Episode 106 - Doctors Are Not God But They Often Act Like It

Chasing greatness can look spiritual on the outside while quietly feeding ego on the inside. We open with a hard teaching from Pirkei Avot, “Do not seek greatness for yourself,” and unpack the context that changes everything: it’s not a warning against success in work or helping people, it’s a warning against using Torah learning as a pedestal. We talk about honour, humility, and why real growth shows up in how we treat others, especially our parents and the generations before us.

From there we get practical: Torah study matters most when it leads to action. “Learn in order to do” becomes the measuring stick, and we explore what it means to let performance exceed learning, to do more and say less, and to build a home where the table is rich in wisdom rather than status. If you’ve ever felt envy toward the “king’s table,” we reframe what wealth and royalty really mean when your crown is shaped by character and connection to the Creator.

Then the conversation takes a sharp turn into health, hope, and medical prognosis. I share why expiry dates and gloomy predictions can crush a person’s spirit, fuel fear, and even steal the will to recover. We dig into emunah, emotional and spiritual well-being, and a more careful way to speak truth without shutting the door on possibility, divine intervention, or the many cases that defy the odds.

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Transcript

Welcome And Sponsorship Invitation

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The trust factor is the ticket to a better life. The trust factor shows you how to get through the life. Trust factor. 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. It's another day and another episode of the Trust Factor Podcast, another opportunity to grow and learn and become the best version of yourself. A reminder that if you're looking to sponsor an episode, you are more than welcome. Reach out and we'll get you all the information you need. You can dedicate it to whoever you want in any circumstance. If somebody's looking for healing, we can make a dedication on their behalf. If somebody's looking for a mate, a life partner, we could do the same. Or to have children or any other issue that is holding somebody back. It's a great opportunity to pray on their behalf by giving a little bit of your hard-earned money to a Shem's Torah. Let's get into it. Do not seek greatness for yourself. That's a tough one. How do you tell somebody not to seek greatness? And so, like everything else, you have to understand context. Context matters a lot in this world that we're in, especially, because one way to manipulate reality is to play with context, to take somebody's words and to apply them in a fashion or in an area of life that they weren't intended to be applied. They weren't said in that context. So let's understand what the Torah tells us when it says, do not seek greatness for yourself. In what context? And the answer is not at work and not at being successful and not at helping people and not at all these wonderful things where you should seek greatness all day long. It's talking about with regards to your Torah learning. Don't seek greatness for yourself. Are you learning this stuff for yourself to put yourself on a pedestal, to make yourself better than everybody else, to show to everybody that you've learned these new concepts and ideas and therefore they represent you or you represent them? That's the wrong approach. And do not crave honor is what follows that. And that comes to further cement the idea of not seeking greatness for yourself. If you're learning Torah in order to gain the honor that would come from it, you know, I know people who are secular people who have never really studied in a yeshiva or in a seminary, and yet their children start to grow in Torah. I've seen this firsthand, and they send their kids to religious institutions, to yeshivas and seminaries, and the kids come back thinking that they're better than their parents. I know it's hard to believe, it's hard to imagine, but I could show you multiple examples of that very thing. That the children who went to learn on their parents' dime and came out for whatever reason thinking that because they now know more than their parents do, then they're better than their parents. It's a shocking idea, especially around Torah. If you told me about that in the secular world, I would believe you that people in today's generation believe that if they know more in technology, if they're able to write code, if they're able to produce something in this society with regards to the technology and the advancements that we have available to us today that their parents have no idea about, that they'll look back at the previous generation before them and think, ah, what does that generation know? They know nothing. We know more. That certainly applies in the secular world. There's a whole story about an individual on an airplane, a very holy rabbi sitting on an airplane, and beside him is sitting a secular Jew, and they're flying, call it from Israel to Toronto, and they're flying for a very long trip. And the son of the rabbi keeps coming over and keeps checking in on his father. How are you, Dad? Everything okay? Can I get you something to read? Can I get you a pillow for your head? Every 15, 20, half an hour, this kid would come by and check on his father's well-being. And eventually the guy sitting beside him, the secular Jew, turns to him and says, Your son, he keeps coming up every half an hour to check on you. He keeps coming to see how you're doing. There must be something wrong. Maybe I can help. My son, nowhere to be seen. I'm sitting here already on the flight with you for hours, and my son is also on the flight, hasn't come to check on me once. What's going on? So the guy says, Let me explain. In your world, he says, your children are secular, and they're taught that because they know more or they know different than you, that they've learned newer advancements in technology, and science has taught them more than in our generation, that somehow that makes their generation better than yours. My son knows that previous generations were closer to the giving of the Torah. The further you go back in history, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, they are holier people than this generation because they are closer to the truth, the truth that was given to us 3,500 years ago, and therefore they respect and honor previous generations as opposed to the current generation that honors themselves and belittles previous generations. Bottom line message over here is do not crave and do not learn Torah in order to tout yourself and to believe that you're better and smarter than everybody else. Let your performance exceed your learning. Do a lot and say little. Similar concept, but it's in reference to Torah. It's important to learn, but why do we learn Torah? Why is it that in the prayers in the morning it says all these different wonderful attributes that says they give you a double dipping opportunity? You get paid in this world and you get rewarded in the next. And it rifles off a bunch of mitzvahs that fall into that category, like visiting the sick and hosting people and coming first to synagogue in the morning and doing these wonderful things, honoring your parents. Those are double dips. You get rewarded in this world and you get rewarded in the next. And at the end it says, but all of these deeds that you do are all outweighed by one. Which is that one? The learning of Torah. That is the pinnacle of success. But the question is, why is it that I can take all these other mitzvahs and put them on one side of the scale and I can put learning Torah on the other side of the scale, and learning Torah outweighs those other ones? And the answer is, because we learn Torah in order to do the mitzvahs. If you're learning Torah just for the sake of learning for your own knowledge or for your own honor, it all is strung together, then you're learning it for the wrong reasons. We learn in order to do. We learn and we teach, and then we need to guard our teaching and our learning, and we need to perform the mitzvahs. So do more performance of the mitzvahs than sitting down and learning them all day long, because the theory is not going to help you all that much. Do not lust for the king's table, for your table is greater than theirs. To summarize this quickly, again, in Torah context, don't be jealous of the table of all these wealthy people that you're not sitting at. Why? Because all you need to do is share words of Torah wisdom at your table, and it is a billion times a greater table than theirs. And your crown is greater than their crown. In other words, your royalty is bestowed upon you by your Torah learning, by the value of the individual that you've become through your learning and your connection to your creator. Theirs is bestowed upon themselves by their friends and associates. So your crown is that much greater than theirs. And your employer is trustworthy to pay your remuneration for your deeds. In what context could that possibly be? Obviously, it's got nothing to do with your employer in this world. It means that if your table can be better than the greatest and the most wealthiest in the world and the most powerful, and if your crown is better than theirs because it's bestowed upon you from your creator, then obviously your remuneration is your life, your opportunity for goodness that God gives you to be able to grow and to experience and to build your next world. That compensation, that remuneration for your deeds comes from your creator. Do you know who compensates the wealthy in this world? The other wealthy people with their own evil inclinations. So your employer, so to speak, quote unquote, is your creator. And his compensation you could take to the bank every single day, because he is the bank. That wraps it up for Pierre Kavot. Back into the book. Yesterday we talked about this physician, these physicians that feel a sense of entitlement to be able to tell you with their God complex when you're going to die. Do you know who doesn't tell you when you're going to die? The one who controls your day of death. God doesn't publish for us our expiry date. And there is a very good reason for that. And yet, despite that, the doctors feel that they are very much entitled to telling you when you're going to expire, even though they haven't got a clue. So what does that tell you? It tells you that clearly this concept of a God giving you a prognosis and telling you how long you have left to live flies in the face of what they should be doing, because they all the more so need to emulate our creator. That's our all of our jobs is to emulate Hashem. These are the people who heal, who give you more life potentially. All the more so they need to be at the forefront of emulating our creator. So when they're running around telling everybody, you've got six months, you've got three months, you've got a year, who are they? How shocking is it? How arrogant is it that they would come and tell you something like that? A doctor, a good doctor, looks for opportunities to build you up, for opportunities not to tell you, even though they know that you have weeks or months, they try their best not to tell you. They don't want to give you that news. Why? Why should I cement for you this fear and put it into your heart that now the countdown clock starts to run? Now all you're doing is thinking, how much longer? Doctor gave me three months. How much time has passed? Three weeks. Oh, yeah, yeah. Let me do the math. What's left? So they're already killing themselves. They're already putting themselves in the ground. Why? Because a doctor, a foolish doctor, came and committed to them that you, my friend, only have three months. You know, I know an individual, I know multiple, who have been told, one guy in specific, keeps popping into my mind that the doctors told him he had three months left to live with treatment. Six months, maybe if he got treatment. He lived at least six, seven, eight years longer than that. And the reason that he died wasn't because of the illness. It was because of the treatment that they gave him for the illness. At the end, they had to go in and fuse his spinal cord and they cut into his bowels and he died of septic. True story. Happens every single day, my friends. And the idea that a doctor must give patients truthful assessments of their situation is a complete fallacy. He does not have an obligation to give you his hypothesis of when you're going to die and just how bad it is. A patient should not be robbed of their hopes to recover. Do you know that hope is the only thing that somebody in that position has? Somebody who is facing certain death, they only have hope and amuna to be able to rely on. Everything else goes out the window. The doctors have said there's nothing we can do for you. So the only thing they have left is their hope that their creator will step in and do something for them. Some miracle will happen. You know, in the times of the Holocaust, they say that what did the Germans in Machemam do, the Nazis? They would get these people who were now coming to go into the gas chambers and they would tell them, knowing full well that they're going to be killed, they're not coming out. They would say, When you undress, take your personal belongings and put them on your hook with your number. Put everything below your number. This way you'll get them on the other end. They're building them up to understand that on the other end you're going to come out alive. There is hope. Even though they were petrified, thinking that they're going to go into this gas chamber and they're not coming out. They double down on that by giving them the false assumption that they are, by telling them, keep everything in the right place, because this is just a shower. You're going to come out okay. The Nazis did this. And doctors can't do that. Doctors can't say to somebody, don't worry about the prognosis. It doesn't matter. We've given you treatment, we brought you to this point. You're going to continue to do your best to stay alive and live a long, healthy life. And that's it. Build your relationship with your creator. Start to make things make sense. Stop working so hard. Stop focusing on the mundane and start focusing on your emotional and spiritual well-being. And everything will be fine. Why can't he say that? The doctors who frighten and discourage their patients, especially those who forecast how long an apparently terminally ill patient has to live, are actually robbing them of any chance for recovery. They're stopping them from getting better. Now you may say if you're pessimistic enough and if you live in Canada, that's by design, because we know that made medical assistance and dying in Canada is quickly becoming the number one cause of death. And you may have a point in that. But generally speaking, when you tell somebody that they have an expiry date and that you know it, all they start doing is counting down to that expiry date. Even in apparently terminal cases, a gloomy prognosis robs the patient of his right to die with a feeling of optimism and faith in his heart. This doom prognosis leads to a bitter death accompanied by feelings of despair, bewilderment, and even anger at their creator, heaven forbid. When doctors say that the end is near, they deny patients their ability to invest in their amuna. When you've told them there's no hope left for you, go get your affairs in order. You've now taken this person's last bit of inspiration that they have to be able to get closer to their creator, which we've said. Remember, the whole reason this person was sick in the first place was as a test and an opportunity to build their connection, to build their amuna. And in one fell swoop comes this doctor and takes away even their last hope for Imuna. Who says that the patient's condition won't make a sudden and dramatic change for the better? We've all heard of even clinically dead people. And if you haven't learned this, guys, go learn it. Google it. Life after death, or listen to Rabbi Mizrachi, my rabbi, has got an entire hours, three, four-hour long lecture on life after life. Look it up and learn, and you will see. Happened in my family, happens in many families, and happens every day in the hospitals around the world where people die. A clinical death. And even after being dead, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, they come back to life. It's well documented. Again, it's not one of the things that they promote often, but a movie was just made about it. Hollywood just made a movie about it less than a year ago. It's everywhere. It's not just in Judaism. These are just not popular things that they want to talk about because they don't understand them. And if so somebody's going to come back from a diagnosis of death, you're dead, my friend. You've been dead for a half an hour, and they're going to come back to life. Who are these doctors? Are they God? Obviously not. That they know what's been decreed on each patient. He can change everything in the world from one moment to the next. That's why a sick person can recover despite all the doctors and their negative predictions. But in all fairness, sometimes the patient's family members put tremendous pressure on them, demanding to be told the truth. Tell me, doctor, how long does he have to live? Even the patient sometimes. Listen, if the patient digs their heels in, even then the doctor needs to try and avoid the situation. But sometimes they have no choice because sometimes the patient themselves or their family say, we want to know the truth. And in such situations, what does a doctor do? A doctor should be cautious and say that according to natural circumstances, that the situation seems critical. But experience has proven that divine intervention can alter the picture from one moment to the next and override any natural laws. And if they're an honest, good individual, they should share with them firsthand accounts of people who have defied all odds and that they should encourage them to go and invest in their emotional and spiritual well-being. Have an amazing day, my friends. 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.