Quotes of Rav Moshe Chaim Part 1

You have to give to the closest people first. You give first to your wife and your kids. Yes your wife comes before your kids…your immediate family then larger family, then your community, then your city, then your country, then the whole of humanity…Chessed [kindness] starts in the home. Giving starts in the home. Sometimes it’s easier to do some giant chessed, some huge publicity, let’s all get together do some big chessed! But like your son is struggling with something. ‘Oh it’s ok, don’t you see I’m doing chessed here!?’ ‘Dad like can you play catch with me??’ ‘I’m busy, like I’m doing so many good things! I’ll call you later.’ Sad. …Why do you spend all the time in your work and not so much time with your kids? 

 

The best kept secret in the entire world is Orthodox Torah Judaism. No-body knows. It’s such a secret. No-body knows. When people start getting glimpses, they start seeing there is something big…People are coming back from the four corners of the globe, it’s beautiful to see. And it is our job to teach and to share. 

 

The merit for eternal life is the more that you can be like Hashem. 

 

The sick need us (everyone should be healthy and well). When someone is sick, it’s difficult. The Gemara says when you visit the sick you actually take away some of their illness. You pick people up when you go to visit them. Visiting the sick is a tremendous mitzvah. Go visit the sick, just be there. Often times they don’t need anything, just your presence. Sometimes also just a feeling like someone to talk to, just be there. 

 

Rav Noach Weinberg of blessed memory, look what he did to give us this kingdom of Torah learning. Amazing. Amazing. We have to thank our ancestors, the one that came before us. 

 

We are taught that one of the most powerful ways to pray to God is actually to pray for somebody other than yourself…What about my friend that he should find a wife? What about my friend that he should have good parnasah? And have wealth and success? How much am I praying for other people? 

 

God knows that we are all working on ourselves. And He also knows where you are up to. And He knows that you want to care more about other people. ‘So [if] I am not doing it totally for the right reasons so I’m not even going to pray for my friends at all.’ Would that be the right response? No. It means, start praying for other people even if you are not fully doing it for the right reasons because at least you are thinking about another person, to some level. And then we hope as you get accustomed to actually thinking about another person, you will actually really start feeling a lot for them. 

 

Whatever I’m doing, stretching, exercising, having a nice conversation, so you might say to me, ‘Well none of those were mitzvas per se.’ It’s not like I was putting on tefillin or putting on your tzitzis or keeping Shabbes. Yet, as long as though you’re choosing God, you’re going for a walk with your wife and kids – with God, thinking about Hashem together. You’re thinking about how Hashem wants me to have a family. You’re thinking about how eating well and having smoothies for example is taking care of my health (which God wants). And working out, got to be fit, to be a good eved Hashem [servant of God] in this world; so you pull Hashem into everything. So all of a sudden those are no longer mundane things, those are Godly activities…You can uplift everything. They become a mitzvah, yes. A person can’t say, just so you know, ‘Oh I’m just going to have the BLT sandwich. I’m going to bring God [into it].’ Or I’m going to steal for God. You know Robin Hood? He’s not allowed. You’re a thief. That’s not permitted. ‘But it sounds so good,’ sounds so good?? You’re a thief. You’re not allowed to steal. So you can’t do an avera [sin] to pull God into it…We don’t live on mountain tops away from society. The message of the Jew is integrate into the world and elevate the world. 

 

The Jewish people are fanatics for acts of loving-kindness. We love helping. We love helping other people. We go to the ends of the earth just to help people. We send aid and relief anywhere that we can. 

 

Does the Torah limit the amount of money you can spend on other people? Yes, because you can’t make yourself poor. The general rule is you give a fifth of your income. 20% of your income. Jews give away 20% of their income. At least 10%, up to 20% of income. This is one of the areas that God says, ‘You want to become rich? Test Me.’…Now what about if a person says, ‘I make a million dollars a year’…In the case where if he gives more than 20%, he’s not impoverished, he can give more than 20%.  

 

You’re really supposed to learn Torah nonstop. Any free moment you have we learn Torah, any free moment. Does that mean you don’t chill?…If by ‘chill’ you mean healthy relaxation to rejuvenate then yes we chill. Depends on how you’re defining ‘chill’. If it’s just like space out and waste time, then no. Never allowed to do that. If it’s healthy relaxation to rejuvenate, it’s important for me to go and relax and have a Magnum ice-cream bar because I learned a lot of Torah today. I just feel like I just need to relax, watch the sunset, eat my Magnum ice-cream bar, feel that peace, the relaxation. Enjoy the flavours that Hashem put into the ice-cream bar (kosher one obviously). Make a bracha [blessing]. And just be with Hashem in that moment, and you call that chilling, great. If I need to do that five times a day that might be going over a line. 

 

[God consciousness]: God being a real part of my life, day after day, minute after minute, every single second of the day. And my decisions flowing out of 613 mitzvas as defined in the Torah, flowing out of a firm reality of God giving us the Torah at Mount Sinai. 

 

I want you to know, one of the main goals that we have in our learning together is I want you guys to become Jewishly literate. I want you to become independent in your learning and to become literate as Jews and know how to learn and grow in your learning to such a degree where you can explore the vistas of Hashem’s Torah…Once you start seeing the vistas then everything opens up. It’s very, very important because everybody knows that we have an expression, we say it in Yiddish usually, but every single Jew needs to either be a rabbi or somebody that could drive his rabbi crazy. You know what I’m saying, I mean there is no such thing as not being learned; everybody learns, we’re crazy about literacy and education, you have to learn and have to know how to learn. And that’s why we’re so into you guys becoming independent in your learning and then you could fly, then all of this is at your fingertips. You could access, you could explore the depths of Hashem’s Torah and think things through deeply yourselves. And therefore people usually ask how long do I have to stay in yeshiva or should I stay in yeshiva? A major part of that answer is to become independent in your learning; that you feel I could open up seforim [books], I could learn myself, I could develop an approach in learning Torah so that is a major goal that we have. 

 

The Vilna Gaon and the Ramban and the Rambam and other great Sages – the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rav Soloveitchik and others, who went into secular studies. The Chazon Ish, he knew certain things in other ways…Is that if you see it all as an expression of God then you could find God everywhere. But it’s much harder there because it’s more concealed. Even though it’s true 1+1=2, it’s true, even though you go to certain universities and they’re going to say like 1+1=3 and they’re like, ‘Hoa!! That was so profound like what’s he gong to do next?’…Well the answer is 1+1=2 and we know that that’s true. Anything which is true is Godly. And therefore you could find God in these places, but it’s not as explicit. 

 

What’s the Jews business? God. All day long and in which way? Torah. A Jew always has to have some piece of Torah on his mind. That if someone stops you on the street [and says], ‘Tell me what’s on your mind, tell me a piece of Torah!’ You shouldn’t be ‘mm m m,’ don’t stumble, you have to be able to say immediately, ‘This is what’s on my mind. This is the sugya I’m in, this is the topic I’m in…’ …I’m in the Torah, I’m in it…A Yid, what’s our business? Torah! Torah! All the time you have to have something on your mind. 

 

You want to know what a sign that somebody loves Torah so much? ‘All day long all I do is talk about it.’ A guy, how do you know what he likes? Just listen to what he talks about all day long. ‘Did you see that homerun, did you the stock, did you see bitcoin…’ I see what you’re into. If you love God, all day long Torah is on your lips.