Dear friends,
Our trip back from the States ended up being a 22-hour odyssey, so when Shabbos came around, my husband suggested something that we had never done since the bad old days of Covid. We would have a Shabbos without any other people to light up our table. Friday nightand Shabbos day were so quiet and so relaxed that by the time the third meal came around, we had enough serenity. He went down to the Boston shul, and I headed to Breslov. I loved every moment.
Rav Atiya explained some of the more difficult passages of Likutey Moharan, which is not an easy read by anyone’s standards. He quoted Rebbe Nachman as saying that much of our confusion comes from the fact that we spoke about not going to the right or the left.” The same terminology is used when the Torah tells us that we shall listen to the wise men of our times and not stray “to the right or to the left.”
The Torah often uses anthropomorphisms (what a gevaldik word! 17 letters!), which means using human descriptions to give us insight into Hashem, whose infinity makes Him beyond genuine description. One of the symbols used is “right,” symbolizing the stronger arm (an arm being the means of bringing your thoughts or plans into action), and “left” being the less dominant arm.
The stronger “arm” – the means that Hashem uses primarily – is His desire to give. The left is the “arm” that He uses to hold back His giving (by being more concealed and challenging us with life’s struggles and difficulties) in order to allow each of us to partner with Him by using our challenges as means of self-actualization. It doesn’t always feel great… and isn’t always easy.
When you go too much to the “right” you end up saying yes, and giving what shouldn’t be given. Going left, and being strong can also go wrong when you fight the wrong battles and devote yourself to the wrong challenges; What that means concretely is either extreme leaves you less than you wish you were, and at best, confused. The Torah sages are meant to help you maintain this balance by their erudition and the example of living Torah that they set.
What does this have to do with anything?
I sat next to the Rebbetzin who told me what this means in real life terms. Her father had a sudden incidence of heart failure. The people around him called Hatzalah, the emergency volunteers who came instantly. They took his vital signs, looked at him, and told the relatives that as far as they could see, it was over.
Nonetheless, they attached him to a defibrillator. It did its magic instantly. In a short time, he literally got up. It was, she told me, like witnessing the dead come to life. Later, he made a seudah to publicly thank Hashem for what all of the medical people described as a miracle. Here is what he said:
Being alive is Hashem allowing you to be here, in this world as a gift He gives you second by second. It’s not just a matter of being born – it is a gift that is constantly renewed. What that means is that if you do a mitzvah, you are redeeming the life force of that moment,
Imagine yourself a girl for whom tznius is a jump. You are getting married and choosing a gown. You suddenly realize that the moment you put on your tznius gown, you are changing eternity, since those hours and moments are part of the great whole that we call reality. Even if the next day you revert to dressing with no tznius, the moment you were tznius doesn’t disappear.
The trick in getting it right is not going with your heart when it tells you to “go right” or when it tells you to “go left.” You try to find the place where truth, not human subjectivity, is at least for the moment what is guiding you.
Elul is a time for looking over your life. This process means looking for both times you said no when there was room for a compassionate yes, and times when you said yes when you could have had the courage to say no. The commitment to stay centered is what teshuvah is all about.
This may sound heavy, but the truth is that your soul wants the center, not the distortions. The soul, an aspect of Hashem, is hard to grasp by its nature. It has three “garments”: thought, speech, and action which give you access to knowing yourself and to knowing other people.
When you judge yourself, realize that if you are far from the center in some aspect of your life, it is only the garment that you see. Your essential and real self never moves far from the center.
Elul is a time of forgiveness. When you see other people’s garments, don’t confuse them with their essence.
Love,
Tziporah
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