Am Yisrael Chai | Rabbi Binyomin Pruzansky

Dovid was a young teenager who was living in new Jersey. He attended a Modern-Orthodox school. And one day it was decided that the school would go on a trip. They would go to Europe on something called March of the Living, where all these teenagers would come together and visit the concentration camps, to see what the Jews had gone through with their own eyes. They began to tour Auschwitz and they saw the railroad and they saw the signs and they saw the barbed wire and they saw the gas chambers. And the feeling was one of sadness, yet of pride to know that, yes, Am Yisrael’s alive and no matter what our enemies try to do to us, we will keep on going and thriving. But as he stood in one of the rooms that was right before the gas chamber, he was told by the tour guide that in this room they undressed, and this was the last stop right before they went into the gas chambers. He's looking around the room, trying to imagine what it felt like to be in that room. And then he sees on the wall something that pierced his heart. He saw a scratch in the wall and he wondered: What's this scratch? And then he realized, There must have been a young man, someone around his age, who was grasping onto the wall, trying to hold on to life for one more second, and he held on until he was dragged to his death. What was this young man thinking? He knew he was going to die. Why did he hold on? Because one moment of life is precious. He realized that one second of life is the world. And then Dovid started to think about his own life. He lived a life as a teenager. He was having a party. Life was fun. He was indulged in the secular influences that were around him. And then he said to himself, But that's got to change, because life is precious. Every moment counts. He said: When I go home, I'm going to turn my life around. I'm going to start looking at the right things, because I want to be closer to Hashem and really value life and really be able to declare, Am Yisrael Chai. That's our battle cry, because I'm alive, and because I'm living a life that Hashem would want me to live and I'm making Hashem proud every moment. Rav Shimshon Pincus once said, What stops a person from looking at things? Is it because he's worried that someone's going to look at you and say: Hey, what are you looking at? Or no. You want to be able to turn to Hashem for anything you need in life. We need so much Bracha and Hatzlacha in our lives. How are we going to get it? If we turn away from the things that we're not supposed to look at, then when we turn to Hashem, He will answer our call. Let's give it our all, and that way we can all declare, Am Yisrael Chai. I'm living every moment of life.