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This Jewish Inspiration Podcast is dedicated to learning, understanding and enhancing our relationship with Hashem by working on improving our G-d given soul traits and aspiring to reflect His holy name each and every day. The goal is for each listener to hear something inspirational with each episode that will enhance their life.
Welcome back, everybody. Way number 41. U'maamidu al ha-emes. Emes is truth. U'maamidu al ha-emes is putting things on the truth. So it's actually interesting. We get into a big conversation about what is truth, what everyone has their own truth. Truth is not something which has multiple sides to it. Truth is truth. There's, generally speaking, one side of truth. Now,
somebody can see things from their perspective, and it seems to be that that's the truth. But then you zoom out a little bit, you see that there's another part of the story that perhaps wasn't seen in that truth. Truth is not something which has many different perspectives. So, when we talk about U'maamidu al ha-emes, is to be unwavering with the truth. Even if it's uncomfortable. We have something called logic. We have something called emotion. Our logic knows, and this is a very oversimplified
explanation, our mind knows two things. Yes or no. No, maybe. Maybe's not there. It's either yes or no. True or false. Black and white. The maybe part is the heart. And the heart says, well, you know, yeah, you know, I was actually talking to someone last week. And he said to me, he pointed out, he says, you know, you realize in this conversation we just had, you said could be perhaps
a couple of times. He says, that's not what I asked you. I asked you a yes or no. That's the, and that the truth is, sometimes we don't want to commit to things. So we do that. Maybe, if, I'll see. Could be. No, no, no. Is it or is it not? Yes or no. Black and white. That's the intellect. That's the mind. The emotion kicks in to try to give it the gray area
of life. So what we need to do in this way, way number 41, ma'amidu al ha-emes, is get into reality. What is the truth? And never stop seeking the truth. In Torah, we see this constantly. We never stop pursuing the truth. Never. Never stop pursuing the truth. That's why every page of Talmud has arguments and disagreements. Where they're fighting with one another. Why? For what? What's the big deal? Who cares? Let's just get along. No. If you want truth,
you never stop pursuing that truth. That's what we go for. Never stop asking, is it good to be alive? Is it good? Yes. So what am I living for? What am I living for? If it's so good, what is it that I'm living for? Let's ask and let's live for it. We need to be good. Helping others straighten out their lives is not just part of living. It's what living is about. That's what we're living for. We're living for
helping other people straighten out their lives. And that other people starts with us. It starts with our family. It starts with our children. You know, it's very interesting that if I say, Howard, where's my 10 bucks you owe me? Howard's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, you borrowed 10 bucks last week. You know, it's time to pay back. So now we come to the court here. We have this disagreement. I say, he owes me 10 bucks. He says, oh, I paid you back.
I'm like, no, you didn't. He said, yes, I did. I'll actually tell you a beautiful story about this. There's someone named the Rashash. The Rashash was an enormous Torah scholar. He wrote commentary on the Talmud. I mean, he was, and he was a very, very wealthy man. And he'd give charity to whoever needed. He'd loan out money to whoever needed. He was a great, a great, a great person. So one day, the tailor in town comes to him, and the tailor had a very good reputation.
He comes to the Rashash, and he needed, he got a very big order, but he didn't have money to buy the materials that he needed for this big tailoring job. So he asked the Rashash if he could take out this, I think it was a thousand rubles. It was a large sum of money, a thousand rubles. The Rashash did his background check on him. He says, this is an individual I can rely on, I can trust. So he loans him the thousand rubles, and
it was for, I think it was for a 30-day loan. The tailor goes, he buys the materials, and he does the job. He makes a very handsome profit, and now he runs back to the Rashash to pay him back. Now, the Rashash was a Torah scholar, so he'd sit in the study hall and learn Torah. And he sees that the Rashash has all of these books around him, and he's studying uninterrupted.
No one's going to bother him, and he's waiting for the Rashash to stop learning for a minute, so he can just pay him back his loan. He's waiting on the side, and he sees he has his moment. He runs to the Rashash, he gives him his thousand rubles. The Rashash takes the thousand rubles, puts it into his book like he always did. He'd put the thousand ruble into his book, and he'd continue learning. Then at the end of every month,
he would go open up the books, and he'd find all the money that was returned, and he'd remember, oh, he returned, he returned, he returned, and everyone paid back their debts. He goes to the tailor, he says, you haven't paid me back. He says, yes, I did. He didn't pay me back. He says, I did. You put it into one of your books. They look in the books, they can't find it. So they take him to court. What happens in Jewish court?
You don't have witnesses. What's the law in Judaism, the Talmud teaches us? Hamotzi michaveiro olav haraya. The one who wants to extract the money has the burden of proof. And because the Rashash wanted to extract the thousand ruble from the individual, from the tailor, the burden of proof is on him. He didn't have any proof. He didn't have witnesses. And the tailor walks scot-free. The word gets around town that the tailor is a cheat, and he's a scam, and he's not truthful, and he's not honest, and
he's now excommunicated. Nobody wants to do business with the tailor. He loses his business. He loses his livelihood, and he loses his dignity. He tells his wife, I can't send my kids to school anymore. I can't. Nobody wants to do business with me. I have to leave. They leave town, and they move to a little village outside of the town, and it's very sad. And one day, the Rashash opens up one of his books, and he sees the thousand rubles.
He realizes what went on here. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? See, he runs to this tailor, and he begs him, please, please forgive me. It was my mistake. I apologize. I apologize. So what do you mean you're asking me for forgiveness now? Look at me. I don't have a tailoring job. I don't have a dignity anymore. No one wants to marry off my daughter, which is the most painful thing in the world. I can't marry off my daughter.
Since I can live without a job, I can live without a livelihood. I can't live without marrying off my daughter. No one wants to date my daughter now. See, he says, I'm going to try to help. Rashash thinks he has a son. The Rashash goes back to town. He tries to tell people, you know, the tailor is a really honest guy, and everyone's like, the Rashash is so righteous. He's ready to take a bullet for the tailor,
right? Even though the tailor is wrong, he's willing to say that, no, he was wrong. Wow, he's so righteous. The tailor is obviously an unscrupulous guy. No one's going to do business with him. Anyway, he's continuing to try, to try, to try. He can't persuade people. So he says, the only solution is to marry my son off to his daughter. He says, let them date, and let's see if they like each other. If they like each other, we're going to be
mechatanim. We're going to marry off our children to each other. And sure enough, the Rashash married his son off to the tailor's daughter. And that way the community saw that, wow, it wasn't just words. It was actually, the Rashash was willing to give his prize, possession, his son, to the tailor's daughter that was assigned it in the deed. But you know what? Compromise is not truth. Compromise is not truth. Because if now I say to
Howard, say, Howard, let's go. We're going in front of a court, and the court says, look, you say he owes you 10. He says he owes you zero. Let's do a compromise, and I'll give him five. There's no compromise in halacha. Oh, sorry. There's no, we never see, by the way, yesterday I was invited. Someone opened up a business in Alvin, Texas. He says, Rabbi, I need you to put up the mezuzah in my new business. I can't start business, a second day of business. I can't do business
unless I have a mezuzah on my door. I drove out to Alvin. It's like a gazillion miles away from here. And I drove there, and I put a mezuzah on his door. I said to him an amazing thing from the Rambam. U'visha arecha in all of your doorposts, in your business we have here at the torch, we have in all of our doorways, in your business, in your home, wherever it is that you do,
where you live. If, again, if you're a partner in a practice, then it's not your practice if you're working at someone else's place. But if it's your business, absolutely. So, I go out there, and I tell him like this. It's a very interesting thing. You never see compromise in halacha. Never. It's either one way or the other way. We don't say, you know what, let's find middle ground. Who's right? Who do we rule like?
Rule like one or the other. We don't do a compromise except for one time. The laws of mezuzah, according to the Ashkenaz, the mezuzah needs to be completely horizontal. According to Sevard, it needs to be completely vertical. And what do we do? We put it on a slant. Why do we put it on a slant? To remind you that if you want success in your home, if you want success in your business, you need to learn how to compromise. It doesn't only go your way.
You have to be willing, you have to be able, you have to be accepting of compromise. And that's the way, you know, the way compromise works in the home. It always goes like your wife. It always goes like your wife. You know, they say about Rabbi Saul Salanter that he announced that my wife, he says, I only make the big decisions. My wife makes all the other decisions. So they asked Rabbi Saul Salanter, so what's a big decision?
He says, whatever my wife says is a big decision. It's what is a big decision. But my wife makes all the decisions. I only make the big decisions. She makes all the decisions. That's the way it works. That's the way it should work. My grandfather says when he talks about family peace in the home, he says the home is the wife's domain. The home is the wife's domain. She decides what color the walls are going to be. She decides what color the floors are going to be.
And she decides what type of drapes and she decides what type of furniture and where things go. Well, I want it to be. Well, it's not your house. It's her house. It's her house. It's her domain. Of course she does. And that's something that every man needs to understand. It's like, no, this is my house and I'm going to decide. You decide other things, not her domain. Okay, so, but truth is unwavering.
Truth doesn't have a right day of the week and a wrong day of the week. Truth is very solid and we need to be comfortable with it. The Torah doesn't say things to be nice to people. The Torah says, what is emes? Toras emes nasan. HaKadosh Baruch Hu, the Almighty, gave us a Torah which is truth. Truth is not going to be so pleasant all the time. Two women were fighting about whose baby the baby was and King Solomon said, you know what?
We'll make a compromise. We'll cut the baby in half. You get half and she gets half. And one lady says, that's a fair compromise. The other lady's like, no, it's my baby. It's like, okay, she's the real mother, right? Because the real mother won't allow her child to be cut in half. Right? What is the root of the problem? Always dig down to the root. Cut it out and release the latent potential. Every person has an incredible potential. Dig deep. You'll find it.
My grandfather used to say that if you want to know the trait of a person, you have to go back to their childhood. Because in childhood, all of the truth, all the honesty is there. Right? Because when little Chaim went to his aunt's house to eat dinner and she fed him some food, he's like, oh, that's disgusting. Right? He would say it with straight honesty. His mother says, Chaim, you can't say that.
It's not nice. It's going to be offensive to your aunt. She worked so hard to make this one. So what is he supposed to say? It was delicious. Right? So we try. So the problem is that children have that honesty. And then we try to tell them how to do it politically correctly, how to be nice, how to fake it till you make it, you know, type, you know, it's like, but that's the real truth. My grandfather says if you ask a child if he did something wrong,
and he could have easily said no, and he says yes, even though he knows there's a consequence, you know that the root of that child's traits is truth. Because he could have lied easily. He could have gotten off the hook. And yet, he demonstrated his willingness to sacrifice for the truth. That's someone who's truthful. A person needs to ask themselves, do I really want to live in reality? It's not a pleasant thing to live in reality, because there are consequences in reality. But the truth is,
is that the world we're living in today, particularly this month that we're in today, people are living in la-la land. People want to live in a world where there's no consequence. People want to live in an imaginary world, and the imaginary world is their reality. And that's, that's not, it's not, it's, it's, it's craziness. We're living in a world of total chaos. Why is way number 41 so important in the Torah? Because truth is something we need to always seek out, even if it's not pleasant,
even if it's not convenient. What is the truth? I prefer the truth than fake. And that's our goal. That needs to be our ambition in life. So, my dear friends, let's go out, let's pursue truth. That, this concludes way number 41, ma'amido ala emet.