Vayeitzei - Davening in the Darkness

3:02 If the Torah wanted to tell us that Yaakov Avinu davened, what would it have said? The Yaakov hits Pallel. The Yaakov davened in that place. Why does the Torah use Vayifka? So Rashi tells us there's another layer. So far we have two layers. Now Rashi is going to give us a third. What was the first? Vayifka ba makom. Ba makom is a reference to the makom that we learned about before. Akedas Yitzchak. It's Har Moria. That's level number one. Level number two. What does vayifka mean? Vayifka is a way of saying not just he encountered, but vayifka means he davened. Now there's a third layer. Veshina hakasev, a low kasev vayispalal And it doesn't tell us vayispalal. Why does it use this strange language of vayifka? Rashi here refers to a Gemara, and the Gemara tells the following story. Something called kvitzas haderech. Have you ever heard of kvitzas haderech? Kvitzas haderech means as follows. Kvitzas haderech is that you're in one place, and the earth folds in on itself.

4:07 And then because the earth folded in, you're right next to the other place, and you just walk one step, and you're automatically in that place. The Gemara tells the following story. This is the Gemara that Rashi is referencing. It's an amazing story. The story goes as follows: Yaakov Avinu, he was traveling to Lavan, and he felt badly because he had passed Har Moria. But he didn't stop there to daven And he felt badly. How could I have not have davened in the place of Akedas Yitzchak? How could I have not davened there? So comes along Thank you. Comes along. Comes along Yaakov Avinu and he says Chaval, I should have davened there. What happens? Kvitza Saderech, the world folds in on itself, and all of a sudden Yaakov turns around and where is he? He's right next to Hara Moria. Girls, you hear the unbelievable nashe that happened to Yaakov Avinu?

4:57 The world folded in on itself, and all of a sudden, even though he had gone. Thousands of miles, hundreds of miles, whatever it was, passed Harar Moria. Now the earth folds, and Udselvi takes one step and he's by Harar Moria. Let's review what we've learned so far before we start to unpack this. Level number one: Where is the makom that Yaakov Avinu is, girls? Where we say Harar Moria, the makom of Akedah Shilat. Level number two: What does Vayevka mean? That not only he encountered the place, but rather he davened in that place specifically. What tefillah did he daven for the first time? He davened Meir. Very good. And what's the third thing we need to know? The third thing we need to know is how did he arrive at that place? How did he encounter it all of a sudden? Because really, he was hundreds of miles in the other direction. Once was that? This is Jacob. Really, he was hundreds of miles in another direction. But he felt badly. He turned around. The earth folds in on itself. He takes one step. He encounters the place. Out of nowhere, because it literally came out of nowhere. That's the Torah that's being taught tonight. Very beautiful Torah. But there are some problems if you start thinking a little bit deeply. There are some problems about the Torah we just learned because these three things seem to be very disjointed.

6:07 We have three different things that we were just taught, all in two words in the Torah, and they seem, if you're paying attention, to be three completely different things. The first thing is that we're talking about the future side of the Bei Shemekdash, the side of Akedah Sichah. Girls, is that really relevant to the story here? It doesn't seem to be relevant necessarily to the fact that Yaakov avinu davened myrav for the first time ever. What's the difference if he davened myrav here or davened myrav there? The main thing is that he davened myrav. That's problem number one. You see how one has nothing to do with the other? Why is it important that the first myrav happens when the earth folds in on itself and it's just one step away from where he was? Why is that a critical part of the process? These things seem to be very disjointed, as we're going to see in a couple of moments. These things are not disjointed at all; they're all part of one process.

6:55 That's the first question. The second question is as follows: Girls, is it possible that this is the first time anyone ever davened myruf? It doesn't really make so much sense if you think about it. Does it mean Avram Avinu, when it got to nighttime, he never davened? Yitzchak Avinu, when it got to night, he never davened. So Yaakov Avinu instituted the Tefillah of myruf. And this was the first. It seems like Rashi is saying that he was. What's the lashon of Rashi? He instituted. He was matakin. He structured tefilas arvus. It's weird to think that Avram Avinu never davened at night. It's weird to think Yitzchak never davened at night. It's weird even to think that Avram Avinu didn't teach his followers to daven at night. Tefillah is such a central part of Yiddishkeit. How could it be that Avram Avinu ignored prayers? So what is the idea? We're not. I want to give one answer that's going to tie all these things together. Did he not establish a specific prayer?

7:46 Again, we have to know what it means that he established a specific tefillah because obviously Avram and Yitzchak must have davened before that. The last thing I want to ask is a very simple one. What's this concept of kvitzos haderich? This is like the weirdest one of all of them. If we make a mistake in our lives, doesn't it take us time to journey back? Make a mistake. Imagine, let's say chas v'cham. Even not on a physical level, right? On a physical level, of course, it's true. But let's say on a spiritual level. You ever do an avera? We've all done averas. We do an avera. It's not easy to undo an avera. You have to do tshuva. There's a process. Maybe it's a process of rebuilding yourself. Maybe it's a process of rebuilding your reputation. Maybe it's a process of thinking about the Avera in a new way. These things—they're complicated. They take time.

8:34 Nothing in this world is ever instantaneous. There's never a journey that's just for a moment. This concept of kvisas adarach is deceptive. You mean to tell me that I could go from point A to point B in a moment? That's not the way the world works. The easy answer is just to say it's a miracle, but it's a cop-out answer. Because if Rashi's connecting davening with kfitsa ha'aretz, with this concept of the land folding in on itself, is probably something going on here. There's more that meets the eye. Does that make sense? So we have three questions. The first question is, what's the unifying factor between all these stories? What unifies the beis hamikdash, tefilas maariv, and kfitsa ha'aretz? The second question is, could it be that Yaakov Avinu davened the first maariv? Does that make any sense? Abraham and Yisroel didn't daven maariv. And the last question, the most obvious question, is what is this concept called kfitza saderich?

9:27 Makes sense. Those are the three questions. I want to start to give you an answer. But I want to talk about this and hopefully find a unique way, maybe one you've never heard before. Let's start with the dominant question. We'll start with the second question first. The Gemara says Halavai sheyispalal kol hayom kula. Would it be that we could daven the entire day? What does it mean to be in a state of tefilla the entire day? What does that mean that a person sitting there with a sitter all day long davening? Is that what a Jew is meant to do? Is that even an aspiration for us? Because if we were sitting with a sitter the entire day, what would we be not doing? I wouldn't be doing anything else. I have a mitzvah to go out, and I have a mitzvah to give tzedak. I have a mitzvah to go do chesed. I have a mitzvah to sit and learn Torah. What does it mean when Chazal say "halavay sheyis palel koleyom kulo"? So the Balik Chassidus say as follows: When a person davens their entire day, it means every aspect of their day, in a certain way, is turned into a type of prayer.

10:37 It's turned into a type of tefillah. In other words, the idea of tefillah is that I recognize that there is a God above me. It's possible for a person to perform all the acts of Judaism but not to be connected to Hashem. It's possible to learn Torah and it's for your own gaiva or for your own intellectual enjoyment. It's possible for a Jew to give tzedakah because they like the feeling that they give tzedakah. It feels good when you can help out somebody else. It's possible that a person could do chesed because they're a personable person, but it's not necessarily connected to Hashem. Halavai sheispala kol ayom kulo is a very sophisticated idea. It means Can I make sure that my entire day is connected to Hashem? Can I make sure that every single thing that I'm doing is part of a pursuit of a godly life? It is not obvious that people do this in life. How many times, girls, in our lives do we have what's called a fragmented life?

11:33 What does a fragmented life mean? A fragmented life means that I could be doing six or seven different things, but they're all for different purposes. There's nothing that unifies my life. Can I give an example of what this looks like? Do you mind doing me a favor? Just tell them, if you don't mind, to let the internet girls know. They don't realize it's not their fault. Thank you. The I'll give you an example of this. I'll do it from a guy's perspective, not from a girl's perspective. It's easier. It'll be easier for you to hear if it's not about anything that's relevant to you. You have a guy that wakes up in the morning. He goes to Davin. That's one part of his life. Maybe he goes to dafiyomi. Maybe we'll even call that the same part of his life. We'll call that the spiritual life that he has. Then he goes on. Then he gets on a train or gets in his car and goes to work. And that's divorced from his davening and learning. And why does he go to work? Let's just make up a story about this guy. Let's say he goes to work because he loves ambition.

12:28 He loves success. He loves to win. So he goes to work. What does he do at work? He's winning. He's getting the next promotion. He's making the next deal. He's making the most money. Then he comes home at night and does some homework with his kids. Maybe he hangs out with his kids for a little bit. Doesn't have that much time left before they go to sleep. So we call that the time that he's a father. Then he has maybe a couple of minutes left before he goes to bed because he's got to wake up early in the morning to go to daven and to go to learn. So that's the time when he's a husband. Let's look at what he did in his life. He had a spiritual life. He had his material life. He was a father and he was a husband. But those four things are not necessarily joined together. Those are four things that he does. They don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. And this guy, he's stuck in a state. This happens all the time, where people say to him, "What's your work-life balance?" You know why he has to have a work-life balance?

13:19 Because all the things in his life need to be balanced; they're four separate things. But if you have somebody who has a unified life. You never hear them speak about balance. Because if you're unified, then everything is heading towards the same goal. It's not about balance. It's about how do I hit this goal together? Let's take for example, you have a business. That business has a lot of different parts of the business. Do you know that businesses compete within the business itself? Do you know that there are different divisions of a business that could compete with each other? Because everybody wants to get what they want the most, let's say budget for their company. So for their section of the company. So do you know that a company might have a section that spends more than it needs to in order to keep their budget up? Is that good for the business? It's good for the people in that particular team. It's good for the people in that particular division. It's not good for the business. That's a fragmented business. So then we need to talk about how to balance the budget?

14:18 But we only have to balance the budget because everything is going in different directions. And if a person lives a unified life, it's not about balance because everything works harmoniously. His wife isn't upset that he goes out in the morning to daven and to learn, and she has to be the one to get the kids off because she understands it's all part of one family life that we have. I want to have a husband who invests in his yiddishkeit. When he goes out to work, it's not for his ambition. He goes out to work because it's an expression of his godly soul. He goes out to work because he has an opportunity to be mikdash shem shamayim. He goes out to work because he wants to make a paycheck for his family so they could send his kids to yeshiva and seminary. Then he comes home at night. It's not just now that he's playing the role of a father. This is an extension of everything that he believes in. It's part of this business. This business is all headed towards one goal. And he spends time with his wife.

15:08 You can always tell what a person's unifying feature is by where they dedicate time to. I just saw an amazing thing from the CEO of Netflix. The CEO. You wouldn't expect me to quote from the CEO of Netflix. The CEO of Netflix has a rule. He's a happily married man, and he wrote that he has a rule. At five o'clock on Tuesday, he leaves. If you want to meet with him at 4:55, you have five minutes. You will not have a sixth minute. He never violates his Tuesday five o'clock rule. Why? He says my wife is my best friend. I made my wife the center of my week. Tuesday nights, I'm with my wife. Whatever we're doing, we're doing it together. It doesn't matter what's happening at Netflix. At 5:01, he's out the door. He's not there anymore. Whatever problem exists at Netflix, it'll exist tomorrow. But at 5 o'clock, I'm out the door. That means that his life is really about his wife.

15:59 And his job at Netflix has to fit into that position. The reason why people live with this tension is because they go, 'How can I? How can I manage the fact that I'm?' The fact that I'm a CEO of a company and at the same time balance being a husband, because to most people those are competing interests. They're not competing interests. What was that? You could always tell the unifying. You could tell what a person's unifying factors are in their life by what they give precedence to. Of course, a person needs to go out and they need to have a job. They need to support their family. But what happens if their job is now interfering with the very family that they seek to provide for. Then it's out of balance and it's not working. That's why you have a father who says, if I work on Sundays, I can make another seventy-five thousand dollars a year. You have to make a cost-benefit analysis. Seventy-five thousand dollars a year, but you don't get to coach your kid's little league team.

16:49 It's not obvious that seventy-five thousand dollars is worth it. Isn't there something special about that dad that spends his Sunday afternoons coaching up his son? Isn't there something special about when I was growing up, little league was a very big thing. I want to tell you there were two types of parents, or maybe three types of parents. There were the parents that coached the team; those were the best parents. They were really involved. There were parents that were also maybe even maybe they were the best parents too. Parents that showed up to every game. They brought their lawn chairs. They sat on the side. They brought snacks for the kids, unless you were like the mother who brought like apples for the kids. Everyone hates that mother. Don't be that mother. Bring snacks. It's little league baseball. It's okay. Nobody's gonna die from a bag of potato chips. They come to game. There was always a parent. I always felt bad for these kids. There were parents that saw little league as babysitting, free babysitting. I get to drop my kid off and I don't stay to watch my kid play. I'll pick them up at the end of the game. They would ask my father was my little league coach. They would always ask my dad about what time do you think the game will be over. It is crushing.

17:47 It is heart wrenching. It's a punch in the gut to watch a kid's face when one set of parents is staying and another father drops his kid off and says, "What time is the game over? I want to pick my son up." Showing up to your kid's game is huge. It prioritizes. It shows you what's the yichida, what's the core, what's the central point. Of course, you all have to work, but at some point, your work takes over the thing that's the goal itself. You've lost sight. That's called a fragmented life. A person who davens every single day, not just davens three times a day. A person who makes tefillah his entire life is putting God at the center of his universe. That's a very big deal. That means in every single thing that I do. In my davening and my learning, it's possible to daven and learn. Girls, have you ever davened not to Hashem? Like, have you ever woken up in the middle of Shemona Esrei and said, "How did I get here?"

18:38 "? When's the first time you have to pay attention in davening? In the Shir Shal'yon, you have to think about what day it is. You ever have that? You ever wake up in the middle of Shemona Esrei and find that you should make a Tefillah Sederet because you were six thousand miles away? It's possible to daven without thinking about Hashem at all. It's possible to learn Torah without thinking about Hashem at all. It's an amazing intellectual exercise. A person who davens their entire day puts God at the center of their yiddishkeit. A person who davens their entire day is not just talking to Hashem all day. When they're at work, that's serving Hashem. When they're a father, they're serving Hashem. When they're a mother, they're serving Hashem. When they're a husband, they're serving Hashem. When they're a wife, they're serving Hashem. When they're a member of their community, they're serving Hashem. The avos were people that davent the entire day. And of course, it goes without saying that Avram and Yisroel davened that night.

19:29 What does it mean that Yaakov Avinu was mesakin ma'ariv? I want to share with you an amazing idea. It means that there are aspects that they connected their tefillah to in ways that had never been done before. Avram Avinu connected tefillah to the notion of being conscious and being directed in what is my day going to bring today. A Jew wakes up in the morning. The first thing they do is they orient themselves. Where am I going? The shachris is the beginning of your journey. So Avraham Avinu paid special attention to davening in the morning because he said, In which direction am I headed today? How am I oriented in my life? Where am I going? It's not obvious. People get in the car all the time and they just space out and go, How in the world did I get here? It's not a joke. Do you realize there are people that wake up in their 40s or 50s and they go, 'How did I get here?' And then they have a midlife crisis. And they have to buy themselves a little red sports car.

20:22 Right? Why do they have to do that? Because they realize I don't know what happened to my life. My life got away from me. You should know when I turned 40 years old, it messed with my head because I said to myself, Al pidarach ateva, my life is about half over. At 40 years old, I realized I was like, There's no going back. I'm not going to be 18 again. I don't get a do over. I don't get to learn from my mistakes and go back to be 18. And I was having not a midlife crisis, but I was definitely having an existential crisis. Am I doing enough with my life? And it's a great question to ask yourself. Where am I going? What's the direction? Where do I want to be at the end of this? You're 18 years old. You're in the shachris of your lives. You could choose to go anywhere. You don't know what life is going to look like 20, 30, or 40 years from now.

21:07 You don't know. It's going to be an amazing adventure. But how you orient yourself makes a very big difference. You have two girls that went to Bar Meryam. At the end of Bar Meryam, they're this far apart. They look so close, just a tiny little bit. What happens a year later? A year later it's this, and five years later it's this, and ten years later it's this, and thirty years later it's that. Why? Because of small differences, small decisions that they made when they were very young. This is the shacharos of your life. This is Avraham Avinu. Avraham Avinu was the very beginning of the world. He said we gotta orient the world towards godliness. Then there was Yitzchak. Yitzchak took us to a second level. Yitzchak said you gotta learn to hit pause. You gotta learn that sometimes, in ways, when it says you're going in the wrong direction Like turn around. You ever not listen to ways?

21:54 You ever go like, no, I know better, and then find out that you're gonna be sitting in an hour of traffic, and ways knew better than you. There are times in life where you have to be willing, like Yitzchak, to stop in the middle of your day and ask, is this going the way I want it to? That's a very big Yitzchak. So Yitzchak connected tefillah to this. He connected tefillah to the parts of our lives that aren't going so well. And the need to recalibrate. Yaakov Avinu did something extraordinary, something that every one of us has to do. Of course, we make davening the central part of our day. But girls, listen, this is an unbelievable idea. Yaakov Avinu said, introduce tefillah to the lowest, darkest moments of your life. Not where you're just five blocks away and you have to go in a new direction because there was a road closure. What happens if I missed the boat?

22:43 What happens if I ended up somewhere and it's not five miles, not fifty miles, but five hundred miles away from where I was supposed to be? I didn't want my life to go like this. A chaver of mine recently made Aliyah. He made Aliyah a couple years ago. He was living in New York and then he was living in Florida. You should know I have tremendous respect for this guy. And he came to Eretz Yisrael and were talking, and he said to me, and I live here. It's crazy that I don't live in this country. I said, "I hear you." And he started thinking about the different moves he made in his life and how he ended up living in Florida. And not that Florida is a bad place. Anybody here from Florida? So I'm not insulting Florida. Where in Florida are you from? Jacksonville. Jacksonville, Florida. Right. Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville, amazing place. Big naval base there, right? But the I'm not insulting Florida. But if a Jew, if you have like a destination that you want to live in Israel, how in the world do you end up in Florida, right?

23:35 So he started thinking about it, and he started going. He started like I made this decision, and then he realized these decisions took him somewhere he didn't want to go. He was in a state of mirv. He was in a state of darkness. His life, after 20 years of being married, of building a business, of building a family, and he said, I ended up in a country that I didn't want to end up in. Ended up with a value system that I didn't want to end up with. What did he do? He moved to Israel. Do you know how hard that is to do? After you're married with children who are teenagers, and you pick up your life and you go, "Nope, I'm coming." That's called myrev. Myrev doesn't just mean Yitzchak as I stop in the middle of the day. I got to make sure I'm going in the right direction. Myrev is I'm in the darkness of my life. How in the world did I get here? You ever have a moment like that where you wake up and you go, "How in the world did I get here?" It's the hardest moment to encounter. It's moments of confusion. It's moments of lack of faith. I don't know how I got into this place.

24:31 Yaakov Avinu says you have to bring ma'ariv, you have to bring davening into your lowest places. You have to ask yourself, are my lowest places an opportunity to turn my entire life around? People don't become great from success. People become amazing from failure. The famous story is about a CEO who has an employee, and the employee blew the deal and lost five hundred thousand dollars. When asked if he was going to fire him, the CEO says, 'Why would I fire him? I just paid five hundred thousand dollars for him to learn this lesson.' When we fail, failure is the greatest teacher. The problem is that very often, when we go into the nighttime of our life, that's not a godly time for us. When we go into places where we're like, I can't believe I did that, we usually fall into a depression. We fall. We become morose. We're like, What am I going to do with my life now? I messed it up.

25:19 You have to know that those are your highest moments. Your lowest moments are just moments away from being your highest moments. If you find the godliness of those moments, girls. What's kafitsa saritz? Remember, all these things go together. There are times in life where you need to take a journey. There are times in life where it's going to take you six months, a year, two years to get to the place where you need to go. There are times like that in life. Do you know why you need that? Because you need to go through the process of becoming. It's not an easy thing to become. Life takes time to become. I very often wish that I got to meet you girls ten years from now. Because a lot of times I think like the things I'm telling you, you can kind of hear them now, but you won't know what I'm talking about until ten years from now. The process of what you become over the course of the next ten years of your life is going to be unbelievable to watch. The girls who are here in Ber, Miriam, Shana Aleph, Shana Bet, in ten years from now you'll be completely different people.

26:15 That's why adults very often forget what it's like to be a kid. Because we've become something so different that we can't even imagine what it was like to be a teenager anymore. In ten years from now, probably not everybody in this room will be married with children. Hopefully, everybody in this room will be married with children. That's a, that's a good, it's a good bracket to say I mean. But it's a beautiful thing to think about. The fact that at 18 years old, I might have been coming to Parry Merriam, and maybe at night I went to the place where they sell vegetables in the morning. In ten years from now, you're going to talk about. I can't believe I ever went to the place where they sell vegetables in the morning. At night, there were no vegetables being sold. Why did I go there? In ten years from now, your life will look different because you're a mother. You're a mother. A mother has different concerns. You know what a mother says? I got to get to sleep now because this kid is going to wake up in five hours and I'm going to be exhausted. The same girl that could never fall asleep in seminary, all of a sudden she's mapped it on her sleep schedule. It takes time to become.

27:11 Except there are exceptions where you can become in an instant. And these exceptions to the rule are as follows: If you're willing. If you're willing to engage the lowest moments of your life And you're willing to bring godliness into the most dark aspects of your life. Then you're on a trampoline. And the trampoline, the impact is immediate. There's a rule in the world of science, what goes up must come down. In Judaism, we have the opposite rule: what goes down must eventually come up. Person hits rock bottom in their life. Sometimes it's a process of taking themselves out of rock bottom. I've seen with my own eyes. Sometimes a person hits rock bottom; their life is destroyed. And they're like, "That's it, I'm done being this person." The change takes time, perhaps, for everyone else to recognize, but the change is instantaneous. The guy who is an alcoholic, the guy whose wife left him, whose kids won't talk to him, who lost his job, who lost his house, who's living under a bridge, and whose mom is going around collecting bottles just to get his next bottle.

28:20 That guy, you should know, when he hits rock bottom, when it finally occurs to him, I'm in the darkness of my life, and he finds God in that place. These people become the most spiritual people you'll ever meet in your life, and it's not a long process because they have no choice but to discover their true self. It's instantaneous. It's called kfitsa sa'aretz. Usually, the journey takes a long time, but if you have sincere regret. And this is the hardest thing in the world to do. Regret is a beautiful emotion. There's a difference between spending your life in regret and having regret. If you spend your life in regret, then you're just involved in self-flagellation. That's not a good thing. But if you do something wrong and you regret it, that's healthy. It tells you that behavior was beneath my dignity. And once you know that, it's instantaneous. I'm not doing that anymore. I'm not that person anymore. I'm not going back to that life anymore.

29:07 Yaakovino had true regret. He said, "How could I have gone past Har Hamoria? How could I have gone past the place of the Akedah?" I'm going to the house of Lavan. I'm going to be asked to sacrifice on unbelievable levels. I had to bring my Yiddish kite down into the lowest place. Lavan was a Rasha Marusha. Lavan, in some ways, was worse than Paro. Like it says in the Hagada, he wanted to destroy everything. Paro just wanted to destroy the male baby Jews. Yet Lavan wanted to destroy everything. Yaakovinu says, how could I have gone down to Lavan without stopping at the place of self-sacrifice, without connecting myself to that place? He had such regret that all he had to do was turn around and he was right there. And what is right there, girls? Right there is Har Hamoria. Right there is the Beit Hamikdash, the holiest place in the entire world. The journey from your lowest moments to your highest moments can be instantaneous if only you daven Maariv.

30:00 You have to be willing to go into the lowest places in your life, and you have to say, "I found God there." Some people find God in the Seder. Some people find God in the Gemara. Some people find God in Tanach. Some people find God in Chesed. Those are all beautiful things, and if you found God in those places, more power to you. But I want to tell you the most powerful place to find God is rock bottom. If you sincerely regret what you've done in your life, that experience of becoming connected to God is the single most powerful experience you'll ever have. To do an avera is the opportunity, like Chazal say, you could turn your averos into suyos. Your averos could become your merits. Because if you find out who you really are in your lowest places, it's the biggest chesed of all. In fact, at that point, you know what you say?

30:45 Baruch Hashem, I did that avera. That avera helped me become the person that I am today. That's where I found God. And I'm not going to get into specifics. I'm not going to tell you this avera and that avera. You all have to think for yourself. What was your avera that made you feel deeply undignified? What was the average that you did it, and afterwards you said, "Oh. Can't believe I did that." It's a rebbe in Mevaseret. His name is Ruv Steinert. He has an amazing line. His line is, "Don't tell me what you'll never do. It's what you've done and what you haven't done yet." Everybody, at some point in their life, crosses the line that they promised themselves they would never cross. Do you remember when you did it? Do you remember when you said, "I'll never do that," and then you said, "Oh, I did." And the first time you did it, you felt like, "Oh It's not me. You should know that moment. If you had leaned into it, it could have been the trampoline of your life.

31:36 Most of us just go. I don't want to think about it anymore. I'm just not going to do it anymore. Jump in. What does that mean? Discover all the aspects of that moment. How did I get here? Why did I do what I was doing? How is that part helping me? Is this who I really am? There's a bierer. There's a clarification that happens in our lowest moments. You get to discover who you really are, and not because anyone made you feel bad. And I want to be clear about this. Not because of the consequences. Not because there were negative consequences, but because the behavior itself made me feel gross. Sometimes we change because I don't want to have to deal with the consequence of that behavior, so I'll do the right thing because I don't want to do the wrong thing. But let's say you know you're never going to get caught. Let's say cheating on a test. If the only reason I'm not cheating on a test is because if I get caught I'm going to get in trouble, you didn't really change. It happens to be you're not cheating, but you didn't change. If a person stops cheating on a test, it's because I am not a cheater.

32:26 I am not a person that lives outside of the boundaries of truth. If I fail the test, I'd rather fail with integrity than cheat and get a good mark. Because then afterwards I have to look in the mirror and I have to be able to say to myself, I can't believe that's who I am. Yaakov Avinu was Masak and Meirav. It means Yaakov Avinu was the first one. Avram Avinu went to low places for sure. Avram Avinu went to Mitzrayim. Yitzchak, even though he went only within Eretz Yisrael, he also went to the Peshitim. Everybody had to deal with their things. Only Yaakov Avinu went to Lavan. Only Yaakov Avinu had to deal with losing a child. To his sibling, to that kid's siblings, Yaakov Avinu lost nevuah for the entire time that Yosef was in Eretz Yisrael. For all those years, he couldn't talk to God. Yaakov Avinu, in his life, had to go to the lowest places. But Yaakov Avinu only became Yaakov Avinu. Why? Because in the lowest places he davened. He connected those places to Hakadosh Baruch Hu. Girls, I want to give us all a bracha. Every one of us is going through hard times. Everybody here is struggling with something that nobody else knows anything about.

33:21 You have two choices. You could look away, you could run away from those difficult moments, and you could go, "Good, I'm not dealing with it anymore. I'm good." And then you get to throw out one of these lines, "It was hard, but I grew from it." It's not true. Most people just run away. If you want to be able to say, "It was hard, but I grew from it," you have to lean into the discomfort of the work. You have to go into that lowest place, and you have to find out who you are. You have to find your most godly self. My bracha is that as we go through those hard times, we should be zeicher to discover who we truly are. Amen. Thank you so much.