Imagine you were given a chance to meet anybody in history. I’ve asked this of very many students of mine over 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. I’d love to see how they’re doing and 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, “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 about something you can do. Yeah, I don’t have a time machine to go into the future, but I do have something else. It’s something that Chazal (the Sages) teach us, but it’s something my father would always tell me: What 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 (evil inclination) 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 you would want your great-great-grandkids not to have—the challenge and the 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 (for eternity). It’s an olam haba that will echo for you. 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 Kiddushin tells us that Reb Amram Chasida had these captured women brought in. They put them on the second floor, in the attic of his house, and the ladder that went up to the attic was taken away so nobody would be able to go up to them. In the middle of the night, the Gemara describes a certain light that came from one of them, which Reb Amram Chasida saw. He was challenged. A test. He grabbed the ladder, it says, that ten men couldn’t carry. That was the power of the passion he had in that moment. He went and brought it over to that place, to that hole in the attic, to be able to climb up into it. As he’s climbing up, the Gemara tells us, he stops halfway through. And he yells, “Nura bei Amram! Nura bei Amram! There’s a fire in the house of Amram!” All the rabbis came running to help him, and they saw him standing on that ladder, shivering, frozen in place, sweating. They said, “Reb Amram, what’s happening? There’s no fire.” He said, “Oh, there is.” He said to them, “I would rather have that embarrassment now, in this moment, in this world, than for all eternity.”
The story ends with the representation of the Yetzer Hara coming out of him as a fire. He told that fire how it did not succeed in defeating him. He yelled in the moment, “Rabotai (my masters), I want to give us maybe a little bit of advice. The next time you have that challenge, let’s use Vayema’en as an example. It’s my Bar Mitzvah (son of the commandment) parasha, actually. The parasha is Vayeshev, which has the Vayema’en (And he refused). And you know how the trope goes? I do; I read it in Ashkenaz. It goes like this: Vayema’en! So the next time you have this challenge, and you’re about to look at something you shouldn’t, we know that Reb Amram yelled, ‘Nura bei Amram,’ but maybe you can just stop there and say, ‘Vayema’en!’ I can almost guarantee it’ll wake you up and hold you back, so that your future generations will never have to yell, ‘Vayema’en.’”