Still There | Rabbi Doniel Osher Kleinman

So I'm a regular commuter. I travel to Philadelphia twice a week, two hours there, two hours back. The Belt Parkway, the Verrazzano, Staten Island Expressway, which is more like a parking lot, the New Jersey Turnpike. And as most drivers nowadays, I use Waze. You travel Waze, so it tells you about a police car, a car stopped on the side of the road, a hazard. And they always ask you: Still there? Is it still there? And you have the ability to click the thumbs up or the thumbs down. Many people ignore it, but sometimes I'll click it. And I noticed something very strange. When you click and you tell them if it's still there or not, Waze says: Thank you for assisting us. And then it shows like a blue diamond, and it gives you a +5. And I always wondered: Where does that +5 go? Who exactly gets that +5? Do I get all my points? Does it redeem? Do I earn anything from it? I don't know, but it's weird, it's strange, it's funny. Every time I see that +5 on the screen, I actually feel good. I don't know if I'll ever see it, I probably won't, but I'm sure that that's why they do it. When I was younger, there was a game, Rollercoaster Tycoon. We used to sit for hours, glued to a screen, building the most magnificent amusement park. And people come and go and there are disasters, and there's money that has to be made, and there are natural disasters and there are storms and there are issues, there are problems, and you make money, you lose money, and the challenge is to get the most money and to earn the most money, and have the biggest park in the world. And we sat as teenagers, glued to the screen for hours, for days on end. You see, I wonder if someone out there would develop an app with all the moments, with all the thumbs up and thumbs downs, showing how much we earn. Could you imagine every time we're confronted with a challenge and we fail, it's a thumbs down. Maybe it's a -5 or -10, maybe -100, -1000. Every time you succeed, do you know what it means to walk down the street and to be confronted by something that's inappropriate, and instead of looking at it, because nobody knows the difference, you look away? Imagine you had a screen that you could put in a thumbs up at that moment. You know what the screen would show you? +10 million. One day, the day is going to come, we're going to come to Shomayim, and we're going to see how many millions we earned from every time we simply looked away, from every time we told ourselves: No, I'm not going to succumb to my Yetzer Hara, from every time we told ourselves: I'm going to be stronger, I'm going to be elevated, I'm going to be above. Every time we told ourselves, we clicked the thumbs up and we told our Neshama, Still there. The Neshama is still there. Our Yetzer Tov is still there. Every time we told ourselves that, every time we looked away, the Ribono shel Olam gives us not just a +5, He gives us diamonds, He gives us Olam Haba. I wish there was an app. Maybe one day there will be an app. Every time you look away from something, make an app for yourself and click the Still There, and see how many millions you earn, because the day will come that those millions will be there. The +5 of Waze you'll probably never see it, but the +1 million of your Shmiras Einayim, one day, you and your family and your children and your einiklech will reap the benefits forever on.