The Tug of War

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If you're on a tug-of-war team, you can't be thinking if the other guy is pulling or not. You have to bear down and put 100% of your strength and concentration into your own pulling, otherwise you'll lose. As soon as we direct our thoughts on others, we lose focus on what we ourselves are doing.

85% of the people who have been emailing me in the last six days have completely missed Rav Shalom's message. They've sunken into fear or depression, fretting what will be, what the government will do, what the IDF will do, and so forth. Rav Shalom's message of the imminent harsh decree was not a doomsday prophecy; it was a call to mobilize, for us to dig our heels deeper into the holy ground of prayer, Torah, teshuva and mitzvoth - particularly loving our fellow man - to mitigate the harsh judgment.

In the rope-type tug of war, there's no time to contemplate how strong your adversary is. You simply must concentrate on pulling harder than he does. If you let up for a moment, you fly forward on your face. That's not what we want.

I've been out in the field looking at myself through a fine-tooth comb, and there's plenty room for improvement. All Hashem wants from us is that we try our best to be a little bit better than we were yesterday. He simply wants us to pull our share of the rope and to correct what we're able to correct. What the UN, the Turkish Navy, or the Israeli Government does is not under my control, so I neither bother with it nor fret about it. If I did, I wouldn't be doing what I'm supposed to.

Mobilize, yes; incapacitating fear and depression, by no means! Let's each of us start pulling. Talk to Hashem while doing some serious self-assessment, and you'll know exactly what you need to work on in the 2 short weeks remaining until Rosh Hashana. And yes, I believe we'll be the winners when the smoke clears.