TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Bring Joy into Your Life by Feeling 2 Conflicting Feelings Simultaneously
Date: 10/11/24 Length: 38:36
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. Thanks for all you do, promoting the show and telling other folks about it. And thank you for subscribing and being part of the show. Very, very much appreciated, because, as you know, I solely dedicate myself to revealing how the world really works, and for helping to lay the foundations of the principle that the more that things change, the more we need to depend on those things that never change. And one of the things that never changes, of course, is that foolish people act emotionally. Now, I'm not saying we mustn't have emotions. I'm not saying they have no role, but I'm saying that making decisions and acting in important life changing areas on the basis of emotions is the act of a foolish, foolish person, and sometimes the emotions run very strongly, and it's very difficult to urge people to keep the emotions under control, but here is a really important exercise, and that is, don't allow yourself to be overwhelmed by any one emotion. And so when you feel that, let's say you're a young man and you are absolutely infatuated with a young lady. Say to yourself what I always say to young men who come to tell me, young men who I advise, and they come to say she's incredible. I found the girl in my dreams. She's the one. And I always say, so, tell me two things that are wrong with her. Tell me two flaws, two drawbacks. And I usually get met with a face that looks like a goldfish. The jaw drops, the eyes blink, the mouth closes and opens, and it takes quite a few seconds before any sound emerges and they say, Well, what do you mean? I mean, she's fantastic, she's perfect, she's every right. So now we know you're about to act like a fool. She may be the right person for you. She may be exactly who you should marry, but one should do that in a very sane way, because important actions in life should be done not on the basis of emotions, but on the basis of thoughts. We shouldn't use our heart. We should use our head. And so I say this, and before we go any further, if you want my ongoing advice on this matter. I want you to tell me. And then they start thinking, and well, I guess you know, you could, you could say she, you know, she, interrupts and speaks over me all the time. Whenever we're somewhere and I'm I've just started saying something, she usually jumps in and talk, okay, now we're getting somewhere, and that's not a reason not to go ahead and marry her, but it's important that you are able to handle more than one simple feeling. You know, as as you know, Susan and I suffered an almost unimaginable loss this past summer, on July the seventh, and yeah, we lost out our daughter. And there's, there's no day that that isn't real and a part of us. But at the same time yesterday, we happened to see three of our grandchildren, three daughters that arena left behind and and we saw them playing joyfully and and dancing and laughing and and we reminded ourselves of this piece of ancient Jewish wisdom, how important it is to be able to handle more than one feeling at a time. And so yeah, nothing was going to remove the feeling of loss and pain and grief. It's still much too raw, but at exactly the same time, simultaneously, while that's going on, we were able to allow our heart to melt at the sight of these three little girls playing together as sisters. So our heart was breaking and our heart was melting at both the exact same time, and it just served as a reminder to us that this is a very important life lesson, and it's something we all ought to be able to do, or to be able to look and make sure, not so much look, make sure we can feel. Even conflicting and incompatible feelings at the same time. And so when you find yourself feeling something very strongly, Oh, I feel, you know, anger at what that horrible criminal did to somebody. You know, anger at a political set of circumstances. It's always a good exercise to force yourself to stop and say, Okay, now, what could I feel differently? I don't do it because my head isn't allowing me. My head is telling me so I'm but you know, Can you can you feel some sadness at a criminal who was who basically, little by little, step by step, from some small mishap as a four year old with no parents and no guidance and no moral instruction, he was on a road that anyway, even I find it a little difficult, but it is important to make sure that we do train ourselves To feel more than one thing at a time, particularly when they are even incompatible things we might be feeling. I tell you this in the context of the Nobel Prize Committee, which just on Friday, October the 11th, 2024 Friday the day before Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.
Daniel Lapin 6:25
On Saturday, the Nobel Prize Committee announced that a Japanese group of survivors of the atomic bomb attacks in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That group is called the Nihon hidangkyu, and that group has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. And the head of the Nobel Prize Committee said that this group is so important, they've contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo. And the idea is that the they the goal is to make sure that nuclear weapons will never be used again. The survivors. The general term for the survivors in Japan is hibakusha. The hibakusha are the people who who are left still survive. And the Nobel Prize Committee and this, this group that run the Nobel Peace Prize say, look, these survivors help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable and somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons and because we are creatures with not only heads, but also hearts, we hear that and we say, can you imagine what that day on august 6, 1945 on a sunny morning in Hiroshima? Can you imagine what that was like when there was suddenly a blinding fireball a few 100 feet above the city. And it's spread in a second, in a microsecond, incinerating, you know, maybe as many as 100,000 people. I say maybe, because nobody really knows. Could have been 150,000 could have been 60,000 nobody really knows. And if you know, you've got to imagine some of what Japan had inflicted on it during the last few months of the war. Not to forget that, up till the dropping of the atom bomb, General Curtis LeMay had inflicted, from a military point of view, an extremely successful firebombing campaign, not only on Tokyo, but on many other cities. The toll of that probably a quarter of a million, probably 250,000 Japanese civilians incinerated in the firebombing sometimes incinerated, sometimes stifled, because the fires were so intense that they literally sucked up all the oxygen. You sometimes hear people saying, well, he sucked up all the oxygen when he walked into the room as an expression, but in real terms, the fire was consuming so much oxygen that there was literally nothing to breathe. People asphyxiated. And similar things happened in Dresden when the Allies bombed the city of Dresden in order to force Japan closer to surrender. So
Daniel Lapin 9:31
these things, you know, we hear and we say, how absolutely awful this really. It's wonderful that these people got acknowledged, and the Nobel Prize Committee gave them the Nobel Peace Prize because what they're doing is so important that is to remind the world of the unimaginable horror and cruelty of the atomic bomb that exploded on the sixth of August 1945 and that's how it sounds, right? And. We feel that, but catch yourself for a moment. Catch yourself and ask yourself, Wait a moment. Let's try and understand what's going on here. For a start, anytime the Nobel Peace Peace Prize is awarded, you can be suspicious because it was awarded to Barack Obama, it was awarded to Yasser Arafat the the terrorist leader. The Nobel Peace Prize is a hilarious, sick joke, very, very sick, rather than very funny, but the Nobel Peace Prize is already notorious as being awarded in the most awful, awful kind of way. So, so the real question is, what exactly are they trying? What is this group trying to tell the world that nuclear weapons can kill our heart of people? Or are they saying nuclear weapons kill people in the most horrific way imaginable? Which of those are they say? Or maybe they're saying both. And I'm going to now explain perhaps many of you have figured this out already for yourself, but if not, I'm going to explain why it is that this was a nonsensical award, and that the organization itself has zero function other than perhaps to make the survivors feel that they survive for a purpose. I'm not criticizing it on that level. God bless them. They should do whatever makes them feel good and whatever they want to do. But the notion that this is an organization achieving serious ends in the world and playing an important role in the world and having a significant purpose in the world, That's complete nonsense, and they fully deserve the Peace Prize. Once you know what an absolute sick joke the Nobel Peace Prize is so why do I say that? Well, I'm going to explain that, but first, if I may, I want to urge you, if you haven't yet, got yourself a copy of the audio program, The Gathering Storm, decoding the secrets of Noah and the flood. I would like you to use this opportunity of jumping in on the tail end of a special sale price for this at the website at rabbiDaniellapin.com and I'll tell you why, because so much of it is relevant to where we're going. You know, if, whether or not you are a Bible enthusiast, you might want to start looking at developing the faith the F side of your life. Get hold of a Bible and look at chapter six, and Chapter Six is leading into the flood, and one of the things it's talking about is a group of people called the Nephilim. Many English translations translate them as the Giants. And you know, who and what are these Nephilim? Are they really giants? And and then, just before that, they seem to be, well, something connected with the sons of the gods. The children of the gods, really, who are these gods? I mean, is this, is this really what it's talking about? And what I do is we launch into the program of the Gathering Storm, decoding the secrets of Noah on sale right now at the website, what I do is explain who these sons of the Lords are and how the Lords is a term that has often been used for not gods, but people who are hugely powerful and influential in a society. Now, if you happen to live in a country like the United States of America or the United Kingdom or Canada or Australia, even in parts of Africa, you know the extent to which your life is influenced by lords. As a matter of fact, in England, they even have a formal place for them to sit and talk about what they'd like to see happening in the country. It's called the House of Lords, and it's part of the British parliamentary system. It's not a place where gods come. It's a place where hugely important and influential and very powerful people gather to make their plans and to talk. There are other places where that happens. The World Economic Forum is another place, another house of the Lords. And in order to really be able to derive significant real life practical benefit from those couple of chapters, 678, of the. A Book of Genesis. It's really, really helpful to get some insight as to what these people are, what they're trying to do, and generally, what their children do, and who these Nephilim are. And you might be shocked to hear the extent to which abortion is actually a signal marker of the journey of a once prosperous and successful culture down the road of decline, down the slippery slope towards decadence and depravity and the failure economically and militarily of that society all flows from what you see happening at the beginning of chapter six. And I do explain that, I think scarily but very authentically, very accurately. I make ancient Jewish wisdom accessible to you. So go to the website RabbiDaniellapin.com, and take a look at The Gathering Storm. You'll see you'll be able to read more about it, even then than I'm telling you. Um, it is also possible right now to get hold of the chorus of connection, the Book of Ruth and again, extremely important in your 5f program. If you're a Happy Warrior, right, you already know about the 5f program. You probably have the textbook, The Holistic You and you are working on your five F's. Well, part of the 5f is connection, your family connections, your financial connections, and your friendship connections. So right there, three out of the five have to do with human relationships. And the Book of Ruth is rather extraordinary in that sense, because, like, what do you say when you first sit down next to somebody I don't know on a train or you're going to be together on a flight for a few hours. You know, you generally start talking, and after a couple of minutes, invariably, one of you puts out a hand and says, Hi. You know, my name is William, and you exchange names, and as soon as you've exchanged names, the connection moves to a different level. So why would it be that the Book of Ruth, which has a great deal to do with connections, starts off with a verse in which no names are mentioned. It's just a man from this group goes into another woman, and they go with people, and the first verse mentions no names, and then the second verse imposes the names. Why doesn't the verse simply read, hey, a man called so and so went to the fields of so and so, etc, etc. But ordinarily, when people talk or write, they introduce somebody, they say who his name is. That's ordinary. You know, it's almost a rule of writing and and yet here there's a violation of that rule. And so you'd want to know what's going on here. How, how do you employ this piece of strategic information from ancient Jewish wisdom in your own life endeavors, or later on, in that same book? And again, you know, read through the book. And by the way, I'm addressing myself now to folks who think of themselves as non religious, and you can't lose right? You don't have to worry. It's not going to turn you into anything. It's not going to make you do anything you don't want to do. But if you read the book of Ruth and then study the audio program, the book of Ruth and the chorus of connection that again, you'll find at the website RabbiDaniellapin.com
Daniel Lapin 18:47
you'll be astonished. You'll be astonished at the questions that crop up. And when those questions crop up, and I always teach people whenever I'm teaching the Bible, or even even when I'm instructing my coaching clients, I very often say, Look, I know you're not a Bible based person. I we've discussed this before. I know you don't even have a Bible in your home, but why don't you get hold of one and take a look at this chapter. It is very relevant to understanding the things that you are trying to change in your life right now. And so if you read read along in the book of Ruth, one of the great mysteries is that this very demure and modest woman, Ruth, goes along and climbs into the bed of a man she doesn't know she's later going to marry him. But right now, what is happening that night on the threshing floor when this demure young woman acts in this most shockingly provocative manner. What's that all about? And so all of that. These are two audio programs that, if you're a happy warrior. Trying to gain greater understanding into how the world really works. On the basis that knowing how the world really works helps you more effectively form your coherent life strategies. It makes you more likely to act on the basis of what you think rather than what you feel, it makes you take the important steps and make the important decisions in your life and effect the important choices in your life on the basis of your head and not your heart. Then these two programs contain a huge amount of information that'll be very, very useful to you. And so I'm wanting you all to succeed. I'm wanting you all to grow in your five F's. And here are two extremely useful by the way. They really are easy to listen to, and I would even recommend that you listen to them with somebody important in your life, either family member or a friend. It's it. You know, it's fine to say to your spouse, or somebody who may become your spouse, I'd like us to spend the evening instead of going to a movie, let's do something more meaningful. Let's listen to this material. Or you might say to one of your children, an older, more mature child, let's listen to this together, and then we'll be able to discuss it and talk about it. So anyway, that is what you need to do right now. If you don't mind, go to the website, Rabbi Daniel lapin.com and get yourself a copy of The Gathering Storm. And by the way, you can get it instantly download, because these are audio programs you download the the audio program right away, and then you download the PDF, which is the accompanying booklet that helps guide you through the program. So one is called The Gathering Storm. The other is called the Book of Ruth. So don't hesitate. It is at rabbi. Daniel lapin.com please go ahead and seize these resources for significantly redirecting your life effectively. Excuse me interrupting. But there's one thing I realized I wanted to remind you of, and that is that, as many of you already know, in an effort to find a way to adequately express my appreciation to those of you who are joining us in the Happy Warrior community, I've started making available a special bonus podcast available exclusively as A way of thanking those of you who've made that step forward in making sure that you yourself are on the path of growth and change through the 5f and the this bonus podcast, this time that today, associated with this show in which we're Talking about feelings, is, first of all, it's an interesting business opportunity. It's something that's going on right now that not everybody, not many people, are even aware of. But if any of you have been thinking seriously about getting into the world of business, maybe you have a job. Maybe you work for some company or another. Maybe you work for the government, whatever it is, maybe whatever you are, but you think to yourself, you know, I'd really like to have a side gig. I'd like to open up a business. Well, there is a way of doing this that eliminates the risk inherent in business startups, and it's a way of acquiring and getting involved in something that is already up and running, not as an employee. And I'm going to talk about that and explain that, and as part of that same discussion, I'm going to speak about ownership versus renting. And so yeah, we are in a time where people are not only renting more than buying homes, renting car rides instead of owning a car, but we're in a time where that is being glorified as a superior lifestyle. Own nothing at all and make sure that everything you use is just rented or used on a temporary basis, and I'm going to provide some ancient, ancient Jewish wisdom on why that might not be really good advice for you as you shape and Build your life. And so all of that is going to be in the bonus podcast, which I hope you will get a chance to hear. I thought about it a great deal, and I was careful in preparing it and making it accessible to you. So enjoy and and now back to what we were discussing.
Daniel Lapin 24:58
Okay, so back. To the Nobel Peace Prize given to these folks who, according to the Nobel Prize Committee, are helping us describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons. Okay, so are they talking about the pain and suffering. In other words, dying by a nuclear explosion is worse than other ways, much worse, which is not true. Or are they saying that the death toll from nuclear weapons is so much higher than the death toll in other ways also not true. For instance, looking at the last matter, first, about 35,000 people die every year only in the United States of America. Not counting Canada, not counting Mexico, not the whole of North America, just United States. 35,000 die in motor car accidents, road accidents every single year. So three years it's 100,000 people. If it is that important to prevent the deaths of people, then we must either remove automobiles from the roads or we must impose a nationwide 15 mile an hour speed limit and enforce it, or we should do something. But if we don't, then we are acknowledging that it is not the most important thing in the world to us to eliminate death. What is more, the number of people that were killed by Pol Pot in Cambodia is certainly in the order of two and a half million people. That is several orders of magnitude more than the number of people killed in Hiroshima, and they didn't use nuclear weapons. You don't need nuclear weapons to kill large numbers of people, the number of people that Mao Tse Tung killed in China, middle class Chinese families brutally massacred with What? Knives, knives, spears, hammers, farm tools. That's true. That really, really happened, or the number of people killed in the 1950s by Joseph Stalin, the Russian leader, the Man of Steel, right? He didn't use nuclear weapons. Never even used bombs. And the Nazis millions of people by means of gas death camps. So this idea that nuclear bombs is something utterly unique, utterly distinctive, utterly different from anything else at all, and therefore our efforts, you know, and again, I'm not pointing a finger at the individual, I'm pointing a finger at the Nobel Prize Committee, but the people themselves. Oh, come on. I understand people with terrible suffering. I understand people who are haunted by the memory of a horrible day and and, you know, maybe not on the same scale, but you know, we all, we all are haunted by days like that, and certainly they should do. I mean, I'm not judging them at all, but I am judging the Nobel Prize Committee, and I'm judging foolish people who react emotionally to that kind of thing. So the idea that nuclear weapons kill inordinate numbers of people. It's not true. It's absolutely not true. As you know, as I said, just with simple
Daniel Lapin 28:48
incendiary bombs that have been around for more than 200 years, and a lot more General Curtis LeMay fire bombs the cities of Japan and and even more people died. So it's definitely not a numbers game. So then, are they saying that this is the most horrible way to die? I don't know that any of us can really judge that, but I would venture to say that cases that I know of, and many of you may know of them as well, I'm thinking of, well, perhaps, gosh, most hideous. I mean, you know, there are so many of these dreadful cases. One, one only needs to look at the newspaper, but, but I want to make a point here, and so you'll pardon me if, if I do. But this is just one example, Jennifer ertman and Elizabeth Pena, Two girls, one was age 14 and one was 16, back in 93 in Houston, Texas. These were two good girls. They were not girls in trouble, nice families, just you. Doing well at school. They were just two good girls, and they they took a shortcut one tragic afternoon, and they were on on their way to to a friend. And instead of walking the streets, they took a shortcut across the fields and five young males got a hold of them and started tormenting them and started torturing them, repeatedly raping these two girls, over and over and over and over again, over a lengthy period of time and and then as they begged for their lives, as the trial later revealed, one of them had to watch the brutal massacring of the other, and then the first one was also killed. Now these girls must have known for several hours that their lives were over, and I'm sorry, but nobody's going to persuade me that somehow or another dying in an instant flash of unimaginably hot gasses is somehow worse than what these two girls went through on October the seventh, 2023 in Israel. And I'm not going to be gruesome, but there was more than one man who was forced to watch his wife and daughter being mutilated and violated and then killed, and then he was killed after he had been forced to watch these horrific brutalities. Is that way of dying better than dying in a blinding flash of a nuclear explosion. You know, God should save us from ever having to make those kinds of judgments. But my point is that we must not fall into emotional traps. And I'm talking about, you know, particularly gruesome and real circumstances, but ordinarily in life, events occur all the time. There are judgments you need to make. There are decisions you have to make, having to do with raising children, having to do to interacting with parents or siblings. There are decisions in business having to do with how to relate to something that a customer has said or done, how to relate to something that a boss or a supervisor said or done, or how to relate to an employee or an associate all of the time, and there are two ways, invariably, responding with your head and with your heart, responding with your thoughts or with your feelings, responding intellectually or emotionally, three ways of just saying the same thing. And let's train ourselves. Let's train ourselves as reliably as we possibly can to not fall into the trap of emotional decisions, let's learn to explore feelings and say, you know, I feel really sad for what these survivors of a nuclear attack in Hiroshima experienced, of course, very, very sad. But they want me to, you know, give a year's worth of charity to support their organization. No Not happening. I'm sorry, because it's not an organization that is telling the truth or doing anything significant or real and and is meaningless. If you're going to ban nuclear weapons, you may as well ban knives, you may as well ban bombs. You may as well ban fire. You may as well ban cars. Not going to happen utterly and entirely meaningless. So if you are a happy warrior member of the community, please make sure to listen to the bonus podcast that is available, especially for you on the member website. Wehappywarriors.com and enjoy the discussion there, in which I discuss how these things happen gradually.
Daniel Lapin 34:35
You know, nobody goes from taking $2 from his mother's purse to the next day robbing the bank on the corner. There is a journey. There is actually a slope. There is a spectrum there that needs to be understood and and I go into explaining that it also. Has application in terms of emotionalism. One doesn't become an emotional person, where we act on emotions overnight. But unfortunately, what happens is, the more you allow yourself to be susceptible to feelings, the more you indulge in it. And by the way, here, I'm sorry to say, but the whole world of talk therapy is largely at fault in this area, because the more you talk about a bad feeling you had, or any feeling you had, the more intensely you feel it. And so you know if, if you are just consumed by feelings of anger towards your parents, if you'd shut up about it and get on with your life, and you'd grow up and realize that no matter what your parents did or didn't do, at some point, you are responsible for your life. You get to make decisions. You are an agent of change, but the more you talk about it, the more you tell your therapist about the more angry you get at your parents and the less capable you are of lifting yourself out of this ridiculous cesspool. And it's like that in every other area as well. The more you indulge the feelings, the more you have to tell your friend, oh, you know what happened? I can't tell you how badly I feel about this. You know what? Just grow up, really. I mean, yeah, we get it. You feel it. I feel it. We all feel it. But stop going on and on and on and on about your feelings, unless you're my wife, if you're my wife or my daughter, I'm going to it's part of my job description. I will listen to whatever feelings you want to discuss. Now I might then respond at a certain point. I might say, look, speak it out, get it out of your system, and then can we put it away and never raise it again? Because the feelings aren't doing you any good at all, unless they are. Feelings of gratitude, feelings of happiness, feelings of warmth, feelings of optimism, go for those absolutely and so my dear friends, as we come to the end of today's show, I want to urge you to focus on your five F's, if necessary, if any of them are particularly weakens. It just so happens. This week, several people have told me that they're doing well on four out of the five, but the faith one they're getting nowhere on. And I'm saying, Look, I didn't include it because I'm a rabbi. I included it because it's true, it's effective and it's important. And it doesn't just mean faith, it also means the intangible things, the spiritual things in life, fall under the faith heading so you might want to, in fact, get hold of a Bible. Take a look at Genesis six. Take a look at the book of Ruth, and then with somebody important in your life. Listen to the Gathering Storm. Listen to the book of Ruth in the chorus of connection. And get ready to be astounded and helped become a more effective person in your family, in your faith, in your finances, in your fitness and in your friendships. God bless. I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
