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The Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe Podcast Collection is the one-stop shop for the Torah inspiration shared by Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe in one simple feed. The Jewish Inspiration Podcast, Parsha Review Podcast, Thinking Talmudist Podcast, Living Jewishly Podcast and Unboxing Judaism Podcast all in one convenient place. Enjoy!
You're listening to Rabbi Aryeh Wolbe, Director of TORCH, the Torah Outreach Resource Center of Houston. This is the Jewish Inspiration Podcast.
All right, welcome back, everybody. We're in the middle of the month of El and I wanted to share one of the important tools that I believe are required to succeed in our work in these 40 days. As we've mentioned previously, the 30 days leading up to Rosh Hashanah and the 40 days up to Yom Kippur, the extra 10 days for Yom Kippur.
So one of those very, very important tools for growth is to never, ever jump. If you jump, you're going to fall. Our sages tell us that one of the keys to our spiritual growth is taking small steps because if you take a big step, too big of a stride, too big of a jump, you'll fall. There's many verses that teach us this. We know from King Solomon in Proverbs, I believe it's chapter 13, verse 9, where he says, Yiveles odam tesalef darko, v'alashem yizaf libo.
He says, it is the foolishness of man who jumps and then blames God for their failures. We should not be in the business of jumping. It's one of the keys that we see from the Pesach Seder, where we learn from the Pesach Seder, that that is the only time in the year where we have something, a concept called dilug ukvitsa, that we can jump. We can take a huge leap because the Jewish people in our history, when we were taken
out of our bondage in Egypt, it was a huge leap to our freedom. So that's the only time in the year that we see that we can take a leap. Every other time of the year, we have to take a small step, a very meaningful, small, small step. I want to share with you in our evening prayers, we say something so magnificent. We're asking Hashem, please lay us down to sleep, Hashem, our God in peace, raise us
up our King to life and spread over us the shelter of your peace. And then we go into all the different blessings that we want Hashem to grace us with. And one of them is v'haser satal mefaneinu umachareinu, and remove the spiritual impediments or the satan from before us and from behind us. So from before us makes a lot of sense, so that we don't have stumbling blocks, so that we don't have barriers, so we don't have challenges that we can't overcome.
But what does it mean to not have the satan behind us? Our sages tell us that one of the greatest weapons of the satan, of the yetzharah, of the evil inclination, is to trick us into thinking that we can do more than one step at a time. And we start taking a little jog, and then it starts going to a run, and what does the satan do? He comes from behind and he pushes us over and we fall flat on our face.
That is v'haser satal mefaneinu, remove the satan from before us, umachareinu, and from behind us, don't put us into a place where we're taking too big of a stride, too big of a step, because if God forbid we do that and we take too big of a step, it will damage us in more than just one way. Because if we just, you know, fall, okay, so we get up again, and that's part of the part of the nature of the righteous, shevayi pol tzadik v'kam, a righteous person will
fall seven times and get up again. So we're not afraid of falling, that's not the problem. The problem is that when you fall from jumping too high, you don't get up so fast. And sometimes, even psychologically, we're like, you see, I tried, I tried, I tried, that's it, I'm giving up. And that is the worry. We can't, not because, we can't take a jump or a leap, not because it's inconvenient for
us to fall down and get back up, but because that experience of falling down so hard, it's like imagine someone climbing up a ladder. We all know that for safety, because we don't want that pain when we fall, for safety, we take one step on the ladder at a time, one step on the ladder at a time. And if we take more than that, what's going to happen? We're going to fall all the way down to the ground and it's not pleasant.
And then we think twice before we get on a ladder again. The problem in our spirituality and our spiritual growth is that if we fall too hard, we can be devastated from the pain that we experienced and may never want to get up again. We say, you know what, it's just not for me. I tried learning Talmud, it's too difficult for me, I'm out. But if a person says, you know what, I'm just going to take one small step, I'm not going to try to learn all of Talmud.
I'm not going to try to read everything in the prayer book. Let me take one line of the prayer and understand it. It doesn't have to be everything. Take one small step, understand one word of the Talmud, is an amazing story that was told about Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was once suiting up, getting dressed up to go to a siyam. A siyam is a celebration of conclusion of Talmud. And generally when people make a conclusion on Talmud, it's on a whole track date.
It's on the whole Talmud itself, which is 2,711 pages of Talmud. So one of the students of Rabbi Feinstein asked him, so what are they concluding? He says, this individual finished one page of Talmud and they're throwing a massive party. One page of Talmud. And I'll tell you that I know people who that one page of Talmud is as meaningful and is as precious as finishing the entire Talmud. The amount of effort, the amount of work, the amount of toil to just finish that one page.
And by the way, the amount of challenge to overcome and to succeed is incredible. So it's not about winning the, it's not about winning the entire thing. It's about taking a meaningful small step forward. When we're trying to work on ourselves, on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, preparing ourselves emotionally, spiritually, physically, getting ourselves ready to stand in front of the Almighty, we should never approach this as being, I'm going to change everything about my life. Take one small step, one small change, and make it a meaningful change.
I wish everyone tremendous success in this journey of spiritual connection and that one small step should be the most meaningful step of your life. Amen.
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