Tangled Shadows of Repentance: A Tale of Forbidden Sin and Redemption.

grew up really from from birth um my family grew up we grew up in Brooklyn we always kept Shabbat we kept kosher we always would go to SCH I would learn a little bit uh before M Used To Learn with my father all the time and really my childhood was pretty good but uh in the community we were in there are mixed parties and I grew up going attending them um I didn't know anything was wrong about it and as I got older um different challenges started coming up in my life and what I realized is you could be from from birth but at the end of the day you have to have a plan for the yet because he's going to come one way or another um so at the age of 13 12 uh maybe 14 I don't remember exactly but um I was on a computer one day and something popped up and from one thing it led to another and I started falling into having issues with my eyes and shirata breit and I thought it was weird at the time but I had no idea it was wrong at all whatsoever um I never knew there it was a wrong against ala no Rabbi ever told me and I was fairly religious at the time what I thought was religious I would learn I would pray I would keep kosher and I was pretty good to what I thought and for years this is going on um I'm in contact with rabbis uh at the time but no one ever mentioned to me that this is wrong no one ever mentioned to me going to a mixed party is wrong no one ever mentioned to me that certain things were were wrong and I wasn't looking to to to tell anyone about this problem I didn't feel comfortable with it as I got older um I got to high school um to I learned um now that I look back at it when you're trying to do learn Torah and you have a problem with your and your it's not going to work out it's totally not going to work out and what I learned the hard way is um I found myself not enjoying my learning anymore I found myself not enjoying uh Torah and teila and everything and I just started to wear off and I didn't know where this wearing off came from at the time so I just started uh going with the flow I ended up one summer to work at at a co-ed uh institution and I was talking to girls that I shouldn't be talking to and I was doing certain things that I shouldn't have been doing listening to music I shouldn't have been doing and my parents weren't so proud of it at the time but uh I did it anyway and I went with the flow and I still thought I was fine I was still praying I was still uh I was not really learning I would go to class here and there I would go to SCH on shaba and I thought okay that's it I'm I'm good and I still had this problem with my eyes but it went on as I got older um and time went on and I was continuing doing the same things um I had someone one time send me a video of RAB mrai and I listened to it I think it was Toran and Science and I listened to it and then everything made sense and myuna and Hashem was higher than it ever was previously and I finally for the first time felt connected to uh my religion and from that video it turn to more videos of risi and one time I was actually watching a raki video and video from Rabbi ruven actually popped up and I started watching it and the rabbis was speaking and it sounded like everything was true everything was correct and I continued to watch more and more and one video um probably pretty early on maybe my first or my second or third video the rabbi was talking about chirat and chirat breit and I was just shocked um I said my whole life I've been doing this sin and it's such a big in and I had no idea the ramifications of every time what I was doing and I was just so upset about my whole life how no one told me anything if someone would have told me something my life would have been completely different and I would have never did anything to that extent and I was just shaken at the moment I went through so much and I said I have to reach out to the rabbi and and tell him I I was doing this my whole life without any without any uh I had no idea it was even wrong so I finally reached out to the rabbi and I spoke to him about my whole life and explained to him um the sins I was doing and the rabbi helped me out barem and guided me away out andem after that it it got easy obviously there's a few bumps in the road here and there uh but hasem um through the Torah and through Rabbi ruven I was able to overcome this I was asked about my favorite video from the rabbi but um I can't give one exact one but what I'm going to give my answer is my favorite video about the rabbi is when he calls out something that's wrong because through my personal experience if someone would have called out shirim and Shir being being so bad it would have prevented me from doing one of the most horrific sins in history and when the rabbi calls out let's say a speaker speaking bad or a person doing uh something wrong or whatever it is it's not just to bash him out and it's not just to to embarrass the guy or to to make him stop it's to prevent other people from listening and thinking something is okay when it's not um if I wish in my case that I would have found out earlier what was actually wrong and uh what I was doing was wrong and and it would have prevented me through a lot of problems I went through but uhem the rabbi does what he does and his audience is pretty big andem he really helped me and I have a lot of hakar for the rabbi Rabbi ruven shim affected My Life um in a big way um it gave me a whole different aspect to life and tah and uh everything by teaching me that there's a reward punishment to every action that's done and um it when you have that mindset you can uh think to yourself let's say in the business world oh I can uh steal a few dollars from this guy in uh in this way but at the end of the day Hashem is going to take care of that in one way or another if whether you make the right decision or the wrong decision every decision you make there is a reward and consequence at the end of the day um when when you have that mentality um spiritually not not just in business it will make you a better person because when you have fear of Hashem it'll just push you to do better and make you a better person and make the right decisions and certain [Music] situations my whole life I've been listening to speeches from people who speak soft and Feelgood speeches I like to call them um even if they're not heresy or um because there's many rabbis that speak and do all these feel-good speeches and and at the end of the day they're not even following the Torah like some people would say oh come drive to my Shu and chabat or come do this and that but it's clearly against the Torah yeah it feels nice uh to have a guy come uh who never kept Shabbat in his life to come to your house for Shabbat but to drive there you're breaking the torat it's completely wrong um but all the time I even rabbis who are not heretical you hear you hear a speech from them and it sounds nice and everything sounds good about it and and you you go on and you hear the speech it sounds nice and you feel good but it doesn't push you to change but when you hear a Shure from the rabbi and he tells you that there's hus and reward and and at the end of the day everything's going to be held accountable it it pushes you to change you're not going to change from a story that makes you feel good like oh you'll say oh that's nice maybe it'll feel good for a few seconds after uh and I've been hearing a lot of speeches like that my whole entire life but at the end of the day it's not going to push you to to change it's not going to push you to be a better person it's not going to push you to learn more T it's not going to it's not going to take you uh to a lot of places in the next world uh at the end of the day that's our goal in life our goal in life is to be to get to the highest we can Ina and a feel good speech I don't think uh we'll take you there but uh when you listen to the rabbi and uh when he's blasting you with information and and giving you rules and and ways not to sin and ways to fear Hashem I think it's very very beneficial for everyone to listen to that opposed to uh these other types of speeches that in my opinion don't don't push for [Music] change my advice to someone new to the shim or new to religion as a whole is to listen to the rabbi as much as possible watches shim um take them internally not just to take them in and also to make the Rabbi you're Rabbi uh it doesn't mean just to listen to the shim and move on with your life you have to take it and take what he says literally and do do it by actions also another very important um piece of advice is to be open with the rabbi to reach out to him if you have any questions or any problems that come up because I think that's what makes a rabbi a rabbi you have to be comfortable to reach out to the rabbi with with anything that's on your mind anything B bothering you any situations you're in that that you're having uh issues with because at the end of the day you can have a rabbi that that writes Hal and uh gador gors even but if uh you can't be open with them about your personal situation I don't think you can call them your Rabbi also another big factor that helped me grow and develop uh really well is uh to learn gimar to learn it as much as possible and um as focused as possible because when you have musar and gamar as like a onew combo it really makes you Unstoppable and it really takes the fight the like like nothing else can uh when you learn a piece of gamar and you understand it really well and you review it a few times and you get it into your into your head and you you're enjoying the learning it's going to take away a lot of the problems that people come up with and uh adult time and downtime and it's you're also doing a big Mitzvah at the process and it's going to prevent you from sinning also and it's uh really amazing to learn garan to listen to mus and learn M and I'm really grateful to the rabbi and uh I would like to thank him for this opportunity but uh also I don't even think I'm Z to be doing this but uh thank you Rabbi for everything you've done for me 7 years of lectures 7 months of film editing countless hours of study by two rabbis [Music] information we received over 3,000 years ago all for this [Music] moment had greed the movie there's a small member in your it shouldn't take over your whole life if you satiate it you're never going to have [Music] enough the soer clan when it gets a hold of something it does not let go time for us to rectify what we have done normal number should be somewhere around 20 million or higher you'll never going to have control if you [Music] started only feed it when it's permissible according to the prnography is as addictive as crack cooking [Music] you're always going to be happy including this world and the [Music] next e