Episode 102 - Nature Is A Disguise For Reality

Most people want the fast track: advanced spirituality, impressive knowledge, and the feeling of being ahead. I think that’s why so many lives feel unstable when pressure shows up. I open with a blunt case for foundations, drawing from Pirkei Avot and Jewish ethics to explain why character and truth have to come before anything “trendy” or complex, and why skipping the basics leaves us building a straw house in a windstorm.

From there, I get practical about relationships. I unpack Rabbi Eliezer’s line about honouring a friend the way we honour ourselves, and I challenge the casual habits that erode trust over time. Even a nickname can become a tiny permission slip to belittle someone, and once that door cracks open, respect drains out. If you want real friendship, not performative connection, we have to protect dignity, choose our words carefully, and stop taking cheap laughs at someone else’s expense.

I also dig into patience, anger, and the urgency behind “repent one day before your death.” Since none of us knows when that day is, daily repentance becomes a way of living awake, using prayer and honest self-review to catch what we did on autopilot. Then I pivot into a bigger idea: there is no such thing as “nature” as an independent force, only a cloak that can hide Divine providence and test what we truly believe. I close with two vivid metaphors a dashboard warning light and a smoke detector to show why ignoring wake-up calls only makes the cost higher later.

If this helped you think more clearly about trust, Torah, and purposeful living, subscribe, share it with someone who needs it, and leave a review with the line that hit you hardest.

Transcript

Welcome And Why Foundations Matter

SPEAKER_01 0:10

The Trust Factor is the ticket to a better life. The Trust Factor shows you how to get through the life.

unknown 0:21

Trust Factor.

Honouring Friends Without Belittling

Patience Over Anger And Daily Repentance

Reverence For Torah Scholars

Why There Is No Such Thing

Stop Ignoring The Wake Up Calls

Closing Thoughts And How To Engage

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. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Trust Factor Podcast. I'm really glad that you could join. I've been getting so much great feedback on the ethics of the fathers on Pierre Kervot, and it's no coincidence. It is foundational to our very success. These are the foundation upon which life should be built. And like I said the other day, it's not taught enough. If you have a weak foundation and there is nothing to build on, and we're living in a society where everybody is hellbent on getting ahead. They want to be better, stronger, more knowledgeable than everybody else because it's all about achievement and success in this world. Unfortunately, it's material success. But nonetheless, everybody's always striving to know more than their neighbor, which means that what they end up doing is that they skip all kinds of foundational principles in order to learn the advanced. They want to know that they are ahead of everybody else. And in that quest, they don't build foundational principles. It's like going to learn calculus and trigonometry without having learned basic arithmetic. You can't do it. And whatever you're going to learn is going to be easily demolished, easily exposed as fraud. When the time comes, a good gust of wind comes over and blows down a straw house. What's a strong house? A house built with concrete and rebar. What's rebar? You know what rebar is. It's the metal that sits inside the concrete when they build a hundred-story skyscrapers. If they built it just using concrete, it would fall apart. It would crumble. And they've figured out through research and science that when you take metal, rebar, and you put it inside the concrete, it reinforces it to a point where it will last generations and it can hold that much more weight and sustain that much more impact. And so that's your foundation, that's your structure. That is Pierre Kavot. That's what we're learning now. It's the stuff that comes first. Everything else can be built upon that. Running to go and learn Kabbalah, which is trendy, it was made trendy a long time ago by celebrities, Hollywood celebrities of all people, who wanted to feel like they were spiritual. And so they started to learn Kabbalah and they opened up these retail Kabbalah centers, which came under a lot of fire, a lot of scrutiny for the obvious reasons, the reasons I'm telling you now. How do you go from having zero knowledge, not knowing who the forefathers and mothers were, not knowing basic Jewish history, not knowing anything about Torah, which is the foundation upon which Kabbalah is built? How do you go straight to Kabbalah without having spent a minute learning Torah? And that's what happens. Everybody just wants to get ahead and seem like they know more. But it's really built on nothing. It's emptiness, it's devoid of all real important content. And that's what we're learning here. That's why I'm getting so much good feedback from it. So let's read a little bit more and then we'll get back into the book. What does it say? It says, Rabbi Eliezer said, let the honor of your friend be as dear to you as your own. If you want to be a good friend, if you want to be a person that people want to be around, if you want your friendships to be lasting and real and true, where you can rely on those people and they can rely on you. By the way, just as an aside, having a hundred friends or a thousand friends or two thousand Facebook friends is a joke. It is the exact opposite of reality. In reality, we have room in our lives for one, maybe two real friends. And what I mean by real friends are people that we can rely on. People that we can not interact with for months and even years. And then when you phone them, when you see them, it's as though you've never departed. You know them and they know you, and it's not built on anything other than your two nishamas, your two souls having come together and created a bond. Which, by the way, is no coincidence. We've said that bond comes from previous existences. There's no coincidences that the people you surround yourself with or that you find yourself with, your friends and your family, are there, are who they are. They're there by design because they were there in previous existences. And you need to be around them in order to fix and to repair previous relationships. So let your friend's honor be as dear to you as your own. If they're a real friend and if you're a real friend, then you will constantly be sure not to belittle your friend and not to get laughs at their expense. And that even means, believe it or not, I'm guilty of this also, not using a nickname for your friend. It's a hard pill to swallow, especially for guys. We're known for doing that kind of thing. It's a it's a term of endearment. We don't mean anything negative by it. We really love our friends, we love them entirely. But we use these terms of endearment, these nicknames that we've been using for them for decades since we were children, as a way to say it's fine, we're all good. We know exactly what the root of this nickname is and we're good with it. How do you know? How do you know, number one, that your friend hasn't grown out of it and if he feels belittled by it? And even if he doesn't mind it, you know what it does? When you use that nickname to refer to your friend, it takes him down a notch. It opens up the pinhole, the opportunity for you to now belittle his honor in other ways. Because you're willing to do it with his nickname, why wouldn't you do it somewhere else? Even if you're not going to, don't do it. Because it exposes you to that risk. And be not easily provoked to anger. Who do we have to emulate? Our Creator. Is there any better example in the world of not being quick to anger? Of having everlasting patience? Think about it. The vast majority of human population not only doesn't follow his instruction manual on life and listen to their father in heaven who cares about them, but they go against him every day. Every day, not just in Judaism. Sure, there's vast majority of Jews in the world are not religious Jews, but the vast majority of humanity are not religious individuals, whether they're Christians or Muslims or Sikhs or Hindus or Buddhists. The vast majority of them are not actively practicing what the religion is that they claim to be a part of. So not only are they not doing his will, but they're oftentimes going against him. They're not doing the mitzvahs, they're actively doing the averas, the sins. And yet, despite that, Hashem has all the patience in the world. He will still give you 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 years waiting for you to figure it out and come back. And in the end term, he does not get anger. If we're going to be like him, which is godlike and which is our obligation, then we cannot be easily provoked to anger. Repent one day before your death. What do you get from that? How can somebody repent one day before their death? Let me ask you a question. You're walking across the street, and God forbid you get hit by a bus, and that's your end. It doesn't have to be at 95 in an old age home with some kind of illness in your family around, waiting for you to pass away. You could be 25 years old, God forbid, walk across the street, get hit by a bus, fly in a plane, and God forbid a cross. There's a million different ways to die. At any time, and it can happen in a second. So how do you repent one day before your death if you don't know when the day of your death is? And the answer is you're always repenting. You're always doing that investigation into your life to say, what did I do today? That's the whole purpose of prayer. That's why in multiple prayers a day, we repent. We beat on our chest and we say these things that we may or may not have done in a certain day because we want to cover off all of the things that we haven't even thought about, all of the things that we've done by rote, the sins that we've committed that we haven't even been aware that we're committing them. That's why we say all these terms when we repent in our prayer multiple times a day. Why? Because I don't know when I'm going to die, but I know that I prayed. I'm obligated to pray multiple times a day, and in that prayer is my opportunity to atone for my sins. So if you're actively praying, if you're doing what you're supposed to do, then that means that you are repenting one day before your death, because it can come at any time. He also says, Warm yourself before the fire of the wise, but beware of being singed by their glowing coals. What does that mean? It's referring to Torah, scholars, big rabbis, people who should be held in very high regard. It says, Warm yourself by the fire of the wise, meaning the heat, the glow that comes off of their Torah and their wisdom. You should want to be surrounded by like a person who's freezing in the middle of winter and needs warmth and refuge. That's the way you should be seeking out one of these giants, these Torah giants. But beware of being singed by the glowing coals, meaning to say, and it says even more, it says, For their bite is the bite of a fox, and their sting is the sting of a scorpion, and the hiss is the hiss of a serpent, and all of their words are like coals of fire, meaning, revere these people. They're not your friends. They're not people that you can belittle. And if we just finish talking about honor of a friend who may not be one of these people, how much more so do we need to hold the honor of these righteous Torah scholars in the highest form of regard? You have to be careful with the words. Don't belittle them. You don't know a percentage of what they know. I don't know a percentage of what they know. And so we have to admire that and we have to recognize that God embodied them with a power to learn his Torah, unlike most people. He's given them an opportunity to be leaders of the generation. You should not take that lightly. Recognize that you don't want to be on their bad side, you don't want to belittle them. On the contrary, you if you're honoring your friend, then these people are deserving of the highest form of honor. Because if God forbid, you go against them. The bite is the bite of a fox. He's talking about illnesses here that can come from a simple bite that will last a lifetime, and you can potentially never become healed from these bites. They will follow you for the rest of your life. It's not a simple thing. Be very careful with the honor of a righteous person. That's it for today when it comes to Pierkay Avot. Let's get back into the book a little bit. We're talking about the fact that you should know with absolute certainty that there is no such thing as nature. Do you know what nature is? Nature is a cloak, it's a disguise that God uses in order to give the world an appearance as though he's not here. Why? It's like any other good parent. They want to see what their child is going to do when they're not around. You know, when we're when we have children and they're young kids, and we see that they're about to come upon a situation which is new to them. It's foreign to them. An opportunity, let's say there's food on the table, there's a cookie on the table, and they know they're not supposed to take it. And they're always being supervised, and mom's always warning them. And now they have an opportunity to take that cookie without being noticed, or at least that's what they think. But mom is hiding right around the corner, and she can see and she's watching carefully. What is this boy going to do? Is he going to take the cookie even though he knows I told him not to, that he's not allowed to have it until after dinner? And she watches from around the corner. She doesn't want to sit on his shoulders, she doesn't want to helicopter parent. She doesn't want to be down his throat. She wants to give him a little bit of autonomy. Mum's not here now. I'm not watching you. You're on your own. What are you going to do? Are you going to do the right thing because I told you to do the right thing and you know it's the right thing? Or are you going to let the evil inclination get the best of you? Are you going to succumb to your desire for that cookie? And is all that I've taught you going to be thrown out the window at the slightest urge? So Hashem creates this thing, this facade called nature to say, do you recognize who runs the world? You've learned so much Torah. You've sat through podcast after podcast, episode after episode, season after season. Has it sunk in? Do you get it? Has it become a part of who you are? Or are these just a good 10, 15, 20 minutes of your day that you feel good about yourself because you recognize that these are feel-good ideas and they make sense and they're logical and they're inspirational? Or do you actually embed them in who you are? Do you change the individual that you are? And now all of a sudden, when you're faced with a challenge that you would have been faced with six months ago or a year ago, your approach to it is entirely different. That's what he's testing for. And that's what nature was created to test. When you get ill, do you blame nature? Do you blame the cigarettes? Do you blame the alcohol? Do you blame the exposure to some chemical that you had at work? Do you blame it on your DNA, on genetics? Or do you recognize that there is a God that runs this world? And nothing is by coincidence, and everything is exacting and precise. If I get a cold today, there's a reason why it's today, and there's a reason why it's a cold. If God forbid I get diagnosed with a major illness, there is a very good reason for it. There is a message there. Nothing is random. It's got nothing to do with the exposure that you had a long time ago. Nothing. There is nothing beyond God's abilities. He can make somebody who drinks like a fish and smokes a pack a day live well into their 90s and hundreds. You've all seen this before. And at the same time, he can take a young, healthy individual who lives a spectacularly healthy lifestyle as a marathon runner and give them critical illnesses at a very young age. What gives? It doesn't make sense. And so at the end of the day, you have to understand there's no such thing as nature. It's really just a facade. A person who puts his trust in doctors and medicine without attempting to interpret what Hashem is trying to tell them is like a person who's driving around in a car with the oil pressure warning flashing on the dashboard. What does he do? He pulls into a garage and he says to the mechanic, listen, I've got this light on the dashboard. I need to get rid of this light. It's bothering me. So do me a favor and figure out how to get rid of this light, but I don't want it to cost me any money. I don't want to have to do anything to actually come out of pocket to fix the problem. What can we do? And the mechanic says, no problem, and he snips the wire to the light. So now there's no electricity going to the light bulb. The light goes out, and you drive away ignorantly in bliss. You drive away thinking I've solved my problem. No, you haven't. You haven't at all. You've avoided the problem. You haven't fixed it. So you know what's going to happen eventually? That car's engine is going to stop working. The entire car is going to become worthless, a pile of junk that you cannot drive around in anymore. You cannot utilize it to your benefit. Why? Because you ignored a warning side. Or the person with a smoke detector in their home that gives you an early warning of the fire or carbon monoxide. And instead of looking for it, what does he do? He takes the battery out of the smoke detector. It's the same person who tries to put out Hashem's wake-up calls. If you're trying to avoid them because they're inconvenient for you and you don't want to deal with them, they're just going to get louder and louder and louder. And ultimately, you're going to have to pay a heavy price. Why? Why? It's so easy to put out a small fire, to take a fire extinguisher and put it out. You've solved the problem. There's another day to live. Now you've got a lifetime ahead of you because all you did was the right thing. You put out a small fire, or you spent a few hundred dollars or a thousand dollars to fix your car's engine, and now you're gonna get another 10 years out of the vehicle. But most people don't have that inside of them because it gets in their way. It's inconvenient. They're preferred to keep the$1,000 in their pocket and deal with a loss of a vehicle in six months from now, and they wonder why it's happening to them. Guys, there's no coincidences. Everything happens because of our actions and the way we view our relationship with our creator and his involvement in our lives. Have an amazing day. Have a purposeful day, my friends. We'll chat tomorrow. 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.