When I was a high school student back in New Jersey in the late 60s, I had a teacher who would say to us, he was our social studies teacher, he would say that in matters of religion and politics, he said people usually speak with a degree of certainty inversely proportional to how much they actually know. And over the years since I learned that from him, I've found that to be often the case. The first YouTube video that we put up on our channel, we did this here many years ago, was about Jewish meditation. And I mentioned during that lecture that there are many people who assume, and they've told me, that meditation is totally foreign to Judaism. And we show during that lecture that there's no truth to that at all. We find similar statements about the topic of reincarnation. Many people assume that while it's central to Buddhism and Hinduism, it has absolutely no place within Jewish thought. What I'll try to show tonight is that this as well is not true. And one of the reasons I believe that the topic of reincarnation is not better known in the Jewish community, is that it's really not found overtly described or discussed in any of our primary literature. You won't find anything really about reincarnation in our Tanakh, in our Bible. You won't really find anything about reincarnation in the entire Talmud. The only mention you really find at all about the topic of reincarnation are in the mystical teachings of Judaism that we refer to as the Kabbalah. Now the Bible we'll find basically goes through the basic contours of Judaism. That's what we'll find in the Bible. The Bible begins with the story of God creating the universe. It goes on to describe later how God revealed the 613 commandments of the Torah to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. But many important questions are never really addressed in the Bible. Obvious questions. For example, the first sentence is in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Well, why did he create the heavens and the earth? What was his agenda? What was the purpose of creating the heavens and earth? How did it actually happen? Was it simply God saying let there be light and that's all that happened? Was there more to creation than the few verses that we actually read in the Bible? It says in the beginning God created the heavens and earth. Well, who is God? I mean, it's a word that appears everywhere in the Bible, but the Bible doesn't spend a lot of time discussing the question of who is God? How are we to understand God? So these are sort of very ultimate basic essential questions that are not really explored in the Bible. There's a God that created the world, but how does God interface with the world? How does an infinite transcendent God have any kind of a relationship with finite physical creatures? How does that work? What is the nature of the soul that God breathed into Adam? The Bible describes the creation of the first person formed from the dust of the earth, but then God breathes the breath of life, the soul, into this creature. Well, what does that mean? What is the nature of this soul? Again, it's just thrown out there, but you don't find any real discussion about these topics. What happens after we die? I mean, we're all here. Many people are curious what happens next. Not really discussed in the Bible. The Bible has lots of commandments that God gave us. Don't eat shellfish. Why not? I mean, the Bible gives us lots of instructions, dos and don'ts, but the Bible almost never engages in an analysis or discussion of what the purpose of these commandments are. What is the meaning? What are they supposed to accomplish? So it is these kinds of questions and many others that are explored in the Kabbalah. Now, there are several reasons why Kabbalistic thought has not been more widely known throughout Jewish history. One reason is that for many, many years, centuries and centuries, these teachings basically remain secretive. They were only studied by a select elite. The basic text, the primary text of the Kabbalah is called the Zohar, and it has its origins in the oral revelations that God revealed to Moses back at Mount Zion. Those are the origins of Kabbalistic thought. But the work of the Zohar itself was first composed by Rabbi Shimon Baruchai, who lived in the first century of the common era. But the text itself, the book, never appeared in print until the 13th century. So for many, many, many years, these concepts were simply not widely accessible. And after it was published, it wasn't widely disseminated. One of the reasons for that is that the material of the Kabbalah is extremely difficult, esoteric and complicated. It's not easily grasped by people who don't have a very strong and silent granting in the fundamentals of Judaism, which themselves can take a lifetime to master. So for a person to first really be well-grounded in the entire Bible and the entire corpus of rabbinic literature, like the Talmud and the Midrash, that's quite an accomplishment that's necessary. It's a prerequisite before someone can then approach the mystical teachings and understand them. So these mystical teachings of Judaism are really not well known at all by the masses of Jewish people until approximately the 18th century. What happened in the 18th century? Rabbi Zoro Balchemto started the Hasidic movement, which was a populist movement that swept throughout Europe. And it began to popularize and spread Catholic teachings. It made it easier to digest and easier for the non-scholar to understand. And so for the first time really in our history, Kabbalistic ideas began receiving a lot of attention by the masses of Jewish people. However, at the very same time in our history, there was a parallel movement. We know that during the enlightenment, the skeptical enlightenment, we began to find a challenge and a question of all concepts in Judaism that seemed supernatural, mystical, mysterious. There seemed to be an anti-supernatural bias that crept in to the Jewish world. And what happened is sociologically, you know this, if you just look at the history of North America in Jewry, even going back to European Jewry in the 1800s, there was a growing tendency towards secularism among Jewish people. And Jewish communal life became focused primarily on things like Jewish ethnicity connecting to Israel, but the more spiritual aspects of Judaism were neglected. I mentioned I grew up in the child of the 60s. I originally was from the Bronx, New York, and then my family moved to Fairlawn, New Jersey. There was a very well-known famous rabbi from Fairlawn who later, after I left, published a book in 1989 where he wrote in this book that reincarnation is totally alien to Jewish thought. So this famous rabbi just states unequivocally that reincarnation is a concept totally alien to Judaism and the Jewish thought. And there's a wonderful book that I recommended before called The Jew in the Lotus. This book has a little bit of a history. Many of you know that the Tibetan Buddhists were basically going through a systematic persecution by the Communist Chinese. Communist Chinese were destroying many Tibetan Buddhist temples, persecuting and murdering many Tibetan Buddhist priests. It became very difficult to maintain any kind of connection to their spiritual traditions in Communist Chinese occupied Tibet. So many people began to believe it. And we know that in the 1960s, the Dalai Lama, who was the leader of the Tibetan Buddhist path, spiritual path, by foot traveled to India from Tibet with many of his followers. And the Indian government was kind enough to give them an abandoned hill city. It was a hill village that was used by the British in the 1900s because it was cool there. It was destroyed by a earthquake and it was abandoned. So the Indian government allowed the Tibetans to come there. It's a little town called Dharmasala. And that became the headquarters of the Tibetan Buddhists in exile. The Dalai Lama found that it was difficult to be a people in exile. He found that many Tibetan Buddhists outside of Tibet began assimilating into the outside culture. So his concern was, how do we survive exile? Turns out that the Dalai Lama has many Jewish students. And they said, you know Dalai Lama, our people have to be the leading experts in the world in surviving exile. We've been in exile for over 2,000 years. So the Cummings Foundation organized meetings between the Dalai Lama and a number of Jewish rabbis and educators. They traveled to India. And there was a young, he was a professor of English, literature I believe, his name is Roger Kamenez. He went there to document and to report on these meetings. And the book produced this quote, The Jew in the Lotus. There's a wonderful comment in this book where the Dalai Lama begins asking because morally these rabbis are gonna explain the secrets of your survival. You know, we have families, which is a problem because Tibetan Buddhists are roughly monastic. And we have these holiday celebrations like the Paschal Crusader. And they were trying to explain, what is it that we are able to have as a technology to help us survive? But the Dalai Lama was very curious and he began asking questions about Judaism. And he began asking about mystical concepts. Now one of the rabbis, only one of them was someone that had a strong background in Jewish mysticism. His name was Rabbi Solomon Schachter Shalomni. And he went into a long discussion in front of Wally Liravai's and the Dalai Lama about angels and about spiritual worlds and about Kabbalah. And the Dalai Lama was totally captured by it. Totally captured. So Kamenez writes here the following. I can see the other delegates were getting a bit uncomfortable. Rabbis have egos too. And perhaps some were simply concerned that Rabbi Solomon would use up most of the talk in that day, as indeed he did. But there was something else going on. Although the group had already assumed that Rabbi Schachter's material would be of interest, they could not have anticipated this absolute explosion of curiosity from the Dalai Lama. It hit with enormous force and suddenly they confronted their own embarrassment about these subjects, which was not just theirs personally, but was endemic to contemporary Judaism itself. Rabbi Yitzchgrimburg, for example, felt the need to add some spin control. Well, what you're hearing is the mystical tradition, but more legal systems would not affirm all of these beliefs. Then Rabbi Joy Levitt piped in to general amusement and she said, and some of us are hearing these ideas for the first time as well. So there was this huge vacuum in the Jewish world where as the community began pulling away from mysticism and capitalism began to thwart, but many, many Jewish seekers wanted exactly that. And so we found that many Jewish people returning eastward, there was a tremendous interest among Jewish people in Eastern spiritual traditions. Pearl Epstein wrote a wonderful book called Pilgrimage, which to a great extent is autobiographical and describes her own struggles to find spiritual path within Judaism. And she mentions a friend of hers named Sue, who was one of these seekers who went off to India to find transcendence that defines spirituality. And is a particularly poignant line that Pearl Epstein has here, where she said, in the ragged, obscure manuscripts of the Catholics, I began to find tantalizing glimpses of the holy sparks that I had intuited in the scriptures as a child. And I marveled at the powers of obstruction that had hidden the ecstatic teachings from Jews like Sue, who were so hungry for them that they would travel to dusty Indian villages, contract dysentery, and even die to find those teachings. Hebrew word for reincarnation is Gilgul. The word Gilgul is related to three other Hebrew words. The word golel, which means to roll. For example, if you come to the synagogue in Shabbat, there'll be someone who lifts the Torah after it's read, it's called Hattah. And then someone rolls it together, that's called Ilela. So golel means to roll. Gilgul is also related to the word gal. A gal is a wave. And also the word gal gal, which means either a wheel or a circle. So why is the incarnation called Gilgul? It's the idea is that life is not always a straight line. Life is not always simple. And sometimes life has to go through a cycle of life and death and life and death, rolling from one body into the next. And this may be why the Hebrew word for life itself, khayim, has a plural ending, right? The same way in English, if you want a plural word, you have an S at the end. So when Hebrew, a word becomes plural by having the in, the unit that's so fleet at the end of the word. So khayim, we say is life, but khayim is life as a plural ending. And it might be that the purpose, the reason that the word khayim itself is a plural ending, a plural form, is that really life itself might be a process of many lives. The Jewish concept of Gilgul is not exactly the same as the one taught in Eastern religions and many contemporary New Age philosophies. They view reincarnation really more technically trans-migration as the soul of someone when someone's soul dies and returns intact into a subsequent body. And this can happen more than once, but it's always the same soul that returns. The same soul that comes back into body after body after body. The goal of Hinduism is to escape that cycle of reincarnation, but it's always the self, the original soul that gets totally trans-migrated into a new body. In the Jewish mystical understanding, Gilgul is more nuanced and more complex. And it's basically finding the way we understand the makeup of the soul itself. The Kevala teaches basically that our soul has five levels. And that itself is a tremendous oversimplification. Let's begin there. The soul is understood to have basically five levels. Though part of our soul that's the closest to God, our unique divine soul is called Yechidah. Yechidah from the word unique, personal. Then, lower down, meaning more distant from that godly source, is an aspect of our soul called Chaya, again from the concept of life. And that is the life source, the transitional life source, that really animates the other three levels down group. The next level down is called Nishama, many of you've heard that term. Nishama is the aspect of our soul that's associated with our intellect, our ability to think and to conceptualize. The next level down is called Ruach, which is the emotional part of who we are. And finally, the Nephish, which is the instinctual aspect of who we are associated with our bodies. And the Bible actually, animals also have a Nephish. They have an animating soul that keeps them alive. Now in reality, our souls are much more complex than these five levels. I remember when I was in junior high school, we were learning physics for the first time, chemistry actually. So in seventh grade, I think the teacher said, well, class in Adam has a nucleus which is composed of protons and neutrons. But then around the nucleus, there are electron rings. They're actually rings of electrons and they're right. I remember at least two electrons in the first ring and then six or eight in the next ring. But then I remember two or three years later, the teacher said, well, that wasn't true. It really aren't these discrete electron rings. It's really an electron cloud and it's a probability curve. But two years ago, you couldn't have really wrapped your head around something as abstract as a probability curve electron cloud. So we made it work concrete for you. So the truth is we don't have these just five simple levels of the soul. But each level contains all five levels. Our soul is also connected to more inclusive primordial root souls. So for example, on some level, each of us is connected to Adam and Eve. So in the view of Kabbalah, rectified parts of our soul. Parts of our soul that have been perfected and rectified move on and don't need to return. It's only those levels of our soul that still need further development and rectification that undergo reincarnation or real rule. The concept of reincarnation. What I'd like to try to do is see it within the broader discussion of what life in general is all about. And so the more artificial to look at that part of life without having the bigger picture. So I'm gonna share with you a foundational presentation of this idea based upon the seminal work of our emotion of time with Sato called Dera Hashem or the way of God. And I'm gonna be summarizing his presentation. Number one, he says, why did God create the world? Why did God create human beings? He says that God's purpose in creating the world was in order to be able to bestow his goodness upon others. Meaning that he says the nature of good is to do good. The nature of good is to give. The nature of love is to want to give. It says in the book of Psalms, Ola Nkhestah Nyeba Naye, the world was created out of loving kindness. So if God by nature is good as loving and wants to give, that's just God's nature. If you want to use a word like that. So God desires to give to others. The focus of the Bible is what he intends to give to human beings. The require, when necessary, when necessitate that the recipient, human beings, receive the greatest good and pleasure as possible. God's agenda is for the recipient to receive not just any good, but the greatest good and the greatest pleasure possible. Think about these terms. What does every normal parent want for their children? Any normal parent wants their children's pleasure. And if you ask the parent how much pleasure, the parent will say as much as possible. No parent would say, I'd be happy if they traveled third class. Oh, every parent wants their children to have first class pleasure. The absolute maximum possible. And that's God's desire and his will. Now since God himself is the ultimate good. So the ultimate good that we can have is the ability to attach ourselves to God. The ability for us to be connected to God. Normally we think of pleasure in much more mundane terms. We think of an ice beach or a piece of dark chocolate. Whatever our vision of pleasure is. But Kamala basically says that all of these pleasures in the world, they have a source. There's a source to every pleasure. And if you enjoy the product of the assembly line, so imagine being able to spend your whole lifetime connected to the source of all these pleasures. So if you enjoy a beautiful sunset with a smile of a baby, and that gives you a lot of pleasure. So imagine the possibility of being connected to the source of all pleasure in the world. This is the goal. If this is God's goal, why didn't God just create souls? After all, that's when each of us is. When you come down to it, we're not really a body. After 120 years, your body is going to be separated from your soul. The body is going to be buried in the ground and bye bye. What exists eternally is our soul and our spiritual essence. So if God really wants to give each of us pleasure, why didn't God just take our souls and plunk them into paradise? Take our souls and just stick them in heaven. And each person would be in bliss from square one. Why place the soul into a visible body and make this soul with this visible body dwell in a visible world with all the distractions that our world has against spirituality. We live in a world where spiritual pursuits are not always the most attractive pursuits. If many people had a choice between coming to a class in spiritual thought or going to a Blue Jays game, they might consider going to a Blue Jays game. I think that there are huge temptations in the world, distractions from spiritual pursuits. So why would God put us there? So Rabbi Lusaz was saying that true pleasure only results when we earn it and work for it. That anything that you receive for free as a handout without working for it is not really pleasurable. It's only really pleasurable when it's really yours and it's really yours when you work for it, when you've made it part of yourself, rather than it being given to you and it's really only associated with you accidentally. God forced us into a relationship with Him. God could have forced us to have a relationship, but obviously the relationship is infinitely more meaningful when we choose the relationship. So therefore God placed human beings into a world where we have free will, a world where the choices in front of us are equally attractive and balanced and we're not compelled toward either choice. In addition, we ourselves would have to be beings consisting of both the physical and spiritual side, the soul being drawn to the spiritual, the body being drawn to the physical and these two sides of ourselves are in a state of constant tension. If the soul prevails, it elevates itself and it elevates the body with it and the individual achieves their personal potential. Each person achieves his or her personal potential. Of course, when a person is drawn more to the physical and the spiritual, they don't achieve their perfection. They go through their lives and identify primarily as a body. They think of themselves primarily as a body. Who am I? Excuse me. A body. And they don't attend to their souls or spend any time on spiritual development. I'm sure each of us probably knows a few people that don't pay any attention to developing spiritual. The Talmud teaches that when a person dies and their soul separates from their body, because that's basically what happens when you die, the soul separates from the body. So if it's a person that spent their life developing their soul and recognizing that at the end of the day, they're not a body, they happen to be a soul that's temporarily in a body for 70, 80, 90, 100 years, but then the body's gonna be buried and the soul will tend to exist.  That's how difficult it is to get their soul away from their body. The body's not cringing to the soul. The body understands it's not a soul.  It's very difficult for that body to let go of that soul, or that soul to let go of that body. So according to the mystical teachings of Judaism, one of the major reasons for reincarnation and the major purpose of the reincarnation is that it offers us a second chance to earn perfection. The Zohar teaches the following. The Zohar says, as one as a person is unsuccessful in fulfilling their purpose in this world, the Holy One blessed me, He uproots and replants them over and over again. This is the way Rabbi Moshe Chaim Sato describes it in his book, Derah Hashem, the Way of God. He says, God arranged matters so that our chances of achieving ultimate perfection should be maximized. A single soul can be reincarnated a number of times in different bodies, and in this manner, it can rectify the damage done in previous incarnations. Similarly, it can also achieve perfection that was not attained previously. Now the basic platform of Allah is found in the Zohar. It wasn't until the 16th century when a spiritual genius named Isaac Luria was referred to as the Irene. He was born in 1534 and died 38 very short years later in 1572. He was the one that fleshed out and fully elaborated the ideas in the Zohar. The last three years of his life, he moved at Svat in northern Israel and he taught his teachings to a select group of students. His main disciple, Rechaim Vitaal, who lived from 1542 to 1620, basically committed the idea of his master, the Irene, to writing in a massive eighth section work called the Eighth Qayyim, The Tree of Life. And one entire section of the Eighth Qayyim is called the Shahr Adil Ghalim, the Gate of Reincarnations. It's an entire book explaining probabilistically what reincarnation is all about. And he suggests that there are a number of reasons that a person might be reincarnated. For example, to fulfill commandments that they never fulfilled previously or that they didn't fulfill properly. There are 613 commandments in Torah.  Or maybe they fulfill commandments but not with a whole heart. Maybe they give charity but not with a whole heart. So they may have to come back to fix what they didn't do properly previously. Or they may have to study all the parts of the Torah. There are any parts of the Torah and we're supposed to ideally study everything in the Torah. Not just the nuts and bolts of the commandments but their mystical interpretations. That's important to learn. We may have to come back to be able to study parts of the Torah we never studied previously or to rectify any sins that we may have committed or personality traits that were not perfected in previous existence. Or we may have to come back to rectify a problematic relationship pattern. We all know that there are certain things in our lives that we keep on going back and doing incorrectly in terms of our relationships with other people. We don't give people enough space. We're too nosy. We're not generous. We may have to come back to fix those.  They may have to come back and have children. There are people who never met their soul mate. But even the person they married was not their real soul mate. They may have to come back to marry their real soul mate. They may have to come back to this world to help other people. Maybe they're okay. But it could be that you would be the unique position to help someone else. You may have to go back for that. How many times has the soul reincarnated? How many times have they come back? Most sources say that after our initial life, a person can be reincarnated three times. And this is found hinted at in the verse in the book of Eove, the book of Job. In chapter 33, verse 29 and 30, which says, God does all these things twice or three times with a person to bring their soul back from the grave to bask in the light of the living. So the basic teaching is we may come back three times. However, there are sources like the Savior by here. We'll talk about that in a few moments. The Savior by here says that a person can be reincarnated a thousand times. So which is it, three or a thousand? And so the way most people understand the resolution of this is that if after three times a person comes back and they make no progress, they don't make any forward progress after coming back three times, that's it. They'll never come back again. They may lose that possibility of correcting their lives through reincarnation. But if their soul makes a little bit of progress during those three times they've come back, they can keep coming back even a thousand times and the Tsukune Zahar says they can come back as many times as is necessary. Now, Catholics teach that normally we are not aware of our previous incarnations. They teach by the way that just about every single person in the room here is here not for the first time. The Catholics would teach that just about everyone in the room, this is not our first time around. But most of us are not aware of previous incarnations. However, and don't get scooped out by this too much, some Catholics maintain that there are times when someone can come back as an animal, a fish, a plant, or a inanimate object. And here, the person is not able to achieve rectification through their free will anymore. But they will be aware of their human incarnation. They will know that they came from a person and that will cause them a lot of anguish. And that anguish can be cleansing for the soul. So when we are here in a reincarnated human form we're not aware of our previous incarnations. If people come back as a fish or as a deadline they are aware of the fact that they are a human soul in an inanimate object and that's not fun. So one main purpose of reincarnation is to be able to get a second chance at life. Another purpose of reincarnation discussed in the literature is that it may help explain why righteous people may seemingly undergo unjustified suffering in their lives. I mentioned before the Sehra Abahir. It's one of the earliest published capitalistic works. It was attributed to Rabbi Nakhunya Benakana who lived around the year 100 of the Common Era and it was first published in 1174. And this book writes the following. Why is there a righteous person who has good but another righteous person has evil? The answer is because the second righteous person was wicked in a previous lifetime and is now being punished. Now when we seek to evaluate someone's life to see if they are being treated fairly by God, everybody has a sensitive meter. You know how fairly they're being treated by God.  We say in Hebrew, right, it's a low fare. But at some time in life it's not fair. Gilgul reincarnation expands the context of the life being examined. Life is not just the 70 years we're here on this earth. It could be that the scene to look at is much broader. Sometimes evens out the ledger from previous lifetimes and subsequent ones. According to Nakhunya Benakana he said that Gilgul is an idea that features in the book of Eo and the book of Job. If you're familiar with this book, it's an entire book of our Bible dealing with the topic of theodicy, of explaining why righteous people suffer. And this banding Eo of the Job is an extremely righteous person and he is going through serious, serious suffering. And he can't understand it. Why am I suffering so badly? I'm a righteous person. I shouldn't be going through this. So three of his friends come to basically explain to him, look, God is just. And if you're suffering it must be for good reason, you must have done some bad sins. And he's indignant. And he says, no, I did not do anything wrong. I'm righteous, I shouldn't be suffering. What's interesting is that not only does Job himself forcibly refute these three friends of his, but towards the end of the book, God as well chastises these three friends of Job. But there's another character who enters late in the scene named Elihu. And Elihu tries to help Job contemplate why he's experiencing what he's experiencing. And neither Job nor God responds to Elihu. Meaning it seems that what Elihu was saying might have some substance to it. And Ahmadi says that in some of the words of Elihu, you see this idea of reincarnation. For example, in chapter 33, verse 25, he says that God will return, he will return to his days of youthfulness. People return to their days of youthfulness or the verse we saw before, that God will bring back his soul from the grave. And therefore, according to Ahmadi's, what Elihu was hinting at is, look, Yov, look, Job, it's true you didn't do anything wrong in this lifetime. From that perspective, your suffering is unjust. But it could be that you're suffering now to pay back things that you did wrong from a previous lifetime. So it's not as if your suffering doesn't make any sense. And it could be that this was consoling to Yov. The Chavitzchayin, I grew up on my grandmother hearing stories about the Chavitzchayin. He died in the year 1933. He was a mainstream rabbinic leader, not known as a capitalist. He wrote that a child who dies young may have been the reincarnation of a great person. And the Balchentom I mentioned before was the founder of the Hasidic movement was alleged to have the ability to identify the purpose of a person's incarnation. In a famous story, there was a couple who once asked the Balchentom for a blessing to have a child. The woman became pregnant, she had a baby, but before the baby turned two years of age, the baby died. And the couple came back to the Balchentom and they were complaining.  So the Balchentom told them the following story. He said, in your child's previous incarnation, he was a son of a powerful king. He was a very special child with unusual abilities. So his parents hired a special tutor for their child, for their son. And the tutor was a great genius, very brilliant man. He himself was almost chosen to be the bishop of the city, but he turned down that position. And he agreed to tutor the boy under one condition. The condition was that he would be allowed to have one hour a day for himself. And during that hour, he would lock himself in his room and no one was to disturb him. So he went on for years tutoring his boy until the boys from Nassiki got the better of him. And one day after the tutor sent him out to play, he hid in the closet of the tutor's room. When the tutor locked the door of his room, the boy peered out from the closet and what he saw shocked him. He saw his tutor standing by the wall, wrapped in a tallit and a fillin that was strapped in his arm into his head. And he was swaying and chanting words the boy didn't understand. The boy let out a gasp and he was discovered. He began asking this tutor numerous questions. What is he doing? What is all about? What are all these things we were doing? And he was so impressed with the answers of his tutor that he begged to be taught about Judaism and he promised to keep his tutor secret. He became an adult and converted to Judaism and became a great Torah scholar and Islamic, a righteous sage. Now the Al-Shantul told the parents that when this man died at a rightful age, he could have immediately gone through a blissful paradise. But one thing was missing from his life. He was never loved and nursed by a Jewish mother. So the Al-Shantul said therefore he returned to this childless couple and died at a young age before he could commit any sins so he could fully experience the heavenly bliss. And the Haqqas Chaim himself explained that the ways of God are altogether just. God is just the way he runs the world. And he saw this in the verse in the book of Psalm 19 verse 10 where this verse says the laws of God are true and altogether they are just. And the Haqqas Chaim told the story of that person who was very, very wealthy, but very arrogant and cruel and abusive to people of lower status. After he died, he was taken to task for never asking forgiveness from these people. And he had to go back to the world to make amends. He was told they're gonna have to go down, buddy. So he pleaded to be sent back as a corporal. I don't wanna go back as a rich man. I wanna go back as a corporal. But the heavenly court said, no, that wouldn't be much of a test for you. You're going back as a rich man. And he pleaded, please, I can't do that. Please send me back as a corporal. And God in his mercy relented and he came back to live a miserable existence as a forper, but he was able to rectify sins and purify the soul. The Haqqas Chaim said that when we look through the people that we see in our lives, you might see a forper that's living so destined to be poor, homeless, without anything to support himself. And you might wonder, why can't he make a living? Why is he so downtrodden? What did he do to deserve such an existence? We don't see the big picture. We don't understand the whole picture. The Haqqas Chaim said, that's why in the verse it says, all together when you see the big picture, God's ways are just. Now we know why this person came back as a forper. Now there's no clear reference to reincarnation in the Bible or Talmud. Our sages found numerous illusions to it. We previously saw, for example, in the Haqqandis, some of these were several verses in the book of Job pointing to the idea of reincarnation. Some see a hint in the book of 2 Samuel, verse 14 in chapter 14, which says, God favors not a soul, but he devises means so that the soul, which is banished, be not cast from him, meaning God finds a way to rectify his soul. Psalm 19, verse 8 says, Torah sashantanima, the law of God, the Torah of God is perfect. Mashi'vah's mouth that should restore the soul. So some of the Catholics say, yes, the Torah of God is perfect and has the ability to help us to reach perfection. But if we don't reach perfection, Mashi'vah's mouth that's God will return our soul for a second chance. The Zohar itself has a very curious source of the idea of reincarnation. If you want to find the egg words of the entire Zohar for a discussion on reincarnation, it appears in the part of Olmishpatin, beginning in Exodus chapter 21, that focuses on Jewish civil law, the laws of torts, monetary payments, and the Zohar takes this chapter on an allegorical symbolic level as the need for us to make payment for things that took place in previous lifelines. Another thing that's explained by the Catholics in the Bible is famous law of liberal marriage. You see that in Genesis chapter 38, Yehuda, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, so Yehuda had a son named Eric, who died childless. And his brother Onan was supposed to marry Eric's dead brother's wife, whose name was Tamar. Onan was supposed to marry Tamar, who was Eric's wife. Through what was known as liverite marriage, so that the brother's name could be carried on. And we know that Onan didn't want to do this. Now, why didn't he? It's impossible to say that he didn't want to give his brother's name to the child. Why would that be so offensive? And the truth is that in liverite marriage, he didn't have to name the child with the same name as the dead father. Now, onan suggests that this story contains a very deep, capitalistic secret. And the commentary to Onan Lee suggests that it is hinting at reincarnation and pupil. And that when it says that this baby is going to carry on the name of the father, what it really means is that when his liverite marriage and a brother marries the wife of his dead brother, the child that's born will have the soul of the dead father. And that's why Onan did not want to have children with Tamar, but he said it's not going to be my child. And why should I be raising someone else's child? So many see the whole idea of liverite marriage as based upon the idea of the pupil. Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, the great Vilna Graham, saw the entire book of Jonah in the Bible on a metaphorical level and the story about the soul of someone that has to return to this world in order to accomplish this perfection. It was a soul that did things improperly the first time around, and Jonah has to come back again to make repairs. Now, the capitalists like Deoree and others claim to know the prior incarnations of historical figures. For example, if you're familiar with Vilna in the Bible, Vilna was the non-Jewish prophet, who was hired to curse the Jewish people. So the Ares says that Vilna was a reincarnation of Levan. Levan was Jacob's father-in-law. And on the way to trying to curse the Jewish people, Vilna's donkey refused to cooperate and pushed him against the wall, squatting his leg against the wall. And the Ares says this was a reminder to him that the way to Jacob was violated. Levan said to Jacob, this mound, God, this God, this mound, will be a witness that I will not go beyond this mound with that intention, as Genesis 31-52. So because Vilna broke this oath of not going against the descendants of Jacob with that intention, we're told that he did not live a long life. According to the Talmud and Trakiks on Peter in 106b, he was 33 years old and he was killed by Pinchas. By the way, the word Gal for mound in Hebrew adds up to 33. So Vilna was 33 when he died. And it says in the book of Psalms, chapter 55 verse 24, that men of bloodshed and deceit will not live out half their days. The moral life is 70 years. He didn't reach 35, he died in 33. There are many, many other theories that the capitalists put forward about different reincarnations. So Jethro, Yisro, Moses' father-in-law is seen as the guilty will, a reincarnation of Cain. Moses is seen as the reincarnation of Abel. So those two brothers come back later on into this relationship between Jethro and his son-in-law, Moses. The 10 martyrs that we read about on Tisha Bahad and Yom Kippur, who were brutally slain by the Romans, are seen by the capitalists as reincarnations of the 10 brothers who sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt. And now they're coming back in these 10 martyrs that have to pay for what they did to Joseph. It's interesting that in the Bible, these 10 brothers would never really, there's no consequence to them. Joseph lets it slide. They say to them, well, whatever you had in mind for evil, God made sure it turned out for good. But they were really guilty of kidnapping and attempted murder. Now I want to emphasize, it's not important for us to believe in bill of wool. It's not a card to believe in Judaism. As we mentioned, it's not even in the Bible, it's unlawful. So if it rubs you the wrong way, don't feel guilty. And there were several great rabbinic authorities that didn't seem to accept the idea of reincarnation. Included was Rabbi Ságaón in the 10th century, the leader of Babylonian Jewry. Rabbi Nerojosef Albo, 14th century from Spain, wrote the famous St. Mary of Calvary, the Rajah of 13th century Spain, and Rabbi Greskis, among others, who simply did not accept either because they didn't know about these powerless teachings or they had various philosophical or psychological objections to bill of wool. For example, one objection was, an interesting one, if we believe in reincarnation, right? So if we believe in the resurrection of the dead. So if we are going through various reincarnations, which body will be resurrected at the end of days? That was an objection that was presented to the capitalists because Jews have to believe in resurrection. That's in the Bible. So there are many theories to explain this. By the way, the capitalists had answers for all the objections. One theory was that the soul will take on the body of its last incarnation. So which body will be resurrected? The last one you're in. So you should make sure the last body you're in should be with shape and look nice. A soul, or others say, that our souls will be divided into a number of bodies and they will all be resurrected.  Or, it might be the most elegant solution, a spark in soul will be combined into one resurrected fold, which sounds nice. Okay. I'm gonna conclude tonight by sharing with you the fact that this is a topic that has gained a tremendous amount of traction in the world in general. One of the first people to really do a lot of research into reincarnation was I Jewish man, I think he's Jewish, Dr. Brian Weiss, who wrote a famous book, wrote many books, but his famous book was called Many Lives, Many Masters. Now, he was not a insignificant doctor. He graduated from Yale School of Medicine and he ran a major medical center, the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. He headed this psychiatric wing of this hospital. In 1980, a 27-year-old woman who he refers to as Catherine in his book came to his office in Florida, complaining that she had life crippling phobias. She had fears of water, fears of drowning, fears of the dark, fears of choking. And because of these fears, she was literally not able to sleep at night, literally couldn't sleep. The fears were paralyzing. So he tried conventional psychotherapy for about a year and a half, nothing helped. So she finally allowed him to use hypnotherapy. During hypnotherapy these sessions, it was revealed that she had repressed childhood trauma. And normally what psychiatrists find is when you reveal repressed trauma, the phobia associated with those trauma will be resolved. But even though she was able to recover, actual things that happened to her when she was a child in this life were phobias that go away. And he was really perplexed. So during one session, Dr. Weiss induced a very deep hypnotic state and asked Catherine to go back to the very first experience poisoning her traumas. And she began to describe the great detail experiences from her life thousands of years before and how a tidal wave flooded her village in Grand Creek. Unlike at that point, didn't believe necessarily that this was true, but the following week, Catherine came back and reported that she no longer had any fear of water or drowning. And she was feeling a much easier time sleeping. And Weiss was very impressed by this. But he still didn't accept uncritically the idea that Catherine had described her previous existence. But he continued to treat Catherine by having her go back to the initial source of her trauma. And she continued to describe events in her previous lives while her symptoms continued to ease in the race after recovering their source in her previous lives. But then, a totally unexpected game changer happened. Under deep hypnosis, while describing how she died in the previous life, she told Dr. Weiss that his father and son were with her. She said, your father says you will know him because his name is Avron. His death was due to his heart and your son's heart was also a problem because it was backwarded. And Dr. Weiss was shocked by this because indeed his father and son had died earlier before Catherine became a patient of his. His father did die from heart problems. His name was Avron, which was not the name he was usually called, usually people called him by his English name, Alvin. And his son had an extremely rare condition that took place in one out of 10 million births where the veins that his father were going into the wrong side and his son died after 23 days on his plan. This finally convinced Dr. Weiss that there must have been something to Catherine's past life aggressions. She continued to have therapy with him for a few more months and was totally curable at phobias. Dr. Weiss then continued to study and research over 4,000 patients using past life regression therapy. He came to believe in reincarnation as a phenomenon based upon his significant findings and research and data. It wasn't for him a belief, it was something that he felt he had documented. And Dr. Weiss believed that the stronger evidence for reincarnation are not the stories of adults that tell about past lives during hypnotic regression, but the stories and accounts of children who recount past lives not under hypnotic regression. And children are usually not that able to fool people. They're much more innocent and naive. So the person that's studying this was Dr. Ian Stevenson. He was associated with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia and he documented over 3,000 such cases of children who described to him past lives. What Stevenson would do was he would travel all over the world, welcome to India and to countries in the Far East. He would interview children at grade length and then he would go to the places that they were describing to corroborate the details of the child's story. And he found a monotony corroboration between what the children were telling him and they had no way of knowing and the research he did in the places that they were describing. For example, in one case a young girl made 49 statements about an earlier life in a place somewhere else in India. He was able to corroborate 46 of those 49 statements, including great detail about the house where she allegedly lived in her past life and family members that he was able to identify was still alive. In another story, there was a toddler from Sri Lanka who heard his mother mention the distant town of Kataragama and he proceeded to tell her mother, she proceeded to tell her mother that she had drowned there in this city when her dumb brother pushed her into the river. She went on to mention 30 details of her previous home family and neighborhood. Professor Stevenson went to this town and found a family that perfectly fit the child's description. Their two-year-old daughter had indeed drowned in the river while playing with her mentally challenged brother. Professor Stevenson verified 27 of the 30 statements made by this young girl, Dr. Helen Bambach, sent out in this crew reincarnation and she hid the tide over a thousand subjects beginning in the late 1960s and asked very detailed and specific questions about numerous details about the time of these subjects allegedly lived, describing the clothing, the homes, utensils, what kind of money they had. And except for 11 subjects, their descriptions were totally corroborated by the history of these periods. 11 out of over a thousand were not corroborated. She became a believer in reincarnation and published the book for Life Before Life in 1978. And in conclusion, I wanted to point out that tonight happens to be Yonah's show. This is the day tomorrow we commemorate the European Holocaust of six million Jews. And one of the most fascinating fields of research that's going on today, into reincarnation, have been the accounts of numerous people, including many non-Jews, who recall having lived through the Holocaust. Youngest inversion someone actually met in Minneapolis, Minnesota many years ago, wrote a book called Beyond the Ashes, documenting numerous cases of people that had strange phobias, but were born after World War II. Some of these unexplained phobias were paralyzing the fears of anyone in tall black boots or seeing barbed wire, where nothing was able to explain these phobias, which caused these people to go into incredible, absolute terror. Many of the non-Jews interviewed by Gershwin believed that they actually died during the Holocaust. In one such story, a young man named Ryan Arthur Rishers, born in 1977 in Olan, Nebraska, to Christian parents never knew or met a Jew while he was growing up. He began having a dream that he was a religious Jew with a beard and peice, working as a scribe. He would see himself ushered into a shower room with other Jews. He knew that these were gas chambers. He couldn't understand why this was happening to him. He was a religious Jew, and he became very angry with God and cried out to God, why did you make me a Gentile? Why did you make me a Jew? Why did you make me a Gentile? He kept on having his dream over and over again in 2001, while the dream was still recurring. He met a Jewish person on an online chat room and began discussing these dreams and Judaism. Three months later, he gave up and renounced Christianity. Two years later, he began a conversion process in Chicago. In 2010, he moved to Israel and finished his conversion in 2011. Today, he lives in Calvary, El, and many Torontonians live there in northern Israel, and he's studying to be a solter of scribe. Take from this discussion of reincarnation. I just want to share two points that I have, and then I'll be happy to try and take the question. One point that I have after going through this material is that it made me much more aware of the fact that there's much more to our lives than we often think there are. There's much more going on than we tend to assume is there. Life's much bigger than the life we normally pay attention to. And secondly, reincarnation to me is a message about how much God loves us and cares for us and how much faith he puts in us, how much faith God has in us, that he keeps on giving us a chance after chance after chance to improve and to succeed. Or something I'm calling of the Linn, great Hasidic master who died in the year 1900, said that as Jews, we have to not only believe in God, we have to believe in ourselves as well. We have to believe that we have incredible spiritual potential. And in the same way that God has faith in us and God tries to give us every chance to succeed, we as well have to have faith in ourselves.


which is a culinary specialist to send all your back to the defect dining facility and making food now.  It's a job that a lot of people don't look at it as a job, but we actually do a lot more than just cooking and setting the defect. We're out here like today training and shooting out and testing different weapons. Solid or short, outstanding skills which make us proud and better. We are truly stronger together.


The final item of business is members' business debate on motion 146.3, in the name of Edward Mountain, on the investigation into bullying claims at NHS Highland. This debate will be concluded without any questions being put, and I would ask those who wish to speak in the debate to press the request-to-speak buttons now. I call on Edward Mountain to open the debate for around seven minutes, please. I am, in fact, saddened that we are having this debate this afternoon, firstly because we shouldn't need to be having it, and secondly, it should have been dealt with when I first called on the First Minister to hold an independent inquiry into this issue in September. I would like to thank those members of the chamber and of opposing parties who have signed this motion that was in my name, particularly David Stewart, Rhoda Grant, Monica Lennon, Liam MacArthur, Alex Cole-Hamilton and John Finnie. Although no SNP MSP has supported the motion, I am confident that they believe, like I do, that there should be zero tolerance when it comes to bullying. I would like to welcome, before I go into the substance of my debate, those who have come from the Highlands to listen to this debate, who are up there in the gallery. I would like to thank them for all the work that they have done to bring this to the attention of the Parliament. I would also like to welcome those who are following this on BBC Live. There is a huge interest in this matter. When I became elected in 2016, it was apparent to me that there were significant issues within NHS Ireland, not just with waiting times and poor financial performance, but there was something else, something that I couldn't quite put my finger on, something that frankly made me feel very uncomfortable. I believe, Presiding Officer, that the way in which an organisation treats those that they work with paints a good picture of the way they treat those that work for them. In 2016, the deep division between patients in Cathness and Sky and NHS Ireland warned me that something was seriously amiss. Those protesters felt ignored and that NHS Ireland had shown them an unbelievable level of arrogance, which is perhaps why over a thousand of them took to the streets in Cathness on a wet and windy afternoon in October of that year. My concern grew further when doctors and nurses across the Highlands started to contact me informing me of issues and passing on correspondence from NHS Ireland. A trickle became a flood. Issues that should have been addressed with senior management, but they felt that they were unable to do so because of the response that they received. That attitude manifested itself at board level. The huge turnover of non-executive board members in the last five years should have been a flag to the then health sector tree, but it wasn't. What should have been an even bigger deafening klaxon to that sector tree was when the non-executive board passed the following motion on 28 August 2017. I read that motion. We feel that the culture and leadership of the organisation is a risk to our stated values and objective. That is from the board of NHS Ireland. That motion was passed to the chair of NHS Ireland, who subsequently denied he knew about it, and it was also passed to the Scottish Government. The result was a Government's review, which condemned the executive management of NHS Ireland. I am going to quote one paragraph of the report produced by John Brown, and it is as follows. If you want to look it up, it is paragraph 430. The chair should consider externally facilitated support such as mediation to provide a safe and insecure environment for board members to meet with him and the chief executive to discuss recent concerns and for an agreed way forward to be found. One has to ask what exactly was going on in the boardroom that made it an unsafe and insecure environment, while perhaps exactly what was going on elsewhere in NHS Ireland. On Friday, a meeting organised by the GMB and whistleblowers was set up to discuss bullying. We heard stories about what was going on, and I want to quote just one, just one of the 100 plus that had been reported. I quote, and this is from a lady. Each time it got worse and worse, crying and begging my husband before a shift not to make me go in, and crying when I returned home. My bullying in the workplace got so bad that it affected my mental health. It was so bad that it not only affected me in the work but also in my home life and my life with my kids. This is from a healthcare professional doing her job. She is not the only one. I have heard of other harrowing cases who have contacted me directly. I have been so concerned that, on one occasion, I contacted the office of the chief executive of NHS Scotland to seek help as NHS Ireland remained uncommunitive. It does not stop there. There are patients across the Highland who feel let down, unable to raise the issues that they want to because of the unpleasant reaction to the fact that some have received when they have the temerity to complain. Everything that I have seen and heard has convinced me that there is a bullying culture in NHS Ireland, and it cannot be written off as gossip that the chair of the board tried to do on 27 July this year. To me, it is evident at every level, from the boardroom to the floor of the wards. You see it in the way that NHS Highlands work with their own, with their patients and with those who dare to question the service provision or management. On the latter point, I will just make this point. Trust me, I know. On Friday, the cabinet secretary announced an independent review into bullying in NHS Ireland, which I welcome, but I am afraid that that is just the start. The review will need to look back to identify where the culture of bullying emanated from. John Starrett will need to speak to the staff and patients and board members, and that will take time. I hope that, during the course of this debate, the cabinet secretary can confirm who will be allowed to contribute to the review, that the review will look back for at least 10 years, that the review will cover what I will term as the coercion of staff by the projection of authority, which I believe goes on the whole time. When it comes to reporting, I hope that the cabinet secretary will confirm to me what early 2019 means, because time is sadly a luxury we don't have. We have to address this issue that is festering and I have told has been around for over 10 years. We need to do it, cabinet secretary, for the staff, the patients and the victims in NHS Ireland. Bullying has no place in any of our institutions, and particularly not NHS Ireland. We move to the open debate. The speeches of around four minutes, please. I call Gail Ross to be followed by David Stewart. Bullying, discrimination, intimidation, victimisation, abuse, harassment. We teach our children from a young age that this behaviour is not acceptable in nursery and school, it's not acceptable in college and university, it's not acceptable in the workplace and it should not be acceptable full stop. When the news broke in the press that four clinicians had come forward to say that scores of health workers had been or felt they had been bullied at various NHS Highland establishments across the Highlands, there was quite rightly a condemnation of such behaviour. I am not going to go into the detail of the allegations, because for me that is something for the investigation to explore. What I will say is that any member of staff at NHS Highland that feels they have been bullied no matter what shape that takes must feel supported to come forward. I have met with staff locally, Government officials and spoke to the Cabinet Secretary about that. On 15 November, I asked the Government about an independent investigation, and the answer from the Cabinet Secretary was as follows. The scale and scope of the allegations of bullying and the timespan of those in NHS Highland is such that I need to understand the issues that appear to have led to a culture where those concerns cannot be raised or resolved satisfactorily by the board. To ensure all the issues can be raised and heard by those involved, I have commissioned an externally led independent review. This review will consider all the circumstances that have led to the allegations and make recommendations. My officials continue to hold discussions with NHS Highland staff and their representatives, and we will finalise the scope of the investigation during the week beginning on 19 November and look to announce who will lead the independent investigation as soon as possible thereafter. On 23 November, I asked who will be leading the review and what the scope of the review will be. The Cabinet Secretary answered that I have asked John Sturrick QC to lead the independent review to explore the underlying issues and concerns that have led to allegations of bullying and harassment within NHS Highland. The review will include conversations with affected individuals, including current and former staff, representatives, board members and health board management. The scope of the review will be to create a safe space for an individual and or collective concerns to be raised and discussed confidentially and with an independent and impartial third party. To understand what, if any cultural issues have led to any bullying or harassment and a culture where such allegations apparently cannot be raised and responded to locally, and to identify proposals and recommendations for ways forward, which help will ensure that the culture within NHS Highland in future is open and transparent and perceived by all concerned in this way. The review will commence with initial meetings taking place before Christmas. A review report with proposals and recommendations for ways forward will be provided to the Scottish Government in early 2019. Separate to this independent review, the chief executive of NHS Scotland, Paul Gray, has today written to NHS Highland to offer an increased level of support to help them to recover their financial position and strengthen internal governance. That will raise Highland to stage 4 in the board escalation framework. Additional support will take the form of a support team led by a transformation director who will assist the board in planning and delivering the improvement initiatives that are necessary to restore the board to financial balance. I believe that it is important to get that on the official record. The Government is taking that seriously and has answered calls for an independent investigation. The board is being given extra guidance and assistance, but I will end with two pleas. First, a plea to NHS Highland to commit to listen and act on the evidence received. Secondly, a plea to all NHS staff that are considering coming forward with any information about anyone. Please feel safe and supported to do so, because you are on the front line and the backbone of our NHS. We appreciate everything that you do, and we need you to be healthy and happy so that we can be too. David Stewart, followed by John Finnie. I congratulate Edwin Mountain for securing this evening's debate and all his campaign work around bullying within NHS Highland. I also warmly welcome to the gallery NHS Highland staff, past and present. As with Edward Mountain, on Friday I attended an important but emotionally challenging event organised by the GMB doctors and whistleblowers on bullying. Over 60 people attended and over 140 statements from victims have already been taken. One account of the bullying particularly struck me and I quote, You raise a bullying in a harassment case and yet every step of the way you are on trial. Your character is attacked, you are then subjected to mockery and someone even writes that you are schizophrenic in their statement. Every step is a way, you are treated like you have done something wrong.    Suddenly you are very afraid of what has just happened here.  You are beside yourself, how could this have happened? You go from being bullied and trying to report it to suddenly you are the problem. Your family do not know what to do. You are seeing the doctors every few days.  Your family and partners stay with you. They are scared to leave you alone. They do not talk about it even now. The staff that I met before and after the Bava event had all worked for NHS Highland at some stage in their careers. In addition, as with Edward Mountain, I spoke to several former board non-executives over the last year and also received many phone calls and emails from concerned staff in administration, front-line nursing and GP practices. It seemed to me that there was an underlying toxic culture of bullying. That clearly was having an effect on staff morale and emotional health. The wider issue to me was the possible effect that this was having on the credibility of NHS Highland and its ability to recruit and retain staff. It is also difficult to measure the effect that it has had on patients but surely has had an impact. For that reason, I welcome the cabinet secretary's written answer on Friday, which, with perfect timing, coincided with the bullying conference that I am colleagues were attending. Like Edward Mountain, I had also been calling for an independent QC-led review and I welcome the terms of the review to include current and formal staff. Could the cabinet secretary or the minister in their closing speeches confirm whether there is any time limit in respect to formal staff in terms of when they left? What about patients? If they have witnessed or experienced bullying among NHS staff, will that be considered by the Starwick review? Will the findings be published in full and will the health and sport committee have a role in the proceedings? I also asked the cabinet secretary about the role of ACAS. I contacted them and the chief executive and sharps it to me and I quote, we would be pleased to meet all or any of the representative bodies, ideally face to face, while an investigation is not within our remit. We can conciliate in any dispute and carry out work to improve employment relations. I am also struck by history repeating itself. The Francis review, led by Sir Robert Francis QC, examined bullying in the NHS in England. Its recommendation stressed early support for whistleblowers, cultural change, prevention of isolation and containment, and legal protection for whistleblowers. Members will know that the independent national whistleblowing officer will be subject to a super-affirmative SSI in the spring of 2019, which will be held by the health and sport committee of which I am a member. This is an important recommendation, notwithstanding recommendations in the Starwick review. I will provide new principles, standards and procedures to protect and enhance the role of whistleblowers. In conclusion, Presiding Officer, this has been a timely debate, and everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and respect at work.  Let us look to the new year and the conclusion of the review for a new dawn where staff in NHS Highlands started fresh in safety and security as respected, dedicated professionals, free from the dark cloud of bullying. As is the convention on these occasions, I thank my colleague Edward Mountain for securing the debate. The member will know full well that I have not always agreed with his pronouncements in relation to NHS Highlands, and that is certainly the case tonight. I think that there has been a conflation of ideas. I would like to restrict myself to the wording of the motion, which I think is important. Who is not going to condemn bullying in any shape or form? I will also condemn the people who have stood in silence and watched that happen, and the institutional arrangements have allowed that to happen. As the motion says, I also welcome the independent review, and I commend John Sturrick. John Sturrick is often referred to a man of the highest calibre who has a history of understanding the meaning of words and listening, and that is the important thing. The other word from the motion that I would like to comment on is the word promptly. I think that what is very important is that we get this matter understood and resolved, and that should take the time that it takes. I like others, like the two members who have already spoken. Indeed, along with Ian Blackford, one of the MPs for the area, I attended Friday's meeting. I have to say that it was very harrowing to hear some of the statements. I commend the people who have come forward. Now, we are all given a very large folder, and that has contained a lot of harrowing information. I hope that information will be made available to Mr Sturrick. The dignity that you can show anyone in a workplace is very important. In a previous career, I was involved as a police federation official just across the road, and we discussed the introduction of a quality and fairness programme. The police is quite a challenging environment, given the rank structure there. It would certainly seem that it has embraced the philosophy of equality and fairness better than across the road, but the key to that is dignity. You can have all the processes in the world, and I do not doubt that Mr Sturrick will unearth that there is a great wealth of policies sitting and gathering dust on a shelf. It is my personal experience that it will not go into case work other than to say that, having dealt with a particular case, it is apparent that the timescales, often the case with employment disputes, went right out the window. That sends a very clear message to someone. If someone is too busy to deal with your issue, if someone is going to be in holiday, if someone has left the organisation, I want to understand the value, for instance, of any exit interviews that have taken place, because people have talked about the loss of people, and David Stewart has talked about the potential of recruiting and retaining staff. It is important. We need to understand the systems that are already in place and those that should be in place to address concerns. I also want to pick out—I was very grateful for the cabinet secretary's response to my colleague Gail Ross's question. I thought that it was comprehensive. The timing was the timing. If someone says that they are going to create a safe space for people to come forward, I am very happy to commend that, and the confidentiality that is ensured with that process. There is no doubt that Mr Stewart is an independent and impartial third party. I made a suggestion to NHS Highland earlier on this process. That was, again, back from my days when there was an instance of bullying in the then Northern Constabulary. I, using health and safety legislation as a health and safety rep, called on the expertise of the Institute of Occupational Medicine to come in and examine the workplace. That was a suggestion that was noted but not taken up by NHS Highland. I think that it is fair to record that there have been issues over a period. I think that probably what I am keenest to come out of this is that we have a safe working environment for people, but that we are not this big black cloud hanging over the NHS in the Highlands. The majority of people that I speak to know nothing of bullying, what they know of, is the quality of care that they have, and the very high standard of care that they have. I would not want anything that we do or say to impact on that. I think that it is fair to say that the NHS Highland is a caring organisation. People would have imagined that care would have transferred to the wellbeing of their staff. Hopefully, that is the case in the future. I look forward to Mr Stewart's work, and I am sure that we will be discussing it again in the future. The last of the open debate contributions is from Donald Cameron. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I would like to begin by thanking my colleague Edward Mountain for not only bringing his motion forward to be discussed this evening, but also for his dogged persistence in raising the profile of this issue and in campaigning for the staff who are at the centre of this debate. I know that I speak for many across this chamber when I say that we all appreciate everything that our NHS staff do, but nobody should fear their place of work. The allegations that have surfaced and continue to surfaced are deeply alarming. The simple fact is that, according to one clinician, the number of victims in NHS Highland who have been caught up in this particular issue could reach the thousands. That fact alone is extremely concerning. This issue is one that requires political consensus, and I do not want to use this time either to point fingers or to use it as a political football. I welcome to the fact that an independent review was announced by the cabinet secretary despite the fact that it has taken some time to get to this point. In particular, I welcome the appointment of John Sturrick QC to lead it. I happen to know him fairly well many years ago. He was one of the people who trained me as an advocate, and I can attest to the fact that he will bring a robust, rigorous and measured approach to this review. He also has a hugely impressive track record in mediation, and I am sure that his stewardship of the review will ensure that those who brought this issue to light and those who have since come forward with their experiences can rest assured that no stone will be left unturned in the review. It is critically important that we do not turn this issue into a witch hunt or seek to prejudge the review and the allegations that have been made, but it is clear from the sheer number of complaints that have been raised that there are serious questions to be asked. I share the concerns of others that the initial response to claims from the management of NHS Highland did appear to lack any awareness of the extent to which those problems existed. At the end of October, NHS Highland stated that it was unanimous as a board that there is no systemic culture of bullying. I find that last statement very difficult to reconcile with the facts that we now know, because what has happened since that statement and what continues to happen is that a number of clinicals and medical professionals have come forward to tell their stories that they have been too frightened to disclose. They deserve to be commended for their courage in speaking out. One of the worst stories that I read in the media was the example of one employee, former employee, who contemplated suicide as a result of his experience. That story should haunt us all. The fact that someone felt so badly let down that he considered entering his own life is a stark reminder of the human cost of the situation. I am pleased now that the NHS Highland Chair, David Alston, has welcomed the review. It is clear that there are many questions that need to be both asked and answered. I hope that the review is as extensive as possible. As John Finnie has just said, it reports promptly, albeit with due regard to the evidence. I am sure that it will. It is clear that we need to avoid rushing to prejudge its outcome, but what is obvious, it seems to me, is that there has been a very serious breakdown in communication between the NHS management in NHS Highland and its wider staff. It seems that many people have felt that they cannot disclose issues for fear of retribution, and there is a deep, deep problem, it seems. I sincerely hope that the review will go some of the way towards rectifying that situation and that any recommendations will be looked at more broadly across the wider NHS in Scotland. If we do not care for NHS staff, if we do not care for our carers, then we are in serious trouble. I hope that this day marks a turning point, not just for health provision in the Highlands but across Scotland, too. I now call on Jane Freeman to respond to the debate for around seven minutes, please, cabinet secretary. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I am grateful for this opportunity to set out what the Government's position is on this matter and what we have done. I think that it is clear, as has been said across the chamber, that it is a sentiment that I would share with all the members, which is to condemn bullying and harassment in any shape or form. The bottom line is that bullying and harassment is an abuse of power, and an abuse of power is something that offends me personally and deeply. I am concerned and was concerned about the recent allegations that amounted to, as they emerged, a bullying culture within NHS Highland. That is why I acted to ensure that the serious issues that were raised could be properly dealt with. I am mindful that, as those allegations emerged, there was clearly, although we had offered the board assistance in listening properly to what those allegations might be way back in September, what was clear was that there was a need for an independent review to be undertaken so that people could feel that what was being looked at and the conclusions that might be reached had a degree of credibility. What I want to understand from that review is why there are still so many staff who feel that they cannot raise concerns about what is an issue that is important to them and is therefore a valid issue. That tells me that there is something that we need to tackle. If there is anyone in our health service who feels bullied or harassed, we need to address it. What is clear is that, although we have policies and procedures, it is still the case that, underneath that, people feel unable either to speak up or if they do speak up, they feel that they are being closed down and those policies and procedures are not working. That is partly why, in addition to the independent review, I will take the time to answer the questions that have been raised by members in their contribution, but that is also why I have raised, as my ministerial colleagues have, in every review that we are undertaking of every health board, questions around those matters, particularly with area partnership forums, to begin to understand, even in boards where we do not have the situation that we face in NHS Highland. That is the case for the majority of our boards. It is still the case that we may have situations where staff feel about 15 per cent, I think, from the most recent survey, that, in some way, they are being bullied and harassed, but those issues are not surfacing. We need to understand what it is that is preventing that. In that regard, our staff side, our combination of trade unions, RCN, BMA and others, are one of the ways in which we can harness some of that work. In terms of NHS Highland, as members already know, on 23 November, I announced at John Sturrock a QC, and Mr Cameron is absolutely correct, a QC of some standing, some significant respect in this area and, indeed, a highly respected mediator has agreed to conduct that independent review into the allegations of a bullying culture at NHS Highland. The review will explore what the underlying issues are and will include conversations with any affected individuals, including current and former staff, their representatives, board members and management, and, indeed, including patients if patients wish to come forward. My officials have had a number of conversations with key stakeholders, and that has helped to shape some of the scope of the review that we discussed and agreed to with Mr Sturrock. Given that Mr Sturrock is carrying out the investigation, how and how safely can people divulge information to him? He has to have an understanding of what is happening, but, at the same time, if there are people perpetrating that behaviour, that has to be dealt with. I wonder how that interacts and what control people will have over where their report and what happens with the information that they give. If they are afraid to speak out, they might be willing to speak to Mr Sturrock, but they will not pursue anything else if that is a fear. That comes down the line. I am grateful for that question, because it is a very important question. There are two sets of issues that we need to deal with. The first is for Mr Sturrock, and he has already begun work by contacting a number of individuals and making his presence more publicly known. For him to understand all the issues and to hear from all the people who want to come forward and speak to him about their own personal experience or instances that they have witnessed, so that he can begin to form his view through that safe space for the concerns to be raised and discussed confidentially and to form his view in terms of the overall culture. What is the prevailing culture? Why are those matters being raised in the way they are? Why do people not feel that they are able to pursue those? Alongside that, he will have to identify individual specific instances that need to follow a different process if the individual wishes them to do that. In any bullying culture, there are those who are bullied and those who are bullied, and we need to be able to address both in that. That is why, in answer to another question that Mr Mountain raised about how early in 2019 we are talking about, I have said to Mr Sturrock that I am looking for at least interim recommendations in early 2019, but until he begins his work, we cannot be absolutely certain exactly how long it will take him in its totality. We need to see what the volume of individuals he should be listening to and taking account of are, especially if it is past as well as present. However, I need to know and have some degree of pace around this so that, if he has interim recommendations, we have those in early 2019. In response to Mr Sturrock, yes, they will be public. I would expect the Health and Sport Committee in the Parliament to want to discuss those and, indeed, to want to discover from me what I intend to do about them, and to pick up some of Ms Grant's issues around individual cases and how those individual cases, if the individual wants to pursue it, might be addressed. Until he has begun the work, then that is not something that we particularly know. I am conscious of time if I can cover a couple of other areas of what was asked. Mr Stewart mentioned ACAS, Mr Swinney also mentioned the source of other—not Mr Swinney—Mr Finnie. I am sorry to have done that to you, if you want to be responsible for education. I am sure that he will share it with you. What Mr Finnie asked was about other areas of expertise, and that is for Mr Stewart to determine where else he might want to seek other areas of expertise to help inform the work that he is doing. Obviously, as a Government, we will continue to support him in that. I am conscious of time, so let me just finish by reaffirming that I take that matter very seriously. I am looking for those interim recommendations in part in answer to Mr Cameron's point about where are the lessons here to be learned for our health service as a whole? Abuse of power in any form, by any individual, in any organisation is utterly unacceptable and in our health service above all, which is compassionate, caring and highly professional in NHS Highland as it is elsewhere. Our staff deserve to be treated in the manner that we expect them to treat our patients. Thank you very much.


Welcome back, in the previous segment we discussed that the main program is a function and we motivated the need for splitting a program into functions as well as into several files. In the next segment we are going to, in the rest of this lecture sequence actually, we are going to see how to actually split programs into files and that is what is going to happen in this segment. And then in subsequent segments we will see things like how your program uses code written by others and features that C++ provides for that and also finally we will see how you can use C++ without simple CPP. So how do you split program, split a program into many files? So a program may contain several functions and all of them need not be placed in the same file. So if a code in file capital F calls a function little f then the function f must be declared inside f actually before any call to it. Now a function definition that we have been talking about is a declaration but that is not the only way to declare a function. So the definition could be in another file and so long as there is a declaration in the file capital F which contains calls to this function that is enough. So every function must be defined in just one of the files that are used for a program but it must be declared in all the files that make a call to that function. So what is a function declaration? Well it is essentially the definition without the body. So declaration of the GCD function looks like in GCD int nn. So after that you could have given the body but that is being omitted in a declaration. Also acceptable is n GCD int nt. Now you may notice that this is really like declaration of a variable. So I might have written int x so it looks like a declaration of a variable but it is the parenthesis are saying that it is not a variable but because of those parenthesis following the GCD the compiler can tell that oh this is a function that we are talking about. So basically that is what a declaration tells the compiler. It tells that look GCD is a function and should the name GCD appears, appear later on in this file, think of it as a function which takes two arguments. And the arguments had better be of the specified type. So this way the compiler checks that subsequent uses of the name GCD adhere to what you have said about GCD. Again the general strategy over here is to say what GCD is and then check whether you are using GCD in the manner that you have just described. This is also because we are worried about making mistakes. So the compiler tries to help you out and tries to see if you are possibly making a mistake and therefore it needs to know what every name is whether it is a function, it is a variable and therefore the declaration has to be given preceding the use of that name. Now if a file contains a call to a function but does not contain its definition the compiler will assume that it will appear elsewhere. In fact that is the whole point of putting in a declaration. So putting in that in GCD int n, int n without the body. But the compiler will not be able to compile it as a main program. In fact unless the main program is there it will not be able to compile but furthermore if some function body is missing again it will not be able to compile. What it can compile your file into is what is called an object module and we will see that. To get an executable program all the object modules containing the called function must be linked together only then you can produce an executable program. We said this long ago when we were talking about how the hardware works but now you will see a little bit a few additional details. The function declaration that we have talked about so this line this, this, this portion this or this is called a declaration but it is also called the signature of the function or the prototype of the function. So some examples. So here is an example of a program which is split over multiple files. So you can have a program consisting of a function in GCD with the body also given and perhaps you can put it in the file gcd.cpp. You can also have a second file lcm.cpp, a third file main.cpp. So what is in these files? So the green portions are function definitions and the red portions are the function declarations and each file you will see has a declaration, declarations of the called function. So in this file there is a call to GCD and the definition the function is not defined over here but the function is declared in this file. So this is the declaration. So the compiler can compile this file at least partially into an object module. Then in this file main.cpp lcm is being called and it is not defined over here but there is a declaration saying that oh it contains it has two arguments and in fact compiler can check that indeed two arguments of type integers have been given. Now if you have these files and you want to compile and link them together you would issue the command s++ main.cpp lcm.cpp gc.cpp if you are operating under Unix and these files were in your current directory. If you are operating, if you are using the full IDE then you would have defined something called a project in which these files would have to be present. But the contents of the files would have to be exactly these that if a file uses a function makes a call to a function and if the function is not defined there then there has to be a declaration of it above the use or the call to that function. If you want to compile each file separately this is what you do you write s++ but you add this compiler option minus c which essentially says compile only or do not link lcm.cpp. So this produces lcm.o which is an object module which you can think of as something which is partially compiled. And if you have all these object modules then you can compile them together by writing s++ again s++ does everything as you can see the compiler does everything. You can write main.o lcm.o gcd.o so this will actually produce your executable. Now what you typically do is not quite this. What you typically do is that you write a program say in a file called pgm.cpp on Unix you compile it but the s++ command itself supplies all the additional modules that you want. So if you are using square root that module is supplied. If you are using simple cpp the modules required for simple cpp are supplied. So this compilation is really quite similar to this compilation or even this compilation even though you are using only a single file. So this s++ is compiling your program pgm.cpp but you are also linking it to object modules which are developed by others. So where are they? They are in some places that this s++ knows and some of them might be present as libraries. So it is not only object modules that you can compile together. You can also compile together libraries. So the libraries might also get listed over here. So we are going to omit that detail because s++ places those libraries for you but they are sort of like object modules. They also contain code for functions. So for all this to work correctly your program must have the right declaration. So if this is your program then it had better have a declaration of the function that you are going to use. Now you may say that look I use square root, I used write, I used turtle sim, I used init canvas but I did not put declarations to all those in the program that I wrote. So there is a different mechanism for putting in the declarations which I am now going to tell you about. So this mechanism is called header files. So it is tedious to remember what declarations to include in each file. So what do we do instead? We put all the declarations into a file called the header file and include the header file into every file that we use. So here for example is the header file gcdlcm.h, I just made up a name. So this file contains ngcd intlcm so it contains the declarations of gcd and lcm. And now the file gcd.cpp does not actually contain the declaration but it says include this file. So all those declarations would go in. lcm similarly just includes this file and main also includes that file. So basically I do not, I am not worrying about oh include the declaration for this function, I am not going to worry about this function, that function. I am just going to say look whatever functions I need those and maybe more than those are present in this header file. And I am just going to include my header file and that will automatically bring in these lines. So the directive include file name just copies the contents of that file into your file. So it gets replaced by the contents of the name file. And it is acceptable if we declare functions that do not get used. So for example in this if we include gcd lcm.h this file itself directly does not need the declaration for gcd but it is okay to have it. It just says that gcd is a function, whether I am using it or not is not important. It is acceptable if we have both a declaration and then the definition. So that is going to happen over here. So this include is going to be replaced by ngcd int int which is just a declaration but it is also going to contain a definition but that is okay. We can have a declaration and a definition. So long as they are consistent of course. What we cannot have are two definitions. So two pieces of code cannot be given. We will also have noted that there is another include over here include simple cpp. Now it is in this braces but anyway that simple cpp file is included it is picked up from some specific places and that file contains the declarations of all things like turtle sim right left also things so all those things and that is why you have not been needing to actually include put in declarations for all the functions that you have been using so far. And that file simple cpp also includes an include file itself called cmath which contains the declarations of square root sign and all of that. So the include files have been putting in all the declarations that you really needed. So a little bit more on header files. Header files customarily have the suffix .h which is what we just used. They could also be .hpp or sometimes they do not have any suffix that is also allowed. If the header file is mentioned in quotes it is picked up from the current directory if it is mentioned in angle braces then it is picked up from some standard place. For example simple cpp is present in some standard place which the compiler knows about. So if you say include simple cpp s++ will pick it up from that standard place. So what have we discussed? We have discussed how to split a program over many files and effectively how do you assemble a program out of functions in many files and I guess this is really what is most relevant for you because you are not going to split a program but you are going to use functions which are there in several programs. So you want to know how to use those functions. Then we have discussed what are function declarations and definitions and we also talked about header files. We are going to talk about namespaces which is a c++ feature which helps in writing programs across multiple files. So we will take a break.


Hi everyone and welcome to the trade of the day presented by the Stock Swoosh. April 25, 2016. Before we go on to today's play, I'd like to remind you our coming attractions. Our next webinar will be Tuesday, April 26 at 5.30. Earn $1,000 a day trading using common sense. And if you missed that, you can catch the replay on YouTube under the Stock Swoosh. Here is the play. The stock was MYL. The reason that we were interested in that MYL chart, the reason I was interested was because of the daily chart and what we teach at the Stock Swoosh about gaps. This is a particular gap that gave us the opportunity to look at that daily chart and get a bias, a very strong bias on where the intraday pattern might go. On the intraday pattern, here's a five minute chart. You can see that at some point just before 10 o'clock a play was entered and a strong downtrend began intraday. That's what we do is to identify these opportunities. Notice the extreme move that occurred and notice that, again, that first 30 minutes of the day was critical. Entry under 46.34, stop over 46.56. Actually, entry at 46.34, stop at 46.56. Exit target one, 45.82. Exit target two, 45.31. Overall, the 2,500 share, $550 risk is $19.36 and profit about three and a half to one on a reward-to-risk ratio. How do you do? How do you find plays like this? Well, this trade strategy is from the Golden Gap course presented by the Stock Swoosh. If you're interested in learning how to do plays like this every morning and be done trading by 10 o'clock or 10.30, take a look at the Golden Gap course coming up. This week coming up Saturday and Sunday, April 30th, the typical weekend class, or we're offering a one-time event here, having a week-long live trading session for the class. Either one, take your pick, $49.99. Contact us at the Stock Swoosh if you're interested in signing up and also if you sign up at April 28th, you'll get a month free in the Stock Swoosh trading room.