Yesterday we mentioned the concept of appreciating the important things and not getting stuck with the smaller things. We promised a beautiful thought from Rabbi Ades on this concept. Rabbi Ades said he was once on an airplane and not long after takeoff, he looked outside the window and he saw that all the cars and all the houses had shrunk. What was going on? Who shrunk the houses? Who shrunk the cars? Of course, this was just said in jest. The cars did not shrink, nor did the houses shrink, but rather the airplane was high up. And when you're very high up, things that used to be big are small. Rabbi Ades used that as a mashal for life. As long as a person is low down and has not yet matured and grown, and hasn’t become greater and higher, all the little things look big. But once you get on the plane and take off and are much higher, all those things that seemed to be very big become small. How do you become higher? The pasuk in Devarim 32,2 says כִּשְׂעִירִ֣ם עֲלֵי־דֶ֔שֶׁא Like wind upon the grass, and Rashi says, just like the wind strengthens the grass, so too the words of Torah lift up and make great, those that learn them . Learning Torah, which is what we are doing now, causes us to become uplifted, above the small, mundane things. Rav Yerucham Levovitz uses a beautiful mashal that also illustrates this point. When children are young, little girls play with dolls. Some boys play with dolls as well, such as GI Joe, as some people will remember. A boy can be hooked on GI Joe, but he doesn't need to go to therapy to stop. Why not? The same question can be asked about a baby’s blanket. A baby may have a blanket that he's connected to. Why doesn’t he need therapy to stop using it? The answer is, he just grows up. No one has to struggle with discontinuing their play in the sandbox or playing Lego. You just grow up, and with growing up, these little things become meaningless. That's what learning Emuna and Bitachon does for us. We realize that we're not here forever, that there's an everlasting life and there is reward and punishment. We'd rather get the negative here than in the future world. And we’d rather have the positive in the future than get it here. With those proper Torah values, we're able to look at things differently. That is the concept of lifting yourself up. Like Rabbi Ades said, look out the window, and suddenly everything becomes small. The things that used to get you upset no longer do. The things that got you down no longer get you down. You wonder, Where'd that come from? How'd that happen? The answer is, You're growing up. You're maturing in your outlook on life, based on the Torah that you are learning . That's our job-to lift ourselves up. B’Ezrat Hashem, we will continue to lift ourselves up to even greater heights.