TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: The Maddening Thing They Do With Christmas/Chanuka
Date: 12/20/24 Length: 38:45
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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 being part of the show. And as you know, I deeply appreciate you promoting the show, telling friends and like minded people of the show. If you enjoy it, if you derive value from it, the odds are that you have friends who will too. And those of you who've been doing that have been extremely effective, and I very much appreciate it also. If you are not yet a subscriber to the show, it'd be great if you could do that as well. Take care of that right away, and you will have my appreciation. And here we are, right on the threshold of Christmas and Hanukkah, both of which occur very close to one another. At this point, we're at the end of 2024, and they happen to come very, very closely together. And I want to talk about that a little bit. I want to explain one of the sad aspects of both those holidays, which is the tendency to secularize them. And that's been going on since the 1960s already, and the results have been really rather sad, and I'm going to explain just why that is. But in order to do that, I have to tell you about something your car has. It's called a catalytic converter, and it's a little device about that big, and it sits in your exhaust line under your car. And to give you an idea, this innocuous little piece of equipment which processes exhaust gasses to make them less problematic. About Well, last year, 25,000 of them got stolen in California in one year nationwide, 50 to 60,000 of them get stolen every year. Why? Well, because they have something inside called platinum. And platinum is an element in the periodic table quite close to gold, and it is a very expensive metal. Sometimes it's a little more expensive than gold, but it's right up there. And catalytic converters, if they are stolen, can be sold to scrap merchants for, you know, ballpark, $1,000 so. And here's the other part of it is which they're kind of easy to get to. And I mean, I'm speaking to Happy Warriors, so I don't mind telling you about all this, but I I sure hope they don't publicize this stuff around and let more of the ungodly become aware of just how easy it is. There's no serial numbers on a catalyst converter. You just saw it out of the out of the exhaust line, and off they go. Well, why is it called a catalytic converter? Well, because platinum plays a role as something called a catalyst. What's a catalyst? A catalyst is something which helps a chemical reaction to take place, but it plays no part in it directly itself. It's really kind of a weird thing. You know what it's a bit like. Somebody told me years ago that it's a little bit like an athletic coach running up and down the sidelines of a game yelling to players or a coach coaching his runner, and running alongside a, you know, a five mile runner or 5k runner, and yelling instructions at him. Well, the the coach isn't running the race, the coach isn't going to win the race. Nothing happens to the coach at all. But by virtue of his being there, the runner or the athlete performs better than he would have in another way. Well, it's kind of like that, and about 90% of chemical industrial processes that go on in the world have a involve a catalyst to accelerate the chemical process that is needed or make it require less energy. That's a very common purpose of a catalyst. And so the platinum inside your car's catalytic converter doesn't get consumed. It doesn't go up in in the smoke of the exhaust pipe. It just sits there. But by its presence, it allows two things to go on. For those of you are interested, two of the bad chemicals that come out of a car internal combustion engine is carbon monoxide, which is CO it's made up of every molecule of carbon monoxide is one atom of carbon and one atom of oxygen. You put them together, and you've got this dangerous, poisonous gas. And another thing that comes out are nitrous oxide gasses. So one atom of nitrogen and one atom of oxygen is nitrogen, nitrous oxide, and that's not good. Or one atom of nitrogen and two atoms of oxygen, nitrogen dioxide, also not good. And so when the exhaust gas goes through the catalytic converter, what happens is an atom of oxygen gets added to carbon monoxide, and that makes carbon dioxide CO becomes CO two. And no problem. It's just fine. And nitrogen oxide, nitrogen dioxide, loses oxygen and just becomes nitrogen. Same with nitrous oxide, it just loses one atom of oxygen and just becomes the gas plenty nitrogen in the atmosphere as well. The air we breathe is 70% nitrogen or more, so the catalytic converter makes the the byproducts of internal combustion more benign. Anyway, that's the the process. Why am I telling you all this? Because I want to talk about the role of God and faith as a catalyst in your lives. That's the important thing. And you know, there are some Happy Warriors who do have a connection with God. There are many who don't. And a week or two ago, I spoke about ways in which to start trying to connect if you have a yen. Today, I'm talking about why you should have a yen, why it is that the presence of God and faith in your life actually serves as a catalyst for several other processes to occur that are good and positive for your life. And so when I teach the 5f system for balancing your life, family, finances, fitness, friendships and then faith. And I want to explain how all of these things play a part, but that faith makes it easier for all the others to act as well. So are you okay with that? Well, okay, so let's start off with one of the first what's the absence of faith secularism. One of the malign dangers of secularism is that it leads quickly to its sinister consequence, namely, socialism. It it almost always happens. And it's not an accident that secularism is a fundamental part of every every socialist culture, every socialist country, every socialist society and in the parts of the United States of America that have become secular socialism is part of it. So take, for instance, the university campuses. And heaven knows, over the last few years we've seen plenty of that. But what is the reigning political doctrine on the university campus? It is, of course, socialism. It is a natural outcome of secularism, so much so that I want to tell you what I your rabbi, the circumstances that would turn me into a socialist. I want to tell you about that, but first of all, a reminder that if you haven't yet joined our Happy Warrior community, please do that. It's one of the ways we can communicate easily with one another on the We Happy Warrior website, where Susan & I interact with our Happy Warriors, and it's also where you can get huge access to a vast treasure trove of resources that have been carefully developed over the last number of years, and they are accessible to Happy Warriors. So you can do that. And then finally, one of the great things is Happy Warriors connecting and communicating with each other. It's a big thrill to be able to help somebody else with a problem, and it's an enormous blessing to be able to help, to be helped by somebody when you have a problem, and another happy warrior chimes in and says, You know what? I dealt with, exactly the same thing. All of this goes on in the community of happy warriors, which you can join by being part of the organization. You do it. Go to RabbiDanielLapin.com
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and you'll see how to become a Happy Warrior. Really simple, and I would love to be able to welcome you to our community. So please do join us and be in touch. Love to hear from you. I love hearing the comment. It's on thought tools and on this podcast and on everything else we do in the general comment section as we talk and exchange ideas. And I really do take things into account. In other words, somebody has an idea or somebody points something out, I like emphasizing that and indicating that it's an idea of a Happy Warrior. Also, we, from time to time, interview a Happy Warrior for the podcast, so you get to know each other. We interviewed Marco a little recently, and we'll be doing somebody else after the holidays. So become a member of the Happy Warrior community. We'd love to have you along. And also, if any of you are still looking for last minute gifts, obviously, you will find those in the store at the rabbiDaniellapin.com don't hesitate. Please join us and acquire whatever you need, because you know it will bring value into the lives of those to whom you gift those things. You can even give courses like, Wow. This one's a biggie. This is Scrolling through Scripture unit one. This is an approach to the entire enterprise of understanding the Bible. And understanding the Bible means seeing it in its depth, I pointed out in a thought tool recently that, you know, if we would have parachute a car down to a remote, isolated cannibal tribe that hadn't seen anything of civilization, and the cannibal chief opened the car door and he climbed into it and he discovered that his enemy's arrows bounced harmlessly off the surface of the car, he'd be absolutely thrilled and delighted. And yet, if we went to him and we said to him, you know, you are deriving only 5% of the value of this car, because it's true, it does shelter you from things outside. But more than that, it could transport you and carry you and your family or you and your friends huge distances, very quickly and very comfortably, and it's fun to drive. You're not going to get through to him, even if you could overcome language problems, it wouldn't make any sense at all, would it? Because he has no idea of roads, he has no idea of gasoline. He has no idea of rapid transport. It's a lot like that, happy warriors. Probably many of you already know that if the Bible to you is a sequence of Bible stories, ancient narratives about anachronistic happenings of primitive people, you are not getting more than a tiny percentage of the value of the Bible if you want to get the entire value, but if you really want to be able to understand what this book has done in sculpting civilization and in bringing the wealth that the Western World enjoys strictly as a result of biblical insight, then scrolling through scripture would be a fabulous way of starting that journey. It's about 10 hours of instruction, and you'll find that it's called scrolling through scripture, and it is on Rabbi Daniel lapin.com you'll just look at the top and it points you out about it. And, yeah, you can't go wrong. It's very, very exciting. I honestly believe it is perhaps one of, I was going to say the most important work I've done, but holistic, the holistic you book is, is right up there as well. And it's really sort of part of the same idea. But at any rate, back to what would make me a socialist. It's very simple. If I were persuaded that I'm completely wrong and everything I know is not true and God doesn't exist, there's no such thing. We live in an utterly material world. There is nothing of any spiritual significance on the planet, then I would become a socialist. Why? Well, because if that's the case, you've told me that everything of reality is only material. I can either touch it or drive it or eat it or wear it or it's it's everything in the world is material. In that case, we live in a limited world, a world of ultimate shortage, because there is no God of abundance. And if that's the case, then I have to look at everybody around me as a competitor for the very air I breathe. Stop breathing my air, stop taking my water, stop eating my food, stop using up the space of which were so limited and so on and so forth. So if I were persuaded, no, God, okay, fine, then I get it, then I understand that I live in a world of shortage, and the only way to be moral about it is equality and to make sure that everything is redistributed. So. We have, everyone has the same amounts as everybody else, because nothing new is being created. Wealth isn't being created. You know, now there's a big mystery. A lot of people who believe this are scratched their head and they wouldn't How is it possible that there's so much more wealth in the world today, and there is how is it that wealth means so much more money than the word wealth used to mean 100 years ago because of human creativity. But wait, if humans are creative, then we're not like ostriches and emus and cows and camels. Then we are capable of creation in a way that animals are not. Whoa. That's, you know, that's a little bit too much, and so people are not that comfortable with it, but that brings us, of course, to an understanding of one of the benefits of having faith in your life, and that is not being beset by an atmosphere of shortage. And make no mistake, secular people do live in a mindset, a spiritual schematic of shortage. It's a terrible handicap. It imposes huge limitations on your potential and what you can achieve in many areas, but tip it particularly in the area of wealth creation. And so to banish, to utterly banish, the entire concept of a world of shortage and limit the best approach and quickest and most reliable. The catalyst to That is faith, and it's a very, very worthwhile thing. Now, the next benefit that is brought by having God and faith in your life is relationships. You see, there is a binary of God and government, which is to say that human beings are drawn to a mighty force in their lives. They are drawn to believing in the power of an outside force we are we're drawn that way, and that's one of the reasons that the alcoholic synonymous program, for instance, is so successful, because it kicks off with this fundamental reality of we are relating to a greater force. Now the binary is that there are only two possibilities for this greater force. One is the little g of government, and the other one is the big G of God. And so that's one of the reasons that it's a real binary and very visible in the United States and other countries as well. And that is that people who have this child like faith in government and in the United Nations generally do not have relationship with God. And conversely, those people who are comfortable with the relationship with God do not have this naive faith that government can solve all problems or that the United Nations can and so if one is wedded to government, if one is locked into this concept that the state is all powerful, then the natural outcome of that is people build what I call Hub and Spoke relationships. They all build relationships where they are connected to the central hub of government, and that's one of the reasons that socialist tyrannies totalitarian governments, which are nearly always socialist, the tendency is to prohibit the formation of clubs, associations, groups and gatherings, because they fear that people will plot conspiracies against the central government. And beautifully, in the genius of the founders of the United States of America, God believing men one and all, they built into the Constitution the right of all Americans to associate with whomever they like. You want to form a stamp club. You want to form a club of gun owners. You want to form a club of theatrical enthusiasts. Go ahead. God bless you. Break a leg, go for it. Nothing to stop you. But that's not true in socialist and totalitarian regimes where there's great an ease at Citizens getting to know one another, and stories written by Solzhenitsyn and many others of the Soviet period speak of how nobody trusted anybody else. People turned each other in Canada, which has become an increasingly socialist regime over the last few years,
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the they estimate that about 30% of Canadians have turned in their neighbors for one thing or another, not adhering to COVID restrictions, for taking COVID money wrongly. See about as many Imagine living in a society where 30% of your fellow citizens are snitches, and yet that's exactly what socialism tends to encourage. Because after all, if I am linked to the central hub, the giant, the little g of government, well then anybody who takes from that government is sort of hurting me. It's my job as mine. I'm a good friend of government. So anybody who takes from government is is the enemy, and they need to be corrected, and they need to be caught and snitched on and punished and captured. That's exactly the idea, and that is exactly what happened in Canada, what happens elsewhere as well? People speak about nobody trusting anybody else in a socialist regime, and that's also exactly true. And so in general, then relationships are warmer and stronger with other human beings within a faith environment and and people speak all the time of the friends that they have in their faith, family, the people you know through synagogue, the people you know through church, there is a special closeness there, and that is because there is not a referee called government between us. We just relate consensually as two human beings. It's also one of the reasons that economies work better in that environment where you don't have the referee of government coming between two consensual adults wishing to effect a commercial transaction. And so those people who worship the little g of Government believe that the only way to safely have economic interaction and to have financial transactions is if the government regulates it from up above. The truth is, while I dare say, certain regulations are probably necessary, because we are not perfect human beings. The more regulation you impose, the more you undercut, depress and destroy economic enterprise, the harder, the more regulations you need to comply with in order to start a business, the worse it is for that economy. And there is actually statistic that is measured in terms of which each country how many documents have to be filled in, how many forms have to be filled in, how many regulations must be complied with in order to start a business. And you can see it corresponds directly to the economic vitality of the society. Societies with downward economic vitality make it very difficult for anyone, indeed, to start a business. And so the the whole, the whole purpose of the Torah is to make it possible for human, I should say one purpose, I guess, is to make it possible for human beings to coexist. Because if there is not a system of expectations and obligations, it becomes impossible to live with anybody else. For the reason I mentioned earlier that we constantly start seeing one another as competitors and rivals, and we see we try, we do everything that we can to handicap other people, because we see their success as coming at our cost. And so the whole of the Old Testament is designed and has a function of making it possible, in other words, to even out expectations, obligations. Expect, expectations. I say so is that it is possible to live whether with one another. Here are here's how we set up a partnership. Here is how we behave if we own adjacent fields and adjacent properties. Who has to pay for this? For what all of this stuff is detailed throughout the the Old Testament and throughout the Hebrew Scripture, the idea making it possible for us in order to to be able to actually live together, it also makes marriages more easily able to function. You know why? Because in order to get married, you have to have faith. And one of the catalytic effects of faith is that it rubs off into other areas. Religious people worry less than non religious people because, and you know, I hear this all the time, particularly when I was in Israel during October of 2023, and the Hamas invasion took place on October the seventh. And for the next couple of weeks, I got it. Things look really, really bad. And meanwhile, the there was worry that the West Bank might explode and the North might explode. I. And the expression I heard over and over and over again from people who when we say to them, how are you able to just go about your daily business? Aren't you be set by dreadful worry about where is, where's this all going to be tomorrow? And the answer, they all go, God's in charge. Now, some people will think this sounds a bit simplistic, and you don't have to, you know, whatever God's in charge. Yeah, fine. The fact is, there is a catalytic effect. The catalytic effect is you can be more cheerful. You can be more happy because you don't feel the crushing weight of worry. And heaven knows, if we decided to now give free reign to our worry, can you, I mean, how long would it take you to come up with 10 really disturbing things to worry about right now in your life, easy, right? And religion, faith and God make it far easier to put them aside, because being happy has huge value in itself, apart from which the people you live among, your family members, your people you work with, it's so wonderful to be near happy people. It's so uplifting. It's almost joyful. And by contrast, to be with people who constantly worrying and constantly gloomy, right? They are dranos. They are real dranos. They just drain everything out of you. They drain the joy of life. They drain everything away. That's that's what happens. So another catalytic effect of having faith is diminishing of worry. Another catalytic effect is that faith spreads and you're able to apply it. Making an investment takes faith. Buying a House takes faith, but nothing takes more faith than getting married. And it's not an accident that marriage is healthiest in faith communities today, it's true, and there's never been a time in American history where fewer people are getting married, and where are marriages happening in faith communities, Jewish and Christian, and I dare say Muslim as well, although I don't know, but Certainly in in Jewish communities and in Christian communities, marriages continue all the time because faith is a huge help, and having God and faith in your life has this overflow effect where it's it plays a role in being able to bring about something which deep down on every level, everybody would like to spend their days with somebody of the opposite gender with huge, unbreakable love between them, in a relationship that isn't going to end because One person gets upset, or one person gets annoyed, or we fall out of love, or anything else that is so shaky and unpredictable, an emotional mood. Marriage, you don't change the rules of a marriage just because you had a an emotional upset. You know, I fell out of I fell out of love with you. So what is the correct answer? What's that going to do with anything? We still are building a life together, and you know what? The love will come back, promise you. And so all of these things are enormously impacted by the role of faith having children. You know what faith it takes to bring children into the world and again, who's having children today, people who have a connection with God and with faith. Why is it such a help? Well, apart from anything else, um, it is the root of the whole concept of a hierarchy structure, an authority hierarchy. I have to listen to him, so my children have to listen to me. That's the deal. That's the fifth commandment, Honor your father and mother. But the first commandment is we have to honor God.
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And when your children see that you honor God, it makes the request that they honor you totally palatable. And so the truth is, for secular people to have children is terrifying. It really is. If, if I was a secular person, would I? Would I have children? I really don't know, because I'd be fearful of raising not monsters, necessarily, but people with whom I have no connection, people whom I sink and invest an enormous amount into, but who feel nothing for me. I can't imagine the tragedy of that, the pain of that, and for the. Most part, that is a pain that people who have God and faith in their lives do not have to experience. That's that's a wonderful thing. It's a huge, huge blessing. So the stability of marriage and family are very much a function of faith. In other words, faith is a catalyst to make those things happen and make those things take place in in more likely circumstances, and the the other thing is that another catalytic effect of faith is handling time, God and faith make us aware of not only the present, but past, present and future. This is one of the reasons that, for instance, on the scourge of abortion, people who have God and faith in their lives. Do not like abortion, and people who like abortion, for the most part, are people who have no God and faith in their lives. What's that got to do with anything? Well, very simply, that a secular person, for the most part, tends to focus very much on the present. I mean, I'm not saying they're not aware of the future. I'm not saying that secular people do not buy Roth IRAs and investments for their retirement. So they're not oblivious to the future. But in terms of a constant awareness that we live in a time continuum. We live in a moment that is more in action than a moment which converts the past to the present simultaneously, as we progress through that thinly sliced moment of time that takes faith in God to help us understand, to help us do and it's a very different thing. So when you have a child, and the child is, you know, a month old or two months old, and you're not getting any sleep and you're you really are questioning whether you can survive this. If you are a person of faith, then the odds are that your mind intuitively latches onto the space the past, present, future continuum, and you say to yourself, this won't last forever. Now secular persons also say to themselves, this won't last forever, but a religious person is more likely to hear it, absorb it, and integrate it into their rampaging hormones and feelings going on at this early stage of raising a little baby, and so relating to time very much a factor. It is true that our natural instinct is to relate to time, to live in the present, and if you look at criminal behavior, people who study that sort of thing tell you all the time these people are focused only on the present. There is no concern about bringing shame onto their parents and their grandparents, in many cases, having been raised by the structures of government instead of God, they probably don't know their fathers, because marriage is very much a function of a faith and God connection in life. And so, yeah, part of the criminal mind is an obsessive preoccupation with a present and sometimes say, people ask, you know, how could this criminal have done it? Doesn't he realize he's going to get caught and go to jail? You've got to understand what I'm trying to explain to you, which is that, for somebody who is a deeply committed secularist, where secularism has really spread throughout his psychology and become part of who he is. You don't live the future. You only live the present. I'm not even saying Being aware of the future. I'm saying living the future. And when people celebrate Christmas, they're living the past. When people celebrate chanuk, we're living the past. We're very aware of it. It's not this isn't just a sentimental get together family. Let's get together and eat traditional foods and give each other presents. No, no. This is reconnecting with God, which is why I so much despise the secularization of Christmas and of Hanukkah that has been going on for since the since the 60s, of course, already. So, so that is really what we what we're talking about here, that having faith and God in your life. You know you might say, well. I didn't grow up religious. You know, I'm not a religious person. I don't believe in God. Now, I spoke about that in the podcast two or three weeks ago, but the bottom line is that there are it's a catalyst, and it's worth more than the value of the catalytic converter under your car. It's it has enormous catalytic benefits, having faith in God in your life really changes the quality of your life experience. And this is something you know, if your spouse is not into it, yet, you might want to have this as a conversational topic. And what could be better than this time of the year, Christmas or Chanukah. What better time is there to talk about the difference between a secular lifestyle and a lifestyle in which God and faith play a role? And so it is that when I teach The Holistic You, which is the name of our newest book, when I teach the principles of the 5f transformational system. Yes, you know, people see why you need family, why you need finance, friendships, sure, fitness, obviously. What's faith got to do with it? Faith is the catalyst that makes all the other four work better. Finance also, because, if you don't understand the spirituality of money, and you don't understand how money is created, then you are beset by a deep, unshakable sense of guilt at making money. You do not automatically feel the moral goodness and the dignity and the value to other people when you make money, these are part of the effects that are the catalytic consequences of having God and faith in your lives. I've spoken many times, of course, and I do and thou shalt prosper the book. You know why it is that Jewish people are disproportionately good with money, not everybody, but disproportionately. And part of it is this idea that because of a connection with God, we understand how money is brought into existence, and we don't feel guilty about having money. We get it, we understand it. We understand that we made it because money is something we make. It's not something we take. But all of these things are sub you don't have to consciously do it, but by having faith and God in your life, these are catalytic consequences. These things, you start thinking differently. All of a sudden, you find yourself aware in a very internalized way of past and future, not just present. And one is aware of what money is, and one is aware of how to deal with worries and concerns even fears. Conquering fear is a catalytic function of faith, these and many other wonderful things. So hopefully you are all a happy warrior members. If not, now is a great time to become a Happy Warrior member, in time for 2025, and in time for us to be able to connect and communicate in the spirit of the season. So thanks for being part of the show. Thanks for listening. Make sure you visit Rabbi Daniel lapin.com and until next week, I wish you a week of growth in your family and finances, your faith, your fitness and your friendship. I am Rabbi Daniel Lapin, God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
