The God Squad with Rabbi Marc Gellman

Rabbi Gellman explores the two types of scars we bear in life – virtue scars and mistake scars. Virtue scars, the result of doing the right thing, are often reminders of moments of courage and the things worth fighting for. They may be the result of protecting a friend or speaking out for what is right. Mistake scars, on the other hand, are the result of moral weakness and remind us of our brokenness. 

In this second episode I consider God winks which is the name of the ways dead people find to communicate with us. Please send me your God winks and we can grow our collection. Just press “Record message” on our website godsquadpodcast.com and we can consider the weird but wonderful ways that our loved ones have found to us that everything is okay and that death is not the end of us.

In this first episode of the second season of the God Squad podcast which was recorded before Valentine’s Day I offer up as a love letter to my wife Betty my favorite words of wisdom about love.

The third in our series of podcasts on famous sayings we think are true but are not: “All I want is for my children to be happy.”

The first reason this saying is wrong is that as it turns out that being happy is less like something you can achieve and more like something you already have by virtue of your innate personality. Wishing that your children should be happy is sort of like wishing that they be tall or beautiful or good in math. They either are or they aren’t and sadly there is not much you or they can do about it. Psychologists and social scientists who have researched this topic of human happiness are univocal in their conclusions that happiness is much more like an attribute than an acquisition. 

We know this to be true by seeing two children from the same loving family with radically different happiness set points. Environment matters but not that much. The psychologist and researcher Alex Michalos succinctly put it, “When it comes to subjective well-being, you don't get a big bang out of the real world.” 

The amazing discovery from those who investigate happiness is that the things we think matter most in making us happy actually matter least, and the things we think matter least actually matter most: Beautiful people are not happier than not-so-beautiful people. Young people are not happier than old people. Smart people are not happier than intellectually challenged people. Educated people are not happier than uneducated people. 

So if the things we think will make us happy really don’t, what does? It turns out that simple things, prosaic things make us happy. Bread makes us happy. I tell a story about how Bill Paley who ran CBS began every dinner by slowly caressing and eating a roll. He did it because he believed that if he could be thankful for bread, he could more easily remember to be thankful for all his many other blessings of wealth.

A good sense of humor makes us happy. Friends obviously make us happy. Volunteering makes us happy, and community makes us happy. There is, of course the cynics who like Spike Mulligan taught in his Las Vegas lounge act, “Money can't buy you happiness, but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.” Henny Youngman said, “What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money.”

I tell the story of an American investment banker trying to convince a South American fisherman that he should go public as an example of the joy of a simple life. 

The rabbis teach, “Who is rich? The one who is happy with his lot.” 

I tell the story of an executive vice president of IBM whom I heard speak at his retirement luncheon and there, in front of all the young, eager, and ambitious gaggle of vice presidents he said this, “I know that every one of you in this room want my job and I am going to tell you how you can get it. When my daughter was married I walked her down the aisle. At that moment of my daughter’s life I realized that I did not know her favorite color, or the last book she read, or the name of her best friend. I realized that I knew nothing about my daughter. That is the price I paid to get the things I thought would make me happy. So, if you are willing to pay that price, you can have my damn job.” 

The rabbis teach, “Who is rich? The one who is happy with his lot.” That is the truth. 

Tommy got Mother Teresa’s business card. On it there was no phone number and no address. It just had her name and these words, “Happiness is the natural fruit of duty.”

The third in our series of podcasts on famous sayings we think are true but are not: “All I want is for my children to be happy.”

The first reason this saying is wrong is that as it turns out that being happy is less like something you can achieve and more like something you already have by virtue of your innate personality. Wishing that your children should be happy is sort of like wishing that they be tall or beautiful or good in math. They either are or they aren’t and sadly there is not much you or they can do about it. Psychologists and social scientists who have researched this topic of human happiness are univocal in their conclusions that happiness is much more like an attribute than an acquisition. 

We know this to be true by seeing two children from the same loving family with radically different happiness set points. Environment matters but not that much. The psychologist and researcher Alex Michalos succinctly put it, “When it comes to subjective well-being, you don't get a big bang out of the real world.” 

The amazing discovery from those who investigate happiness is that the things we think matter most in making us happy actually matter least, and the things we think matter least actually matter most: Beautiful people are not happier than not-so-beautiful people. Young people are not happier than old people. Smart people are not happier than intellectually challenged people. Educated people are not happier than uneducated people. 

So if the things we think will make us happy really don’t, what does? It turns out that simple things, prosaic things make us happy. Bread makes us happy. I tell a story about how Bill Paley who ran CBS began every dinner by slowly caressing and eating a roll. He did it because he believed that if he could be thankful for bread, he could more easily remember to be thankful for all his many other blessings of wealth.

A good sense of humor makes us happy. Friends obviously make us happy. Volunteering makes us happy, and community makes us happy. There is, of course the cynics who like Spike Mulligan taught in his Las Vegas lounge act, “Money can't buy you happiness, but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.” Henny Youngman said, “What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money.”

I tell the story of an American investment banker trying to convince a South American fisherman that he should go public as an example of the joy of a simple life. 

The rabbis teach, “Who is rich? The one who is happy with his lot.” 

I tell the story of an executive vice president of IBM whom I heard speak at his retirement luncheon and there, in front of all the young, eager, and ambitious gaggle of vice presidents he said this, “I know that every one of you in this room want my job and I am going to tell you how you can get it. When my daughter was married I walked her down the aisle. At that moment of my daughter’s life I realized that I did not know her favorite color, or the last book she read, or the name of her best friend. I realized that I knew nothing about my daughter. That is the price I paid to get the things I thought would make me happy. So, if you are willing to pay that price, you can have my damn job.” 

The rabbis teach, “Who is rich? The one who is happy with his lot.” That is the truth. 

Tommy got Mother Teresa’s business card. On it there was no phone number and no address. It just had her name and these words, “Happiness is the natural fruit of duty.”

Spiritual balancing is taught in the wisdom of every world religion. Spiritual Balancing is the only spiritual wisdom that links the religions of the East and the West.

I learned this technique one day when I watched a workman carrying carrying two five gallon pails of spackling compound up some steep stairs in an old house we were remodeling. His euphonious name was Meladin Keladin and I asked him, “Meladin, why are you carrying two buckets of mud when you only really need one?” He replied, “Because two pails keep me balanced. If I only carried one bucket, I would be pulled off to one side and it would hurt my back.” 

Since that moment I have used the concept and the technique of spiritual balancing to help people cope with their griefwork and depression. I have also lectured about spiritual balancing to psychiatrists and psychologists some of whom have adopted it as a therapeutic technique and others have told me politely to keep my day job. What I discovered is that if you ask people who are depressed or suffering, “Is there anything good still left in your life?” they will all answer yes, and they will all be able to name their blessings without hesitation. Their problem is that they are spending all their time thinking about what is going wrong in their life and almost no time thinking about what is still going right. They have become so fixated, so obsessed, with their suffering that the thoughts of their blessings are crowded out by their need to fixate on their burdens and they have therefore been spiritually strangled. So I ask them to spend five minutes recounting their burdens to me in excruciating detail. Then I ask them to spend exactly the same amount of time recounting to me their blessings. At the end of the session many of them feel more balanced. That is spiritual balancing and that is the topic of this episode. 

My absolute favorite rabbinic legend (midrash) teaches this point precisely. The rabbis ask, why was it that some of the people who crossed the Red Sea argued with Moses and God as soon as they went free on the other side? They answer, “Those people did not see the miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea. But others asked, ‘How could they not have seen the miracle? They were walking through the middle of Sea themselves and their eyes were open?’ But the others answered, ‘They did not see the miracle because they never looked up, and so all they saw was mud.’”  They were so consumed by the dangers of the Exodus; they missed the miracle of the Exodus. All they needed to do was to look up and down and the journey ahead would have become balanced and easy. 

Spiritual balancing is taught in the wisdom of every world religion. Yin and Yang are the symbols of spiritual balancing in the I Ching. In Buddhism the eight fold noble path is the heart of Buddhist teachings, and its purpose is to teach those seeking enlightenment to walk a balanced middle path in their life between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification. Says the Dalai Lama, "...the practice of Dharma, real spiritual practice, is in some sense like a voltage stabilizer. The function of the stabilizer is to prevent irregular power surges and instead give you a stable, balanced and constant source of power."

Spiritual Balancing is the only spiritual wisdom that links the religions of the East and the West.