Episode 105 - Who Gets To Rule Your Life And Your Health

If the news cycle leaves you tense, distracted, and angry, you’re not alone, but you might be aiming your trust at the wrong target. We start with a sharp teaching from Pirkei Avot about praying for the welfare of government, not as a flattering gesture, but as a recognition that law and order prevent society from sliding into chaos. We talk honestly about what happens when leaders are unchecked, how corruption trickles down, and why a functioning deterrent still matters even when the people in power are imperfect.

Then we bring it home with a counterintuitive form of freedom: taking on the yoke of Torah. The Mishnah describes how choosing Torah learning and service of Hashem can lift the “yoke” of government and worldly burdens, meaning you stop being emotionally governed by every policy, headline, and bureaucracy. It’s a shift in focus that replaces political anxiety with spiritual clarity, personal responsibility, and steadier daily peace.

From there we move into health, physicians, and bedside manner. A professional may be licensed to heal, but never licensed to crush hope. Jessy shares a real family story about a frightening dental warning that sent everyone into panic, and we unpack why pessimistic prognoses can do real harm. We explore optimism in healing, laughter therapy, medical clowns, and the Breslev emphasis on happiness as protection against sadness, fear, and emotional collapse. The key reminder lands simply: doctors are intermediaries, but Hashem is the true healer.

If this conversation helps you reset your trust and your mindset, subscribe, share it with someone who needs hope, and leave a review so more people can find The Trust Factor Podcast.

Transcript

Welcome And Why Trust Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:10

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

unknown 0:21

Trust Factor.

Torah Wisdom Hidden In Plain Sight

Why Society Needs Government Deterrence

Replacing Political Anxiety With Torah

Doctors Must Not Crush Hope

A Scare Fueled By Bad Bedside Manner

Optimism And Laughter As Medicine

Emuna As The Path To Healing

Closing And How To Connect

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. It is another week. Happy Monday. We're getting into a packed, jam-packed week full of not just the Garden of Imuna, but Pirke Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers. This is priceless wisdom that is thousands of years old, that has carried humanity for those thousands of years. So many people in the world have heard these concepts before, in one context or another, through secular teachings, whatever, through their parents or through school when they were children, but they don't get that it originated in the Torah 3,500 years ago, and that the secular world ended up adopting these ideas, putting their own humanistic spin on it, and then representing it to society and to humanity as their thoughts. That's what philosophers throughout history have done, and all types of intellects have done. Even today, when you listen to the radio, you hear from time to time, every month or so, you hear a new scientific discovery. The latest one I heard was a woman in the time of her menstrual cycle, the doctors suggest that it's a very important thing that she abstain from relations with her partner. Why? Because of the fragility of her uterine lining, it could introduce bacteria, which could make her very sick, and therefore they should take a pause during that period. Huh, that's an interesting one. You know where that came from? 3,500 years ago in the Torah, there are examples after examples of this brilliant wisdom that came, not just brilliant, but divine wisdom that came from our Creator that has been repackaged and sold to you. And even today, they're figuring things out that we've known for 3,500 years. It says, pray for the welfare of the government, because if people did not fear it, a person would swallow his fellow alive. The example is of a fish in the ocean. The way that a big fish eats a small fish, it eats it whole. There's no chewing involved. It swallows it up like it's nobody's business. Same thing would happen if we didn't have a deterrent. The number one role of any ruling party is as a deterrent from chaos, from crime, from disorder. That is their job, to make sure that everybody understands that there are rules and regulations, that there are court systems that will hold you accountable if you harm your friend. If you do something that steps out of line and hurts society, then you will be punished for it. That's their number one role. After that, they've got all kinds of other jobs. But their key one is to make sure that people understand that there is law and order. The big problem happens when you have people running government who are human beings made of flesh and blood. They have an evil inclination. And as a result of that, and add to that, I should say, that they're not checked. They don't have rules and regulations that apply to them. They are literally Teflon. None of these things apply to them. That's why just look online and you'll see in Canada how many members of parliament in Canada's history or prime ministers have ever been charged, tried, and convicted of a crime. It does not happen. You can count it on two fingers in decades and thousands and tens of thousands of representatives going unchecked at the highest level of power and policy making in the world, and they're not held accountable. That's why when you have corrupt governments, that corruption trickles down to the citizenry. And when you have an upstanding, upright government leadership, the odds are much better for an upright, upstanding community. So the Mishnah tells us we need to pray for them. We need to pray for them, number one, because we know they have an evil inclination, but number two, because it is a hard job, it is a very difficult job, and it needs to be acknowledged that it's not a simple thing, and that we need to fall in line. And at the end of the day, we have to recognize that they're corrupt. And because of that, we need to pray for them so that everybody continues to fall in line because it's in our own best interest that we have law and order. Now, what if you don't want to deal with them? You want to distance yourself from them as much as possible? The Mishnah tells you if someone takes upon himself the yoke, the burden of studying Torah, which is very difficult, to sit and take time out of your day and dedicate it to learning Torah, then what happens? The yoke of government and the yoke of worldly responsibilities are removed from him. That's your secret. That's the one that you just unlocked by listening to this podcast today. If you want to get away from the impact of government and other worldly responsibilities, all the things that everybody gets locked down with every day, all of the distractions that come at us, whether it's government offices or whether it's business or school or any other element of today's society that we would consider a worldly responsibility, all of those can be removed from you if you take on, if you replace it with the yoke of Torah. If you say, listen, I serve a creator, and that creator runs the world. Therefore, I don't need to serve anybody below that. That means that you're not running around serving government all day long, which so many people do. They run after them thinking they're the be-all end-all. If you want to avoid that, and you don't want to have to deal with humans who are flawed and making flawed policy and scratching your head or banging your head against the wall, trying to understand their policies, which nine times out of ten you can't do because they simply don't make sense, then the way to remove yourself from that responsibility, from those interactions, is to interact with Torah. God recognizes that you're doing the right thing. He sees that you're focusing your efforts in the right place and that you're subservient to Torah and only Torah and only Hashem. Then he says, okay, I don't need to put any other rulers to rule over you. But if you're not being ruled by me, if you're not being ruled by Hashem in his Torah, then he says, somebody needs to make sure that you're in line. Somebody needs to make sure that you follow law and order, and therefore I'll put you at the mercy of the ruling class. Now you decide. Where do you want to be? Do you want to be at the mercy of a ruling class led by humanity with their flaws and their mistakes and their evil inclinations and their self-serving nature? Or do you want to be ruled directly by the creator of the world who simply cannot take for himself because he lacks nothing? It's all selfless. It's all for you. After everything we've learned, you now have a choice. Where do I want to focus my concerns? Where do I want to constantly measure myself out to see how I'm doing? Do I want to do it by a loving, caring, selfless God that gave me everything and continues to give me life? Or do I want to put all that time and attention in human-led governments? For me, it's an easy one. It doesn't take much thought. That does it for Pierquet Avot. Now let's get into the book. We'll spend a few minutes where we left off. We're talking about physicians who are given a license to heal. And it says that because they are granted a license to heal, that does not give them the license to discourage or to dishearten patients. Yesterday we left off with this idea about bedside manners and how so many doctors simply don't have them. Think about the upcoming generation. Just think about this, my friends. The generation that was brought up on iPhones and iPads and technology, removed from society without even realizing it, not developing their ability to have social skills. And so now they're going to become doctors and physicians. So you want to talk about bedside manners, knowing how to interact with somebody in a way that makes them feel comfortable? Good luck in the upcoming generation. In many cases, doctors give patients and family members of patients a pessimistic outlook and a feeling of hopelessness. Telling a patient that he has only so much time to live is a terrible, terrible mistake. Let me tell you what happened to us a few years ago. My daughter, my youngest, was probably a couple years old. She went to the dentist for a routine checkup as a baby. Teeth were starting to come in. She barely had any teeth to begin with, but she had a habit. And you could see it on her. Her habit was to sit and push on her teeth while she's idle, doing nothing. She had this habit that she would use her top teeth to push and pull on her lower teeth, on the incisors, the ones on the left and right that were pointy, she would push on them. And as a result of that, she would loosen them up, and she ended up losing two teeth. Now, after she lost the second tooth, it might have been the first or the second, Michelle takes her to the dentist. And I get a phone call from Michelle in hysterics from the dentist. This young dentist that just got into the business a few years earlier and is very zealous and trying to make a name for herself, wants to discover all of the things that everybody else is missing. She says that she saw something very disturbing on an x-ray. And she tells me on the phone, you don't want to Google this because it's not good. But I suggest you get her to a hospital right away. That set off a series of events that shook everybody around us. I put out feelers to the community saying everybody needs to pray. There is something very serious going on because of course, when somebody tells you not to Google it, what do you do? You Google it. And that's what I did. And she's trying to tell me that my daughter has an immune deficiency that is going to cause her, God forbid a million times, to die a slow and painful death. You hear this? Shocking. Shocking. The last thing a parent wants to hear that your whole life has been turned upside down in a second. I've never met this dentist before. I know nothing about her. She knows nothing about me. She's met my daughter for the first time, and she took her first x-ray, and she says that her teeth are falling up because she has this illness. But don't Google it. And we end up at Sick Kids Hospital and we end up putting her through a battery of tests and going through hysterics. And even our family doctor, her pediatrician, was saying, don't listen to this lady. She's crazy. Apparently, she had a history of doing this. She was known. When Michelle called the pediatrician's office and mentioned this dentist's name, our doctor and his assistant already knew right away it wasn't the first time she had a history of driving parents crazy in her desire to prove something to the world. And as a result of that, she made everybody go through unnecessary torture, emotional anguish, which turned out to be absolutely nothing, thank God. But wow, did it ever wake us up? Medical research shows that optimism and a happy attitude play an important role in healing. That's what we said yesterday. Recovery and resistance to disease, your odds for success are that much better. Such nuances as laughter therapy have reportedly helped cure a number of ailments. I heard this decades ago, that just being exposed to comedy and laughter, that in and of itself has the power to heal from so many different ailments. Today in Israel, many hospitals employ medical clowns. Remember that movie with uh Robin Williams, where he came in as a clown and his whole therapy, his whole healing approach was through laughter based on a true story? These clowns have a job, and their job is to make patients laugh and to divert their focus from pain and suffering. So when you have a doctor who comes out and tells you you only have X number of days, weeks or months left to live, what's wrong with these people? Do you know how many people, we've all heard them, these stories about individuals who end up in hospitals, get diagnosed with some terminal illness, and the doctor gives them three months and they live years, years and years after that. The doctor gives them days and they live months and months and months after that. Do you know how much of their life was removed just by the doctor's prognosis? Just the fact that the doctor said you have six months left to live just took years off of that individual's life. Who says they have the right to determine that? They know nothing. All they can do, if they really wanted to, is suggest based on what they've seen in the past, this could be the case. But you're your own individual. You are unique. And your approach to this and your outlook on it and your mental health is going to have a very big impact on how long you live and the quality of life that you have. That's what people should be hearing. Not I'm the doctor and therefore I'm giving you X number of days, weeks, and months and years to live. It's ridiculous, but they do it today more than ever before, to just show you that they know something that you don't. And ultimately, nine times out of ten, they're completely wrong. But when they're right, it's because the fear that they've put in people's hearts has contributed to the fact that they are going to die at a younger age, earlier than they're supposed to. That's why this whole idea of Brezlov is all about happiness, maintaining happiness. That's their operating mechanism. Their whole principle of the Brezhnev movement is to maintain a constant state of happiness and to avoid sadness and depression at all costs. Why? They understand that sickness and disease are a result of the breakdown of happiness. And emuna leads to happiness. It takes away all of your sadness, it takes away all of your worry and your fear because you know who runs the world. And as a result of that, it saves you from a tremendous amount of sickness and ailments. But when you're in the loop, you're in this vicious cycle of the medical world where you're poked and prod and given all these professional quote-unquote diagnoses and prognoses and given a time frame in which to live, you're simply surrounded by fear, panic, and hysteria. And all that contributes, God forbid, to a terrible outcome. My friends, there's only one healer who runs the world, and he runs the hands of all of the healers who are intermediaries. So remember, if you're ever put in that position that you have to rely on the medical system, know in your mind, know in your heart that these people are simply intermediaries and that God works through them. When you know that, then Hashem will make an extra effort, even if the doctor does not acknowledge that God works through him. If you do, then that will greatly increase your odds of success because Hashem will work his magic through these doctors. That's it for today, my friends. Let's leave it there and we'll chat again tomorrow. 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 Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.