Staying Connected | Rabbi YY Jacobson

There’s an expression in Yiddish, People often ask me, What's the best way to avoid temptation? The most powerful way is when every single day, you connect to a place in yourself that transcends all this type of behavior. Let's remember, your Neshama, my Neshama, our Neshama is a חלק אלוה ממעל ממש. Your soul is filled with light and love and peace. What your soul is looking for is Emes, truth, authenticity, Dveikus, real connection. Connection with yourself, connection with Hashem, real connection with other people, real connection with the world. When I am in that space, there is absolute clarity, there is absolute peace, there is absolute love and there is absolute light, and there is decisiveness. Every single morning, we need to take time to be able to align ourselves with our Neshama, to be able to listen to the קול דממה דקה, the still, silent, serene voice of our soul, as it speaks. It wants to be our best friend. We want to take our soul every morning and hold onto it and walk with our soul together, throughout the day, to be channels of genuine love, of genuine Dveikus. And then when I come across something that's going to completely derail me, physically, emotionally, psychologically, socially, spiritually, I don't go there, because I have already tasted who I am, who I can be. The Ba’al HaTanya once got up in a Shul in Shklov in Lithuania, and he said, Taste! And you will see that Hashem is good. If my feeling, if your feeling of Hashem is negative, toxicity, pressure, anger, punishment, negativity, I am serving an alien God. We have to reevaluate. טעמו וראו כי טוב ה’. Hashem is a source of goodness, of comfort, of love, of peace, of empowerment. And your soul is a piece of Hashem, so your soul is a source of comfort and empowerment and peace, and when I connect to that every single day, I don't want to detach from an eternal reservoir and wellspring of inner peace and love.