Ivdu et Hashem B’Simchah. “Worship God with joy.” Even during this time period of serious reflection, worship God with joy, not sadness.
Repentance – a thoughtful process of self-assessment of one’s faults and shortcomings – can be depressing. I’m still mired in the same issues as last year. The situation is hopeless, one feels.
That isn’t the task – to feel hopeless. The Piaseczner Rav, in a work entitled Hovat HaTalmidim, “The Responsibility of the Students,” outlines some common human faults and ways of overcoming them. He pauses to explain the delicate balance of emotion involved in such self-improvement:
“Do not become saddened, young one of Israel, and do not let your heart drop inside you from the enormous responsibility, for sadness is itself a bad trait which destroys the mind and the heart, and even leads to laziness. “
Instead of sadness, the Piaseczner Rav proposes a kind of gentle motivating worry -- an awareness of one’s enormous potential and of one’s responsibility to fulfill that potential. He paints a picture that expresses the difference between sadness and this state of heightened concern. The person who is sad is like one who has lost his fortune and has no hope of ever retrieving it. He is despairing and depressed. Not so one who knows that there is treasure buried deep, deep under ground. He feels a gnawing urgency to begin the work and a constant worry about how to dig and reach the treasure, but the worry merely propels him to action; he remains essentially positive about his future.
Despair has no role in repentance. On the contrary, one needs to feel inspired and secure that there is indeed a treasure buried deep deep inside oneself and that it is just a matter of work to retrieve it.
Rosh HaShanah is a time of inspiration, not despair. The call of the shofar is not a cry of sadness, but a call to arousal and action, galvanizing the people like the ancient trumpet call to war; there is energy and optimism in this call.
You will be punished, said last week’s parsha, for “not worshipping God with joy,” tahat asher lo avadeta et Hashem Elokekha besimchah. Sadness and despair, as the Piaseczner Rav says, lead to non-action. What we are looking for this time of year is a joyful optimism that inspires us and gives us the energy to do the digging we need to do.
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Thanks for providing this very important perspective. It will help guide me during the upcoming self-assessment period. Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova.
ReplyDeleteGreat.
ReplyDeleteYou define repentance as a thoughtful process of self-assessment of one’s faults and shortcomings. But there's also a kind of bitul, an abandonment of our selves to G-d, where we negate our selves to allow G-d in. That seems like more of a passionate experience.
I wonder if these are different things, or how they are related.