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Rav Shorr talks ‘true happiness’ to HAFTR boys

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An eleventh grade HAFTR class met with HaGaon R’Shorr shlita in his private study in Flatbush last week, and listened intently as the Rav discussed the meaning of “true happiness.”

Rabbi Baruch Fogel’s gemara class had been anticipating their trip to meet one of the Gedolim of our time, as well as visiting the Living Torah Museum in Boro Park, famous for offering a hands-on experience that brings the Torah alive.

Rav Shorr discussed how to approach living in this world as a frum Jew. He brought in parables, told personal stories and added some original Torah insights.

Among the thought provoking concepts presented was an explanation of the phrase “true happiness.”

Why is the word “true” connected to the word “happiness?” Rav Shorr explained by asking another question: “Why is it that when you have eaten a great meal you do not feel good about that meal a few years later, but yet if you had performed an act of kindness like helping an old person cross the street, you would remember that positive feeling and still feel good about it even years later?”

He answered that the barometer of truth is its staying power, because the truth lasts forever. Therefore when someone does something that relates to Judaism which is, of course, true, then the feeling will exist years later!

Rav Shorr added that the computer program that alters pictures, Photoshop, is a great lesson in how to approach the world. The fact that every thing we see can be manipulated, and that we can longer trust our eyes to identify what’s real or not, is the greatest mussar lesson how to approach the pull of our yetzer hora. While it might seem to our senses as something desirable, we have to know that the enjoyment of gashmiyus is only photoshopped and that it is not real. Chasing the yetzer hora is literaly chasing a picture that is not real.

At the end of the meeting he gave each one a copy of one of his printed seforim, as well as an invitation to come speak to him whenever they are in Brooklyn.

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