There’s no such thing as immediate success
Continuing the series of translations of Rabbi Eliezer Berland’s words from the You will succeed! book. Click HERE to buy the book in Hebrew.
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It’s explained on the verse, “a woman who gives seed and gives birth to a boy”, that if a man is like a woman who is prepared to go through difficulties and waiting, he knows that there is no such thing as an ‘instant birth’.
If H\he’s prepared to serve Hashem from the aspect of a ‘woman’, then, “she will give birth to a boy” – he will merit to succeed.
“With all your heart” – chazal explain this to mean serving Hashem with your two inclinations.
What does this mean? Man has an evil inclination and the evil inclination confuses him. It causes him to sin and now he’s annoyed, ‘why did I sin?! Why didn’t I pray? Why didn’t I get up for chatzot?’
This is the work of “with all your heart” – not to be broken by the evil inclination.
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If a person starts to get upset with himself, ‘why don’t I learn…? Why don’t I pray? Why am I not a Tzadik? Why don’t I get up for chatzot?
Nothing good will come out of this.
A person needs to know that these things go very slowly.
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Rav Natan says serving Hashem doesn’t come in one year and not in two years, and even more than that.
Rather, it takes many, many years, and then a person succeeds to pray with fervor, to pray with enthusiasm, and to pray with attachment to Hashem, and then he succeeds to become consistent in his Torah learning.
But, in the meantime, even if a person doesn’t merit this, the main thing is that a person realizes that this is the truth, that he wants this and yearns for this, and he doesn’t yearn for sadness or annoyance. Rather, he yearns for this with happiness, because he realizes that he is in such a place, next to the true Tzadik, so he’ll achieve all the things in the world.
Then, he’ll succeed.
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According to the size of the soul is the size of the yetzer hara
