A Shift of Perspective | Rabbi Shlomo Landau

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.