Acknowledge Our Weaknesses | Rabbi Naftali Horowitz

Guarding one’s eyes requires tremendous willpower, Especially, once a person has habituated themselves to looking at everything around them. Many studies have been done on this word called ‘Willpower’. Sometimes, we have more of it, sometimes, we have less, and sometimes, we have almost none at all. A study was done in Israel, where they looked at many, many cases that came before a parole judge over a long period of time. And they wanted to see if there were any metrics that they could find which would predetermine why a person would be granted parole, or why they would not. What turned out is, much of it had nothing to do with the merit or lack of merit of the criminal’s case. It had more to do with the time of day that the case came before a judge. Cases that came early in the morning or right after lunch had a much higher probability of Of achieving parole than those that came before lunch and later in the day. And the reason they determine is that to grant parole to a criminal, to put somebody back on the street requires a lot more willpower than to just stick with status quo and send them back to prison. Before lunch, when the judge was hungry, or later in the day when he was exhausted, he was sapped of his willpower, and therefore, he was unwilling to grant parole. What does this have to do with us? You will notice, that there are times in the day when you have more willpower to avert your eyes, and times that you don’t. I noticed this years ago when I would still take the train or the subway to and from my job. On the way there, I was much, much better than on the way home when I was exhausted from a day of work. When a person is sapped of willpower, they will succumb to almost anything. Whether it’s a fattening cheese danish that they know they shouldn’t eat, sometimes alcohol, and forbidden sites. It would behoove us to be much more mindful of where our willpower reservoir stands, and create strategies around that. When you know that you’re sapped of willpower, because you’re having a bad day, you’re exhausted, or you’re just plain hungry, you probably shouldn’t go to places where you know you’re going to have Nisyonos.