Transcript
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One of the main reasons a person is sad,
he's upset, he's not happy, he's angry,
is because something happened in the
past. He had something that someone said
to him, or someone did to him, or he
went through a difficult situation. We
all had it in our lives. The question
is, how do we move forward from that?
And we all want to become besimcha. We
all want to be happy, like we've been
discussing in the past many times. And
the answer is very, very, very powerful.
And that is that the word simcha, which
means happy, is very similar to the word
shemacha. You know what that means? To
erase. When a person erases the past,
says, "Masha ya ya, whatever happened,
happened. I can let him out of that. The
main thing is to start from fresh, to
start beginning, start new." Then all of
a sudden, you have a renewed energy of
positivity, of goodness, and you can
move forward in life. Many people, they
can't move forward because they're stuck
in the past. We have to forget about the
past many times, and we have to move
forward. And in Judaism, we have this
concept, and that's the concept of
teshuvah, which means to repent. And
many people think that teshuvah is only
for young people, or the old, or the
holiest day of the year. No. In Judaism,
actually, the Gemara says it, that is
you should do teshuvah
a day before you die. You should do
teshuvah, you should repent one day
before you pass away. And the the
students asked the rabbi, "Rabbi, we're
supposed to do teshuvah, we're supposed
to repent one day before we die, but who
knows when they're dying? It doesn't No
one has a contract how long they're
living, when the last day is." And he
said, "Ah, that's right. No one knows.
That's why every single day you should
do teshuvah. You should be repenting
every single day." And the question is,
what is this process of the teshuvah
process? How do we do the delete button,
the erase button of our sins and the bad
things that we did in the past? And
there's a very simple simple formula.
I actually came up with a with a with
the with the letters BAT. You know, in
baseball, there's a bat you hit you hit
a you hit a bat, you hit the ball with a
bat, right? So, the letters BAT is a
simple formula for doing teshuvah, which
is repenting. B is feeling bad. That's
step number one. You have to feel bad
what you did wrong. And the truth is, A
is supposed to be before B, which is
admit. You have to admit what you did
wrong. That's really the first step. To
admit you did X Y Z A B C, whatever you
did, then you feel bad about it. It just
it wouldn't work with a B A T if it's A
B T. But B is feeling bad, A is
admitting what you did wrong, and last
but not least, very important, is the
letter T, which is to try your best to
never do it again. You have to do some
sort of a game plan. I just say for
example, a person has a terrible desire
to eat non-kosher food. Eat McDonald's
cheeseburgers. We all know it's
terrible. It's a sewer, basar v'chalav,
meat and dairy. And what happens is
every time he passes by there, he has a
terrible desire to go in. So, what
happens is that the way you try your
best not to do it again is by making a
fence and not even
passing by it.
Now, not going might be difficult for a
person, but how do you try your best is
by not even passing by. That way you
don't have the desire to go into a
non-kosher restaurant. At the end of the
day, marabote, ladies and gentlemen, try
to erase the past, mach shaya ya.
Whatever happened, happened. The main
thing is to start from scratch, start
from the beginning. Every single moment
we have, we have to change. Shanah in
Hebrew means a year. Shanah is from the
word shinui, which is to change. Rosh
Hashanah, beginning of change. Then you
have chodesh, which is a which means a
month, is hichadshut, which means to
renew. We have to renew ourselves every
month. And last but not least, you might
think, "Oh, every year or every month is
enough." No. How do you say a second in
Hebrew? It's shniyah. Shniyah is a
second, and shniyah is from the word
shinui as well, which means to change as
well. Every single moment we have to try
to change to become better people and to
move forward in life.
