Episode Transcript
[00:00:17] Back with you. I'll tell you something. I've been playing the guitar for 35 years.
[00:00:22] Yes, I should be better, but but that means in 35 years, that's 12,775 days I played the guitar. Most of those days, probably. Which means that I should be really good at tuning the guitar as well, which means I've probably done that several thousand times, which makes the incident that occurred. And I know that Darren and Sabrina shared some of this with you when they talked about Israel, but we went to Yad V'Shem, the Holocaust Museum. I had my guitar in Israel. We went through this very special place called the Valley of the Forgotten Communities with our tour guide. His entire family, basically not his parents, had been killed in the Holocaust. And so he's sharing his story there in the Valley. And I have my guitar. And, I mean, I've been playing a long time. I also know from leading worship for 20 something years that there is a time, there's a right time. Don't ever let them fool you. Worship is sometimes used as a manipulation. It is. That's a side note. It has nothing to do with what I'm telling you, but there is a time when the spirit in a place is right to play a certain song and do certain things. I have written a Holocaust song. It's very personal to me and has had a pretty significant impact on other people that I've played it. So Shlomo, our guide, shared his story. It was incredibly powerful, and it was the time for me to take my guitar and play this song about the Holocaust in At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial. And I take out my guitar to do that, and I strike that very important, all powerful first chord.
[00:02:15] And it sounds like a drunk tomcat singing in the alley.
[00:02:20] I have no idea why it sounded like that an hour earlier. It was in perfect tune and playing beautifully. So I set about doing what an experienced player would do and I started tuning my guitar.
[00:02:32] Although I couldn't tune my guitar for some reason, no matter what I was doing, I couldn't get the guitar in tune.
[00:02:42] And it took me what normally would take me about 45 seconds to do, ended up taking me about three or four very awkward, uncomfortable moments to tune this guitar.
[00:02:57] So I played the song and that was it. That's a good story, isn't it?
[00:03:01] So, anyway, what I want to talk to you about today no. Then from there, we made our way over to Yad Vashem, and there is very, very crowded through the hustle and bustle of the crowd. And we walk to this particular area, and there Shlomo, our guide, is sharing this book that he wrote. And we go into this little corner here. There's some people exiting the area and Shlomo is talking about his book and who's in it. And this young girl, American girl, stops and says, what are you doing with that book? That's my book. And shlomo confused, says your book. I wrote this book.
[00:03:48] And she said, I know, but my family's in that book.
[00:03:54] And they, through a conversation, determined that she's from Cleveland, Ohio, visiting Israel on this trip with her class, and they happen to have they're from the same family, and some of her family members Shlomo knew. And now, like, that was amazing.
[00:04:22] And I was too dense to make this unique connection that someone did for me.
[00:04:28] They pointed it out to me and said, well, now you know why you couldn't tune your guitar.
[00:04:35] I said, Well, I thought about it a minute earlier, and they would have been gone a minute later.
[00:04:46] Obviously, we would have missed this connection.
[00:04:51] So random in the world of all the people that our guide and this girl meet, and this is it.
[00:05:00] It was crazy. And that moment the story is not about me, but I'm only saying that moment of personal embarrassment where I couldn't tune the guitar after 40,000 times of doing it in some tiny way was a part of that.
[00:05:18] Do you believe that if you're in tune with it, if you can see it, people say there are no coincidence? No coincidences, right. I'm not sure that's actually true.
[00:05:35] Another thing happened just by I went to Chicago last week. I'm flying from Chicago to it from Atlanta to Chicago. There's, like, a Mormon I saw a couple of them in the airport. This is going to be a long message.
[00:05:50] One of the name tags was Elder So and So, and this girl was Sister So and So. They were Mormon missionaries, I think. And so she was seated in our row, and it turned out she was in the wrong row, and the plane was packed and she was mortified, and she had to get up and leave. And so we fly to Chicago, and a couple days later, I'm walking to Wrigley Field for a sold out Cubs game in downtown Chicago, a city of how many millions and millions of people? And we're walking into Wrigley Field, and I say, Sister, and it was the girl from the plane in Atlanta at Wrigley Field in Chicago.
[00:06:39] It's weird, but it's probably coincidental. I don't know that any fantastic thing happened about that. It could be a coincidence. But listen, I know for sure that there are miraculous things that happen around us all the time that are inexplicable outside of a creator, outside of an architect, a doer of good, an orchestrator of fantastic experiences, whether they're for you or for him or for them or for the whole world, I don't know.
[00:07:09] But if you're willing to see it, you have to be willing to see it. I think about this a lot of times, too, when I'm driving down the road behind someone who's driving illegally slow, or I'm late, which is happening a lot, and I'm almost through the light and it turns yellow. And you've had that, but then you have that thought, right?
[00:07:36] Maybe God saved me from a terrible accident just down the road by hitting this light.
[00:07:43] If X hadn't happened, then y I remember in 911 hearing stories of people who were supposed to be on those planes, but for some crazy reason they weren't.
[00:07:58] I choose to believe that God is involved in things on some level. Not like Greek mythology where the gods are coming down and procreating with humans and doing all this kind of stuff. That's not what I'm talking about. And I don't actually think that God was involved in the tie that I picked out today. I don't think he cares about that.
[00:08:22] And we've talked a whole lot, a whole lot about seeing the good. And I think a lot of people don't see the good.
[00:08:35] I think that what we see matters a whole lot in our happiness. Don't you think that your perspective, what you see, it affects your happiness? I think, actually, and I know that I talk about this a lot, seeing the blessing, acknowledging how much good is around us, even when you can't tune your guitar or you miss a red light, little things, and not to be dramatic, but listen, this message is not about gratitude, really. It is about vision. It is about perspective. It's about what you are willing to see. The Torah portion this week opens with these words rene re anohi notain LIF Nehem Baracha uklala re si hayom. Today I set before you what bracha blessing uklala curse.
[00:09:31] It's very easy. He goes on to say, if you do the good things, you'll be blessed. If you do the bad things, you'll not be blessed if you don't follow my words. See it's right there. Make a good choice. Choose the good. See the good. Choose blessing, choose life, it says later.
[00:09:47] It's never quite that easy, is it, though?
[00:09:52] I'm a human being, you're a human being. It's never quite that easy. If it were, honestly, to always walk around seeing the good, I believe we could eradicate unhappiness in our lives and probably in the world to some degree.
[00:10:07] But if we truly saw, we'd have a hard time believing how good we actually have it. We don't see all the ways that our creator is with us. That's a great thing about believing in a power beyond yourself. You don't know it all. You don't get to know it all.
[00:10:27] That he's blessing us, protecting us, he's guiding us. And it doesn't have to be through some supernatural thing. It could be through a conversation with Cody Leckberg or a book I happened upon at Mean. God speaks in all kinds of ways. It doesn't have to be weird.
[00:10:45] But I told you this actually isn't about the good. It's about a different kind of seeing. Hayom, today. This message is a different kind of seeing. Re means to see, to learn about, and just as necessary as seeing the good. You ready for this. And it sounds completely contradictory sometimes, like right now, at this time of year, it's very important that you see the bad.
[00:11:20] And why would you do that?
[00:11:24] Well, I'll put it to you like this. For many people, there is a particular blockage in your vision of the good.
[00:11:35] And it is motivated by your past.
[00:11:39] It is motivated by the things that have happened to you or that you have done to others.
[00:11:47] It creates that past. That past could be driving here in the car. It could be five minutes ago, it could be yesterday, it could be right before you sat down here and said, let's learn the Bible. It could be five years, 50 years ago. But for many people, there are bad things in their past. Bad things is pretty generic. Most of us, when we think of bad things, we think about things that have happened to us. But if we're honest, if we're really seeing, if we're looking, there are things in our past that we cause to happen to others. And both of those things are bad. And both of them need to be surveyed.
[00:12:32] There are moments of regret, moments of failure, of hurt, of tragedy, of pain that block our vision from seeing the good that is around us, and more importantly, much more importantly, from having the life that you actually could have, from living the life that you could actually have, from finding joy and contentment and satisfaction. Because that thing or those things in your past that might have been in your mind a pivotal moment in your past, your life changed when that thing happened, or those things, or I did that to them, or they did that to me, that might have been something that, like, that changed you forever.
[00:13:27] They're painful sometimes. They're difficult to deal with, to face, to encounter, and we just don't want to there are things that we do not want to re a to see in our past lives.
[00:13:40] We say there's absolutely no way that that could have had any positive impact in my life or there's no way that that caused that much damage in someone else's life.
[00:13:53] We push it down. And then when it's pointed out to us that seeing them and dealing with these things could actually make our eyes better, you know what we do?
[00:14:04] We close our eyes even tighter and we block and we push as not to have to confront things. Darren talked about the word ness, right? Everyone knows what the word ness means now. Three meanings of it trial, right?
[00:14:24] A miracle or what?
[00:14:28] A banner, a flag, fantastic series of messages. And I really love the part, as I remember it, where he discussed the places where you faced a trial in your life and you overcame it.
[00:14:43] You won.
[00:14:47] You won.
[00:14:50] There's a banner planted right there. You planted it or God planted it. But it's a thing.
[00:14:57] It's a positive.
[00:14:59] It's beautiful. And you know what?
[00:15:04] There's a time in our lives when we have to face the fact that for not everyone, but most of us, there are other banners on the road of your life.
[00:15:18] They're not very pretty.
[00:15:20] They're black and torn and shredded, but they're stuck in the ground of the journey of your life.
[00:15:35] We faced at those times, a trial or we had some major fall or failure issue. And it's not the victory banner, but it's a banner nevertheless, a signal in numbers. It says, that Korach when the earth swallowed him, that was Laness.
[00:15:59] And in that translation, it's a warning sign.
[00:16:03] You most human beings have these they're unresolved situations. They're issues. Maybe something from this morning or 12,000 mornings ago. But you have this banner flying over that spot in your lives on that day, that period of your life. And if we were to walk back down the road of our lives, most of us would see them scattered along the path. Yes or no?
[00:16:33] You don't have to answer. I know the answer. And you know what most of us do? We choose not to see them.
[00:16:41] We choose not to go back down the road. Why would we?
[00:16:46] That will only cause me pain.
[00:16:50] You know what a technical debt is? Have you ever heard the word technical debt? Blake might know this word. I knew he would. I'm going to explain it, not in Blake's language, but in a rabbi layman language. Blake is a computer superstar programmer. A technical debt is when you are coding something, writing, designing some piece of software or program, and you come to a place where you just got to do what you got to do to get it done, knowing that you're going to have to come back and fix that at some point. A technical debt, it's like a crutch. It's like a bridge, I guess. You get it done because you have to. There's a deadline or something. You get it done knowing you're going to come back and fix that thing.
[00:17:38] I learned that term in a recent article I read, but that was the little piece of it. What I really found incredibly important about that article is where he went from that technical debt to something called an emotional debt.
[00:17:57] And you can probably make the connection pretty easily.
[00:18:01] Something bad happens, hurtful, tragic, relational, personal, professional, whatever, and a banner goes in the soil of our heart, our road of life, a warning, a signal, a reminder. It's planted there. We know it happened. We know it's got to be dealt with. And it can eat you alive from the inside out, but man too painful. I'm not going back to it.
[00:18:30] I'm just going to do this right now. I'll come back to it, but not right now.
[00:18:38] There's a physiological need within the human body to do that. Sometimes in this article, I saw an incredible video about an antelope that had been captured by a leopard. The leopard had it in its jaws, strangling it to death, and something scared the leopard off. And the antelope laid on the ground. It was free. It laid on the ground, still eyes wide open. And about a minute into this video, the antelope just starts shaking.
[00:19:13] And it's so weird. It was like it was having a seizure. But you know what it was doing?
[00:19:21] It was shaking off the experience that had just happened, all the adrenaline, all the near death that was about to happen to this animal, it shook and then got up and ran off free.
[00:19:38] It's an incredible video, but it's an incredible illustration about the fact that so many times we don't do that.
[00:19:49] All of that that's in you, you never shake it off. And it's an emotional debt.
[00:19:58] And you know what happens with debts got to be paid or you suffer a penalty, right?
[00:20:10] That's what debt is.
[00:20:13] And like those technical debts, that same thing, if you don't come back and deal with the technical debt, eventually the program will implode. It won't work, but we don't want to do that.
[00:20:32] Just leave it unpaid emotional debt. Don't worry about it. And we think we can do a great job of pushing it down and covering it and blinding our eyes to it. And we think our program is running just fine. I don't have to worry about that. And then someone says something to you, or someone points out a failure or a flaw in your life, and all of a sudden, bam, you're transported right back to that place, looking at that banner saying, oh, my God.
[00:21:01] Why, God?
[00:21:06] It's not dealt with.
[00:21:11] It has to be dealt with.
[00:21:13] You pay the price or you pay it off.
[00:21:23] We come back. They're called anchors. That's another anchors, right? You hear a song you loved in high school, and instantly you're transferred back to, what's, the summer of 69?
[00:21:36] That was Brian Adams. Anchor right.
[00:21:41] It's a feeling, though.
[00:21:43] We've been there before, but you see, there is a penalty to these emotional debts. I want to read you something from this article. It's kind of long, but just listen. Research. It's called how to Pay Off Your Emotional Debt by Kelly's brother, Johnny Miller. It's not really her brother, but that is his name. Research has shown that accumulated emotional debt wreaks havoc on our nervous systems, often leaving us stuck in hyper, anxious or disassociated shutdown states. Most scientific literature focus on people with extreme PTSD.
[00:22:17] But he goes on to say, I've seen this in many, many of my clients with a range of backgrounds. Those buffered experiences accumulate, they contribute to various health conditions allostatic overload is what it's called in neuroscience has a range of downstream consequences accelerated cellular aging, increased mortality, chronic health conditions.
[00:22:44] This is where we get phrases like the issues are in the tissues.
[00:22:49] Your body holds on to this.
[00:22:55] For individuals with high degrees of emotional death, their nervous systems will be prone to greater fragility, reactivity in relationships, more likely to shut down in high pressure situations, and becomes a vicious cycle, because ultimately that leads to the loss of support nets of friends and romantic partners, which causes even more stress.
[00:23:16] The debt's got to be paid or you'll pay the penalty.
[00:23:22] These are extreme cases and many of us say, golly, thank God he's not talking to me. But, I mean, we have to honestly see, we have to ask if we're free of are we really debt free?
[00:23:35] Are we? It's a hard task.
[00:23:39] Have you ever taken an intentional and hard walk down the road of life you've lived and asked God to show you the places that need correction, the places where you need to become debt free? It's hard. It really is to really see to see what was and what is and what must be changed. And most people never do and they will suffer for it.
[00:24:09] And right now, everyone in this room and everyone on that livestream is saying, wow, glad he's back.
[00:24:22] This is the most depressing stuff I've ever heard in my life. He's usually funny and jumping around. That's what I wanted him to do.
[00:24:30] Where's the good stuff, Rabbi? Take another week, get your head right.
[00:24:36] No, my head is right. And this is good. And you need it.
[00:24:42] Very particularly, you need it because I think every human being I've ever met needs because you have the choice to see it and deal with it. Re anohi notain lifnihem hayom bracha uklala today, see, God was saying that through Moses to Israel, they were standing on the cusp of going into the land about following the Commandments and choosing life. I'm saying the same thing to you. The context is different, but it's still about blessing and curse. It's about vision. It's about something that God is setting before you today.
[00:25:19] Like Israel standing on the border, preparing to enter and receive these instructions. Today, my friends, we stand on the border of something.
[00:25:29] Do you know what it is?
[00:25:31] With this kind of talk in the air?
[00:25:34] It can only be elul.
[00:25:39] And the road to Repentance and the high holidays, the days of chuvah of repentance and I would add, the days of seeing what we can and need to deal with in our lives.
[00:25:57] That's the relevance of everything I just told you. You get to choose. You get to choose to see it and deal with whatever those emotional debts are in your life. Those signals, those markers, those banners, whatever they may be, the season of repentance. And that's the repentance road. That's the name of this teaching. Next month begins the month of Ulul, which leads us into the most sacred time of God's calendar. These days are called heshbon hanefesh. You remember what that means?
[00:26:27] The accounting of the soul.
[00:26:30] These are the days where we dig deep and we look and we evaluate and we ask God the days of turning. I always talk to you about pressing on and not looking back and being grateful and seeing the good, and you should always do that. But these are the days to actually go back.
[00:26:55] It may just be last year. Maybe you got it all dealt with last year and you are rocking, man, but probably you didn't. But anyway, these are the days to go back. And sometimes in order to go forward, you got to go back, get a running start. That's what happens sometimes for people to get momentum. But you got to turn. That's the word Shuva from the word shuv to turn.
[00:27:28] The primary meaning, of course, is that we're turning from sin, and that's a big word. And we're going to spend the next few weeks discussing the why, the how, the power. Some people right now just checked out and said, I'll catch you at Rosh Hashanah. Don't do that.
[00:27:45] Do not do that. Don't leave me up here.
[00:27:49] I got something to tell you.
[00:27:55] You see, if we'll see them, and God promises that he will help if we will uproot these banners, take them down, replace them with something beautiful, we'll pay the emotional debts. We're not going to ignore them, not justify them, and say, I will deal with this. It could be the mistake you've made, your life's biggest regret or relationship broken. It could be something done to you, something done to someone else. There's so much to say about these things, but it starts with willingness, and it might need help. You might need to talk to somebody. You might need to just be transparent. You might need to read. You might need to listen. You might need professional help. All okay?
[00:28:37] Anyone listening here is thinking, my goodness, who is in this congregation he's talking to? What is this?
[00:28:44] It's humanity is what it is.
[00:28:48] No matter.
[00:28:50] And it makes us, most of us anyway, very, very uncomfortable. These discussions. We gear up to put our blinders on and say, I'm fine, friends. It could be anything personal, professional, relation, relational. I know from experience, just looking back over the last year, we have things we need to confront and we should. But I'm actually asking you to go further. I'm asking you to turn and really just do that exercise, to be open to God ordained processes here so that you can get the most out of this opportunity that God has before us, to choose blessing, to choose it. And there's this response.
[00:29:34] Debts, debts. What's this guy talking about?
[00:29:40] Jesus paid it all, man. I don't have any debts. I've heard this multiple times through the years from people close to me. Why do you do that? Why do you do that? Why do you do these high holidays? They're not so high if they're taking you away from Jesus. He paid it all, man. I don't have to think about that.
[00:30:06] That statement is true. Yeshua. Paid it all. He took the cost of every failure so that one day you will escape death. You will live forever in the presence of God.
[00:30:23] But you live here right now.
[00:30:28] And this, and the holidays and the process and Cheshpon Hanesh and Shuvah and black shredded banners. It's for right here. And this is the way God set it up.
[00:30:43] It's for you.
[00:30:49] There are things you can choose to do that will remove a burden that you might not even want to admit is there. It's tough, it's uncomfortable to repent, to forgive. That's what we're going to talk about on this repentance road. I'd like you to go with me. Kelly posted something in her Musar class, or for her Musar class from Israel. Solanter, the modern sort of the guru, the Musar great teacher, and he said this first a person should put his house together, then his town, then the world.
[00:31:28] Now this is about the attribute of order in Musar, that we should live with order. But there's a clear overlay here, right?
[00:31:37] What house do you need to put in order?
[00:31:40] This one.
[00:31:43] You can't thrive in the world. You can't affect the world positively if this house is completely out of order.
[00:31:50] And this is part of it. This is the foundation of repentance, forgiveness and gratitude. The first two we deal with now, repentance and forgiveness, we deal with them now. The third one, gratitude is the prize. It's at the end. It's when we close those gates on Rosh, on Yom Kippur Nilah and the Chauffeur Blast and we say, Gosh, I feel good, first of all, because I'm going to eat pizza. But other than that, I feel like, spiritually renewed.
[00:32:25] Who wants freedom in their life?
[00:32:31] Everybody. And here's the last bit of good news, and I'll close with this. You don't have to do it alone.
[00:32:40] I know when I give these messages every year, which I do, I know that there's a very small percentage of people who will be able to attach to it. I know there might be one person who has some monumental, life shifting experience through the days ahead. That's fine. I'm sorry all the rest of you have to suffer through it. For that one person.
[00:33:05] We'll leave the 99, right?
[00:33:09] But really, you don't have to do it alone. Because that's the great thing about being in a Messianic Jewish community or a Jewish community at these times.
[00:33:18] We're in it together. I read this story about a rabbi. Someone had started coming to synagogue regularly to say kaddish after a relative died. And the Mourner went to the rabbi and said, I'm really enjoying being at synagogue these days. And the rabbi said, that's nice to hear. Is it the serenity of the synagogue or perhaps the power of the prayer that you find comforting? And he said, no, it's just looking around at everyone else who has to say Kadesh too.
[00:33:54] And so that's really one of my favorite parts, is that if we're all in this together, and we are, then whether it is transformative in this small space, what you experience and what you bring into this room will be real.
[00:34:13] And it'll be incredible. And it's a big, tall order. And I know maybe that one person who gets it will have enough energy for all of us. No, I want it to be much more than one person. There's individual work and there's collective work. So listen, whether you just popped into this live stream to see what this was about, or if you've been part of this community for years, this is what you were supposed to be here to see and hear today.
[00:34:43] No coincidence.
[00:34:47] The article that I quoted as we are heading down the repentance road over these weeks up to the holidays. The article I quoted had this subheading. A toolkit for navigating stressful experiences and cultivating emotional mastery.
[00:35:05] Big promise, right?
[00:35:08] Well, here's the good news.
[00:35:11] That's what the next few weeks are about as we dig into repentance and forgiveness in advance of the days of awe. And that toolkit? A toolkit for navigating stressful experiences and cultivating emotional mastery. The toolkit we're going to use. The Master of the Universe created it for you. It's perfect. It works.
[00:35:35] So let's go.
[00:35:38] You with me.
[00:35:43] Shabbat. Shalom.
