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Happy People's Family Struggles
00:09:08
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| It's the happy, happy, happy, happy hour, my friends. | |
| Happiness! | |
| The great founders, the founders of this country, giants. | |
| These were giants. | |
| I know that we don't like using the word, but I'm not using it about small people. | |
| You know who hate giants? | |
| Midgets. | |
| I don't mean this physically. | |
| I mean it. | |
| Morally, intellectually, etc. | |
| That's why they're torn down by very small people. | |
| Anyway, it is the happiness hour, and it is really important. | |
| Happy people do make the world better. | |
| So today's subject is... | |
| Family life is normatively filled with problems. | |
| I was going to say dysfunctional, but that might be too severe a word. | |
| The purpose of this hour is to tell you that if you have some big issue in your family, welcome to the human race. | |
| If you have no big issues in your family, thank God, every day, you dodged a bullet. | |
| Because some of the finest people in the world have serious family problems. | |
| I ask people about their family life whenever I meet them. | |
| I'm not particularly good at small talk. | |
| And I'll tell you why. | |
| Among other reasons, I lose interest immediately, and then I tune out, which is not a good thing to tune out of a conversation with somebody you've just met or at whose table you're seated. | |
| I don't have a long attention span for what I consider boring. | |
| So I ask people about their lives. | |
| I'll give you an example of what I ask. | |
| I ask people, if let's say the parents have traditional American Judeo-Christian values, how many children do you have? | |
| They give me a number, and then I ask, do they all share your values? | |
| No one, by the way, has ever even hinted at it's none of your business. | |
| I have never gotten your it's none of your business as a response to asking people about their lives. | |
| I think one of the reasons is they know I don't have a bad motive. | |
| I think another reason is people like to open up about their lives. | |
| And why shouldn't they? | |
| And why hide it? | |
| And so often, I will hear so often, more often than not, I hear about people who have very difficult relations with at least one of their children. | |
| I'm not talking about their teenager. | |
| Talk about their 30-year-old. | |
| One of the greatest ideas I ever heard from a caller, I heard talking about difficult children. | |
| A woman who touched my life with this comment, and I have spread it far and wide. | |
| Dennis, I have a very troubled... | |
| I think she used the word miserable, 35-year-old daughter. | |
| And one day I awakened and I realized I didn't break her. | |
| I can't fix her. | |
| If that woman were present, I would have given her a hug. | |
| I hug a lot of people. | |
| I'm a hugger. | |
| And she would have gotten a big one. | |
| What a brilliant insight, and it's been so helpful to so many people I've told it to. | |
| You didn't break your child, and you can't fix your child. | |
| If your child wants to fix him or herself, he or she, or now they, will do so. | |
| Another point that I make about The problems of families and dysfunctionality and how normal it is is that I consider the book of Genesis in the Bible to be a gift to humanity. | |
| The book of Genesis is largely about families from Adam and Eve to Jacob and Joseph and every single family in Genesis is either truly dysfunctional Or highly troubled? | |
| Starts out with Adam and Eve. | |
| One son kills the other. | |
| Now you've got to admit, compared to Adam and Eve's family, your family's doing fine. | |
| If one of your children didn't kill the other, you're ahead of Adam and Eve. | |
| How's that for a troubled family? | |
| Noah? | |
| Noah is, after Noah leaves the ark, Noah has the terrible problem of being in some way sexually humiliated by one of his sons. | |
| That's pretty severe. | |
| Of course, we jump to Jacob, the third of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. | |
| And his favorite son, first of all, the fact that he had a favorite son was a terrible indictment of his fathering abilities. | |
| If you have a favorite child, you have a favorite child. | |
| But to show it? | |
| That's very damaging. | |
| And what do the siblings do? | |
| They throw him in a pit to die, or sell him to be a slave. | |
| So, it's a pretty difficult world out there for children. | |
| I mean, I could go on, obviously. | |
| Do you know what happens to Lot? | |
| Lot survives the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. | |
| This is Abraham's, what is it, his cousin? | |
| Nephew, right, his nephew. | |
| And the daughters of Lot. | |
| First of all, he was prepared to give his daughters over to guys at the door who wanted to rape the men who were visiting. | |
| So he said, no, don't take the men. | |
| My daughters are virgins. | |
| Take them and rape them. | |
| This is actually in there. | |
| How would you feel if you were Lot's daughter? | |
| One of the reasons I love the Torah is its honesty. | |
| The Torah of the first five books, it's what I'm writing my commentary on. | |
| And Deuteronomy, the third of my five volumes, the fifth of the five books, is coming out shortly. | |
| And I would ask you to help me get the word out, it's the best book ever written, and help you with your life by pre-ordering it at Amazon. | |
| We're getting it when it comes out of Costco. | |
| That Costco ordered 25,000 copies of the commentary on Deuteronomy? | |
| It's one of the few bright lights at this moment. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thumbs up is right. | |
| Double. | |
| Double thumbs up. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I mean, the point is, and I don't have to go on, A dysfunctional family in almost every chapter in Genesis. | |
| This is, I believe, God's way, if you prefer Moses' way, if you prefer somebody's way, of conveying to you that that is the norm. | |
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Celebrate Your Blessings
00:00:46
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| If you have a happy and loving relationship with your parents, your children, your siblings, you are Probably an outlier. | |
| There are many who do, but it is not the norm. | |
| That is the subject and the message of this Happiness Hour. | |
| It's very important. | |
| That way you can celebrate the good that you have in your life and in your family and not walk around thinking, woe unto me. | |
| When it's in fact something normative to the human condition. | |