Happiness Is a Big Problem!

[00:00:00] Today we're going to speak about happiness. [00:00:04] Dennis Prager was once invited to speak at ucla. [00:00:10] Hillel, which is a Jewish student organization at ucla, once invited Dennis Prager to speak many, many years ago. [00:00:17] I think it was his first time speaking there back then. And the Rabbi of Hillel called him up to arrange it with him. They made up time, place, everything else. [00:00:29] And then Dennis Prager asked this rabbi, what do you want me to speak about? [00:00:35] And the rabbi said, well, I want to speak about happiness. [00:00:41] Dennis Prager said, whoa, happiness is a big problem. [00:00:48] The Rabbi of Hillel said, exactly. This will be the title of your talk. [00:00:55] And this is how Dennis Prager came up with his very popular talk, which is titled Exactly Happiness is a Big Problem. [00:01:03] So we are going to be speaking about this very problem right now. [00:01:07] In the Torah portion of Chukat, there's a very strange story. [00:01:12] It is telling us about Jews rejoicing and singing and praising God for a miracle that was even greater or comparable to at least the splitting of the Red Sea. [00:01:28] What was this miracle? What happened? [00:01:31] As Jews were coming close to the land of Israel, they were traveling, and a nation that was living right there, called Amorites, they decided to ambush Jews as they were walking. [00:01:48] And they prepared a very clever plan. [00:01:53] There was a valley that was nested between two mountains, between two cliffs and shepherds. And people who deal with flock know that as a valley of death. [00:02:08] You probably remember reading in Psalms in Tehillim, one of the Most famous Psalms 23 says, and I shall pass through valley of death without fear. So valley of death is exactly that. [00:02:23] It's a valley which is in between two mountains from where animals of prey or other people could attack you as you are walking beneath them. [00:02:35] So Jews were supposed to walk through this valley of death, and. And Amorites set up a whole plan to ambush them as they would be going through there. [00:02:49] What did God do? God made a miracle. It was an avalanche. [00:02:54] Mountains shook, and these Amorites got buried under the rock. [00:03:00] They got buried under the mountains which were even higher than them. [00:03:05] So everything is great and fine, but the question is, how do we even know about that? Who was there to see it? [00:03:14] That was exactly the issue that God decided to take care of. God wanted Jews to know about this miracle, that he just saved them from this inevitable annihilation. [00:03:28] And he made another miracle. [00:03:31] Waters rushed through that area and washed off these dead bodies of Amorites. [00:03:40] And Jews saw those corpses just falling from the mountain top of them. Not only that, Jews also saw that the blood on them was fresh so they understood that they just died. [00:03:52] And that's how they understood that somebody was trying to ambush them from up there. And God made a miracle for them. [00:03:59] Now we know that God does not do miracles for no reason. [00:04:04] God resorts to miracles only as a last resort. [00:04:09] Not even as a plan B, as a plan C. Because God is trying to do everything in the most natural way. [00:04:15] Why would God make this special miracle so Jews will find out about being saved. We understand that God made a miracle to save the Jews because otherwise Jews would be completely decimated. We understand that here miracle was really needed. But once God already took care of the enemies of the Jews, why would God make another whole miracle just so the Jews would find out about it? What's the answer? The answer is precisely that we see how important it is for God to know about his miracles. [00:04:52] Why? [00:04:53] Not because God is desperate for us to thank Him. Not because God is looking for us, praising him. [00:05:00] Because God wants us to be happy. [00:05:05] You see, if I drive from point A to point B, as I usually do, and I'm just minding my business, and I see how a tree falls right immediately behind my car as I pass there, missing me by an inch, I will right away think, oh wow, thank God it was a miracle. God saved me because this tree could have fallen onto my car. [00:05:36] But what if I drive the same way and I mind my business and I pass by that spot and tree falls missing me by an inch, but I don't notice it? [00:05:49] Let's say it's a big storm, it's very noisy, and it's dark at night. I'm so focused on the road that I don't even notice that a tree just fell behind me. I don't know about this miracle. I didn't notice it. [00:06:02] So imagine my mood in the first situation where I noticed how there was a tree falling right behind me. And how I was saved by an inch. [00:06:14] And my state of mind and my mood in the second scenario where I'm not aware of it, the events are exactly the same. But what about me? My attitude is completely different. [00:06:25] And you know what? In the first case when I noticed it, I will be in a much better mood. My spirits will be uplifted. I will be thankful to God. I'll be thankful to Mother Nature. I will be thankful to my friends and surroundings. And I'll be thankful to everything and everyone. [00:06:46] When we live in this world, we are taking everything for granted. [00:06:52] I woke up in the morning, nothing hurts. I go to work and I get there safely. And I Do my business at work and I come back home. We take all this for granted, but in the meantime, God might be averting 20 different calamities that could have hit me and I don't even know about them now. I'll tell you even more than that. [00:07:15] Do you know that every research shows that people have negativity bias? [00:07:22] If you show a little child a pleasant picture and then you show the same little child a scary picture. We are talking about children who are two years old. Little children, they already understand the difference between pleasant and scary, but they've never learned any of our social constructs yet. So we can't blame it on societal norms. [00:07:45] You show it a little child, a scary picture and a pleasant picture, he is going to be focusing on a scary picture for longer than on a pleasant picture. [00:07:55] This is how we are wired. [00:07:57] If I left my party and I wrote on Facebook, this was a very nice party. Thank you everybody who came. I'm so happy that I was part of this event. [00:08:13] I left the party, wrote this note on Facebook, how many likes or comments am I going to get? [00:08:21] Barely any. Maybe a few. [00:08:23] Now imagine I left the same party and I write on Facebook, I hated this party. The DJ was terrible, the food was awful, the venue stunk. [00:08:35] I can promise you, everybody and anybody going to be chiming in, whether they're going to be agreeing with me and continuing to curse out the dj, the caterer and the venue, or maybe they'll be arguing with me, saying, no, no, no, the food was actually not so bad. Or maybe somebody else will write, yeah, and I was the other day in the same place and I also didn't like it. And somebody else will write, oh, but I was in this place and I did like it. And somebody else will write, I also had a different party, different place. It was also terrible. So a negative comment will always garnish bigger response. [00:09:10] Always. And you know what? [00:09:13] The people who are programming social media algorithms know that very well. That's why they always boost negative content. [00:09:24] That's why they always suppress positive content, because they want you to stay on their platform as long as possible. [00:09:31] Do you know who else knows that very well? Everybody in the media. [00:09:35] This is why there is a saying, if it bleeds, it leads. [00:09:40] Whenever there is blood, whenever there's something terrible going on, it's always going to be on the front line. [00:09:46] That's how they keep our attention. [00:09:49] Our psyche is wired towards negativity. Now, it comes from a very basic instinct of every human, the instinct of preservation, self protection. [00:09:59] Why because if everything is good, I don't need to focus on anything. If something is bad, I need to flee, or I need to react, I need to defend myself. We are wired like this to simply protect ourselves. [00:10:13] We understand why, but it doesn't negate the fact that we are hardwired to focus on negativity. [00:10:21] Now the question is, what do we do about it? [00:10:24] Rambam the Maimonides writes about person's traits and how we are supposed to conduct ourselves in his book of Mishnah Torah. And Rambam writes a very simple but genius rule of life. [00:10:43] If you find yourself having a specific trait which is dominating and you want to change or uproot this trait, you need to push yourself to the other extreme. [00:10:57] This way you'll end up being somewhere in the middle. For example, if I notice that I am very talkative, I talk too much, then I need to push myself to keep quiet more than an average person. And this will help me to be somewhere in the middle. [00:11:14] If I, on the other hand, notice that I'm antisocial, I don't like talking to people, I need to try to be more social than average person, and this will bring me somewhere to the middle, and so on and so forth. With every single trait, whether I'm too stingy or I'm too kind. [00:11:31] If I'm too stingy, I need to push myself to be extra kind. If I like wasting money, I need to try to be extra frugal. And if I overdo it, the other direction is going to help me to be somewhere in the middle. So now, when we know that the humans are hardwired to be focusing on negativity, we understand that the only way to overcome it is by overcompensating it. [00:11:55] Focusing on the positivity. We need to make an active effort to focus on positivity. [00:12:02] Therefore, we always need to make sure that we force ourselves to pay attention to the good things that are happening around us. We need to actively look for whatever good is happening around us. We, we need to try to always talk about it, talk about it more than we talk about everything else and share this with our friends. [00:12:25] This is why the Jewish law, first of all is instructing us. If something good happened to us, we need to make a dinner, a kidushan shul, or a special dinner about it. [00:12:37] We need to make sure to celebrate it. Why? Because we gather people around and we tell them about this story. [00:12:46] This is how we celebrate it. It specifically said that we should make a feast, we should make a meal why? Because people always come for dinner. [00:12:54] You call people for dinner, they'll come. And then once they're there, they are your captive audience. And you tell them then about the miracle that happened to you. [00:13:03] The same thing is with our daily prayers. Why do we have to recite the same prayers over and over again? Why do we have to always think about the same things and say the same things over and over? People get annoyed. People are wondering, me same prayers, you're mumbling them every single day. Yeah, but these prayers are me thanking God, me looking for what good has happened. [00:13:26] And this forces me to think more about everything good that is going on. [00:13:32] So this is how Jewish rituals are forcing me to think about all the good things. And that over compensates the negativity bias that we have. And this is why we have all these rituals that are associated with specifically thinking and focusing on good things. [00:13:52] The same thing with the Mitzvah of reciting a blessing. Usually in non Jewish world, what do people do? They take an apple and they just eat it. We recite a blessing. What does blessing mean? Blessing means that we are thanking God. [00:14:04] We are thanking God for having it. We are not taking this apple or the slice of bread for granted. [00:14:10] And this helps me to be a happier person. Every research shows that people are more thankful, they're happier. [00:14:19] Why? Because when I thank somebody for something, I recognize that without this somebody, I would not have this something. [00:14:29] Which means I'm not taking this something for granted. [00:14:33] This is the difference between a person who noticed how a tree missed them narrowly and didn't notice it. [00:14:41] This is why God in the story of Parashat Chukat, God goes to an extra step to make a miracle to tell Jews that they were saved to help them to be happier people.