Hi all,
I posted a story yesterday about Teshuva. I assume there are a lot of people here on GYE looking for inspiration while figuring out life, others are here to pick up great advice, tips etc from the amazing people here on GYE. After reading through quite a few threads here on GYE I feel that many people here have a lot to offer on this topic.
I'll repost the story and please feel free to add your two cents.
A Bal Darshen once spoke to the bucherim of the yeshiva in Radin. He gave a scary shiur about how hard it is to do real Teshuva and other stuff. When the bucherim told their Rosh Yeshiva ר נפתלי טרופ that they are scared from this derusha he told them the following story.
There was once a ship sailing through the sea on a long journey. At some point the captain realized that the compass is out of order and is not showing them accurate navigation. They were completely lost and felt helpless. They announced on the ship if anyone knows how to fix a compass, and to their great luck there was an engineer who was able to fix it. The second they had it back on the crew relaxed and the captain announced, “our journey might take longer that originally planned, but we are on back on track and we will reach our destination”.
Teshuva is just fixing the compass. Once we have a well working compass, we might still have long journey ahead but we are in the right direction and with hashem’s help we will reach our destination.
Teshuva involves חרטה על העבר which we do right away when we fall, we get this feeling of embarrassment, failure etc. On this we don't have to work that much... the part of קבלה על העתיד we usually get stuck. We make up our minds not to do it again "I will never in my life watch this garbage again". If we stop here it is the Y'"H telling us "You did real Teshuva! Just move on don't think about it". On a practical level this doesn't help us in any way! In order to have a real קבלה על העתיד we need to sit down and think, what triggered my fall? am I ready to do it again, while I know almost 100% that I will fall again? The fact that Hashem gave us a month of Teshuva every single year at the end of the year, not every seven years or so, shows us that without Teshuva we can't move on to a new year.
I am writing this to myself to help me fix my compass. I appreciate the honesty, openness and understanding of this community so I decided to go out of my comfort zone and post on a public form.
P.S. I am new here. If I should've posted this somewhere else or if there's any other thing I didn't follow the rules please let me know.
Thanks,
Thoughtful
