Rabbi David Wolpe | "Broken Tablets: How to Handle Our Regrets"

we lost a giant this year his name was jackie mason nobody understood and pointed out the foibles of jews better than jackie mason he was the one who said that only jews come up to him afterwards and say your act is too jewish he said i performed for the queen of england afterwards when she came up to me she was talking like me but the jews they say it's too jewish but actually this is the part of what jackie mason talked about that i want to remind you of he said when i drive around the city with any jew this is what happens they start to point at the buildings and say i almost bought that i bought that but i sold it too quickly they cheated me out of that one i would have had that one i was gonna buy that one i would have had the whole row i didn't buy the one in the middle nobody does real estate regret like the jews we are filled connoisseurs of regret not just about buildings but about other things too and the truth is that yom kippur is the holiday of regret when we think about the things we did that we wished we hadn't done the things that we didn't do that we wish we had done when i was in high school they took us to an old age home that's what it was called then an old age home and each of us was supposed to be paired up and was paired up with someone who would then be our buddy for the day and i remember that i was paired with a man whose name i remember as irv fox and he was a jazz pianist and i spent a couple hours with him and i remember it was hard to understand what he was saying because he was old and he wasn't well and at the end of that visit he said to me promise me you'll come back and see me again and i said i promise and i never did and to this day i regret that i still do i know that some people say that regret is a useless emotion that guilt is a useless emotion or that they have no regrets jenna regret react remember edith piaf famously saying but i don't believe it i think all of us are filled with regrets in fact according to a psychologist named amy somerville who used to run a lab called the regret lab believe it or not at miami university in ohio regret is the most common negative emotion more common than loneliness more common than anger and also associated with it regret can cause loneliness remember miss havisham in great expectations who was left at the altar and so she sits alone day after day year after year with her dress rotting to bits and the mouldering wedding cake plotting revenge on all men because of that moment of regret but according to our own tradition regret is important and not useless and not purely destructive in fact on this day in his laws of chuva of repentance maimonides says you have to experience and express regret not just feel it but say it now i know that some people will say that they regret the things they didn't do and not the things they did and the truth is you regret both sometimes you regret the things that you didn't do because they're shaped by imagination and so you can make them perfect had i bought that building i wouldn't had any trouble at all would have made a fortune whereas the things that you do are very specific i remember my father telling me once in terms of things that you'll regret that he was as i will return to later he was the only child of a mother whose husband died very young when my father was 11. and later on he had an opportunity that he really wanted to take when he was a little less than 20 years older i guess 20 21 years old to take a ship over to israel and to help fight for independence but his mother said to him i've lost my husband you're my only son i don't want you to go so he didn't go therefore my father was not on the ship he was going to be on which was called the exodus he could have been in a movie but who knows what the right decision was you tend to regret by the way only things that actually are possible i don't regret not having been an nfl linebacker because i don't really have the physique for it even if you're watching at home and seeing me on a very very big screen believe me i have the physique of a chess player but you do regret the things that you do that were wrong or hurtful and the question is what do you do with those regrets do you push them aside do you say that regret is useless and i'm not going to regret because i did it and it's in the past and why should i regret it and i'm done and forget it well the first thing to remember about regret is that if you regret things you're not alone when the psychologist says that regret is the most common negative emotion the rabbi says even god feels regret it says it right in the torah god regretted that he made human beings it says in the torah you can understand it it's a very dicey business this inventing of human beings and how do you make the tikkun that is how do you fix do you repair the regret what do you do because obviously i can never go back and visit ur fox he's gone the time is gone it's gone how do you make a tikkun well one thing i will tell you is many people have been visited because of earth fox there are a lot of times when i thought to myself do you need to go and i think of her fox and i think if you don't go that might be another regret and then there is another strategy and this we see from the greatest moment of regret in the history of the jewish people moses goes up to the mountain he gets the ten commandments from god and unbeknownst to him down at the bottom of the mountain the children of israel are worshiping the golden calf so he comes down and he sees the calf and he smashes the tablets and he rebukes the people and it's like a carnival of regret god regrets moses regrets the people regret so what do they do does moses say you know what yeah it's over let's forget about it you made a calf the calf is done let's move on no moses takes the symbol of regret the broken tablets and the rabbis tell us the intact tablets and the broken tablets carried together in the ark you carry your regrets with you because that's how you remember you carry them with you because that's how you do better you look at them as teachers not as tormentors everyone has their own iron codish everyone has their ark now let me tell you about the ark of someone who is very close to me i mentioned earlier in this sermon and some of you have heard this before that my father's father died when my father was 11 years old growing up he would occasionally mention his father what a wonderful and loving person he was but we didn't really know that much about him because he died early in an age when nobody recorded things or had pictures there are one or two pictures of him but that's about it but when my father died i discovered what was in his oran kodesh as we were going through his drawers we came upon two letters to him from his father didn't ever know they existed i didn't know that he had anything tangible from his father he never mentioned it we put them away and yesterday morning i texted my older brother steve and i said do you have those letters i want to see them i saw them then but i haven't really seen them since and he sent them to me and now i know what my father did with what was the biggest regret of his life which is that he didn't know his father when he got older what he did with it was he spent all the time he possibly could with his family i know that my father turned down all sorts of opportunities that would have allowed him to take other positions but would have pulled him away from his family because he knew what it was not to have a father around he went so far as to take us cross-country in a winnebago do you know what it is for a family of six to travel in a truck across the country back and forth i mean it's bad enough for my father for my mother god only knows with four boys but when i read the letters i saw why one of them his father signs off be a good boy and you will never be sorry with love your daddy and then at the very bottom his father writes to him write a long letter and then there's this letter this letter begins my dear little boy and then talks about how the hopes he's having a wonderful time and then he says we'll be over to see you sunday in the meantime have a good time and enjoy yourself with love from all of your dad and mom and then it says p.s don't blow the bugle too early in the morning let the other boys sleep my father was very musical and i suspect that that was based on an incident or two but i realized that this letter which said we will be over to see you sunday is dated july 6 1938. on july 9 1938 saturday my grandfather died of a heart attack and my father never saw him again that's the shivre luchot the broken tablets in his iron kodish and what he did with it the tikkun he made because he couldn't undo the loss which he became the father that he missed he drew as close to his children as he had yearned day after day and year after year his father would have drawn to him my dear little boy be a good boy and you'll never be sorry there is so much love in these brief expressions that i can only imagine how much my father missed or maybe i don't have to imagine it because i know how much he gave do you have regrets of course you do have you done things that hurt people you love if you have loved you have done things that hurt people you love can you undo them sometimes but usually not but you can live with your regrets in the aren't kodish of your life and be different because of them you can be better you can carry the love around that you received and create the love that you did not receive our wholeness and our brokenness we carry with us as we carry it into a new year may we turn all of our regrets into love shamatova you

Channel: Sinai Temple

Views: 2,779

Rating: 4.9148936 out of 5

Keywords: jewish, rabbi david wolpe, yom kippur, sinai temple

Id: mqDfqlaR3qc

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021