Debbie

i'd like to thank mineflex and the amazing people at project inspire for inviting me to join you tonight life is an unfolding story a play in many acts sometimes when we have a lot going on it's a fast-paced drama sometimes like when we're in lockdown because of a pandemic it's a slow-moving documentary that seems to drone on and on the thing about our stories is that along the way we draw conclusions about the other actors on the stage of our lives and those conclusions become the backdrop for the next chapters in our life i'll give you an example so a nice young girl gets married we'll call her sarah a few weeks after the wedding sarah and her new husband go to her in-laws house to celebrate the shabbat sarah feels some tension coming from her mother-in-law it's not that she says anything bad or hurtful to her it's just that she's not making eye contact and she's not smiling and there's just this sense of tension okay she gets through the weekends she goes home and sometime later they spend another shabbat together at sarah's in-laws house and the whole situation repeats itself again and sarah leaves with a tremendous sense of unease she notices that when her mother-in-law calls her home that she only asks to speak to sarah's husband her son and little by little sarah becomes very sensitive about that and even a little bit jealous when she hears her husband laughing and having a good time on the phone with her mother-in-law with his mother by the end of the first year after their marriage sarah's mother-in-law has become public enemy number one she can do no right sarah tells her close friends about her difficult mother-in-law who she dislikes more and more as time goes on the whole topic becomes a sore one between sarah and her husband we tend to take our circumstances and our impressions of them and connect the dots creating a picture in our mind's eye that is fixed i saw my coworker meet with my boss several times the day before he called me in to tell me that i'm not getting the promotion they never meet that often i'm sure he had something to do with it sometimes we need to ask ourselves are we sure about the conclusions that we've drawn is that picture reality or are we just taking all the new input that comes in and using it to reinforce what we have already decided we need to learn to question our narrative why do we love to hate that guy or that gal or that in-law or that boss is this narrative serving a purpose let's explore for a few minutes some possible benefits to self that we use sometimes not even consciously to keep for the purpose of keeping bad feelings about someone else going number one is this person making me uncomfortable maybe they want something from me that i can't provide for them right now like friendship or closeness or even honesty number two is there some jealousy lurking there lurking in my heart is there station in life their job their beauty their youth something that i have it number three sometimes my bad feelings towards someone are simply because i had a bad first impression of that person and believe it or not sometimes even the act of changing our own minds is uncomfortable for us rabbi destler a great thinker of the 20th century talks about this when he explains that and there's there are many laws regarding jewish judges and jewish courts of law and he says that one reason for the law that a judge cannot hear the case of one plaintiff before both are present is simply because once an impression is made it becomes just plain holes uncomfortable for us to change our minds so really first impressions are quite long-lasting and number four another possible benefit to stoking the coals of a vendetta that may or may not have had merit at the outset is that it deflects attention from myself if i am railing even if it's only in my own minds against that person's lack of thoughtfulness or their self-centeredness or their greediness the unspoken implication is that clearly if that is so upsetting to me that i don't suffer from the same problem now that may or may not be true but as long as my attention and my emotional energy is going towards hating someone else i will never find out in king david psalms chapter 92 we say three words which are so foundational and so amazing to understand the words are toev tov means it's good lahodot means to thank hashem it's good to thank hashem i think that's a fairly uncontroversial kind of statement but let's take this these three words of king david apart and come to understand something about ourselves so when we say that something is stove it's good so what does that mean judaically judaically tove means to be in a state of harmony not just with those around you and not even just with the universe to but to be in a state of harmony with the purpose for which you were created so if we want to be in harmony if we want to be good if we want to be in harmony with the purpose for which we were created then we have to learn le hodot la hodot means to think like toda like yehudim all the same word root but la hodot means something else as well hodot means to acknowledge you know on the high holy days on the day of atonement on yom kippur when we do vidui and we clap and we say we admit the wrongdoings that we've done so that word vidue la hodot to admit to acknowledge it's all the same word so if we want to be in a state of tove of in harmony with the universe with the purpose for our creation then we have to first be able to admit to ourselves and then ultimately to our creators who we are it turns out that all spiritual growth is at the same time a journey in self-knowledge we can't really grow in a real way without getting to know ourselves better our ongoing hate campaigns are holding us back in our own spiritual lives our ability to hold on to bad feelings beyond any reasonableness is sometimes astounding i want to share with you a story that i heard from rabbi david revson the founder and dean of nivea yerushalayim a visionary jew so rabbi refsen grew up in a town a small town in england and it was a town in which almost an entire town in europe had transplanted themselves to this town in england and so there was the jewish community there rabbi refsen's father of blessed memory approached one of the families in the community and suggested a match a match for one of their children and to the father of the girl the boy i don't know which one and this man says to rabbi refsen's father with that family i'll never make a match with that family and rabbi resin senior a little bit surprised says to the man really why not and the man says because they didn't take us in during the great fire the great fire rabbi refs and senior says what great fire you know the great fire in the old town in europe in 1842 they didn't take our family in a hundred plus years later they were still keeping it going the torah our holy torah in leviticus chapter 19 verse 17 mandates that we do not hate our brothers in our hearts the words are lo cisna don't hate your brother in your heart we're not stones we have feelings and hate is a feeling and we don't deny that feeling and it has its place but our brothers our jewish brothers and sisters to keep hateful feelings going once the dust has settled to keep that going in our hearts that's something that the torah asks of us not to do so if the torah mandates that then what are the tools that we have our at our disposal what are the tools that the torah has to address this situation with that we find ourselves in when we have really bad feelings towards somebody else so the best tool or one of the best tools in our toolbox that each of us really has we have to learn to open that toolbox and use it but one of the best tools that we have for dealing with that kind of negativity that kind of those kinds of bad feelings if i could really say the word even that kind of hate is the tools that we have are called midos midos are character traits midos are the measure because the word media actually means measurement midos are the measure of who we are a big area of spiritual development is what we call midos work when we work on our meadows we are strengthening our personality muscles to be in service of our souls now if you would think for a moment and ask which sense of our five senses the senses with which we interact with the world is the beginning of all medos work well maybe it's our ears because after all we hear things sometimes that are just annoying and sometimes even infuriating or maybe it's our noses as in i have a good nose i can sniff out that imposter that creep that bad person that type of thing but neither of those would be right actually the most important sense in starting to work on our midos are actually the sense is actually the sense of sight it's our eyes that are the most important now you would think that a person's eyes are objective and i see what i see you can't tell me that i didn't see it i saw it but i assure you that our eyes are not objective at all i see through a set of lenses a perspective that we have cultivated over time we call this ability this the media of developing the proper perspective when we interact with people and the proper perspective in understanding our circumstances and the unfolding story of our lives we call that media an ayantova a good eye now we've all heard of an ayan hara an evil eye but what really is an ayantova rashi the famous commentator explains that having an ayantova means that you see the good in the other and that you want good for them in their lives so that's a little bit of a leap if you're feeling really badly about something someone and you're thinking about maybe you don't want so much good for them in their lives so let's explore let's try and understand a little bit about what our sages teach us about what is this meda of an ayantova a good eye so we always go back in judaism to the source everything ultimately is black on white and there are two sources in the mishnah for this media of ayantova so in the mishnah okay which is part of the talmud of pirkeia vote ethics of the fathers the idea of an ayantova comes up twice in the second chapter the mishnah relates to us that rabbi yochanan ben zakai challenges his five primary students and he asks them to go out into the world and to be able to discern ezu he derektova yidbak what is the good path which to which a person should cling and rabbi eliezer rabbi eliezer ben harkness answers goes out and comes back and tells his teacher his rebbe it's an ayantova it's a good ide and then later in ethics of the fathers and perceived in chapter five the mishnah teaches us that those who have a good eye an ayn tovah a humble spirit and a meek soul are among the disciples among the students of our forefather avraham abraham and those that have an evil eye an arrogant spirit and a greedy soul are among the disciples of bill um russia bill um the evil one now who was bilam bilham as i'm sure you know was the non-jewish prophet that was hired by a king named bullock to curse the jewish people when they were in the wilderness and we'll come back to that to have an ayantova means to see the good traits in your friend your spouse your child your mother-in-law and to want good for them rashi explains to us that the starting point of an ayantova means to take the jealousy out of our own hearts this is explains that the perspective of a person no matter what their circumstance should be that i have a lot and therefore i have enough to overflow onto others and therefore i can seek your well-being i can seek your honor and i can focus on your good traits when i focus on your good traits it leads me to seek good for you in your life and to want you in your life to have only good the way that we relate to people and what we end up feeling towards them starts obviously with our own perspective what do we see when we look at another person when we see them doing something when we meet them it's so easy to pick out a person's flaws she's a good teacher says one student but she didn't doesn't give back our tests on time is the rejoinder i think that man is so generous one person says oh but he wants his name on every building says the other person my spouse is a really nice guy but he's so unmotivated and everyone in his office is making more commission than him or my teenage daughter does so well in school but she's so self-centered she spends hours in front of the mirror all these are aspects of the yes butt syndrome which minimizes the positive and draws the eye toward that aspect of a person or situation that is less than whole less than positive so we need to know that the least objective of all our senses is our sight we in fact choose what we see whether we choose to see the positive or let our eye go to the negative is the difference between which brings blessing into the world and in iron hara which brings suffering in the world ayantova does not refer to the sharpness of our sight but rather to the generosity of our vision so some people object to this and they say but why should i fool myself isn't it naive to simply ignore the negative that's there i want to live a real grounded life i want to have two feet firmly planted on the ground i don't want to live in la la land and some kind of a fantasy so what needs to be understood here is the power that our vision has we see our eyes and our sight as a mechanism by which we take in and absorb the worlds around us with our eyes we can take in the universe in which we exist from the smallest bud that's budding on the tree in the spring to the view of saturn and her rings on a summer night in the desert all these are accessed through our eyes what we don't think about and perhaps what we don't even realize is that just as the eyes absorb so too they transmit the maharal of prague in his book nisivos olam in the section titled ayantova explains something remarkable he says just like what we see influences us the way that we see whether with a positive or negative override influences others basically our vision and its generosity can influence others even without our interacting with them i know that's wild right so we see an amazing example of this in the torah itself at the ends of the portion which is called bashalach and this is the setting the jews have left egypt and our nemesis the nation of amalek comes out and fights a war against us moshe moses our king our leader goes up on the mountain that he goes up on the mountain to pray he also has another purpose in being on the mountain he wants the jews to look up towards them as they go into this battle that they're ill-prepared for and moshe feels that this will direct their vision upward not only to moshe but past moshe and up into the heavens and they'll think about god and pray to him to protect them but the ramban says something fascinating he teaches us that moshe went up on the mountain not so that we should see him but rather so that he should see us he wanted to put his iantova his good eye on the people on the jewish people in order to influence the outcome of the situation the outcome of the war positively i'll just say the words in hebrew because they're so amazing says that moshe wanted us to look up on the mountain aino hatov alayhim so that moses could in turn put his good eye upon them now we mentioned bilaam before the non-jewish prophet hired to curse the jewish people and bilaam is the model of the bad eye of the ayan ra now billam also goes up on a mountain and with his bad eye he seeks to bring destruction to the jewish people through the power of seeing and pointing out what was negative about them what was imperfect about them now when balak the king who hires bellam to curse the jewish people he's he says of them a nation has gone out of egypt and the kisa they have covered up the eye of the land now the simple explanation of that verse is simply that there's a lot of them a deeper understanding though is that even the land itself exerts a certain influence which draws a person towards earthiness towards physicality and bullock says the jewish people they're different they have covered up that influence and they have attached themselves to a higher more heavenly influence they are playing the game of life with a different set of rules he wanted them removed and he calls on bilum to crush them having an ayantova a good eye means that i have the choice as to what i absorb it's not that i don't see i'm not going through life with blinders on but an ayantova means that i truly can choose what i absorb what i take in and what i allow to affect me the famous rabbi nachman of breast love has a beautiful teaching he says that when you see the good in someone when you make that choice to take in what's good absorb what's good and to sideline what's negative that you are actually promoting that good now we that's what we need to do we need to find that little spark of good inside the person put our good eye on it and fan that spark into a flame sometimes giving that person our good eye gives them access to the good inside of themselves rabbi nachman says that sometimes you can bring a person from a bad place to a good place simply by putting your iron tova your good eye upon them so leaving out the mystical implications of rabbi nachman's teaching we can certainly understand how many people really feel good about themselves today i interact with a lot of people and i could tell you and you could tell me probably not that many how many people are in need of a good word a smile a kind eye when i look into your eyes and i see myself reflected back in your eyes what do i see am i liking what i'm seeing am i seeing that you're disappointed in me am i seeing that you feel kindly towards me well that is going to affect me very very deeply you know there's a famous quote it's been i've seen it attributed to a lot of people i'll quote it in the name of ralph waldo emerson where he says that it takes a great deal of character to look past the past to a better future now we don't have to make everybody our best friends but the torah does really want us to take those bad feelings out of our hearts they're not good for us and they're not good for the planet and i want to share with you one of the most amazing true stories that i have ever heard i actually heard this story not too long ago and this story is about the power of an ayantova to transmit and bring good into our world so i'll tell you where i heard it okay it was a video and the rabbi that was speaking was rav shmuel eliyahu who was at that time the chief rabbi of tsvat and he was the one that was telling this story so in 1982 israel entered into the lebanon war it was a very difficult war and one of the difficulties of that war was that there was that there were five jewish boys who were declared missing one of those boys was a young man a religious young man named zachary baumel now in april 2019 37 years after zachary balmel went missing his body with his seat sits still on was returned to israel by lebanon and zachary bammel came to kevin israel to a jewish burial the story the rest of the story was told to rabbi shmuel el yahoo by the sister of zachary bama she related that all those years seven 37 long hard years the family it was very difficult the family had no closure there was no body there was no grave there was no burial and they kept up their efforts to pressure the israeli government to not forget about their son their brother zachary belmo and to keep putting international pressure on lebanon so that his body would be returned and she related that all those years whenever the family got together inevitably of course they would talk about their lost brother's son that talked about zoharia zachary bammel and the feeling was overridingly negative everybody in the family had complaints they had complaints against the israeli government for not working hard enough to get back his body they had complaints specifically against bibi netanyahu who they felt connected to who they felt should really put more effort and more focus into bringing back the body of zachary bammel well just a short time before april 2019 the baml family had gotten together for a family gathering and when the conversation turned to the negative complaints against bibi and the israeli government one person in the family stood up and said you know we have had an iron ra on this situation for such a long time maybe it's time that we as a family change our view of this situation maybe in fact we are not correct maybe the government is doing everything that they can maybe they have done everything that they can and you know what zachary baumel is not the only thing on the agenda of the israeli government and somehow his words penetrated and the family took them to heart and from that moment on they changed their perspective and they started having an ayantova on the israeli government and on bibi netanyahu in particular now when the body was returned they had a funeral which mr netanyahu attended and after the funeral the sister who told rabbi eliahu the story had the opportunity to have a conversation with the prime minister and for whatever reason she had she shared that the family for so long had had complaints on him and on the government and that just recently they had gotten together and shifted their perspective and had started to appreciate and have a good eye an ian tova and everything that the government had done bibi looked at her and he said that is exactly what happened and he shared with her the following he said the security arm of the israeli government had uncovered information that thwarted a terrorist attack against russia putin was appreciative and the way the game is played bibi knew that the time would come when he would be able to ask putin for a favor in return so he convenes a meeting of his highest advisors to discuss when that time comes to ask putin for a favor what favor should he ask for they constructed a list of 50 important items but you can't ask for 50 items and after many hours of deliberation they slowly whittled down that list from 50 to 30 to 20 to 10 to five and ultimately to three important items that they felt that mr netanyahu could ask putin for in return for thwarting the terrorist giving information that led to the forwarding of the terrorist attack mr netanyahu did not know when he would speak to putin so he wrote the three things down on a piece of paper he put them in his pocket and he kept them with him so he would remember to ask for those things well a short time later putin called and they were on the phone and bibi remembered the three things that he was supposed to ask for but for some reason at that moment all he could think about was zachary bammel and he says to mr putin there's an israeli soldier that died 37 years ago in the war with lebanon and they have not released the remains back to us i want you to help bring him home so that he can be buried properly and come to what we call kevar israel a jewish burial he is quiet on the other end of the line finally putin says are you kidding this is what you're asking me for yes said bibi i'm asking you to bring belmo home and he's thinking himself my cabinet is going to kill me and putin says to him why do you even care we're talking about a soldier that died 37 years ago and netanyahu said to him we care about each and every one of our soldiers we are committed to bringing them home and to giving them a jewish burial that's just the way we jews are putin is quiet again and he says okay if that's what you want i'll do it but that a lie that one's on me you can ask for something else as well so you see my friends everything that we do and even the way that we think is so much bigger than ourselves the ripples go out into the worlds and come back around in ways that we can't even fathom if we can come to understand why we should take the bad feelings out of our hearts that is the first step in an amazing journey towards loving the people especially those close to us close to us that we have till this point love to hate i'll just end with something very practical and that is to cultivate an ayantovo or any good media you have to understand why it's important to gain a deeper understanding of what the media actually is and three practice practice practice it's just an understanding and practice hate is a real emotion we don't deny it we don't push it away we just want to use it in its right place and that place is beyond the scope of this talk but certainly it is not the place to hate any of our jewish brothers or anything any of our jewish sisters so baha'i may you have great success in your journey to stop loving to hate some people thank you so much for listening um