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Relatable Judaism Podcast | Guest Speaker

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This is part 3 of Maimonides personality development and life skills of Maimonides

Maimonides promises that if you follow his directives as long as there are no underlying condition you will live a long life.

Maimonides wrote many books on health but in his book on Jewish law called Mishneh Torah he designates one chapter to health. This chapter is mostly comprised of logical directives needed to prevent sickness and ways to maintain healthy organs.

There are three areas where one needs to be careful in order to maintain a healthy body.
1 Eating
2 Bowel Movement
3 Exercise
Maimonides also mentions the importance of sleep.

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This is part 2 of Maimonides personality development and life skills of Maimonides

Maimonides wrote 14 volumes on the entire Torah. In the first volume Maimonides dedicated one section called Hilchot Deot literally translated as laws of the mind to personality development and life skills. They are 7 short chapters filled with practical and meaningful advice for becoming a spiritual person.

In this section we went through the second and third chapter of Maimonides where he continues to demonstrate examples of what it means to go in the way of God.

In summary there are two main ways to be In the path of God
1 Going in the middle path and always working on moving back to the middle path of all my personalities. The extremes are evil and not In the way of God
2 Ask what am I doing this for? Sleep, work, health, workouts, , children and everything else I do should only be done so that I can be a better servant of God. Non of these things are a goal in itself and If I do make it a goal I will eventually be very unhappy.

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In Hebrew the words to see and to fear have the same letters.
יראה ראיה
Fear gives you a vision of what is going to be. It allows you to see and be aware of the consequences in life.

In this episode we will go through the four misconceptions of fear taught by Rav Noach Weinberg Zt”l in his famous book 48 ways to wisdom. We will learn to embrace our fears and use them for the reason they were created!

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Maimonides wrote 14 volumes on the entire Torah. In the first volume Maimonides dedicated one section called Hilchot Deot literally translated as laws of the mind to personality development and life skills. They are 7 short chapters filled with practical and meaningful advice for becoming a spiritual person.

In the first chapter he explains the commandment “to go in God’s ways”. Maimonides explains that this means to always aim for the middle path in all our personalities. Every personality has two extremes, the middle path is the right path. For example if pride is one extreme, no self esteem would be the exact opposite. The middle of these two is humility. The same will apply to all other personalities. Finding the middle path applies only to ones character.
If a person finds himself going to one of the extremes he must go to the other extreme for a while until he ends up in the middle again. Doing this is the act of a pious person.
Different Circumstances in our lives always keeps moving us away from the middle path and our aim is to constantly work towards that middle path.

This a fundamental rule in Judaism and a very important lesson for ones growth.

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Effective listening and effective communications
Effective communications starts really with effective listening

The first step of effective listening is to actually listen to what is being said to you and making sure we understand the other person’s viewpoint.
Effective listening is not an easy skill

Have you ever been in heated discussions between friends or colleagues or any relationship and you felt that you are not being heard? The other person was too busy pushing their argument or saying their point of view and he’s not listening. Even worse you may have felt that they completely didn’t understand what you were saying and did not listen to your side.

We are all guilty of this. How many times do we think we are listening to the other person but yet our mind is wandering elsewhere and we are not focused, sometimes our mind is focused on the word of wisdom or our answers we want to get across once they finally finished speaking.

Before we decide whether to accept or reject an idea before we argue, before we make statements, first we need to make sure we are paying attention. We need to be genuinely listening and understanding what is being said otherwise there is no dialogue there is no communication there are just two people talking at each other and not to each other.

In this class Shira gives all the reasons listening is so important and all the skills necessary to attaining effective listening and communication.

We also spoke about Mindfulness,

*Listening to what we see, read and experience:
we tend to be lazy, we can spend an hour doing something or reading something and not even remembering what we have read a few minutes later. We need to get into the habit of articulating what we learn.
Anything worth our time like reading a book, having a conversation with someone, touring, learning, should be productive! You define your goal ahead of time what do you hope to accomplish? And once it’s done define what you have gained from that experience.
don’t let it become an undefined big piece of data swimming around in your brain.

*Listening to the events of our life:
Take the time to introspect and define the lessons you’ve learned from big events that happened in your life, for example you got fired from your job. Articulate the insights and what you’ve learned from that experience without it you have no way to verify that you actually learn a lesson from this experience.

You might be thinking I cannot trust employers or I’m incapable of a successful career, but once you recognize your thought process and you introspect you can evaluate what you feel and sharpen your thinking. Maybe you can get to the conclusion I need to improve my work habits for my communication skills etc…

*Listening to what other people say:
Listening is a skill that we work on. make sure you really hear the other person and understand what they are saying. Work on getting clear definitions. They are an essential tool for cutting some confusion and help you gain clarity. They will ensure you become objective.

Here are the Exercises that were shared at the end of the class. Give example of applying effective listening on a date / in a relationship. Define the following terms to yourself, try finding the torah definitions for: good, free will, marriage, love, happiness, friend. Play I YOU SHE game, different scenario. Define what you are living for and share with confidence

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This talk is not just a response to Seth Rogen but a defense for Judaism and it’s people on a whole.
We don’t always have to respond to people that are negative towards Judaism but we do have to respond to our inner selves in an honest and authentic way. Why am I Jewish? Do I really know anything about it? Was Hebrew school until the age of 13 enough to tell me that I can be at the front of worlds criticizers of Judaism. Do I hate the minorities of my own people just because they are different? Is that the same as antisemitism? Can Jews be antisemitic? Am I more willing to go out my way to except other cultures and minorities that I never hold their values to be true? Will I go out my way to accept my own culture even if their values are true? If you want to hear a passionate talk that has all the answers to almost every topic that is criticized in Judaism, then this talk is for you.

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In this episode we spoke about how we can be at peace with the people around us which will In turn allow us to achieve mental health.

We discussed as a group what people think we need in order to achieve peace with the people around us.
There was many ideas but we focused on the idea that it starts by loving yourself.

The period of time that we are in now in is the three weeks which remembers the destruction of the temple. The talmud in yoma9a says that the second temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred. The talmud explains that although there was Torah and good deeds there was still baseless hatred. This means that the hatred that we are seeing untill today is an internal hatred. Its a hatred that comes deep from within. That’s what we need to work on. Today We are great at speaking nicely in public, today we are all about tolerance but not so great behind closed doors deep from within and that’s what we need to fix.

So how can we love ourselves more? Here is a list of ideas we came up with.

1 Don’t let your ambitions allow you to forget what you have become.
2 Stay away from negativity. You see things based on what you are used to seeing like Abraham saw people, Lot saw the angels. This includes bad friends, TV and negative music, cursing, complainers,

American Psychological Association (APA) Scientists have linked TV viewing to antisocial behavior, lowered verbal IQ and altered brain structure. Affects babies even when unaware. Lowers Attention Span. Makes you fat. – The average 18-year-old has seen 200,000 violent actions committed on television over the course of his life, including 40,000 murders.

3 Dress well maimonides says this is the opposite of Shefal ruach a person that is low in spirit

4 Don’t waste time. If you do you will hate yourself more and be angry at the success of others

5 Don’t live a life that is for others

6 Strive for perfection Don’t demand perfection from yourself. Enjoy the growing process

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Does God Punish?
You better hope he does! We always want and demand justice.
For those that believe Judaism does not have any consequences to our actions well you just need to open the Torah
The torah is a book that is filled with stories of consequences.
We pray for consequences.
Reward and Punishment is one of the 13 principles of faith that judaism believes in.

In order to understand reward and punishment we need to understand why God put us in the world. If he is infinite he certainly does not need us. He created us to give to us. The only good that there is, is of himself. The real place for this reward is in the world to come. we need to go through free will in this world to recieve his goodness because we need to earn it otherwise we are incompatible to Him and we will not enjoy it.

The rewards we do get in this world are just to help us have more convenience to do more good but there is no real reward in this world. That is only in the world to come.

The final point of the class was the nefesh hachaim 1,12 (Rabbi Chaim Vilozhin 1749- 1821) where he mentions how the sin IS the punishment. God does not work in ways of revenge or punishment we are taught he even cries (spiritually) when our arm hurts it hurts him and every day that the temple is not rebuilt he is in pain. Of course God can just forgive us but he doesn’t because that is the way of the world. Ever since creation it was set just like everything else, just like gravity, the planets and any other part of physics, these things are set and have rules. There is also a rule that won’t change and that is that when bad is done there is a consequence and when good is done there is a consequence. Part of this creation also allows us to replace that bad energy we create with good by doing teshuva repentance and good deeds.

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Barak is the author of Rise of the sex machines. In this talk Barak lays out how culture and technology are hurling us toward the end of romance, relationships, and love.

Barak is also a radio show host, author, owner and managing partner of Laurie and Seltzer law.

This video is part of the dating series run by Rabbi Jack and Shira Melul
The Effective dating series #8
This also available on our podcast Relatable Judaism Spotify and iTunes

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What is Peace? In this episode we discussed
1. Peace starts from within
2. Peace needs conflict.
3. Peace is not the absence of war
4. Justice does not contradict peace. What if someone is coming to kill you.
5. Peace is a call to action
5. The hebrew letter Shin
6. Peace is about entering a new reality
7. The ultimate time for peace is in the future
8. What do you do When Truth Peace and Justice conflict?

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Enjoy this episode with Rabbi Dov Heller LMFT.

A Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
Psychotherapy, Dating and Relationship Coaching.

You can Email dov@claritytalk.com for a free consultation or visit his website http://claritytalk.com/

In this Episode Rabbi Dov Heller discussed the 7 ways to move on after break up

Here is the outline of the class

1.GET CLOSURE
Do you have closure? Closure means you know it’s over; have no doubts
Why or why not? If not sure, ask the other person.

2. MOURN YOUR LOSS
5 stages of mourning: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance
What have you lost? What needs were met? Distinguish between healthy and unhealthy needs.
Move from fantasy to reality: Don’t obsess and fantasize about all the good. The bad is why it didn’t work.

3. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOURSELF?
Do you feel good about how you handled your part in the relationship?
Do feel ashamed about how you handled your part?
Do you blame yourself for why it didn’t work?
Forgive yourself and give yourself permission to be human

4. DON’T AVOID YOUR FEELINGS
Identify all your feelings. What’s the most painful one? Process them
Feelings are information. They are our teachers and a pathway to self-understanding

5. LEARN FROM THE EXPERIENCE
What can you learn from the experience?
What mistakes did you make?
How can you be a better person? What specific changes will you make?
What character traits do you need to work on?
Clarify what you’re looking for

6. MAKE A COMPLETE BREAK
Get rid of all memories and reminders
Can we be friends?

7. CLARIFY WHAT YOU WANT AND WHERE YOU’RE GOING NOW
Don’t date until you know what you want
Why were you in this relationship?
Do want a boyfriend/girlfriend or marriage?
Are you ready for marriage? If not what do you need to do to get ready?
You are emotionally ready to date when you have gone through 5 stages of mourning and feel you are ready to give 100% to another person.
Watch out for rebound relationships

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The second discussion was when should I listen to the thoughts of my date? How can we identify negative vs positive thoughts? The difference between emotional thoughts and positive thoughts and identifying unnecessary speculations that we make of our date.

Finally we entered the conversation of how we can know that my date is genuine?Maybe they are just putting on a good show for me? we listed four ways to see this in my date.

overall this was a very productive and content filled discussion!

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