Nafshi III - Rabbi YY Jacobson: "G-d, I Got This" – The Soul’s Secret Promise

This is not a punishment for the soul. This is the greatest, most powerful, blissful, ecstatic achievement of the nish. Because when the nishama is in its source, it's full of bliss. It's full of light. It's full of oneness. There's no ego. It's completely completely one with the source, with a scythe, with infinity, with hashem himself. So why in the world would Hashem create the severing of the child? Why would you take a piece of yourself that's purely infinite, pure light, pure ecstasy, pure holiness, and allow it to feel separated and fragmented. Coming into a body, coming into an animal consciousness, coming into a world with everybody's individual and collective challenges and struggles and skeletons and demons and darkness and setbacks and failures. And the answer is this is a mission. It's a schlithus. It's like the soul tells Hashem, the med says that Hashem had to consult the souls before it created the world. And the soul says, "God, I got this." It's here within a shama can ultimately truly and authentically demonstrate its divinity. So it departs from its father in heaven goes into an environment that seems so dark and not only does it not fall but it actually transforms the darkness into light. In many ways it's within a shama is not only a child and a student of God but it becomes divineike because it creates something new that it couldn't create before. Before that everything was light. Now it takes the darkness and transforms it into light. Among the mitzvah, the alterba says in Tanya chapter 37, the most powerful mitzvah that demonstrates this is the mitzvah of sodaka because our greatest energy we put into making money. It's hard to make money. And people invest not just their brain, their brain and their heart and their time and their resources and their arms and their legs and their passion and their creativity. And when I take a portion of that money and I give it away to a poor person, I give it to a person in need, I do something holy with it. This is a transformation of all the creativity and all the work that I invested in my money now is transformed into the divine into holiness. It's recognizing the kaduca, the holiness of life in the most base and mundane of matters called money. And especially the alterb says this is unique when it comes to the that we give for our brothers and sisters in the holy land. The holy land is it's the vista to heaven. It's where heaven and earth converge. And we take that money and we use it for here is when we take the most physical of activities that which makes the earthly mundane selfish world go around and that money literally becomes heavenly. So that the mission of Kabad which is in many ways is one of the most powerful successes and achievements of the soul in this world. The world has changed since the alterb is liberation. Wars, famine, industrial revolutions, population shifts, scientific breakthroughs. But the mission of Kal Kabad has not. Indeed, in our time, our Reb took it upon himself to revitalize Kal Kabad to address the challenges of dynamic changes in the Holy Land. A new young society, new immigrants, Holocaust survivors, victims of terror, war widows and orphans. The impact of the oldest continuing operating charity in Israel is evident everywhere in Israel. Soup kitchens, daycare centers, nonprofit supermarkets, holiday food distribution, free loan funds, immigrant aid, help for widows and orphans. Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome the director of Kal Kabad, Rabbi Shalom Dman.