RABBI ABRAHAM TWERSKI, MD: HOW TO FACE LIFE'S CHALLENGES AND WIN THE SPIRITUAL BATTLE

it is such a pleasure to be here with rabbi dr torski i have been reading his books for the last two decades and inspired on a constant basis by growing each day and growing each week and so many others and it's really it's really a pleasure and a joy to be here with you so the goal of within us podcast is to share empowering tools spiritual tools to help people grow and to help bring out the best in all of us and when we originally scheduled this interview i didn't anticipate what was coming and i think that the timing of this interview is really special in a lot of ways because your wisdom can help so many people at this time in particular so thank you so much for joining me my pleasure so tell us a little bit for any of our listeners who have yet to meet you or become acquainted with your work what have you been engaged with over the last what what is the the what have you been doing over the last several years you've written books and i know that you've worked with some of the most challenged people in society can you tell us a little bit about your history my father was a rebbe in milwaukee hasidic rally i wanted to be following his footsteps his office was always buzzing with people looking for a device and i modeled myself after him when i became a rabbi this was in 1951 post world war ii psychiatry and psychology had to mediorich rise and quite soon became available that my populace is not going to be like my father's first of all the older generation died off the younger generation in milwaukee was unfortunately not properly educated there was no interest in adult education so what was i going to do as a rabbi if i'm not going to primarily do counseling or teaching torah what i'm going to do is perform ceremonies promises funerals whatever whatever other ceremonies there were i didn't see that as fulfilling it and i decided that perhaps i should knew what in order to be what i wanted to be as a as a rabbi i should go for the professional because that's where people are going to go for counseling so i wrote a letter to the stipend of gun who was the friend of the family he and my father grew up together and i told them what the problem was and that i was planning to go to medical school and he wrote me a long letter and he gave me his blessing so i went to medical school with the intent of becoming a psychiatrist which is what i did and then i'm not disappointed with it i think it was a a good decision if i had to do it over again i would do it exactly as i did and then i was asked to take a position as director of saint francis general hospital which was a catholic hospital in pittsburgh a very large hospital 750 beds of which 300 were psychiatric and that was my job and then there was a part of the psychiatric unit that was an alcohol treatment unit now it was very primitive um alcoholics were uh admitted to be dried out which was four days five days six days and they were sent out and i said to the administrator i said sister we're not doing these people any good we have not given them any tools how to stay sober i think we need a residential treatment center locally and i went about getting the i i'm making it sound very simple it was awfully complicated but i went about putting together a committee of influential people and then trying to raise money and getting a government support grant etc and in 1972 we opened the doors of gateway rehabilitation center which has since become one of the foremost addictions treatment centers it started off with alcoholism but then when the drug epidemic hit we started treating drug addiction and uh in the last couple of years we had a special youth center because of the spread of drugs of all kinds among young people and then i began to write a little bit about some of my experiences under my ideas early on i found that most people that i uh treated it other than alcoholics and ethics all had a common denominator that all had feelings of inadequacy and inferiority that were not realistic and then suffered from terrible underestimation and this gave her i said many problems so i got started on a theme of developing a selfish team my first book was entitled like yourself and others will too and that was the beginning of a career because for all practical purposes when people have asked me how many books have you written i said something was in the 80s wow well how do you find time to find so many books i said i never wrote 80 books i wrote one book in 80 different ways because all i talk about is how important it is to get to know the truth about yourself and not be blinded by these inferior inferiority feelings so that's been one of my major themes a second issue has much to do with addiction and that is that as long as people are pursuing in pursuit of self-gratification they'll never meet the addiction problem i mean i've lost over the past 40 years i've lost the government in america spend billions of dollars to try to do something about the addiction problem and it keeps on increasing and it keeps on increasing because there's no end point to wanting comfort pleasure uh self-gratification right so this is where spirituality comes in right our ancestor avraham avinu uh was a maverick and he did not go along with the prevailing idolatry but his um contribution was not necessarily teaching monotheism that there's one god that's part of it what it was about was that idolatry was a practice of trying to appease the gods so that they could fulfill your wishes right for whether for whether it is from powerful crops or children or whatever and iran says you've got it all wrong god is not here to serve us we are here to serve hashem and that was a revolutionary kind of statement and uh very few people picked up on this except for so if we have a goal in life of wishing to fulfill the wishes and directions of hashem it is possible to have a a truly happy life and not official artificial happiness but that's not the way the world is going in the history of the world there has never been a generation that has been as hedonistic as ours people are in pursuit not of happiness their pursuit of pleasure and uh that is going to feed into addiction and i see no end to it yes you can build more treatment centers but you're not going to do anything about preventing addiction right and ideally the torah observant community should have learned the lesson of avraham avinu and they followed in the footsteps of the teachings of the of the tadika of all generations some of that has happened but on the other hand to many people being terror observant is primarily doing the rituals of torah which is important but it's not enough the mistress and the rituals are important but a strong hashem and the moon is the only kind of thing that's going to get us through life right muhammad says that the prophet says the righteous person will live with him i'd like to ask you for those listeners for our listeners who are not familiar with this idea of emunah this this is a hebrew word that we're using so some of our listeners are not familiar how could you rabbi how would you explain this concept to someone who's not familiar i would try i don't know whether i'll succeed all we can do is try it right but uh and luna is comprised of faith and trust and hashem so first one has to believe in hashem and this is something that we get from our heritage we get from our parents our grandparents and so forth right now once we have a belief in hashem then we have to learn how to trust hashem and that everything hashem does is for the best even though we can't begin to understand this right and whenever we're challenged by things that seem to be terribly unfair i just have to have stuff and pause and think uh so much of the gun the vilna all of these intellectual and spiritual giants they knew the same problems that i did they had all the same questions about about hashem but yet they kept up the faith okay and there are so many instances of where people have sacrificed their lives for hashem rather than to deny him so that's what the moon is about a strong trust and faith in hashem and it's a battle it's a battle a lifelong battle it's a simple battle for children to learn but as we get older and more intelligent and more experienced and more aware of the world now the challenges become greater not lesser okay and so the challenges that i face in the moonlight now at close to age of 90 are much greater than the challenges that i had when i was eight or ten okay but if there is true amino and you realize you're living for a purpose and the purpose is not just to get the maximum fun and pleasure out of life our current generation seems to believe that the world was created to be a huge amusement park right but if we believe that we're relieved to we were created to fulfill a purpose that i said months again there may be a lot of gratification that we're missing but there is the gratification of knowing that we're doing the right thing and fulfilling the purpose for which we were created beautiful so i want to revisit the idea that you shared about self-esteem and the idea that you shared in terms of someone not believing in themself not having the self-esteem the self-concept and yet having every reason to believe in themselves but somehow believing this falsity this falsehood can you explain to us a little bit about how that happens and how do we how do we open ourselves up to believing in ourselves there is no logical explanation for that in psychology the explanation is that if you um are unhappy with yourself it's due to a deficit in parenting or other external circumstances that deprive you of that which you wish um i used to think that like unlike other psychologists uh but then i came across something that is said by one of the ballet musa which became much clearer than me and he said that we believe that hashem created the opinion generally was tries to seduce you to doing sins right but then i found that uh one of the great bunny wizards said that that's not all the asahara does the asahara assembly wants to disable you so that they should not be able to fulfill the will of hashem right and although he can do who gets themselves out by seducing you to sin most of it is by taking away yourself trust taking away your selfishness and making you feel worthless and if if he gets you to feel worthless he's won his battle right so when i get the feelings like everybody else does that uh i'm severely lacking or i'm not doing enough i have to stop myself and i say wait a second um i get other ideas out of the sarah eat whatever i can or whatever i like even though it may not be closer and i don't listen to the eternal right so i don't listen to the answer and he tells me how how incapable i am right i say doesn't that that's not so i know that i am a child of hashem and as such i have on the shama that is part of hashem and it's really endless and it's potential right it's beautiful it's a beautiful idea and so empowering in terms of how we can seek happiness and i'm curious if you can share a little bit with us about the difference between happiness and pleasure and especially for those of us who are unfamiliar with spiritual teachings what is going to make us happy in this life if it's not pleasure first of all i strongly believe that there's a basic difference between adult animals and men i don't believe that science is correct when they say that man is a homo sapiens because homo sapien simply means a gorilla with intellect okay animals are driven by pleasure okay and it's natural and that's perfectly okay for animals but if people do that then they're lowering themselves to a animal status okay and so i have to realize that i have something else to contribute to life other than just selfish gratification and selfish gratification may give me a few moments of pleasure but in the long run it's going to fail right and the best example of that is the i've worked with thousands and thousands of drug addicts and they have a pursuit of pleasure and they have a pursuit of pleasure that destroys them now if pleasure was would be the source of happiness then addicts ought to be the happiest people in the world but they're not they're the most miserable people in the world and so many people who have fortunately recovered from drug addiction have said to me the worst day of my sobriety is better than the best day of my addiction the worst day of my sobriety is better than the best day of my addiction it's powerful it's powerful and it's true but uh i'm privileged to know that because i've dealt with thousands of people who are addicts and who have crawled out of that right and if i realized that they were heading in the wrong direction right so uh animals have pleasure okay i don't believe animals have happiness happiness is a human trait pleasure is an animal trait i refuse to be homo sapiens i love that i like how you speak about it in your book on spirituality that what makes someone uniquely human is their capacity for spirituality so i'm curious if you could share with those of our listeners familiar or even unfamiliar with spirituality as a term or as a practice are there practical things that anyone can do to live a more spiritual life of course we have to first realize what is it really that separates a human being from a lower form of life all right and the answer is that the human being has a component called the spirit and what is the spirit right the spirit is consists of several things first of all of being able to sacrifice one's own needs for the welfare of someone else the ability to grow the ability to forgive right the ability to see a purpose in life rather than think of oneself as an accidental occurrence on earth there's perhaps 13 or 40 things that are characteristic of a human being that animals do not do they don't have those capacities right and it's those items that separate us from an animal that constitutes spirituality now some people have asked what about religion i say remission is very important but it's not part of this it's it's not the most essential part of spirituality in fact a religious performance without spirituality is a superficial performance and there's then there's a very little value right so being from and doing the misfits is important but only as part of the package that we do so because i said monsters do that wants us to do it and we were created to do that and we're fulfilling a purpose in life so over the course of your work you've had thousands of patients thousands of patients who were suffering with addiction and i think right now in this time of stress it's especially important to think about how does someone deal with stress and deal with wanting to be comforted or feeling a need for a substance how can people deal with those desires in times that are difficult they can do that if they realize that that's the only way to go unfortunately many people especially in our modern age believe that the solution to the that lies in taking some kind of substance that will give you a kind of a train of thought or kind of sensation it'll take away your stress right so they have recourse either to alcohol onto drugs or to other kinds of pleasures such as uh gambling such as uh sexual addiction um all kinds of things that are totally self-centered without a sense of responsibility or duty right and those kinds of things are very short-lived and can only give one a very brief period of gratification and then there's the desire for more and more and more and so it suffers actually a frustrating existence sounds very difficult so in in terms of shifting out of that addiction mentality seeking pleasure is there a mindset or something that that people can do on a daily basis to affirm their spirituality to affirm their life and purpose living for real happiness what can we think what can we do i think we have to learn the sources in torah that deal with us and whether the works of musa or the works of kasiras in addition to the those are the kinds of things that can give a person a a sense of accomplishment and a sense of value okay and in terms of our listeners who are not familiar like our listeners who aren't jewish or who don't know these sources um we have like a diverse space of listeners so for non-jews for example is there anything you could recommend any practices would it be also reading spiritual texts or where do we go with that i spent most of my practice working with alcoholics and addicts and watching them grow in recovery their recovery is based on making a significant change in lifestyle and in practical terms it's based on the 12 steps of alcoholics anonymous right and it's strange i think that i've often clipped that if bill wilson was the author of the 12 steps had he been living today i would have a suit for male practice and not for malpractice for plagiarism because what he did was take the ideas out of musser and apply them to everyday life and yes he uh also has a belief in god but that is not the essential thing right the potential thing is practicing the 12 steps not having camaraderie and support with other people in doing so and i've seen people change their lives around from being a homo sapiens right to being a sensitive feeling believing person it's so beautiful to hear that it's possible and that there's hope for everyone and that we all go through the same difficulties i think it's really comforting to hear from you that everyone has this sense of doubt this evil inclination that's holding us back from being who we can be in this world and i'm curious if you have any advice for our listeners in terms of what's happening today i know that around the world people are feeling scared and times are changing and i'm curious if you could share any practical advice that you have for for people who might be concerned right now complete that last question is it any advice that you can share for our listeners in the time that we're in right now the immediate thing is to do the kind of things that are most likely to preserve our life and prevent us from getting this horrible disease that is number one once we do that then again uh if we realize that our lives are purposeful uh we don't take the fear as a threat to our existence right and that's this is in very simple terms uh it's easy to say very difficult to do so on a practical level in terms of being precautious with with everything we need to do to stay safe we have that on the first hand and on the second hand it's not allowing ourselves to live in fear are there any any any tips or anything in particular that i could do on a daily basis all of the books uh whether it's the torah volumes or even some of these secular items deal with the fact that panic is going to get you nowhere now is it it's terribly uncomfortable right but all panda can do is destroy and if we realize hey this is reality we happen to be going through an exceedingly difficult period of reality right but if we panic all is lost stay calm in other words try to stick up try to stay calm okay and are there anything any particular methods you recommend for staying calm almost any of those if you go through any of the books that talk about uh stress and anxiety other than taking medications and it's very easy to make yourself oblivious to the world by thinking enough of a tranquilizer but that's not the way to go uh but i think if we learn how to stay calm with the kinds of kinds of things that are uh sensible practices right it can be achieved and will survive this right we should have the epidemic of the 1917 influenza i will survive this one also will pay a price for it what do you mean by that what do you mean in terms of are paying a price for well we're going to pay a price for it because that unfortunately going to be an increased number of deaths from this disease and there is no treatment yet and all those active prevention so uh we're paying a price for uh being vulnerable but again you do the maximum that you can and if you have trust and belief in their sin then you pray for the uh guidance and protection and protection amen thank you so much thank you for joining me and thank you for sharing your wisdom with our listeners really we really appreciate it thank you so much pleasure examples of times in the torah where panic was a problem and then how that was and and how that was dealt with so maybe an example in the torah where people panic the prime example the prime example was described by uh one of the muslim authorities of who explains how the phenomenon of the worship of the golden calf could possibly have happened here were the people who had been at sinai and had heard the word of hashem they watched the splitting of the sea they saw miracle after miracle the presence and actions of hashem were palpable how do they go off the deep end so he said it was very simple um they were in the desert they don't know where they're going they don't know how they're going to survive the only thing that they had was moshe moshe was the leader who provided for all of their questions and all of their needs and suddenly moshe is gone for 40 days and he assumed to be dead and he said they went into a panic and we went into a panic could do something as idiotic as working worshipping a golden cow okay so the remedy for this rather than let's say we could rewind the story what could someone do instead what could someone do instead what what could have to you turn to your leaders you turn to your leaders and you get guidance and their leader was gone their leader was gone moses was gone and so they panic do you find it odd that this last week's torah portion was and this was when everything really just if you can talk to israel about that maybe if you find any divine coincidence there well if we assume what uh rashford said that they episode of the ego was due to a panic right then the antidote is to have faith and not panic and just because we what happened was with with them was they saw no way out without moshe and they saw no way out in a barren desert uh so logical there was panic he said you can't go by lounging you have to go by you have to go by your faith go by your faith beautiful message thank you so much okay

Channel: Dr. Azi Jankovic

Views: 38,213

Keywords:

Id: 8X4yMf7chKY

Length: 36min 38sec (2198 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021