I am so Much Greater | Rabbi Eliyahu Sonnenschein

Nobody is perfect. That's not a slogan or a mantra, but we say, There is no righteous man on earth who does good and sins not. How strange it is then, that after the Confession on Yom Kippur we pray, we say, May it be Your will that we should never sin again. Never sin again? Is that too tall an order? Is that asking too much? Try to imagine somebody told you that he's taking on a Kabbalah to never sin again. You would say: No, no, no. That's not how it works, you see. There's more to it. We have to put one foot in front of the next. We have to try our best. We have to work slowly. May it be Your will that I should never sin again? Never again? The Yetzer Hara has this old simple trick. Before an Aveira, he tells you, Don't worry, you'll be the same guy. It won't change you at all. And the moment the person transgresses the Aveira, he tells you that it's changed you forever. Now you are a sinner. You are the Aveira. You're beyond repair. But as Yidden, we know that that's not how we operate. There are things that we've done, but then there's who we are, and we are not the mistakes that we've done. We are not the mistakes that we've taken. We are so much bigger. We are so much better. We are so much deeper. Yes, there are things that at times we do that are inconsistent with who we are, and we do a Teshuva, and then we pray, May it be Your will that I should not sin again. We're not easy prey. You can't just bark up this tree again and expect me to do it today, because I did it yesterday. לא אחטא עוד I'm not going to do it just again. You'll have to approach me as the “righteous man on earth who does good”. You're approaching a Tzaddik, each time anew. A few years ago, I was having this ongoing conversation with a Bochur, a Bochur who suffered from a terrible self-image. He felt that he was hardly a worthy person. Not a very good person, to say the least. I disagreed with him. I thought he was a wonderful person. And we had this ongoing debate going on for months. At a certain point, the conversations became so circular that I told him: Listen, let's just do this the old-fashioned way. On the left side of a paper, write all the reasons why you think that you're not a good person, and on the right side of the paper, write all the reasons why you think that you are a good person. He brought it back a day or two later, and we looked at the list. And I saw this glaring reality. It seems to me, I said, that you're a very good person who does some very bad things. The Yetzer Hara needs us to be what we've done. And when we face the Yetzer Hara, we need, the very first thing, to absolutely reject that. We are more, we are bigger, we are greater, and we always will be. May you have great success.