The Rav Dessler Moments | Rabbi Ari Bensoussan

I don't know if anybody really knows all the stories of Rav Dessler. Rav Eliyahu Dessler. There are incredible stories about his life. But what people may not know is that at the outbreak of World War II, he and his family, they were already in London, away from the fires that unfortunately took so many Jews from this world. What you may not know is that his wife and his daughter had left right before the war broke out to go visit family back in Poland. And when the war began, unfortunately, they were found on the wrong side of it. Six years. Six years it took for them to finally come home. Six years of Rav Dessler worried, crying, praying, petrified, what's going to be with his wife and his daughter. Thankfully, they got out and they ended up having their own incredible voyage, but they ended up in Australia. Now we have to begin to appreciate that there were no phones back then. There was no communication back then. When a letter would show up at his door, it would be the greatest day of his year. So now you can only really imagine that one day, when Rav Dessler had one of those letters show up by his front door, and the letter, you could tell, had photographs inside, it had pictures of a daughter he hadn't seen in six years, you'd figure he would take it, he would tear it open, and he would read it up quick, and he would just bask in the goodness of those few moments to know that they're okay and maybe to normalize and make everything right, just for that fleeting second. However, when a neighbor saw that the mailman had dropped off the mail, the neighbor came running to find out how his wife and daughter were doing. The neighbor found that Rav Dessler was sitting at his table and that the envelope was nowhere to be seen. What happened? How are they doing? Did you get news from them? He said: Yeah, I did. He said: Well, how are they doing? He said: I don't know. The envelope is over there. What? Why? Why haven't you opened it? And he said: I've trained myself in life that if there's anything I really want, if there's anything that's pushing at the last ounce of my soul that I feel like I have to have, then that's me giving in, and that's me not in control. So I'm waiting about another 10 minutes and telling myself: You're opening this up with control. And only then am I going to find out how they're doing. We ask ourselves: How is it that we can gain control? How is it that when things out there in this world that we are meant to really hold back on, how do we gain control? And let's learn from Rav Dessler, this incredible golden advice: Become somebody who is Godlike. The difference between God and everything else is that God is always in control. And the reason why He demands of us to not look at things is because we ourselves are meant to be in control. Begin this as a practice with anything that comes your way, whether it's good food, whether it's meeting up with somebody you haven't seen for a long time, take even 30 seconds and tell yourself: These are the Rav Dessler moments. The moments where I become Godlike. The moments that I become in control.