Kentucky Fried Chicken | Rabbi Shlomo Farhi

I have three letters for you: It doesn't stand for Kosher Fried Chicken. It stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken. You can barely walk a block in any city or state in America, without seeing that big red and white sign of non-kosher chicken, calling out to customers to come on in and have a bite. My friends, that restaurant is here to teach us today an incredible lesson. You see, there was a man who started Kentucky Fried Chicken, famously known as Colonel Sanders. He was 50 years old before he came up with the recipe for the chicken that would actually take over the world. And what's so interesting is that at that point, he was such a failure in his life that all he had was his $105-a-month Social Security check. He believed in this recipe, so he started trying to sell it. It was only when he was 62 years old that he got his first franchise. And even later than that, when he started actually making serious money from selling this non-kosher chicken. He had to travel the whole country. Everywhere he went, people told him ‘No’, until finally he started getting some ‘Yes’es. Today, there are over 27,000 Kentucky Fried Chickens. They employ 800,000 people and they are in 145 countries. Every single time you see a KFC from now on, think of this. It means that even if you are 50 years old or 60 years old, even if you haven't been able to get anyone to buy in to you or to what you're trying to do yet, that doesn't mean that your story is done. Even if it’s happened before that you’ve walked down the street, and looked at something that you shouldn’t have, or had your attention grabbed in a way that you wish it wouldn’t have been, remember this: Try, try again. Every opportunity offers another chance to be able to conquer this Yetzer Hara and to do the right thing and to build one success on another, on another, until eventually your efforts take over cities, states and worlds. Our Chachamim explain to us that when a person looks at something that is inappropriate, they give that thing in our world power. Everything in טומאה, in unholiness nourishes from something that is holy. But the more that we push it away, the more that we build the power of Tahara, of Kedusha, in our world. Today, you can barely walk a block without seeing one of his restaurants. But what if the day comes where because of our efforts, no matter how many times we’ve failed, every block you saw a Beit Midrash, a Beit Knesset, outposts of holiness, because in this place that Yetzer Hara was conquered and we took over this place again for the team of Kedusha. If you ever want to give up hope, just think: KFC. It's not too late.