(Translating) If you work hard for your connection, then you can trust that connection. If you do not work hard for your connection, don’t trust that connection.

At the time of the splitting of the sea, they received a tremendous connection to the Light. It was greater than the greatest prophets. There are tremendous revelations, and then immediately afterwards you find people falling.

This is the key. If we do not work, the Light will not stay. We are given a gift in these 7 weeks — through the difficulty of that earning we can trust the Light will remain with us forever.

These 7 weeks are about work. It’s a simple idea, and we might lose it. I guarantee if you do this small thing, it can change your life. Very often when we look at our spiritual work, we have a checklist in our minds. As long as we are doing a certain level of connections, we are happy.

What Pesach teaches us — an understanding that is available for us today — is that if it is not difficult to do the work you are doing, then you are not earning the Light. We can make a connection like the first day of Pesach, but we can lose that Light.

What I try to do every day is count the small things I’ve done, not the amount of connections. I am blessed with this work. If I wanted to be silly I could say I live a spiritual life. It’s not about making the connections, it’s about doing the difficult work. I think about the small things, how many times a day did I do something I did not want to do.

I’ll share an example. A couple of weeks ago, Mark, a friend in LA, asked me to put up a mezuzah on Sunday. My natural inclination was to take the kids to the park first and do it later. I didn’t think it mattered to him what time I did it, but it made a difference to me. I didn’t want to do it right then. I’ll use another example. I was working in the house and my wife asked me to help one of my kids, who is being potty trained, to go to the bathroom. She was in the kitchen, I was studying. Why couldn’t’ she do this? I tried to remind myself to go. Not because it’s important for my wife, or my kid, but because it’s important for me. This changes everything.

Every day we are asked to do things we don’t want to do. It’s not about doing them and being upset about it, but about being so excited about knowing this is the key — the small tiny unimportant things that we do not want to do are the key to true transformation. If we make connections that are all what we want to do, we are not going to earn or keep the Light.

(from a recent lecture)
I hope to remember and take out of this, even with all my connections, that this is the key. Make sure at the end of every day you can count a few things, tiny things, that you did that were not important to anyone, but that you know are the path to true transformation. This is the path to holding onto the energy we were given at Pesach, the path to true transformation.