Craving Kovod
Whatever you do a little more is going to find you a great deal more favor in the Eyes of Hakodosh Boruch Hu. And when He looks upon you with favor, that’s the greatest honor that you can ever get.
Now, don’t say you don’t care about kovod. If a person says, “I don’t care for kovod,” he’s a fool. He’s a liar too. It’s not true. You want kovod. You want it tremendously! You crave it!
There are some people who even give their lives in order to get kovod. In battle, some soldiers run ahead and risk their lives; they’re willing to be killed in the hope that maybe someplace in the Bronx, they’ll put up a statue commemorating his heroism. What happens? There’s a statue of a soldier now in the middle of a park in the South Bronx. Birds sit there on his head and leave their droppings. At night homeless goyim come there and they urinate on the statue.
How could it be that people, good people, give up their lives for that?! The answer is that among the secrets of the mind is the intense craving for glory, for kavod. If you study human nature, you'll see that the desire for honor, for appreciation, is perhaps the greatest drive of all in everything they do. Everybody wants kovod! It’s a fire that burns in the human soul.
Propelled By Your Cravings
And it was Hashem who kindled that fire. He says, “You should desire kovod. You should want kovod; absolutely! Only you should want the right kind of kovod; statues are nothing! You should want kovod from Me!
And for that you have to want to excel. He put that desire into the mind of men so that they should desire to excel, to become great, to be a step ahead of those around them. You have to have that feeling that you want to make progress. “I cannot be like the people around me who are stagnant. I cannot lose my life in this crowd. I don’t want to merely go along with the yoke of habit on my shoulders and be satisfied with the life of a decent personality, of a loyal Jew.“
