Spiritual Success - Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb (Jewish Philosophy)

What’s said in this shiur

The opening of this shiur, in Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb’s own words — taken from the captions, so names and Hebrew terms may be approximate.

Okay, today's topic is spiritual success. Which is something you could spend 6 years on fruitfully. Um so I want to pick out a couple of strands which I think are perhaps underemphasized. And try to point at least the beginnings of how one could uh address them. Let me start with a parable. I think it's a fairly well-known parable. Uh which teaches us I think the basic dimensions. The parable mentions a king who ordered one of his citizens, thank you very much. He ordered one of his citizens to work for him in a room. King took him into the room and the King took him into the room and the citizen saw a pole, a metal pole, arranged horizontally and exiting a hole in the wall. So that half some portion of the pole was inside and some portion of the pole was outside. And the king told the citizen, "Grab hold of the end of the pole here in the in the room and I want you to rotate it and I want you to rotate it with both hands." So the citizen walks up and he takes it and says, "And there's resistance." And it's not easy, but he can do it. And the king said, "This is your job 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. That's what I want you to do." Listen, he's a loyal citizen, he believes in the king. And he shows up every day for work. After a year,

Jump to a moment

1. 0:09Okay, today's topic is spiritual success. Which is something you could spend 6 years on fruitfully.…
2. 4:12One is the things in the world that you accomplish and the other is what you…
3. 8:18subject of virtue. What is virtue? What does it mean to be virtuous? How do you…
4. 12:25that the two the two categories are separate and they and they're related to one another.…
5. 16:32Character traits are built slowly over time with slow and gradual development. So, the idea of…
6. 21:09unless you work on developing yourself. And one of the ways you work on developing yourself…
7. 25:23Cuz it means that if you make the effort and something beyond your control prevents the…
8. 29:28effort that I make. And this now sort of democratizes Torah. You don't want to say…
9. 33:31born and trained in his family to start life at at level 80, and he, through…
10. 37:35I know someone who was in a sudden life-and-death situation, and he told me he found…

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