You are Free | Rabbi Moshe Perlstein

Dear Jewish children, my dear friends, I want to share with you a parable. Imagine, sadly enough, there’s a fellow that was locked up. Who knows where, maybe in a dungeon back in the times of the days that there was a paritz, sadly, all the way on the bottom of the ground. And the fellow, sadly, becomes used to that way of life. Whether there’s a roll call, whether it’s literally climbing on the floor and crawling and looking, searching for a little bit of bread or a little bit of sustenance, because he’s sadly in jail. And let’s say it goes on months and sometimes possibly even years. And then one day, somebody comes and bails him out and takes him out, and this fellow is brought to freedom. Wow! He could see the sun, he could see the heavens, he could breathe. Gevaldig geshmak! He could have life. And he comes home, and all of a sudden, the next morning, his family finds him on the floor, scraping, and he’s waiting there like stiff. And they’re like, My dear friend, what are you waiting for? He says: Roll call. You’re free! No roll call! Okay, fine. And he’s looking and he’s crawling all over. Can I have bread? What are you doing? I’m looking for food. Open up the cabinets, open up the refrigerator. Meat and fish and all delicacies. Ah. Isn’t that sad? That a fellow doesn’t realize he’s free? Dear brothers, We have to believe 100%, after going through the holy days, after going through these unbelievable Days of Awe, we are brand new people. We’re a brand new existence. I say it all the time. There are certain occasions, certain existences that Hashem created, that there’s Teshuva. For example, the Sefarim tell us, you go to a Bris, Eliyahu Hanavi comes, all our sins are forgiven. We go through Yom Kippur, the Torah tells us, all our sins are forgiven. The problem is that we don’t stop to contemplate and realize, One second, I’m scot-free. Instead, we leave this unbelievable Yom Kippur, we leave whether it’s a Bris, whether it’s a Chuppah, all these sayings that Chazal tell us, that all his sins are forgiven, and we just go right back to being our old selves, back into our old ways, into our old habits. And we don’t stop and think for a second. We’re free. It’s not us anymore. We don’t want to be like that fellow in that parable, that he’s free, he’s out of the dungeon, he’s out of the prison, but he’s still acting as if he’s there. It doesn’t make sense to us. So, my dear friends, don’t you realize it doesn’t make sense, when we come out of such holy days of Tishrei, we were brand new. We’re a completely new existence. We have to realize that we’re free. We’re not the same old people from before with the same old habits. That guy, I don’t even know him anymore. I don’t remember him anymore. Chevra, a whole new me, a whole new existence, a whole new being of connection with the Aibishter and my commitment to holiness and to Torah and Mitzvos.