King Solomon Learned Some Things From Ants. We Can Learn Others.

[Music] hi everybody welcome to the rabbi Daniel lapin show where I take you back a few years I was at school at the time and a friend of mine a number of years older than me but somebody with whom I would occasionally go camping asked me if I'd be interested in seeing something that was completely amazing and of course I said yes and we put the camping gear and the and there was some other equipment as well he threw into the back of his pickup truck and we jumped in and off we went and we went off into the African felt so we used to speak of it ve al D and eventually after a couple hours we arrived in an in a very remote and isolated area and all that one could see there were ant mounds I you know a common sight in that part of Africa but I've never seen it anywhere else since and so I'm gonna try and describe it because you you've probably not seen it okay so there we are in the felt and there's this tall grass and the grass you know could be five feet high easy and there's bushes and this trees and every now and then dotted around were these huge sand heaps but when I say sand heap you tend to think of a heap of sand like you might find on a construction site where it's a round round shaped heap of sand no this looks like a Gothic cathedral of kinds this is hard the it's when you go up to it it feels more like rock than it does like sand and it doesn't look as if it's a pile of sand dropped off the back of a dump truck no this is it's got towers and turrets and and lower sections and and they're even holes in it there are doors or windows and just to give you an idea of the scale this thing was was taller than I am right the thing stands anywhere from four to seven feet it's they're huge absolutely huge such a circumference 25 feet maybe a 20 feet it's big anyway he said all right let's find a place to camp all right so we set up the tent and there was a little stream there and it was perfectly comfortable would look like a nice place but I still didn't know why we came here particularly usually when we went camping it was you know to go for a hike in a specific area or to climb a a specific mountain you know I was no big mountain climber but but you know I call it a hike with more difficult sections well here there was nothing so I so you know what's what's going on well once the camp was set up and we built a campfire he then said right now come I want you to watch something and he took out of the back of his truck a big piece of cardboard you know you know what it was like you know if a refrigerator gets delivered to you sometimes it comes in a cardboard packaging and so there it's made up of four big pieces of cardboard each the size of the dimension of the front or the back called what are the sides of the fridge and a top and a bottom that's what it looked like it was a big piece of cod wood looked like it could have come from a refrigerator packaging and and then he took something that looked like a black marker pen and and then he had a meter stick this is it's like a long wooden ruler three feet and three inches in length it because South Africa was on the metric system by that time and and so it's it's a it's it's a stick mocked of mocked off as a metre ok so then he asked me to hold the cardboard vertically next to the ant mound so he then laid the end he put the end of the metre stick against a particular point on the on the mound and at the end of the metre stick where the meter stick ended on the cardboard he he made a marking with the black marker pen and he did this many times I'm like maybe 40 times and when he'd finished he had marked on the cardboard basically what was the line of the cross-section of the contour of this termite mound or this ant mound okay fine then he took a knife and he started meanwhile I'm still in total bewilderment right I do not know what's going on meanwhile then he he takes a knife and cuts the line and when he's got at all he throws away one piece he discards it and the main piece of the cardboard he holds up against the termite nest and it matches almost exactly you can barely see daylight where at exactly one point where it contacts the termite nest or the ant nest and he's managed to transfer the contours of the nest to the cardboard he'd cut it out and it was now like a template of the cross-section of the nest I hope I'm making sense if not if you wait for just a moment I think it should become clear as to what happens here okay so then back to the truck and he comes back with an axe and a shovel and he starts attacking the termite nest exactly where the cardboard had been and he starts hacking away at it and believe me these grains of sand had been glued into position meticulously and it was really hard going he asked me to take the shovel and join in and we're just one side of the the Nets not the whole thing just one side we're trying to take it down meanwhile no sooner do we attack the end nest immediately out poor like I was gonna say Millions but I'd rather not exaggerate a huge number of ants uncountable and he my friend who was very knowledgeable in this area shows me and he points out that there's two kinds of ants and you can see the difference between them one group events is is the attacking answer the defenders ants they are there to drive off the near silence namely us well I can tell you a few got up my boot and under my pants legs and I knew when they got there because they started stinging my legs and I was out I was dancing up and down in agony and he was laughing and I mean you know I managed to kill him and get away from them but he showed me what to do about my pants and my boots to minimize but that was these ants trying to stop us from from doing from doing what we'd been doing while that's going on a different looking group events again huge numbers of them I mean thousands and thousands are pouring out of the nest and they have started repairing it and I'm watching and I literally I see these ants each one gathers up one grain of sand and then they come to another end that sort of sticks up his rear end and you've got to really look carefully and you see that n number two is excluding a sticky liquid and number one rubs the grain of sand that he was holding in his forms with their technical names for these intents and he then goes and puts it in position and you can follow this takes a good few minutes because these are small ants and the distances are real and he climbs up to the damage and he meticulously places one little grain of sand that has now been coated with glue into position and he goes back and does another one meanwhile tens of thousands of ants are doing this at the same time so at that point it's starting to to get a little evening wise we go back to our campsite and we cook up our Franks hot dogs and beans and get ready to call it a night the next day we go and we see that a lot of repairs been done during the night so then my friend took me to we drove somewhere else and we camped somewhere else the next night and I think there was probably a third night as well somewhere else and I don't remember the exact place and then it was time to start heading home and he says and now I'm gonna show you the whole reason we did this trip the whole reason we came here is because I wanted to show you something you're not gonna believe so on the way back home we come to the place where we camped the first night and we go to where we came to nearby was the ant nest that we attacked and inflicted serious damage to well it's all been repaired we go up close and there are no more ants climbing around the job seems to have been done and the repair was complete but my friend then says go back to the truck bring the template bring that big piece of cardboard that we cut to the exact shape of what the termite nest looked like before we did the damage I think you probably know what I'm gonna tell you now but I've never forgotten that is truly mind-boggling we took the cardboard bring it back to the hold it up to the and nest on the place that we damaged and now been repaired and guess what you could still barely see daylight between the cardboard in the nest in other words my dear friends I hope you realize the enormity of what I saw what I'm just telling you the ants rebuilt the nest to exactly its original dimensions the exact thing we had damaged was now replaced and you could not tell the difference because the cardboard we had shaped to the original contours of the nest still fit the new contours the enormity of this struck me immediately and I was I was dumbfounded now I said to my friend immediately how do they do it and he laughed in in exhilaration because that's he was hoping I would I would catch on and he said how do they do what he wanted to clarify that I knew what the real mystery was here I said how does each ant know where to put his grain of sand like where's the collective architect where's the civil engineer where is the designer where is the site supervisor where is the foreman who is telling these ants where to place the grains of sand so the end result will repair exactly the damage that was done and restore its shape to precisely what had had been in the first place this is wild this is absolutely amazing it happened and it happens all the time there are a lot of amazing things about the nest by the way I didn't know it at the time but the underground tunnel system under the nest we can run for hundreds of feet I mean the engineering these ants do is incredible one of the holes maybe more than one on this on this ant heap at this ant mound is a ventilation hole it's as if the ants know that air blows more rapidly when you're a few feet off the surface of the ground then on the ground so in other words close to the ground the wind is slowed by stones and bushes and grass and everything and there's a measurable difference in wind speed between one inch off the ground and six feet off the ground well when air travels at a higher speed the pressure in that air drops that's by the way the secret of how an airplane wing works and the when the the the air traveling close to the ground is traveling at a slower speed so the pressure is higher and so they have different parts of the ant nest open to the air at different heights and if you have imagined an air tube at it from an opening low in the ant nest and it runs through the end nest down below underground and then all the way to a place on top to an exit on six feet up on the top of the mound air is gonna flow why because the air down at ground level is at higher pressure and it pushes into the hole and meanwhile the air exit at the top of the mound is at lower pressure so it sucks air out just like a straw and the air is then forced through at a fairly good speed ventilating the entire nest system underground and above it's pretty amazing stuff but the ants do all of this where is the engineer where is well I know what some of you will say well there's got to be a queen ant and you're absolutely right buried way down deep underground in the absolute inner recesses of this huge structure of the ants nest there is a queen ant but so what she's not out there yelling instructions she's not writing work orders so what difference does it make the mystery still stands the mystery is how does every one of those 10,000 ants no way to put his grain of sand so end result is exactly the way it was before huge mystery when we come back I'm going to tell you the answer to the mystery and why I'm telling you this in the first place I'm rabbi Daniel lapin our website is rabbi Daniel lapin comm rabbi Daniel lapin comm and firstly I would like to make sure that you are subscribed to our emailing because that way not only do we manage to stay in touch but also you are able to receive information on a regular basis and you it just arrives in your mailbox that's great wonderful there is any particular week you're overwhelmed you don't want to just delete it but there it is so do that at rabbi Daniel lapin comm and also available on Kindle now available in electronic download right away is one of the books we published called hands off this may be love read about it please at the website it's it it makes a very persuasive case why it is that if particularly a young man and young woman are seeing one another why it makes sense that not only do they not have sex not only do they not even kiss but that they shouldn't even hug and yes even hold hands Wow what's that all about it's called hands off this may be love and it is very compelling particularly this time of the year if they're young people in your life who are on the threshold or are already in the dating mode it's very worthwhile for them to read this and know about it okay back with you in just a few minutes moments here we are together back again on the rabbi Daniel lapin show so there is the story of the ants so we come back from that trip and I say to my friend I need to understand a little more about this and he said you need to read a book called the soul of the white ant and it's by a South African author called Eugene morees pronounced in South Africa Mari and the soul of the white hand and I have no idea if it is still in print or not but I I still have my copy from years ago because I immediately went and I remember the book straw into a bookstore in Johannesburg South Africa called random books and I got a copy of the soul of the white hand by Eugene Marais and it's it's an extraordinary book for those of you with with even the slightest interest in Natural History if what I'm talking about intrigues you and and you enjoy almost poetic writing easy to read it's like it's not academic it's not written for zoology departments but this is written for an amazed young boy a man whatever who is absolutely astounded and is desperately eager to try and find out more about how these little creatures function that's the book the soul of the white ant and and he he he's seen to this day I think he's seen as one of the great South Africans he wrote the book in nineteen say nineteen twenty five I'm I'm not if I'm out I'm not more than a year out it's it's right about there by the way he wrote the book in Afrikaans which is an an offshoot if you like of Dutch which is in itself somewhat related to Flemish spoken in Belgium meanwhile there was a rotten scoundrel of a guy in Belgium and a really unpleasant pretentious artiste kind of guy Belgium guy and his name was Maurice Maeterlinck and it turned out that he got himself quite a little gig going a little rip-off game what he did was he found obscure works by artists and authors far away and in those days you know there was there's no internet no Google we're talking 1920s and a lot of people didn't know yet about Eugene Marais scholars in England had already regarded his work as stupendous there were places that knew I mean it was it was not that it had been published the soul of the white hand was known but Maurice metal inked in in Belgium got hold of the book literally plagiarized I mean without even bothering to change I'd say about a hundred pages of it in a book that he then published called the the life of the ant or something like that and that's an maurice metal ink became famous anyways you Jean Marais did try to sue him for various reasons that didn't work but the bottom line was that everybody got to know what happened is particularly in the 1960s a long time later a anthropologist called Robert Audrey who I was a big fan I mean I learned a lot from Robert Audrey wrote a book called the territorial imperative and I I found that to be that helped me understand a lot of things but Robert Audrey helped to popularize you Jean Marais and today everyone knows what a scoundrel Maurice Maeterlinck the Belgium was but none of this is important what is important is a single point that came out of the book and you Jean Marais depicts this in such eloquent English and articulates it so fluently that I should really just read that whole section to you but I'm not gonna do that I'm gonna leave you to enjoy it all for yourself should you choose to read the book I mean how often do I recommend books and even here I'm not recommending it to everybody you if you have a passionate interest in the kind of thing I'm talking about well then you want to read the anyway the the key thing is that Eugene marais answers the question of how do the ants know where to put the grains of sand and no one has improved on his answer although you are going to be a little bit disappointed in the answer nobody has come up with a better answer it's a huge mystery here is his answer and he calls it organic unity and it's really important because it has an application in trying to understand things that are happening in Europe things that are happening in the United Kingdom things that are happening in our own country with country where I live the United States of America and no doubt wherever you are listening because I'm happy to say we have a rapidly growing international audience all over the place so anyway when you when you write in to me do tell me if you are listening to the show from elsewhere do let me know I get a kick out of that so what's the the principle organic unity alright a Eugene Marais says look take a look at your body and you're always having always regarded your body as your body it never occurs to you to think of your of your liver as a separate little creature and your heart is a separate creature and and your brain is a separate creature all inhabiting this house called your body it never occurs to you to think of all the white blood cells whose job is to fight off the enemy and all those red blood cells whose job it is to rebuild the damage does that ring a bell it never occurs to you regard all these things as separate entities even though every single cell is unbelievably complex our cells are hugely complicated mechanisms a lot going on there anyway what's my point the point is that if you give yourself a little intellectual agility if you let yourself just adjust your point of view just a little bit you find that you can indeed start seeing your body as a group of different creatures all inhabiting one house one home and in this case is not a cave or a a nest it's your body and they all communicate with each other how through a system operated by the brain and so when the hand picks up some food and puts it in the mouth that's because the brain sent information requesting that that happen but it could be one part of the organism putting food into another part of the organism and then that part of the organism sends it somewhere else and there are all kinds of separate little creatures operate right it's a bit fanciful and it's it's not a truly helpful way of seeing your body work in that fashion however it helps us now go back to the ant nest and use our newly acquired intellectual agility in the reverse direction hello I described the end nest as a home a house occupied by huge numbers of separate little discrete creatures some of them behaving like white blood cells some of the merit there that's right some of them fighting off the enemy namely me some of them rebuilding okay fine you get the idea what if you would stop looking at an ant colony that way and you would start seeing it the way you see your body one big animal one big organism one big entity made up of lots and lots of little cells and don't think of them as separate little creatures yes I know that through your microscope or magnifying glass you noticed that all those little ants had leg and they are moving around well hello ourselves also can move and so now start seeing the ant nest as one big organism made up of hundreds of thousands if not millions of small pots and these pots have specific functions there are ants that repair damage there ants that repel invaders and their ants that make glue in their ends that carry of sand particles and send grains and their other hands that look for food and there and in the middle of it all is a queen ant now the big question which I cannot answer to you is how does the queen ant communicate with the other hands nobody knows it's not wireless not radio waves it's not through sound went through audible sound it's not through tapping or vibration we don't know here's the craziest thing again with experiments done in South Africa when the Queen of the end nest is put in a lead box but in the same position she was before the end this continues to function if you the carry the end the Queen and out of the end nest up till about a few feet away the ants still continue to function if you take the ant queen and further away or you kill the queen ant they come the end the whole ant colony winds down dies and comes to an end well isn't that exactly what would happen if you took the brain and took it away somewhere the body that was formerly a house to that brain will eventually die now we know how the brain communicates with other parts of this particular body we do not know how the queen ant communicates with the other ants of the colony we don't know that but she does in some kind of a way and so she is the brain of this big organism and this organism has many many different parts each of which has its role in continuing the life of this organism and there it is why is this interesting and why do I tell you about it well don't you see this is now the way we look at a whole society the United States of America sure Canada sure United Kingdom and Norway yeah start thinking of your society as a complex creature an organism and it has many different cells it has some cells that teach in schools that has some cells that drive trucks it has some cells that fix communication systems it has some cells that captain boats all kinds of cells operating to make this huge big organism function what is the brain of the organism well it's the system of government that we have set up and the what about the digestive systems of this organism and the food says yeah there are supermarkets and their trucks and their roads and communication systems is the nervous system it is very helpful indeed to start looking at a country as a society start looking at it as if it was an organism and there all the people all of us inside all this organism are actually cells of thing itself isn't that weird why is this interesting because I'm going to tell you coming right back meanwhile the website is rabbi Daniel lapin calm if you feel like communicating with me then go to rabbi Daniel lapin calm hit the contact us and I will see your comments I'll see what you're after me and I appreciate that love hearing from you this past week I gave a speech at grace Life Church in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and wonderful absolutely wonderful audience there with Pastor butkin pastor Amy Schaffer what a wonderful organization that is anybody in that area eastern Pittsburgh looking for a great church to associate with that's the place to be at but the reason I mentioned it is that I met so many P Paul there who were aware that I was going to be there because they received four tools because they received asked the rabbi and they heard I was going to be there and they came and I had a chance to to greet and meet a whole lot of new friends which I love doing so make sure you're on our mailing list to get thought tools and also make sure you take a look at a new resource we've published called hands off this may be love it's a book you can get it as a regular book but what's really nice is that it's now available as a download you can get this on on Kindle and its really very fascinating because it makes the argument that yeah when particularly a young man and a young woman are getting to know one another sexual involvement diminishes the likelihood of a happy conclusion to this in other words it is very difficult to make a wise decision when your physical senses are involved and touch is the most powerful one of those and so you know for both the woman thinking I've really got to figure out is this really the man I want to devote my life to is this the man I want to hitch my wagon to oh is he just an exciting guy when he puts his arm around me and the guy's got a think also this is a woman I need a help mate somebody to march through life with me I need somebody to share all the times good and bad tough and easy joyful and sad and it's kind of difficult because I I just I have such a strong addiction to the feel of her to be able to touch her and kiss her and hold her it's very difficult to make a rational decision because your head starts distorting things you so badly want the answer to be yes that you make it yes even when it should be no and so hands off this may be love is a fascinating book working really effectively we've sold a huge number of them have heard back from a whole lot of people who've got the book saying this is really helpful this has changed the way I've gone through this helped me with their romances helped me with a relationship anyways take a look at it it's on the website at Rob I Daniel lapin comm back in just a moment with why the story of the white ant is so useful so hello everybody and what is the lesson to be learned from the white ant what does it help us to know that a society a country a large group of people can be viewed as if it is one organism holding together large numbers of individual cells in exactly the way that the human body is not really a lot of different organisms like lungs and heart and kidneys and skin cells and blood cells all living together in this big thing we call the skin no it could be described that way but that's not really accurate but maybe there is some value in seeing a society not as a huge group of completely independent separate little entities but instead one huge organism with a lot of different cells you think of everybody on the planet everybody in the country as if they were a blood cell of an organism well it helps to understand certain things for instance most of us like to think of ourselves as being incredibly independent right we we really make all the decisions for ourselves we decide what to believe in we decide how to think we decide what we think is true we decide what we think is false yes siree we are independent people the only trouble that is that ideas spread through society and people accept it people buy into it and they don't necessarily weigh it up intellectually in many instances there is an emotional resonance it feels good yeah I like that idea I'm good with that and so the idea that homosexual marriage should be sanctioned by the state and should become a state function that's spread in that same fashion it's not that people sat down to think through the consequences long-term effects it was usually just simple slogans like how does me getting married hurt your marriage you know and yeah that's right it yeah doesn't does it or why should some people be allowed to fulfill their love and others not and so some of these sort of slogans do not reach into your cognitive core they don't have anything to do with your intellectual virility no they they strike at your emotional centers and you go for it that's what happens and so these ideas spread through the culture almost the way a virus spreads through an organism and the idea that gender is fluid and that it exists on a spectrum well now it's at the point where in some states medical professionals doctors and nurses can be penalized if they list a man as a man without checking that that's what he wants to be listed as maybe wants to be this as a woman and conversely the other way around so these ideas again spread through the society how well it's much easier to understand if we consider the possibility that one can view a society as if it was an organism and once it's an organism well I know how viruses spread through an organism I see it all the time I understand that the the idea that again I've spoken to a lot of people and one of the questions I asked just in passing is by the way how serious a problem is a white police officers killing unarmed black men and again nobody says these very few people I've spoken to say well I'd have to look at the figures I know that there are statistics available you know the number of shootings by policeman number of shootings by white policeman number shooting by black policeman number of police shootings victims number of them that are white now you know taking a look at these numbers and then drawing a conclusion no this is a virus that has spread through society and in spite of the fact that it's completely untrue they people will immediately say yes it's a vich what are the biggest problems of the country right now white policemen shooting a non-black men yeah right it isn't one of the big problems of the country I mean it's a sad thing if when it happens but it's not one of the big problems of the country in the area of big problems and so ideas spread by means of this idea that the that the society is in a sense a form of organism and we understand it more effectively that way we also notice that with an organism disease say a human a human body human body pops an unhealthy substance in its mouth and the result isn't that it impacts the mouth the result is that it might impact the toes down the road so for a Mad instance imagine imagine somebody suffers from gout it's a it's a disease that afflicts I think mostly men and it's and it's it's not widespread but quite a lot of people have it and and so there if you view the human being as a collection of different organisms all living in the same place called a body then you see some red meat and some wine being popped into the mouth and then all of a sudden two big toes at the other extremity of this organism suddenly get inflamed and and and obviously something is very wrong with them we understand how that happens in a human body because we see the body as one United organism but in a society we're accustomed to seeing the society as made up of millions of separate disconnected individuals and so it's very hard to an stand how can it be that one person somewhere or a group of people somewhere engage in destructive behavior or any kind of behavior and a whole lot of other people miles away who've never met the first group of people start doing the same thing right again things spread now we have mechanisms that help to spread a television radio communications newspapers and so you know take tattooing tattooing today is much more popular than it has been at certain times in the past so why is it that if I'm walking down the road I have might all of a sudden feel some kind of an impulse to get a tattoo just because a whole lot of other people elsewhere in the country have done it and I may not even have seen them I may not even have read about them yeah that's right it does work that way in an organism things do spread in very interesting ways and that's exactly what this helps to illustrate so effectively there are other examples of things that spread through the culture means and ideas thoughts things that become popular to the extent that many individuals believe that they have carefully considered the question and have arrived at a sane contemplated thoughtful purposeful deliberate conclusion when in reality all that's happened is you are part of a big organism and you've been infected with an idea and it spreads spreads all the way through the entire organism a useful a useful tool and a valuable way of looking at society and the way ideas spread through society it's not always gonna provide a definitive answer but it is useful I've certainly found that there are many things that unravel themselves and reveal themselves more effectively when I view a group of people whether it's a family or it's a corporation or whether it is a club or a civic organization whatever it is I'm working with when I begin to view them as if there are all parts of one single organism and I ask myself well what effect would that have could that explain some of the things we're seeing and if so what is the medication we can give you know if this is an organism what might be the medication that would neutralize the disturbing effect that the organizers of this organization whatever it is asked me to come in and look at in the first place all right my friends I appreciate very much your listening and I particularly appreciate those who you helped to spread the word of this show you've been doing absolutely great it is growing to my enormous gratification and I certainly appreciate it the website rabbi Daniel lapin com don't forget stop by and read up about this new book of ours called hens off this may be love take a look at that I think it'll have some things in it that will not only surprise you but could actually be very useful to somebody in your orbit take a look at rabbi Daniel lapin come also make sure you're on the mailing list and you receive thought tools that'll be terrific and finally if there's anything you want to say to me that would also be a good place to say it add rabbi Daniel lapin com so until next week I am rabbi Daniel lapin wishing you only good times in your faith your finances your friendships and your family god bless

Channel: Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Views: 19,204

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Id: AX2cGyi2Mjg

Length: 44min 17sec (2657 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018