Latest / In the Valley of Giants / A Dark Knight Rises from the Shadows of Aushwitz | Rabbi Cary Friedman | ITVOG Ep. 17

Transcript

A Dark Knight Rises from the Shadows of Aushwitz | Rabbi Cary Friedman | ITVOG Ep. 17 · In the Valley of Giants

• 0:00
  We're just meeting each other, and what I'm about to do is
• 0:02
  we're about to go from zero to 60 within a couple of seconds
• 0:06
  because I'm now about to bare my soul and tell you much more
• 0:09
  about me than you or probably anybody in the world would want
• 0:12
  to know. My mother is a Holocaust
• 0:14
  survivor. She should live and be well.
• 0:16
  She went through the war. She was a hidden child.
• 0:21
  She, for all of that, had a chance to see a tremendous
• 0:24
  amount of brutality. She watched family members taken
• 0:28
  away right before, right before her eyes.
• 0:31
  And but for Hakoroshbaru, whose plan and his decision to to save
• 0:38
  her so she could create the family she created, she would
• 0:41
  have been dragged along with them.
• 0:43
  So when I was growing up, I was a little kid, I heard these
• 0:48
  stories. Our house was always filled with
• 0:51
  all of the Tantas and the fetters who were our simulated
• 0:56
  family members, but they were Holocaust survivors.
• 0:59
  And a typical, a typical dinner table, let's say a Yontiff meal
• 1:05
  or something, would be, they'd go around the table and people
• 1:08
  would talk about, for example, the closest they ever came to
• 1:11
  being killed. These stories were unreal.
• 1:15
  And I was a little kid. I was 678.
• 1:20
  The trauma of those kinds of things, the trauma of that
• 1:23
  image. My mother was in a room
• 1:26
  somewhere with her, one of her set, a set of aunt, aunt and
• 1:32
  uncle, and the Nazis burst into the place and dragged them away.
• 1:39
  My my mother saw things. I, I was not unfamiliar with
• 1:42
  these things. And to process the trauma, it
• 1:46
  was almost overwhelming. To see the Batman TV show
• 1:51
  starring Adam West in the 1960s and the concept.
• 1:55
  For all of you know how campy, it wasn't a joke.
• 1:57
  I had no idea that it was a joke.
• 1:59
  It was my first exposure to the Batman of what I saw.
• 2:03
  What I understood was here was a here was a character at the age
• 2:07
  of eight, he witnessed his parents killed.
• 2:09
  It just seems so senseless, the brutality, the tragedy, and
• 2:13
  ripped from a life of ease, comfort, affluence, all those
• 2:16
  kinds of things. Suddenly he was standing there
• 2:18
  and just witnessed his parents murdered before his eyes.
• 2:22
  And the story is about what a human being does in response to
• 2:26
  that. The comments you made before
• 2:28
  about the willingness to stand up to evil, not to just give in,
• 2:32
  not just to succumb to surrender, to just be rendered
• 2:36
  impotent in the face of that. So I use The Batman to process
• 2:42
  through that trauma. Hello everyone, we're privileged
• 2:49
  today to have Rabbi Friedman on the show.
• 2:52
  Rabbi Kerry Friedman is a multi faceted educator, author and
• 2:55
  chaplain recognized for his pioneering work in providing
• 2:58
  spiritual and ethical support to the law enforcement community.
• 3:02
  He serves as a consultant to the FBI's Behavioral Service Service
• 3:06
  Unit and is the Associate Director of the Law Enforcement
• 3:08
  Survival Institute. We developed curricula focused
• 3:11
  on spiritual survival for officers facing the rigors of
• 3:14
  high stress careers. An expert in the intersection of
• 3:18
  pop culture and faith, he is famously known for his book
• 3:21
  Wisdom from the Bat Cave, which uses the Batman mythology to
• 3:25
  illustrate profound moral and spiritual lessons.
• 3:27
  Along with many others farm that he has penned.
• 3:30
  In addition to specialized training for agencies like the
• 3:33
  FBI and various police academies, he's an accomplished
• 3:36
  author of several books on marriage and Jewish philosophy,
• 3:40
  holding a master's degree in electrical engineering from
• 3:43
  Columbia University and rabbinical coordination from
• 3:45
  Yeshiva University. We hope you enjoy.
• 3:48
  Rabbi Friedman Yashikov, thank you very much for being here.
• 3:51
  We're all very excited to have you on the show today.
• 3:52
  So thank you for taking the time.
• 3:54
  It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
• 3:57
  Of course, I have to tell you a very funny story.
• 4:01
  So my father is a deep thinker. And as all sons, we try to learn
• 4:05
  as much as we can from our fathers.
• 4:07
  And my father usually sends me these really interesting,
• 4:11
  thought provoking articles ever since I was a little kid,
• 4:14
  Hushguf and philosophy was something to be discussed at the
• 4:17
  table. And my father said, I have a
• 4:19
  have a safer for you that I really want you to read.
• 4:22
  OK, because I'm going to send it to you.
• 4:25
  So he sends me the safer and like it took a while to get
• 4:27
  there. And it's wisdom from the
• 4:30
  Batcave, which was not the first like, you know, title of a safer
• 4:34
  that I thought I was going to get for my father.
• 4:37
  But I was excited to read it. And I have to say, I really
• 4:42
  enjoyed it. I thought it was, I thought it
• 4:45
  was so much fun and I agreed with with basically everything
• 4:49
  in there. And there really is wisdom from
• 4:52
  the back cave. Although I guarantee Rabbi
• 4:53
  Friedman, if it wasn't for you much, we would have gotten that
• 4:55
  wisdom. So it's really it's it's fun for
• 4:59
  me. It's a for for to have you on
• 5:01
  the show for us to talk to you about these these amazing topics
• 5:03
  that I want to bring up with you.
• 5:04
  So so thank you. You're very kind to say all
• 5:07
  that. I'm I'm happy to be, I'm excited
• 5:09
  to be here. OK, so I actually want to start
• 5:12
  off on that theme with Batman. Why what, what's this
• 5:16
  fascination that that you have with Batman, Batman in
• 5:19
  particular? Before you answer, I just want
• 5:21
  to give a little bit of a of my outlook of what this is in terms
• 5:25
  of, you know, pop culture. I find it interesting.
• 5:28
  You know, Nietzsche was was right in in a certain sense when
• 5:32
  he said that, you know, God is dead and we have killed him.
• 5:34
  I think that society has become more secular over the last
• 5:39
  century plus, but what happens is, is that that those deep
• 5:44
  messages and that religiosity and that philosophical push, it
• 5:48
  just kind of bleeds out and other places.
• 5:52
  So for example, Lord of the Rings or the Star Wars saga.
• 5:58
  So they're all stories that I think are very meaningful for
• 6:01
  people because it shows the paragon, it shows the adventure
• 6:05
  from being mundane and then encountering evil and not
• 6:09
  backing down and becoming someone bigger.
• 6:11
  And I think that that's why they have such cultural significance.
• 6:14
  And I'm not really involved so much in pop culture, but like,
• 6:17
  I, I know that there's a, there was a movie, the cat.
• 6:19
  I don't know how recent it is, but Thor, which is I think, I
• 6:22
  think I don't know how recent it is, but I find it funny that
• 6:26
  it's like the people will go to the movies to watch a movie
• 6:29
  about some superior called Thor, which is literally taken from,
• 6:33
  you know, mythology. So I I think that I think that
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  there are these really path powerful messages that are
• 6:38
  wrapped up in in certain pop culture things.
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  And when they do, they become really effective.
• 6:43
  So I'm assuming at least this was my feeling, especially after
• 6:47
  reading your book, and I completely agreed, is that
• 6:50
  Batman does have a lot of those very, I think, deep paragon
• 6:54
  ideas that are are very Jewish and they're very true.
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  And they're very deep in in and not wallowing in despair and
• 7:03
  being more than nothing and looking at our fears and looking
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  and and seeing them as an invitation to become something
• 7:10
  great. But what does it mean to you?
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  What what's your fascination? Thanks for taking all the good
• 7:17
  material. I mean it that.
• 7:21
  Way. Yeah, OK.
• 7:21
  No, I'm. I'm not mad.
• 7:24
  No, I still have. I have a few things maybe Amir
• 7:26
  Sashem to contribute. You really asked.
• 7:31
  You asked 2 questions. Excuse me.
• 7:33
  One of them is the reason for my fascination with the Batman.
• 7:38
  And then you were discussing the pop culture in general, our
• 7:47
  society, why our society seems to be obsessed with Batman,
• 7:50
  because it really is obsessed with Batman.
• 7:53
  So those, those are the that, that those are the gateways to
• 7:58
  lots of profundity. I think in terms of why I'm
• 8:01
  fascinated or really why I'm obsessed with the Batman.
• 8:04
  So we're just meeting each other, and what I'm about to do
• 8:08
  is we're about to go from zero to 60 within a couple of seconds
• 8:11
  because I'm now about to bare my soul and tell you much more
• 8:14
  about me than you or probably anybody in the world would want
• 8:17
  to know. My mother is a Holocaust
• 8:20
  survivor. She should live and be well.
• 8:22
  She went through the war. She was a hidden child.
• 8:27
  She, for all of that, had a chance to see a tremendous
• 8:31
  amount of brutality. She watched family members taken
• 8:34
  away right before, right before her eyes.
• 8:38
  And but for Hakorshbaru, who's plan and his decision to to save
• 8:44
  her so she could create the family she created, she would
• 8:48
  have been dragged along with them.
• 8:50
  So when I was growing up, I was a little kid, I heard these
• 8:55
  stories. Our house was always filled with
• 8:57
  all the Tantas and the fetters who were our simulated family
• 9:03
  members. But they were Holocaust
• 9:04
  survivors. And a typical, a typical dinner
• 9:09
  table, let's say a Yontiff meal or something, would be they'd go
• 9:13
  around the table and people would talk about, for example,
• 9:17
  the closest they ever came to being killed.
• 9:20
  These stories were unreal. And I was a little kid.
• 9:24
  I was 678. Father, you should rest in
• 9:30
  peace. My father was an American.
• 9:31
  His family, all four of my grandparents, came from Vilna,
• 9:34
  but at different times. They, you know, those who came
• 9:39
  to America. My mother and her mother came
• 9:42
  after the war. My father's parents came at the
• 9:44
  beginning, like in 19 O 119 O 2, when they were kids, when they
• 9:48
  were babies. But my father was an American
• 9:52
  and he would listen to these people.
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  My father was a big, strong man. He was 6, three, 280 lbs.
• 9:58
  He was a very formidable, imposing fellow.
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  He should rest in peace. And he would turn to me and to
• 10:04
  my brother and he would say to us, these people are
• 10:06
  unbelievable. If, you know, if we had been
• 10:09
  there, we weak Americans, we, we would have been wiped out.
• 10:14
  The trauma of those kinds of things, the trauma of that
• 10:17
  image. My mother was in a room
• 10:20
  somewhere with her, one of her set, a set of aunt, aunt and
• 10:26
  uncle, and the Nazis burst into the place and dragged them away.
• 10:33
  My my mother saw things. I I was not unfamiliar with
• 10:36
  these things and to process the trauma, it was almost
• 10:41
  overwhelming. It was almost overwhelming.
• 10:44
  My my childhood was spent in a little town in Connecticut, but
• 10:49
  it was really spent in some underground bunker, a potato
• 10:54
  cellar, things like that. Outside of Vilna back in during
• 10:58
  during World War 2 to deal with that trauma.
• 11:01
  I would have lost my mind if it hadn't been for The Batman.
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  When I was 4/4, I had the opportunity to see the Batman TV
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  show starring Adam West in the 1960s.
• 11:16
  And the concept for all of you know how camp, it wasn't a joke.
• 11:20
  I had no idea that it was a joke.
• 11:21
  It was my first exposure to the Batman and what I saw, what I
• 11:26
  understood was here was a here was a character.
• 11:29
  At the age of eight, he witnessed his parents killed.
• 11:32
  It just seems so senseless, the brutality, the tragedy, and
• 11:35
  ripped from a life of ease, comfort, affluence, all those
• 11:38
  kinds of things. Suddenly he was standing there
• 11:40
  and he just witnessed his parents murdered before his
• 11:44
  eyes. And the story is about what a
• 11:46
  human being does in response to that.
• 11:49
  The comments you made before about the willingness to stand
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  up to evil, not to just give in, not just to succumb to
• 11:56
  surrender, to just be rendered impotent in the face of that.
• 12:02
  So I used The Batman to process through that trauma.
• 12:05
  It was much easier for me to think about this.
• 12:10
  You know, Bruce Wayne to me is a very living human being, but
• 12:15
  he's really composed of dots on a page, their four main colors
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  in the printing in the ink process of printing comic books
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  and the stories. As I as I was growing up, gave
• 12:26
  me an opportunity to process through and to think about this
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  in a philosophical way. There was a story from when I
• 12:31
  was a kid where whatever the premise of it is in some
• 12:34
  supernatural way. Bruce Wayne is given the
• 12:36
  opportunity to go to some other reality, some alternate timeline
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  or something, some parallel universe, and he can spare the
• 12:44
  Bruce Wayne of that world if he can intervene and he can prevent
• 12:49
  the murder of this little Bruce Wayne's parents.
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  So he can stop all of that, all of that pain, all that trauma,
• 12:55
  all that, everything which he knows so well.
• 12:58
  So the story is filled with this kind of hush gothic, if I can
• 13:02
  use that term, discussion of is this really the best thing for
• 13:07
  this reality is Bruce Wayne. If his parents in fact are not
• 13:12
  killed, he'll grow up to be the lazy spoiled Playboy that he in
• 13:16
  our reality only pretends to be. So perhaps for his neshama is
• 13:20
  the best thing for him, the person he would ultimately
• 13:23
  become his parents murder. Now to think about that in real
• 13:27
  terms with real people. I'm with my family, with I'm
• 13:31
  Israel and Vilna in Europe to thinking those would be
• 13:34
  disrespectful. It would be.
• 13:35
  Unconscionable. It would be impossible to think
• 13:37
  about. But here it was as a kid, and I
• 13:38
  was thinking about that. Wait a second.
• 13:40
  Sometimes tragedy is the spur to extraordinary accomplishment, to
• 13:45
  development of the ennoblement of character, the refinement of
• 13:48
  our soul. I would be thinking about those
• 13:50
  kinds of things. The Batman character saved my
• 13:54
  sanity and formed the foundation of a lot of the way I look at
• 13:57
  the world I've encountered. Other Holocaust survivor
• 14:01
  children who have dealt with the.
• 14:03
  Trauma in other kinds of ways. In sometimes what I think.
• 14:07
  I think mine is completely psychologically normal.
• 14:09
  In fact, I think it's awesome. Of course, that's a self-serving
• 14:12
  analysis, but I've seen other people.
• 14:15
  Who have dealt with it? In other ways, I know one lady,
• 14:18
  she's a little older than I am. She used Barbie, the image of
• 14:23
  Barbie, this fantasy, this idealized world.
• 14:27
  No issues, no problems. I admit I'm not familiar with
• 14:30
  Barbie, but I imagine it's like that where everything is just
• 14:33
  surface and there are no real issues.
• 14:36
  So she's she developed an obsession with that.
• 14:39
  It helped her cope. I'm not here to judge, I use
• 14:42
  mine. I think the idea of the Batman
• 14:45
  was the closest parallel. In microcosm that I could
• 14:48
  identify that allowed me to deal with all of this Holocaust
• 14:52
  baggage that I have in, in terms of, if I may, the second part,
• 14:58
  in terms of why our culture is obsessed with Batman.
• 15:01
  You know what? I'm going to interrupt you.
• 15:03
  Excuse me on your first answer. Do you feel that as you were you
• 15:08
  were around 8 years old when you had exposure to to Batman, would
• 15:11
  you say? I was four the first time and
• 15:15
  then you know, over the years you think an intensified 678 my
• 15:19
  my older brother would would buy any Batman comic books.
• 15:23
  So the intense relationship started.
• 15:27
  I was 7 or 8. Did that, did that change
• 15:30
  developmentally as you got? I mean, it sounds like to me
• 15:33
  that it did. But as you got older, then you
• 15:35
  were able to interpret more and then grow more from that
• 15:38
  philosophy. Like, do you see that guiding
• 15:40
  you through stages? It sounds like, yeah.
• 15:42
  But is that true? Absolutely.
• 15:44
  Absolutely. And the truth is that the more
• 15:49
  that I learned in day school, I would look at these ideas and I
• 15:54
  would, and I would hear the real stuff, the real stuff.
• 15:58
  Because the truth is Torah is of course the real stuff.
• 16:00
  But I would look at it and I would, I would bring it back
• 16:03
  home. I'd bring it to the Batman, to
• 16:05
  the comics. And I would identify things and
• 16:08
  I, I would identify these themes on a deeper level.
• 16:10
  I could relate to them. The.
• 16:13
  The content, we'll have to talk about it some point.
• 16:15
  Our conversation about the you know, the danger, the question,
• 16:20
  God forbid. I'm not trying to dilute Torah
• 16:22
  by introducing, you know, it's possible to, I to adulterate
• 16:25
  something by putting in foreign elements.
• 16:27
  And I've spent my entire life, certainly in the writing of the
• 16:30
  book, I was very, very careful not to take Torah because
• 16:33
  anytime you have Torah and something other than Torah, so
• 16:38
  the result is that it dilutes it.
• 16:40
  It's not just that it dilutes it, it changes it such that it's
• 16:42
  not Torah anymore. So the, the question always the
• 16:46
  challenge is to make sure and I, I have had this challenge my
• 16:49
  entire life to make sure that I wasn't introducing some foreign
• 16:52
  element that was foreign, external, antagonistic, any of
• 16:56
  those things to Torah. But what I thought when I was a
• 17:00
  kid. And caste Hashem, I think it was
• 17:03
  confirmed by the, you know, Tamika humming with who I with
• 17:06
  whom I consulted later on in life.
• 17:08
  But I saw them as I saw the Batman stories.
• 17:11
  Again, I'm talking about when I was young.
• 17:13
  This a long time ago was a different world.
• 17:15
  The stories were different than they are today.
• 17:18
  But I found them to be illustrations of the principles
• 17:22
  that I was learning in day school.
• 17:24
  My riband were teaching me all kinds of things.
• 17:27
  And then I saw them illustrated in a dramatic way, in a visceral
• 17:31
  way that. Allowed it to, you know, bring
• 17:33
  it back and put it deep into my guts, which is what I really
• 17:36
  wanted. I want to be able to understand
• 17:38
  it in a very tangible way, and the Batman stories did that for
• 17:41
  me. But you're right, absolutely
• 17:43
  right. The older I got, the more Torah
• 17:45
  I learned, the more my relationship with this character
• 17:49
  matured and deepened. Yeah, I think lore has worked
• 17:53
  like that forever. I mean, if you even want to go
• 17:55
  to the Lahal, the loaf of Dolph, the Torah itself, I believe I'm
• 18:00
  forgetting if it's the more Navukhim, if it's the Mornevucha
• 18:05
  or the hobos Alavos, I believe it's actually the hobos Alavos
• 18:07
  and Shara you hood. But he discusses how
• 18:10
  inappropriate really it is to describe in any place of in the
• 18:14
  Torah physical characteristics to God.
• 18:16
  And and yet they're they're clearly stated black and white.
• 18:20
  So if they're so and if they're heretical, then why are these in
• 18:24
  the Torah? And again, either the Rambam or
• 18:27
  the Hobos Alavos continues to explain is that when you're a
• 18:30
  simple person and you're trying to learn about God.
• 18:33
  So then, yeah, you say that he has eyes and he has ears and
• 18:36
  that he can hear you, you know, But as you, as you grow older,
• 18:39
  then you're able to take that and make it deeper into the next
• 18:41
  level. And that's why in terms of
• 18:43
  clinic, I do. I'm very against, you know, 3 or
• 18:46
  4 year old saying, well, Hashem has eyes so he can see me.
• 18:49
  And then the parents say, no, he doesn't have eyes, but he can
• 18:52
  see you anyway. And they have no, like the kid
• 18:54
  is now lost. He has no idea what you're
• 18:55
  talking about. I think the Torah approach was a
• 18:58
  good approach. Like I don't think we need to
• 18:59
  change what the term is, right? So like the Torah kind of, you
• 19:03
  know, it, it is written in a such a perfect way that that
• 19:05
  both child and old man, you know, can read it and, and grow
• 19:08
  from it. So it grows with the kids.
• 19:10
  So I think also philosophies that we have as children, right?
• 19:14
  So those can grow and deepen as we get older.
• 19:16
  I'm not so sure that that it needs to be adding something to
• 19:20
  the Torah. And in fact, here in Israel, I'm
• 19:21
  sure they do it in America also. But here in Eric T Straw,
• 19:24
  there's a an unending library of comic books of all different
• 19:29
  like new superheroes or stories that are like completely high
• 19:32
  rating and have ascamas from big rebuttum in the beginning.
• 19:35
  And I think I'm serious and I think it's I think it's this
• 19:37
  idea. It's like, yeah, we can we can
• 19:40
  take this and put it on a level for younger people to
• 19:43
  understand. And then they'll grow older and,
• 19:44
  you know, apply it, apply it to the next thing, which is
• 19:47
  awesome. That's why when you sent me
• 19:48
  earlier today, I loved it. The story from him.
• 19:51
  To be honest, if you didn't send it to me, I would never have
• 19:53
  believed it. The sort of a Victor Miller and
• 19:55
  a Victor Miller for those watching.
• 19:57
  If I had to think of a more, I don't mean to extreme in a bad
• 20:01
  way. I mean extreme in a good way,
• 20:02
  like a a positive zealot, like a really someone who is just
• 20:06
  concerned with religiosity and health and philosophy.
• 20:09
  There's no one bigger than ever the last 100 years in America.
• 20:14
  He commented on comic books for kids that it'd be better to put
• 20:18
  that in there like, you know, little shul candy bag than to
• 20:21
  hell him, which is like to me reading.
• 20:22
  I was like. There's no way.
• 20:24
  But then I thought about for a second, like, yeah, it
• 20:26
  absolutely makes sense, especially with that depth.
• 20:28
  So I'm, I'm with you there. I think your experience is, is
• 20:31
  not just special, it's special. That should be standard.
• 20:34
  And I think that the people are trying to do that now with these
• 20:37
  comic books and with these stories that we're telling our
• 20:38
  kids and, you know, but we've been only just doing it around
• 20:43
  the campfire, you know, with our kids.
• 20:45
  I just think that now it's on, you know, printed paper.
• 20:49
  The Batman, the role that it played for me, this character
• 20:55
  and I don't in any way want to appear disrespectful.
• 20:58
  Torah is the center, it's the core, it's the everything.
• 21:02
  It's everything. Everything in my life, the the
• 21:05
  family, my wife and I have created haste, Hashem, our
• 21:08
  children, everything. The teaching that I do,
• 21:11
  everything is Torah. The Batman played a very
• 21:14
  important role in all of that. It doesn't enter into the Khadri
• 21:19
  Khadarim, the Khadarsha Kadarshan.
• 21:21
  Of the values, but the way that it finds expression, I don't
• 21:27
  even call them the neutral parts of my life, but in in the
• 21:30
  mechanics of my life. I I have AI have a.
• 21:35
  Bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering.
• 21:38
  I have a higher order black belt in Shaolin gongfu.
• 21:42
  I've done a lot of things in my life because I was trying to
• 21:46
  walk some path that the Batman had walked.
• 21:50
  I, I didn't plan on standing on the top of a 20 story building
• 21:54
  and you know, thinking I was going to swoop down and fight
• 21:57
  crime because I have a fear of heights.
• 21:59
  I have a glass jaw and I the Friedman family has a proud
• 22:03
  tradition of cowardice. So for all of those things, I
• 22:06
  was quite aware of that. But this concept of.
• 22:09
  Being, excuse me, of being prepared, of looking at the
• 22:14
  world, not being naive and being ready if the circumstances ever
• 22:18
  demand gone, forbid or emir sashem, depending how 1 looks at
• 22:22
  it. But if the circumstances are
• 22:24
  correct, a person has to be ready.
• 22:26
  They have to know. So I went through, I've done all
• 22:28
  those things, my people. Sometimes I interact with
• 22:31
  people. And they don't really get what
• 22:34
  I'm talking about. When I talk about Batman and
• 22:36
  they'll say to me, wow, so you must have all the action figures
• 22:39
  or you you probably have all the and when I say to them is it's
• 22:42
  not so much that, but I do 200 sit ups every day and they'll
• 22:46
  say what? I don't understand What what do
• 22:49
  you mean like that? So it's like I see you nodding
• 22:51
  or a doerfin because you get it, you get it.
• 22:54
  So it's not the externalities, it's not the silliness, it's not
• 22:56
  the nourish kind of it, but it's the essence of it and the
• 23:02
  essence of it, I think what you were saying before is very
• 23:04
  profound. It's not all that, you know,
• 23:08
  deeply lurking inside. It's more or less on the
• 23:10
  surface. We live in a world which is
• 23:15
  obsessed with Batman in large part.
• 23:18
  I think you referenced before some of those other stories,
• 23:24
  those other kind of franchises or whatever they're called, The
• 23:27
  Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and various kinds of these
• 23:31
  modern legends. But we live in a world which the
• 23:37
  kind of biblical refinement, the biblical presence, the the
• 23:43
  inspiration that once existed in Western society.
• 23:47
  I was born in the 1960s. That was a time when they more
• 23:50
  or less effectively killed whatever the last traces of
• 23:54
  biblical refinement there were in our society.
• 23:57
  The sexual revolution and the just the, the rebellion against
• 24:01
  all of those values that helped shape and define Western
• 24:06
  civilization today. I mean, they were, they, they
• 24:09
  were running on fumes. Today, there's just about
• 24:11
  nothing. It's about nothing.
• 24:12
  And people's souls. Every human being is created
• 24:15
  with a Salim Elohim and those Nashamas are starving to death.
• 24:21
  They're just starving to death. I wrote this book and I have
• 24:25
  gotten insane amounts of correspondence from people,
• 24:30
  letters to the publisher, emails that I receive.
• 24:34
  People come up to me when I speak places and they talk to me
• 24:37
  and, and these are people who I've got respect with.
• 24:39
  Sometimes deals people are kind of a tough hand and tough set of
• 24:42
  cards and their life circumstances are very, very
• 24:45
  challenging. And they'll say to me, I use the
• 24:48
  image of the Batman because if this child, this victim of
• 24:53
  tragedy, could respond in that way creatively without
• 24:56
  succumbing to despair and to use it in some kind of creative way
• 24:59
  to make themselves make himself into a better person, I could do
• 25:02
  the same thing. And their neshama's on some
• 25:05
  level, not always consciously, but on some level, they interact
• 25:08
  with the character. They found this nourishment in
• 25:11
  the Batman and they're able to, on some level subconscious, I
• 25:14
  believe, metabolize the character.
• 25:16
  They identify what the lessons are.
• 25:18
  I brought them out into bold relief in the book.
• 25:20
  I make them conscious. I formulate them, I articulate
• 25:23
  them. And people were very grateful.
• 25:25
  They were like, Oh my gosh, I, I've been trying to, you know,
• 25:27
  I, I was trying to be able to formulate.
• 25:29
  I just couldn't do it. And you said everything that I
• 25:31
  believe. So I think that's why in our
• 25:34
  society, Batman is so relevant because of that.
• 25:40
  Because people are just, they have these huge Neshamas.
• 25:42
  They're all dressed up with nowhere to go.
• 25:45
  Society has ripped away all of the religious kinds of
• 25:48
  influences that should inspire when they're looking around.
• 25:53
  You know, in terms of Robbie Miller.
• 25:54
  I just have to have to add a little poster, if I may.
• 25:58
  When I was growing up, Rabbi Miller, his tapes, they were a
• 26:04
  lifeline for me. I would every couple of weeks, I
• 26:07
  would write into the Shiva office and I would order two
• 26:10
  tapes. I would get them.
• 26:11
  I amassed the collection. I had over 600 of the tapes.
• 26:14
  And I listened to Rabbi Miller all the time.
• 26:17
  Always, always. I used to call him.
• 26:19
  I would call him from Connecticut.
• 26:21
  I had conversations with him. There were times, you know, he
• 26:26
  he was very gentle on the phone with me when he spoke.
• 26:29
  Yeah, he thundered on the tapes and his hash gaffa, that whole
• 26:34
  constant of Slobatka Musser would form the foundation for me
• 26:38
  of everything that I did. All the writing that I do, I
• 26:42
  I've written, I've published the eight books and a number of them
• 26:46
  I dedicated to him. But the truth that I should have
• 26:49
  dedicated all of them because all the Torah that I have, my
• 26:51
  way of looking rule comes from him.
• 26:52
  I would listen to the tapes and I walked the path he learned in
• 26:57
  Slobatka. And if you think about it, the
• 27:00
  Batman book, you know, I have to say Lahavdil.
• 27:03
  But I say it. I wish I didn't have to say
• 27:05
  Lahavdil, but it's all Slobatka Musser, because it's premised on
• 27:09
  this idea of the godless Adam, the Batman character, the idea
• 27:13
  of being able to master just about everything.
• 27:16
  What are the limits of human accomplishment?
• 27:19
  There are none. So if there are 127 different
• 27:22
  fighting disciplines in the world, the Batman has mastered
• 27:26
  all of them. If there's chemistry and physics
• 27:28
  and botany and all the other kinds of things and criminal
• 27:31
  investigation and everything he he's mastered all of them.
• 27:34
  He's devoted his life to that in the fight against evil.
• 27:37
  So the concept, if you think about it, it's the godless Adam.
• 27:41
  What are the limits of human capability?
• 27:43
  There are no limits. So Rabbi Miller would talk about
• 27:46
  his teacher Ravi. It's like Isaac share.
• 27:48
  I would listen as a kid and when I was old enough and the the
• 27:53
  Lechat Cephas Musser were reprinted, I went to Benet Brock
• 27:56
  and I begged them and I got the first volume.
• 27:58
  Then I went back. I got the second volume.
• 28:00
  I went from there because he talked about the Alto Slovak.
• 28:03
  I got the Aurat Soften today. It's called the Oregon News.
• 28:05
  I think there's some extra material in there.
• 28:07
  But all of those things came from Abbi Miller.
• 28:10
  So when I would call him, I, I called him a few times.
• 28:13
  He was very gentle and once or twice he'd be talking.
• 28:15
  I would say, how do you reconcile this with how does the
• 28:18
  rough like to explain this, these tapes in?
• 28:20
  So he would sometimes be talking and at times if I didn't quite
• 28:23
  get it, I'd be furiously looking down to see where's the stop the
• 28:26
  rewind button. It was in real time.
• 28:28
  There was no rewind button. So it was a little disorienting.
• 28:32
  But the fact is that what he said, that was an important
• 28:36
  piece of it, that when I was trying to understand the Batman,
• 28:40
  he gave me the Torah vocabulary, the concept of the Goblasa Adam
• 28:45
  and all that comes with that. And that was what I identified
• 28:51
  in the Batman. And that was what I tried to
• 28:52
  bring out in the in Wisdom from the Bat Cave.
• 28:56
  It is a book. If you look at it and you
• 28:58
  understand that on that level, it's what it's giving, but it's
• 29:01
  providing, I hope, is Slobodka Musser.
• 29:04
  So Rabbi Miller, that story I wrote the I wrote the manuscript
• 29:12
  1999. I had been the rabbi at Duke
• 29:16
  University and the Batman played a very important role there.
• 29:19
  I hope to talk about that. But as we were leaving and
• 29:23
  coming to coming to New Jersey. So I wrote the first draft of
• 29:27
  what would become wisdom from the bat cave.
• 29:30
  The about a year and a half later, Rabbi Miller was was
• 29:34
  niftar. And I read that article in the
• 29:37
  Ted to me it was like the a shocking cataclysmic clash of
• 29:44
  various worlds, different parts of my life that I had kept
• 29:46
  separate but not really separate.
• 29:48
  Suddenly we're right there on the page and I almost, I almost
• 29:51
  fainted. It was I was reading the article
• 29:54
  about, I mean it was a hesp and it went on and on and it was
• 29:57
  like gold. I was devouring every line.
• 30:01
  Every story was magnificent. And there were little
• 30:04
  subheadings every 3-4 paragraphs a different episode.
• 30:07
  And then they look and it says Rev Miller on Batman.
• 30:11
  And I thought, my, my blood ran cold.
• 30:14
  And I thought, uh oh, this is it.
• 30:16
  The the jig is up. I'm done.
• 30:20
  I'm done for it. So I read it and that was the
• 30:22
  story. The story told how in his show
• 30:25
  someone was given. The the.
• 30:28
  Job of preparing Pecola for the kids for some Christora and he
• 30:33
  took a candy bar and an apple and he went to the store and he
• 30:38
  purchased he was making 50 Pekolach.
• 30:41
  So he bought 50 copies of Detective comics starring Batman
• 30:46
  50 comic copies of Batman comics starring Batman and he bought
• 30:52
  Richie Rich or you know whatever a couple of a few other titles
• 30:56
  he put them in brought them to the show.
• 30:59
  The the president of the show said what are you insane?
• 31:02
  How can you do this is crazy. So they went back and forth and
• 31:06
  they brought the question to Ruff Miller.
• 31:08
  Ruff Miller said I have no idea what these are leave them leave
• 31:11
  them for me and I'll look at them.
• 31:14
  So he said you know I'll get back to you in a day or so come
• 31:17
  back to him saying so he got in touch with the guy almost
• 31:20
  immediately. He said to them in point of act
• 31:23
  and what the the fellow the you know youth director.
• 31:26
  He had said if I put what copies of to Hilleman the kids will
• 31:30
  treat them disrespectfully. They'll leave them somewhere
• 31:33
  that's not appropriate. This is a you know it's it's
• 31:35
  just harmless. Rob Miller said in fact, not
• 31:37
  only is it allowed to show kids these comic books.
• 31:42
  There's a there's a mitzvah aspect in it, he says, because
• 31:45
  they model all kinds of important Torah principles.
• 31:48
  And he went on in the article, it mentioned three or four of
• 31:52
  them. And I looked and I was like, oh,
• 31:54
  Hasti Hashem, I had written all those lessons in the book.
• 31:57
  They were already in the manuscript.
• 31:58
  But I actually, because the story was so shocking.
• 32:02
  And he said, you know, he, he relentless.
• 32:05
  He's relentless. He in one of the stories that
• 32:07
  Ravi Miller looked at, he said he was shot.
• 32:09
  And for all of that, he continued to fight.
• 32:12
  And until he prevailed, he said he keeps his face covered in a
• 32:16
  in a mask. It's not for his own personal
• 32:18
  cover. It's not for his glory.
• 32:20
  It's to do what's right. He said, I'm sorry, I have to, I
• 32:24
  have to stop because we just said it's so, so, so important.
• 32:27
  That piece. It's there's this, this, it's a
• 32:31
  big pet peeve I have. You know, people think that that
• 32:39
  how shall I put it? People think that a Nova or
• 32:41
  humility is to say you're nothing and a nobody and you
• 32:44
  don't know anything. And Gaiva has to say that, you
• 32:49
  know, you're the most awesome person in the world.
• 32:51
  And I think I think it's wrong. I think what the real hush Guffa
• 32:54
  is is is a Nova is saying exactly what you are and who you
• 32:59
  are. It's honesty.
• 33:00
  That's why Mosher Beno is Anamiko Adam, and yet he wrote
• 33:03
  very positive things about himself, right.
• 33:05
  So saying more than you are, that's Gaeva saying less than
• 33:11
  you are, that's just stupidity, right?
• 33:13
  And then there's this other aspects that you brought in now,
• 33:15
  which I think is so, so, so important, especially within our
• 33:18
  bonus is that, you know, having the leadership, leadership roles
• 33:24
  is difficult because you have to wield power and it's very
• 33:27
  difficult to be in a leadership role and not, have not have to
• 33:30
  wear the crown. But there's two sorts of people
• 33:31
  that wear the crown. There's a person that wears the
• 33:34
  crown because they think that they're amazing.
• 33:36
  But again, Maver, so that's the gaiva thing.
• 33:39
  They think they're better than they are.
• 33:40
  So they wield the crown because it feels good, right?
• 33:43
  And maybe there are a Helica people that's like that.
• 33:45
  But there's a huge chunk of leaders, OK, that are wielding
• 33:49
  the crown or the scepter and sitting in the throne.
• 33:52
  And that's the last place they want to be.
• 33:53
  They're only doing that in order to be a leader because they know
• 33:57
  that that's what's necessary. So like, they, they take, it's
• 34:00
  almost like they're taking a bullet for us really.
• 34:02
  Because they're, they're, they're, they're, they're
• 34:05
  putting on this show and wearing these regal robes, but inside
• 34:08
  they're like, it's not me. And they know it's not them.
• 34:10
  I'm only doing this so that I can lead.
• 34:13
  I think wearing a mask, so to speak, is such an important
• 34:16
  thing that that leaders have to understand.
• 34:18
  But also parents, educators. Yeah.
• 34:20
  It's it's embodying an idea and leading the future doesn't
• 34:25
  necessarily mean that you're as awesome as the thing that you're
• 34:27
  trying to put forward, but you need to put on that face
• 34:30
  sometimes in order to lead, right.
• 34:32
  So I just had to interrupt you because it's such an important
• 34:34
  and no one talks about it. It really the idea.
• 34:38
  So some secular writer wrote me said that the humility isn't
• 34:46
  thinking less of oneself. It's thinking of oneself less
• 34:51
  and the the profundity in that is just kind of shocking.
• 34:55
  The idea that a novel would be like this, it would be a pure
• 35:00
  kind of the author of Nevardik made the comment.
• 35:04
  He said. I never asked myself if I could
• 35:06
  do it. I only asked myself if it needed
• 35:09
  to be done. So this concept of I'm not going
• 35:13
  to consider it all my capabilities if I'm, if I'm self
• 35:17
  absorbed, the opposite of enough is like being self absorbed.
• 35:20
  It's saying, it's saying like, wait, like, what about me?
• 35:23
  How do I think? How do I feel?
• 35:25
  Am I going to be able to? It's like that's being all
• 35:26
  wrapped up in oneself. Another pure, another is to say
• 35:30
  the assumption is if it needs to be done, of course I can do it.
• 35:33
  I'm possessed of this infinite. The the infinite, the potential
• 35:37
  human potential is literally infinite.
• 35:39
  We have a a a spark of of divinity within us and we have
• 35:45
  to, we have the ability like if we keep, if we go to the well,
• 35:47
  however often we go to the well to pull out greatness and
• 35:51
  accomplishment, the Co host that we need to accomplish.
• 35:54
  It's all there. We can never the well can never
• 35:57
  run dry. So the idea of saying, I'm not
• 36:00
  going to ask if I can do it because like, what am I self
• 36:02
  absorbed? Like gaive, I think of as like,
• 36:05
  in other words, a person being so wrapped up in themselves, how
• 36:08
  they feel, how they think. Like, who cares about you?
• 36:10
  Who cares about you? There's a job to be done.
• 36:12
  And Moshe Rabeno in that sense could stand before kings, could
• 36:16
  stand before, could argue with them, could see all kinds of
• 36:18
  things because it was nothing to do with him at all.
• 36:21
  He, he as the Anna Biko anthem, was somebody who it never even
• 36:24
  occurred him to think about. Like, how do I feel about this?
• 36:26
  How do I do I want this? Why not?
• 36:28
  Absolutely not. The job has to be done.
• 36:30
  Of course I have the capability and the idea of of a Nova, is
• 36:35
  that what makes us great? A person supposed to think that
• 36:38
  you believe of the dark ashram person supposed to build
• 36:41
  themselves up and think like, I'm awesome, I'm totally
• 36:45
  awesome. There's no end to my greatness.
• 36:49
  And The thing is though, the common denominator is whatever
• 36:51
  it is that makes me great, every other human being possesses
• 36:54
  that. They possess that greatness.
• 36:56
  So if that's the case, that's the great equalizer.
• 36:59
  So it's not. There's no arrogance that comes
• 37:01
  from that, because whatever I have that gives me this
• 37:03
  potential, this endless, this infinite, limitless potential to
• 37:07
  accomplish, every other human being has that potential.
• 37:11
  Do you think? It's necessary.
• 37:12
  Though sometimes to put on that mask, though, to go to go a step
• 37:15
  further, yes, I, I have that potential.
• 37:17
  I'm as divine as anyone else. And, and being divine is, is
• 37:20
  unlimited. But how about in, I mean, you've
• 37:22
  had some leadership roles. I mean, do you feel that it's
• 37:25
  appropriate and even would you encourage for people to, to take
• 37:29
  up honor, but not for the sake of honor, but for the sake of
• 37:32
  utility? You know, Robin Miller in, in
• 37:37
  one of the tapes, I think that's seven O 6.
• 37:41
  He, he would do it again in tape #720 this goes back a lot of
• 37:45
  years, but he had the 10 steps to greatness, 10 steps to
• 37:48
  greatness. The original set was I think
• 37:50
  tape number seven O 6. And then sometime later, because
• 37:53
  of the response that he got, he made-up another set.
• 37:55
  But in one of the, in the first set, one of the 10 commandments
• 38:00
  things to do every day is he says do has to do it secretly.
• 38:04
  That's advice that I give to my police students.
• 38:07
  I'm a police trainer and I, what I do is I teach them Slovaka
• 38:10
  Musser. So they don't they don't realize
• 38:13
  that. But the fact is that it's advice
• 38:16
  that I give them in terms of how to recharge their spiritual
• 38:19
  batteries, their spiritual accounts.
• 38:21
  But this idea of doing a hasset, everybody doing it in secret,
• 38:26
  because all of that theory we were talking about, it sounds
• 38:29
  great, but we're human beings, we tend to get distracted, we
• 38:32
  forget things and some of our earthiness, our instincts kick
• 38:36
  in and it's possibly be very confused and misled.
• 38:39
  So the idea of doing something in secret is to allow us to
• 38:43
  recalibrate, to reset, to remind ourselves every day, the
• 38:46
  audience, the conversation that's taking place is between
• 38:50
  US and Akoteshbarovo, everybody else, every human being, like
• 38:53
  all those people, they're wonderful, they're important to
• 38:55
  us, they're all kinds of things, but ultimately they're just kind
• 38:57
  of an illusion. They're props, they're stage
• 38:59
  props that Hashem sets up because the real conversation,
• 39:03
  the real interaction, Like when the Meddor says that Esther,
• 39:08
  Esther was having a conversation, like as she was
• 39:10
  talking, whenever she said Hamalek, she wasn't talking to
• 39:12
  Ashvairosh, she was talking to Khoshbaho.
• 39:14
  He was in the room. The whole thing was a was an
• 39:16
  illusion. It was a hologram.
• 39:18
  She was talking. So the fact is that we tend to
• 39:20
  forget those kinds of things. So when we do actions in this
• 39:24
  world, practical actions, when we do that act of hesit in
• 39:28
  secret, when the Batman covers his face, things like that,
• 39:31
  we're we're affirming to ourselves and we're pounding
• 39:35
  into deep inside ourselves these Torah truths.
• 39:38
  It'd be great if he walked around then we were always
• 39:40
  accessing them right, directly. But we don't, but we don't.
• 39:44
  So the that's not all he's doing though.
• 39:48
  He's not just, he's not just hiding his face and becoming
• 39:50
  anonymous. You know, he is also becoming
• 39:53
  this terror. He is becoming power.
• 39:55
  He is becoming intimidation, right?
• 39:59
  That's true. Like Raviolfman talks about the
• 40:01
  fact that Kamara talks about how people put on clothes and they
• 40:04
  become, you know, it, it it makes the man, so to speak.
• 40:08
  So you're right. There's a lot of there's a there
• 40:11
  are a lot of truth to any one of the things that the that the
• 40:14
  Batman does can be you can you can break that.
• 40:20
  You can go deeper. I had a conversation when I when
• 40:23
  I wrote the book I. I sent it.
• 40:27
  I'm telling the story a little bit out of order, but that's
• 40:29
  okay. But in the course, after I wrote
• 40:31
  the book, I had occasion, I brought it to all kinds of comic
• 40:34
  book writers and artists, some of the great creators of
• 40:37
  yesteryear from when I was a kid, even before.
• 40:40
  And I had an opportunity to meet Jerry Robinson.
• 40:43
  He was one of the one of the early creators he knew Bob Kane
• 40:48
  and Bill Finger, the two men who created the Batman.
• 40:51
  They were obviously, you know, they were young men when they
• 40:53
  did. And Jerry Robinson was the
• 40:55
  creator. He created the character of
• 40:57
  Robin, the Joker, the the utility Batman's utility belt.
• 41:02
  He added a number of of features of details to the Batman
• 41:07
  mythology. And I, I gave him a copy of the
• 41:10
  book. It was, I guess, still in
• 41:13
  manuscript form. And I, he was appearing
• 41:15
  somewhere. He's since gone to the oil
• 41:17
  mammoths, but he was speaking somewhere in Manhattan.
• 41:21
  So I drove into New York. I went to see him and I brought
• 41:24
  in the book. After he spoke, I, I went up to
• 41:26
  him and I, I asked him if he'd look it over.
• 41:29
  So he took a copy. We exchanged phone numbers and I
• 41:33
  spoke with him a few days later and he said to me, those guys
• 41:38
  who created The Batman, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, he says they
• 41:41
  would have loved this book. He said as they were creating
• 41:43
  The Batman, he said they had been given us an assignment from
• 41:48
  DC Comics. It was called I think National
• 41:49
  Periodicals. At that point the company and
• 41:52
  Superman was very successful and they wanted some kind of a
• 41:55
  follow up so they assigned Bob Kane.
• 41:58
  So he went with his friend and they were thinking and he said,
• 42:01
  and as they were trying to create this character, he said
• 42:03
  they were talking in the kinds of terms that you were talking
• 42:06
  about. They were trying to come up with
• 42:08
  a character that would embody noble ideals that would
• 42:11
  represent something he said. And they were thrashing around.
• 42:14
  They were batting around ideas. He said, I think they would have
• 42:17
  loved your book. He said some of the things that
• 42:19
  you talked about. He said, you know, they talked
• 42:21
  about just, you know, to finish that story about about Rabbi
• 42:24
  Miller. When I read that article in the
• 42:27
  in the Ted I was so taken about, I was flabbergasted by the
• 42:31
  thing. So I got in touch with the
• 42:34
  paper. I got in touch with the fellow
• 42:36
  who wrote and I tracked down the now an now an older man, a much
• 42:41
  older man, the youth director. So I, I, I said to him, I, I
• 42:48
  need confirmation of the story because it seems too crazy.
• 42:52
  I, I've done a pretty good job of my life trying to keep Rabbi
• 42:54
  Miller and the Batman separate. It never would have occurred in
• 42:57
  that they would have interacted with each other.
• 42:59
  They would have encountered each other.
• 43:00
  So I said, can you confirm the, the truth of that story?
• 43:04
  So he said absolutely. He said the one thing that the
• 43:06
  article did not include, he said Rabbi Miller didn't identify
• 43:09
  three lessons. He identified a whole bunch more
• 43:14
  and then this fellow went on to tell me three or four other ones
• 43:17
  that he recalled. And the whole time he was
• 43:19
  talking, I was like, oh, haste Hashem, because I had those in
• 43:22
  the book also about half a dozen of them where he said I don't
• 43:25
  remember. I don't remember.
• 43:27
  So I was a little sad, but I was what a gift he had given me.
• 43:31
  And the Hoshkaka, the fact that it was in the in the article,
• 43:36
  I've seen that article reproduced at times on the
• 43:39
  Internet with that section missing.
• 43:43
  When people have reproduced the, the obituary, some have chosen
• 43:48
  to leave that out. And I totally understand why we
• 43:50
  live in a different world today. And the Batman comic books, I
• 43:53
  would never, I never recommend that people if they're not
• 43:57
  already obsessed, like if I have a from audience, I will never
• 44:00
  say to them, you should go familiarize yourself with
• 44:03
  Batman. You should go read the comic
• 44:04
  books because our society has become pornographic.
• 44:08
  I had to sadly many years ago, stop reading Batman comic books
• 44:13
  because it was just what it was. What they depicted was
• 44:16
  antagonistic to my value system. I've never seen.
• 44:19
  I've never seen any of the Batman movies.
• 44:22
  The 1st in modern times Batman movie I think was in 1989 with
• 44:28
  who's the Actor Michael Keaton starred as Batman.
• 44:31
  There have been a whole bunch more since then.
• 44:32
  A whole bunch more. I've never seen any of them.
• 44:35
  I've never seen any of them because it's, you know, the
• 44:38
  Batman today society today. I couldn't in good conscience
• 44:42
  say to anybody go pick up a Batman comic book because that's
• 44:46
  not the, that's not the real Batman, the Batman I know.
• 44:49
  And if you, you know, you look at the book, the stories that
• 44:52
  I'm describing are stories that were written.
• 44:56
  The most most recent come from probably 30 to 33 years ago.
• 45:03
  Most of them are from 50 years ago, 60 years ago.
• 45:06
  But that's the essence. That's the essence of the
• 45:08
  Batman, the real Batman. And that that's the part of the
• 45:10
  Batman that resonates with all those people that I mentioned, I
• 45:14
  described who are out there, who need inspiration.
• 45:17
  It's not the filthy parts of Batman that they've added over
• 45:20
  the, over the decades. The pure, the pure image, the
• 45:23
  pure character, he belongs to a different time.
• 45:26
  So anyway, that was the Batman that Rabbi Miller was seeing
• 45:30
  when he said it's not just kind of a reshusted, give this to the
• 45:33
  kids, There's a mitzvah quality. They need to hear it pull you
• 45:38
  back again. Just that I just want to dig the
• 45:40
  point in a bit deeper. The point I was making before
• 45:43
  about wearing a mask, not just conceal your identity, but to
• 45:46
  also wield a symbol. Do you find value in that?
• 45:49
  Do you think that that's true and something that, you know,
• 45:52
  people should be learning from? I think the power of symbols.
• 45:58
  I think the power of it's, it's limitless.
• 46:01
  It's limitless. And the fact is that I, I bring
• 46:08
  this point home for my police students.
• 46:10
  I make it clear to them that when they put on their uniforms,
• 46:15
  they cease to be some individual human being.
• 46:19
  They're not a man or a woman. They become a symbol.
• 46:23
  They're the living embodiment of the United States of America.
• 46:26
  I say to them, you are the people.
• 46:27
  When people interact with you, what they see is the
• 46:30
  Constitution of the United States taking form in flesh and
• 46:35
  blood. Because the words on the page of
• 46:37
  the constant, you know, on the Constitution, they're just empty
• 46:40
  words. All those ideas of limiting the,
• 46:43
  the exercise of force of giving people that they have rights to
• 46:47
  privacy, they have rights to dignity, things like that.
• 46:50
  And that the power of the government, it needs to be
• 46:53
  controlled and tempered. And all those things I say to
• 46:55
  them, those words are empty words.
• 46:58
  They're hollow. They have no life.
• 46:59
  They mean nothing until someone brings them to life.
• 47:04
  And I say to my students, when you put on that uniform, when
• 47:06
  you put on that badge, when you go out, every human being, every
• 47:09
  citizen in our society, when they interact with you, they
• 47:12
  don't see some individual. And there been studies that show
• 47:16
  this actually, and I talk about this a lot, that the face of the
• 47:20
  police officer is actually obscured.
• 47:22
  People don't really, they don't see a face.
• 47:24
  What they see is the uniform. They see the the hat, they see
• 47:28
  the badge. And what they see is they're
• 47:30
  relating to a symbol of something.
• 47:34
  And the power of that is extraordinary.
• 47:37
  It's incalculable. And I say to my students, I want
• 47:39
  to sensitize them and I want them to understand the awesome
• 47:42
  power that they wield because if they do something, they do
• 47:45
  something bad. It wasn't some person who did
• 47:49
  something bad. It was the Constitution itself.
• 47:51
  It was our system of government, our very society.
• 47:54
  It has failed. And if they've done something
• 47:57
  good, so there, the impact is huge.
• 48:00
  If you think about that and you bring it home.
• 48:01
  Because ultimately all of these ideas we have to think about for
• 48:05
  our own community, the Torah community when we go out into
• 48:08
  the world and we're identifiable as a Torah Jew.
• 48:12
  So when we misbehave, the Hilo Hashem in that that institution,
• 48:16
  the concept of Hilo shem, of Akita shashem, it's also
• 48:20
  incalculable. It's limitless when people
• 48:23
  interact. My wife when she was in when she
• 48:25
  was in law school, at the end of each chapter, there were case
• 48:29
  studies. Suddenly that page is in a Gray
• 48:31
  box and it's illustrating whatever they talked about in
• 48:34
  the in the chapter. One of the chapters ended and it
• 48:38
  said Moisha's somebody and Yoyly somebody comma, long time
• 48:44
  yeshiva buddies comma and then went out to describe some kind
• 48:47
  of crime that they perpetrated. That was, you know, a violation
• 48:51
  of whatever the legal principle was in the chapter just just
• 48:55
  presented. That's that's right.
• 48:58
  Never it. It's not just that, you know,
• 49:01
  two people, one named Moisha, one named Yoyly.
• 49:03
  They did something. It's the entire Amistra.
• 49:06
  It's the Torah. It's a kotoshbaraku.
• 49:08
  It's the God of Israel, if you think about that.
• 49:11
  Conversely, if someone walks up and they wear yarmulke and they
• 49:15
  behave in a certain way with dignity, with honesty, with
• 49:18
  kindness, if the person's recognizable as a Torah Jew,
• 49:22
  people walk away. That's what the Kumar is saying.
• 49:24
  The Kumar Yuma saying that it's not exaggerating.
• 49:27
  One of the one of the lessons, like my experience all of
• 49:30
  growing up and living life has been that every single thing
• 49:32
  that Hazal say, they're never exaggerating, they're never
• 49:35
  joking around. They're saying it absolutely
• 49:38
  straight, absolutely straight. So people see a Torreju and
• 49:41
  we're supposed to be symbols of that, symbols of that.
• 49:45
  And we're larger than life and what we represent, not
• 49:48
  ourselves, not ourselves, but we represent everything that all
• 49:52
  the things that we Revere, that we cherish, we're the living
• 49:55
  embodiments of that. So when you talk about what
• 49:57
  you're tapping into, this idea that The Batman puts on that
• 50:00
  costume, that mask, and he represents something, I think
• 50:03
  that, that it has a power to it, the power to endow somebody that
• 50:09
  if as a human being, they might think to themselves, I'm more or
• 50:12
  less tapped out. I'm tapped out.
• 50:14
  I, I can't do anymore. But when they recognize and I, I
• 50:18
  interact in my police training work, I interact with other
• 50:21
  trainers who teach mental toughness, emotional resilience,
• 50:27
  things like that. One of the, one of my
• 50:29
  colleagues, we work together is the chief force psychologist for
• 50:33
  the Navy Seals. He's played that role for over
• 50:35
  20 years. And he teaches, this is a group
• 50:38
  of veritable supermen. And he explains to them, he
• 50:42
  talks to them about the fact that they represent something
• 50:43
  much larger than themselves. And these people report that
• 50:47
  when they've been pushed to the absolute limit of what you might
• 50:49
  imagine is human endurance, physically and psychologically,
• 50:53
  then they'll remember. They'll remember to themselves.
• 50:55
  Wait a second. I'm a member of this.
• 50:58
  I have this identity. I have this pin.
• 51:01
  I've got this cap. I've got this something I belong
• 51:03
  to. I represent something much
• 51:05
  larger than myself. And it enables them to turn
• 51:09
  inward and to put the bucket down into the well.
• 51:13
  And guess what? There's more potential there
• 51:15
  because that potential that well is inexhaustible.
• 51:18
  So I think what you're describing is really important.
• 51:21
  And again, in all things, this idea of the Batman, it's always
• 51:25
  for us to ask ourselves, he's the mushal.
• 51:28
  What he is is the ultimate mushal.
• 51:31
  And we, our lives, our Torah lives are the nimshal.
• 51:35
  So we have to look at him to say, wait, how does this, what
• 51:37
  is the nimshal? Is there some way that I can tap
• 51:40
  into this? When I was struggling with the
• 51:42
  idea of committing the ideas to a book and writing a book about
• 51:46
  Torah with Batman, I was concerned, as I mentioned
• 51:49
  before, about adulterating the Torah ideas.
• 51:52
  That's disrespectful. It's inappropriate.
• 51:54
  It produces some kind of travesty, perhaps.
• 51:57
  I was terrified about that, and I went to my post sake and I
• 52:01
  said I expressed my concerns. Are you looking to see who that
• 52:05
  is? I'd rather not just because he
• 52:09
  he's an autumn Godot be Israel, unbelievable, unbelievable.
• 52:13
  But it's always the question of whether I've lived up if I make
• 52:17
  him proud, if he thinks that, you know, if he looks and he
• 52:20
  would shake his head and say like, you know, this guy here,
• 52:24
  I'll be happy to be happy to. I discussed it with two people,
• 52:27
  one might rush to Shiva and another my post sake and they
• 52:32
  gave me analysis on different levels.
• 52:35
  My rush to Shiva, to whom I've asked like all the important
• 52:38
  questions in terms of, you know, should I do this work with the
• 52:41
  FBI, the law enforcement community?
• 52:43
  Should I write this book? So tremendous amount of Torah
• 52:46
  would come out of it. But when I went to this
• 52:50
  particular of and I said this is appropriate.
• 52:52
  So he looked it over and then we spoke and I could hear there was
• 52:58
  kind of a smile in his voice as we were talking about this
• 53:00
  topic. And he said, let's imagine this.
• 53:02
  He said, imagine that you took all the Michelin in, in Hazel in
• 53:10
  the various Mafarshian down to the, you know, anytime as long
• 53:14
  as you're talking about spar that are authoritative and
• 53:17
  authentic, he said. And it talks about Melech who
• 53:21
  went and did something or a Ben Melech who went into something.
• 53:24
  He says, imagine you collected all of them and you attached
• 53:29
  guyed attributed a name to this character.
• 53:32
  You claimed this is all one person and these are their
• 53:36
  adventures and these are all things that they did and this is
• 53:38
  their name and you collected it. He said the sources of all of
• 53:42
  those stories are certainly authentic.
• 53:45
  They're certainly kosher Vyasha. And what you would have is a
• 53:49
  story of a, the person's very colorful life.
• 53:52
  They've done a lot of things. They had a lot of adventures at
• 53:55
  every chapter in their life. And every one of those
• 53:58
  adventures they would have, you know, then we would stop and
• 54:01
  we'd say Viha, Nimshal, whatever it was that Hazel identified, or
• 54:05
  the Rishonim or the Hasidic masters or whoever it was, He
• 54:08
  says they've lived a very colorful life.
• 54:10
  He says that's what you did. He said that's what you did.
• 54:13
  He says you took the series of Mishalim.
• 54:16
  At any point, any chapter in this person's life, he says you
• 54:20
  can find. He says, and you did.
• 54:21
  You found parallels in Hazal and other places about that Ben
• 54:26
  melech, that melech, the whatever it was, he said, but
• 54:29
  you lump them all together. It was one personality.
• 54:32
  He says as long as you're not schlepping in stuff that will
• 54:38
  disqualify this character from whatever, however his adventures
• 54:42
  are portrayed in pop culture, etcetera, He says as long as
• 54:45
  there is nothing that taints it, that corrupts it.
• 54:50
  He says, I think you're on solid ground.
• 54:51
  He says you haven't added anything to the Torah.
• 54:55
  You've just, you've, you know, you've illustrated it in
• 54:58
  dramatic ways. He says, but that's what those
• 55:00
  Michelin were doing in, you know, Marshall, Lamar, Dover,
• 55:04
  Doman, you know, blah, blah, blah.
• 55:06
  And that's, and the he says, that's what you did here.
• 55:09
  He says that's, that's not a disqualification.
• 55:13
  It doesn't taint the Torah ideas you're presenting.
• 55:16
  I breathe the sigh of relief. And I will be happy to tell you
• 55:19
  off the air who that was great. You know, I'm really excited to
• 55:25
  talk about this, this next topic with you.
• 55:27
  We're running out of time. We're going to do the best that
• 55:29
  we can. OK.
• 55:30
  And if we run out of time, I might have to have another
• 55:32
  conversation with you. We're just OK, We'll see Your
• 55:37
  work with the FBI. That's that's not a that's not a
• 55:40
  standard rabbinic post. So why don't you talk about
• 55:44
  that, that very interesting endeavor?
• 55:47
  Sure. As long as we can stop for a
• 55:53
  moment, I'd appreciate Al Khoder Shraku's sense of humor.
• 56:00
  Here's some guy reading his Batman comic books, practicing
• 56:08
  his martial arts, doing whatever man of Khoder Shaku says.
• 56:11
  Really. You like that kind of stuff?
• 56:15
  All right, how about this? So I was, I was a shill rabbi
• 56:24
  long time ago I was, I was asked the local Funeral Home, they
• 56:32
  called me up. They asked me to, they asked me
• 56:35
  to if I would officiate at a funeral.
• 56:37
  Fellow in town, in my community passed away.
• 56:40
  The family had no shyhus to Yiddish Kite, nothing.
• 56:43
  They didn't belong to a Shoal, didn't belong to a temple or
• 56:46
  anything like that. Even simulations of Judaism.
• 56:48
  They were totally out. They needed someone.
• 56:50
  So he called me and I had done a number of levias in that through
• 56:55
  that Funeral Home. And he said to me, would you do
• 56:57
  it? And I said, if they, if the
• 56:59
  family will do it holically, I'll agree to do it.
• 57:03
  So he said, let me check each. And they said, yeah, I'm fine.
• 57:07
  So I didn't know this the nifter, but I did a lot of
• 57:10
  homework and I got ready for the thing.
• 57:13
  I spoke with his family. I spoke with all kinds of
• 57:14
  people. And I figured the crowd who's
• 57:17
  going to be there, they weren't going to be a bunch of tamidi
• 57:20
  kahman. These people were out.
• 57:22
  So. I prepared my remarks.
• 57:25
  He was a decent man, this guy, he was a patriot.
• 57:28
  He was a family man. He never missed a day of work.
• 57:30
  He, he did all kinds of things. He was a veteran.
• 57:32
  So I prepared my my husband and I spoke in English.
• 57:37
  Kiru work has made my first language is Yiddish, but my kiru
• 57:40
  work has made it over the decades that I speak a pretty
• 57:42
  good English. My grammar isn't so bad and I
• 57:46
  can express everything in, you know, I, I don't speak
• 57:51
  Yeshivish. If I'm talking to a group like
• 57:52
  that, I certainly can't. I can speak that language, but
• 57:55
  I, I was speaking in English. So I prepared an idea and I'm
• 57:59
  giving whatever idea. So when I finished, the fellow
• 58:01
  came up to me and he said, Oh my gosh, my gosh, like what you
• 58:04
  just said was really was beautiful.
• 58:06
  He said to me, it was very spiritual.
• 58:08
  It was spiritual and he was more talking to himself than
• 58:10
  anything. He said what you said was
• 58:12
  spiritual, it was substantive, it was inspiring.
• 58:16
  He said it was, there's no jargon and nothing like abstract
• 58:20
  or abstruse or esoteric. He was like off in the space of
• 58:22
  thinking and he said it was like substantive, inspiring.
• 58:26
  He said it was spiritual, wasn't religious.
• 58:29
  So it was spiritual. And I, I was like, what, what is
• 58:32
  with this guy? Like just seemed like a nudnik.
• 58:34
  So you know, where is this going?
• 58:37
  So he said to me, can can you do that on a consistent basis?
• 58:42
  I said, I said, what, what are you talking about?
• 58:44
  So as he was asking the question, he said, can you do
• 58:48
  this on a consistent? And he went like he did the
• 58:50
  sweeping gesture with his arm to indicate like consistent.
• 58:54
  Like, do you have a lot of as he said that I was thinking to
• 58:56
  myself, you know, to say something like, what's it to you
• 58:59
  who are as I, as I asked him, you know, as I was getting
• 59:02
  ready, gearing up to say that, his jacket opened and I realized
• 59:06
  that he had a gun and a shoulder holster.
• 59:08
  So that changed the terms of the interaction subtly but
• 59:12
  decisively. I said, I can do anything you
• 59:14
  want. So he he tells me he's the chief
• 59:18
  of the behavioral science unit. He's the chief of the behavioral
• 59:21
  science unit of the FBI. He handed me his business card
• 59:25
  and he said to me that the Behavioral Science unit had
• 59:28
  spent many years, He'd spent five years trying to identify
• 59:32
  tools for intentional spirituality, tools that police
• 59:36
  officers could use to nourish their own, they could preside
• 59:40
  over their own spiritual well-being.
• 59:43
  The career about that, well, it was, you know, it goes without
• 59:49
  saying that the career is stressful physically.
• 59:51
  It's very challenging. It's very dangerous.
• 59:54
  The big fiddish back in the 1960s was that the career was
• 59:57
  also stressful psychologically or emotionally.
• 1:00:00
  Not every, you know, not every. Injury or wound is nicker on a
• 1:00:06
  person's body. It can take place inside.
• 1:00:09
  So that was a tremendous, tremendous hitch and the
• 1:00:13
  discipline of police psychology was born.
• 1:00:15
  They've done a lot of work since then.
• 1:00:17
  They've done they've produced a tremendous amount of, you know,
• 1:00:18
  great insights, great resources, things like that.
• 1:00:22
  So to add it to that list, like the career of stressful
• 1:00:25
  physically and also psychologically strange thing
• 1:00:30
  that from the mid 1960s when the career, the when the discipline
• 1:00:34
  of police psychology was created from the mid 1960s to the mid
• 1:00:37
  1990s when this study began, over a 30 year period, the
• 1:00:42
  number of police officers killed in the line of in the line of
• 1:00:46
  duty that were killed or injured, the numbers had dropped
• 1:00:51
  precipitously. And they could attribute that to
• 1:00:54
  better technology, the bulletproof vest, things like
• 1:00:57
  that and better training. They do, they study how police
• 1:01:00
  officers are killed and they adjust training accordingly.
• 1:01:03
  Certain kinds of things the police officers do are very,
• 1:01:05
  very dangerous, like a domestic violence call or an unknown
• 1:01:08
  risk, traffic stop, things like that.
• 1:01:11
  So over that 30 year period, the numbers of police officers
• 1:01:15
  killed every year in the line of duty had dropped precipitously.
• 1:01:18
  Thank God we'd like it to go to 0.
• 1:01:19
  It's not there yet, but it dropped significantly during
• 1:01:23
  that same period of time. The statistics for, right, the
• 1:01:27
  mid 1960s, mid 1990s, that was a period during which there was
• 1:01:31
  now this discipline of police psychology.
• 1:01:33
  But the indicators there other character statistics of police
• 1:01:37
  besides the number of officers killed every year.
• 1:01:39
  They include the number of police officers who self
• 1:01:44
  medicate, who via who you know abuse alcohol and who you know
• 1:01:48
  engage in substance abuse. The incidence, the rates of
• 1:01:52
  domestic violence, the divorce rate for police officers, the
• 1:01:56
  incidence of all kinds of organic diseases, the incidence
• 1:01:59
  of organic diseases police police officers is crazy high.
• 1:02:03
  There are types of stomach cancer that are unique to the
• 1:02:05
  police profession. There are all kinds of
• 1:02:08
  statistics. Perhaps the most dramatic is the
• 1:02:10
  suicide rate. Police officers kill themselves
• 1:02:13
  at a very, very high rate. A police officer in the United
• 1:02:16
  States is more than 8 times more likely to kill him or herself
• 1:02:20
  than to die at the hands of some felon, some bad guy.
• 1:02:24
  So during that 30 year period, those numbers, none of them had
• 1:02:27
  dropped down at all. None of them had dropped down.
• 1:02:30
  That was a little shocking to the Department of Justice.
• 1:02:34
  That explains the identification of a psychological issue.
• 1:02:37
  But the fact that they were able to to to correlate it or
• 1:02:40
  identify that there's a connection to a spiritual issue,
• 1:02:43
  I find quite, quite novel. Exactly.
• 1:02:46
  But that the point is that during those 30 years, that was
• 1:02:49
  when police psychology was born, was revving up, gearing up, and
• 1:02:55
  they're producing all kinds of amazing resources and insights.
• 1:02:58
  And yet for all of that, it made no difference.
• 1:03:01
  So the Department of Justice, when they were looking at that,
• 1:03:03
  they said the physical dangers of the career have dropped.
• 1:03:06
  We could do definite things to make those numbers drop.
• 1:03:10
  Why weren't these other statistics responsive to all of
• 1:03:14
  these infusions from the police psychology world and the
• 1:03:17
  shocking realization on the part of the behavioral science, you
• 1:03:20
  know, the research that they did beyond the scope of this
• 1:03:22
  conversation to describe how they figured this out.
• 1:03:25
  But what they realized was that the career is not stressful only
• 1:03:30
  physically and psychologically. It's also stressful spiritually.
• 1:03:34
  And those statistics, the self medicating, the expression, the
• 1:03:38
  expression of, you know, the domestic violence, this the
• 1:03:42
  incidents of all those organic diseases, the suicide rate, that
• 1:03:46
  was the the natural consequence, the inevitable consequence if
• 1:03:50
  these officers, if they're being fed all kinds of great stuff,
• 1:03:54
  they're giving resources, but it's the wrong currency.
• 1:03:57
  So what the department, what the Behavioral Science Unit figured
• 1:04:00
  out in their research to answer the Department of Justice's
• 1:04:04
  queer their question, They said the career is stressful
• 1:04:07
  physically, psychological, emotionally, but also
• 1:04:11
  spiritually. They spent five years trying to
• 1:04:14
  come up with what do you do about that?
• 1:04:17
  How do you provide spiritual resources or what they call
• 1:04:20
  tools for intentional spirituality with which officers
• 1:04:25
  could nurture, preside over their own spiritual healing?
• 1:04:29
  They worked for five years. They had about 70 people who
• 1:04:35
  were clergy, and they were ordained clergy and sworn law
• 1:04:39
  enforcement, and they were not able to come up with resources
• 1:04:42
  that were not overtly religious. They were overtly religious and
• 1:04:48
  that violates all that church state separation requirements.
• 1:04:53
  They couldn't go saying to the police world, the Behavioral
• 1:04:56
  Science Unit couldn't say, tada, here are all of these resources.
• 1:05:00
  They're profoundly religious in nature.
• 1:05:02
  You can't do that. So after five years of this kind
• 1:05:06
  of research, they suspended the project.
• 1:05:09
  The director of the FBI suspended it and said we can't
• 1:05:11
  go peddling religion. They suspended it.
• 1:05:15
  The next day the chief happened to attend a leviah of a family,
• 1:05:21
  of a friend, of the father of a friend.
• 1:05:24
  He went to this leviah in New Jersey, and he was standing
• 1:05:27
  there marvelling. He said to me, this stuff is
• 1:05:30
  very spiritual. It's not religious at all, very
• 1:05:33
  substantive. You got more of this, like, what
• 1:05:35
  is this? And I said to Torah, Torah, he
• 1:05:38
  says, is there a lot of that? I was like, you have no.
• 1:05:40
  Idea. There's so much of it.
• 1:05:42
  There's so much of it, so he said to me.
• 1:05:45
  You might be the guy I've been looking for.
• 1:05:48
  You don't ever want to hear an FBI agent say you're the guy
• 1:05:51
  I've been looking for. It makes your blood run except
• 1:05:54
  for that. So he said to me, and yet 110
• 1:05:58
  minute talk isn't enough. He said, how do I know that you
• 1:06:02
  have more material? Like what?
• 1:06:03
  What Like can you, like, impress me something.
• 1:06:07
  So I sent him the manuscript of the Batman book.
• 1:06:10
  It wasn't published yet, but I sent it to him and he received
• 1:06:16
  it. He called me up a few days later
• 1:06:17
  and he was like, I got it. I understand.
• 1:06:20
  He was like, come down to Quantico.
• 1:06:22
  I went down to Quantico. I spent about three years there
• 1:06:26
  intensely interacting, shadowing police officers.
• 1:06:29
  They have a program in which they to which they invite
• 1:06:32
  leaders in law enforcement from local, state and federal levels
• 1:06:36
  around the country and from around the world.
• 1:06:38
  It's called the National Academy.
• 1:06:39
  The FBI hosts the National Academy at the FBI Academy.
• 1:06:44
  And I spent three years shadowing these people,
• 1:06:48
  participating in the in the, in the program and speaking with
• 1:06:52
  them whenever they weren't in classes or courses, I would sit
• 1:06:55
  down and talk to them and I would say to them, tell me about
• 1:06:58
  your life, tell me about. And they gave me insight into
• 1:07:01
  who they were. That was what it took.
• 1:07:03
  That was the hardest part because to understand the
• 1:07:05
  reality that confronts them, what they do, how it changes
• 1:07:10
  them, the kind of people they are.
• 1:07:12
  After several years of this, when I saw the black spots on my
• 1:07:16
  Om Neshama and I understood the trauma that they felt.
• 1:07:21
  So I said to my boss in the behavioral center.
• 1:07:24
  I said to him, OK, I'm going to go.
• 1:07:26
  I'm going to go home now and I'm going to, you know, do what
• 1:07:31
  needs to be done. I'm going to do what needs to be
• 1:07:34
  done. And what I needed to do was
• 1:07:35
  this. I needed to take the what I had
• 1:07:41
  spent three years doing was creating a prism of an
• 1:07:45
  understanding of how of what their reality was like and what
• 1:07:49
  they needed. So I took the small amount of
• 1:07:52
  Torah that I had at that point, all my Torah learning, not a
• 1:07:57
  lot, unfortunately, whatever it was, let's say it was this much.
• 1:08:00
  So I took that Torah learning that I had and I passed it
• 1:08:03
  through that prism of now this understanding of what they
• 1:08:09
  confronted, what they needed, and what came out.
• 1:08:14
  Now imagine, right, Dorfman, you know a lot more Torah than I do.
• 1:08:18
  If you were to take you, trust me, I wouldn't lie about this.
• 1:08:21
  This is a sensitive topic for me.
• 1:08:24
  But if you were to take all your Torah learning and you're to
• 1:08:27
  pass it through a prism, different prisms on any topic.
• 1:08:30
  In other words, all someone would have to do would be to
• 1:08:32
  explain to you. They'd sensitize you to to what
• 1:08:35
  this prism is. You pass it all through.
• 1:08:38
  You think about the Hazaz I, I remember having this experience
• 1:08:41
  teaching at the, at Duke University and we're doing Kiru
• 1:08:44
  work there. And I would sometimes I'd give
• 1:08:46
  five classes in a day. I'd sometimes use, they were all
• 1:08:49
  different classes on different topics.
• 1:08:50
  I'd have learned the causal, let's say in the morning, the
• 1:08:53
  night before, the week before, at some point in my life, I
• 1:08:56
  would use the same causal 5 in five different classes to
• 1:08:59
  identify 5 different things. You can take any piece of Torah.
• 1:09:02
  There's an infinite amount of lumbus of uncus of inside of
• 1:09:05
  everything in in it. And I passed it through and I
• 1:09:10
  created at that point the course that they would use at the FBI
• 1:09:17
  Academy, at the National Academy that they've used over the last
• 1:09:21
  22 years, more or less continuously.
• 1:09:26
  I created, I helped create that course and I distilled it into
• 1:09:29
  this book, Spiritual Survival for Law Enforcement.
• 1:09:33
  This book spiritual is a fiber of law enforcement.
• 1:09:34
  When the book came out, I was a show rabbi and that same show,
• 1:09:38
  we had a yeshiva in the building and one of the one of the
• 1:09:42
  bachram they loved that they used to love.
• 1:09:44
  I'd come back from the FBI with my FBI jacket and you know, it
• 1:09:48
  would say, you know, it'd have the logo of the behavioral
• 1:09:52
  Science unit. It would say Rabbi Carry
• 1:09:53
  Friedman. And that's, and they love that
• 1:09:56
  kind of stuff because you know, they're young men.
• 1:09:57
  So one of these young men who was already something of atomic
• 1:10:01
  Hakam 17 years old, he's become only a a greater tomahawk him
• 1:10:07
  over the over the years since he took a copy of the book and he
• 1:10:11
  came back the next day in the margins.
• 1:10:14
  I feel very bad. But but but I've run out of
• 1:10:17
  time. But you know what we're I want
• 1:10:19
  to continue this conversation. At some point.
• 1:10:21
  We'll make it work. And I definitely want you to
• 1:10:22
  talk more about your new book. I think that would be amazing.
• 1:10:24
  There's so much to unpack with the spiritual help of people,
• 1:10:27
  health of people, and also what you've written in your work in
• 1:10:29
  the FBI. So I hope we can continue this
• 1:10:32
  soon. I would love that.
• 1:10:33
  I'm sorry I'm such a blabbermouth.
• 1:10:35
  That's always the problem. You're just.
• 1:10:37
  No, you're just. You're just a well with lots of
• 1:10:39
  wisdom. You're very kind to say that.
• 1:10:42
  So. OK.
• 1:10:43
  But you have you have enough stuff to produce whatever you
• 1:10:48
  wanted to produce. Yeah.
• 1:10:50
  Yeah. Absolutely.
• 1:10:50
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:10:51
  This is a great talk. I appreciate you sitting in a
• 1:10:53
  talk with us. OK, great.
• 1:10:55
  We'll probably do it in the future.
• 1:10:56
  It was excellent. I'll look forward to that.
• 1:10:58
  Thank you very much. Have a great job us be well.
• 1:11:01
  All right, all the best. That isn't bye.
• 1:11:03
  See everybody.