26 Oct A MESSAGE TO THE DOUBTERS

With seven gold
medals, including three at the
recent Tokyo
O l y m p i c s ,
swimmer Penny
Oleksiak is Canada’s most decorated Olympian.
But not everyone always believed in
her. Following her recent success,
she tweeted, “I want to thank that
teacher in high school who told me
to stop swimming to focus on school
(because) swimming wouldn’t get
me anywhere. This is what dreams
are made of.” She followed it up by
sharing, “Also in reference to my
last tweet – no shade at all towards
teachers in general, my sister is a
teacher and I see her inspiring kids
every day. Most of my teachers saw
the vision and pushed me towards it.
That one who constantly dragged
me down though, WOAT (Worst of
All-Time).”
A friend of mine recently shared
with me that in high school, he had
an administrator who didn’t believe
in him and regularly made that
known. When he told the administrator that he was going to study
hospitality, he asked, “Do you plan
on being a bartender for the rest of
your life?” Today, my friend doesn’t
tend bar, he tends to the Jewish people and is a successful Jewish communal professional making a difference every day. I shudder to think
of what he and we would be missing
out on had he listened to this educator instead of those who encouraged
him.
Many of us have a WOAT influence
in our lives. If it’s not a teacher, a
family member or a colleague, it is a
voice of negativity and doubt in our
own head. It tells us, “You are imperfect, you have shortcomings and
deficiencies, you aren’t the smartest,
you are not the best looking, the
most creative, and will never be the
most successful. You have made
mistakes, underachieved, set goals
that you failed to realize, and you
will never amount to anything.”
That voice can weigh us down, hold
us back, or cause us to give up on
our dreams and aspirations. But here
is the catch. That person or that
voice only holds us back if we listen
to it, give it attention or consideration. Like Penny Oleksiak or my
hospitable friend, we can replace the
WOAT with a GOAT (Greatest of
all Time) person or inner voice to
listen to instead, one who believes
in us, propels, and pushes us and
lifts us to aspire to become the best
version of ourselves.
In our Parsha, just moments before
Sedom is destroyed, the angel says
to Lot, “Run for your life. Do not
look behind you, nor stop anywhere
in the Plain; flee to the hills, lest you
be swept away.” Despite the warning of the angel, Lot’s wife couldn’t
help herself. She looked and became a pillar of salt. In fact, the
Jewish historian Josephus claimed
to have seen the pillar of salt which
was Lot’s wife.
Why were they warned not to look
back? The classic answer is that Lot
and his family weren’t righteous and
in truth deserved to suffer the same
punishment as Sedom. They
weren’t worthy of witnessing the
downfall and were therefore told not
to look.
The Divrei Shmuel, Rav Shmuel
Weinberg of Slonim, gives a different perspective. In telling Lot
and his family, “Don’t look
back,” the angel was teaching a
fundamental lesson in life. When
you have made mistakes, when
you underachieved or came up
short, don’t look back, always
look forward. Don’t focus on
your past and beat yourself up,
doesn’t listen to voices of negativity and defeatism, look to the
future and the opportunities it
presents. Obviously, we need to
understand what drove the mistakes we made and feel remorseful for them, but we cannot and
must not ruminate on them.
Lot’s wife turned around. Whether she was nostalgic for her sinful past or simply felt guilty
about it, either way she turned
into salt. Salt was not a random
vehicle for this punishment. Salt,
by its very nature, preserves and
keeps what it is spread on intact.
It inhibits the ability to grow, to
change, or to move forward.
Lot’s wife literally got stuck in
her past. She couldn’t move past
it, couldn’t look forward, and
didn’t let herself start again.
This is the classic methodology
of our yetzer harah, the self-destructive voice we all confront.
We tend to harp on our mess-ups
and mistakes, and we tell ourselves we are incapable, unworthy. We therefore experience yeiush, we give up on becoming better
at whatever we want to improve.
Indeed, we spend a lot of time
dwelling on the failures from our
past. Research shows that at least
70% of the time we think about the
past, we only relive the negative aspects of our lives.
But according to psychologists at
Yale and the University of California, obsessing over a mistake not
only won’t change the past but it
will make it worse. Their study
shows that living a mistake over and
over impairs our problem-solving
abilities. It leads to increased negative thoughts and depression. It even
erodes our support network because
no one wants to hear from the person who can’t let things go. Essentially, dwelling on past mistakes
puts us in, and keeps us in, a bad
state, which is of course the very
thing we’re trying to get out of.
But moving on and silencing the
WOAT in us sounds easier than
done. Many who would never bully
someone else still bully themselves
with negative thoughts. We tend to
beat ourselves up and harp on things
we could have or should have done
differently. But that thinking sabotages our very future and forfeits our
present.
This is what we daven for every
evening when we ask Hashem in
Maariv, haseir Satan milfaneinu
u’mei’achareinu, remove the Satan
from before us and from after us.
Why would we confront a Satan
from behind us? It is critical to pray
that we not only find the strength
and will to overcome our urges and
temptations when we confront them,
but that if we do fail, we can put it
behind us and move on, not harp or
get stuck. Each night, as we reflect
on the day that was, including bad
choices or uncomfortable mistakes,
we pray to have the strength and
conviction to hear the GOAT in us,
not the WOAT in us.