Conquering Mount Everest | Rabbi Eliezer Feuer

History was made in 1953, when a fellow by the name of Sir Edmund Hillary reached the summit, the peak of Mount Everest. What many or most people don't know is that he tried in 1952 and failed. When he came down from that trip, after a miserable failure, his followers and his supporters threw him a banquet in England. It was the who's who of London that came to this affair. And in the middle of this banquet, they asked Sir Edmund Hillary to address the crowd. Sir Edmund got up on the stage. Of course, there was a shining light beaming on him, following every move he made. And he told over the preparation, the amount of money that was spent and all the challenges and trials of what went through, ultimately to be a failure of the attempt to reach the peak of Everest. And suddenly, with the mural of Mount Everest in the back of him, and as he was pacing the stage, he spun around and he pointed to Mount Everest and he said, Everest, I will conquer you, for you have stopped growing and I have not. What a profound statement. If a person continues to grow, eventually, he will reach the summit. Do you know that the middle letter of all of Sefer Tehillim the epicenter of Tehillim, which everything revolves around, is the letter עי”ן, which is in the words, referring to the wild boar that ravages the forest, referring to Esav ravaging Klal Yisroel. What is the antidote for that? What perhaps is the medicinal remedy that we can protect ourselves from our enemies? And I think the answer is that if you look in the letters of מיער, the עי”ן in every Tehillim is enlarged. If a person watches his eyes, Shmiras HaEinayim, that is the greatest medicinal remedy to protect ourselves from the ravaging boar in the forest from harming a Yid. You know, R’ Shlomo Freifeld, the great Rosh Yeshiva of Sh'or Yoshuv, once commented, There is only one Chazon Ish, but every one of us can be Ish Chazon. There is only one great Rav, the Chazon Ish, in his great, incredible genius, but every single Yid has the ability to be men and women of vision. איש, אנשי חזון. But how do we do that? The answer is to watch our eyes. When our eyes are sacred and holy eyes are guarded, that's how we will have not only sight, but even more important, holy vision for the rest of our lives.