So Stark Tank listeners have been treated to four incredible
episodes, which are by David Lappin.
And for the episode that's going to be dropping on air of Tish
Above Monday, the day before Tish Above, we're actually gonna
do one more a bonus episode. And the reason why is because in
one of our offline conversations, I was reflecting
with where I lap in on the fact that both of us have experienced
a loss over the last month and 1/2 or so.
I mentioned on this podcast before that I lost my
brother-in-law, Ali Moshe Zimbalist Hashemi com demo in
Gaza and every lap. And maybe you can share with our
listeners the loss that you've experienced in your family.
Thanks, Yakov. Yes, the very sad and tragic
niece, my brother's daughter, who passed away after a few
years of struggling with cancer, left a large family, little
children, just a wonderful human being, a wonderful, wonderful
woman, wonderful family. And it's been painful for the
for all of us and for the family, immediate family most of
all. So yes, dealing with loss and
and of course in in it's a Charlotte at the moment.
We're all touched by loss every day.
You've been touched very, very closely.
But but we've all got friends and friends of friends and, and
relatives who are experiencing loss.
So, so it's something big. This Shivos of the Tamas was
different for me from, from anyone before.
The Slykhas were different. The, the feeling of it was
different, the, the feeling of walls being breached and what
happened after that at the time of the Kurban, our walls being
breached and not only our physical wall and around Gaza,
but but the whole wall of, of protection of the Jewish people
that that has been breached by horrible anti-Semitism and what
and what that feels like. So, so the Shiva Sabatamis, it
caught me by surprise really how deeply emotive it was for me
and, and therefore the three weeks and, and, and and Tish
above all together. And I think that dealing with
loss, understanding loss, understanding hardship is
something that is important not only in the three weeks, just
just part of our lives. Yeah.
And we had two interesting offline conversations and the
first one is actually nothing to really do with our broader
conversations about work and being a Bentora and a career.
The second one actually brings it closer.
So we're going to share some of these ideas for our listeners as
well. So what I had shared with you
was the fact that the Ramban in Parshas Bhaira, when he talks
about the misayon of Avraham, he has a great line where he writes
person who's doing the the the God who is trying the human
Yitzhabebo lahot sihadavar minhaka al apoel lihiot lo
saharma setov lo sahar lave tov bilvat.
So human beings oftentimes have a lave tov, they have pent up
potential, but oftentimes it's not brought out.
And then he's silent as a Karishbar whose way of showing
his love to Sadiq Imrama. The Ramban goes on in the next
few lines to show how much he loves them and to allow them to
realize that potential. So with the obvious caveat that
we have no idea why Karishbar, who brings these awful tragedies
on us, but the Ramban is giving us at least one angle and one
insight, which says that it's meant to allow us to realize
potential that we didn't realize we weren't able to actually
actualize and and bring out to the actual world around us.
And I was thinking a lot about this line, reflecting on, you
know, the reactions of some of the family members and the
people around and really noticing them grow up in a very,
very impressive way throughout the tragedy that we experienced
in our family. And they really drove home their
own bonds line, which is that it really allowed a lot of people
to express some very, very impressive sights to them that I
had never seen before. Even though they're very close
friends and family members, I had never seen that and was only
able to be brought out through the.
And the other thing that it reminded me of was the line that
I believe is attributed to Michelangelo where he said that
the key to being a great sculptor is seeing the sculpture
within the block beforehand. And the sculptor is just meant
to discover that he's not creating something new.
It's all there inside, but he is able to chip away and uncover
that. And that imagery really hit home
because the process that we've gone through is one that I
wouldn't wish on anyone. It's awful, it's terrible, it's
tragic. The emotions, the sadness, the
the tears is really terrible. But in the end of the day, when
you come out is something very, very beautiful.
So I think about that, that imagery of, you know, a nail and
a hammer chipping away at a block is obviously very
uncomfortable for the block, but you end up with something very
beautiful in the end. So I relap and I share this with
you and you had some very interesting Mara Macombos and
Kazel that reflect a very similar idea as well.
Yes, I the the idea of Minakok and La Paul is so important
because we all have good intentions.
It's not just what I always used to understand that Ramban just
it's an opportunity to test to what extent you really mean it,
to what extent it's really important to you.
But it, it's so much more than that.
It it's, it's very much like that, that that Jimmy example
that I've that I've given that it's only when you resist
gravity that you develop strength.
So the NACE is not, is not a test.
The NACE is the method of trans of converting potential into
actual. It's not just testing whether
your potential is really there and what you, what you're able
to do. It actually is the the method.
And when you go to the gym and you lift those weights, it's not
testing whether you're serious about exercising.
It's actually building your strength.
And, and we saw that what you've seen in your immediate family,
we saw nationally, didn't we, after October the 7th, where we
saw a nation that was so fractured that, that was on the,
on the edge of implosion. And we just saw it in, in
minutes, come together heroically and, and achieve A
level of, of unitedness, of, of oneness, even a level of, of
emunah and be token that was far beyond anything it had had in,
in recent times. And, and it's just tragic that
we need an October the 7th to do that.
It's tragic that we need loss and hardship to, to bring that
craft into power, but that is life.
It's, it's not even about tragedy.
If we look at it and, and say that is life managing the
friction of life and, and overcoming it.
That is what life is. Life is that the overcoming that
struggle and the fulfillment that comes from overcoming it.
That sense of accomplishment that comes overcomes from
overcoming it. A psychologist who recently
started talking about the importance of grit.
Just that determination that that desire to the, the
fulfillment 1 gets from seeing something through to the end, as
hard as that is, and overcoming that, particularly in our
society, which has become so convenience focused, so comfort
focused, so entertainment focused.
And, and, and that's not life. Those are all escapes from life.
And, and the idea that I mentioned in a, in a medicine
Pasha's hookahs, the, the biggest hawk of all hawk is
something which doesn't seem to have a rational explanation that
the biggest hawk of all is, is Sadiq Viralo and I, and I guess
Russia Batovila as well. But just let's focus on Saadiq
Viralo. And that's the, the, the focus
of, of Saifur Iyev. And according to Khazal, Saifur
Iyev was, was written by Moshe, according to some as according
to some view. So Moshe Rabaenu himself finds
it necessary to explore Saadiq Viralo through the experience
of, of Iyev, because at the end of it, it's a hoax.
It, it's something that that Hashem does.
And Hok doesn't mean an irrational law.
Hok is like a law of nature. It's it's kakuk into the into
the world. It's the way the world works.
The word Sadiq, Viralo is part of the way the world works
because by, it's Sadiq, by a righteous work person having to
grapple with hardship that grows his sitkus, that takes his, his
piety and converts it from potential into, into actual.
And that very word of hukka cacti, Gazzara, gazzarati vende
karachutlahara. Because I'll say, I've, I've
made this law, I've legislated this gazzara and you have no
permission to question it because it's an inherent law of
nature. You don't question gravity.
You don't question the, the, the, the, the laws of, of, of
nature, because that's how the world is built.
This too is one of the laws with which the world is built.
And those very words support your your illustration because
hokhakti hakika means sculpting, it means chiseling, and gazera
gazzati means cutting. So the metaphor that that came
up to me when I learned the madrish was a sculptor sculpting
a rock as you described, or a tailor cutting a suit of
clothing out of the cloth. And while we look at it always
from the perspective of the customer or the viewer or the OR
the tailor or the sculptor, what is it like to be the rock?
What is it like to be the the cloth?
And to realize how much loss, how much has to be chipped away
from that rock? Because as Michelangelo said,
every block of stone has a statue inside it.
It's the task of the sculpture to discover it.
Every one of us has greatness inside us.
It's the job of life to help us discover it by chipping away the
stuff that's blocking it, the stuff that's hiding it.
It's the job of the, of the tailor to cut away the cloth
that you don't need in order for the for the suits to emerge.
And in life, there's just a lot of stuff that we carry with us
that we don't need. But, but losing it is, is sad.
There's, there's an incredible sense of loss.
And, and I always think of the loss of Ghanaian as being
something that embedded in the human psyche, a fear of loss
that is bigger than any other fear.
In fact, if you think of most of the things that people fear, you
can think of it yourself as I do.
If I list all the things I fear most, they're all loss.
Loss of life, loss of love, loss of health, loss of money, loss
of status, loss of home. They're all, they're all about
loss. We experience such profound loss
when Adam lost Ganadin that we never want to go there again.
We never want to have that sense of loss again.
And so we try and avoid loss, even when that loss is positive,
when that loss is going to be good for us and is going and is
going to help us. Of course, we try to avoid loss.
But when we experience it the way the nation has and the way
you personally or or my family has experienced it, just to
understand that that's going to unlock and unleash.
And we've seen it in front of our eyes.
We see the statue emerge in people that they themselves
didn't know, that they they had that greatness.
Naftali Bennett, without being political in any way, gave a
little talk recently that I came across that was very profound.
And he talked about the fact that the 50 years of prosperity
that that followed the Second World War was probably because
of the hardship that that generation went through.
They went to war, they fought, they lost lives, they lost loved
ones. That experience of those five
years of war created a generation that was able to do
what was accomplished over the next 50 or 60 years from 1945 to
to the turn of the century, basically where we had the most
unbelievable period of prosperity.
And and he suggested that the hardship that Israel and
Israelis are going through at the moment is such that that too
will usher in A50 year period of unbelievable success and and
prosperity. Because we're producing the kind
of people unlike what we're seeing in the United States,
where we're seeing people who will do whatever they can to
escape discomfort. We're seeing a nation embrace
discomfort in the highest way possible, helping one another
through the discomfort, comforting one another through
their loss, taking the negative and turning it to to positive.
We're just seeing such unbelievable greatness.
And as we go through the the three weeks and tish above and
we look at what we've lost, it's not just a matter of mourning a
loss of the besamic this that happened thousands of years ago.
It's about reliving feeling the loss and feeling the pain and
using that feeling of loss, using the pain to take us to a
new to a new level, to take us somewhere where we couldn't have
got if we hadn't experienced the loss in the first place.
Just to put a pin on one of the things that you mentioned, the
imagery of the of the cloth and the tailor and the cutting of a
zera Zera. It's interesting because when
you tell someone that you're cut from a finer cloth, so they
usually think of themselves as like really wearing a really
fancy suit. But you don't realize that that
fancy cloth before it was chopped up by the tailor was not
worth a lot. And now that the tailor has made
it into a fancy suit, it is now. But you need that process of the
cutting and not just the viner cloth.
So I think that's really cool. I'm wondering, do you think
there are any expressions of this?
I always like to think of these things in a, in a, as you do in
the manconium, you know, thinking about the connection
between the halacha and the Lumdas and the ashkafa in the
halacha savalas. Do you see this expressed, this
idea of avalas being a way of not just wallowing in our pain
and our suffering, but but really using it to to to propel
ourselves forward? So interesting firstly in the
experience of of Avalus and then in the, in the halachas, the
experience of Avellis. I've just found here since since
the war started a totally different experience of Avellis
from anything that I experienced in in Kutzlaat overseas.
I've dreaded going to each beta veil that I've that I've gone to
and come away feeling so uplifted and and inspired, where
the the Avellis is more a celebration of the person who
that person was, what they lived for and what they died for,
whether they're religious or non religious.
I've been to to to as as most of us have is to just a wide
spectrum. And it's the same always that
it, it's almost you come there and it's almost as if it's kind
of like a party. And of course it isn't a party
at all, but it's there's something very meaningful and
very uplifting and very inspiring about it.
So clearly part of the idea of our values is to bring people
together to learn and to experience the loss together.
Part of the idea of, of Mishtatev butsaya or basimka is
that I'm not limited only to the joy and the suffering that I
have in my own life. The but that I'm able to share
in the joy and suffering of others and get the benefits of
that. That I, that it's not only my
own losses, but if I can share in the losses of other people, I
can share not only in the terms of, of being there for them, but
also for their loss to be there for me and to help me gain
through that experience. And I think in Hilco Savalas,
just the idea of the silence that that when you go to to a
base Oval, you sit silently and unless the Oval wants to talk
because it isn't about you comforting them, it's not.
It's really about you just being there, thinking of the loss and
feeling loss because by feeling it as well, by being mishtatev
in that, in that loss, by sharing and partnering them in
that loss, you get some of it too.
And and we kind of feel the need to have to say something, to
have to talk. No, it's about feeling and, and
to be able to feel loss and stay with it and understand and feel
the growth that comes through that loss.
That's interesting because it touched on saying, which I was
reflecting on during the Shiva, which is that as you mentioned,
the halacha is driven based on a pusk.
I believe it's Nishao, which has hanik Dome that the availus is
a, is an expression ideally of silence and you're not supposed
to be talking. And the Shivaos are so bursting
with energy. And I was just trying to like
figure out like what to make of that.
You have any thoughts about that?
I think when the energy bursts out of the Dome, it starts with
silence. And when that silence, you can't
take it anymore. And then the energy comes out.
I think it's a, it's an energy that's rooted in the silence of,
of the pain. And I, and I think it's a, it's
a delicate balance to, to achieve.
But I, I think when that, that, that dynamicism that happens in
the, in the Beethoven is something that comes out of the
feeling of the pain and it doesn't come to try and push the
pain away. It is part of the pain to be
able to to be able to hold at one moment the pain of loss and
the privilege of of life and to be able to feel both at the same
time. To me, that's what you're trying
to capture. Innovators.
One of my thoughts on that issue was going even back, talk to
rasadas before this happened on a more personal level is that I
felt like growing up in such a secure and comfortable and safe
environment, you know, suburban Boston and then Bachemesh and
having my needs taken care of so wonderfully by my wonderful
parents created a situation. Even going back to, you know,
when they had Yoma Shawa as a kid like there was, I was wasn't
able to start wrapping my head around such pain and tragedy and
suffering because of the great personal comfort and safety that
I had grown up with for 29 years before this all happened.
And I even felt that a little bit afterwards, like a certain
level of denial because of the fact that I had grown up in such
a secure upbringing. And, and even now I still sort
of feel that true, even though the, the, the pain has really
come to our door. And I certainly felt it.
But on a certain level, I felt that the the comfortable
upbringing that I've had has protected me from really
understanding and and absorbing the tragedy that happened.
You talk about it as a privilege and it is a privilege because
not, not everybody has, has that privilege and pain and loss is
not something one needs to chase as, as, as you've also
mentioned. But but when it comes and it
does come, we all have have our periods, our times to experience
it. When it, when it does come, the,
the stronger one is and the stronger the one's upbringing
is, the more one is equipped to handle it.
It's, it's not a negative. I think it's a an absolute
positive because loss is so powerful that no matter how much
privilege and comfort you've come from, when it hits, you
feel the pain. OK, there, there are a lot of
potential segues we could do from this back to the business
world and the career role, but I'm actually not going to do it.
I think that, you know, coming up on Tish above and with all
that we've gone through, we're going to do one episode of star
tank that goes a little bit off ground.
Then it's my podcast. So we're going to do it the way
I see fit. Think you're my lap.
And I'll leave it to anyone else who wants to, to think about the
house Lahore and the, and the, and the lessons they can take
away to their career if they want to.
But I think it's also important to to, to just take a step back
and say, this is Tish above. It's Tish above that is going to
be like no other as you referred to before and hopefully bezrath
Hashem, we can all find the strength to turn the pain and
channel it into the right direction.
Thank you.