I recently became the victim of identity fraud. It started with my personal credit card. Then the Chabad credit card. Then PayPal.
Thousands of dollars of fraudulent charges on every platform. Things I would never buy in a million years.
Then my stockbroker called me asking if I had approved a $2,000 transaction. I hadn’t.
And then, at 4:00 in the morning, my Gmail account was compromised and it became clear that someone was trying to hack into my life piece by piece.
It became all-consuming. I spent days changing my passwords and then changing them again. I spent hours on the phone with multiple banks. I froze accounts. I reset all my authentication systems.
Ironically, some of the passwords I set up were so long and complicated that I struggled to remember them myself!
When I began to emerge from the chaos, I realized that there’s an important lesson here: If banks and emails and stock accounts need protection, how much more does the soul require safeguards?
Fraud isn’t limited to the financial realm. There’s spiritual fraud too. The yetzer hara worms its way in quietly, one step at a time, breaking through one railguard before moving on to the next. One bad influence. One compromise. One distraction.
It happens sneakily, subtly, until eventually we wake up one day and realize that we’ve been compromised. Our peace, our innocence, our clarity, our connection to G-d, have all been chiseled away at.
But just like my bank accounts and email addresses, Judaism gives us spiritual authentication.
When we set aside time each morning to pray and acknowledge G-d’s presence in our lives, we fortify ourselves.
When we attend a Torah class, we build another layer of protection.
When we light candles and observe Shabbat, we reinforce our safeguards.
With every mitzvah we do, every safeguard we set up, we are making priceless deposits into our spiritual bank account, which, unlike a physical one, can never be hacked.
This is how we set up the soul’s two-factor authentication and protect ourselves from becoming spiritually hacked by a world full of temptation.