Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
Rav Wolbe, in his sefer Alei Shor (vol 1, page 141) discusses what he calls Yediat Atzmo/knowledge of yourself. We spoke yesterday about how learning oneself is like learning any other sefer- there's depth to it. So how do you get to know yourself? He says there's no one that can teach it to you. It's something that you have to experience. Just knowing that you have some good middot and bad middot is not called knowing yourself. When your eyes are open and you start to realize all the different biases and all the different vested interests that you have, and all of the different, we'll call it almost negativity that you have in you, that is knowing yourself. There's a lot going on inside of you.
There are parts of us that we’re really uncomfortable acknowledging to ourselves, but that's our job in life. Sometimes the darker side of a person shows, but the darker side is there in everybody. Some people are willing to acknowledge and work with it, and some people are not. Rav Wolbe quotes an unnamed philosopher who says that when you get to really know yourself, it’s like going into Gehinom while you're still alive.
That means it's obviously very painful to look at who you really are. A person likes to think he’s a sadik or at least a Benoni…but to realize that you have real negativity… like David Hamelech said, “Kol HaAdam kozev/the entire person is a lie.”
We are close to Hoshana Raba, and in a class about Hoshana Raba, I mentioned a sefer Yismach Yisrael, which says that Hoshana Raba is called the Day of the Arava-
Of course, we bang, the Arava on the ground. But who is the Arava? We know there are four species-the Arava is the one that has no taste and no smell. He says, the goal of the holiday Succot is to reach the understanding that I am the Arava.
I thought I was the Etrog, or at least the Lulav..maybe I was the Hasadim?
No. You’re the Arava.
The first step to change is to realize that I have negativity inside of me.
Rav Wolbe gives the the following mashal: Imagine you have a good friend and someone that really doesn't like you and these two people are having a discussion. Every time the friend mentions how good you are, the enemy says, “No, that's not true. He didn't do it for that reason, he had a vested interest…. etc.”
What would your reaction be if you heard this conversion about yourself… “…He gave charity because he wanted to show off… He did xyz because he was interested in bettering his own position….etc”
On he goes, finding fault with with every single thing you do. What is your reaction going to be? Are you going to be in shock that this enemy is saying all this negativity?
Are you going to be angry at the fact that no one's sticking up for you? Are you going to feel bad that you weren't able to have a better image? He says, a person who really knows himself will say, very serenely, “Everything that the enemy said is true. There's nothing that I don't already know about myself. Yes, I have those qualities. I'm sometimes lazy, I'm sometimes arrogant, and I'm sometimes showy….etc”
Certain people, he says, live in an imaginary world, where they want to think of themselves, and project themselves, as perfect. But knowing yourself means you realize and recognize what's going on inside of you. And there's a lot going on inside of us. Like we said, we are a very deep book. It's not all bad, it's not all good, but there's a lot going on inside of us.
The first step to changing yourself is called recognizing yourself.
If you never realized or understood what's going on, you'll go through your life very serenely and you'll do some good deeds, and some bad deeds, but you'll never be able to truly work on yourself if you don't realize there's something to work on, or anything to fix.
Have a wonderful day.