to time, it's good to speak to yourself.

I'm sharing this story because, yes, we have to show up as souls.

We have to see ourselves as souls.

We cannot be defined by our limitations.

We must be defined by our limitless potential.

But how do we do so? I want to share with you this morning just three thoughts, three suggestions.

The first one is the one we just mentioned that sometimes we must speak to ourselves, to our deepest self.

And I think this is one of the biggest things that I see, people dragging them past in their future so their future looks exactly like their past.

Sorry.

Absolutely.

You know the line abracadabra that magicians use? Well, abracadabra really are two Aramaic words.

And what they mean is exactly what you just said.

Abra means to create.

Cadabra means words.

Words create.

This is a – The space between my mouth and this microphone and your mouth and your pulpit and your synagogue and this microphone, I think it's holy space.

Hmm.

And the reason is because the blemish that I see in someone else is very often a blemish that I personally have, and the other is just a reflection of myself.

And so when we come to judge others, whether we are actual judges or whether we are ju- just judging, as so many people do, especially these days on social media and in other outlets, we are really looking at ourselves.

We may recognize that or not, but the other is a mirror, is a mirror to what we have.

And it's interesting because, you know, positive people are people who, when they look at others, they see positivity, and that's because they themselves are positive.

Negative people, they see negativity in others because they themselves are negative.

And very often, yeah, God is telling us, "Don't be, um, a judge in, th- that, that uses his ego as his, his means to judge." Remove that completely, and make sure that when you judge, you do it without any iota of ego.

Th- does, that goes a little bit back to the very first sentences we were talking about this hour, isn't it? When you were talking about students going to schools, uh, college, at college age that don't teach the extremes but rather teach you how to live with, uh, a form of, uh, some kind of even keel, if you will, some kind of, uh, steady s- strain, I think is the phrase from the Navy.

So

that's what he was going to do in his eyes with his perspective.

He suffered from a disease called Gaucher and he needed dialysis every single month and he would go to the Jerusalem hospital where he lived in order to have this life-saving treatment.

But he wouldn't see it as a medical treatment that he needed to get.

He would see that hour as an extra hour that he had in his day to study.

Yes, during that time he would receive this treatment, but it was a secondary thing in his mind.

The primary thing was that I have an hour to study, so fine.

studio.

What are we doing here in Deuteronomy 3, Rabbi?

Right.

Well, that's the opening theme where Moses begs God to please enter the land of Israel after he was punished, that he could not enter because he had hit the rock and not spoken to the rock.

has gotten instructed to provide water for the Jewish people in the desert.

But what's interesting is that Va'etchanan means, according to many commentaries, that he begged God 515 times.

515 times because, you know, in Hebrew, every letter has a numerical value.

And if you take the numerical value of the entire word, of all the letters in that word, Va'etchanan, then they amount to 515.

And I thought, man, that's a nice psychic way of really thinking about how to comport your life, that God is your boss.

most

amazingly happy moments of life.

That's right.

Yes.

In fact, it's the saddest day in the Jewish calendar.

It falls on the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av.

And as you mentioned, this portion always falls just before the ninth of Av.

If I have that close to correct, it seems to me when we think about improving the world, it begins with really the hardest thing in the world, which is improving ourselves.