The Ultimate Solution

In Part 1 – The Secret Weapon – I explained that the truth is that you are a soul, which is a part of G-d, and is absolutely only good, just like G-d! The bad has nothing to do with you whatsoever!  

Now, I want to go further and explain in more detail how to use this knowledge in your everyday life to fight the Evil Inclination and win! Which means, to connect to the good inside of you and your holy soul and use the awesome and incredible power of your soul to truly purify yourself and make your external deeds also good and worthy. 

The key is to recognize that G-d loves you and is full of love and mercy towards you. He created the Evil Inclination, and He knows how powerful it is. He doesn’t let go of even the tiniest sin – you must do teshuva, apologize, regret, and fix what you did to the best of your abilities. But when you come to Him asking for His help, praying to do better in the future – know that He accepts you with open arms full of love and understanding! He wants you to succeed – even more than you do! 

G-d is loving, patient and merciful – even more so with someone who is genuinely trying to improve and coming to Him every day in personal prayer, doing a full spiritual accounting and asking for help for the future. He doesn’t expect us to change overnight, and He is so proud of every step we take! Just like a parent would never get angry and hit a baby taking its first steps, but instead, is full of love and encouragement, even when the baby falls – so too Hashem.  

So – if G-d wants you to be holy, good and perfect – and you are your soul, which only wants to be holy, good and perfect – what goes wrong? And how do we fix it? 

The problem is only that you haven’t prayed enough for Hashem’s help! The Gemara says that if Hashem doesn’t help a person, he alone cannot overcome his Evil Inclination. Hashem built it into the equation that you need His help! Just ask!  

The whole point of the sin is not to crush you and make your despair of yourself and your potential, or your goodness. It is only to get rid of your arrogance, lest you think that you can achieve anything – physically or spiritually – on your own. Lest you start believing that you are a perfect righteous person and become filled with arrogance, and then really put distance between yourself and Your Creator, G-d forbid. Rebbe Nachman teaches that anything that you receive without prayer, will eventually harm you. But when you pray for something, and you see just how much you cannot achieve it on your own, and eventually Hashem gives it to you – then you won’t be harmed by it or become arrogant over it. 

This is why everything is dependent on personal prayer. Hitbodedut gives you the vessels to actually change. Without it, even if you figure out what you are doing wrong, you won’t be able to fix it!  

You also can’t fix anything being sad, depressed, broken and full of despair, thinking that you have no way to fix yourself and your problems. Nor can you merit any salvations! These thoughts stem from the fact that you think you are something, and you are sad and angry that you aren’t living up to what you think you are.  

But really, you are nothing! You can’t do anything on your own – you are your ratzon, your will, your desire. You are your soul, which means you are full of desire to do good. But until you pray and express that desire to G-d, G-d won’t help you, and then you will surely fail. Not because you are bad – but only because you didn’t express the good and ask that Hashem bring it from potential into reality.  

So, go pray! It doesn’t matter that you don’t have the power to do fix yourself – go request from the One Who does have the power, knowing that Hashem loves you and already wants to give you everything you want! You don’t have to convince Him; you just have to create the vessels to receive the abundance that He already wants to shower on you.  

Therefore, to believe in yourself means: To believe in G-d's mercy, that He loves you and wants to help you, and that you are only good, and you only sinned because you didn’t pray enough. Therefore, you know that you can achieve anything with prayer – and you won’t stop praying until you achieve what you want! 

This is the foundation of everything and the ultimate solution for everything. Fixed! Done!  

The only thing you must do is pray with this emuna in yourself, and with the emuna in Hashem that He loves you and already wants to give to you.  

Prayers are accepted according to their emuna. Now that you are praying with perfect emuna – the prayers are accepted!