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Date Posted: 21:37:27 01/15/13 Tue
Author: t
Subject: fb286




#701 It's Easier to Feel Self-Confident When You are In a Positive State of Mind

Your state of mind impacts your self-confidence. When you are feeling joyful or happy, you are more optimistic and feel better about yourself. In a good state of mind, your self-confidence will rise.

Make it a habit to be more grateful and more appreciative of all the gifts the Creator has bestowed upon you in the past and continues bestowing in the present.

While one does not need to be happy to experience self-confidence, it helps. It's so much easier for a master of happiness and joy to be self-confident. Every moment of happiness and joy is added to your mental library. You are always in the right time and place to improve yourself.

(Self-confidence, chapter 19: Artscroll Publications)


See Rabbi Pliskin's new book "Self-Confidence"





5 Shevat
Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter (1847-1905), leader of the Ger chassidic dynasty. Rabbi Alter is better known as the "Sfas Emes," the title of his book of insights into the Bible, Jewish thought and holidays. Sfas Emes was orphaned as a baby and raised by his grandfather, the saintly Chiddushei HaRim. At age 23, Sfas Emes was selected by the chassidim to become their "rebbe," or spiritual leader. He built up Ger as the largest chassidic group in Poland prior to the Holocaust, numbering 250,000. The son of Sfas Emes escaped the Nazis, and came to Israel, where he oversaw the rebuilding of the Ger community, which remains vibrant till today.




5 Shevat

When your enemy falls, do not rejoice (Proverbs 24:17).


The Torah explicitly forbids taking revenge, or when doing a favor to someone who had denied your request, to say, "You see, I am not like you. I am doing you a favor even though you refused me when I needed your help."
Solomon goes one step further. He states that passive revenge is also wrong. Even if your enemies have come to grief without your contributing to it in any way, you should not enjoy their downfall.
Solomon's father David was the victim of a ruthless rebellion led by another son, Avshalom, who drove him from the land. As David was in the process of quelling the rebellion, Avshalom was killed. Although the son had been his father's mortal enemy, David grieved bitterly for him, going so far as to say, "Would that I had died instead of you" (II Samuel 19:1). He was of course, feeling the paternal love which can prevail over all other emotions.
While it is not realistic to expect anyone to grieve over an enemy's misfortune as a father might grieve over the misfortune of a defiant son, we can have enough compassion for other human beings to at least not rejoice in their downfall, even if they were our enemies.


Today I shall ...
...
try to overcome any natural tendency to passive revenge, and have enough compassion even toward my enemies to avoid rejoicing in their downfall.


See more books by Rabbi Abraham Twerski at Artscroll.com



5 Shevat

Handicap: Why?
A woman in our neighborhood has spina bifida. It's so heart-breaking to see. And it has me wondering: Why do some people suffer and others seem to have it so easy? It is not evenly divided between "good" people and "bad" people, as I can plainly see. So what determines this in God's eyes?
The Aish Rabbi Replies:
You are asking a very important question.
The Talmud (Yoma 35) tells the famous story of the sage Hillel. At the time, the head of the yeshiva wanted to make sure that the people who came to study Torah did so for the right reasons, and not for self-aggrandizement. So in order to test people's motivation, he charged money to enter the yeshiva.
Hillel was as poor and impoverished as they come. In the winter, he wanted so much to study that he climbed up to the roof by the skylight, and then became so enraptured with his studies that he didn't realize he'd become frozen in. The next morning it was dark in the study hall. So they looked up and saw a person's body. They brought him down and thawed him out.
The Talmud states: "Hillel obligates the poor." That means that Hillel takes away the excuse that we didn't accomplish what we were supposed to in life due to lack of money. Hillel serves as a beacon that even in poverty, one can still become the greatest of the great (which Hillel was).
Now let's ask a question: Was Hillel's poverty a punishment, or was it his opportunity to excel in life? The Talmud explains this as his reason for being here.
There are some souls that come to the earth for what Judaism calls a "Tikun". A Tikun means that the soul has to undergo certain experiences in order to help it maintain a state of perfection. This could be because of different experiences that the soul underwent in previous lifetimes. The soul achieves its tikun by being purified through the experience and/or by helping other people grow through exposure to the experience.
In order to appreciate this concept it is crucial to understand that the world that we live in is only a small speck of a person's life. Judaism looks at life in this world as preparation for the life in the World of Souls. Many of the unexplainable features of life in this world can be better understood if we realize this concept. The pain that one must undergo at times in this world to achieve greater perfection of the soul is worth the eternal pleasure that the soul experiences after the death of the body.
The bottom line: We don't know why a particular situation might be happening. We each have our own package. Each of us is put here for a particular purpose. Sometimes "suffering" may actually be the reason we were put here. Maybe this is, so to speak, our unique contribution.




Featured at Aish.com



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