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“It is true that without attaining the goal that I am working on, my acknowledge Your good kindness. I will return to You in
life is not a life. But I am doing what I am obligated to in the realm truth and with a whole heart….”
of prayer. And if that means that for years more I will continue to
sin and lust, to be a degraded person even if I do not technically And when he recognizes and understands clearly on
violate the Torah, and I will be addicted to all sorts of nonsense and his own that he can do teshuvah only by the power
foolishness, and I will transgress the will of Hashem, until Hashem of Hashem, the Father of compassion, only by
finally saves me—what alternative do I have?” Thus, we do not feel His power alone and in His vast compassion and
that our spiritual danger is, in the most basic sense, life-threatening.
kindness, he cries out from the depths of his heart, and
Our primary and most significant factor in doing the work of he attains salvation.
the will is that we do not see how transgressing Hashem’s will,
how being filled with cravings and addictions, constitutes an actual Then Hashem, may He be blessed, will have compassion
danger to our lives. Therefore, we do not cry out, “I need You to on him. In His vast compassion, He will have compassion
save me right now!” If we felt this threat to our lives, we would cry on him and illuminate him in His vast light, from the
out to Hashem and ask Him to save us here and now: “Without infinite light whose greatness is beyond investigation.
this, I am not alive! I cannot bear it any more. I cannot continue to And with the help of Hashem, may His name be
sin for another moment! This is a question of life and death, and I blessed, this person can in one moment emerge
need to be saved here and now, this very second. A second later from the dark and come to great light—literally
will be too late—there won’t be anyone left to save.” from one extreme to the other.

The intermediate conclusion is thus: only a person who feels that This principle that strong prayer regarding spiritual matters is
sinning endangers his life is able to cry out to Hashem and tell effective in a single moment, despite all of the spiritual rules, is
Hashem that he must be saved immediately, at this very moment.
expressed as well in the writings of Rabbi Eliezer Dessler (from Kovetz
Shem Ushe’eirit, p. 175, 176):
Learning from Our Forefathers
…The second way [of battling against the evil
It does not suffice to have a general feeling that the spiritual inclination] is the way of prayer, the way of “a person
danger is life-threatening. We must feel and visualize in the who acquires his world in one hour.” That is the direct
greatest detail that our spiritual danger—i.e., our sin, craving way for a person to come close to Hashem, may He
or addiction—is a tangible and immediate threat to our lives. We be blessed, even though he has still not rectified the
should think about the examples that Rabbi Nachman described. obtuseness of his heart. This is explained in the Gemara
We should try to enter into the heart of a person who is hanging by in the story of R. Eliezer ben Durdiya, who did teshuvah
his hands from a wall, and then cry out to Hashem.
and clung to Hashem until his soul left his body as he
In the Torah reading of Beshalach, the midrash describes how wept….
the children of Israel stood before the Sea of Reeds in terrible
distress, with the sea before them, the snake and scorpion-infested Rabbi Dessler tells the entire story and emphasizes that R. Durdiya
wilderness on each side, and behind them the host of Egypt, which attained everything that he did because he “requested compassion.”
was three times their size, consisting of bloodthirsty and vengeful, And Rabbi Dessler concludes: