Episode Transcript
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Being from a small town, and Macon is pretty much a small town, relatively speaking. But being from a small town has its advantages, usually in many, many ways. There you can always find bad. But I can tell you that for folks like me from a small town, there is very little nothing maybe like public transportation in a foreign speaking country with tons of people around to raise your blood pressure to make you think that you are insane.
Cars, cabs, buses, subways, and trains. I want to introduce you to the trenitalia. I think that's how you pronounce it. I'm not exactly sure, but this was an adventure that we had. I have to. I gotta fix something because this isn't gonna work. So hang on. Just ponder the train there for a second.
And of course, it won't let me do that.
Why won't it let me do that?
It's going to be rough.
Darren, do you know how to make this auto lock on my iPad, not make the screen go dark?
It's grayed out for some reason. Anyone know?
Well, but the screen goes dark.
Yeah.
Ah, forget it.
This is about to be the worst message you ever heard in your life. You ready?
Kelly and I went on this incredible cruise. Okay?
And by the way, I have to be very vulnerable right now. I'm supposed to be this big, strong guy and, you know, tough leader. I'm going to pour out my weakness before you of how vulnerable I get when I'm in a crowd of people and don't know where to go, and I can't speak the language, and I feel like I want to just go hide in the corner. Okay?
I can't do it. This will not work. So let me. Somebody go get my phone or something, and I'll tell the story.
If you can fix that, it would be better, but I'll also need reading glasses to be able to see my phone, so you may as well start this whole recording over. You guys still with me? Here we go.
At the end of this cruise, you know, at the end, how many have ever been on a cruise? Okay, you have this fantastic time, and then the last day comes along, and they're like, get out.
06:30 a.m. the speakers start going off to disembark the cruise. And before that, everyone's like, how are you, ma'am Kelly? Sir Damien, by the way, that's what I want to be referred to around here going forward. Sir Damien and ma'am Kelly, please. That's what they called us in the dining room, but it's time to go. Okay, so you've relaxed. What I realized is a little late, that this cruise ship pulled into a town that was 50 minutes away. It was Civitavecchia, Civitavecchia somewhere. And we needed to get to Rome.
I looked up the shuttles to get from the cruise to Rome. It was 300 and something dollars. I told Kelly, we're not doing it. Not going to do it. We're going to take the train.
I want to explain to you about luggage. In the Eisner family with, or at least our family, with Kelly Eisner traveling for two weeks, we had probably a combined 180 pounds of luggage in four huge suitcases like this. A couple of the suitcases were my size.
Okay? So Kelly says, I don't want to take the train. We're not going to be able to do this with all this luggage. I said, I'm not paying $300. We're going to do it. So get off. The ship comes on. I go out to this place and look out the window, and I see in the parking lot all these mercedes black chauffeured vans and station wagons coming to pick up all these people. And they're. They're walking out casually with their luggage, and the porter's loading it on all the vans, and they're opening the door for them and getting in, and they're just whisking them off to Rome or to the airport or wherever. And I begin to panic because I've already told Kelly we're doing it. She's already anxious. I have to cover the fact that I know this is going to be difficult, but we do it. We get off the boat hauling 180 pounds of luggage, and the first stop is you have to take a bus from the cruise ship to the train terminal. And there's no place to put your luggage on the bus, so you have to load up the thing, sit in the aisle on the bus, on your luggage. And here's Kelly's look.
And this is before we'd even gotten off the ship. We get to the train station.
I'm looking. I see a cab across the way. The guy looks so nice. I said this, please, God, please, sir. Do you go to Rome? Yes. How much do you think it would be?
[00:06:42] Speaker B: Hmm.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: $300.
Not doing it.
So I told Kelly, we find how to get into the train station with all our luggage. Nobody speaks English. The lady. Well, no, they do speak English, but they don't want to talk to me because they know I'm a tourist, and they didn't like me very much. I don't know why. Probably because of how much luggage I had.
And I go up to the train window. I'm like, we're trying to get to, and she's.
I can't hear you. Her microphone doesn't work, or it's turned down. So not only is she speaking another language, I can't hear what she's saying. We finally buy this tickets.
The tickets say, car eight.
We make our way up to the platform, elevator up, elevator down, across, get to the platform. The train comes hauling in. By the way, there are thousands of people waiting to get on this train.
No, not really. There were 500 people waiting to get on this train.
Car eight.
Kelly, how do we know which car? I don't know.
Well, all right, I'll figure it out. Train comes wheeling by, stops right in front of us. Car three.
Car three. Car eight was way down there, and we got all this luggage. The train doesn't stop forever.
I'm like, Kelly, car eight, come on.
We get to car eight. There's four asian couples in front of us. The doors to the train are about this wide.
Okay?
There's four asian couples in front of us. They have more luggage than us.
They go up the train.
Finally, they get loaded, and I can start the process of hauling up 300 pounds of luggage. I get the first suitcase up. I'm in the middle of the second suitcase.
The doors are closing. I'm like, the asian people are standing here. I'm like, move, move. I throw this suitcase up, come to the doors, hold the doors open like Samson and the Philistines. Kelly, get up here. Luggage.
Kelly's going.
We're on the train.
An american couple comes behind me. They get on. The doors stay open. All of a sudden, our luggage is standing at the end of the train where we are. There's nowhere to put it. All of a sudden, the asian people start yelling and run toward us down the aisle. Wrong train. Wrong train.
And I know the lady behind me was from America, because I understood every expletive. She yelled at them, and so they're knocking us over with their luggage. All of our luggage is there. Kelly's going, like, about to go into shock.
We made it.
We got to the train station. We sat down. The seats were quite comfortable, and I found a place for our luggage on the train so that we didn't have to sit on it. We sit down, I look at her, and I say, that wasn't that bad.
She went.
We got to the train station in Rome. No cab driver would take me, probably because of our luggage.
Four cabs.
One of them came, showed him the address, looked at my luggage. He went, mm mm.
And then I finally had a guy that I wheeled in to come to take us, and I show him the address. He's like, fine. Then I walked back to get the luggage, and he's talking to someone else.
And when I went up there, he goes, I'm taking them. I said, you were talking to me.
I'm trying to really show the love of Jesus. We finally get on a cab, and we get to the Airbnb, where we were staying just for the night.
And it was fine until I walked in and realized they don't do elevators in these places. And our room was on the fourth floor, and I had had one too many glasses of wine the night before because it was the last night.
Just kidding. So I have to haul all of this luggage up, and you know what Kelly's doing when I get up to the top of the stairs?
She wasn't. But we went in, and in the Rome, one of the greatest cities in the world, just looked at each other and just fell flat into the bed and just laid there.
So I told Kelly, I'm going to tell that train story.
She said, why?
Don't do negative, be optimist, do optimism, share good things.
You know what? Does anyone ever tire? Does anyone ever get unnecessarily called a pessimist?
I may not be an optimist, but I'm not a pessimist. I'm a realist. Of course. Right. Of course. Listen, the optimist says the glass is half full. The pessimist says the glass is half empty. The realist says, your glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
That's me, I think, practically. And I am certainly, I promise, Kelly. Certainly. By the way, I should mention, all three of those attributes are found in the Bible.
Optimist, pessimist.
Which one do you think Yeshua was?
Well, you have scriptures like this that everyone knows. I can do all things through him who gives me strength. Right. That's for the optimist.
Pessimist who comes to mind.
Meaningless. Meaningless. All of life is meaningless. Ecclesiastes says.
Yeshua says, who doesn't count the cost before they start building something. I mean, wouldn't you do that? He's a realist.
I am a disciple of Yeshua.
I am a realist.
I appreciate the good, fluffy, beautiful things that surround us at all times. I am in no way being pessimistic or negative about the train. We learned we were in Europe we were seeing some of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Landscapes, architecture, food, art, history. Only the most ungrateful person could not find good in that, right? I just wanted to share a funny story, because I like funny stories. But you know what the main thing I saw in this trip was?
I saw the incredible potential, the beauty and potential of human beings. I spent most of my time there in awe of so many things. I mean, I was in awe of our ship.
Our ship was the largest cruise ship ever built in Italy. It was brand new. It was incredible. I was amazed. I spent about an hour and a half watching the liquid natural gas tanker pull up alongside of it and fill up the fuel tanks. The ingenuity. There were like miles of pipes on this tanker boat that's filling up this other huge. It was amazing human potential.
We saw ancient temples, the parthenon, the Colosseum. I've been to Israel. I've seen a lot of ancient, much older stuff. Masada, the temple. All those things are beautiful, but they're sort of in ruins. You go to Europe and there's standing amazing things that are so beautiful. I'm very convinced now more than ever before that the tower of Babel was a real thing, that when human people put their mind together to create and build, you can do anything. And God had to shut that down because the motivation was wrong.
But that's a confirmation of a bit of Hashem and all of us. And my goodness, my goodness, my goodness. The churches in these places, the churches we only drove past, the Vatican, I didn't see any of that. But what we did see was phenomenal. First of all, there are a lot of crucifixes. As you might imagine, it's a catholic place. A lot of those things. As a jewish young man growing up, I was always incredibly freaked out by crucifixes. I thought it was the weirdest thing in the world to have a dead guy hanging on this thing. But they're everywhere. It turned out that God used crucifixes in my coming to Yeshua, but I'll share that another time. But there are a lot of crucifixes. They're strange. There were also statues everywhere. Beautifully, beautifully crafted statues. Many of Mary, of course, of Jesus, of the apostles. It won't surprise you to know that every statue of one of the apostles looks like a white roman guy.
Do you get it?
And then Andrew.
They really wanted Andrew to show off his pecs and abs, I guess so.
That's the apostle Andrew just in case you wanted to know if he had a six pack. He does.
Anyone ever been to Barcelona?
There's a place there called the Familia Sagrada. You familiar with this?
This is a cathedral, a church of something.
It's monumental. It's beyond. It's awe inspiring. You walk in, can't even believe it. The concrete, jaw dropping feats of engineering by this guy named Gaudi, who actually died pretty early in this project, but had disciples that came after him and loved his style and built this stained glass in this place. All handcrafted, all designed. That's the inside of it. It was miraculous seeing the human potential of what we can do. And the churches, I told you, from the extravagance, this is one of the arks, I guess you call it in a catholic church. But from the mosaics and the ceilings that were who knows what that seemed like. They were a mile above you. And these churches are everywhere.
But they're beautiful, opulent, I might say hundreds of them. And it actually, though, was very invigorating for the soul and for the mind to see human potential and design.
I was once an architecture major, but that's good stuff I just described, right? That's optimism, that's enjoying beauty and being positive. And then all of a sudden, it hit me.
We were standing in Marseille, France, in front of this building with Sarit, our walking tour guide.
Sarit, that's an interesting name. It's not very french. Where are you from, Sarit? I was born in Israel.
I moved to Brooklyn and settled in France. So we had an israeli french tour guide, which was only Hashem does these kind of cool things, but we're standing here, and she's explaining something, and she says, this is originally someone's extravagant home in Marseilles, right on the city square or a city government building. Then during World War two, she explained that the Nazis came in and they leveled basically all of Marseilles except the nicest buildings and homes, which they kept for their offices and their homes. This particular building was the headquarters of the nazi party in World War two in Marseille, France. And the tour. Okay, history. That's it. But I just.
The tour kind of had begun to walk off, and I just stood for a minute and looked at that and thought.
And then my pessimism kicked in.
Right there, 80 years ago, surrounded by beauty and the german people, right there sat the citizens, the german citizens of the nazi party, Germans who are known for their efficiency and their beauty and design and their ability to innovate right there in that beautiful building. Surrounded by all these beautiful things, these people sat using their God given human creative potential to craft the final solution and to carry it out to create with their God given ability, ovens and gas chambers that could burn bodies and destroy bodies, killing machines. And I just pause there for myself for a minute in the contrast of humanity, our amazing abilities, our potential and the choices we make of how we use the gifts that God has given us.
I mean, of all the things that we have, God is a creator, right? And we have the essence and the created in the image of God. One of the most important things that we can do as people of God is he's given us the ability to create. That's actually what we rest from. That's the primary restriction on Shabbat, is that you don't create because God was a creator for six days. Then he stopped. So, so do we. We are creators.
That makes us like God, the part of God in us. So I just pondered the contradiction, the capability of what we can do, for better or for worse, with this God given ability, surrounded by beauty, the most beautiful scenery and the hard facts that no matter what's going on on the outside or where you are or what you're looking at, what's going on in here and in here can be as dark as the blackest night.
And then I thought about the beautiful, extravagant, opulent churches that we continued and toured and saw. Certainly they were built to give glory to God. I know they probably could have been done with a little less expense. I'm certain the money could have been used in plenty of other good ways.
But I thought all of this external visual beauty, all of it. You want to know something? They're all empty.
They're full of tourists, but there's no worshipers there. They might have the rare service, but basically they're empty. No one comes there to give glory to God. They're just a shell of something that was built one day.
No substance, no spirit. But more than that, and this may be. Oh, there he goes again with that whole jewish thing. Come on, just get over it.
But as I walked through Spain and Italy and France, I thought of the history of what was done by the people who dreamed up these fantastically lavish, amazing churches for the glory of God and sat in the gold covered chairs on the ark and the pews. I thought of all of that.
Sat in beautiful places, worshiping God with unbeautiful thoughts, which became actions in the world. Because that's what happens sometimes when our creative negative comes to light.
In the name of religion, inquisitions, crusades, expulsions of Jews. We went to Genova or Genoa in Italy. You know who was born there?
1492, sailed the ocean blue. Christopher Columbus was born there. And it's a beautiful one, maybe one of the most beautiful places we saw. And we're walking the streets, and I can't help but think about Chris. You know, there's a rumor, there's a story about Christopher Columbus, that he's jewish. There's a lot of indications. Well, some, it's anecdotal, and scholars disagree about it, of course. But Christopher Columbus may have been jewish, and he may have been sailing the ocean blue in 1492 because Spain kicked all the Jews out and he was leaving. But his hometown in 1515 in Genova expelled every jew in it. And that started a whole trend of things that happened across Europe.
The pope put everyone in jewish anyway, in ghettos, in Rome. Right. I'm not going to go into the history of all that. I'll spare you, but believe me, it was darkness. So on one hand, I'm taking in the most beautiful things the eye could see in terms of architecture and history, much of which was created for the glory of God by people who professed this incredible faith and love for Jesus, awe inspiring works. And on the other hand, faced with the unbelievable contradiction that history has borne out. Right? You with me. You see the contradiction.
Noble intentions, creative, talented people, empty shells, cosmetic beauty, hypocrisy. And that today those places are empty. Do you know why? Because the same hypocrisy still exists.
So many people claim to be followers and disciples, and yet they treat people like garbage. And they don't want anything to do with any of it.
What I might call the contradiction of religion. And I will tell you that I did not share any of this with Kelly on the trip. Only one little tiny piece. Because I was being an optimist.
But this is just the way my mind thinks sometimes. Realism.
I'll make it happy, I promise you. How's that? Stick with me.
Humanity.
It's not new. It didn't start with the pope. It didn't start in Italy or Spain 2000 years ago. The master pointed to the Pharisees and says, you are whitewashed. Tombs full of empty. You're empty except for the dead men's bones that are inside of you. Your exterior is nothing.
You may think it's beautiful and perfect. And he only said that to some Pharisees because he had a lot of pharisaic friends, whitewashed tombs.
And my thoughts led me way back from Italy and the cathedrals way before that to Malachi. Oh, that one of you would shut the temple doors so that you would not light useless fires on my altars. I'm not pleased with you, says the Lord about his temple. Why the contradiction of religion? The hypocrisy of being something inside that's gross and on the outside, you look all pretty and holy.
Amos says it. I hate. I despise your feast days. Isaiah says, the multitude of your sacrifices, what are they? Learn to do right. Seek justice, defend the oppressed. Amos says, let justice run down like water. Jeremiah, will you steal and murder? Commit adultery? Perjury? Burn.
Has this house which bears my name become a den of robbers? It's happened a long time before Europe, and it's still happening today.
Contradiction spin around it still is. We're prone to hypocrisy and hate while doing our best to look pretty on the outside. One of the other things we saw was the graffiti. There's graffiti all over the place. I don't understand it, but like, graffiti. And this was only one of the many, many, many pieces of graffiti we saw that said, free Gaza, end israeli occupation. Free Palestine. Israel or murderers. All of it. It's all over the place. We were in Greece on May 4. On May 8, a mob stormed an israeli owned hotel in Greece to try to pull out the israeli hostages and kill, I mean, israeli tourists and beat them. I don't know what they were going to do. They didn't succeed. But that's all over the place. That's just another example of this, though. Do you know it? Where on the outside people purport to be these holy. We're really. We're sad about what's going on over there. So help them. Help them.
It's just an ugly mask when you really pull it back and you realize that they just hate jews.
Look at the college campuses. That was disgusting and despicable. That wasn't about saving babies. In Gaza exterior, we can all find these great purposes for great things that we want to look like to everybody else.
But what's the inside look like? That was the question that Yeshua asked so many times.
If someone says, I love God, and yet he hates his brother or sister, he's a liar. If anyone thinks himself to be religious, yet does not bridle his tongue, but deceives his own heart, the person's religion is worthless. James says.
Now why do you call me lord, lord, and don't do what I say? Yeshua asks.
But that's not the end of the story. Because, listen, I'm not a pessimist. I told you, I'm a realist. There's a place in between the glass. You can sit here all day arguing about whether the glass is half full or glass is half empty. I'll go get you the right size glass.
There's a place in between. The realism component is this. We are simply in a place right now in history that's very dark. We are, we're living it out again. We're seeing it. There's worldwide, there's darkness. There really is.
And, you know, the past is the past. We can't change it. But what choices we make in the world going forward right now to create beauty as people who supposedly purport to be religious, who love God, I mean, I keep thinking about it, but this election that's coming up, you're gonna see all hell break loose around here. I'm willing to bet you that's not here in this room, but around. So you better be prepared.
There is value in beauty. There is value in creating beautiful things and doing fantastic external things. God has never been opposed to outward shows of devotion and beauty, and they speak to something that's inside of us, from the Parthenon in Greece to the, the temples of Apollo to all over the place. What I realize is everyone, you've heard this phrase, the God shaped hole in your heart. It was supposedly Augustine who came up with it. It's not. It's Blaise Pascal who said something similar to that. Even the pagans had a place where they wanted to do amazing things for God and they built these phenomenal things. Pascal actually says, what else does this craving, this helplessness, proclaimed but that there was once in man a true happiness of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace. This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with the infinite and immutable object, in other words, by God himself. All of the beauty that I observed over the last two weeks, all of it originated in a desire to do something great for God, to fill that God shaped hole, that infinite abyss that can only be filled with him.
And there are many, many, many ways that we can use God given gifts to give him the glory that he deserves. There are a million ways. Prayer, study, art, music, architecture, build the most beautiful buildings on earth. But in all of it, I was reminded that there is the place for the necessity for simplicity.
Simplicity.
Love God. Love people. Build and create external beauty and be purport to be whatever you want to be on the outside, but make sure on the inside is the goodness that God gave you to be a creator of love and life in the world, not darkness.
Love people. The greatest gift we can ever give God is our love for him to be demonstrated in loving other people.
Without that, you know what it is. You know what it all is without that. Ecclesiastes one, two. Meaningless. Meaningless. That is on my pessimistic side, what I really thought about some of these beautiful, beautiful things. When I look at the legacy in history that is left behind, you might dismiss this and say, oh, my gosh, man, it started with the funny train story. Now we got to have another message about love.
Give me a break. Well, when I read the Torah, the prophets, the writings, when I read the gospels, when I read the apostolic scriptures, the epistles, I just see a lot of it in there. I can't help it. I'm sorry.
It's a thing.
All we need is love.
That's a lie. That's not all you need. You need courage and backbone and fortitude, and you need to be able to stand strong for the things that matter and that you believe in. But you do need some love. And above all people, the disciples of Yeshua are commanded to demonstrate it, even in dark times. And so, listen, here's the end of it. You ready? Because my train story took up most of the message, here's the end of it.
All of this brought me back, standing in the streets of Europe to thoughts of Macon, Georgia.
How could you ever let that happen? Right?
But I did not come back prepared to build a beautiful familia sagrada, Macon. We are going to build a bathroom and a kitchen, but not the familia sagrada. We don't have any plans for massive holes. Holy spirit inspired stained glass, who knows?
But I did come back inspired, because every place I was, every moment, every building, every experience, they were all beautiful, and I was present there, and I saw all the good I did.
Just because I had these thoughts, it doesn't detract from my gratitude for what we shared together, but I'm excited and inspired to be back in our little space in the world where it may not even look like that much from the outside, but inside, something special inside.
Because here there's no contradiction of religion. There are no 300 foot ceilings or frescoes or these are not covered in gold. And, you know, you don't call me Sir Damien or anything.
But there's no contradiction of religion because we strive to live as disciples and sons and daughters. We recognize that we have the ability as humans to create impact in the lives of other people, filling that infinite abyss that Pascal describes. Yeah, that's God. But you know what God is? Love. And how does God demonstrate love? Usually through you, if you're willing.
So we get to be a part of that process, and we do it because, you know, it's not in physical space, in massive buildings and statues, but we're building something. We have built something. That's for certain, something beautiful. We have a beamma and Torah scrolls in classrooms. But our most beautiful asset is right there and right there on the other side of that camera.
That's what's beauty, that's what's legacy. That is something that gravity and earthquakes and bombs from World War Two, allied bombers and erosion. Nothing's ever going to take that away from us. And you keep building it because those are called treasures of in heaven, right?
They don't get destroyed. Neither wrath nor roth, neither moth nor rust can take them and have all the beauty, all the things, the fantastic things we can create. Nothing is more valuable to God than that. So I'm happy to be home with all of you beautiful, beautiful creations.
On the outside, sure, you're all pretty and handsome.
But on the inside, because I get the opportunity to see your hearts. And I know and I'm thankful for what we're doing and what God is doing.
[00:40:14] Speaker B: Shabbat Shalom please visit our website, shalommaken.org, to learn more about us. Join our live services, access other teachings, sign up for our newsletter, join our private network that will connect you with our greater community from around the world or contribute to the work of Shalom, Macon, thank you for watching, and we look forward to connecting with.
