Rabbi Steve Leder: Transformed By Pain

as Rabbi Leader. He is the senior Rabbi at Wilsher Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. Steve is one of the warmest, most thoughtful, wisest people I have ever met. He's a very deep thinker and full of the kind of wisdom that you'd hope for that I think all of us are seeking from a religious leader or a leader in any walk of life. And our conversation centered on topics from his new book Bok, which is called More Beautiful

Than Before, how suffering transforms us. And I know that you know, maybe you're not in the mood to hear about suffering, but I think all of us in life go through various challenges. The illness of a loved one, whatever hardship gets in our way. And I think that from thirty years as a rabbi ministering to a lot of people, Steve has drawn lessons that are going to be very useful in the lives of just about everyone I know, and hopefully in the lives of people listening

to our show. So we talked about everything from the drawbacks of working too hard to finding meaning in life's most difficult moments. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode. Check it out and let us know what you think. So, you've written this book more beautiful than before. What inspired you to write about tragedy and crisis and pain as

a friend of mine? In describing my job, which of course is also very much my life as the senior rabbi one of the largest congregations in the world, he described it as having a front row seat to life. I've been on the inside of other people's lives for thirty years, and that definitionally means I have been witnessed to an awful lot of pain, and so I've learned

an awful lot about pain, healing, growth, surviving. The first essay in the book is called when you must You can, which is so important to have faith in when the darkness comes. You were sidelined by a major health problem, which I think is part of what led you to this. Can you describe that? Uh? So? I'm I'm a person who has always worked extremely hard, punched above my weight, um making enormous sacrifices because I believe in what I do, and it's a noble calling and and a worthy life

to help others. But it takes its toll. For me. Part of the toll was ignoring my own body and the signals from my own body. So I was in a pretty serious car accident, from which I believed at the time I had walked away, you know, unscathed. And then about two or three months later, I started having these horrible shooting pains, and I ignored it, and I ignored it, and I ignored it, and I continued to work. And one day I was essentially paralyzed from the waist down.

I could not move, and this was the first time in my life when I could not will myself to do something. I made it about three feet into my study and I just bawled up in a fetal position and started weeping and begging for morphine. It was that bad. It was torture, and that started me down this path. You know, one of the things when you're rabbi for a large community, there are a lot of doctors who

want to take good care of you. So I had three different doctors prescribing pain killers, opioids, and steroids trying to get me through this, and I became dependent on these opioids. You you literally start eating them like like they're candy. And I would say it was about a five or six month period and I became very depressed. I had never been a depressed person before, and the

depression was very deep, very dark, very heavy. The way I described it to people who don't understand what it means to be depressed is that you literally see no purpose or reason for living. You're not suicidal, You're just entirely without ambition or purpose. Do you believe the opioids caused the depression. I think it was a combination of being at that time a fifty four year old man discovering that he was not immort and the steroids and

the opioids. I had something called posteroidal dysphoria, which is you know athletes have this. They either rage or they get depressed, and I got depressed. Uh, and this caused me to start really thinking about my life in a new way. And I made the decision that I was going to seek help and that I was going to turn this into a midlife opportunity and not a midlife crisis, because, believe me, it could have gone either way. So you talk in the book about workaholism as the last acceptable

is um. There are other is ms racism, sexism that we've all agreed, or at least many of us hopefully should be exercised from our society. But why has workaholism stuck as the thing that is okay and in fact admirable to a lot of people. Well, I think part of it is the value we place in our culture on net worth, the ways in which we continue to find ourselves by what we do in quotation marks. I do a lot of funerals, and I'm always amazed at

the uniformity of inscriptions on headstones. You know, when you have to distill a person's life down to fifteen characters per line, it is essentialism at its most essential. And what do most headstones say? Not your resume, not your g P. A not your net worth. Most of them say loving husband, father, grandfather, friend, loving wife, mother, grandmother, friend, loving brother, loving sister, that's it. So what you're saying is we should think more about our headstones that our resumes.

That's correct, and more about our headstones than our net worth, and to understand that our net worth and our self worth are not the same. Now, it's impossible given the culture in which we live, which bombards us with message is about the meaning of things, of the material. It's impossible not to be affected by that. All of us are I am, you are? All of us are? Can you be aware of that and then do something with

your life that isn't completely informed by it? So let's go back so that our listeners can get to know you a little bit better. You write in the book about how both your parents fled poverty and abuse. They had five kids, including you, before they turned thirty. Your dad ran a junkyard. You grew up in Minnesota. You write pretty bluntly in the book about your father as

belittling and tyrannical. Tell me about that childhood and how somehow you emerged as the wise and benevolent person whom we all know well, sometimes our parents teach us what not to be. But I grew up in a house where there was a lot of anxiety and fear. My parents were seventeen and eighteen when they got married. They knew nothing about parenting. They felt that if they, you know, didn't beat us, they were a vast improvement over their

own parents, and that was enough. And my father's entire life was about work and it was the only thing that mattered to him. He had great insecurity about money. Um, he was not a Holocaust survivor nor the child of Holocauster Harbors, but he still buried gold coins in the backyard in case we'd have to make a run for it. And this isn't, you know, a suburb of Minneapolis, as if the Cossacks were or the the s s were beating down our doors. So my dad was a blue

collar guy, you know. He grew up in that world. He lived in that world. He did not own a metal recycling business. He owned a junkyard and I started working for my father on saturdays when I was five years old. When I was five years old, I was on the floor in that junkyard scrubbing it with a scrub brush. And a bucket on my hands and knees, and all, I want to see our elbows and asses. And my dad would say I, all, I want to

see our asses and elbows. And I was five and that was my life until frankly, I suffered this injury. That was the first time that I woke up and thought to myself, I have been my father. I have been the driving, critical, belittling person my father was, and

I went to work changing that. And the end result of that, Brian, is that I realized that the physical pain, while at the time so crushing and depressing, was ultimately what liberated me from the tyranny of my father, because it helped me choose to change and lead a different kind of life. There's something about brokenness that actually makes us more whole. So do you believe pain is often or even always character building, because sometimes it just seems awful?

It is? It is always awful. You know a friend of mine who had cancer three times, and the third time I was visiting him in his hospital and he was clearly dying and he looked up at me and he said, this much character I don't need, you know. So, this is not a book about glorifying pain. But the fact of the matter is we don't get to choose these painful things has happened to us with no control over most of them. The only thing we have any control over is whether or not we make something of

our pain. You know. That's what I mean when I say in the first paragraph that everyone goes through hell, but the point is not to walk out empty handed. And I'm not even for a moment positing that these painful experiences are worth the insights and changes they can create within us. But I am saying neither are they worth less. So there are a lot of lessons in the book about how to grow and become a better person having experienced pain, or helping those around you who

are in pain. Um, let's let's just go through some of them. Um, there's a word henany that comes up. What does that mean? Henany is a Hebrew word that means here i am. It is spoken by the two greatest men of the Bible, and that's Moses and Abraham, not in that order. When called by God and called by others, they simply say henani, here I am. I give a piece of advice in the book that anyone who has suffered, I think will validate in the book. I tell people never to say these seven words when

someone you know is suffering. Never say let me know if you need anything. That smacks of false empathy. And even if it's sincere, it's nevertheless placing the burden upon the sufferer. That is not love, and that is not care, and that is not friendship. You should anticipate the sufferer's needs and meet them without being asked or being told.

Figure something out. You can do, whatever it is, a meal dropped off at the front door, car pooling for their kids, play dates for their kids, sending a massage therapist to their home, simply emails and calls. Uh, you know in cards. These things matter and you should not wait to be asked. Show up. People call me all the time and say, Rabbi, my best friend is dying. He's been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I'm flying back to New York to visit him. I don't know what to say.

My advice just walk in the room. The rest will take care of itself. Just walk in the room. Show up. I have this and I've been visiting the sick and and distressed for thirty years and often I don't know what I'm going to say. I only know I need to walk in that door because it's the feeling of isolation an abandonment that is one of the worst aspects of pain, and when someone just shows up, it pierces

that sense of isolation and abandonment. Let's take a quick break and I'll be right back with more of Rabbi Steve Leader. One of the most powerful parts in the book, to me at least, was when you wrote that everyone is in pain, the stranger on the subway, the guy who cut us off while we're driving. That you need to have some empathy and recognition of the fact that other people in the world are facing challenges. They're not just acting like schmucks. That's right. There's a reason why

people behave the way they do, you know. Speaking of Henani, here I Am. That's the title of Jonathan Saffron Feuyer's relatively new novel Uh. And in that novel, there's there's a wonderful line which I quote in the book, in which he says everyone is wounded, and if you can remember a person's wounds, it makes it easier to forgive. Because people don't wake up in the morning deciding to be bad human beings unless you're a psychopath, and there

are some, but very few. Uh So, it's very important to remember that we are no different and others are no different. Sometimes when people come to me with some sense of, you know, self righteous indignation at the behavior of another, I sometimes say to them, are you so perfect? Well? And and where do we draw the line and say that this person doesn't deserve empathy? You know, Harvey Weinstein has been all over the news. Uh And and that's led to a flood of stories about sexual harassment and

assault in our society. Do we forgive the harasser? There's a difference between empathy and forgiveness. They're not the same. Can we empathize with a person whose life and ego are so out of control that he's willing to frighten and abuse innocent and vulnerable women? Can we empathize with that?

I would say I can in the sense that the degree of um insanity behind the behavior to me indicates a pretty enormous degree of inner turmoil, dysfunction, or at the very least lack of humility, an extreme and enormous degree of narcissism, and by the way, empathy for the perpetrator does not preclude empathy for the victims. Everyone loses.

Everyone loses. Now, what about forgiveness? Uh, forgiveness? And again I talked about this in the book based on the work of my Mondi is the greatest rabbi and Jewish teacher of the medieval period. Died over eight hundred years ago. Over eight hundred years ago, he worked out this system by which you can determine whether or not a person merits forgiveness four steps. Four steps. First, the person has to stop the behavior. Stop. Secondly, confess that behavior out loud.

There is a big difference between saying to oneself, I'm a sex addict, I'm a gambler, I have an anger problem. There's a big difference between saying that internally and actually saying it out loud to God and another person. Thirdly, you have to apologize and seek forgiveness. And finally, you have to avoid repeating that sin or behavior when given another opportunity to do so. If you go through those four steps, you deserve to be forgiven, and the victim

is obligated to forgive. And if the victim does not forgive three times, says my monides. The sin is then upon the victim. People have a right to change the three strikes that you're out well one strike. If the change isn't sincere and you don't go through these steps, you don't merit forgiveness. And I would also say that forgiving doesn't mean forgetting. But if there's been a true and sincere change, and the behavior has stopped and isn't repeated,

you can forgive. You don't have to forget that it happened. You can't forget that it happened. I've learned over the years that the most important things are said with the fewest words. I do you know it's a boy, it's a girl. Yes, I'm sorry, no more than i'm sorry. In the book, I talked about something related to apology and forgiveness that I think is more profound than i'm sorry. And they're the three hardest words for most human beings

to say, which are I was wrong. Saying I was wrong is a much higher degree of culpability than I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You can mean i'm sorry it happened, I'm sorry, I got caught. I'm sorry, I'm sorry you're offended. There's a lot of wiggle room and I'm sorry, I was wrong is a full acceptance of full responsibility and I'll tell you something. It immediately takes the sting out. It

immediately changes the barametric pressure in the relationship. And look, people are hesitant to say it mostly has of ego and pride. There's a reason foolish pride are words that go together often. But it is also true that we live in a culture that punishes people for accepting responsibility and saying I'm sorry. You know, doctors, when they make a mistake are told never to say I was wrong, right,

They're told to shut up and lawyer up. But there are over thirty states now that have something called a no fault apology law. This is very interesting to me. And no fault apology law allows a physician to apologize to a patient for a mistake without it being admissible in court. And what do you think has happened in the states that have been no fault apology laws, number of lawsuits go way down, plumb it, They plummet because

people don't really want to soothe their doctors. They just want someone to take responsibility and say I was wrong and I'm sorry. This is not only true between doctors and patients. This is true between husbands and wives, between parents and children, and brothers and sisters. I was wrong is an extraordinary antidote to the bitterness of pain. So another extraordinary antidote to pain that you talk about in

the book Towards Thank You. You talk about the power of gratitude in combating depression, in overcoming anxiety, and making our lives better, both the person expressing gratitude as well as the person receiving it. Yes, yes, uh. There's something called a gratitude experiment, which is you, in three words, you write a statement of gratitude to someone in your life, and then you actually go and share it read it

to them. When people do this, there's almost always just deluge of tears, and people report feeling happier and less depressed. We all want to be appreciated. It sounds a little facile to say, count your blessings, but it's really a very important and powerful way to live. And you know, this also goes along with an another concept in the book that I think is so important, which is the

dangers of catastrophizing the future. You know, our DNA survived because we're the descendants of people who lived as if there was a tiger behind every tree. But things rarely, rarely turn out commensurate with our nightmares about how we believe they're going to turn out. And the less time we spend catastrophizing the future when we're in a difficult situation,

the better. There's documented evidence that people in pain who catastrophies the future feel exponentially greater pain than those who don't. And so this involves changing messages from this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me too. I've been through other difficult things and I will get through this. I can no longer do these things too. This is going to lead me to new things. This happened with me with my back. There are lots of things I used to love that I can't do any longer. I'm

just physically incapable of them. They have been replaced with some beautiful things that I never would have engaged in before. I've spent more time in nature now, just walking. You know, I used to love to do something called bouldering and Joshua Tree in California. Joshua Tree is an extraordinary place. It's a state park the size of the state of Rhode Island. It's filled with these enormous boulders. And I used to boulder, which means essentially scampering up over these things.

And I can't do that any longer. So what do I do now? When I go to Joshua Tree, I go and find a small boulder that I can easily just step up onto, and I sit there and I let nature come to me. I hear the wind, I feel the breeze. I notice the subtle color changes as the day progresses. I see the lone coyote trotting, you know, through the underbrush. And the way I put this in the book is that I used to chase after God and chase after prayer, and now I've learned that if

you sit still, the prayer comes to you. Another big fact of your biography is your marriage. You and your wife were both in pain as a result of bad breakups. You met and decided to be married after a few days. Yeah, we got engaged on our second date and and and have had a wonderful relationship. But that relationship changed during your illness. What happened, Well, just to give you a little more specificity about our meeting, I've met Betsy days

after she had finished radiation therapy for Hodgkins disease. She had no hair on the back of her head and I had just gone through this horrible breakup. I was twenty three and thought the world was ending. We talked for twelve hours about what she'd been through, and it was very clear to me that because of what she had been through, she was able to understand me in a way that most people had not at our age.

You know, we were kids. And I literally turned to her on our second date and I said, you know, I don't know if I should say this or not, but I think you're in And she looked at me and she said I feel the same way. And then as only you know, a dumb twenty three year old can, and I looked at her and I said, so are we engaged? And she said I guess so. And that was it. We called our families, uh so, But it was pain that brought us together. The phone call was hilarious.

I called my I called my parents. They both get on the phone and I say, I'm getting married and they both said to who. Yeah, I said, look to this girl and met last week And I said what And my father being my father said Stephen, you're not getting married, you're thinking about getting married, at which point I don't know if I can say this on a podcast. At which point, when my father said you're not getting married, you think about getting married, I said to my father, Dad,

don't fuck this up. At which point my mother said, we're looking forward to meeting her. Huh, And we flew out to California so they could meet Betsy. Ten minutes after meeting her, my mother leaned over to me and said, she's perfect. Look, we've had our challenges with our children, with health, with money, with sex, with work, with all the things that every couple is challenged by. But it's it's been magical since the moment she walked in the room.

And that hasn't changed. My heart still skips a beat when she walks in the room, and you know she has been through a couple of very serious diseases. And in the book, I have a chapter called an Intimate Invitation. One of the things that pain can create, as paradox or counterintuitive as this may sound, is extraordinary intimacy between people. When Betsy had abdominal surgery, she came home with three drains, hanging out of her, and it was my job to

empty her drains. And it was the most intimate thing I have ever done for another human being. That pain and her need and her vulnerability drew us close in a way we could not have imagined. So too, when I was going through my pain and my depression, the withdrawal, she was the only glimmer of light. She was the only person and my children, really Betsy carried me to the bathroom. Pain is a very intimate opportunity, and you

also have to be willing to let people in. You know, if you are not willing to allow others in to be intimate to help you, if you're not willing to reach out, then you have a very good chance of coming out of hell empty handed. So one last topic I want to cover before we run out of time, which is the role of a rabbi in public life. Um, where do you draw the line about when you can weigh in on a contentious topic and when you think it's not appropriate. So I feel very comfortable when judaism

is absolutely clear. When you're dealing with something about a republican or democratic approach to something, you're talking about people who generally have the same goal in mind, but two very different ideas about how to get there. It's not my expertise. And when you have someone like Trump in the White House, for example, if I start weighing in, that is a full time job to be a pundit responding to you know, the craziness that comes out of

the White House every single day. I'm a pretty busy guy. And furthermore, nothing I say matters on that score. I have no control over what happens in the White House. The other issue, of course, is I am not the by a small, homogeneous congregation of like minded people. We have members of our congregation. We have twenty four hundred

families in our congregation. If Jews had a megachurch, we would be at three campuses families too early childhood centers, to elementary schools, to sleepaway camps, and a conference center. We are a heterogeneous community bound together by certain values that transcend who's in the White House and who is not in the White House. And I think it's my job to focus on that more than the politics. D jore. But you have to wait in on some current topics.

For example, there was an episode of The West Wing in which a rabbi gives a sermon against the death penalty, and I wrote that sermon, and you wrote that sermon. Let's listen to that sermon was passed over on the horizon. Millions of Jews will gather around stated tables. We'll sing our songs and a scout questions about the stick that beats, the dog that bit the cat that ain't. The kid will sing not only to entertain our children, but to be reminded by the Hagaddha the simple truth that violence

he gets violence vengeance is not Jewish. So the beeping in that recording was actually part of the show. Is back in the day when people had beepers um. But you wait in on the death penalty. Where do you draw the line about when you can weigh in on a contentious topic and when you think it's not appropriate. When Jewish tradition and law is absolutely clear on the point,

there is no question about it. While the Bible and the Torah permit capital punishment, the rabbis of the tal Mutic period made it legislatively impossible to implement the requirements for rules of evidence, witnesses, and the fact that it could only be meeted out by the Sanhedrin, which hasn't been in existence and won't be again for two thousand years. The rabbis made their view extremely clear. There's no equivocating about it, and so I feel comfortable sharing that, and

I'm sharing Jewish tradition. You notice in there you did not hear a bunch of statistics, Uh, you know, from Time magazine or Newsweek or some website. So I feel very comfortable when Judaism is absolutely clear. You know, I'll

tell you. I'll tell you quickly. I know we don't have much time, but uh, this year, during a break between services and the Key Poor, we had a panel discussion sort of an asked the rabbi town meeting kind of thing, and a friend of mine who used to run the New York Times bureau here in Los Angeles, moderated it for me, and I said, people need to write their question down and pass them into you. You go through them, and then you pull out the German questions.

It did. Afterwards, he said to me, Steve, you know, I'm one of those people that's wanted you to weigh in about Trump and politics, etcetera. But after reading these questions, I've changed my mind. I think your posture is the correct posture, because this is a very very bitterly divided congregation politically, and you frankly have no business waiting into that unless these are extraordinary, transcendent moral issues like capital punishment, etcetera,

or like racism, bigoty, etcetera. But I am not going to get into the politics, d jure, because I think that's just a road to nowhere. Well, one place where you do weigh in and where I think you do make an enormous difference, is how all of us can use empathy and forgiveness and use the pain and the suffering that are inevitable in life to make ourselves more just and generous and happier people. And that's really the purpose of this book. It's an extraordinary book. I highly recommended.

It's called More Beautiful than Before. Rabbi Steve Leader, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for an honor to be here. Thank you to the terrific Current Podcast production team. As always, that's Gianna Palmer, our producer, Jared O'Connell, our audio engineer, Cody Scully, our engineer here in l A, and Nora Richie, our production assistant. Thanks also to social media wunderkind Alison Bresnik, and the unflappable Emily Beena over

at Katie Current Media. Katie and I are the show's executive producers, and Mark Phillips wrote our theme music, which is a very catchy tune. I'm sure you all agree. Remember you can email us with your guest ideas, questions and feedback at comments at current podcast dot com. That's comments at current podcast dot com, or maybe even better, leave us a voicemail at nine to nine, two to four,

four six three seven. You can find me on Twitter at Goldsmith b. Katie is all over the place under Katie Curic on every major social media platform except Snapchat, where she's Katie dot Kirk. That's it for today's Just Brian episode of Your Katie Couric Podcast. And don't worry, Katie is gonna be back very soon. Thanks for listening.