Due to Pride, a Person Loses Spiritual and Material Abundance

"And you shall be as G-d" (3:5)... "The sin of the Tree of Knowledge is 'and you shall be as G-d.' A person thinks he is already G-d, the world is in his hands, he controls the world. Why is a person sick? Why is he not blessed with children? Why does he lack parnassah (livelihood)? Why can he not find his shidduch (marriage match)? Everything is because of pride. With every thought of pride, he loses his spiritual and material abundance; with every thought of pride, he pushes away the feet of the Shechinah (Divine Presence), as it is written, 'I and he cannot dwell in the same space.' Through a thought of pride, the Shechinah becomes disconnected from the person more than through any other sin."

Through pride, a person does not perform teshuvah (repentance)

"Sometimes a person fails in a sin and is broken... he performs teshuvah. But a person who is in a state of pride has no broken heart, because pride is the opposite of a broken heart, and therefore he does not perform teshuvah. When a person is in pride, he cannot tolerate anyone in the world; he thinks, 'Who can reach me? Who is my equal?' A person walks around with the thought that he is the wisest, the most intelligent, and the cleverest."

"If a person feels that he has accomplished something—'Look, I prayed with intention, I cried out in prayer, I rose for the vatikin (early morning) prayer,'—and thinks to himself, 'I am better than the one who is sleeping in bed right now,' then everything is lost. That person sleeping in bed, perhaps he is a weak person? And perhaps right now he is praying with his tallit and shedding rivers of tears? What do you know? He may have risen at 8:00 and said the Shema, but afterward, he cries for a whole hour. What does a person know? The moment you have a thought of pride because you rose for vatikin or conducted yourself with asceticism and therefore you have a certain level of conduct, and you are already better than the other, at that very moment everything goes to the sitra achra (the other side). Unless a person identifies his pride and performs teshuvah for every thought of pride, then he rectifies everything and elevates everything to holiness."

"Pride and desires do not belong to a Jew"

"A person must know one fundamental principle: that pride and desires do not belong to a Jew. This is not the essence of the Jew; it is only an external garment. Because the moment the first man sinned, the holy Zohar says he received a garment called 'the leprosy of the snake's skin' (mishka d'chivya). Hashem gave him a punishment to receive the body of the snake, which is what is called 'garments of skin' (kotnot or) with an 'ayin' and not 'garments of light' (kotnot or) with an 'aleph' as it was in the beginning. And likewise, every person, the moment he is born, receives the external garment, 'the leprosy of the snake's skin,' which is pride and desires, and one must fight against this and know, 'This is not me,' 'This is not what I want,' 'This is not my true will.'"

"A person thinks that desires are his true will, his essence; this is not true, it only seems so to him. Some material desire, some foreign craving has attached itself to him, and this is not the nature of man; it comes from the sin of the Tree of Knowledge. When the first man ate from the Tree of Knowledge, there was a certain poison there, and he ate this poison and poisoned all of humanity. But we must emerge from this poison; it is forbidden to become addicted to this poison; it is forbidden to let this poison pull us. A person must shed his snake body, his mishka d'chivya, because his body is actually the body of the Satan. Hashem created for him garments of skin, garments of the Satan (pride and desires). And in truth, the true tzaddikim have merited to nullify this snake body through their holy service."

Drawing close to the tzaddik shows a person his character traits

"Therefore, our Rebbe (Nachman) says (Torah 10) that the advice given to nullify pride is drawing close to the tzaddikim. Because the moment a person draws close to the true tzaddik, he immediately sees where he stands in the rectification of character traits, and he begins to hate his evil, to hate the desires; he will no longer want it, or at the very least, he will not make the desires a 'way of life.' He will be ashamed of himself, he will cry over it, and he will perform teshuvah. And not like those people who make desires a 'way of life'; instead of being ashamed of it, on the contrary, they boast about it, they value it. If people would believe in the tzaddikim and draw close to them and listen to their voices, then they would merit to emerge from all their evil, from all their desires, and be completely purified."

Courtesy of Tzameh Nafshi

Photo gallery from the Mezuzah placement of the Gaon and Tzaddik, Rav Eliezer Berland shlit"a, at the home of Rabbi Nir Yazi in Pisgat Ze'ev, Jerusalem.