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Jewish and Joyful - Rabbi Fischel Schachter: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

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Author: Jewish and Joyful
Categories: Religion
Tags: religion
Views: 2 · Last viewed: 2026-10-16 08:12 UTC

Short Summary

Main recommendation: stop letting worry control you, because most of our anxieties are not real problems but mechanisms meant to make us think, and the rabbi suggests relinquishing control to God. He illustrates this with a plane story in which a passenger obsessed over a mask while the pilots had actually fallen asleep, and argues that joy is a choice available to every Jew.

Key Points

  • Joy is presented as a choice rather than a circumstance: the rabbi says we are born Jewish but must choose whether to live joyfully.
  • The speaker says the "great writer of Sefer Chassidus" taught that about 90% of our problems are not real problems but exist to get us to think.
  • The mask anecdote shows how fixation on a minor concern can crowd out awareness of a much larger danger, illustrating misplaced worry.
  • The speaker frames worry as a failure to trust a higher power, describing God as the one holding up the plane in the sense of sustaining the world, drawing on the contrast between the sleeping pilots and the woman's misplaced focus on his mask.

Details Worth Noting

  • Concrete instructions: The transcript gives no step-by-step method, measurable practice, or timed routine for stopping worry. The only actionable advice is to relinquish control and put yourself into God's hands, and to consider whether a current worry is a real problem or one that exists to get you thinking.
  • The story of the passenger is set on a flight two summers before the recording, during a period when mask rules were in effect, and the rabbi says the woman did not seem Orthodox Jewish and stared at him before complaining about his mask.
  • The anecdote about pilots who fell asleep is described as a story from last summer; the speaker says he was not necessarily on that flight, and says the plane looped around the North Pole and returned to course after the pilots woke up.

Bottom Line

Much of what we worry about is not the real danger, so the practical shift the rabbi proposes is to place your concerns in God's hands and treat joy as a deliberate choice.