Episode 98 - You Are Not Righteous If You Hurt People

The world is louder and more chaotic than ever, and that’s exactly why we’re doubling down on one question: what does it actually look like to live with truth, clarity, and trust? We pick up deep in the ideas of Garden of Emunah and open a door into Pirkei Avot, a compact set of Jewish ethics that doesn’t just talk about belief, it trains behaviour. For anyone trying to build a meaningful life, this is a reminder that spirituality can’t be separated from how we treat people.

We unpack derech eretz, “the ways of the world”, and why our sages teach that it comes before Torah. That doesn’t mean mitzvot are optional. It means you can’t claim righteousness while offending others, ignoring dignity, or moving through life like only your goals matter. At the same time, being “nice” without learning Torah is like building a complex barbecue without the manual: it might work for a bit, but the missing pieces eventually show up. We talk about why the oral law gives the written Torah its practical shape, and why Pirkei Avot may be one of the most powerful guides for building character, community, and inner balance.

From there, we bring the ethics into the mess of modern life: an ancient line about rulers who act friendly only when it benefits them, and what that reveals about power, politics, and self-interest. We also explore a personal practice that changes decision-making fast: pausing to ask what Hashem wants, then learning to “nullify” our will when it conflicts with God’s will.

We close with a challenging idea on spiritual health and healing: symptoms as signals, prayer as heart-work, and emunah as a foundation you can strengthen. If this conversation helps you, subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find the Trust Factor Podcast.

Transcript

Why Clarity And Truth Matter

SPEAKER_00 0:22

The world is louder and more chaotic than ever. That's why clarity and truth have never been more important. Welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast.

Derech Eretz Before Religious Detail

The Manual For Living Well

Why Pirkei Avot Is Essential

Power, Politics, And God’s Will

Spiritual Roots Of Health Problems

Healing Through Prayer And Closing

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast. I hope you had a meaningful, powerful Shabbat, wishing you an amazing week ahead. We are getting into, we're deep into, I should say, chapter eight of the book of the Garden of Imuna, which is an amazing, life-changing book, really. I've been reading it for probably close to 20 years. I've read it multiple times, and you can understand why. If you've been around from the beginning of this season, then you understand just the power that this book has is unbelievable. It really puts life into perspective. I want to remind you, about a year ago, for those of you who've been around since the beginning of the podcast, we started this about a year ago, over a year ago. Around this time, we do this thing in Shul. We have a tradition in synagogue to read Pirkeavot, which is a section of God's Torah that's defined as the ethics of the fathers, teachings that come from our sages that focus in, they zoom in not on Halacha, not on the rules and regulations of what to do and what not to do in order to do the mitzvahs, the commandments correctly. That's not what this is about. This entire section of the Torah is specifically about a concept called derek Eretz, which is loosely translated as the ways of the world. There's a saying in Hebrew, Derek Eretz Kadmala Torah, the ways of the world came before the Torah. What does that mean? It means that it's more important to be good with your friend, to behave in a way that is upright and outstanding, so that you are a contributing member of society and that you treat people properly with honor and dignity. That comes before doing the mitzvahs. You know, there's two components to an individual. We talked about this recently. There's an individual's soul and there's their body. The body is the materialistic animalistic component, and then there is the soul. We can compare that to the mitzvas and the actions. The mitzvahs are the soul and the actions are the body. You can sit and study to do the mitzvas perfectly. You could be so incredibly careful with how you execute the mitzvah, making sure that not only are you doing them properly, but you're trying to do as many of them as humanly possible. And you might think that that makes you a righteous individual, but I have news for you. It doesn't. It's only half of the equation. The other half of the equation is how you treat people, how you conduct yourself in society. Are you careful around other people? Are you careful with the way that they feel and the way that you interact with them to make sure that you're not running around offending everybody? Because if you don't care if this world and the way that you interact with it is all about you and you getting ahead, then you've missed the point. You simply won't be called a righteous person. A righteous person has to have a proper balance of conducting himself in a way that is upright with other people and doing God's mitzvahs. You are required to do both. One side of the equation is not enough. The opposite applies as well. If you are a wonderful person and you're busy taking care of people's needs and you're always worried to make sure that you're not going to offend somebody and that you're not going to make somebody feel bad. You have wonderful character traits, but at the same time, you've neglected God's Torah. You haven't learned Torah, you don't know anything about the mitzvah, you don't know what you're supposed to do. You've taken the manual for life and ignored it completely. Much like the guy who buys the barbecue and tries to put it together without the manual because he thinks he knows more. And ultimately what happens? It never works correctly. It might be able to cook a steak for you, but it's not going to do it properly. Why? Because all those leftover screws and components that are still in your hand and you don't know where they go because you didn't take the time to read the manual, those were critical components. And so you end up for the next few years while you're using this barbecue, cursing it out and suggesting that nobody should ever buy this barbecue because it is a terrible brand and it was terribly built wrong. You put it together incorrectly. Why? Because you didn't read the manual. You could have been the nicest person in the world. You could have been the most capable person in the world. You could build skyscrapers for a living. But if you didn't take the time to read the manual about how to put it together, and you're left with five or six components still in your hand, and you're wondering where do they go? Ah, it's not so important. Then you wonder why it doesn't work properly. Everything is connected, my friends. You have to have a balance. You have to read the manual, you have to follow its instructions, and then you need to make sure that you do it in a way where you are considering other people all the time, conducting yourself in a way that is upright and honorable. So, all of that to say, that last year when I started this podcast, I mentioned to you briefly, some of you may recall, that I really wanted to inject this Ethics of the Father into the podcast. But it was new at the time. I was still figuring stuff out. If you go back and listen to the early episodes, you'll see that the audio quality was terrible. Like it took me months just to figure out how to record and how to edit. So to start injecting all this other content just wasn't right. But I think it is today, and I think we're primed for it. And we've had so much time to talk about these concepts. Whether you recognize it or not, some of it will sound familiar. I've been throwing this in to the podcast since day one, maybe not reading from the book, but certainly these concepts, these ideas, are things that I have introduced in almost every single episode. So let's start with just a little bit to give you a taste. Because in my opinion, if we were to take, you know, there's an idea that has been said that if somebody comes and puts a gun to your head and says, you have a choice. You can either take the five books of Moses, the Torah that we read from every year in synagogue, or you can take the Gemara, the Mishnahs and the Gemaras and understand the oral law. Not the written law, but the oral law. What the rabbis came afterwards, our sages came and extrapolated the Torah, the five books of Moses. Which one would you keep? The question is, which one should you keep? And the answer is always the same. You need to hang on to the Gemara and the Mishnahs because without those, the Torah is useless. It's just a book of stories, it's a book of tales from a long time ago. Some people often confuse it as a history book. Rightly so, because that's what it seems like when you're reading it. But for those who really know and really understand the Gemara and have learned it, the Gemara takes words and sentences and ideas out of the five books of Moses and teaches us how to be Jews, how to live a life of a Jew. You can't do that just by reading the books. It doesn't help you to read the five books of Moses. You need the Gemara. So you have to hold on. That's more important. If you had to choose one, you would stick with the oral law over the written law. In my opinion, if somebody came to you and said you had to keep only one section of the oral law, now that you've got the oral law, which one do you want to keep? You need to choose a section. In my opinion, take it or leave it, I would choose Pirkeavot, the Ethics of the Father. Why? Because that is the life lessons. If we took this information and made it mandatory learning in all schools around the world, not just Jewish institutions, but all schools around the world to teach these ideas to the children in their formative years, my friends, Mashiach would have come a long time ago. We would have been living in a utopia, there would be no wars, there would be no illness, there would be just love and peace in the world. But so few people read it, so few people learn it. Even in the Jewish institutions, it's not taught enough. They're too busy teaching Halacha what to do and what not to do from a legal perspective to make sure that you're executing the mitzvahs perfectly, that you should be a soldier when it comes to the mitzvahs. It doesn't really matter. Secondary and tertiary is how you treat others or how you conduct yourself as you walk through this life. What a mistake. What a dire, dire mistake. Let me give you a little taste of the beauty over here. I mentioned to you not long ago about the level of corruption in government and politics. Not my ideas thousands of years ago. It says very clearly. You should beware of rulers. When it talks about rulers, it talks about government officials, for they befriend someone only for their own benefit. They act friendly when it benefits them, but do not stand by someone in his time of need. Sound familiar? Remember I was telling you the worst form of human being are our politicians. These are the people who are the root cause of every problem in humanity. From the beginning of time until today, today's no exception. The ruling class are all self-serving. You want to follow an ideology that is not self-serving, that is the opposite, that is completely 100% entirely selfless. You follow God's Torah because God is perfect. By definition, he is divine, he lacks nothing. There is nothing self-serving about the Torah. It is all for our benefit. And you've heard me say many times that we double dip. Why? Because he just wants to give and to do for us because he's complete. All of these people running governments are so deficient. They're morally deficient. They're ethically deficient. And therefore they're constantly trying to make themselves whole. And it's never enough. They have a hundred, they want 200. They have a million, they want two million. They have a hundred million, they want two hundred million. That's why you have people in government, Canadian and American, all over the world, never mind just Canadian and American, who come into politics worthless. They have almost no worth to them from a monetary perspective. They're worth tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands at best, and they come out worth hundreds of millions of dollars as a civil servant? Guys, it's in the Torah right here. I just read it to you. Let me read another one to you because I've said this one before, but this is out of the book. It says, treat his will as if it were your will, so that he will treat your will as if it were his will. Remember this? I said this to you a long time ago. If you run around contemplating God, what does God want me to do? How does he want me to behave? I'm now put in a position to make a decision. I could go with my own gut, or I can stop for a second and think, what would Hashem want me to do? What does my God want me to say or to do in this situation? That's contemplating his will. If you find yourself doing that, then he will contemplate your will, which means he knows what's in your heart and he knows what's in your head and he knows what you want, and he knows more than that, he knows what's good for you. And so he will contemplate what you want more than he would if you weren't contemplating what he wants. I don't know about you. If I have a choice to have the creator of the world constantly thinking about the things that I want, I'll take that all day long. But it doesn't end there. It says, nullify your will in the face of his will. Remember, I said to be a Vatran, a Vatran is somebody who just nullifies their own will. This is where it comes from. Nullify your will in the face of his will, meaning to say, if I know God wants me to do X, but I want to do Y, I know God wants me to eat kosher, but I'm really jonesing for a cheeseburger right now. And you nullify your will and say, I'm not going to do what I want to do. I'm going to do what he wants me to do, so that he will nullify the will of others in the face of your will. You hear this? You have enemies, you have people who are thinking badly about you, you have people who are jealous of you, you have people who are always making comments or who are always thinking about the worst when it comes to you. God forbid this shouldn't be the case. But if you do and you want their will nullified, you want their desires to be null and void when it comes to them thinking of you negatively. Very simple. Nullify your will when it comes to God. When you know that God wants you to do A, but you want to do B. And you're able to nullify your will and make His will paramount, then He does that for you, but with other people, the people that He knows are conspiring against you. If you want their wills to fall apart, then nullify your own will. Think about this, guys. I just gave you a small sample, few lines over here from this wonderful, wonderful compilation of ideas that God gave us to say this is how you conduct yourself as a mensch, as a good person, as a successful, well-balanced individual. These are the tricks of the trade, so to speak, of how to be on the top of your game in this world and how to avoid the pitfalls. Given that it's Sunday and given that we've got a little bit extra time, let's just finish off what we were talking about on Friday. We said that there are no coincidences in our health problems. If God gives you issues with your head, with your brain, with something to do with your head, then you know that your problem is that you don't understand who runs the world, who is the head of the world. And we said that eye problems is usually because you're looking in the wrong places. You're looking at things like pornography or other people's wives when you're not supposed to be. Along that line, ear problems might come from refusing to listen to the creator's commandments. Makes sense. I have ears, but I don't listen. How many people are like that? It says, Oznaim Lahem Veloishmau. People have ears, but they still don't listen. You wonder, what do you have ears for if you're not listening? Lies, slander, and other forms of evil speech, they bring about problems with the mouth if you find yourself with canker sores. If you find yourself often with issues in your mouth, whatever it may be, your tongue, or your teeth, or your lips, it's usually because you have a problem with your speech. Watch how you speak and who you speak about. A person who refuses to give charity or to do compassionate acts will have problems with what? With their hands, right? That's what gives and takes. Legs and feet indicate weak amuna. This is an interesting take. Your legs and your feet indicate weak amuna. Why? It says just as the body stands on the legs and feet, a person's good character stands on amuna. I wouldn't have put that one together, but there you go. And finally it says cardiac difficulties, problems with the heart, God forbid. The number one cause, number one or two, it's always jockeying for a position, of death in Western societies is cardiac difficulties, heart disease. Where does it come from? Insufficient prayer. Why? Because we pray from the heart. It says words that come from the heart penetrate the heart. We use our heart to pray, to connect to our Creator. It's heartfelt prayer. That's where the word comes from. And so if you find yourself dealing with heart disease, recognize that you should get back into your prayer. Invest in the quantity and the quality of your prayer. And my friends, I committed to it last week and I'll double down on it this week. All of these challenges, these illnesses that cause you so much pain and suffering are so easily reversible. God created you. Every component within you, He created and He controls. And overnight, my friends, He has taken away severe illness from people who are suffering. Overnight, doctors were left dumbfounded and they are on an ongoing basis where they simply don't understand how yesterday you were on your deathbed and today you're seemingly on the road to recovery or you're already there. It doesn't make sense for them, and they normally just dismiss it. You should not dismiss it. Recognize that you have the power to heal. God gave it to you. Not just from the food, not just from the earth. All the vegetation that grows out is all of our medicine designed to keep us healthy. But more than that, your prayer, your words, your connection back to him, showing him that I will conduct myself properly. I know who runs the world and I know where the power lies. When you do that, my friends, then it is a clear indication to him that he should invest more time and energy in you. And he has the ability and the desire to do that very same thing. Have an amazing day. Let's have an amazing week, my friends. We're going to get through a lot of content this week, and I'm going to be introducing you to more of the Pierre Care Vot, the Ethics of the Fathers. Have an amazing day. 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 TrustFactor Pumpkins. Thanks for listening.