Rabbi Pinto: “We know people who have money and honor, but they have no life”

What does it mean to truly live? Does everyone who is alive truly experience life? There are people who live until the age of 90, but their lives are not really lives. They are sad, they are suffering. They have a full life—but a bad life, said Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto in his recent lecture in Miami. According to Rabbi Pinto, longevity holds no real significance if a person does not know how to live their life properly.

We see people who have everything—money, houses, honor—but they have no life. They don’t know how to live. They become fixated on one thing, focus solely on it, and forget to look at life itself, he explained.

Rabbi Pinto teaches that the path to a good life begins with the ability to see the world correctly. See your world in your lifetime—one must see the world within their life, understand what to look at and how to look at it. A person who does not know how to perceive reality properly only sees flaws and ignores the good around them.

According to him, the problem is psychological. A person desires something, and even if it is not good for them, they insist on having it. They see nothing else—just that, just that, just that. But they do not realize that it is not actually good for them. And when they get it, they are still not happy.

Rabbi Pinto warns against an excessive focus on one single matter, instead of learning to view life as a whole. A person who does not know what to look at and how to look at it—his life is not good. He lives in his own bubble and does not understand the reality around him.

One of Rabbi Pinto’s central messages is the importance of being practical and pragmatic in life. A person needs to know how to be practical about things, how to be pragmatic. Someone who does not know how to be pragmatic loses their world.

According to him, one of the biggest problems in the world today is the lack of understanding of reality. We see many people who do not know how to be pragmatic, who do not know how to understand things correctly. Instead of adapting to reality, they cling to what does not serve them, ultimately harming their own happiness and the fullness of their lives.

In conclusion, he emphasized, life is not measured by how much you have, but by how much you appreciate what you have. A person who understands this lives a full, happy, and good life.

This article was written in cooperation with Shuva Israel