Episode 114 - What If Discipline Is The Real Freedom

The world is noisy, fast, and full of temptation, and that makes one question matter more than ever: are we building a life with deep roots, or just impressive branches? We unpack a sharp teaching from Pirkei Avot that compares wisdom without good deeds to a top-heavy tree that cannot survive the wind. If our learning, insights, and spiritual talk never translate into action, we end up unstable exactly when life gets hard.

From there, we zoom out to the bigger purpose of daily life. We talk about why this is a world of action, why human beings are built for connection, and why isolation weakens us even when our intentions seem “spiritual”. We bring it back to practical choices: work, family, charity, learning, and community are not random errands, they are lanes where trust in the Creator becomes real. We also share the line “Lo tov heye adam levado” to underline that we are not meant to go it alone.

Then we step into a challenging, honest topic: negative thoughts, lust, and money. We explore how desire can be a gift with a purpose, but how it becomes destructive when it turns into self-serving obsession. We connect that drift to anxiety, depression, and mental fog, and we focus on one concrete practice with big impact: guarding your eyes to protect your brain and your peace. A personal story about walking through a university with a rabbi who kept his gaze on the ceiling brings the point home, and we close with a simple decision rule: check in with your heart, but let your brain make the final call.

Subscribe to the Trust Factor Podcast, share this with someone who needs steadier roots, and leave a review with the line that challenged you most.

Transcript

Wisdom Versus Deeds Tree Lesson

Built For Action And Connection

Lust Money And Mental Health

A Rabbi Walks Through University Halls

Brain Over Heart Final Takeaway

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. Welcome to another episode of the Trust Factor Podcast. I'm really, really glad you could join us today. We are into nearly the end of another week tomorrow. Quick reminder, it's an interview one. So it's not going to be our usual podcast. Look out for that. It's going to give you some insight, some personal insight into what we've been talking about in the last couple of weeks, about our health and our connection to our Creator. Let's get into the ethics of the fathers. Here's how it goes today, my friends. It's a straightforward one, but it's clearly and painfully obvious, especially in today's generation. He says, Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah used to say, Anyone whose wisdom exceeds his good deeds, to what is he like it? To a tree whose branches are numerous, but whose roots are few. What happens when you have a tree that is full of branches and leaves, but has very, very few roots? The roots are what stabilize the tree. Have you ever seen those videos of people? It's very satisfying videos, by the way, of people come with these machinery out, different creative ways of removing a tree stump. And the bigger and the older that that stump is, the harder it is to get out. It's nearly impossible. They have specialized machines for this. But it's shocking how deep some of these roots grow. And that is exactly what allows it to lead a long, healthy life, is these powerful roots that hold it in place. It says the wind comes and uproots it and turns it upside down, as it is said, and he shall be like an isolated tree in an arid land and shall not see when good comes. He shall dwell on parched soil in the wilderness, on a salted and uninhabited land. What's the bottom line? Bottom line is if you're all show and no content, if you're all words, remember we were talking about this a couple days ago, if you're all words and no action, if you're all about me, let me sit down and acquire all this knowledge and I'm not going to do anything with it, you've missed out on life. You've missed out on the point of Torah. The point of Torah is a balance of actions and learning. We learn in order to do. Here he's telling you very clearly, if all you're doing is growing your beauty and your wisdom and your insights and all these wonderful things that you can then go and and tout and not doing the things that the mitzvah's command of you, then you've missed the point. So let's keep reading. But one whose good deeds exceed his wisdom, to what is he likened? To a tree whose branches are few, but whose roots are numerous. Obvious. Even if all the winds in the world were to come and blow against it, it would not budge from its place. As it says, and this is from the beginning of Psalms, and he shall be like a tree planted by water, spreading its roots towards the stream, and it shall not notice the heat's arrival, and its foliage will be fresh. In the year of drought it will not worry, nor shall it cease from yielding fruit. Who are we talking about here? The guy whose good deeds exceed his wisdom. So you see, according to this, never mind the balance, if we had to choose, we were going to be a little bit more extreme to one side or the other. In other words, we're either going to do more learning and grow in our wisdom, or we're going to spend more time doing the good deeds, the midst of us, then we should choose to do the good deeds. Why? Because we're in a world of action. This is not a world of thought. This is not a philosophical world. Same way you need to get up and go to work and produce and earn a living and bring it all in order to feed your family, it's the same idea. We're in a world of action. We were put here to interact with each other. We weren't put here in isolation. And it says in the beginning of the Torah, when God created men, what did he say after he created Adam? He said, Lo tovia dam le vodo. It's not good that a person should be by himself. And so he created Eve. In other words, we're social creatures and we have to interact. And if we're isolating ourselves, and it doesn't matter what the reason is, even when you learn Torah, you need to do it with what's called a khavruta, which means you have a friend across from you who's learning with you. Sitting and learning by yourself, very nice, but not the pinnacle, not the heights of learning. The heights of learning come between a rabbi and a student or between two students who are learning together. That's how you learn Torah. And so we see clearly that we were put on this planet to interact. The question is, how are we going to interact? And in what areas are we going to interact? Is it all going to be about frivolity in this world and amassing as much as we can in business and all these things that everybody's doing, like robots and machines going around in circles? Or are we going to stop and say, no, no, no, no. There's a reason why we have to do all these things, why we have to go to work, why we have to put our kids in school, why we need to go and get educated for ourselves and our children, why we need to give charity, why we need there's a reason for all these things. What are they? Let's learn about them. There's so much more to life than just work and sleep and eat and repeat. This conversation can get a little bit dicey over here, but I'm sure we'll bang it out the way we've covered off all the other subjects. Negative thoughts. Lewd and negative thoughts result from misplaced trust. The Creator gives us a measure of lust in order to fulfill the commandment of marrying and having a family. The two biggest evil inclinations in the world are money and lust, relations. Those are the two biggest drivers in the world. And so the combination of those two, which you often see, in other words, the tool in order to appeal and to fulfill your lustly desires, especially for men, is money. Money and power will allow you to engage in more of your lust and more of the things that drive your animalistic side. A lot of people have a hard time saying no to cash. And that's why money often is connected to that, because people are chasing both. They need one oftentimes to get to the other. Not always, but it certainly helps. The creator gives us a measure of lust. Why? Because we need to make sure that humanity continues, that we continue to perpetuate our human growth and grow and become better people. So how do we do that? Oftentimes life gets difficult. And it could be that people will just say, you know what, it's too difficult to bring kids into the world. And there are people that do that. But our lustly desires that he gave us, oftentimes, even if that's your approach, I know many people, and I'm sure you do, who have never planned to have children. In fact, said we don't want children. And then through their behavior, through their lust, through their desires, their animalistic desires, which he gave us for a purpose, suddenly they're pregnant. And that's exactly why he gave us that lustly desire. Because sometimes, even if you don't want it, you're going to have children, you're going to bring them into this world. And so that's why he gives us this measure of lust. Yet whenever the means of fulfilling that commandment become a vulgar end of self-satisfaction, one's Amuna breaks down and becomes exposed to all types of distortions and emotional difficulties. Given the subject matter that we're reading in the book right now, I'm wondering how he's going to tie this back to illness. I mean, it's not that difficult to imagine. There's both emotional and physical. Debauchery destroys the brain, as does spilling one's seed outside the context of conjugal relations and procreation. If you're not having kids and you're having relations and spilling seed, it's a big average. It's a big sin. Lust and promiscuity, explains Rob Nachman of Brezlev, they both lead to a breakdown of logic, common sense, and even insanity. The proof is that in this decadent age, so many people are in need of psychiatric medication, whereas millions suffer from anxiety and depression. So he's tying it back to mental health issues. And guys, again, it doesn't take a lot of hard work to be able to connect it to. Just look. Just look online, just listen to the news, and you see how many criminals are driven by their lust, how many crimes of passion, how many people, God forbid, with a mental illness go after young children because of that very same lust. So many people are being charged every day and getting sent to prison because of this lustly desire. Yeah? So clearly there's a strong connection to mental illness and depression. Your eyes, it says, are your first offenders. They're the ones who look, they're the ones who figure out the situation. The heart then lusts after what the eyes see. That's how it works. First you have to get the idea. You get the idea by looking, and then the heart gets activated. If a man would refrain from looking at any woman other than his wife, his brain would be much cleaner, his thoughts more pleasant, and he'd have the mental energy to devote to more positive endeavors. It's true. When somebody lusts after this all day long, it's all they can think about. They've got this drive, this animalistic drive, they can't think clearly. It is really a form of mental illness. And it and they're completely everything that they do and everything that they think and everywhere that they look and every person that they look at is a potential target. And so that's all they're thinking about. It's really a form of illness. One would therefore do himself a tremendous favor by guarding his eyes. For by doing so, he guards his brain from lewd and negative thoughts that only drive him mad. This is not easy, for it requires profuse prayer. To guard one's eyes and to avoid the tremendous temptations of modern society's immodest climate, one needs divine help. There's no question, it's not easy. It's up there, it's the top two. So if it's one of the most difficult, evil inclinations that we have, you better believe that you're not going to be able to do it on your own. This is one of the biggest reasons to have a relationship with your creator. Learning a Muna is one of the very best ways, if not the only true way, to cure a person of insanity and to prevent emotional damage. I remember, and I'll leave you with this, a long time ago, I was telling you a week or so ago that I had the merit of bringing in my rabbi, Rabbi Mizrachi, for many, many lectures. And this was about 20 years ago. So I was still a pretty young man. Anyway, lots of energy. And I brought the rabbi in probably on a dozen different occasions to do multiple-day lectures. And sometimes, because they were in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, I'd have to set up a small audience for him. And one of the greatest places to do that was in universities, local universities. And I remember vividly, never forget, taking the rabbi into York University in Toronto to go and give a lecture to a small group of students. It was a wonderful discussion, it was more of a discussion than a lecture, and it was filled with a lot of very liberal reformed Jews. And there was some riveting, riveting conversation. Anyway, point being that I will never forget that as we were walking into the school, the university, it's a university, it's full of kids, teenagers in the prime of their lives, and you know, in the middle of summer, which has happened to me, everybody forgot their clothes at home. Everybody was wearing minimal clothing, and they were literally couples who were making out in the corner. They were getting really, really frisky in the hallways of a university. And I'm walking and I'm just looking forward and I keep noticing that my rabbi is looking at the ceiling. And I keep looking up. I said, what is going on? What is my rabbi looking at? And he just keeps the whole way there, he's looking at the ceiling until we get to the room. And then it finally dawned on me afterwards, because I wasn't dialed in, that he couldn't look forward. He couldn't walk straight. He walked in there and we saw what we saw. For me, it barely phased me. This was 20 plus years ago. I was just starting out, and the rabbi couldn't take his eyes off the ceiling. It only dawned on me later on. We have to watch our eyes. Our eyes are the gateway to the soul. Our eyes are what trigger our hearts. And then our hearts tell us what to do, especially if there's very minimal connection between the brain and the heart. That's why I keep saying we have to make decisions from the brain and not so much from the heart. If we do that, if we make the decisions, the important ones, using our brain, you can check in with your heart, but the final decision has to come from the brain. That's what moves with logic and reason. When you make it from a position of emotion, then you're bound to make a mistake. 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.