Everlasting Reward | Rabbi Shlomo Landau

It was the night of יציאת מצרים. 210 years of bitter שעבוד were about to come to an end, and Klal Yisroel is about to leave Mitzrayim. We know the Egyptians were very into dogs. As a matter of fact, if you look inside of the pyramids, there's drawings of dogs in all kinds of strange ways. And the dogs actually protected Mitzrayim so that not a single captive ever escaped from Mitzrayim in its history. So when 3 million people are about to leave Mitzrayim, every dog in Mitzrayim is ready to bark its head off. Yet we know, Chazal teach us, the Torah says that The dogs were silent that night. And the dogs were rewarded for that, because whenever we have בשר נבילה, we have meat that becomes not Kosher, the Shechitah doesn't go well, there’s a Mitzvah. We throw it to the dog. The dog was silent the night of יציאת מצרים, it's rewarded with our נבילה, our non-Kosher meat. Everyone asks a simple question, Why the dog? By מכת צפרדע, they also did something heroic. They jumped into the ovens. Yeah, we don't find that if we go fishing and we catch a worm, that we have to give half that worm to a frog. It’s the dogs, not the frogs. Why? Why were the dogs rewarded with this eternal שכר? So the Mefarshim point out something amazing. Frogs jump everywhere. Frogs here, frogs there, they're everywhere. They'll even jump into an oven. That's their natural tendency. They're jumpers. But a dog is always making noise and particularly when the מלאך המוות is around, and there's people escaping, and there's people with sticks and it's... Every fiber of their natural being said, Bark! And they didn't. They went against their nature, they went against their טבע. They got eternal reward. We need to think about this when we're faced with issues and challenges of Shemiras Ha’einayim. Yes, naturally we're being pushed to look, to click, to perhaps go to somewhere we shouldn't go, but we need to understand that if we're able to control ourselves, if we're able to close our eyes, we're able to look away or not go, the שכר we get doesn't just last for the moment. For the rest of time, לנצח נצחים, the שכר keeps on giving and giving. It's the most incredible challenge, but it's also the most incredible investment.