Rivka Levy

The Narrow Bridge

Working on our Bad Middot

The foundation of everything

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So, this week is the penultimate week of counting the Omer, which means we’re in the week of Yesod, or foundation.

I was thinking about what connects to ‘foundation’, and two things came to me:

1) Childhood and our formative years, because like it or not, whatever formative experiences God gives us as children continue to shape our reactions, beliefs and personalities for the rest of our lives. That doesn’t mean that we’re stuck with all the negative stuff ad infinitum, God forbid, but it does mean that we need to be aware that every emotional and mental problem we usually have as adults, from the mildest to the most severe, is somehow rooted in, and connected to our childhoods.

I know – that’s a scary thought, isn’t it, especially once we ourselves have been given the job of ‘creating’ the childhood experiences of the next generation.

Over at the spiritualselfhelp.org website, you’ll find an article called: The Seven Cardinal Rules of Raising Happy, Healthy Kids, which lays out some fundamental guidelines for how to lay a strong foundation for our children.

2) Tzaddik, Yesod Olam, translated as ‘The Tzaddik, foundation of the world’. There’s been a lot of tzaddikim, or holy people throughout Jewish history, but only five have ever merited this special title:

  • Moshe Rabbenu
  • Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (RASHBI)
  • The Ari HaKodesh
  • The Baal Shem Tov (BESHT) and
  • Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

These special tzadikim all brought down some unique aspect of Torah, or daat (knowledge) to the world, that was completely hidden before they revealed it. By doing so, they completely changed the whole game plan, religiously, and remade the foundation of our existence, at least spiritually. (How’s that, for something impressive to stick on your CV?)

 

Last week, I went to visit RASHBI’s grave in Meron on Lag B’Omer, with a few hundred thousand other people.

 

It’s not an easy trip: 3 hours driving from Jerusalem; 1 hour commuting in from the Karmiel park and ride on the bus; 1 hour shlepping up to the grave (which is quite a walk even when it’s not boiling hot and you aren’t being jostled by thousands of other people and deafened by kosher trance music); 1 hour trying to get BACK ON THE BUS to the carpark (this is probably the most challenging part of the whole endeavour, as rugby rules apply, and anyone smaller, weaker, slower or female usually gets flattened by people who apparently never bought into the idea of queuing like civilised people); 1 hour back to the carpark; 4 hours driving back (as lots of traffic.)

I came back completely knackered, and to be honest, I wasn’t 100% sure why I’d gone – or why so many thousands of other people had gone, too, including pregnant women, small kids and old, old people.

But then today, I woke up feeling so much better than I’ve been feeling recently, and it brought back to me again the tremendous power of these tzadikim, the foundation of the world.

I got hot, deafened, tired and bemused at Meron. But apparently, I also got lit up with some tremendous spiritual strength without even knowing it. And that’s why people go back, year after year after year.

Kids and praying: Don’t force the issue

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A little while back, someone asked me what I do to get my kids to pray, if they don’t feel like it. I told her straight: absolutely nothing. If my kids aren’t in the mood to formally talk to the Creator of the World, that’s OK: they’re 11 and 14, respectively. They get forced to pray plenty of Amidahs in school, so they know how to do it. And when the time is right, I’m sure they are going to want to start praying a whole lot more than are right now.

I mean, how much did you want to pray when you were 14? When I was 14, praying was pretty much the last thing I wanted to do, and now I talk to God for an hour every day. (Which is an open miracle, and really nothing to do with me.)

Sure, I want my kids to be connected to Hashem, but forcing matters is only going to backfire.

Someone told me a few years’ back about their son, who was at a very serious Torah High School, where they learned a heck of a lot of gemara, and rigorously tested the students on what they were learning.

He came out of that school hating Torah.

How could he not? Cast your mind back to your school days: is there any subject that you enjoyed more after being pressured to cram for it just to score an ‘A’ on an exam? I don’t think so.

And it’s even more the case with matters of the soul, because when you force your kids to conform externally, and they go along with whatever mitzvah it is you’re pushing down their throat, on some level, you just completely killed the inner dimension of that mitzvah for them.

The reason I don’t force my kids to pray, is because I so badly WANT them to pray, when they get older. Praying, talking to God, is so often pretty much the only thing that gets me through my day. It’s an enormous spiritual gift, and one that I want to pass over to my kids. But not by nagging them, cajoling them, guilting them or bribing them to do it.

When they’re ready, it will come.

How do I know? Because while I don’t force my kids to pray, I certainly expect it of myself: I try and pray for my kids on a regular basis, whenever they seem to need it (which can be every day, sometimes.)

I’ve been paying into their ‘spiritual bank account’ for years’ already, and like I explained to them, when they’re ready to start banking their own prayers, they should hopefully find that they’ve already got a fairly large amount of spiritual credit to start off with.

It’s such an upside-down world, isn’t it? So many of us are trying to muddle through with precious little idea of what’s really right, or not, and there’s so much conflicting advice out there from ‘experts’ who talk a good game superficially, but actually don’t help you very much.

The exception to this rule in my life has been Rav Arush. Once I read his ‘Education with Love’, I just knew that all the other nonsense out there about ‘tough love’ and ‘forcing’ and ‘being strict’ and ‘manners’ was exactly that: nonsense.

You can’t force good character traits, you can only model them yourself, and hope your kids will follow suit. So if you really want your kids to pray – take the lead, and show them how to do it.

The exile of the soul

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I seem to be going through a pretty heavy time at the moment, spiritually. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, some years it feels like every day of the Omer is an ordeal you just have to get through, and learn the lessons from.

Some years it’s more obvious, some years less so, and this year – it’s completely in my face from the moment I wake up.

But God always prepares the balm before the blow, so at the same time as I’m being buffeted by severe doubts in my own efforts and capabilities, and also in God’s willingness to help me out of the pit I’ve fallen into, financially and spiritually, there’s Rav Ofer Erez, explaining why it’s actually all really OK, and exactly the way it’s meant to be.

Just today, I was listening to another dynamite class of his where he was talking about galut hanefesh¸ or the exile of the soul. In a nutshell, he explained that the main difficulty for our generation is that we all know what’s true: we’ve read the books, we’ve heard the news reports; we’ve done the research on Google – but we can’t actually get there.

So on the one hand, of course we know it’s bad to smoke, and bad to eat sugar, and terrible to eat margarine, and on the other hand mmmmm, yummy donuts…

Ditto with childrearing. Yes, we all know it’s terrible to criticise our offspring, and horrendous to feed them white pasta, and border-line neglect not to have deep conversations with them at least once a month. But then, who’s got the time, energy or patience for it to be any other way, especially these days?

The same is true in every area of our lives, from our marriages, to our earning abilities (make $100k a month, from home!) to our relationship with God. We can see how it could look, should look, has to look – and we just can’t reach it.

We don’t have the strength to talk to God every day. We don’t have the energy to try and hold our husband together while we ourselves are continually falling apart. We don’t have the motivation to keep hanging on for a miracle rescue, even though we really do know 100% that God can give us one in a second.

Why?

Because we’re stuck in ‘reality’, and our current ‘reality’ and truth don’t make good bedfellows.

Which is when you can get really broken, spiritually, unless you get clued-in about what’s really going on. What’s really going on is that God has set up the rules in this generation in such a way, that’s it impossible to win the game – unless you’ve got a big tzaddik behind you.

That’s the only way to do it, and Rav Ofer explained that both the Baal Shem Tov and Rebbe Nachman were talking about how it was going to be for our generation, more than 200 years’ ago.

Spiritually-crushed people can’t just go and uncrush themselves. They need outside help just to wake up in the morning, let alone to fight off their yetzers and start drinking green smoothies.

So if you’re caught in the gap between what you know to be true, and what you want to embody, and what is actually happening in your life, join the club. It’s the exile of the soul, we’re all in the same boat, and it’s going to take a tzaddik of the calibre of Rebbe Nachman or Moshe Rabbenu to spring us out of prison.

 

The week of netzach

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Today marks the first day of the week of Netzach in the counting of the Omer, which is roughly translated as ‘eternity’ or ‘victory’. Where the first three sefirot are fairly easy to understand and grasp, the next three in line: Netzach, Hod and Yesod, require more explanation, even at the more simple level.

Rabbi Yaacov Haber wrote a great book called Sefiros, that does a very good job of bringing down the deeper concepts related to each week of counting the Omer. This is a little of what he writes about Netzach:

“Netzach gives the long term view. It sees events as part of a much bigger story. For this reason, when bad things happen to righteous people, it’s a manifestation of netzach. Whenever God does long term chesed for someone which manifests itself in short term din, it’s called netzach….Netzach is about setting goals and making changes that will last.”

In the next post, I’ll have something for you from Rav Arush, that ties-in very neatly with the idea that ‘bad’ things are only happening us for some holy, often hidden, eternal good.

But for today, let me leave you with one of Rav Haber’s challenges, for the week of Netzach. He encourages us to:

“Formulate a mission statement for your life. Make a list of five things you would like to accomplish in the next twenty years.”

Rav Haber is much nicer than me, as he’s given you have a whole twenty years to work on this stuff, and I’d usually go the 20 minute route ☺

So take a bit of time this week, and think about what you want to accomplish in this world. What do you want to build? What do you want to grow? Who do you want to become? What do you want to leave behind you?

And if you do that, you won’t just be counting the omer, you’ll be living it.

This year’s bracelet

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A few years’ back, I discovered that it’s a big mitzvah for husbands to buy their wives jewellery before a major Jewish holiday, like Rosh Hashana, Pesach or Shavuot. I’m very machmir (stringent about keeping mitzvahs), so I told my husband to release his chequebook: it was time to go shopping.

As with most mitzvahs, it wasn’t so plain-sailing, at least at the beginning.

My husband came home with one duffo piece of jewellery after another: earrings that were way too big; a bracelet that literally drew blood; another bracelet that was very pretty, but looked like it was made of plastic beads (he’s still insisting they’re glass…)

And so on and so forth.

Last year, I decided I had enough of all the jewellery that wasn’t really ‘me’, and I decided I was going to pick my own stuff, and then just ask my husband to buy it. I picked a simple but very lovely bracelet and wore it happily for many months.

But then I realised something profound: each time my husband picked the jewellery for me, God used it to give me a clear message about where I was really holding in life.

The time I got the bracelet that was so sharp it drew blood, I was in a hyper-critical, judgemental mode of my life where ‘cutting remarks’ and ‘piercing comments’ were the order of the day.

The time I got the glass beads (that look like plastic) I was seriously conflicted about whether I should stay ‘real’ at all times, and thus be a lonely outcast, or whether it was OK, at least occasionally, to go into superficial, ‘plastic’ mode, so I’d still have someone (anyone…) to talk to.

The plastic beads showed up, and it took me a week or two, but then I got the message.

When I picked my own bracelet, it was gorgeous – but it was just jewellery. It didn’t have any deeper meaning attached.

So before Pesach, I told my husband he was free to buy me whatever he wanted (poor guy, talk about pressure) – so I added that I would LIKE whatever it was, and appreciate its inner dimension, even if I hated actually wearing it.

He showed up with a doozy of a bracelet.

Let’s be clear that it’s not my taste in about a million different ways, but because I let go of my ideas and cleared the path for God to send me what I really needed, God really responded in kind.

My husband told me the man in the shop had practically forced him to buy it (even slashing the price by 75% to fit our budget) and it was made with opal stones.

I have a gem book which tells you all the different properties of the many different stones, and this is what it said about opals:

“Opal amplifies traits and brings characteristics to the surface for transformation. Enhancing self-worth, it helps you to understand your full potential.”

This is what it said specifically about blue opals, like the ones in my bracelet: “Blue opal is an emotional soother that realigns to spiritual purpose. It resonates with the throat and can enhance communication.”

As I’ve written about elsewhere, I’d been having throat issues for ages, and the week before Pesach I actually lost my voice for a few days, so I was thrilled to bits with my blue opals.

I put the bracelet on for Seder night – and it’s barely left my wrist, since. Appearance-wise, it’s so not my taste. But God clued me in to the inner dimension of my jewellery, and as a result, I think it’s probably the best thing my husband ever bought me.