Something To Think About | Rabbi Naftali Horowitz

Sometimes we just look because we're laying bored. Really, what is there to do when you walk down the street? How do you occupy your mind? Our heads wander to and fro, looking around just to find something to keep us busy. I always wonder, if somebody walking through Times Square, on his way to a lawyer's office who's going to defend him against a multimillion dollar lawsuit, or somebody driving to a doctor's appointment to find out the diagnosis that he so dreads, would notice the people around him, the people crossing in front of him, that are not properly dressed. The answer is he would not. His mind is preoccupied. There's so much of great value that we could be thinking about as we're walking down the street to keep our minds busy and our eyes where they should be. The Ramchal tells us that people rarely, if ever, stop and ask themselves the most basic questions of existence. Why am I here? Where have I gone? Where is my life at, and where am I heading? These are questions that we ask ourselves every day in corporate America. This is how we get better. This is how we grow. How many times do we stop and ask ourselves these questions and truly think about them? My son posed the question by the Shabbos table. The question was, what would you tell a person who's struggling with anger? What strategies would you recommend that he deploys? And everybody around the room was throwing their ideas out on the table. And I thought to myself, that's something I really need to think about. And my son came to me and he says, "Ta, what do you think?" And I said, "I have no idea. I need to give this thought." When will I think about it? Well, it's in my calendar, my mental calendar. Perhaps, the next time I'm in the back of an Uber on the way to a meeting in midtown Manhattan, instead of looking out the window, I will be thinking about this instead. On that note, I want to thank the organizers of Vayimaen for giving me a lot to think about the last three to four days as I sat in the back of Ubers, namely what I'd be saying here today.