Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
We've mentioned SIMHA quite a few times in the past. We are a mental health organization for the Sephardic community in Brooklyn, and we help people navigate through therapy with referrals and case management. We also have an awareness division and an education division. One of the things we do is a rabbi training course. A group of approximately 10 rabbis gather once a week, for two and a half hours, over a six month period, for a course with Dr.
Shlomo Zimmerman.
Baruch Hashem, we've already graduated two groups and we're in the middle of our third. Beside their training, they also get supervision. It's a wonderful way of introducing rabbis to a certain awareness in mental health.
They've admittedly gained tremendously from it. Yesterday, we had a graduation group and different rabbis spoke and shared some of their feelings. Of course, rabbis are not therapists, and their speeches contained Divrei Torah. I'd like to share one of the beautiful Divrei Torah that I heard there, given by Rabbi Raymond Shamah, who lives in Lakewood, is a rabbi YDE and a teacher as well in Ilan.
He asked, in the name of the Steipler, what went wrong with the sin of the golden calf?
Moshe Rabbenu disappeared. They thought he died. They had a huge problem that tried to solve. So they got an intermediary, they got an Egel. The Kuzari says it was really no different than the Luchot coming down. They wanted something tangible. Of course, there's a difference between the Luchot or Mishkan, which were Divinely directed, versus your own personal solution of a golden calf. But what went wrong, as he quoted from the Steipler, was that they felt, “We have a huge problem, and this huge problem needs a huge solution right now.”
That was the mistake, because not every problem needs a solution right now.
That is an important concept. Quite often, when we have a problem, what adds to the problem is the stress and urgency that's involved. If we slow it down a bit, we realize the problem is not as severe as it might look. If we take a step back, that takes the pressure off. That takes the stress off, and we can start thinking a bit more. We can be a little more rational. That's why when a person comes to a therapist, a rabbi, or a friend, if they come in with a problem and you immediately put on your problem-solving cap, you're basically acknowledging and validating the severity of this problem- that we have to solve the problem. Slow down. Unless it's a medical emergency, we can take it slow. Nothing is going to be solved right now and no one's going to die right now. Usually, problems happen over a period of time. That feeling of urgency has to be ameliorated, and slowed down.
Even in medical emergencies, one of the things that Hatzalah people are trained in is to be calm and not panic. Slow it down. Of course, they're in an ambulance, and they're going fast, but they're not tripping over their feet.
This is a very important concept. Rav Wolbe once said in the name of Rav Yerucham Levovitz, that in the Bet Hamikdash, they didn’t make extra decrees. For example, Muktzeh- you can't touch or move a pencil on Shabbat because you may write with it. But laws like that might not have been in the Bet Hamikdash. Why? Because Kohanim are fast.
Rav Wolbe quoted his father-in-law Rav Avraham Grodzinsky saying, Kohanim are fast.
But if anything, that should cause more of a need for extra decrees, because when you do things impetuously and fast, that's when you get into trouble. And his answer was, their Zerizut was in their head, not in their feet. Zerizut in your feet means there's an urgent problem, let's run and shut our brains off.
But Zerizut in the brain means we're thinking the right way. We're actually slowing things down because we know that haste brings waste.
And if haste makes waste, the way to fix it is to slow down. But you can only slow it down if you don't turn it into an urgent problem. Slow it down. Going back to the golden calf, if they would've waited another day, the problem would've disappeared.
Have a wonderful day.