An Internal World | Rabbi Yosef Elefant

I once heard from the Mashgiach, R’ Wolbe, he said a shmuz in Mir Yeshiva and he said something very interesting. He said that really the reason why there's such a difficulty in Shmiras Einayim and topics connected to that, is really for a reason not connected directly to issues of Kedushah, but rather a person has a constant need to look around. And the reason for that is, is that our sense of self, our sense of self, our sense of existence, is very dependent on being connected to the world around us. So when you tell a person to not look around, a person feels: So how do I exist? What gives me a sense of existence, if not in the connection to the world around us? And the real challenge of Shmiras Einayim is the ability to have an internal world that doesn't require a connection to the outside, doesn't require a dependency, doesn't require a crutch, that in order for a person to feel that they're alive, to feel that they exist, they have to look around, they have to connect with something outside of them. And if a person has an inner world which they're at peace with, whether it's an inner world, they can think about Chochma, Mussar, Torah, then they have a world that's not critical to constantly look around. And the difficulty, he said, for a person to be able to control himself is not even rooted so much in a question of Kedushah, rather it's rooted in the constant need to be connected to something outside of us. R’ Yeruchom, the Mashgiach of Mir, spoke about this by Yaakov Avinu. The Midah of Yaakov Avinu, which is the Midah of Emes, is the Midah of Levado. Levado means, like Chazal say, The Emes of Hakadosh Baruch Hu, says the Rambam, is that Hakadosh Baruch Hu is not dependent on anything, Hakadosh Baruch Hu’s existence is not תלוי on anything. Yaakov Avinu, with his Midah of Emes, got to a level of Levado that his sense of self, his מציאות, his reality, his חיות, his life, wasn't dependent on anything. He was Levado. When a person gets to that stage, where a person’s sense of self is not dependent on what's going on around him, then a person has no need to be constantly connected to the world around him. A person has no need to know what's going on around him the whole time. A person has no need to respond to what's going on around him the whole time. A person has no need to look at what's going on the whole time. That's the Koach of Levado. And we have the ability to do that from our Avos. The test of whether a person is Emes, is does a person have a מציאות and an existence and a חיות when they're alone and they don't have what to connect to or depend on around them. This is probably the most powerful tool for Shmiras Einayim, that by a person developing an internal world that's at peace with oneself, that allows a person to detach from what's going on around him, and to connect to Hakadosh Baruch Hu.