Dr Craig Goodman A B HOW TO BE HUMAN

Shalom my name is Dr Craig Goodman or my Hebrew name is igam my ear and I'm here today speaking to you from hiab brute I have the honor and the cavod to be here and try and make some links between the amazing world of Torah yish kite and psychology and we all know that Freud was Jewish the havil he was you know not a religious guy but he was a Jew and a lot of the insights and the theories that he wrote we can directly link to the Torah to the kabala let me just tell you a little bit about myself as a backdrop for the story I came from the United States originally and I grew up in a

non-religious home and over the years you know one thing led to another I eventually married or I got engaged to someone who was religious and really I slowly started doing chuva becoming a BAL chuva still am still doing chuva every day now it's been about 20 years now 20 a little over 20 years that I've been a BAL Chua now it hasn't been easy but really life is not meant to be easy sometimes well really everything that's difficult has Holiness and everything that's easy you usually doesn't it's much harder to pray and to study and to act decently to be considerate to people it's much easier

to do the opposite it's much harder to be patient and be understanding and sympathize whereas the opposite to get upset or to blame or to be angry always this kind of dichotomy between plus and minus positive and negative difficult and easy it's really one of the main bases of creation Now if we're already talking about the subject of creation let's talk about why is there creation why are we here what's this whole psychology business either it's really this study of the neish the soul Soul the psyche for lack of a better word but what is the psyche what is being spiritual spiritual doesn't

necessarily have to be religion spirituality is something that every human being has and possesses that's what makes us different from the animals spirituality as I've learned from other people is comprised of three three things it's comprised of first our ability to tell the difference between right and wrong to differentiate second to learn the ability to learn from our mistakes and third and not least last of all least our ability to find meaning in our lives to ask ourselves what is the meaning in our lives what is the meaning in what we do the meaning of life the ultimate question what's

the meaning of life everybody always asks hey do you know what the meaning of life is well from my understanding the meaning of life is to recognize that there is a king of the universe that there is a creator and without recognizing that everything is just physical matter this entire world is really made up of particles and molecules these molecules are jumping around bouncing around and according to their density that will determine the hardness of the material there's even a scale of hardness with the hardest material on the planet being in a diamond one of the most valuable materials and

most precious and rare all these molecules as I learned from a very brilliant lecture of rabi RTI he said and this is a based on a a fact in physics that if you take all the empty space in the molecules and you condense down all the actual physical matter which is really the shell the circular shell of the molecules of the part particles you literally can compress the entire planet all the mountains all the skyscrapers all the buildings and homes and everything on the planet into the size of a ball roughly the size of a basketball Got the Whole World in my hands sounds familiar recently in

the past year or two scientists for the longest time have beening trying to understand what is inside the particles what is inside these molecules can't just be empty space and they needed to find out that there's something there in order to bring together all their theories now I'm not a physicist and I'm not claiming to have enough knowledge to do but I do understand from what I've read that recently they finally found there is something there they called it the God particle hm sounds interesting they know there's something there now they can prove that there's something there but they

don't know what it is they don't know how to observe what it is likewise for the longest time when I was a when I was a child in school I remember learning about gravity and the laws of gravity the laws of physics Newton the simple apple falling on his head that we always were taught that gravity is what keeps the solar system and the cosmos together this the Milky Way galaxy that we live in it keeps it together and we thought that gravity is the force that allows everything to stay as it is and not to just you know go into chaos or to change or to become random creation renews itself every

every day the planets stay on their course every day they do the same rotations the same paths how is that possible today physics has found that gravity doesn't explain it it's not enough only there has to be something else so they came up with I don't know how long ago 10 years ago or what or more they came up with the theory that there has to be an energy force and some sort of matter that exists in all the empty space that we think is empty can't be that it's just empty space so they call it dark matter and dark energy they don't know how to measure it or see it or identify it but it has

to they know it has to be there and it has to exist because nothing else can expl explain how the universe exists now let's bring it back to creation Now what's the purpose what's the meaning we study psychology to try to understand the pathology the Psychopathology of people we try to use psychology and the various tools the various therapeutic methods in order to heal people in order to have them and help them to live better better healthier lives but we see more and more people have various disorders anxiety disorders obsessive compulsive disorders depression I once even heard that most of

our sicknesses and illnesses come psychosomatically meaning psychologically we create our own illnesses through internal suffering internal pain I learned from a big Mystic a big RAV mikal a very holy man that I heard a lecture of his that he said that the the gr um shomik said that he learned all his life tud the gamor and that he EV eventually and he learned all the holy books and all the the commentators and all I mean everything that he could pinpoint everything in the tomwood and where it's found in the mishna and where everything in the mishna he could pinpoint where everything is in

the in the five books of Moses T and he could pinpoint the whole Torah in parat Hau hainu heavens and the Earth and he can pinpoint the whole Paras vinu in the first chapter of braet of Genesis of creation and he could identify and compact all of that into the first sentence in Genesis in braet El seven words in Hebrew seven words to represent the seven days of creation six days he created the seventh he rested that's why we keep the Sabbath in order to show him Hashem we recognize you're here you told us take the day off so we're doing so in your honor this is our payment now everyone in the

world all the Nations use a 7-Day week they even for I heard one time or read that in England I believe they even tried to make an eight day week once but it didn't work it didn't last they got rid of it really quick why is that the seven is a very internal integral number in nature in creation we have seven blessings seven BR Chev when someone gets married in a Jewish traditional ceremony we have S weeks from the time of Exodus from the time of the after pesak till sh till the giving of the Torah 49 days 7even time seven there's more and more and more we can even go into the numerology of

things and it's endless many of the lectures here at hiab they talk about this in depth you can check it out you can look on the net today and find it out very easily and let's go back to the gr the gr was able to take the whole seven words of the first PUK the first line in the Torah in Genesis and he can compact it all into one letter bet now I've heard many explanations during the years that I've studied and been at balua why does the Torah start with bet and not with olive and bet signifies According to some uh theories or some some uh uh beliefs bet signifies beina which is understanding

that understanding is the essence of being human is the essence of being a spiritual entity understanding the difference between right and wrong understanding what our mistakes are what is good and what is not good for us and how to learn from our mistakes there's even a tractate in the in the in the gammar in the talud that says that a person can only do D Torah things of Torah if he first fails he has to fail in order to do mitzvah we all have to fail at some point in our lives many of us fail over and over again going back to the first person or first people Adam and Eve Adam the first two

people that were created they made an error within literally the first day of creation according to the midrash there's a m there's a there's a difference of opinion that says that it took only 7 hours and the other is 3 hours until they actually ate from the Tree of knowledge which was the only Mitzvah they had they didn't have the understanding that Hashem said don't eat from the tree you've got Paradise you've got everything so really we were put on this planet to use that understanding to learn and connect to Hashem to realize that everything everything we have is because of him

everything in the physical world he created including us in order that we will have the Merit and the ability to recognize that he is here that he exists to unify his name now I believe that Olive signifies Hashem Elohim one a love Hashem is the Olive and we are the BET and there is no bet without olive and once you have the two together it's alive bet alphabet That's the basis of all the languages and the process of communication all throughout time going back to the oldest book that was ever found gilgames talks about the story of the great flood this a time um there is languages what we

use to communicate language is my main tool as a psychologist how do I communicate with people many of our disagreements and our problems come from lack of communication or miscommunication or problems in the way we communicate and how do we do it we all go to Nursery School in kindergarten and first grade great and on and we learn the AL the alphabet the olive bed all of it came from Hebrew from the holy tongue the lodes and the Greeks saw it was a great tool for expression and communication so they kind of borrowed it from us from Hashem from the Torah so they made the alphabet alphab beta

and then from there that the Romans came and borrowed it from the Greeks and made Latin and from Latin you can trace most of the modern languages today back to that English and French and Spanish and Portuguese all these languages have commonalities and they all come with the actual tool of expression through letters so if we're able to connect Olive and bet if we're able to connect ourselves to Hashem then we give meaning to the world and to Creation to who we are and what we are now was interesting recently I was I was in a staff meeting in the hospital and I mentioned um I said good

morning and someone kind of uh I don't know lovingly and kind of in a humorous way made fun of my American accent cuz because I live here in Israel and said you know I said BTO which is good morning in Hebrew and they kind of made fun say BTO you know they made fun of my accent I didn't take it the wrong way I laughed and then it you know led me to some other thoughts about you know how we communicate with each other and I said that really I mean whatever I say is is just a metaphor for what I want to communicate and then I asked everybody the staff the doctors the nurses says what is

metaphor in Hebrew everybody said metaphora what's metaphora it's the Hebrew word for metaphor that's what the Israelis tend to do modern Hebrew takes a lot of words like telisia it's from television and they just kind of put a little spin on it a Hebrew spin an Israeli spin you know so we went we looked it up or I went and looked it up theem and found that the word in Hebrew which there was a lot of words listed I had to ask the person the staff member was most proficient in Hebrew and English to tell me which one of those words was the most correct pertinent word and they said the word is

hasah hasah I didn't know what that meant I said what does it mean and they said something borrowed something borrowed on alone and then I said wow life is just one big metaphor I didn't realize I had this profound thought all from Good Morning look where I got from a simple good morning to realize that everything is borrowed from Hashem everything was given to us the alive bet communication the Torah books it's endless check check it out connect to it use it in the name of Heaven theem Shi may we all recognize and come together and be good to one another so that Hashem will want to be good to us may we all have love amen