Episode 109 - What If People Pleasing Is God Pleasing

So what makes spiritual growth actually last when everything around us pulls in the other direction? We dig into a sharp teaching from Pirkei Avot: wisdom endures only when it sits on a foundation of reverence, the kind of awe that recognizes who the Torah comes from and why it matters. If learning turns into a way to feel smart while we stay casual about wrongdoing, it slips right through our hands. We talk about repentance, intention, and why “I’m human” cannot be the end of the story if we want real change. 

We also tackle the discomfort many people have with the word “fear” in religion. Why is fear accepted everywhere else, from courts to health, but rejected when it comes to God? The answer here is not terror, but reverence. A loving Father in heaven wants closeness, and awe can be a powerful motivator that creates integrity, discipline, and clarity. Then we ground it in daily life: wisdom without good deeds does not endure, and relationships are spiritual. If we want to be good with Hashem, we have to be good with His children, while still keeping healthy boundaries and refusing to become a doormat. 

To wrap, we share a beautiful “secret” from Rav Shalom Arush about Tehillim, the Book of Psalms: poetry that functions like an IV infusion of trust in the Creator. We tell a story of simple, persistent Psalms recitation and the extraordinary power of a mother’s tears, and we invite you to try Psalms as a practical tool for emunah, healing, and hope. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review with the line that hit you hardest.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

The trust factor is the ticket to a venture. The trust factor shows you how to get through the mind.

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Trust factor.

Reverence Makes Wisdom Endure

Fear As Healthy Motivation

Good Deeds Make Learning Real

Treat People Well To Serve God

Psalms As A Tool For Trust

Closing Shabbat Blessing And CTA

SPEAKER_01 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. Thank you for joining us. If you were here all week, we picked up on so much of the Pierre Kavot. And we're going to continue. We're going to close out the week with a couple of nuggets of spectacular wisdom. And then right into the book. It says the following Anyone whose fear of sin takes precedence over his wisdom, his wisdom will endure. But anyone whose wisdom takes precedence over his fear of sin, his wisdom will not endure. What's the message? The message within this poetic language is if we're concerned with growing our wisdom, if we're always trying to become better and learning Torah, becoming wiser as a result of that, if we don't fear sin, then all that you've learnt is going to come and go. It's not going to have lasting meaningful impact. Somebody who doesn't fear sin doesn't understand who wrote the Torah, doesn't understand what he's learning when he's learning Torah, doesn't appreciate that it's coming from a divine source. And that divine source is his loving father who watches over him on a daily basis. And that person doesn't understand the basic precepts of Judaism. You can't sit and immerse yourself in Torah wisdom and at the same time be an active and deliberate sinner. Things happen by mistake. Sometimes our evil inclination gets the best of us. No question. We're not talking about robots over here. What we're saying is that you can't be somebody who's not scared to sin. Nobody wants to sin. But if you do, then you repent. If you're not scared of sinning, then you don't repent. You just say, it is what it is. I sinned. Oh well, I'm human. Let's move on. Open up that Torah, let's learn again. No. Your wisdom that you gain on that day of learning when you're so fearless of sin will come and go. Nothing will stay with you. It won't be real in you. Yet at the same time, if you are fearful of sin, that means that you recognize who your father in heaven is. That means that you recognize that the Torah isn't just a book for you to get smarter from, that it is an instruction manual that tells you specifically to fear sin. There's verse, chapter, and verse in the Torah that says that you should fear sin. And so if you don't, if you're not concerned with your behavior, you just want to absorb Torah to become a wiser individual, it's not going to work. But if you are fearful, it'll work. So it starts with being in awe and the fear. That's the fear that I'm talking about, by the way. A lot of people hate associating fear with religion. For some reason, it works wonderful when it comes to secular society. Everybody has no problem being scared of the police and being scared of judges and being scared of lawyers and the whole legal and judicial system. Everybody's fine being scared of doctors and all kinds of threat of illness. That we're okay with. But somehow, when it comes to Torah and God, we're not allowed to associate any form of fear. Fear, we've said, is a massive motivator. And the world has understood that. That's why we don't have chaos in the streets, and that's why we have law and order, because people fear suffering the consequences of their action. But when it comes to Torah, Judaism, a religion, no thanks. It's not the right approach. Recognize that you have a Father in heaven, and the fear that you have of him should not be one where you're shaking and trembling because you're so terrified of the concept of being or anywhere near that creator. No. He wants to be near to you, he wants to be close to you, he wants to have a caring, affectionate, loving relationship. The fear that we talk about when it comes to our creator is a sense of reverence, is a sense of awe. Being in front of him or being in his presence and recognizing all that he's capable of and all that he's done and all that he does and manages on a regular basis, every millisecond of the day. That awe of greatness, of power, should be one that blows your socks off, that you can't even imagine what it must be like to be that connected or associated to that source. It's such an awesome feeling. It also says anyone whose good deeds exceed his wisdom, his wisdom will endure. So here, he's taking the same idea, but he's applying it to good deeds. If you have wisdom, but you don't do the good deeds associated with the wisdom, you've missed out. Your wisdom will not endure. If you're learning for the sake of learning and then you don't go out and implement what you've learned, then you've missed the point. We learn in order to teach and to do. If all you're doing is learning for yourself, then it is all lost on you. And that's why your wisdom won't remain. But if you understand that the reason why you're learning is to be able to do the good deeds that come from the learning, then your wisdom will endure. And finally, for today it says, if the spirit of one's fellow is pleased with him, then the spirit of the omnipresent is pleased with him. What does that mean? Hashem is concerned with your relationships with your friends. Hashem is concerned with your relationships with other human beings, with family members, with the people that we interact with on a daily basis. He wants peace and he wants harmony, especially amongst his children, like any parent would want. If the spirit of your friend is pleased with you, then the spirit of Hashem is pleased with you. But it says at the same time, if the spirit of one's fellow is not pleased with him, then the spirit of the omnipresent is also not pleased with him. You want to be good with Hashem, you can't treat his children terribly and expect him to love you. He loves his children. And then you go and you actively work against his children, you actively go and make their lives more and more difficult, you make them sad, you make them angry, you bring out all these negative emotions in his children. Who do you think they cry out to? They cry out to Hashem. When they pray, they're praying to Hashem that he deal with you in the correct manner. Imagine that. And now you want to plead out to Hashem and say, Please take care of me. What do you mean? All you do all day long is make enemies. All you do is take care of yourself. You're not worried about my children. You see that they're suffering, you see that they need help, you see that they're coming to ask for a handout, and in and you turn them away, and then you have the goal to come to me and ask me for a handout. So Hashem says, You want to be good with me, be good with my kids first. And then you'll be good with me. If you're not good with my kids, then you're not going to be good with me. That's not to say that you have to be a shmatte, you don't have to be a doormat for people to come and abuse you. Obviously, we're talking about people who are generally kind and know the difference between good and bad, right and wrong. If somebody's actively harming you, then obviously you have to do your best and whatever it takes to get away from that individual or to figure out what the problem is. But in the end term, we're talking about the people who go out of their way to not be good with everybody else, to be so easy to get into conflict and have challenges and arguments and be that kind of person. It's constantly argumentative. If that's you, then you have a problem not just with the people who you see and interact with on a daily basis, but you also have a problem with your creator. Wraps it up for Pikar Vot. Let's get into a secret over here. We'll wrap it up with a beautiful little secret given by Rav Shalom Arush. Psalms. You've heard of Psalms before. Poetry. That's what it is. Psalms is poetry. It's beautiful poems written by King David, an absolute lover of Hashem. Somebody who spoke constantly, nonstop, thinking and speaking and teaching about Hashem. And he wrote this book called Psalms that everybody reads from. It doesn't matter where you come from, Jew and non-Jew alike. They sit and they learn and they read from these unbelievable words that are really just a massive love story and an appeal to Hashem to watch out for me, and talks about how much King David was crazy about Hashem, always thinking about him, and always pleading to him for help. And what's the message? Psalms have enormous power, tantamount to an intravenous infusion of trust in the Creator. It's a very, very powerful tool to be able to use alongside your prayer. Trusting in God is very conducive to a person's full and speedy recovery. There are dozens of stories about people who merited miraculous recoveries just from reciting psalms. That's the reason why oftentimes when you go to hospitals, especially in Israel, everybody's reading psalms. The sick and their family who come to visit them. They can be recited with simple innocence. He shares a story. A boy's best friend becomes very ill, and the doctors appear to have given up hope. He picked up his book of Psalms and with poignant innocence said psalms for an entire hour on his friend's behalf. He closed the book, ran to his friend's house, and asked if there was any improvement. His friend's mother tearfully shook her head in the negative. The little boy ran home and said psalms for another hour. And once again he ran to his friend's house and asked if there was any change in the situation. And once again the answer was no. That little boy ran back and forth for most of the night reading psalms until he finally found out that his friend's fever had broken. It is well known and accepted that the most powerful tool in the world to appeal to Hoshem is a mother's tears by reading psalms. A mother who sits and reads psalms and cries tears for her child. There is no more powerful tool on planet Earth. That's part of the reason why it's important to still have your mother around, because there's nobody in the world who will be able to beseech heaven to be able to tear it apart in order to gain access to our Creator and to appeal on behalf of her child. Once your mother's gone, you lose that ability. You can appeal yourself and people can appeal on your behalf. But there is no more powerful than a mother who sits with a book of Psalms and cries tears for her child. It penetrates the heaven like nothing else, like a heat-seeking missile. That's the power of Psalms. If you've never read it before, go out and pick up a copy of it. If you don't speak Hebrew, there's Hebrew English versions, and you will see that it is poetic. It is very much beautiful poetry connecting a human being back to their creator on the highest level. And it gives you the opportunity to do the very same thing. It's Friday, my friends. I'm wishing you a Shabbat Shalom. Thanking you again for tuning in and for sponsoring. For those who reached out to be able to sponsor, please share, like, and subscribe and do your best to be able to get the message out so that so many people can benefit in this world of craziness. Let's make things make sense again. Have an amazing Shabbat. We'll speak 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.