The Three Steps To Receive A Good Eternity

0:06And the Holy Yisrael says that there are three levels of divine service. Rabbi Yisroel Salanter explains that if you want to actually have a good eternity, these are the three steps you have to take. The three levels of divine service start with the following. The first one, the gateway and the beginning. The beginning of your teshuvah. What is it? Developing a sensitivity to your own flaws.

1:36His wife is going to be alone. He's the one that was really bringing most of the money into the household. The lion is not thinking like this. When the cow is hungry, he's not thinking, "You know what, I should share the grass. I should share some of this grass with my friend." He's not thinking like this. He's thinking, "I'm going to eat whatever I have in front of me." So when the butcher says, "Hey cow, come over here, come kapah alecha, come come over here," and he slaughters it, the cow is not thinking, "Oh, maybe it's because I ate the grass, maybe it's because I didn't share." The cow doesn't think like that. Why? Because he's an animal; he's a cow. He doesn't think, "Oh, maybe I did something bad and that's why they're slaughtering me." Which means, rabotai (my dear friends), that we cannot be like cows. If you did something bad, you must have the intuition, the ability, the inclination, and the willpower to connect the dots. Nothing bad happens without Hashem signing off on it. Nothing bad in the world happens without Hashem saying it has to happen. Which means that if you got into an accident of any kind, if you have a bad feeling of any kind, it is a message from Hashem.

2:53It's because something happened; Hashem is talking to you in that way. It doesn't mean He hates you. It's the opposite—actually, it means He loves you. He's giving you an opportunity to fix it. If He hated you, He would let you continue doing sins without even feeling any remorse. So the first step of teshuva, rabotai, is developing the sensitivity to your own flaws and the need to repent, the need to do teshuva for these sins. How do you do this? The old Yisrael says, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, he says this is engendered by studying Chazal's dictums and our sages' Mussar teachings. A person must repeat them over and over again until he is finally moved and senses a lacking in his soul. Meaning a Mussar book is not like a Harry Potter book. It's not like a nonfiction book. It's not like a biography. A Musar book is something you have to read repeatedly, meditate on, and think about. Try to figure out how it applies to you. It could take you a year to finish a 200-page book, assuming that under normal circumstances, you could finish that in a month or two. The point is that it could take you ten times longer to truly internalize its lessons.

4:20To read a Musar book, if you really read it, you're going to read the same book five, ten, or twenty times. I have some students who tell me, "I can't believe it. I watched a shiur that you made, and then I watched it again a week later. I got something completely different out of it." And then they say, "I watched the shiur again just to see, thinking there's no way this time will be different. I watched the same shiur twice already, so let's watch the shiur a third time." And still, the third time, they derive something completely different. I said, "Yes, that's the beauty of the Torah." That's the beauty of the Torah, especially when it comes to Mussar. So Rabbi Yisrael Salanter is telling you that when you're learning Mussar you have to read it over and over again until it moves you. Meaning that sometimes you can read something and it doesn't change anything. You learn about violating Shabbat and it doesn't do anything for you. You learn about, you know, instead of being greedy, being generous and... Doesn't move you. You learn about the problems of having a big ego, and it doesn’t move you, and so on and so forth. Read it until it does. That's the first step. The second step, the second level, he says, is conquering the evil inclination. Once you realize there's a problem, you have to start overcoming it.

5:41Once you realize that you're not allowed to have a huge ego, once you realize that you're not allowed to get angry on a regular basis, or ever really, once you realize that all of these bad character traits are strictly forbidden in the Torah, you have to overcome them. That's what distinguishes us from being an animal. Animals work off of instinct. We don't. If you have a midah, you can change it. Thinking, "No, no, I was born angry, I'll die angry," is just an excuse. You have the ability to transform your middot. It's like saying, "I was born without any money, so I might as well just die. I'm not going to go to work." You still go to work; nothing stops you. "I'm going to work; nothing stops me. I'm dreaming of being rich." So, how come when it comes to fixing yourself, there's something stopping you before you start? It's an excuse. You have to start conquering the Yetzer Hara. Of course, some are going to be harder than others; some are going to be easier than others. But the point is, you have to battle it out and start doing something about it. Sometimes you beat it today, and tomorrow you fail. Get up and try again. Beat it again two, three, four days, and then if you fail again, get up and do it again. How long? Forever. There is no such thing as a person that doesn't make sins; everybody makes sins. The point is doing teshuva.

7:06You're only gonna get to that second level if you already have the first one, which means that you're sensitive to actually making sins. After that, the third level, the only side says, is rectification of the evil inclinations so that he will rejoice in the light in his Divine service, pretty much destroying the yetzer hara, where at that point you realize, "Get out of my house!" Not that you beat it and you just held on and you didn't commit this sin. Now you're actually celebrating the fact that you're doing what Hashem wants and not what the Yetzer Hara is trying to convince you to do. So this is all a process. It only starts with something simple that everybody here can do. Realize when you're committing a sin. Acknowledge there's a problem. Acknowledge that we're spiritually sick. After that, we can start working on a cure.