Today is the second day of Rosh Chodesh Adar, so we’ll continue with our theme of happiness, as that is the avodah/ service of the month of Adar.
Rav Chaim Vital, the principal student of the Arizal, wrote in his sefer Shaare Kedusha/Gates to Holiness, about the ways to reach holiness. He starts off by discussing various middot, and then explains that we have to conquer certain middot in order to serve Hashem properly.
He explains that man is made of four base materials:
אש, מים ,רוח ,עפר -fire, water, wind and dirt.
When making man, G-d put water and dirt together for the substance of man, then blew wind into him, and the fire gave us our body temperature. These are the four base materials of man, and because they are physical in nature, each element brings with it certain challenges that we have to overcome.
For today, we will discuss יסוד העפר the foundation of dust, and the negativity that comes from it - which is Sadness.
Dirt is the heaviest of the four materials. Fire goes up, wind is intangible, and water isn’t as heavy as dirt. Dirt is heavy.
If you want to know why you can’t get out of bed in the morning, and you feel tired, it’s because of your foundation of dirt, pulling you down. This causes sadness, laziness, bad moods and eventually stops you from keeping the Torah and mitzvot.
Sadness interferes with Avodat Hashem, in that when you’re down and depressed, it’s basically due to one of two things:
1-A feeling of lack of success in worldly matters (for example, feeling like don’t have the business you wanted, or the house you always wanted), which leads to the feeling that you haven’t “made it” in life. You’re down because you were not on the Fortune 500 list.
2 -- בהיות יסורים עליוYou have suffering. Even if you’re on the Fortune 500 list, your knees hurt! You have problems, so you’re sad, and so,
אינו שמח בחלקו בשם דבר
There is no happiness in anything
In Rav Chaim’s words,
עינו לא תשבע עושר:-you can never get enough.
This brings us down.
This is one of four fundamental challenges in life.
How do you beat it? You beat it by taking it head-on.
והשמחה התדירית בחלקו,
By being happy with your portion.
How?
כי כל דעבדין מן שמיא לטב,
By knowing that all we have is from G-d.
This can turn around your whole attitude
You won’t feel down just because you don’t have what “they” have,
And you won’t complain about your achy knees, because you’ll know they’re good for you.
That’s the power of Sameach B’helko- being happy with your lot
It’s the antidote to depression.
Furthermore, when you do a mitzvah with simcha, as David HaMelech says,
שש אנכי על אמרתך
I am elated when I fulfill Your words,
כמוצא שלל רב.
It’s like I found a treasure
With these attitudes of:
1- Recognizing that everything comes from G-d and everything G-d does is for the good,
2- Appreciating that you learned Torah, prayed, did a hessed etc, and realizing how precious every mitzvah is, this will charge you.
He discusses this at length.
He says the challenge of sadness: שער התחלת גרוי הסתת היצר הרע
It’s the gate of the beginning of the enticement of the Yetzer Hara.
It’s the Yetzer Hara’s first attack- he wants to get you down, and he says it goes back to the original sin of Adam and Chava. The Snake was trying to tell Adam and Chava that they were lacking things, and when they listened to him, it caused them further sadness and depression. As the pasuk says,
Adam’s punishment was that
בעצבון תאכלנה
He will eat it with depression
And Chava was told;
וכתיב (שם ט"ז) בעצב תלדי בנים,
With depression, you’ll have children
You’ll be down, and your life will be down, if you follow that track of chasing worldly pleasures and listening to the snake.
We can combat this by saying, “No. G-d put me in Gan Eden, He’s taking care of me, He gave me Mitzvot to keep.”
This is the way to combat that sadness.
This is a just a short dose, beH to be continued.
Have a wonderful day, and a Chodesh Tov.