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A Shift of Perspective | Rabbi Shlomo Landau
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Recently, I was traveling
out of the country,
and I had to be in a particular place.
It was a very warm day,
and I'm going to be honest with you,
the Nisyonos of Shmiras HeEinayim
were other-worldly.
It was as if I was playing
one of those video games
and they keep coming at you
and you have to dodge them
so that you don't get run over
and you don't lose the game,
you don't get out.
And literally, I'm just thinking
to myself, at some point,
Ribono shel Olam, it's not fair
what You're doing to me.
They're coming at me
and they're coming at me,
and no one even knows,
but I know.
And then all of a sudden,
I don't know why,
a thought popped into my head.
You know, I’m viewing
every person that walks by
and everything that's around me
as a Nisayon,
as an insurmountable challenge.
But why am I viewing it that way?
Maybe I have to change my mindset.
It's not a challenge.
It's not a Nisayon, it's not an ordeal.
It's an opportunity.
The Ribono shel Olam
keeps throwing at me
opportunity after opportunity.
Ah, here's one opportunity,
I'm not going to miss that opportunity.
And here's another opportunity,
I'm not going to miss that opportunity.
And while I'm going to be honest,
maybe it would have been
better for me to not be there
and maybe I didn't have a choice,
but once I was able
to shift my perspective
that it wasn't a Nisayon
and an insurmountable challenge,
but it was an opportunity,
it became so much easier
to be עומד בניסיון.
And a little while later,
I heard something
absolutely incredible
that kind of brought
everything together.
There was a fellow from Guatemala
who became a גר.
This fellow shared with his Rav
that his entire life, until the age of 40,
living as a Goy,
he never, for a moment,
struggled in any area of Kedushah.
He never had a תאווה that was
pulling him to look at things.
He felt that's how all people are.
But the moment
that he went into the Mikvah
and he came out as Moshe Aryeh,
he came out as a Yiddishe fellow,
all of a sudden, he was hit with issues
of Kedushah and Shmiras HaEinayim
that he never knew existed.
And he said to him: It was like,
what is happening to me?
And the truth is that what
was really happening to him
was the Ribono shel Olam
said: You became a Yid.
You capitalized on the opportunity.
I'm going to give you more opportunities
to capitalize.
So the next time we find
ourselves in a situation
where we feel like
we're being challenged
in a way that maybe
it just seems insurmountable,
shift perspective.
It's an opportunity.
Thank the Ribono shel Olam
for giving me the opportunity
and for giving me
the opportunity to be מצליח.