The Bull and the Shoelace | Rabbi Naftali Horowitz

One day, Farmer Frank goes to visit his friend, Farmer Joe. And as he's walking around his farm, he notices this massive bull tied to a tree with a shoelace. And he says to Farmer Joe, Farmer Joe, is there something wrong with that bull? Why on earth is he tied to a tree with a shoelace? Don't you realize he can run free? Farmer Joe says, Of course, he can run free, but he doesn't realize that. You see, I own this bull since he was very, very young. And when he was just a baby calf, I would tie him to that tree with this shoelace. And once or twice he tried to break free, but he couldn't. And since then, he's come to think that this shoelace is absolutely unbreakable. He's grown up, he's strong, he's powerful, he plows fields for me, he carries things for me all the time, but when it comes to that shoelace, he thinks he's absolutely weak. The Piaseczno Rebbe tells us, The Yetzer Hara doesn't win over us because he is stronger than us. He's not. He's much, much weaker than us. He wins over us, because we think we are weaker. When two fighters enter a ring, one stronger and one weaker, the one that's going to win is not the stronger one. It's the one who thinks he is stronger. Because he's going to take advantage of the fact that his opponent thinks that he's too weak. Think about it. When we were young, we habituated ourselves to looking at everything. We were naturally curious, we were children. Over our lifetime, we've seen too many things that we shouldn't have, and we've grown to think that we are too weak to stop. In the meantime, we’ve finished Shas, some of us have gotten Smichah, we've done Chesed, we’ve davened thousands and thousands of Tefillos, we've passed so many Yom Kippurs, we've become so much stronger as people, yet in that one area, the Satan still has us tied to a tree with a shoelace, thinking that we are too weak to break free. The day we wake up and realize we're much more powerful than we think, we're much more powerful than him, is the day that we begin to break free of this. It's the day that we say to him, I am not weak, you are weak. I am stronger, and I will prevail.