortable, but the truth of the matter is that for a kid today, the reason they're so pulled by their friends is because if their friends are going to do something and they're not going to go along with it, the kids are providing more attachment and more safety than the parents are. It's not the parents' fault. We've raised the level of affluence in our community to such a degree that the parents can't spend time with the kids. And we say it's not about quantity time. It's about quality time. It's true, but you know what? It's also about quantity time. It's also about regularity. It's about being there for your kids and spending time with your kids every day. The mothers in our community today are heroes. Because a woman who wakes up in the morning, who gets her kids off to school, who goes to work, who comes home at four thirty, five o'clock in the afternoon, just in time to take her kids, makes dinner, does homework, puts the kids in the bath, and gets the kids to sleep, and by the time her husband comes home at eight thirty, she's a shmata.

34:34 She's posher the shmata. That's why the words you hear today from mothers all over the world are, "I'm just done, I'm done." How much could you possibly ask me to hold? But the reason that these parents are doing an amazing thing—those mothers that are pushing themselves like crazy, and those fathers that are jumping to spend time with their kids on Sunday afternoon—not the fathers that drop off their kids at Little League. Little League is not a babysitting service. If your kid is playing Little League, that's an opportunity to go and to pull up a chair and to watch your kid's game. It's two and a half hours on a Sunday. It's two and a half hours of your kid sitting and saying If I have a game, Mom and Dad show up to the game. I can't tell you. It's obvious to me the difference. When I was a kid growing up, my father was my little league coach. And he would always say, "This is not a babysitting service." But there were always parents that saw it as a babysitting service. And I want you to know, as an adult looking back on those kids, it was obvious to me why those kids were the way they were. It's because their parents were looking to get rid of them.

35:30 Isn't that nice? They could play for the Young Israel Farakway Little League team and I don't need to see my kid for two and a half hours. There's always that parent that says, 'Come, let's learn together.' And there's always the parent that says, 'Come, let's play backgammon together. I'll teach you how to play chess. I'll teach you how to play whatever card game. I want you to know, learning with your kids is a beautiful thing. If you have a husband who's learning with his children, that's a beautiful thing. But there's also such a thing as we just want to spend time with each other. Let's go have a catch in the backyard. That used to be a normal thing. You don't have to be so frum with your kids. My father used to say, 'A little learning never hurts. So let's learn as little as possible.' That's the father I grew up with. This is my rebellion. I want you to know the kids would run to come to my house on a Shabbos afternoon. And you know who was running to come to my house on a Shabbos afternoon? It was all the kids of all their abanim. They were the ones that were running to spend Shabbos. And they used to say out loud, "If we come with you right after davening and we go home, then we don't need to learn with our dads."

36:25 Because if you think that the only thing your father wants out of you is to learn Torah, then what type of relationship do you have with your father? We're a product of our environments. We're a product of our homes. But there's also something very beautiful about knowing that. It means taking an appropriate amount of accountability. That if you are in a certain way, and you're sitting there judging yourself and saying I shouldn't be the way that I am, I want you to know that you're wrong. Every single person in this room is understandable, and anything that's understandable is forgivable. How many of us think people go to therapy for this for years? People will pay ten thousand dollars a year, twenty thousand dollars a year on therapy bills. I can save you that money right now. It's not me. This is an obvious thing. If you understand that every single thing you do makes sense And you just need to figure out where it's coming from and how you got to this moment with kindness and compassion. With appropriate levels of context, you can forgive yourself.

37:25 And you could let go of the person you've been to become the person that you want to be. We're stuck in certain behavior patterns because we don't understand that this is a product of where I come from. It's a It's a scary thing. But I took a parenting class. I had the unbelievable opportunity to take a parenting class with a woman whose name is Dr. Dr. Anat Bornstein. She's like the queen of something called IFS. If you heard of IFS, you don't have to out yourselves. If you went to therapy but you don't want to say, you could just not do anything, and I'll know that you know what IFS is. So about thirty percent of the room right now knows what IFS is. Thank you for coming with me on this. I had the opportunity to take a parenting class with her. It was a life changing parenting class. And one of the reasons it was life changing is because she said How were you parented as a child?

38:16 And then she had us fill out a whole questionnaire. And then she said Are you mimicking your parents or reacting to your parents in raising your own children? And it broke me. I was like, 'Oh my gosh.' I'm literally either doing exactly what my parents did, the things that I promised myself I would never do, or going to the opposite extreme. And it brought into focus how much we're impacted by our environment. Her point was that parents consciously make choices, but many of us are stuck in autopilot because we come from somewhere and we don't even know the place we came from, and we don't understand how our parts developed, and we don't understand why we're doing what we're doing. So we just get into this thing of I just need to have more willpower. It's not about willpower. It's about understanding and forgiving ourselves. Yehuda approaches Yosef HaTzaddik And he's about to fight for his brother's life.

39:07 The first thing he says is, "You're a Paro. Why are you behaving this way?" But the second thing he says is You're behaving this way because you're in the house of Paro. You're impacted by your environment. This is your father, so to speak. You're the child of Paro, and so you're acting like Paro. That's not an angry thing that Yosef is saying to Yehuda HaTzaddik. It's trying to wake up Yosef HaTzaddik to say this behavior. You learned it from somewhere. You didn't make this up. Children are amazing. Children are really amazing. One of the best blessings you'll have in your entire life is before your kids get big enough to care what other people think. You'll just get to see what it looks like to be raw, and natural, and unadulterated, and unencumbered. You'll just see a human being as we're meant to be. And I love that stage. I love the first four or five years of every kid's life; it's beautiful.

40:17 Because these kids are crazy. All these kids are naturally crazy. You've never met a calm two-year-old. You know what I'm saying? You've never met a two-year-old that's not powerful. You ever take a two year old to the grocery store for the first time And walk down the cookie aisle? Have you ever done that? The two year old looks at you and goes like Check it! Like they get that look in their eyes, and then you're trying to negotiate with the two year old. You go If you behave, and the kid's like, 'Really? We're gonna do this right now, right?' And the kid on the floor screaming a temper tantrum, and it's in the middle of the five towns, so everyone's looking, and then you're like, 'I don't want to be judged,' so you give the kid a box of cookies and reinforce that behavior for the next twenty years that food equals love. If you just cry enough.

41:03 Little too close to home. The for me. The I love that stage because kids are real. You know what day I hate? I hate the day, and it's one day you can pinpoint it. I hate the day when kids come home. And they have a bigger need to fit in than to be themselves. That's the saddest day. My daughter, my nine-year-old daughter. I remember when it happened to her. My nine-year-old daughter was obsessed before she turned six. She was obsessed with unicorns, and everything in her life was unicorns. Everything I would buy her was unicorns. And then she came to me one year right before the start of school. It's a very big thing. I don't know if you know this. It's a very big thing to buy a teak to buy a knapsack, and it's like a big social choice, like what knapsack you get in first grade.

41:51 And she came to me and she said, "Abba, please don't buy me a unicorn knapsack." Of course, I was gonna buy her the biggest unicorn knapsack with the horn coming off Like the entire thing was that shimmering thing that if you play with it. So I sat there. I said, Miriam, why don't you want a unicorn knapsack? She said, unicorns are for babies. I was like, no, they're not. Unicorns are for you, right? You're not like but she. It was so important for her to fit in So she got like the Adidas knapsack the kids in Israel like. It's the it kills us as a parent to see our children crumbling under this. We all came from somewhere. We weren't always like this. We had to make decisions of how to survive in our lives, and the way that we are, those were survival decisions. When we're giving ourselves mussar, when we're giving somebody else mussar, are we doing it starting off by saying you're awesome? I see you like this. Why are you behaving like this? You're an unbelievable person.

42:46 Why would you be malachlech yourself by behaving in that way? I just want you to know you come from somewhere. It's not Chassidisholim angry. You're behaving like this because this is what was modeled for you. This was the survival tactics that you had. That's a kind way of treating somebody. To let them know that they're understandable and anything that's understandable is forgivable. I'll finish with this. When the war broke out So there was a young man in yeshiva, and I don't know how to say this nicely. I'm sure it was very different for the girls. I don't really like speaking in seminaries, but I don't really like talking to the girls so much. I'm sure the girls handled it very differently when the war broke out, and I'm sure that people were talking about their feelings and unpacking things, and there was creating a safe space for things. I'm sure all of that happened.

43:38 And with the guys, it was a very different experience. I would ask the guys, "How are you doing?" They'd say, "Yeah" That's like the whole conversation. That's like the entire level of the spectrum of emotional expression was like. You know, means I'm having a really hard time. There was one guy in yeshiva. He was like the toughest, most macho guy in yeshiva. He's walking around. He's going like, 'Yeah, take these guys down.' Like one of those types of things. And he came into my office about a week into the war, and he broke down crying. And this is a kid who hasn't cried since he was six, and he's bawling. And so I just like trying to. I'm like, "What's going on? What happened?" And he goes, "Honestly, I'm just scared." Something had happened in his life. He's like, honestly, I'm just scared. And he couldn't appreciate himself, and it was horrific to watch.

44:26 He couldn't appreciate about himself that was a normal reaction That's an understandable thing. And in his mind, he was sitting there judging himself. I know I'm acting like a baby right now, and I shouldn't. Why are you so quick to reject who you are? And when we unpacked it a little bit, and we started to understand his fears a little bit, it turned out that he had been living in fear for the last 13 years of his life. 14 years of his life. Pasha living in fear. And when I asked him where he learned that behavior from, he's like He's like Rebbe, that's everybody in my life. Everybody in my family is living with this dread because of a certain thing. I don't want to give away any details because of a certain thing that happened. Everyone was living with dread. So I said to him, "I just want you to know, it's a very simple thing. I just want you to know that what you're going through is totally understandable and it's totally normal and it's okay."

45:19 And you saw just a sigh of relief. He was like, "Really? It's okay?" I'm like, "Yeah," like big people live with these things and it's normal to go through that. And you saw he just like that breath you take at some point in every session where you go, "This is like I just saw he like it melted away the pounds. He's carrying a ten thousand pound knapsack. A chaver of mine is a therapist, and we were in this parenting class together, and we were doing one of the exercises. He looked at me, and this is like a very therapeutic. You have to speak. Do anyone here speak therapy? You know what I'm talking about? Like therapists speak in a particular way. So I'm talking about a certain thing, and he just said, 'So how long have you been carrying that bag?' And I was like, 'I don't know. Shut up.' So I was like, I don't know. I've been carrying it a long time, and he goes. So how heavy is it? I'm like it's really heavy. Just stop it. You know, I'm not in session right now.

46:14 And he's like, what would it take to put it down? It's like you gotta stop, man. Like I'm done. Sometimes we just know that we're understandable. We can let go of that bag because it's really heavy, right? I guarantee you, there's a lot of people in this room that have been sitting in judgment of themselves. And we shouldn't be because we're normal because we come from somewhere. Because we're awesome people who lost sight of our awesomeness And this is part of our recovery. Yehuda comes to Yosef haTzaddik, and that's like coming to the Melech. And any time we see coming to the Melech, that's coming to Hashem. And if we're going to come to Hashem, then we have to start treating ourselves like godly souls. To know who we are And to know that if we're not behaving in accordance with our highest levels of dignity, it's not chas v'shalom because we're bad people But simply because we come from hurt places. And blessed Hashem, we should be zeicher to healing.