Fire! Fire! | Rabbi Ari Bensoussan

Imagine if you were given a chance to meet anybody in history. So I’ve asked this to very many students of mine throughout the years, and I've gotten some really incredible answers. I'd like to tell you what my answer is. I would love to meet my great, great grandchildren, and I'd love to see how they're doing. I'd love to see how they're turning out. I'd love to help them with their challenges if they needed help. You know, we daven for them every day, when we say, ”וצאצאינו וצאצאי צאצאינו.” We're davening for our great, great grandkids that they should stay in the path. Well, I'd like to give you a little advice of something that you can do. Yeah, I don't have a time machine to be able to go into the future, but I do have something else. It's something that Chazal teach us, but it's something that my father would always tell me. What it is that you yourself overcome in your life, the challenges that you're able to finally squash, the challenges that you're able to gain control of, and to throw water on that fire and extinguish those challenges, your children won't inherit that Yetzer Hara that you have. Your children won't inherit those tests and those problems, because you'll have destroyed it, you'll have vanquished that beast. So if there's something that you would want for your great, great grandkids to be able to not have that challenge and that test that you have, making sure to look at the correct things, it's up to you, and it's not just your own Olam Haba. It's an Olam Haba that will echo for eternity. So I want to give you maybe a little advice, somewhat of a thought on how one can go about this. We know that the Gemara in Kidushin tells us that Rav Amram Chasida, they had brought these captured women and they put them inside the second floor, the attic of his house and the ladder that would go up to that attic was taken away, so that nobody would be able to go up to them. Well, in the middle of the night, how the Gemara uses a Lashon of there was a certain light that came from one of them that Rav Amram Chasida saw and he was challenged, a test. He grabbed the ladder, it says that ten men couldn't carry. That was the power of the passion that he had in the moment. And he went and he brought it over to that place, to that hole in the attic, to be able to climb up into. And as he’s climbing up, the Gemara tells us, he stops halfway through and he yells, !נורא בי עמרם, נורא בי עמרם There's a fire in the house of Amram! And all the Rabbis came running to help him and they saw him standing on that ladder, shivering, frozen in place, sweating. And they said, ‘Rav Amram, what's happening?’ ‘There's no fire.’ And he said, ‘Oh, there is.’ And he said to them, ‘I would rather have that embarrassment now in this moment, in this world, ‘than for all eternity.’ The story ends that what was the representation of the Yezter Hara came as a fire out of him, and he told that fire how it did not succeed to defeat him. He yelled in the moment. Rabotai, I want to give us maybe a little bit of advice. The next time you have that challenge, you're watching this on Vayimaen, it's my Bar Mitzvah Parsha actually, Parshas Vayeishev, that has the Vayimaen. And you know how the trop goes? I do, I read it in Ashkenaz. It goes like this - Vayimaeeeeen. So the next time you have this challenge and you're about to look at something that you shouldn't, we know that Rav Amram yelled נורא בי עמרם, but maybe you can just stop there and say, Vayimaeeeeeeen. I can almost guarantee it'll wake you up and hold you back so that your future generations will never have to yell - Vayimaen.