Q:
How can one convince a man who watches movies and television shows to stop doing so?
A:
Take him out in the street, to a sewer, and dip a cup into the sewage. As it’s rushing from the sidewalk into the sewer you pick up a cup of sewage water and say to him, “L’chaim my friend, take a drink.” So he says, “I can’t drink that; it’s dirty water.” And you tell him, “It’s much cleaner than what you drink everyday from your television.” Because watching television means that you’re pouring the dirtiest kind of filth into your mind. Besides for atheism in the brain, the worst thing that can happen to a man is if he gets water on the brain. If he gets sewage on the brain then there’s no hope for him! Television today is poison. Anybody with a bit of understanding knows that if he wants to have any hope of coming to the next world, it won’t happen if he’s a television watcher.
It says אלקי נשמה שנתת בי טהורה היא – “You gave me a pure soul.” And so, you’re supposed to return it to Hashem at least how you got it. The truth is you should make it better. But at least the way you received it, you should give it back to Him.
And so Hakodosh Boruch Hu is going to be pretty angry when you return the soul to Him and it smells bad; waterlogged with sewage. Because, the way a man dies that’s the way he’s going to remain forever. If a man leaves this world with a soul that’s putrefied with television garbage, so he’ll have to live with it all his life forever and ever for the next million years. That’s a principle, “The way a man leaves this world,” the Rambam says in Avos, “that’s how he’s going to remain forever.” That’s why it’s important to purify the mind and put into it as much kedusha as you can, because that’s what you’re going to exist with forever and ever.
TAPE # 613
