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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.
All right, welcome back, everybody. Way number 34 is, Ohevet HaMeisharim, love the straight path. So we talk about righteousness, love righteousness, and now we're talking about Meisharim, being a straight person. A straight person, we say, Pikudei HaShem Yisharim Misamchei Leif, Mitzvot HaShem Barim Me'ir Esenayim. God's ways, God's rules, His laws are straight, and they make you happy. What do you mean by straight?
I remember one time, my rabbi said a beautiful idea. He said, sometimes the best way to learn is the simplest way. You start getting too deep, you start becoming crooked. And he told me the following thing. He said, if you take a ruler and you put it into water, so it'll say, let's say, six inches. But what happens if you bend the ruler and you put it in? Then it can be seven, eight, ten inches, right? But it's not.
He said, the word amok, which means deep, is the same letters as the word akum, which means crooked. Sometimes if you want to get deeper, it means you're going to have to bend the truth and you're going to have to look at it crookedly in order to get deeper. We have to understand that the Torah is very simple. The Torah is very simple, and I know we think, oh, it's very sophisticated. It's only for the rabbis, or it's only for the scholars, or only for the intelligent people.
But the Torah is simple for every Jew. You know, there's an amazing phrase that's used on people. It's called aposhetayid, a simple Jew, a simple Jew. And there were people who were called, people who had emunah pshutah, simple faith, simple faith in God. They weren't complicated. They weren't all, you know, learned, and they know all of the midrash. They just knew, God doesn't want me to do this, I'm not going to do it. God wants me to do this, I'm going to do this. Why?
I'm not, I don't get into the questions of why. I don't get into the questions. Now, if one wants to advance their learning and wants to advance, but people didn't have access. You think about it, 100 years ago in Poland, you think they had the library that we have here at TORCH? No, they had one Talmud in an entire city. A whole entire city had to share one Talmud. You had to reserve it. You'd wait online. You wanted to learn the Talmud, it wasn't easy.
Today, every bar mitzvah boy has two sets of shahs of the Talmud, two sets. You have an abundance of books, of publications that it's, and they're amazing. It wasn't always like that. So people weren't so learned. People had to go to a rabbi if they wanted to learn. The rabbi would have some books. The rabbi in the synagogue would have some books, but that's it. People had something else then. People had simplicity. They'd just go in a straight path. You know why I do this?
Because my grandmother did it. And she taught me how to keep a kosher kitchen. I keep a kosher kitchen exactly the way she did. I have no idea why. And I've had people tell me, this is what we do. I have no idea why. I don't care why. My grandmother did it. This is the way I do it. Oh, well, let's learn. Let's understand. Okay, if you want to add a level of understanding, that's great. Torah doesn't need to be complicated.
I have a book here in the library, which is three minutes a day to learn about Shabbos. Three minutes. It's not so difficult. Three minutes a day. Who can't do three minutes a day to learn about the laws of Shabbos? It's an incredible tool. If you look on the Shabbos shelf, you'll see it. Keep it simple. Invest in your honesty. Don't go for political correctness. Be real. You know, you have my father's like this.
My father's a person of truth, and he'll tell it to you straight. I'll give you an example. He'll say, do you like this tie? He'll tell you, it's ugly. He's not going to beat around the bush. He's not going to say, well, you know, everyone has their taste, and it's like, it's ugly. Finished. You know? You ask for his opinion, you got it. It's not flavored with sugar coating, and there's no sprinkles on top. At least it's straight. It's honest.
I remember once my father came home, there were very few times I saw my father cry. When my father saw something which was crooked going on in the shul, or going on in the school, or going on in the community, he'd cry. He couldn't see something crooked. So my father was eight years old. My grandfather, of blessed memory, found my father in the back of the shul, in the women's section. He saw my father crying there.
So my grandfather sat next to him, put his hand over his shoulder, and he said, what are you crying about? He said, is there nobody in this world who's honest? Is there nobody in this world who's straight? It's a real, my father was born with this, no monkey business, he's a straight arrow. And he tells you things, yeah, it may not be pleasant, it may not be sugar coated, but it's the honest truth. So we all have intellect, and we all have emotion, hopefully.
The problem is that sometimes we cloud our intellect with emotion. We don't allow our intellect, which knows right from wrong, or at least it should, we cloud it with emotions, well, it wouldn't be nice, or, you know, good or bad? Is it right or is it wrong? I'll give you an example. Does everybody agree that we have to follow the law? We all agree that we have to follow the law. But there are certain times where we say there are certain things that are above the law.
We have this in Judaism as well, right, but with Shabbos, right, there's one thing that supersedes Shabbos. What's that? Saving a life, right? Save a life. You are allowed to do anything in the world to save a life, including, I have a friend of mine who got a phone call, there was someone who was in a remote island who desperately needed COVID medication, this is back during COVID. He called me up at five o'clock during the winter, where it's already almost Shabbos in New York.
He says, I'm boarding a plane, I'm flying to this remote place to save this person's life. No problem. He had to go. To save a person's life, you can break the law. We all know that over here we have ambulances or police, when they're dealing with an emergency, they don't need to follow the law per se, they can skip the lights and they can exceed the speed limit. Why? Because we understand there are certain times, but there are certain times that people allow
themselves for whatever excuse, I'm late to a meeting, I'm late to, and people allow, well, it's something else, I'm going to my daughter's wedding, like, hello? That doesn't mean, just because you have an exciting thing going on in your life, doesn't mean you can bend that intellect or that what you know is right or wrong because of your, you know, our sages define a Yashar, someone who's a straight person, as someone who does the right thing, even if they'll be criticized by other people.
Who cares what other people think? I'm going to do what's right, regardless of what other people say. And being today, in our generation, being someone who follows this way, way number 34 of loving the straight path is very unpopular, it's very unpopular. People want to just be, love is love and whatever go, everything goes and, you know, and again, I'm not getting into the political or the whole discussion of Pride Month and all of that, that's not my conversation.
But we see that the book of Bereshith, the book of Genesis, is called Sefer HaYisharim, the book of the straight. Who are the straight? Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We see that from the portion of Lech Lecha all the way to the end of the book of Genesis, we have a very strong focus on Abraham, on Isaac and Jacob, on the tribes, because they show us a path of doing the right thing, even if it's at the expense of being unpopular.
You're not always going to be popular if you do the right thing. But our sages tell us that the reason why the book of Genesis is called Sefer HaYisharim, is called the book of the straight, is because before you start learning all the laws of the Torah, you have to have your head screwed on right. You're going to have many laws, right, there's only, I believe, three laws in the entire book of Genesis. Three biblical laws in the book of Genesis.
Everything else, all 610 are in the book of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. If you don't have your head screwed on right, there's no way you're going to be able to apply the rules properly, apply the guidance of the Torah. That's why it's called Sefer HaYisharim. The first thing that's most important is be on the straight path. You know who is the one who called Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the HaYisharim, the straight ones? Bilaam.
Bilaam, the wicked prophet who our sages tell us was more powerful in his prophecy than Moses was. He called Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the HaYisharim. Tomos Nafshimos HaYisharim, he says, let me die like the righteous, with the righteous. What's the difference between a white lie and a black lie? Nothing. Nothing. A lie is a lie. We spoke previously about one of the great sages, his students asked him, what's the category of exaggeration? He says, oh, you mean a lie?
If it's not the truth, it's a lie. Saying it's a white lie is trying to say, well, it's inconsequential. Who makes that decision? Okay, so that doesn't excuse it. It's still a lie. A lie is a lie. We're not saying that you're allowed to insult people and hurt people and put people down. We're not saying that. On the contrary, we spend all Monday night talking about how to have refined character and finding proper ways to give criticism if it's obligated.
If it's obligated to give, which we're going to talk about in a few weeks, if it's obligated, you must find a way to say it in a way that is effective and constructive, not in a way that's derogatory, shameful, or hurtful. You can't. You're not allowed to. The Torah obligates us to find a way. Even the Torah, by the way, it's an amazing thing. Do you know that when the Torah was about to put someone to death for a crime, to put
someone to death, you know what they would do? They'd beg him, please repent. Please, we don't want to. Please, please. What do you mean? The guy just did something that's, no, no, no, but if you repent and if you apologize, we can get you off the hook. They'd plea with him. We don't want to do it. You don't have that in court today. In the United States court system, you don't have that. They don't plea with you.
Just say that you're guilty and you will say, say that you're sorry. No, no, no. We just want to, we have to, how many people can we lock up today? There are three times that Talmud says that we're allowed to lie. Number one is on how much Torah you've learned. Someone says, oh, how much Torah have you learned? You're going to say, I'm an ignoramus. I don't know much. You're allowed to lie about that.
You're also allowed to lie about if you ate by someone's house and they have delicious food and now you see there are people who are not, there are people that are unscrupulous or people who are going to take advantage of them and they ask you, how's the food at their house? You're allowed to say, not worth your try. It's not worth it so that you protect that person. There's one other, I don't remember off the top of my head, but it's a Talmud in tractate
23b on the bottom and over there it says exactly the three things, but even then it's only for purposes of peace that you're allowed to do that or humility in the case of the Torah scholar. There's a story told about one of the great sages where they asked him, did you finish the Talmud? He said, only half the Talmud. So which half? Whichever half you want. So there's definitely, just because someone is honest, it doesn't give them the right
to disparage people, to hurt people, to shame people. By the way, even though we talk here about love the straight path, we spoke about love righteousness, that doesn't mean that we have a right to put people down if they choose a different path. That's not, we're not here to be God. We're here to do the right thing for ourselves. And this is a very clear idea, a concept that we see in the Torah constantly.
Just because I don't like what you do doesn't mean it's my business to stand in front of your house and picket how evil of a person you are because you make your choices. That's not a Torah way. That's not what God wants us to do. We are our environment. If we put ourselves around people who are choosing bad morals and bad ethics and bad bad character, we're going to adopt that. It's a matter of time that we're going to adapt to their standards.
So we have to remember that even if a person is, we don't want to be in an environment that's negative and we don't want to be an influence to others that's negative. So I think it's important for us to remember that our responsibility is not only, we have to cure in all situations. Okay.