Dvar Torah for Elul

Based on Likutey Moharan 21

What do you do if someone is after you, if someone one wants, God forbid, to kill you? How can you save yourself?

For most of us reading this, such a situation is, thank God, never going to happen. On second thought, maybe, just maybe, it's already happening.

Most people tend to consider their spiritual challenges as being limited to the spiritual arena. Not that we are challenged only in our spiritual endeavors, like davening (praying), trying to perform a mitzvah or overcoming a temptation. We're challenged in our mundane affairs as well: will we "let slip" a piece of lashon hara (gossip), or take the extra change the cashier mistakenly gave us? No. It's not the challenges that we limit. It is their results. We consider the effects of the success or, God forbid, failure as being limited merely to the challenge at hand.

This is not the case.