VLK - Ahavas Yisrael on Fire - 4

[Music] there is an extremely obvious and very glaring question when it comes to and that is how is it humanly possible to love someone the exact same way you love yourself human beings much like the rest of nature are extraordinarily selfish virtually every thought that we have from the moment we come out of our mother's womb is about us our mood our health our hunger our education our bank account our person our Persona our Legacy our image our future we love our children not so much because we are selfless but more because we view our children as part of ourselves and we love ourselves if you were to take an x-ray of someone's brain you would find that close to 96% of one's brain usage is used on oneself this Mitzvah to love our fellow Jews the way we love ourselves seems Herculean at best and virtually impossible at worst how in the world is selfish man able to properly fulfill the Mitzvah of perhaps the following perspective can shed some light being that the first step in loving others is loving oneself and that loving oneself begins with seeing oneself primarily as a soul and not as a body likewise loving others begins with seeing others as a soul and not as a body the more you see the soul in you the more you see the soul in others and the same way that loving ourselves means to recognize that we are a we are sparks of divinity we are a a piece of so too loving others means to recognize that they are also means that we realize that the same way I am here to spread and godliness and spirituality in the world so are you and so is every other good in the world and the same way the entire spiritual world needs my soul so to the entire spiritual world needs your soul and the two of them are in actuality too limbs on the same spiritual body and therefore I love your soul the same way I love my soul much like the way I love my left hand the same way I love my right hand we aren't being asked to love every Jew on planet Earth out of sheer colossal selflessness we are being asked to see our spiritual selves in others and love them the way we love our spiritual self if our knee-jerk reaction when seeing another Jew is to feel threatened by them they make us feel to from or not enough too with it or not with it enough too intellectual or not intellectual enough too out of town too in town too immature too underdressed if our knee-jerk reaction is to see only the externals of others their body and not their Nisha it is more often than not a reflection of our own external relationship with oursel a reflection of the distance between ourselves and our soul when encountering another Jew we shouldn't turn the other way out of selfishness and egocentricity we should look at them and see see a dazzling soul that our Nish wants nothing more than to join forces with and fill the world with r and spiritual light the more we focus on our physical selves the more we see others as threats to our pursuit of physical material Bliss the more we focus on our spiritual side the more we see others as part of our own spiritual selves and the more we view others as part of our spiritual selves the more we love them the same way we love ourselves it's no coincidence that the gatria of the word ahava is the same as the word for the more we realize that we are all spiritually one the more we see our souls as being interconnected and that interconnectivity leads to love I love your soul not despite the fact that it's not me but precisely because it is a part of me or as the med sums up means Mish [Music]