Part 8 - The Wolrd is Already at War With Us - so you need to Fight!

Instead of standing up to Edom spiritually, we allow ourselves to become even more infected with their culture. Western civilization separates religion and state. It proclaims independent secular values that are arbitrarily defined and dictated by man. On a deeper level, it sees a complete disconnect between the physical world we feel with our senses, and the spiritual world that we can only perceive with our neshamot (our souls).

No concept could be more antithetical, more abominable, or more utterly offensive to what it means to be a Jew. To a Jew, these ideals are anti-real.

Through Jewish eyes, the spiritual and the physical are intertwined. All physical actions are merely mirrors of what is going on the spiritual realms. Rabbi Nachman of Bretzlov went so far as to say that everything physical in this world is a representation of something spiritual. Every physical act has both physical and spiritual impacts. During the times of the Roman empire, the Jewish People were seeped in sin. Our sins went up to heaven, and the decree came down to earth. Exile soon followed. The same thing happened during the First Temple times, the times of the Judges, and while we sojourned in the dessert. To the Jewish reality, Hashem personally supervises over every act of His creation at every moment. Nothing goes overlooked and every action has a physical and spiritual consequence to it.

The West will tell you differently. We may talk a lot about family values, or about being one nation under G-d, but do we really take our King into consideration in our daily lives? Does the world? Too often, we pay G-d lip service, but we don’t acknowledge that while He is watching over us with every action we do, it is our responsibility to act as if we are standing before the King at every moment and try to always improve our behavior.
Modern media tells you that we have complete power to control our environment. The graphic content we see on TV implies that anything goes. The law states that as long as it is constitutional, you can say, hear, or do anything you want. There are hundreds of actions that are acceptable according to the law that go against everything holy.

Our forefathers lived during the Greek and Roman periods. They had to combat the hedonism all around them. What did they do when these decadent cultures tried to wipe out or faith? They openly rebelled. We are faced with the same challenge. Can’t we at least rebel against the mainstream culture with our daily actions? All of us, all of the Jewish people are doing nothing to combat the horrible influences around us. We talk about Tony Soprano and the Bada Bing without ever questioning if it is something we really should be watching. We talk about gangsta and hip hop rock and how great it would be to pull some this and get some that without ever realizing that we are speaking in profanities. We act as if our words, deeds, and thoughts are being monitored only by our friends.

The task that the prophet Bilaam failed to complete thousands of years ago, Paris Hilton, Brittney Spears and MTV have overwhelmingly succeeded in accomplishing. We need to take our souls back. Religious and not, we need to rediscover our own neshamot. In re-evaluating our day to day decisions in the area of our sexual conduct, we can reawaken the true strength of the Jewish spirit that is within all of us. Once we do, we will discover the true meaning of inner happiness, spiritual awareness, connection to our King in Heaven.

The Torah tells us that in the End of Times, all of the nations of the world will try to destroy the Children of Israel. As we speak, millions of Jews in Israel are under physical attack by the Children of Ishmael, and millions of Jews in Europe and North America are under intense spiritual attack by the forces of Edom. This could be why the Torah tells us that Moshiach will come in the merit of those who hold this mitzvah!

The battle has been identified, now it’s time to take a side and fight!

The first step is to regain control over our immediate surroundings. As hard as this step may be, it isn’t impossible. We have the freedom to make our own worlds. We can install free internet filters to our computer, have our spouses or friends create the passwords so we can’t override them. We have it in our power to limit what we see on TV. We have it in our power to control what pictures we post up or reading materials we have in our own homes. We can move our internet into a public area like a living room or a dining room. Using the internet in the privacy of your own bedroom is a deadly trap.

Sex and permissiveness infiltrated all levels of society like never before. It has never been commonplace for a man or a woman to have had relations with more than 8 people before they get married. The divorce rate has never stood at 50%. We have never lived in a world where just as many children have been born to a single parent as to a loving family. This has all been running rampant only over the last 40 years. This is all due to this particular sin.

The spiritual destruction has already set in. The physical destruction is following. On orders of the U.S. State department, Jews from all over the country are thrown out of their homes, and prevented from settling the Land of Israel. Even in the Golan Heights, which all political parties recognize as part of the State of Israel, government officials refust to allow people to settle there in anticipation of a future concession. Sacrifice for the settlement of the Land of Israel used to be a value that was top priority to the Jewish People. Standing firm on our core beliefs also used to be a principal value of the Jewish People. During the past 40 years, right in conjunction with the erosion of every basic sexual value, we have fallen apart. Israel and its leadership has become a vassal state of the American Republic. The Jewish people are victim to rabid anti-Semitism all throughout Europe. The Jewish leadership in America is generally silent. With more wealth than any Jewish community ever had, Jewish America has failed to send as much as 1% of itself to Israel to make Aliyah while 50% of the community has been wiped out by assimilation and intermarriage.

We need to stop this.

We can.

As Edom attacks us from within, and mosques all over the Arab world curse Israel and the Jewish people, we are surrounded. Is the war of the nations against Israel underway? Will we survive? How much of us will make it? How do we fight them? How do we win?

We win by strengthening the foundation of the relationship we have with Hashem. We win by fighting Edom on their turf by resisting their culture and hedonistic ways. We win by guarding the Brit and winning favor in Hashem’s eyes. I am not saying become a recluse. I am not saying that we need to spit on American culture. What I am saying is that there are certain parts of it that we don’t need to embrace. We don’t need to watch that much television. The average American watches 29 hours of TV per week. Assuming we each sleep 8 hours a day, that means one out of every four minutes we are awake, we watch TV. It also means that we spend the majority of our existence either watching TV or sleeping! There is so much in this world that we all pass up on each day. There are levels of reality and levels of spirituality that we never personally experience. One day, whether it is in this world, or right after we die, the blindfolds will be lifted from our eyes. We will be shown everything that we could have done in the world and how each individual action makes a tremendous impact on the other realms of the universe. When we realize this, we will deeply regret all of the time we could have done something more productive and didn’t. in the words of Rabbi Zecharia Wallarstein, “There are a billion people in the next world begging Hashem for another chance.”

By embracing a life of sexual morality you are not only saving yourself in this world and the next, you are protecting the Nation of Israel. You are serving your brothers and sisters at every moment. You are petitioning Hashem directly for His protection in the battles that lie ahead. How many of us have dreamed about becoming an Israeli soldier and valiantly taking that hill for the people of Israel. In truth, you don’t have to enlist to serve the Jewish People. You can make a stand by simply pushing away a tempting thought.

Weeks before Israel’s greatest battle, in 1967, the Lubavitcher Rebbe spoke to thousands of Jews, all frightened about Israel’s impending fate. He said:

"Your brothers and sisters who find themselves in the Holy Land, in Israel. God protects them and sends them His blessing and salvation to an even greater degree than usual. In order for them to be saved, and they will be saved from the current situation successfully. You, dear children, carry the special honor of helping them. Through studying an additional verse of Torah, and through loving your neighbor as yourself, to effect relatives, friends, and family. To use every opportunity to spread Torah and its commandments, Rabbi Shimon said, this saves every Jew, wherever he may be, from the hardships he may encounter. This will bring them God’s blessing to a greater degree; a success and salvation."

Like the Israelites who saw Amalek chasing behind them, like the Hasmoneans who looked eye to eye with the Greeks and fought with all their might, we are locked in a war to the death. G-d Willing, we will stay true to Hashem, to our Torah, and our special way of life to take part in a great physical and spiritual redemption.

The sin of spilling seed is compared to murder. How is that? How can one compare this act to killing a human being? Human seed is the seed of life. According to Kaballah, every drop of semen has a soul inside it. If you make a sincere effort to use this seed towards creating life, you are sanctifying the act of producing seed. You are attempting to create a body for that soul to dwell inside. Even if your wife is pregnant, or past the age of child birth, as long as you produce seed in a Kosher manner, it is a Holy act to make it. Each soul that is attached to every drop of semen will be elevated through your act. However, if you create seed through an illicit relationship, or through oral intercourse, or on your own, these souls will be ripped from the seed and fly around aimlessly. They will immediately get sucked up by the side of evil and endure great suffering. The side of evil uses spiritual shells, or klipot to suck up the souls and use their energy. Throughout our lifetime, these souls which endure constant suffering, due to our actions, bring great suffering upon us in this world and the next. These souls are considered as your offspring. Spilling seed is like killing your own children, Chas V’Shalom. This all comes straight from the Zohar. Around us, at all times, are thousands of angels and demons. There are many levels of reality that are going on around us at every moment.

These demons that have suck up our energy (the souls from our seed) taunt us with the worst torment possible. They act as a barrier between us and Hashem. They dull our senses. They destroy our sensitivity to perceiving spirituality. In this world, this is the most dangerous consequence of this sin. I can personally attest to this. Once I became Shmirat HaBrit and stopped spilling seed, I became a lot more sensitive to the spirituality all around me. There was so much of Hashem’s existence that I never felt before that connected to my soul the moment I took on this mitzvah.

Still, this sounds a little far-fetched. Think about it. Does your mind ever get a little cloudy after you masturbate? Do you feel tired all the time? Do you get feelings of lethargy often? Do prayer and Torah learning too often feel like chores? Do you read about great Jews learning 30 hours straight and you think to yourself, it’s not possible! Where does he get his energy from?

All of this comes from what we lose when we spill seed. The demons that took our children and these souls empower these souls to attack us in this manner.

But Demons? Souls without a host? I don’t see any of this?

It’s around you. We don’t physically see the spiritual worlds in this one but it does exist and it is all around us. There is a famous story about a great Rabbi who wanted to see everything that was around him. He didn’t want the spiritual blinders that protected him from perceiving what existed beyond his eyes. He prayed fervently, he learned Kabbalah intensely. One day, it happened. He saw everything around him, nothing was invisible. He saw spirits, he saw demons, he saw angels, he saw souls all hovering around him. The realities around him were too much. He soon went insane. It took tremendous effort of the Rabbis of his generation to close his eyes to these realities so he could emotionally heal.

With every ejaculation of semen, we exile hundreds of thousands of souls without a body to receive them. We cause immense harm to so many. Where there are limitations to what these captured souls can do in this world, they will be much less restrained to take out their vengeance on us in the next one. We are doing severe damage to ourselves and we don’t even know it.

The worst attack on us in this world is the desensitizing of our souls. As we are pulled further away from Hashem, we no longer fear sin. We are no longer aware of Who is watching over us at all times. Committing the spiritual atrocity of spilling seed even once in our lives is horrifying enough. We do it so many times, we don’t recognize the dangers of what we are doing. It’s kind of like a serial killer. The first time he kills, he is stunned at what he did. It is a traumatic experience. After he kills some more, it is no big deal. He has gone through the emotional ‘motions’ of the act so much, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal anymore. To the naked eye, killing, no matter how many times, is an atrocious act. You have to be sick to even consider wanting to kill, let alone a number of times. We not only pay for this sin through suffering, we pay for it in not being properly aware of the tsuva we can do to stop.

The Talmud states that the punishment for the sin of spilling seed is death at the hand of heaven. The Zohar states that this sin is so severe, there can be no tsuva for it.

If this is the case, then why isn’t anybody talking about this? How come there are never any articles, lectures, radio shows about this sin?

The answer is that too many of us are all doing it. From secular Jewish leaders to the religious. There are big parts of every community that have succumbed to the temptations of adultery, illicit relations, masturbation, and using our eyes and minds for sexual gratification. As a nation, we have become completely desensitized to the consequences of what we are doing. Among Jewish leadership, the “official line” has become “everyone is doing it, we can’t stop it, so we won’t try.” This is a direct result of everyone doing this so much, that we have all become so distant from fear of Hashem. When it comes to a discussion on the political situation in the Middle East, everybody comes from out of the woodwork to give their opinion. When it comes to the fate of the Jewish People, everybody has something to say. When the issue of sexual morality comes up, there are literally only a handful of people saying something. We are so far from the pure joy of guarding this mitzvah and being so close to Hashem, that we have forgotten what is at stake. We have left behind what we have lost and given up on trying to regain it.

David Fink is the Editor-in-Chief of the daily investment newsletter, Real Wealth Recon. In 2008, his Real Wealth portfolio MADE MONEY, outperforming the three major indices by 38%, and the average Hedge Fund by 25%. For $99 a year, you get David’s daily market commentary, instant emails for every trade he makes, total access to David’s portfolio, and a weekly review of the major articles published around the world. Why hand over your hard earned money to someone in a suit saying “trust me.” Keep your money and trust yourself. Join the elite investors who are making money this year, and tell Wall Street: YOU’RE FIRED!