Rabbi Lazer Brody is the “English voice” of world-renowned author Rav Shalom Arush and the English translator of the million-copy-bestseller The Garden of Emuna and a number of other Rav Arush works. He travels the globe enlightening others about the life-changing benefits of Emuna (faith), and recently gave a free lecture at the Sephardic Kehilla Centre in Toronto.

Can you explain how Emuna will help us bring the redemption?

Gratitude is the manifestation of Emuna.  Let’s suppose you have eyes that see, legs that work and a functioning body. You also have a job, yet you are unhappy with your lot in life, and you have no gratitude for what you have. Do you wake up and thank God for your seeing eyes? Have you ever? Grateful people are never bitter, and bitter people are never grateful. As soon as you have Emuna in your life, it activates all the other blessings. Imagine a cheque, without the one in the front of all the zeros; you have nothing without the one! Emuna is a time-tested formula to be happy.  You see, your soul comes from God and emotions come from the soul. It’s impossible to find gratification of the soul anywhere else outside the context of God. Thus, Emuna is the key to happiness and the formula for a blessed life. When I was in the army, I had to do my best daily to survive. You have to do your best, then leave the rest up to HaShem. Emulating the attributes of God’s name (mercy, kindness) can help us accomplish this.

How did a secular boy from a conservative Jewish home in Washington become one of Israel’s top commandos in an IDF elite fighting unit?

I grew up in a very Zionist home.  My mother, who lost her entire family in the Shoah, never stopped sharing how important a Jewish homeland was to the survival of the Jewish people.

After I completed college at twenty-one in Maryland,  I made aliyah to Israel, volunteered in the army, integrated into secular Israeli life, and pursued my dream to ensure the survival of the Jewish people in her homeland.

Was there a life-changing event that precipitated the radical change to becoming a chassidic rabbi devoted to spreading gratitude through Emuna?

During the 1982 Lebanon War, when I was 33, I was part of the perilous fighting on the ground that took the lives of  many IDF soldiers. I had everything, my dream farm, success, love, and good health.  The moment came as I faced my imminent death in a gutter in Lebanon when I realized that I had nothing, and that I was nothing before God.  With little chance of surviving, my unit was perishing, and I made my plea to God,  understanding at that moment that I really had nothing to show for my life. It was gornisht (nothing).  I spoke to God when there was nowhere else to turn and the end had come.  From out of nowhere, I heard a voice speak the words “Elizer Rafael, I am going to get you out of here.”  I thought that I was hallucinating, but the words kept coming, “I am going to get you out of here, you are fighting the wrong war.”  I had no sense of time or reality, but an intense love overcame me, nothing like I had ever experienced. Then I witnessed miracle upon miracle conspiring around us to bring home eight soldiers from my unit of twelve.

What is the master key to life’s blessings?

This is a message that, if understood properly, will unify all Jews.

Listen, the way you look on the outside –  kippah, sheitel or other religious garments – is no testimony to your relationship with God. It also doesn’t necessarily testify to your moral, ethical and/or spiritual level. We have put up barriers that have caused separation between us Jews. This is a very big problem. Each time we judge another Jew, it takes us further away from life’s blessings. So as Jews, we must look for the commonality between us, not for the things that separate us.

These blessings, can you describe them?

To recognize our blessings we need to be holy, but not holy in a prudish term. We need to become the attributes of holiness: kindness, mercy, slow to anger, compassion, forgiving.  By emulating these traits we will become them.  All negative emotions come from a lack of gratitude. Today many people have so much (material success) yet find themselves unfulfilled. The blessings I speak of are not of material things.  I am not saying that having success and nice things don’t matter, I am saying it is not enough.  And if you are not happy or feel blessed with what you have, you will lose it.  You must be grateful for everything in your life, even the tsouris (stress) and I am serious.  Everything in your life, even the “so-called bad,” is for our good. All comes from God, our one true loving father.

Can you comment on the spiritual significance of why Jewish blood is being spilt so demonically today in Israel?

The metaphor for being stabbed, literally, is the same as when you embarrass or harm another Jew publicly. This is a pure source of tyranny. Our sages called this non-apparent murder. This is one of the reasons our blood is being spilt again and again. When you embarrass someone in public, it is equivalent to stabbing someone in the throat with a knife.

We (as Jews) are not treating each other respectfully as one soul or as brothers and sisters.  In dating and marital relationships especially, HaShem commands us to love one another, not to break each others hearts randomly. To compound the problem we have  explicit laws guiding teachers and parents forbidding abuse of children.

How do you recommend today’s modern Jew manifest the attributes of holiness?

We have the same father, so you don’t need a PhD in genealogy to figure out we our brothers and sisters. It’s simple, before we speak to anyone we should ask the question, “Is what I am going to say going to be gratifying to the person who hears me?” or, “Is there anything that will be insulting if I say this?” In the army, you don’t shoot from the hip, as it would be the most inaccurate shot, so we say in the Jewish religion, we don’t shoot from the lip.

Why is gratitude the key to every blessing?

Gratitude is the greatest statement of our belief in God, it’s what we call Emuna. For example, if I interpret so-called “bad happenings” in my life as being unfair, awful, and am not thanking God for it, it means I am interpreting the situation incorrectly. True Emuna is the belief that this is happening to me, not because of my neighbour, my boss, and not because of anything else: it is coming directly from God to teach me Emuna.  It’s like a coach who is working the team so hard.  God is like our coach, to make sure we come here to accomplish and have Emuna.  You can only gain Emuna in this world. Some of us need to have struggles in life to find it.  Without any suffering we would be arrogant and self-serving. Sometimes, a little tsuris (distress) or seemingly bad things teach us to forge a relationship with our father.

You say that Jews are above nature? Can you explain?

Jews are a walking miracle. In Israel, things don’t go according to nature, the weak are strong and the strong are weak. All the wars Israel has fought and all the miracles that occur daily prove that the Jewish people are a living miracle here by God’s grace. The world knows Israel is the greatest military nation in the world; if today’s murderous attacks had been happening in Russia, Gaza would be a corn field.  But we use restraint. Jews need to recognize how rich they are as a people, and love our entire family as one. As we say daily: Shema Israel Adonai Eloheynu Adonai Ehud. We are one.