We say Barchi Nafshi. Barchi Nafshi is a chapter of Tehillim that we say on Rosh Chodesh (new month). In this chapter, there is a Pasuk (verse): “Tashit choshech vihi layla, bo tirmos kol chayto ya'ar” (You make darkness, and it is night; in it all the beasts of the forest creep).
But the Gemara in Bava Metzia also refers to Barchi Nafshi and this Pasuk.
He may start to bump into things. He may hurt himself. If somebody asks him, “Why did you do that? Why did you trip on that chair? Why did you bump into that pole? Why would anyone do that?” of course, your answer would be, “I couldn't see. It was dark.” Darkness is when a person is not able to see what's in front of them.
In this world that we live in, even when there is light and we can see with our eyes, very often, in our decision-making, we are living in darkness. What do I mean? A person can make a decision today without knowing the consequences that are going to come from that decision tomorrow. Isn't that darkness?
There are hundreds of millions of sick people in the world today who made themselves sick. If you ask them, “Why did you do that? Why would you become addicted to things that are hurting you? You now have to struggle in your life. You used to be a normal person. Why did you do that?” they would tell you, if they were honest, that they didn't realize that certain decisions they made when they were younger would have this consequence, leading to where they are today.
Things just don't happen in life. Life is a place of cause and effect. A person does something; he sets off something else. Things don't magically happen. That's why Shlomo HaMelech says in Kohelet that when you see something good in the end, you have to know that something happened to produce it. Something happened in the beginning. As a very important Mishnah says, when you make one good choice in life, right behind it is another good choice. That means life is a connection. It's like a train with cars that are connected. Each car is a train. Each car is a Mitzvah (commandment), but they're all connected.
You do one good thing today; you make one good decision today. Tomorrow, or the next hour, is going to bring you another opportunity for another good decision, and another good decision. For example, a person prays in the Beit Knesset (synagogue) in the morning. That's a good decision. A person may not be used to doing that. It's hard to wake up and get out of the house; he has a schedule. We can understand that. But he knows it's the right thing to go to the Beit Knesset to say thank you to the Creator of the world for the life He's giving him, for the Beracha (blessing) He gives him, to ask Him for his needs, and to talk to Him. That's the right thing to do.
But sometimes it's complicated. It's hard. A person makes a good decision. He goes. He fights that laziness and the resistance to change that a person has to fight anytime they want to change something. But you know what? All of a sudden, he goes there and meets somebody. That meeting ends up becoming a good friendship, and maybe that friendship leads to getting involved in some sort of charity, and then maybe that leads to getting involved in some sort of learning. All of a sudden, that one decision a person made is actually connecting to more good decisions. That's the way life is. Life is not one major decision, and all of a sudden everything changes. Great people don't just show up all of a sudden. It's a process of decisions that are made, good decisions.
Of course, the Mishnah says the opposite is also true: negative decisions also lead to negative decisions. A person will never realize how one bad decision could have such far-reaching consequences. Choosing a bad friendship, for example, is a great example of that. You choose a bad friend, that leads you to a bad place, that leads you to a bad thing, and all of a sudden you look back in three years and say, “What happened to me? What have I become? I never dreamed that I would be this kind of person.” When you look back, you'll realize it wasn't huge decisions that you made. It was one bad choice that led to another bad choice. That's the way life is.
The problem with us humans in this world—or the challenge for us humans—is that, like darkness in the physical world, where we're not able to see what's coming and therefore might trip and hurt ourselves, we also don't see the consequences of our decisions. We're blind to them. So when we're blind to the consequences of our decisions, we'll make very bad decisions for ourselves and our future without even realizing it.
If a person asks you, “Why'd you do that? Why did you get involved with that?” you would say, “I had no idea that doing that then would bring this now. I didn't know. I bumped my head because I didn't see the pole. If I had seen the pole, I wouldn't have bumped my head, but I couldn't see.”
How many people today—how many, we'll call them billions of people; many of us, probably all of us—look back and have regrets in our life, regrets for decisions we made that led us to a place that, looking back, was a bad decision? And look what happened because of it. That's why this world is called a world of darkness.
I say that one of the biggest things we should have as people, especially as young people, is to know this Pasuk.
You're telling me that knowing it's a dark world is enough? Yeah. If a person knows they're in darkness, that's enough for them. That's enough for them. That is a tremendous help for walking forward. What do I mean?
If I sit in a dark room and, for some reason, my mind convinces me that it's not really dark, that whatever I'm looking at is really what's there, I don't see darkness. I think I see everything. That's very dangerous, because I'm going to walk around with confidence that I'm going somewhere. I don't see anything. Then I really will get hurt.
But if I'm in a dark room and I know that it's dark, that's a very important piece of information, because once I know it's dark, I'm able to navigate in darkness and be safe. Maybe I'll feel with my hands. This is what I'll feel around. I'll walk cautiously. Maybe I'll take a candle and light it so I can see a little bit ahead of me. Maybe I'll call out and say, “Is there somebody in the room who can help me figure out where I should go and where I shouldn't go?” But I first have to know that I'm living in a dark world.
The worst thing that can happen to a person, especially a young person, is to feel that this world is a world of clarity, a world of light. “I see clearly.” That is the worst state of a human being, because when you think everything is clear and it's not, you're going to walk with confidence. You're going to make decisions left and right without turning back, because you see with your eyes but don't realize it's a dark place. What you see is not what you think you see.
This may not have been the answer you would have given if somebody asked you what's the most important principle to live by in life, especially when growing up. But I believe—I can't rank the most important principle—but I believe this one has to be up there. If it's not number one, maybe number two. Because with this understanding of life, you're a young person, you're about to go out there and accomplish things in your life and achieve things in your life. You must know where you are.
If you ask me, “So what does this information help me with?” Okay, now I realize I'm in a dark world. You're right. There's a dark world. There are many people out there, myself included, who look back at decisions we made with confidence, and today we realize they were wrong. Today we realize they actually caused damage.
When I spoke to my friend in a certain way, at the time I was talking, I said, “This is the way I gotta tell him.” When I spoke to my wife about something and said it in a certain way, at the time I thought, “This is the way to do it. I thought this is the way to do it.” But when I looked back, I thought, “Oh, that was very damaging. I wish I didn't say that. I wish I didn't go there.” So I realize, yeah, this is a dark world.
So now if you ask me, “What's that going to help me with?” Okay, I got it. I hear it. It's logical. I'm not telling you anything that has to be analyzed very deeply. It's obvious. We all know that. It's a world of darkness. You just have to open your eyes a little bit to see how dark it is. So what do I do with that? How does that help me?
Once a person knows they're in darkness, their approach to life changes. It's not one thing they'll change. Their entire approach to living and to making decisions changes once they know they're in a dark world.
For example, Shlomo HaMelech tells us a most needy and necessary Pasuk. We need this Pasuk. He says, “Kol derech ish yashar be'einav”—every way of a man is right in his own eyes. He's in this world of darkness. Any road that any man takes in his life, in his eyes, is the perfect road. Don't ever be surprised that when you are making a decision, your opinion on that matter, in your eyes, is the perfect decision.
Anybody who has an opinion on a derech (road), there are a lot of people who have many roads in life. And what's amazing is that every single road, no matter what road the person chose, in his eyes, it's yashar, straight. It's the road to success. It's the road to happiness. It's the straight road to accomplishment. Any decision, no matter what lifestyle you have, in your eyes, you're going to feel that this is the perfect road. Anybody feel that way when they make decisions? Yes. Everybody. All of us.
Says Shlomo HaMelech, it's a rule. “Kol derech ish”—every way of a man. Any road that a man chooses, a woman of course as well, “yashar be'einav”—is right in his eyes. In his eyes, he's perfect. He knows exactly the derech of being the perfect father. He knows the derech of being a perfect son. He knows the derech of being a perfect husband. He knows the derech of being a perfect friend. He knows the derech of being happy in life. He knows exactly how to do it. He has the formula.
Says Shlomo HaMelech, if you feel this way, you're not special, because everybody in the world feels this way. “Kol derech ish.” No matter what the road is, even if the road you're on is the most detrimental road to your success, in your eyes it could look like the perfect road. Even the road of a drug addict. The road he took, in his eyes, was a perfect road.
Nobody thinks they're perfect. Don't get me wrong. Everyone knows they make mistakes in life. But their general direction, their road, they think is the perfect road. “I have the perfect road in religion. I know the exact formula for religion.” You know how many of us walk around that way? Now we know exactly how much. We know exactly what's called too much, what's called too little, where the exact line is. We have it all figured out.
No matter what road you chose, in your eyes, that's the only way to be. “Oh, that one, that's too much. Oh, that guy, it's too little. My road, perfect.” Everyone makes the same calculation. It's a rule. It's a rule. That rule comes from the world of darkness. When you live in darkness, any road you go on is perfect, because it's dark. You can't see. So no matter if you choose to—if the exit is to your left and you go to your right—in your eyes, it's the perfect road, because you don't see. In a world of darkness, anything you do, anywhere you go, you think that's perfect. But that's part of being in the dark.
So we have a problem. Shlomo HaMelech is saying it in a beautiful way. He's saying the same thing: it's a world of darkness, but now he's telling us what happens in darkness. Any road you choose, you think it's perfect. And we know, we all know very clearly, that not every road is a perfect road. That much we know.
So now we have a big problem. We have this predicament. We are in this world, this world of darkness. We are in this world of darkness. We don't really see ahead of us, and whatever we think, we think is the perfect thing to see. So how do we fix that?
Here's a young person ready to embark. The one who asked this question is ready to become something, to be successful. They want to be successful and happy in their life, like all of us. They want to be happily married, not just married, happily married. They want to be a happy teenager. They want to be a happy father and mother. They want to have a beautiful family. They want to have all good things in their life. They want to have peace of mind. They want to be satisfied in their life. They want many good things. Who doesn't want that? We all want the same things. We want a life of pleasure.
But we know that just because you want it doesn't mean you're getting it. You could want all you want. It doesn't mean you're actually going to achieve it. And the proof is all the billions of people out there who are not satisfied with their life. You'll find one in a million where the guy says, “Yeah, I'm fully satisfied. Baruch Hashem, great. Awesome. No complaints. I love my life. Every moment of my life is great.” When was the last time you met someone like that? You meet people. They have complaints. Sometimes they express them. Sometimes they don't. They're lacking the Simcha (joy) of Chayim, of life.
So what do we do now? We're stuck. We're stuck in a dark room, and we don't know what's ahead, but we know there's something good ahead, and we don't know how to get there. So how does this information change my life? This is a life changer. This is not a small thing, what I'm telling you today.
So we turn to Shlomo HaMelech, and he tells us, “What do you do in a dark room?” You don't know where to go because we don't see. To reach the proper destination, says Shlomo HaMelech, you have only one choice. You have one thing to do: “Ve'shomea le'etzah chacham”—a wise person takes advice. A wise person takes advice.
You sit in a dark room and need to get out of that room. You find somebody in that room with you who knows more about the room than you do, and you ask for advice.
If you go through life, especially being young—but again, this is for all ages—we're all, in a certain way, young. We're always young. From the day we're born onward, there's always another day ahead. But of course, as younger people, we have much more ahead of us, hopefully.
The advice Shlomo HaMelech would give you once you know you're in a dark world is: don't live life like you're the first person on the planet. What a fool you would be to live life as if you're Adam HaRishon and have to learn everything from your own experience. You can make many mistakes using your own experience. You can make mistakes that there's no turning back from.
Shomea le'etzah chacham. You want to be a person who has wisdom to make good choices, to end up in the right place? You have to ask for advice. You have to ask people who know more than you.
Now, of course, by nature, we don't like asking for advice. Our nature is to hate taking advice. Our nature is to hate taking advice. Our nature is to hate taking advice. Number one, we have an ego. If I take advice from somebody, that means I don't know as much as he does. That's not very exciting for me and my ego, because I like to believe that I know everything, even though I know I don't know everything. But I want to at least act like it. At least on the surface, I want to show that I know everything.
So now I'm going to go take advice from somebody—from my friend, from my cousin, from my father, from my rabbi, from my grandpa. That means I don't know as much. That's a big blow to my ego. I don't know if I'm ready for that.
We don't like taking advice because it makes us feel below what we want to look like out there. Plus, we feel that taking advice is taking away our independence. When was the last time someone told you something and you felt like, “Hey, who are you? I'm going to live my life, not your life.” When someone tells me to do something, automatically I want to reject it. Number one, ego. Number two, I'm an independent person. Are you trying to take my independence away and make decisions for me?
I believe these are two big blocks for a person who doesn't use this power. This advice of Shlomo HaMelech—it's obvious what he's saying. It's not complicated. If you're in a dark room and you don't know where to go, and someone is there, of course, ask him. But it's not so easy, because you're dealing with our ego and our desire for independence, for freedom.
But we must answer those questions. As far as ego is concerned, we have to be honest with ourselves. And let's be honest with the people around us. Of course we don't know everything. Of course there's always something to learn. When we go to a doctor and he tells us, “This is what you should do,” we listen because we understand he knows more than us. It's okay that someone knows more than me. In fact, it's a sign of a great person who gets up and says, “You know something? I don't know. I don't know.”
I met somebody years ago who was head of human resources at Verizon. He interviewed probably thousands of people a year. That was his job: hiring people for the company, at all levels. I was having a conversation with him, and one of the questions I asked him was, “How do you know if someone is reliable or not? You meet someone for the first time, you don't know their family, you don't know their upbringing, you don't know anything about them. How would you know if a person is qualified? You look at their papers, but that doesn't tell you anything. It doesn't tell you the story.”
Among the things he told me was something very interesting. You'd appreciate this. He says, “During my meeting with the person,” he says, “often I would bring a question to the table that I am sure this person never thought about in his life.”
So you sit with someone for 15 minutes, you understand where he's from, you understand what he's all about. You bring up a topic that you know for a fact the guy has never thought about in his life. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
“You know, what do you think about the situation in Middle Africa where the tribes are fighting with each other? What do you think about that?” You know for a fact the guy has no clue. “What do you think is going on in the Middle East between Israel and the other countries?” The guy has no clue about that. “I ask a question that I know the person never thought about. I ask, why would you do that? What could he give you about something he never thought about?”
He says, “I want to see his answer.” He says, “The guy who starts giving an opinion—‘Oh, I think, you know, the issue is this and that’”—he says, “that guy is not reliable. He's the person who says, ‘You know, I don't know. I don't know. I never thought about it. I don't know.’ He says, ‘That's someone you could rely on.’”
A Goy (non-Jew) told me this. He's the head—he was the head, I don't know where he is now—of hiring people at Verizon. A person who can't say, “I don't know,” is not reliable. It's a beautiful thing to say, “I don't know.” You know why? Because when you say, “I don't know,” then whatever you do know means you actually know. But if you say you know everything, that means you probably know nothing. The only value of knowledge you could be trusted with is when you say, “You know something? This, I don't know.” That's something to be respected for. That's real ego. That's real respect.
We think we're going to have respect by thinking and making everyone think that we know everything. That's a mistake. It's a huge blow to the ego. We want respect, don't we? Get up in front of people and say, “Gentlemen, I made a mistake.”
Imagine you go to your family. One time I had an issue. I did something that later on I felt was not right. I said something to my son that I felt was not the right thing to say. It took me a lot of strength to do this. It was very hard. But I ended up apologizing to him. I told him, “You know what happened two days ago? You did something, it was wrong, but I want to tell you the way I reacted was wrong.” I apologized. It was hard to say that. But I tell you, there wasn't a greater feeling. I could tell you the appreciation and the respect that I had for him. But the relationship changes. You get the most respect from people when you stand up and say, “I don't know.”
But in the world of darkness, we think the opposite. We think, “No. When everyone thinks we know everything, then we get respect.” It's not true. So that's number one.
As far as independence, it's true. When somebody tells me what to do, then I don't have independence. It's true. But when I myself go ask somebody for advice, that's my own choice. When I go to a doctor and see his credentials and his experience and ask him what he thinks, I'm not giving up my free choice. I'm not giving up my independence. The opposite. I'm choosing to ask him.
Losing freedom is when someone takes it away from you. But when you go and ask advice from someone who knows more than you, that's not called losing your independence. Again, in the darkness of this world, somehow our mind convinces us, “Oh, you can't listen to that. He's taking away your independence.” No, he's not. It depends on the approach. If you need advice and you go for advice, that's your own free choice.
All people Shlomo is talking to, especially young people—is there a greater piece of advice to give your son or daughter? Is there a greater piece of advice that I can give a young lady, a young man? You're living in a dark world. What you think you see may not be the reality. Your decisions today will make a very big difference tomorrow. Don't ever allow your mind to convince you that what you're seeing is 100% clear. Rather, find yourself a mentor. Find yourself a rabbi. Find yourself a role model. Find yourself a role model. Find yourself someone who loves you. Find yourself someone who not only loves you, but has experience and wisdom to be able to help you. Go to him. Say, “You know, I need advice.” There's not enough of that. There's not enough people going to others saying, “I need your advice.” There are a lot of people giving advice. But there's not enough people asking for advice.
When He made the world, He set an example for all of us. Nobody is too old. Nobody is too smart. And nobody is too holy not to ask for advice. The Creator of the world Himself set the record straight when He made the world.
The Pasuk in the Torah says, “Naaseh”—let us make—Adam. Let us make men. And I write this in the Quran. Let us make men. Rabbis ask, “Let us? Who's making men? Isn't God the Creator by Himself? Hashem Echad? Hashem is one. Who's He talking to? He has partners?”
The Midrash says that Hashem, before He created mankind, first asked the angels for advice. “What do you think? Should I make men? Is it worthwhile?” Does Hashem need to ask advice from the angels? Surely not. But we need to learn from that. Hashem is setting an example for all of us. It doesn't make a difference who you are. When you have decisions to make in your life, small ones, especially big ones, don't do it on your own.
When you're going to school, you're going to high school now. You're 14 years old. Before you go to high school, ask somebody older, “What should be my attitude toward high school? What should be my attitude toward my studies? What should be my attitude toward my friends? How do I deal with this challenge?”
A person of such nature clearly will end up finding success in life. Because success, if you would turn on the lights, is right in front of our face. The problem is we live in a dark world. We just need someone to turn the lights on for us.
To me, I would say if there's one thing I would want my children to know, it's this principle. No matter what you think, you think it's perfect. But it's not. That's why, be a smart person. Get a mentor in your life. And go ask, “What should I do to bring success in this situation or in general?”
Wishing you all a wonderful day. It's great to see everybody.