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We Have a Problem With "Living"

Sunday, 11 December 2011
Part 2/2 (to see other parts of the article, click on the pages at the bottom)

If you want progressive freedom, peace, and to live the good life, then all the eitzas for how just to escape and evade lust attacks may only help you do just that: keep running. It has been my experience that progressive peace and recovery come from slow, patient inner change allowing a connection to G-d and His people. I meet so many who go around and around, settling for the valiant struggle day after day. They may intend to be serving Hashem, but is intention everything? I believe that even well-intentioned people can be fooled by their own insanity. I have posted before, that many people write about the struggle to stay clean as a 'valiant mission', romanticizing it as though such a state is actually what Hashem wants for us, in general. Of course struggling with the Yetzer Hara has its place, and is a tremendous part of a beautiful avodas Hashem... but for crying out loud! Would you wish on your own son to have a chronic progressive disease that has deadly side-effects that can wreck his sanity, health, marriage, happiness, relationships with G-d and man, etc...and then just give him a way to keep running from it?We are Hashem's children. He didn't give us this problem so that we should just run from it. Recovery is about a daily reprieve - not 'running'.

No, I am not being m'harheir acharei midosav, c"v, but just trying to make this distinction: For a normal yid, it makes perfect sense to have challenges of fighting lust. The s'char and growth of beating it would be tremendous, for sure. But an addict - i.e. one who is a chronic loser to lust - is different. And that is obvious to me. In my own case, I had to finally come to admit that I cannot win. Not that G-d cannot free me, but that as I am,I cannot win. There is indeed something wrong with me, something's broken. That is a hard pill to swallow. Even though I am a truly good man and trying to be a good yid and serve Hashem (and always have, in my own mind), my track record (first step inventory) proves to me that I am a chronic and progressive loser to lust. I spent nearly two decades trying to beat my lust to death with my brains. Tears, 'teshuvah', Torah, shrinks, medication, mussar, marriage, children, 'growing up', whatever... and failed and only got worse. Eventually I had enough. It is clear that I am mentally, spiritually and even physically sick with the tendency to obsess about and be dependent upon lust. And for over 13 years since 'giving up to' this truth and to my need to actually take real, and occasionally extreme measures, I have used the 12-step program to let Hashem keep me sober. And I am not 'stronger', at all!

'Escape today from lust'; 'don't give in'; 'fight it'; 'be vigilant'.... is all well and good. And without a daily commitment to avoiding the 'first drink', I will surely get nowhere. But a solution, it is not. Ultimately, that'd keep me looking into the familiar mirror of self-will rather than through the aspaklaria at G-d and at other people than myself.

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