Episode 41 - How Cruel Can One Person Be?

Shabbat isn’t meant to blur into the week—it’s meant to feel set apart, holy, and deeply alive. We open with a clear challenge: stop doing Shabbat by rote. Instead, try small, meaningful changes that shape the room and the heart. From a “candy compliments” ritual that ties sweet words to sweet tastes, to quick pre-Shabbat gratitude notes read around the table, we share simple tools that kids love and adults remember. These are tiny shifts with an outsized impact, turning habit into intention and warmth into culture.

We also wrestle with a harder truth about trust. Drawing on King David’s plea to fall into divine hands, not human ones, we explore why people reach for faith during illness or disaster yet forget it when conflict wears a human face. What happens when the pressure shows up as a boss, a spouse, or a neighbour? The call here is to see the sender behind the circumstance, to meet tension with pause, and to invite providence by speaking upward before speaking outward. Silence isn’t surrender—it’s space to think, to search the heart, and to let God open the path that argument can’t.

By the end, you’ll leave with a handful of practical Shabbat upgrades, a counterintuitive way to handle conflict, and a renewed sense of what holiness looks like in real life: distinct time, kind speech, and quiet courage. Try the rituals at your table, experiment with retreating from the next heated moment, and watch what shifts in your home and your week. If this moved you, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a quick review to help others find the Trust Factor.

Transcript

Holiness Means Being Distinct

Simple Ideas To Elevate Shabbat

Candy Compliments For Kind Speech

Gratitude Notes And Family Giving

King David And Human Cruelty

Turning To God In Crisis

Medicine, Systems, And Trust

Seeing The Sender Behind People

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. It's Friday, everybody. Are you ready? Are you ready for Shabbat? Because it's tonight. Have you prepared? What have you done? What have you put in motion to be able to make this Shabbat a better one than the last? It doesn't take much. It really doesn't. It takes a little bit of creativity. Sometimes we need to think outside the box a little bit. And the reason we do that is that we don't do Shabbat by rote. There would be nothing more tragic than doing Shabbat by rote. You want to do the rest of the week by rote? Not a problem. You won't be missing much because it's the same. It's just more of the same. Shabbat needs to be different. Shabbat needs to be distinct. It's holy. The word holy, most people don't know. When God says you should be holy because I'm holy, what does that mean? It means you should be separate and distinct. You shall be different than everyone and everything else. Why? Because God is different than everyone and everything else. So God says the same way that I'm holy and I'm separated, I'm different, I'm distinct from everybody else, so too you should be. He talks to the Jewish nation and he says, you need to be different, meaning you need to step up, you need to do better, you need to do more, you need to take on more responsibilities. Everybody else has seven Noah High Laws. You have 613. I'm putting more on your shoulders. There's more responsibility, there's more commitment, but that comes with more consequence, positive and negative. So if you do your job, you win big time. If you don't, you lose big time. That's just how it works. But he says that Shabbat is holy, Shabbat Kodesh. What does that mean? Again, the same thing. It needs to be separate and distinct from the rest of the week. And so you need to make efforts to make sure that every Shabbat is distinct and that you add to it. Add on to your Shabbat, change it up a little bit, make it sweeter, make it nicer, make it more meaningful. Let me give you an example that I learned a long time ago from a rabbi by the name of Rav Lasri, very, very funny rabbi, a little bit of comic relief. If you're looking for some, look them up, Rabbi Lasri, you gotta speak Hebrew though. The man is just hilarious, but a very wise man at the same time. Rabbi Lasri, a long time ago, I heard him say, take candies, and I did this a few times with my kids when they were growing up, take candies, a variety of different candies. Obviously this works if you have young kids at home, and throw those candies in the middle of the table, nice little pile of candies, the ones that you know your kids like, and then ask them to say something nice about somebody else in the family. Say something nice, compliment your brother or your sister, compliment your parents, compliment your grandparents, even a friend. Point out something good and nice that happened to you during the week, and you can choose any candy on the table. What does that do? It builds a correlation in that child's mind and in their life. That when they say good things, then their mouth is filled with sweetness, the good things that they like, they get immediate reward for that sweetness, for the goodness that they put into the world. It's a beautiful way to enhance your Shabbat. It doesn't have to be earth shattering. It doesn't have to be something that changes the entire dynamic of Shabbat. On the contrary, we love Shabbat the way that it is. We make our own personal Shabbats. But to add just a small drop, a little a little differentiator that allows you to say, oh, here's what we did, something new, something different. The kids really enjoyed it, the parents enjoyed it. Another thing that we used to do at our table when our kids were very young, we used to have thank you notes. We used to take a tzakah box, a charity box, and before Shabbat, just a few minutes before, everybody's busy getting ready, coming home, settling down. Take a minute just before Shabbat, take a small scrap piece of paper, a few of them. Each person should take two or three, and write down on that scrap piece of paper a little thank you note, acknowledging somebody in the family for what they did, for who they are, just anything. Again, it doesn't need to be earth-shattering, and you don't have to look, oh, this person do anything out of the ordinary. What am I gonna? Doesn't matter. These people are wonderful people as they are. Just thank them for being the people that they are, for the wonderful things. I mean, think of if you think about it, it's not gonna be hard to find a hundred different things to thank your parents for, for taking me to school, for cooking a delicious meal, for buying me clothes, for doing all these wonderful things, for helping me with my homework. And the same for the parents, right? Thank you for doing your homework. Thank you for saying thank you. All kinds of different things that you can come up with. But it's an unbelievable exercise, especially when the grandparents are over, if you've got guests coming over that don't normally come for Shabbat. It's an amazing exercise. Well, now they come over and they get thank you notes given verbally by the individual sitting at the table. Guys, it's game changer. People don't do this kind of stuff. It builds character and it takes your Shabbat to a whole other level. Try it. I'm sure you'll benefit from it. And if you don't have young kids, figure out something else. A little bit of creativity goes a long way. Let's get back into the book. Don't let me fall into the hands of humans. Who said that? Trivia question. Who said that? Let me build on it a little bit. What he actually said was, do whatever you want with me, God. Have your will with me. Whatever you want to do with me, I'm good with. Just don't leave me into the hands of man. Who said that? King David. Why did he say that? And in what context? He understood being the king, being somebody who understood just the potential for cruelty that human beings have. He said, God, do your worst if you want, but don't put me in the hands of men because I understand how cruel they are. What's the context? Let's read. If a person in danger finds himself at the edge of a cliff, and he has a choice, that he either jumps off the cliff or falls into the hands of his enemies pursuing him, better he should jump off the cliff, as King David says. Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercies are abundant. But let me not fall into human hands. When a believer faces a natural disaster, something like an earthquake or a hurricane that tore down your house, or God forbid an illness that's raging through a body, he turns to the creator and depends on him alone. And this works. How does it work? By invoking divine providence. God recognizes that this person is turning to him, which is exactly what he wants. And Hashem says, I'm in. I get it. I'm here. You're calling to me. I'm your father, just as your father of flesh and blood, if you called out to him, would come running to do anything he can to help you. God says the same thing. I hear you calling to me. I'm coming to help you. But when faced with people, individuals, flesh and blood, material that I can see, touch, feel, taste, whatever it is, a person frequently construes himself as dependent on them. So he doesn't turn to the creator. In such a case, he diminishes divine providence and falls into the hands of his enemies. The more he forgets his creator, the more the creator retracts his divine providence, and the person falls at the mercy of unmerciful enemies. For some reason, when somebody's in the hospital, after they're done with the doctors, putting their stock in the doctors, which unfortunately a lot of people do. I mean, today I think a lot of people are waking up to the fact that doctors are human and that the medical system is just another system that's built on profitability. I think people are more aware of it. I think I mentioned to you guys the fact that MAID medical assistance and dying has become the number five leading cause of death in Canada and it's being actively promoted. Instead of treatment, they're promoting death in the hospitals that are supposed to be designed to treat you and to heal you. So I think people are tuning in. But for some reason, when people give up hope on the doctors, suddenly they reach out to Hashem, or maybe it's at the same time. I got the doctors are working on me, but I got this crazy diagnosis, God forbid. And the first thing I do when I go home is I start praying to my creator, or even in the car on the way home. I start talking to my creator. Why? Tell me why? What did I do? How can I fix this? And that's what he wants. It's exactly what he wants. That's why you you got that illness in the first place, is to be able to recognize where it's coming from and start to invest in that relationship with your creator. So he comes to your assistance, he comes to your aid, but you've got to reach out to him. The problem arises when it's flesh and blood, when it's your boss, when it's your neighbor, when it's your spouse or your children, when it's flesh and blood that stands in front of you, that you can quantify the individual who's doing the damage, who is actively harming you, then suddenly you forget about God. Why is that? Why are we programmed that way? It's no different. It's really no different. That individual is another tool used by your creator. Just like the illness is a tool used by your creator to wake you up, to nudge you, to say, hey, I'm here. Time to remember your purpose and what you're doing here. Stop spinning your wheels, stop grinding water, stop wasting time, the clock is ticking, wake up. That's the purpose of the illness. That's also the purpose of the individual standing in front of you. The static that is being given to you. I need to check in. I did something wrong, or I'm actively doing something wrong. It's time to change my ways. But for some reason, we're not programmed like that, and therefore we engage. And what happens when you engage? You're into a battle, and it's you against them, and you just have the same odds as anybody else. God's not going to switch that person off until you behave properly, until you acknowledge why that person came to you and who sent them in the first place. Know before who you stand. A person stands before someone who's causing him anguish, like a spouse or one of his children, like we just said, his boss, a police officer, bank manager. He must determine who is really standing before him. If he sees the creator and not the tormenting individual, he won't beg, he won't flatter or attempt to influence the person, which is what so many of us do. He won't be angry and he won't curse. He'll only turn to the creator who put him in that situation in the first place and brought him this test of faith, for he is the only one who can help him. Here, too, there are different levels. Even if he accepts what happens to him with Emuna, he accepts it completely. He speaks to the creator and he and he repents. He says, I'm sorry, I recognize I did bad. But afterwards, he turns to the person who harmed him and tries to influence him. Remember, like we said, I believe God runs the world, but there's always a but. This is still blemished Emuna. It's not perfect, it's not correct. It shows that in the end, he will still take matters into his own hands rather than realizing that he is totally in the control of the creator. One must turn to the creator only, exclusively, and not to flesh and blood. Try this, guys. Just try it. The next time you're conflicted, the next time you are into an argument, a debate, an actual fight, you've been accused, whatever, there's a million different scenarios that happen to us all the time. The next time you find yourself in one, stop. Exactly like I said the other day, retract. Don't respond. Keep your mouth shut. It's very difficult, very difficult because a lot of people equate the fact that I'm staying quiet with surrender, that suddenly I'm surrendering. If I don't respond, if I don't shoot back, then I'm a sucker, then I'm resigning, then that person is correct and I'm admitting guilt. Not true. Not true at all. Relax, take a deep breath, don't respond, turn around and walk away. Two things will happen. Number one, the individual will recognize that you're not in for a fight. They will immediately start to review their own actions and their own words. What did I say? Did I say something that wasn't true? Did I hurt this person to the point where they're not going to respond? It'll immediately get them to start second-guessing their own approach. That's number one. But number two, and most important, is that it will give you time to contemplate. It will give you time to think what just happened. Is there validity to that? What is it? It must be something inside of me. So let me do some soul searching. Let me reach out to my creator the same way I would if I just got a diagnosis from a doctor. Let me do the same soul searching. Let me have the same conversation with my creator and watch. Sit back and watch. I guarantee you, you don't even have to ever come back with a response. Ever. Even if you're in the right, swallow your pride, swallow your words, walk away and have a conversation with your creator. And watch. Just wait and see. The path will open up in front of you. That person will pull a 180. You won't recognize the individual within a matter of hours, days, or maybe even a few weeks. That person will be a completely different individual. Try it out, my friends. Put those exercises in place tonight for Shabbat or tomorrow during your Shabbat meal in the afternoon. Try to upgrade your Shabbat and remember the next time you're faced with conflict, retreat. Swallow your words, swallow your prides, go have a conversation with your creator and then watch. Have an amazing Shabbat, my friends. We'll chat again on Sunday. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts. Drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.