TRANSCRIPT
*Transcripts are auto-generated and reviewed for accuracy, but there may be some errors in punctuation or words. Listen to the podcast at https://rabbidaniellapin.libsyn.com/ for clarification
The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Making Everything Possible-Speech. But From Where?
Date: 02/24/23 Length: 44:02
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Welcome, happy warriors, and welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show where I, your rabbi reveal how the world really works, I get many delightful letters from listeners to this show who write to me at our website, RabbiDanielLapin.com. And here is one of the nicest we just got here. It's from Lena and Dan, who run a trucking company. And they wrote to asked me about tithing issues. We are going to present the question and the answer, we provided them in the Ask the Rabbi feature coming up on our website very soon. See, you'll be able to see it then. But the best part of the letter was not the question. It was the PS. And it says, We are recent listeners to the show. And you will appreciate the story behind how we came to be listeners. And my husband comes from a family and speaks about a number of siblings. And about 13 years ago, the oldest brother decided to leave the family and end contact and there were reasons for it. There were things you know, families are complicated, right? Things happen. But whatever it is 13 years no contact, and all of a sudden, they write, that he reached out. Okay his name is Dave, that Dave, all of a sudden, after 13 years of estrangement from the family, he reached out and brought such joy. And it was the answer to our prayers. He is out of state we have not had chance to see Him face to face yet, but we keep in touch almost every day. And he is a heavy listener of your show. They write to me, and shares many of your videos with us. I don't know which video you posted, but one of your videos opened his heart to reach out to his family. And we want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for this blessing. Would you be so kind to welcome Dave, back to the family on your show?
Daniel Lapin 2:36
Yes, absolutely. I would. Dave, welcome back. I am so happy to hear the story. I'd love to know. I'd love to know which show it was that persuaded you to make the enormous step. And I'm sure it wasn't easy, because you had your reasons. But you made this huge step to reconnect with Lena and Dan and all your other siblings. I'd love to know which it was. But anyway, regardless, I am just absolutely thrilled. So welcome home, Dave; and Lena and Dan, thank you for writing to tell me about it. It's really quite wonderful to hear. And the Ask the Rabbiabbi column is at RabbiDanielLapin.com. So you'll be able to see it there. And of course, that's where you can also write and be in touch, which is exactly what Lena and Dan did.
Daniel Lapin 3:40
So let's go back in time and travel both time and space, shall we? Let's head down to Central America. And let's go all the way down to Honduras. And then off to Honduras, comes Nicaragua. And then comes Costa Rica. In Nicaragua, there used to be a pro-American government, by the name ran by the president. His name was Somoza and along comes 1979. So we traveling back in time, quite a few years, all the way down to Central America. When the radical communists the Sandinistas took over, there was a coup, and they took over Nicaragua, and they started implementing enormous changes in the country. Let us say not all of which were wonderful or successful. One of the things they did okay up till that point. Deaf children lived with their families. And the because Nicaragua was a little bit remote and America's focus was on Panama, obviously, and to some extent Costa Rica Lessa. But there wasn't a lot of connection between America and Nicaragua. And so, whereas American Sign Language had become pretty standard for deaf people in many, many parts of the world, in Nicaragua, that didn't happen. And so you got a lot of children living at home who are deaf, and they all have their own method of communicating with their family, they, you know, every family comes up with its own system for dealing with a child who is not able to hear. So along come the Sandinistas and in 1979, they decide that the state can do better than the families in taking care of deaf children. And they brought them all into the big city of Managua. And they put 500, Nicaraguan deaf children all together. Remember, of course, that these deaf children have no common means of communication. And they are all suddenly they come together in this boarding school. And the school is deciding that they're going to teach them to read lips, rather than to use sign language. And so days in the classroom, are spent on trying to teach these children to lip read. But meanwhile, there's a lot of time that children are by themselves in the dormitories during playtime, and recess, and so on. And a very remarkable thing happened. So much so that this was written up in the Scientific American in 19, when was it written up? I've got a check-up. This was written up. Yeah, it was in was actually a number of years this this started happening in 1979. But it wasn't until the December 1995 issue of Scientific American, in which Scientific American science writer John Horgan wrote, an article called "A Sign is Born". And what it's about is this extraordinary story of these 500 Deaf children in Managua. And they were put in this special school in 1979. But none of them knew or was taught any formal sign language. Within a very short space of time, the children began to develop their own basic sign language, a primitive sign language.
Daniel Lapin 8:07
But then each successive year of younger children entering the school picked up the sign language, which had been developed entirely indigenously by the students alone, no input from the teachers, the school didn't administer it, or sponsor, children spontaneously came up with a way to communicate with each other. They first came up with nouns. And they developed a common understanding of what, you know, a ball or a school or a boy or a girl was going to be then after that came verbs. And then after that came adjectives, and a language emerged, remarkably, and it happened all by itself had just these children spontaneously were determined to communicate with each other. And so they did. And this warrants just a little bit of understanding. I think, when I heard this, and studied it and started reading up more about it and understanding the Scientific American article. It triggered a recollection in me that I had read a little book by the wonderful American writer Tom Wolfe, called the kingdom of speech. And I think I may have mentioned that even on this show, maybe a year or two ago, maybe at any rate, that was a very interesting book that led me it was also about the problem of where speech came from. And you understand, as I've spoken about this many times, that there are many aspects of human beings. That evolutionary biologists will say, over 400 million years, humans evolved the ability to do this or to do that, whatever it is. And I have a different approach. I believe that the good Lord created us in that particular way.
Daniel Lapin 10:20
And the reasons for it are obvious if you do include a spiritual lens in the analysis. So for instance, take the idea of blushing. Turns out, there's no creature on the planet other than human beings that blush. So evolutionary biologists are slow now, as I'm speaking to, you are trying to come up with an explanation for why when human beings are embarrassed, their skin goes red. And, and I've, I've read the most extraordinary and ingenious attempts to try and explain why this would happen through natural selection. So that over hundreds of millions of years, people who accidentally had the capacity to blush and embarrassment, enjoyed a mating and reproductive advantage. And so this then became part of all human beings. That's the evolutionary biologist approach. And my approach is no, we've got to ask ourselves, why would God have decided to put a visible external sign on human beings for when they're feeling embarrassed or uncomfortable, and it's on the law, it's on the largest organ in our bodies, namely, our skins. And so you know, where, and how that came about, is a real challenge. Another one is the hymen in the human female. All right, now, again, from an evolutionary biology point of view, there are all kinds of attempts to try and explain why human females have a hymen, which is a thin little piece of skin, which breaks at the first time that a woman has relations with her husband. And sometimes the evolutionary biologists will say, well, it's not just humans, the elephant has something like that as well. And the reality is, well, the female elephant does have something like that. But it doesn't break until baby Dumbo is born. Prior to that, it doesn't. And so it's not exactly the same human females do. Tough to explain by evolutionary biology, I'm not saying you can't, I'm just saying, it looks a little bit like trying to scratch your right ear, with your left hand around the back of your head. It's a bit of a stretch.
Daniel Lapin 13:07
But you know, from again, from a godly and biblical perspective, it's pretty straightforward. And that is, virginity, in a human female, is hugely prized and valued. Because a man wants to have exclusivity over his wife. And that means exclusive exclusivity always. And in the same way as it's deeply wounding, to a man if his wife has a relationship with another man. It's actually also wounding in a more subtle and subconscious way for a man to know that his wife had relationships with other men before he was married. For that reason, for most men, I think I'm sure there are exceptions. But for the overwhelming majority of men who are married to a woman who had been married before, they don't really like socializing with her ex. They don't want to socialize with her first husband. And a woman who lived with a guy for a long time off for her for a short time, but lived with him and then she gets married to somebody. The husband is not really like if she says, Oh, can we invite Tom to our party? I mean, you know, I lived with him for two years. Very few husbands would say to their wives, oh, what a great idea. You probably haven't seen him since we're married. Come on, let's invite him. No, that's not what would happen. And so yeah, there's a very good reason from a spiritual perspective. There's very good reason for a hymen. from a spiritual perspective. There's a very good reason why human beings blush.
Daniel Lapin 15:01
And the big problem even bigger than those is how language arrived. Because if it evolved, then you ought to be able to see some indication some of the basics of language at the most primitive level even find not in Goldfish, but in dolphins. Alright, fine, not dolphins. And how about horses? Okay, fine. How about chimpanzees? Come on. I'm willing to go anywhere you like. And, and I know there's probably going to be one or two people listening who are going to write to me say, Oh, what about those two gorillas, Coco and the other one also the K. That spoke and then there was a chimpanzee called Nim chumps, Nim Chimpsky, in a sort of a humorous reference to the famous academic linguist Noam Chomsky. Now, there isn't time to go into it now. But suffice it to say, if you are interested in the topic, it'll take you all of about 10 minutes to satisfy yourself that no, those animals never came even close to talking. So much so that I was led to a magazine called Frontiers in Psychology. And in May 2014, in the month of May 2014, they had an article describing how eight very strongly committed scientists, scientists committed to evolutionary biology. And some were linguists, they were biologists, anthropologists, computer scientists, they were eight heavy hitters. And they they authored this article. People like Noam Chomsky, by the way, and Richard Lewontin, who I'm always fascinated by, and Michael Ryan and five others. So they write an article, saying they're giving up that they've spent years trying to find the evolutionary origins of language. And they're giving up. And I'm quoting now, from the article, the most fundamental questions about the origins evolution of our linguistic capacity, remain as mysterious as ever. They said, we actually are despairing of ever finding an answer. We are not. We're not sure there isn't answer, we're not sure that there is an evolutionary basis to language. Said, Chomsky, himself, who, by the way, is a an atheistic guy. In the last 40 years, there's been an explosion of research on this problem. And all it has produced is a colossal waste of time. It's amazing. So language, yeah, this this is really, really important.
Daniel Lapin 18:09
Since Darwin, what's at about 150 years a little bit more, since Darwin think what's happened what what what what what has happened to mankind since then. Right. Einstein discovered the speed of light, the relativity of speed and time. Louis Pasteur discovered germs and bacteria. Watson and Crick discovered DNA, the building blocks that genes are made of, and airplanes came about. Computers, just elect electric electricity, street lighting. Just think what happened in the 150 years, since Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species. And how about in this field of linguistics, the origin of languages, nothing, nada, zip, zero, no information at all. So this definitely does warrant a little bit of thinking.
Daniel Lapin 19:19
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there is for just a short, short while if you're, if you're listening to this podcast soon after its release, then this is for you. And that is that there is a really terrific sale on a resource on our website called Scrolling through Scripture. Now I have to tell you, that the foundation of all that you need to know for a genuine understanding of the Bible is found in the first 34 verses Now, chapter one is actually only 31 verses. And so interestingly enough, the full disclosure of what it's all about and the basic things you have to know and understand, let me give you an example, the very first sentence of the Bible in the beginning God created heaven and earth. Well, why didn't it just saving concern? In the beginning, God created everything. And one of the things I show you in this, and it's about a 10 hour program, little bit more than 10 hours, scrolling through Scripture is that in the beginning, God created heaven and earth, I show you how we know that the word heaven means a spiritual reality. And the word Earth means a physical reality. So in other words, we human beings have certain physical needs, food, shelter, air, water, food, I didn't say that. But we human beings also have spiritual needs. What are they connection with other human beings? When you hear the the words, solitary confinement, if you're a really busy mom, with a busy family, and you do work, and you're running your family, you probably think the word solitary confinement is like a special birthday treat. Your husband and your kids come into your bedroom on the morning of your birthday, and they've got a cup of coffee and a birthday cake, and they sing Happy Birthday, and they say, and now for the rest of the day, you can go into solitary confinement, and you say up how wonderful. But it sounds like that the word solitary confinement should bring a shiver to your soul. It is one of the most gruesome and ghastly punishments. And I'm sorry to tell you that in the American system of incarceration, both state and federal, as appalling as it is, it's even worse because they do have prisoners in solitary confinement. It is an absolutely appalling torture, we human beings have a spiritual need that is every bit as compelling as our need for food and water and oxygen. And that is connection with other people.
Daniel Lapin 22:45
See, we're coming all the way back to language again, how did those children in Nicaragua just come up with communication? And how is it that we have communication, even though animals do not so a weird evolution, it's skipped, the animals jumped straight to people is that what happened? It's bizarre. The implications are unnerving, as those eight scientists in the frontiers of psychology acknowledged. And so in Scrolling through Scripture, I explain that Heaven and Earth are words that mean, spiritual and physical that we have spiritual needs, we have physical needs. What about male female intimacy? What's that? Is that a physical need or a spiritual need? It's not a simple question to answer is it? If it was just a physical need, then all you would need is a mechanical stimulator and that would solve everything. But that isn't good enough, not for men and not for women. That means that it has to have a deeply spiritual component, because it only can be resolved with another human being. All of these things are laid out for us in the first 34 verses of Genesis that I take over 10 hours to explain why with guides and with, with charts, and so on to visualize things make a little bit easier to see. And also, we find language, it's very interesting, because in the first chapter, in the first chapter of Genesis, there is, there's no indication of speech, but in the second chapter, we already start seeing a level of communication. So somehow or another, God breathes into Adam, the breath of life. But wait, that term in Hebrew, the breath of life actually means not breathing, that means speaking, communication. So this stuff's pretty profound. At any rate, please go to RabbiDanielLapin.com, RabbiDanielLapin.com. Have a look for Scrolling through Scripture. By the way, you even get to see one of those lessons just for free, just have a look at it. And if you do want to employ the coupon code for a very big amount of money off, and you happen to be listening in time, while this still is running, then you will use the coupon code, S T S, standing for scrolling through Scripture, the number 1, and then the three letters FEB for February, followed by the numbers 2023. So STS one, Feb, 2023. And that's the coupon code. If you go right away, as soon as this podcast is released, if you go right away, you will be able to do exactly that. And so I wouldn't, wouldn't waste any time it would really be well worth both your time and your money, I can tell you that.
Daniel Lapin 26:17
So just think about that. Just contemplate what this actually means. That the way you and I communicate the extraordinary thing that here am I in my studio, talking, knowing full well, that in a matter of hours, you will be listening. And through the way I move my mouth and my lips and my tongue, I produce certain sounds that are going to produce exactly the response that I predict in your ears and in your heart and in your soul. This is amazing. Now, when I speak of thinking about the way I make the sounds, and that the sounds are going to be construed by you, and by you, and by him, and by him and by her, everybody listening. And by the way, thanks to your efforts at helping to make the show well known and promoting it and telling people about it. There are hundreds of 1000s of people now listening to the show, which is really very beautiful. And it places a heavy sense of responsibility upon me. But at the same time, it's very exciting. So those those words I just uttered, lingered with me from a book I'd read a while back, there's a guy called Steven Pinker. And he, I think, is at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and written a number of books. The blank slate is one that I found very interesting. But another one was called the new science of language and mind. And let me read you from this book. As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability, we can shape events in each other's brains with remarkable precision. That ability is language. Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds. The ability comes so naturally, that we are apt to forget what a miracle it is. And that's really the reality, that we are talking about a miracle. It seems that we human beings are created to communicate in a way that no other creature has been created. And, and that is a remarkable idea that completely changes my sense of who I am on this world and in this universe. I'm created to connect with other human beings I'm created to communicate. I'm created to cooperate and collaborate and ultimately, to create because creativity happens when two human beings interact and how the two beings interact only two ways, either sexually or through language. That's how we create. That's how we connect. And it's how we create remarkably enough, it seems that reading and writing do not emerge naturally. Those 500, Nicaraguan children, if you would just leave them alone, I don't think they would have come up with a system of reading or system of writing a system of graphically depicting symbols of communication, but actual verbal communication, mouth to ear, person to person, that seems to be something that is literally hardwired, built into watch. I don't know what evolutionary biologists are saying nowadays to try and explain speech. I mean, I could imagine, you know, I'm not, I'm not trying to suggest that anything like this is an open and shut set of evidence for creation and God, there cannot be such a thing, they will not be such a thing, because it would eliminate the whole point of faith. But what I would say is that I think this is a very tough one. I imagine one of the things that I would say, if if I had to take the side of an evolutionary biologist, I'd probably say, look, some tribes, some band of chimpanzees, developed more sophisticated ways of grunting at each other. And so they got so much advantage by that, that they wiped out all the other bands of chimps, they were the only ones that survived. And then they multiplied and over time, they had a subgroup in them that developed even better forms of communication. So all the others died out or killed. And only these look, I'm sure you can hear, it's a tough argument to make. And there may be better ones, I don't know.
Daniel Lapin 32:03
But what I do know is that according to my worldview, God created us different, distinct and unique from every other creature on the planet. And the huge difference is speech. And that speech, is what is primarily responsible for airplanes, and relativity, and computers, and motor cars, and everything else you see around you why? Because in the same way, that the incredible creativity of a baby emerges, when a man and a woman have a loving and intimate relationship. So it is that ideas are created, very powerful ideas. And that's why we even use the word he conceived of the idea. Because we recognize a similarity between the way a baby arrives, and the way an idea arrives, an idea arrives, when previous ideas are discussed and communicated and, and connect with one another. And that's all done through the miracle of language. If there was no language, then each generation of human beings would be like every generation of chimpanzees, and that is that they'd have to figure things out afresh. The only reason that, you know, in, in the,
Daniel Lapin 33:46
in the last 20 years, the only reason that the smartphone emerged is because prior to that, other people had built the semiconductor and other people had built the computer, and other people had built integrated circuits. And so one thing coupled with another, you know, it was like the idea of a sandwich, we had bread, we had meat somebody came along the Earl of Sandwich, they say, put them together, you know, or ice cream cones, they had waffles, they had ice cream, somebody can put the two things together. So much of inventiveness is precisely that idea. And so, language Yeah, language the road makes it all possible. And so I would like to suggest for your further growth in your family and your finance, your faith, your fitness and your friendships. I would like to suggest number one, that if you are somebody who employs obscenities and vulgarities in your speech, I would like to recommend an experiment for you try leaving it out. Now it's not going to be easy. Because if you are a person who sprinkles your speech with obscenities, it is so much already a part of who you are that you'll discover it's extremely difficult. You're going to have to retrain yourself to communicate effectively without using obscenities and without using vulgarities.
Daniel Lapin 35:25
If you want help on that, on my website, I have a download program called the Perils of Profanity. You are what you speak. It's a about a one hour audio program called the Perils of Profanity you all what you speak, I would like to recommend that if by chance, you happen to be somebody who just grew up and accustom yourself to communicating in a way that includes cuss words and obscenities and vulgarities. You might want to get the best out of your miracle of language and speech, you might want to try and get rid of that I'd recommend you give it a try. Right? If indeed, you find that your life works better, financially, socially, romantically, if you have modified your speech patterns, then you'll send me a note and say thank you, that was a good idea worked well for me. If it doesn't, then no harm done, you can just go back to your old way of communicating if it makes no difference, but I think it will. And the second thing I'd like to recommend is, again, something which if you've read my books, and you've listened to some of my other programs, then you already know.
Daniel Lapin 36:53
But there's so many new people coming on all the time on the show that I don't think I have to apologize for repeating the importance of improving your ability to articulate effectively, your ability to communicate through fluent speech, there is no price that can be placed on this. It is so valuable for social connection for romantic connection for economic and financial connection. So how do you do it? And the answer is read aloud three times a week for half an hour. Right now, you probably spend more than that time watching a screen during the course of an average week. I hope not, but you probably do. So just chip into screen, watch time for an hour and a half, three times a week, half an hour each time. And pick a book, that is a good book, you can even use the good book, if you want to you can read from the Bible, I promise you that won't hurt. And, but whatever it is, doesn't matter. Just make sure that it's a good book that sounds closer to how you wish you sounded when you spoke and read it aloud. Now, you might be fortunate enough to have a spouse who enjoys listening to you read aloud, in which case go for it. If not, you could always rent a kid from one of your family members, and read to the child. And if none of that works for you then just read aloud to yourself. But the important thing is that for an hour and a half a week in total, your ears must hear your lips and tongue, it enunciating the words that are ultimately going to become part of your vocabulary. And do this for six weeks. Do you hear me? Six weeks? Not a long time, six weeks, at the end of six weeks? If somebody doesn't come to you and say, Hey, you sound different. You You're sounding very sure of yourself. You're sounding confident you're speaking more quickly. If somebody doesn't do that, then you can write to tell me. And I will. What do I do? I'll be astounded. I'll be shocked and amazed. I want to make absolutely sure you did this right, just the way I'm telling you. But if all else if all of that fails. Well, I just have to apologize didn't work for you. works for everybody though. So I've been doing this for long enough. And enough. 1000s of people have tried this and confirmed how powerfully this works. I can't emphasize enough how important it is for every meaningful aspect of your life that you speak more efficiently and better than you do now.
Daniel Lapin 39:50
And then finally, I just want to stress the importance of English. We have many, many listeners. F from all around the world, many of you I know are not from English speaking countries. Now, obviously you understand English otherwise you wouldn't be listening to the show. But I would like to recommend that you work on becoming better at English. Don't forget, English is an extraordinary language with an extraordinary history. And I'm not saying you should become good at English because of its history. I'm saying there's a reason why the next time you fly on an airplane, it is going to be the pilot will communicate with air traffic control in English. And the next time the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries OPEC, meets to discuss raising the price of gasoline 13 member countries. Seven I believe it or they're not Arabic speaking. So what do you think is the language all OPEC meetings are held in? Well, they meet in Austria, which speaks German, so maybe they will talk German when they're there. Or maybe they speak Arabic? Well, three or four, I think now maybe two or three of the countries speak Spanish. So maybe there's no OPEC meetings are conducted in English, the European Economic Community in Brussels, they hate Britain. And they've never forgiven England for going for Brexit and breaking away from the European Economic Community. The main language spoken in deliberation in the European Parliament is English. That's right. There is a reason for that. And it lies beyond what I'm going to cover today. But it's good enough reason to make sure that even if your native language is Lithuanian, or your native language is Nigerian, or you speak Zimbabwean, it doesn't matter. Make sure that your English improves make your English better and better and better. And you do that, by reading aloud for a minimum of an hour and a half a week, you can do more. It'll just make your results arrive more quickly. But I would like to recommend I want to see happy warriors, thrive and prosper, I want to see you all moving onwards and upwards to bright bright futures. And that means in every part of your life, the five critical areas of your life, your finances, your family, your physical fitness, your friendships and your faith. And there isn't a single part of that, that is not enormously enhanced by more effective communication. Because we were created to communicate. We were created to connect. We were created to collaborate and cooperate. And ultimately, we were created to create to be like God Himself. To have to understand all of this through the eyes of evolutionary biology, but it's not impossible. This way, seems to fit together, far more coherently, as I see it at any rate, and I hope you find it useful too. And so that my dear happy Warriors is as far as we'll go today. And so until we get together next week, visit my website Rabbi Daniel lapin.com. Watch the free lesson in the scrolling through Scripture series. And you do your best to grow during this week. In your family matters in your finance matters, your friendships, your physical fitness, and yes, your faith as well. I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin. God bless.
