Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. Today we'll discuss the third piece of advice that Rav Yerucham Levovitz quotes from the Gaon, for how to be successful in every day of your life, by looking at:
-this day as the only day
-you as the only person, and,
-what you're involved is, is all that you have to be involved in.
The example that he gives is a person who wants to finish Shas. If you say, “Oy, I have 2,700-something pages to go,” you're never going to look at it.
But what if you say, “All I have is this page and that's it. My focus for the day is this page and that's all I have to do. I don't have to worry about any other pages. This page has nothing to do with any other pages.”
He says the same is true when you make a beracha. You are making a hundred berachot today. But forget about the hundred right now. All you have to focus on is this one beracha that you're in. If you appreciate the one thing you're doing, and totally get involved in that one thing, it makes it so much more meaningful.
This concept is called Chivuv Mitzvot, to make the Mitzvot dear to you, to realize the importance of each piece in the process. Rabbi Ades once gave a mashal that somebody walked into a room where people from an Israeli aviation company were working on making a plane.
Four men were sitting around a table with a part. He asked them what they were doing and they said, “We're making a plane.”
“But a plane is huge,” he told them. “You're sitting here on this table. How are you making a plane on this table?”
And they showed him the part that they were working on. So you could be working on one part but you really working on the plane. Rabbi Ades said this is a lesson. Saying that you’re working on finishing Shas is too big of a goal. You have to have smaller goals and smaller goals and smaller goals. And if you just focus on that smaller point, then you will see success.
I heard a beautiful mashal from a Rabbi Reuven Leuchter, a student of Rav Wolbe. He said, imagine a person making a ship out of matchsticks.
He could think of the huge ship, and get overwhelmed with what he has to do to make that big ship. Or he could say, “I'm just involved in this one matchstick right now, making sure that it's nice and straight and fits in to the on top of the previous matchstick.”
We could call it one step at a time. There's one day at a time and now one step at a time. All I have to do right now is get from step three to step four and so on. That's a way to make it through a long two days of Rosh Hashanah, to focus on each thing that you're doing as a thing on its own. Right now, I am praying Mussaf.
Within Mussaf, there are many sections. Within the many sections, there are many pesukim. For every pasuk that you say, say, “this is the only pasuk that I have to work on,” And then after I finish this one, I'll go on to the next one.
It’s really all about being present. We're always on to the next thing. When I'm praying the Amida, I'm thinking about the next thing I have to do after that. And then when I do the next thing, I'm thinking about the next thing after that. I'm never in the present moment. The way to be in the present moment is by understanding this is all you have. This is what you have to do. That’s the secret.
The modern day terminology for this concept is, I said, one step at a time. Instead of trying to tackle everything at once, you do one step at a time. This allows you to take on a different mindset. Instead of getting overwhelmed at all the future challenges that will certainly come our way, we focus on the current challenge only. I use the term challenge, but it could be the current beracha, or conversation.
There’s even an ancient Chinese proverb about this: To get through the hardest journey, we need to take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping, but this concept is, foremost, a Torah concept.
Bezrat Hashem, we will take these three important lessons, that we learned over the past three days, and pull them all together to have a successful Rosh Hashanah- one day at a time, one step at a time, and you are the only person to focus on.
Have a wonderful day.