Episode 20 - What If Suffering Still Carries Purpose

The fiercest debates often hide a simpler question: who decides when a life has finished its work? We wade into the MAID conversation with a different compass—potential. Not the glossy kind tied to youth and output, but the deeper current that can still move hearts, heal rifts, and teach courage even when bodies weaken. Drawing on the ancient image of earth versus dust, we explore why some soil grows a seed while other ground stays barren, and how that metaphor reshapes the way we see suffering, timing, and moral limits.

We share a hard boundary through a vivid thought experiment: if we refuse to harvest an elder’s heart to save a young stranger, even when the math seems obvious, then we admit a rule about the sanctity of time. From there, we follow the quiet ripples a single life can send—siblings who reconcile at a bedside, a nurse who discovers a vocation, a family that learns to sit with pain rather than rush to escape it. Along the way, we challenge the myth of control that often rides with success. Money can make us forget how many hands and how much grace shape any outcome. When life narrows, that illusion breaks, and we face a choice: reach for control, or lean into trust and responsibility.

This conversation is not about romanticizing suffering. It is about widening support, telling the truth about fear, and choosing to plant even when we only have a fraction of what we hoped for. If purpose is larger than preference, then staying present can be a final act of leadership—teaching our people patience, dignity, and love under pressure. Join us as we consider how to honour life’s assignment to the end, tend the soil we have, and let seeds do their slow, stubborn work.

If this spoke to you, follow the show, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review—your words help others find the conversation.

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing The MAID Controversy
• 1:10 Potential: Earth Versus Dust
• 3:00 From Adam To Afar: A Warning
• 4:20 Life, Suffering, And Moral Limits
• 6:00 The Ripple Effect Of A Life
• 8:00 Trusting The Plan Over Our Impulse
• 9:40 Mission, Ego, And Illusions Of Control
• 11:20 Wealth, Opportunity, And True Purpose

Transcript

Framing The MAID Controversy

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everybody, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for making it today. We are into what is an interesting conversation to say the least. I've got a lot of feedback from people online talking about this concept of MAID, medical assistance in dying. It's a controversial one, but it is a wonderful example of the challenges that we face as human beings with our limited knowledge. A lot of people who have gone through challenges in life, emotional challenges, physical challenges and illnesses, things that are debilitating that we should never know from because they are the probably, not probably, they are the most difficult test in the world to know that you cannot function, to know that everything hurts all day, every day, and that it's just going to get worse. Nobody wants to think of that, let alone have to deal with it on a daily basis. So they've got this thing called MADE, medical assistance and dying. And a lot of people will step up and say, Yeah, I agree. I think that if you're falling apart or that if you've got a terrible diagnosis and it's just going to get worse for me for you, and on and on and on, then they should have an option to be able to check out when they want to check out. They shouldn't have to go through those challenges. I think it's time, given what we've discussed yesterday, to talk about something that we discussed in season one that addresses this idea, and that is an individual's potential. Let's talk about that for a minute. An individual's potential is the only reason that they are put on this planet. What does that mean? It says in the Torah in the early days with Adam and Eve, before they sinned, God referred to Adam as Adam, which means ground, which means earth, and he said to him that you came from the earth, and therefore he called him earth Adam Adama. Now, later on after the sin, when God rebukes him, he gives him his punishment. He refers to him differently or he says to him that even though you came from the earth you will go back to dust. Afar. Afar and Adama are two different things. So why did Hashem, why did God change the language from Adama from Earth to Afar? And the answer is what I heard from Rabbi Wallerstein, whose memory should be a blessing. He said very clearly that when you take a seed of a tree that brings fruit and you put it in earth and you take care of it, you tend to it with water and sunlight, then you will get life. You will get food, sustenance, and all the good things that can come from that seed. But if you take that very same seed and you put it in dust, it doesn't matter how much dust you've collected. You put a seed in dust, nothing will happen despite the water, despite the sun, despite all the care that you put into it, you will get absolutely nothing. Why? Because there is no potential for life in dust. In earth there is a tremendous potential for life and for all the goodness that we seek. That's why after Adam sinned, God referred to him as going back to dust and not earth, which was really a shot across the bow, a warning shot to tell Adam that sin takes away your potential. But more than that, in this context, it's a reminder that we're put here, Adam and Eve were put here to maximize their potential. How does that apply to this concept of made? Let's discuss. We know very clearly that we're not allowed to take our own lives not a second before our time, and we're not allowed to take anybody else's life a second before their time. If somebody is on life support well into their nineties, and on their way out, yet a individual in his twenties, newly married, has a kid on the way, has his whole life ahead of him, pulls into the same hospital where this ninety five year old is laid out in a coma, and this young twenty something year old needs a liver, or a heart, or a lung because of the accident that he just had. Are we able to take this ninety five year old off of life support in order to remove his heart to give to this twenty something year old? And the answer is no. Absolutely not. But the old man is in pain, he's not in a coma, he's in pain, he suffers every day, it's it's it's terrible, it's devastating. Let's put him out of his misery, let's take his heart and give it to the twenty something year old, and the answer is absolutely not. Now you may ask, but the guy who's in a coma, what potential does he have? Or the guy that's laid up in a hospital bed and can't move and he's ninety five and he's checking out. We just don't know when, could be any minute now. He's got zero potential. You were talking about potential, the guy's in a coma. What's his potential? And the answer is that his potential doesn't stop and start with him. His potential affects everybody and anybody who ever interacts with him. From his spouse to his children, to his grandchildren, to his great grandchildren, to his siblings, to the doctor and the nurse that interacts with them every single day. The people that come to visit him, the family members, the people who see each other for the first time in the hospital next to his bed because they haven't spoken in years, but they came to pay their respects and suddenly they get to see family members and try and reconcile. You know how many times that's happened? Or at the Shiva house, the house of mourning that takes place after the funeral, that should be at the right time. Because if it was a week early, the two people that were supposed to remeet and re-engage at that person's Shiva and reignite an important friendship or relationship, that one of them may not be in town because they're on a vacation. We don't know. Do you know who controls every single aspect of that? The creator, with absolute precision and love. So when he knows that this individual needs to go because his potential can affect so many other people around him, then God orchestrates that. And when we step in with our limited minds and our limited abilities, and we think we know better, and we go ahead and do the opposite of what we know we're supposed to do because it suits our purpose, then we are interfering with a master plan. We are interfering with a precision that is designed for our benefit and those that we love. And so while it is probably one of the most, if not the most difficult decision in the world to live with that pain or that challenge, it's simply not in our hands. We don't know. And so when we've gotten to the point where we've developed our immuna muscle, where we know that there is a God and we have a relationship with him, and we've established with absolute clarity that he exists, there's not a question anymore. We've done the homework, we've read from the Torah, we've done the investigating, and we know that not a single letter in the Torah could have been written by a human being or any supercomputer, even AI and ChatGBT couldn't come close to writing a half a letter, by the way. ChatGBT yesterday, I tried it out, doesn't even know how many R's there are in Strawberry. Put it on the voice function and ask it how many R's are in strawberry. It'll tell you two, and it'll argue with you until you trick it to conceding that there are actually three. And I don't care how smart it's going to get, it will never be able to write even a one letter in God's Torah. When you've established that, then you get to a point where you reach the difficult challenges in life and you switch your brain off. You say, I don't know. I don't know what the right thing to do is other than what God told me to do. And even though I don't understand it, and even though it goes against every fabric of my being, I'm going to go with what God told me to do because he has already established himself as being perfect, as being divine, as loving me, and as caring about me and doing all the things for my benefit. Why in the world would I go against that? Let's put that to bed for now, my friends, and keep reading. He says that the root of a person's tribulations, when your difficulties come along, why does that happen? It's because he forgets that he is a creation sent to this world to accomplish a mission and that he is not his own boss. All the more so, he is not the boss of the rest of the world. How many people walk around with a chip on their shoulder, especially the ones who have achieved success, the ones who have achieved material success, they think they're responsible for that success. Do you understand? When you get to the point where you laugh at that, because you know otherwise, then you know you're on the right page. That somebody who's made millions, tens of millions, billions of dollars thinks that they're responsible. They don't know how to write their name. They don't know how to engage with other people. They're socially awkward, they're on the spectrum. There's a million different reasons why they would have challenges earning a dollar, yet they're worth billions. How do you explain that? How do you oh, because he's on the spectrum? Come on, do me a favor. Think realistically. Listen to some of the things that these people say. They're not always the brightest bulb, they're not always the sharpest tool in the shed, but yet they're worth billions of dollars. Why? Because it is clear as day that God runs the world and they have a purpose. The problem is that the money makes them drunk on power. And so they begin to convince themselves that they are brilliant, that nobody can do what they can do, that only they can do the things that have made them the money. I've got news for you. It's not true. Almost anybody can do what you do. Almost anybody can learn to make the decisions you've made or to build the things that you've built. Almost anybody. Sure, there are many people who aren't capable. I get it, they're limited in their abilities. But so much of humanity has the ability to learn and to grow and to do the very same things that so many of these people are doing, or to hire people and give them responsibilities to do these things and pay them well. So many people could do this, given the opportunity. The question is, do they get the opportunity? And the answer is not always yes. Some people get those opportunities and they blow them up. They throw them out because they use those opportunities for the wrong thing. Some people get those opportunities and don't know what to do with them. The ones who get the opportunities and know what to do with them, like we said yesterday, you want to do something for God. You want to do something to make this world a better place. You want to do something to fulfill your purpose. And it's going to require an investment of$100,000. But you only get$20,000 and you decide because I didn't get$100,000, I'm not going to do what I needed to do. I'm going to use this$20,000 to buy myself X, Y, or Z, a new wardrobe. I'm there. Very nice wardrobe, because that's going to somehow help me when I want to do the thing that I'm supposed to do to meet my purpose in life, to elevate this world. So God sees that and He says, huh, I didn't give you your hundred, I gave you 20. But if you really wanted it, if you were really hungry, if you were really serious about doing the good things that you said you were going to do, you would have done it even with the 20, because you would have shown me that there is nothing that's going to stop you. And there is a direct correlation, my friends, between the uh the amount, the size of the desire that you have inside of you in your heart to achieve X, Y, or Z, and God's desire to give it to you, especially if it meets his purpose. Have an amazing day, my friends.