TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Banish Your Fears & Reach for the Stars
Date: 08/14/2026 Length: 00:22:33
Daniel Lapin 0:02
Welcome to each of you, Happy Warriors. Welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin Show, where your rabbi reveals how the world really works. Yes, each and every one of you, Happy Warriors-you and you and all of you, each of you, is a welcome part of our community of Happy Warriors. Happy? Why do I say happy? Well, that's because you are someone who has come to understand that happiness is not a reaction. It's pardon me. It's a decision. You don't need outside factors to make you happy. You've decided that your default condition for happiness and success is a reasoned, determined, deliberate decision to be happy, and you're also a warrior because you understand that joyful success in life comes from struggling against the natural resistance. You know, I call it spiritual gravity. You try to get airborne, and it tries to keep you earthbound in every effort you make to improve any one or all of your five Fs. You're trying to improve your family life, your financial life, your social life-that I call your friendships, your faith, and your fitness. It throws up obstacles. It throws up temptations. But as a happy warrior, you know that every single victory you win, no matter how small, brings other victories in its wake, and so that's why we are not just warriors and not just happy-go-luckers, but we are happy warriors. And one of the things that happy warriors realize is that our very ability to progress, our success, and our happiness depends upon our ability to impose our own limits on our own freedoms? That's right. Being able to step off that slippery slide, that seductive ride of freedom, and imposing upon ourselves restraints and restrictions and regulation, that is the direction in which happiness and success lie. Because so many people, and I talk to people many times a week. Many people confuse license with freedom. Licentiousness is doing whatever your feelings drag you towards. Freedom is what you have when you are capable of imposing limits and restraints upon your feelings and emotions, and where that is so particularly important is when you are being carried along by an avalanche of emotions. Coming to trust our emotions is a very dangerous thing, and as a happy warrior, you must realize that emotions are wonderful. We should all have emotions, and we should all feel wonderful emotions-emotions like love, appreciation, gratitude. But we should not indulge in emotions like anger and jealousy. Emotions are real, but that doesn't mean that just because you feel it, it's good, and you should indulge that feeling and tell everybody how you feel and strengthen your commitment to those feelings. No, feelings are there to be controlled. That's how you build success in your life. We impose limits and restraints and controls and restrictions rather than just acting on our emotions and doing whatever we feel. But even more importantly for today's show is learning that, as bad a mistake as it is to act on emotions, it is even orders of magnitude more serious and more dangerous to think according to our emotions. The terrible peril is thinking one is being rational when, in reality, one's entire line of thinking is being driven primarily by emotions. Please, for your own good as a happy warrior, believe this to be true. But if you doubt it, just think about the decisions you've made in your own life while in the grip of emotions. Like anger, love, desire. Remember the time you decided to spend a lot of money on something you barely ever used. Remember the person with whom you formed an alliance that you later wished you'd never met. Right? Remember the time you let fly at somebody and send things you wish you could take back, and you wish you'd never said them. This has happened to all of us, and the emotion I want to teach you today about controlling is the emotion of fear, because fear is a real feeling and it's a real emotion. But what I want you to understand is that the way the good Lord created us, He built in certain natural feelings we slide easily into our default condition. That during the course of a fulfilling life, we're supposed to rise above. We're supposed to learn to control, we're supposed to learn to dominate. Fear is a natural default condition. You'll see, animals have it, right?
Daniel Lapin 6:11
Animals, you know, you startle whether it's birds or squirrels or even bigger animals. The first reaction of an animal is to run away, fight or flight, but it's flight before fight. Animals feel fear, but human beings fight against that, and we learn to replace fear with courage. This is really important because right now the entire culture in in in the West is beaming this idea of be sensitive to your mental health, cater to your mental health, be good about your mental health, and you've got people taking off time from work for their mental health because they're feeling anxiety and they're feeling stress, let me ask you: people who went through World War II, people who fought in combat in World War Two, yes, there were a few cases of people who had problems because of that, but the overwhelming majority of people came back home after World War Two and picked up their lives. There were people, not many, but there were people who survived the death camps that the Nazis built. And those who survived, do you think they had more anxiety and stress and depression? They got over it. They dealt with it. Courage is what it takes. Don't fall into this trap of thinking that if you feel anxiety and you feel stress and you feel depression, which everybody feels at one time or another, that this is somehow the paramount dominant factor of your being and must be catered to and must be repaired, and you have to go to therapy to deal. Just be strong. Learn what courage is. That's what we really are talking about here. And the example I want to give you actually is the British Empire. You know, just think about this: for about 250 years, the British ruled over the greatest empire the world has ever known. Think about this: it's a tiny little island, and they generally have had about half the population of Germany. England has about 100th the land area of the old Soviet Union. How did they get to rule much of Africa, much of North America, Australia, New Zealand, all of India, and more? In fact, it's true to say that one quarter of all the land area of the planet Earth was under British rule. How did they do it? And more importantly for today, what has that got to do with you and every happy warrior achieving your own grand goals? And there are a number of different aspects to treat in in connection with this fundamental question of how did the English bring so much control over so much of the world? So how do they do it to such an extent that today English is the dominant language of the internet? English is the language used for all international air traffic control? So you might be a Norwegian pilot, you might be a pilot from Zimbabwe, you might be a pilot from Qatar. Nonetheless, wherever you are coming in to land, you will speak to anywhere in the world. Paris, anywhere you will speak to the control tower in English. The same is true for maritime communication on ships at sea communicating. What did the English have for the? How did they pull this off? Well, the one factor I want to focus on is that part of English culture, being an Englishman, being an English gentleman, everything that English children are taught in school, and every not anymore, but they were. They despised cowardice and they venerated courage. They dispelled fear and replaced it with action. All of English culture resonated around words like charge, forward march, over the top, boys. For greater understanding of this quality, do yourself a favor and read a poem by an English poet called Alfred Lord Tennyson, he wrote a poem called "Charge of the Light Brigade. The Light Brigade's charge was a terrible event during the Crimean War. I think it was in 1854, where British commanders made a really terrible blunder and marched 600 British soldiers down an alley, a sort of valley area, and Russian artillery were on the hillsides, and they mowed them down. I think it was they had close to 50% casualty.
Daniel Lapin 11:35
I do believe it was an absolute disaster, but it's worthwhile reading the poem to get a little bit of a sense of just exactly what was going on, and the question you have to ask yourself is how much of what you wish to accomplish has been blocked by your fears, and that's really pardon me, that's. That's really the question we're talking about. How do you dispel fear? You know, it's perfectly natural and perfectly normal. And so, in order to unleash your fullest potential. You've got to eliminate fear, and it doesn't mean you're never frightened of anything. It doesn't mean you never fear anything, but it doesn't take over your mind. It doesn't influence your thinking and your creativity. So let's focus for a few moments on how you deal with fear. I always find it helpful to start off with biblical sources, and the Book of Proverbs in chapter three, verse 25 says, "Be not afraid of sudden fear. Now, here I have to take you into a little bit of ancient Jewish wisdom, and we need to look at the Hebrew word for fear. Like most Hebrew roots, it's made up of three sounds, three consonants: p, ch, a and d. The ch is pronounced bah, like in the ch in bach. So the word is pahchad, p, ch, d are the three syllables. Excuse me, the three consonants. And one of the rules that is always important to remember is that many important Hebrew words read forwards and backwards with opposite meanings in each direction. And so, very often, when you struggle to find the meaning of a Hebrew word. If you try it backwards and you know what it means backwards, well, now reverse that meaning, and you'll know what the mystery word actually means. It's really important in this case because looking at the word pachad, meaning fear, backwards, we actually find the word dachaf. Now to just clarify here, you heard me finish that word dach with a sound like F, as in fish, whereas I said that the word for fear is a pachad with a p, like psychology, and the important thing you need to know here is that in Hebrew, the words P and F are actually one letter, and this is exactly the reason why, as languages have evolved over the years out of Hebrew, you find PF confusion all the time. Like fire is spelt with f i r e f for fish, right? Fire. What is somebody who lights fires? He's got a sickness. He just lights fires all the time. He's not a pyromaniac. He's a pyromaniac, right? The funeral pyre really means the. Funeral fire-the old Indian custom of flinging the man's widow onto his funeral fire was called the practice of suti, but it was throwing her on to burn to death on the funeral fire. Right? You've even got, you know, I said F for fish. What is the the astrological sign of fish, Pisces. P I C. Right now, replace that P with an F, and you'll see the word fish hidden in there. P I S C. All right. There's no H. There's no H sound, but you you can see it's actually exactly the same. And so many, many other. If if we were going to be discussing Hebrew etymology and how English derives out of Hebrew, I'd spend a bit more time on this. But here, just to explain that the word for fear is pachad, pachad p c h and d. So the word for the opposite should be D, C, H, and then P, Dachhap, but it's actually Dachhaf, F again, and we've got to figure out what does that word Dachaf mean. Well, again, the easiest way to do that is just all we need to do is go and look in the Bible to see where that word is used, and if you look in the book of Esther, the book of Esther chapter six verse 12, you will see the words Haman, Haman was propelled, like moved quickly forward. He was propelled into his house, and that-that is that word. dachaf. And so, if dachaf means rapidly propelled forward, well, then, not surprisingly, the reverse pahad, which we know means fear, also must mean to restrain, handicap, keep back. So, have you ever heard the phrase "being paralyzed with fear" That's exactly what fear does. The opposite of fear.
Daniel Lapin 17:08
Pardon me. The opposite of fear is dacha. It propels when you're not feeling fearful. Forward march, go ahead. Fearful, you tend to be paralyzed with fear, and that's exactly what fear. It's exactly what fear does, and so it makes perfect sense that the opposite of fear is advancing forward, and that's really what fear does, right? Fear freezes us in place. You'll find English expressions like "he stood rooted to the spot with fear, or "he was paralyzed with panic. It's clear, therefore, that ancient Jewish wisdom's advice, when gripped by fear, is to start moving, literally start moving. You got to overcome the tendency of fear to suppress action, deliver yourself from the trance of passivity. But again, how do you do that? And again, a biblical clue in Exodus chapter 14, the Israelites just out of Egypt are transfixed by absolute terror. The ocean, the Red Sea, stretches out in front of them, and the mighty Egyptian army is rapidly approaching from behind them in a cloud of dust, trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea, one might say. So Exodus chapter 14 verse 10 tells us how they were utterly terrified and they cried out to God. And you can read the read the passage. You'll see their fear completely dominated the Israelites. Interestingly enough, God's response was not to split the Red Sea as you might have thought. It was the momentous lesson that you and I can learn from verse 15. And the Lord said to Moses, "What are you calling to me for? Instruct the Israelites to march forward. That's how you deal with fear. And you might say, "Well, what do you mean, march forward into the ocean? Well, yes, actually, correct. Ancient Jewish wisdom tells us that not until the Israelites march forward into the wall, into the water, that the miracle of splitting the Red Sea begins. I think it was verse 22. We see that happening. That's the sequence of events. The Israelites went into the midst of the sea, and ancient Jewish wisdom recalls that the water got up to their chins, and only thereafter come the word. On dry land, they acted. They activated their own miracle, and they contributed to their own deliverance by conquering fear-generated inertia. That's what fear does, and we tend to sort of sit and think and mull over the fear and just feel completely overwhelmed by it. Look, if you want your own Red Sea to split, you'd better march forward. Do not retreat. In that direction lies your personal equivalent of that Egyptian army, but above all, do not become paralyzed and passive. March forward, and so regardless of whatever geopolitical or epidemiological, did I get that right? I think so. Or economic crisis is terrifying you. Whatever personal thing it is, something your financial, family, health, whatever it is, don't allow yourself to become paralyzed by the fear, because that is the natural tendency of what fear does to how we are created as human beings. March forward and take care of those essentials. Just find a way to focus on your finances, on your family, your faith, your fitness, and your friendships. That's all you have to do. And you suddenly find that the fear has receded into the background, and you are moving forward, creating your very own miracle. That's exactly what happens. Give it a try. Let me know as a happy warrior. You have access to the We Happy Warriors website. I don't know what's with me today. I'm sorry. I don't think we're gonna. We're not going to edit these coughs out. Just pardon me. We just want to get this to you as soon as possible, so you can start deploying this in your lives as quickly as possible. wehhappywarriors.com is how you can report success in these in these areas. Let me know just how things are going. So thank you for being part of the Rabbi Daniel Lapin Show, and thank you for helping get the word around. Our subscribers' numbers keep to keep growing, which I find very happy-making. And look forward to next week. God bless.
