TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Bricks for Building a Better Life
Date: 09/20/24 Length: 00:49:54
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Greetings, Happy Warriors, and thank you for being part of the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show, where I your rabbi reveal how the world really works. Thank you so much for being part of the show, and thank you for all you do in promoting the show. Thank you for subscribing to the show, if you have already done so, and if you haven't done so, I'd appreciate it if you did so as soon as possible. Our subscription numbers are really, really important to us, and make it a lot easier for us to deliver these podcasts to you on a regular basis, each and every week, I was fortunate enough to be speaking in Dallas. Recently, I gave a Torah class at a congregation in Dallas called ORAD Torah, and I had a chance to do a an appearance on the Glenn Beck show. He's based in Dallas, and I spoke at one of the most beautiful churches in the Dallas area, new beginnings church under the inspired leadership of Pastor Larry and Pastor tis Huck, whom I've known for decades, actually, and so all of that was wonderful, and I was staying at a Hilton Hotel, and you can imagine my surprise when while I was preparing one of my speeches, and I needed to quickly look up a verse, and so I did what I've always done, and that is, you know, gone to the desk, draw, opened it and pulled out a Gideons Bible. I work more easily with the original in Hebrew but, but that's, you know, more than good enough. And it, you know, usually solves the problem. I just needed to have a verse reference, look it up and find it. To my astonishment, no Bible there at all. And so I called the front desk, and no they, they don't have any Bibles. And I called, I asked to be put through the Office of the General Manager. Anyway, no bibles to be had they thought maybe they could send one up, but they could not.
Daniel Lapin 2:26
All right, this has never happened to me before. So naturally, as I pointed out in a Lapin lens that we posted on the website RabbiDanielLapin.com earlier in the week, I looked into the situation, and it turns out that as recently as as 20 years ago, virtually all hotel rooms in America had Bibles. 97% of them, is what they claimed. And I've certainly, you know, I never a travel affair, but I never encountered a room without a Bible. But then I realized this has been starting to happen more and more. And so now it turns out 2024 and the percentage of American hotel rooms with a Bible is way down now, perhaps lower than 50% I couldn't get an exact number, but that seems to be what it is. And I was curious as to how many Bibles the Gideons put out, and when I published the Lapin lens for you on the on the website, I wasn't sure. And in fact, I was skeptical that it could have reached a billion. And as a matter of fact, the actual number is 2 billion. Over 2 billion, that's how many Bibles have been placed by the Gideons since two since 1908 when the organization placed its first Bibles in a small hotel in 1908 in a small town called superior in the state of Montana. And from there, it's become this huge ministry, and I contribute to them. I think it's I think it's wonderful. I myself, heard a story from someone who was at a speech of mine who spoke about being in a bad place in a hotel room one evening, and found the Bible as he was roaming around the room, found the Bible, and it deflected him from what was going to be a self destructive course of action. You think about it, particularly guys traveling on business you know, far away from family, far away from friends, far away from work associates, and there you know, it's, it's not a great place to be. And so I, you know, look, I believe that even just reading the Bible can be a life transforming event, particularly if, if times are not simple. And, you know, read Psalms, read Proverbs, read Ecclesiastes and things change. Look, I'm not a an airy fairy type of person. I'm not sort of portraying things as as mystical and unrealistic. I'm talking about very plain and simple, it's, a book different from any other book on the planet. Why do I say that? Well, apart from anything else, the numbers that have been printed. Look, I know that I have listeners to this show who are not interested in the Bible, particularly and are certainly do not believe the Bible to be anything special, other than the perhaps ramblings of ancient nomadic tribes that have been loosely assembled into a book. Fine, I welcome and cherish every listener I, as you already know, I respond to messages on the website Happy Warriors write in and, and we communicate and we talk. I love communicating with the Happy Warriors and I do whether or not they are Bible centric in their lives or not. I we people are complicated, and I try as much as I can to fulfill my mission of presenting ancient Jewish wisdom in the context of how the world really works with respect to the things in your life that you really care about, your family, your finances, your fitness, your physical health, your friendships, and ultimately, yes, your faith, your connection with all things intangible and spiritual, rather than material in nature. And the Gideons, you know, not the only people so 2 billion so far and counting, that's and those Bibles are are actually somewhere people are looking at them.
Daniel Lapin 7:05
The Gideons say that the Bibles wear out in about, I think they said six years, if I'm not mistaken. And so Bibles have to be replaced on that basis. Then you've got the Geneva Bible Society. And that's an interesting place because, and although some people have challenged the story, because I wanted to be able to tell it with some degree of reliability, I've checked into it, and the story is true that in the year 1776 the French secular intellectual Voltaire predicted, and these are his words translated 100 years from my day. There will not be a Bible on Earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker. And I will tell you, beyond any shadow of a doubt that in many countries, but I'm thinking specifically of America, there are far more Bibles in people's homes than there are the works of Voltaire. And so as far as the Bible becoming extinct, Voltaire's prediction was that would happen by 1876 not even close. Voltaire, however, your works are kind of getting extinct. Not a lot of readers of that. And one of the best parts of the story is that about 50 years after he died, the house in which he lived was bought by the evangelical Society of Geneva, and I think that became the Geneva Bible Society, if I'm not mistaken. And they used the house to print and store Bibles. And they, you want to know, they, they put out about about a half a million Bibles every year.
Daniel Lapin 9:04
Usually more 500 to 800,000 Bibles a year. So, you know, there is, there's no other book that even comes close to these numbers. So at any rate, there it is. The Bible is the reality. And as I've often mentioned, that I would recommend to you, in all seriousness, I don't care what you do. I don't care what you believe. You believe in God. You don't you're a Christian, you're a Jew, you're nothing, you're an atheist, you're anything, any religion at all. I don't think you will find your time wasted in taking a look at it. I'm not saying it's going to change you in terms of changing your belief system or anything, but value, it will give you value. Why? Because we human beings are made up, not only of body. You. But also of soul, and we are motivated as much by soul as we are by body. I've explained that we all have a need for food and water and oxygen at the very least, but we also have a need for human dignity. That's a spiritual need. No animal has a need for dignity. It's unique to human beings. When human beings buy clothing, invariably, you're being driven by a spiritual need, because there is very, very inexpensive, utilitarian clothing available, and yet, almost everybody buys clothing that's a little bit different. If I am going to give a speech and I appear in a suit and a tie, I can tell you that suit and a tie cost a whole lot more than a set of overalls, and I don't think I would be turned away at any venue because I show up in a pair of overalls. It's I'm wearing a suit for an entirely spiritual reason. It's not because I'm cold. It's not because for any reason other than spiritual. We are spiritual, and we're also the only creatures that are capable of inflicting damage upon ourselves for spiritual reasons, mountain climbing, crossing oceans in small boats. Well, I don't really think that's particularly dangerous. But you know, BASE jumping, extreme sports. Why do people do that? Certainly no animal engages in dangerous activity for anything other than its own safety or its own food or its own survival, but to just do it for kicks, to get a high bungee jumping. Do you know how many companies offer bungee jumping off bridges? Haven't you got to be crazy to tie a piece of rubber band to your foot and leap off a bridge. But people do it, and I totally get the appeal. I can't say it's something that I'm driven to try, but I do get it. We are spiritual beings, and the Bible speaks to the soul. So the part of you right, there's a part of you if you're going to read a crime novel, even that, you've got to ask yourself whether reading a novel is filling a physical need or a spiritual need. Very hard to claim that it's filling a physical need, but reading the The Bible does speak to the soul in often subconscious ways. So at any rate, I'd recommend it send $1 to the Gideon Bible Society when you have a chance and read read the book if you've never done so. Yet, I know many of the listeners obviously haven't done and do, but there are also many listeners who haven't and don't. So give it a shot, and you can thank me later. So have you ever wondered again biblical phrase so common? I'm not you know, most people may not necessarily know just where to find it, but the the phrase you know, take your shoes off your feet, because the place on which you stand is holy ground. And that was told to Moses in the beginning of Exodus chapter three, when he stood at the burning bush. And it was told to Joshua in the middle of chapter five of the book of Joshua, take your shoes off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy and Joshua did so. And you got to wonder, you know, like again, we just take it for granted, okay, yeah, take off. You know, you you envisage some ancient guy in a long robe and a long beard with sandals on his feet and holding a stick in his hand, and God says, take off your shoes for you stand upon holy gra Yes, okay, or but in real terms, in terms of you and me, 2024 what does this actually mean? What? What are we supposed to understand from that? And so I thought I would explain it, because it goes a long way towards also explaining some of the real things that are happening in the world today. Before I do that, I just want to remind you of my new custom. I had been looking for a way to honor the Happy Warrior members of the Happy Warrior community, and I decided to do that by preparing a special audio program, especially for members of the Happy Warrior community, a bonus recording, if you like. And sometimes it's connected to the podcast. Sometimes it's something different. And today it's partially connected. The bonus is, look, you all know the five F's, right? You all know that the five central areas of your life are your family, your finance, your faith, your friendships and your physical fitness. In other words, our life is our lives are a complex amalgam of multiple relationships, how we relate to friends, how we relate to family members, how we relate to money and all the people associated with our monetary relationships, and how we relate to our own body, and, of course, how we relate to God and the world of the spirit, or perhaps only to the world of the spirit, for many people, but at any rate, those are the five areas. And I think everyone would agree, you know that if you've got a few dollars in the bank and you have a great relationship with your spouse and with your children, your siblings, and you have a good social life, you've got a lot of great friends, and you're in reasonably good health, and on top of that, you're kind of okay with God as well. I don't think you have very much to complain about in life, right? You? In fact, on the contrary, you have a great deal to be grateful for, and those are the five F's. And everybody, I mean, I think by now you probably know about that.
Daniel Lapin 16:13
You may even have already studied the handbook for developing the integration of your five F's. It's our book called The Holistic You, the Holistic You again. You can get that or read more about it if you'd like to first just look into it at Rabbi Daniel lapin.com or, of course, on any on site bookseller of your choice. But what you may not know is that the 5f provide you with a very important set of data, because you see, everyone should plan their life, many people don't. But if, if there's any regret that people have later in life, it's not having planned their life. And it, you know, you take a few minutes a day and a few minutes a week to keep up with your life planning. And you you make sure that you have goals and you have ambitions, you may even have dreams, and then you have to ask, Do you have a plan for getting there? But once you've got a plan for getting there, it's a little bit like navigating. You know, I've never forgotten the grand Lapin adventure of sailing from California to Hawaii on our sailboat Paragon and I was the navigator and and there on a paper chart, on the chart room, on the chart table, was little small dot called the island of Hawaii and Honolulu, and that was our destination. And the only and the only way to do that is to make sure that every day you have the boat pointed in the right direction. And how do you do that? Well, you got to know where you are. And so every day, I took a sextant site of the Sun at midday, and from that I was able to compute our position.
Daniel Lapin 18:19
I put a little on the chart with a date next to it, and there was our noon site position each day. And you can watch still on my chart from that trip. You can see this progression of 22 little dots as we make our way across the Pacific. But you can never know which way to steer if you don't know where you are and to know where you are now in real terms with with real honesty, you you have to have some way of establishing that data. And that's exactly what I'm giving in the bonus this this week. So for you Happy Warriors, members of the Happy Warrior community, I thank you for being there. I thank you for your friendship, and I thank you for your involvement and participation, and just so you know that I cherish you. I have a special recording that is, I think, really very useful, especially for you. So back to taking off your shoes. So I was explaining how important it is to have an understanding of the fact that we are spiritual and physical, in a way that's like saying we are suspended between heaven and earth. Animals stand on the earth. We stand upright, and angels, if you like, are in heaven, and we are suspended in a state of exquisite tension between heaven and earth. There are times where we feel drawn a little closer to Heaven, and we've got the Annual, very special holiday of Rosh Hashanah, coming up at the beginning of october 2024, and those two days, very, very special days. It's called New Year. But it's much more than New Year, because it's not a time for parting. It's a time for very solemn introspection and and one comes out of the holiday of New Year, which is a biblical festival, feeling a little closer to Heaven and and so, yes, we must connect to heaven, but never to the extent of losing touch with Earth. So, for instance, if somebody told me, Oh, you know what I you know, I've listened to your words about the spiritual and the soul, and I've decided to pray for seven hours a day. And my response is, excuse me, aren't you neglecting your job? Aren't you neglecting your family? Aren't you neglecting your friends and your community? That's a terrible plan. And if somebody were to tell me, you know, I all I focus on is my career, then I'd say again, you know, I think you're making a little bit of a mistake, because there are five F's, and only one of them is finance. So you you've got to be connected to both heaven and earth, not so connected to Earth that you ignore heaven, not so connected to heaven that you ignore Earth and and that's really a really fundamental principle of living an integrated life. Now it's interesting, people have often asked me about kosher food, and yes, in Dallas there is kosher beef, because I have a friend who's one of the best kosher meat suppliers in the country, and he knows exactly all about kosher one of the requirements of kosher Meat is the kind of animal right the biblical laws of kosher food do not allow certain animals we now we've got a happy warrior who hunts bear and and he's shocked to hear that I don't eat bear, but bears not the kosher animal, so I don't I don't need it. Other people eat it. That's fine, but my set of rules and my value system means I have to follow the Five Books of Moses. So I don't need bear, but I eat elk and moose and beef and and so on.
Daniel Lapin 22:43
What is the requirement? And the Bible says, How do you know what is a kosher animal? And the answer is, it has to have a hoof that lifts it off the ground. So it's kind of as if, as if I'm saying it just lifts them off the ground a bit, just giving them a touch of spirituality, an animal on a hoof stands, you know, two or three inches up off the Earth, closer to Heaven. How about a horse? Horses on a hoof, right? But if they are completely isolated from the ground by having a solid hoof like a horse. That animal isn't kosher either. And so you can check the verse If you by the way, if you don't, if you want a Bible and you don't have one, get the recommended Bible, the Bible that Susan and I recommend. You'll find it on the rabbiDaniellapin.com website, and very worthwhile chapter 11 in the Book of Leviticus. And as I like pointing out, today, we are living in the first time in the history of the English speaking people more than I mean, Shakespeare was 400 years ago, but you can go further back than that. There's never been a generation until now where a majority of English speaking people do not know. They couldn't answer a quiz show. They couldn't answer if a gun was pointed to their head, where the Leviticus is a book or a man's aftershave lotion. But I'll give you the answer. It's actually a book. It's the third book of the Bible, chapter 11, verse three, says, All animals that have a split hoof, you may eat. And now you are probably beginning to see the connection with shoes, right? Get it hoof shoes, so ancient Jewish wisdom treats shoes very seriously, and if you think about it, it's really one of the articles of clothing that hasn't changed in millennia. Shoes, whether it's a sandal or a sneaker or a dress shoe, but basically a shoe lifts you up. Off the ground slightly. That's That's what shoes do, and they protect your feet from any painful object on the ground. And shoes have never changed. They've always served that function. But you know, if you imagine things like hats, scarves, ties, jackets, all of those things have changed with fashion over the years, but shoes haven't. And you know what else hasn't? Pants, right? A article of clothing with basically three holes, one that your trunk fits into and two for your legs, and you pull it up and conceals the bottom section of your body from which you excrete and genitalia. So pants and shoes haven't changed very much, but sticking with shoes, you'll see what the concept here is. We all, of us, mustn't be too close to heaven, disconnected from reality, nor must we be so anchored to the earth that we're incapable of soaring to spiritual heights. Instead, we live in between heaven and earth, within reach of both, but chained to neither. So so we wear shoes. But what happens? What happens when somebody is in the presence of God, like Moses at the burning bush, and like when God spoke to Joshua? So at that point, the spiritual impact is so powerful that it it, it has the runs the risk of utterly detaching you from the earth. So take off your shoes and anchor yourself firmly to the earth. It's a way to do it. And some people take off their shoes every time they worship God. Jews don't do that,
Daniel Lapin 27:03
and I don't believe Christians do. Muslims, man, I'm not 100% sure Muslims may take off their shoes before they go into a mosque to pray, but that you take off your shoes in order to make sure you don't fly away to the heavens in spiritual euphoria, and that you do remain in touch. So there it is, Heaven and Earth, the spiritual and the physical and and I think that the awareness of the spiritual and the connection to the spiritual is perhaps one of the key aspects of today's chief culture clash in the world, namely, is there a spiritual reality or isn't there? I'd like you to listen to these words by a very interesting scientist, a geneticist called Richard Lewontin. He died in 2021 he was very secular. He claimed to be an atheist, and of course, not surprisingly, he was of Jewish ancestry. And hear the words stunning honesty and candor. It's so important to hear these words from a distinguished and acknowledged scientific Great. Here's what he writes, our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. Just a side note. What Richard Lewontin calls the supernatural is what I describe as the spiritual anyway, continuing we take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated Just So stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary that we are forced by our priory adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism. What is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door. My goodness, how clear is that? And that really is the clash. And I think we will soon see the death of materialism, because, as Richard lewinton says, it's so absurd and so ridiculous to decide that every single thing can be answered by science and that science has to come up with improbable explanations for the spiritual or the supernatural that satisfy nobody and don't produce the fruits it promises because it cannot tolerate the allowance of the spiritual. You know, one of the most conspicuous mistakes made by someone because of his complete uncompromising rejection of the spiritual was made by a sociologist and historian called Francis Fukuyama. And in 92 or 93 he wrote a book called The End of History, and it's a book of political philosophy that argues that the Western way, you know, the liberal democracy that we see in European countries and in the United States that followed the Cold War and and followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that this means humanity has reached not just another phase in the Ongoing History of the World, but the end of history as such. That is the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universal acceptance of the western model for liberal democracy as the final form of human government. So remember, 93 is eight years before 2001 so no terrorist attack on 911 no understanding of the role Islamic fervor and fanaticism is playing in world politics. He's writing in 93 in the euphoric days following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hey, the whole world is moving towards the American model of government, and everybody is going to live peacefully and happily ever after. That's really what the book said. Look, today, nobody believes the book is is over and done with. I mean, the whole thesis is rubbish today. Nobody believes that everybody, that all nations and all cultures will accept liberal democracy and free market capitalism, they weren't. China want to accept free market capitalism. Bangladesh will not accept a liberal democracy. And there are many societies that are totally uninterested in, in in anything like that. So it is so, you know, for a short while it had his 15 minutes of fame. Francis Fukuyama was fated. He was a hero. And he's, he's presented a vision of happy times for the rest of history. Everybody is going to buy into the liberal democracy model. And partially, as a result, and as an as an example of that America's stupid attempt to export democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, that didn't work so well for you. Did it right? Of course not, because he was wrong. The whole world is not going to accept liberal democracy. As a matter of fact, there's clear indications that it's not doing too well for the countries that did accept it. It's a strange thing. And so later on, by the way, when when things were sort of beginning to look questionable for fukuyamas thesis, he wrote, I never intended my book, The End of History to be linked to a specifically American model of political organization, following Alexandra kohavi, the Russian French philosopher who, by the way, was a Marxist, Who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The European Union Union's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law, he means the International Court of Justice. US is much more in line with a post historical world than the Americans continuing belief in God, national sovereignty and their military. You can hear the contempt dripping from his tongue, and so you got to see that this idea of materialism and the produced this horrible error, not aware that there are people on earth for whom religious faith, in this case, Islam, is more important than economic success, they're not going to accept capitalism. They're not going to accept a liberal democracy, not going to happen. And there, you know, there you go. By his mistaken belief that there is no spiritual that everything is explainable, materialistically or scientifically. And as a sociologist, he has a strong belief in that he comes up with a completely preposterous theory. Writes a book, which today is found on the remainder piles, because it's now well established that he could hardly have been more wrong. So what we understand is that a materialistic view has tremendous drawbacks, and it causes you to make bad mistakes as a politician, as a nation, as a society, and also as an individual, by the way, and that's why faith is part of the family, finance, friendships and fitness model, you got to have faith in there, because there are many decisions that are faith based, or at least spiritually based.
Daniel Lapin 36:54
And so we find that in the Bible, back to the Bible, there are certain words parts of biblical nomenclature that have specific ideological and philosophical meanings. One of those words is bricks, and so we find, for instance, that a an altar shouldn't be built to bricks. Well, let's take a look at Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah. And again, if, if you the sort of person that has a Bible in your home, you can easily look this up. It's chapter 65 verse three in Isaiah. And Isaiah is speaking about God's anger with the people of Israel. And here he says about the Israelites, you're a people who provoke me to anger, to my very face, says God a people who sacrifices in gardens and burns incest upon altars of bricks. Wow. How evil is that they are bringing sacrifices and altars on altars of bricks. Oh, wow. How terrible. But like, what does that mean? Why is that a big problem? Well, it's a big problem, because you have to kind of decode a it's almost a mathematical text. You've got to recognize symbols here. And bricks is a symbol of something really important that Isaiah, the prophet is talking about. And so he says, you know how terrible the people of Israel are sacrificing on altars made of bricks. Well, if we jump to Exodus 20 verse, 21 you'll see that an altar for God needs to be made of earth or of unworked, raw stone, but not of manufactured bricks. And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? Because the altar is where we go in order to be close to God, it's a place where people are going to interact with God in a very intimate way, it's you and me, you and me, God just me. I'm here before you, and therefore that place should be built out of God's building blocks, not out of things that are constructed by human beings and and if I'm going to relate to God as an individual, not as group identity, I'm not relating to God as part of the LGBTQ plus community. I'm not relating to God because I'm part of the people of the same skin color. I'm relating to God as as me and. Bricks are a reference always to turning people into socio economic units of society. Bricks is a metaphoric language in the Bible, always used when a tyrant is trying to convert people from individuals into a nation of slaves. And just to clarify when I say a nation of slaves, you know that doesn't mean people wearing loincloths, being whipped by brutal taskmasters. You could also be being turned into a slave by the tax collector. You could be a sophisticated person as part of a sophisticated society that is kept working. That when you eventually gather together a few dollars and you're able to buy a piece of land, maybe with a house on it for yourself, you discover that unless you pay a regular tax to the government, you lose it. It's not really yours. You're kind of renting it, and if you stop making your payments, you're not going to have it anymore. It was never yours. There's an element of slavery there. There's an element of slavery where so much of your earnings are taxed that it is almost impossible for you ever to accumulate enough to become an independent person when the style of government is what I call a nimrodian style of government from chapter 11 in Genesis, it is always an attempt to convert people from God's children, each one unique. In other words, a stone, right? A stone, a rock created by God, not by people. And everyone is unique. You want to build a wall out of stones. It takes a very skilled Mason, bricks, something else entirely, made by people all identical. That's the whole point of a brick. They're all identical. Almost anybody can lay bricks, because they all fit predictably. You slap on some mortar, throw the brick down, and there you go again. I do understand that brick laying is a skill, but nothing compared to building with stone and so not surprisingly, as Pharaoh in the beginning of Exodus, Pharaoh begins converting the Israelites, from a free people into his slaves, the very first analogy he uses Is bricks. Chapter one of Exodus, verse 14 and the Egyptians made the Israelites lives bitter with mortar and with bricks.
Daniel Lapin 42:49
What's that about? Yeah, bricks means that a process is underway to convert the free Israelite men and women into Pharaoh's slaves, the conversion of stones into bricks. You see, you can never have a tyranny if people see themselves as individuals. And I believe that that is one reason why the American culture for the last few years has been pussy pushing so hard on group identity, you're not an individual. You'll remember Barack Obama saying you didn't build that. It was you just part of a whole group of slaves, and everybody did it, not just you. Everything being done to eliminate the sense of God created uniqueness. That's the whole point. When we say that God created men and women in his image, it means unique, just like God, each one of us ability with the ability to create uniquely, just like God. If you write a poem and I write a poem, there is zero probability of them being the same, not if you ask two people to write a poem on a sunset, they're not going to be the same. Human beings are unique, but governments that are moving towards tyranny do everything possible to make people see themselves as part of a group. That's the essence of Marxism and communism, right? You are part of the community. You're not unique, and that's why houses, housing in communist tyrannies are all identical. You get into trouble if you paint your front door a different color. And to this very day, public housing is that it's exactly the idea for you, the individualism of having a car, whatever brand you want, with the color you want, driving where you want when you want, no siree. Public transport is the way to go. You know why to save the environment? Because there always has to be a cause to make people accept slavery, the climate, the environment. It save the planet. Oh, okay, fine, I'll do whatever you say. And that is how becoming materialism materialistic works. You get rid of the spiritual, and then everything is material. Well, where is our uniqueness? Our uniqueness as people, is precisely in the spiritual part of our beings. Wouldn't you agree that we human beings, all of us, relate pretty much the same way to ice cream and to roast turkey and to a massage and, for that matter, to sex? We all relate to physical stimuli, pretty much the same way. But our thoughts, we all have our own individual thoughts, and what we think about a specific thing is quite different. That's why one of the joys of being married is being able to say to your spouse, what do you think about that? And it's going to be something quite different and fresh from the way you are thinking about it, because it is in our souls and our spirits that our uniqueness is found. And so a government intent on tyranny, does everything possible to strip away the spiritual, leaving only the physical. And once people are only physical, their resemblance to one another can be emphasized and they can be turned away from stones and into bricks, that's, pretty grim, isn't it? That is, that is grim and sad, but it is very much a real thing and and it's, unavoidable, unless faith is kept alive strong in that society, the bonus for the special bonus program for Happy Warriors, and thank you for being part of the Happy Warrior community.
Daniel Lapin 46:56
It's about the five F's, and everybody knows about the family and finance and fitness and friendship and faith, and everybody knows that the way to have a successful life is to plan your life and to write down on a daily basis and a weekly basis. How am I closer to my goal? This is the goal. I know what it is. This is where I want to get to in each of those areas. But the trick is, you have to know where you are now, and very few of us know intuitively and honestly where we are, because we fool ourselves. And it's understandable, because very often acknowledging where you are now is too painful to endure, to be able to say, Yeah, you know, I failed. I've wasted the last six years. Here is where I am, and I'm nowhere near where I want to be or where I should be, and it's hard. And so we spin stories to ourselves. But if you really want to progress and you really want to move forward to your goals and dreams, well then you really do need to know where you are so you can have a candid and accurate plan worked out. Because if you try and work out a plan, a program, a roadmap to take you from a place to your goal, but that place isn't where you are. It's quite useless, right? I mean that that's obvious, right? If you're in in New York and you want to get to Chicago, but you convince yourself that you are really in St Louis, well, that's a totally different journey, and you're not going to do it, right? So knowing where you are is hugely important, and the bonus program is using the 5f to accurately evaluate your precise current position. And it's wonderful, because you're then able from there to plot an accurate course to your real destination. I hope you make use of it. It's been very, very effective and very, very helpful to a lot of people, and now it can be your tool as well. It's right there on the website for happy warrior member community members. And let me know what you think of it, please. So that's as far as we go for today, and it is time for me. Reluctantly, you can hear, I'm reluctant to part, but I have to say goodbye to you, and until another week, I want to wish you good journeys in your success, journey towards fulfillment in your finance and your faith, in your family, your friendships and your fitness. I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
