Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic initiative for Mental Health Awareness. Yesterday, we spoke about a reframe on antisemitism and Jewish suffering at large.
Today, we're going to talk about reframing suffering in general. There's a sefer called Sefer HaYashar, which some attribute to Rabbenu Tam, a Rishon from 700-800 years ago. It’s accepted as a classic mussar sefer.
In the sixth gate, he talks about an important piece of information that will help a person through life. He says that life has challenges. That's just the nature of the beast. This is not a contradiction to bitachon. He says events happen to people, whether, in his words, a person is taken into captivity, heaven forbid, loses money, has problems with his children…experiences exile or disease. These things happen, and they can take a person out of his proper mindset and approach to life, in general and in serving Hashem.
What is a person supposed to do at that time? Of course, he says, he's supposed to strengthen his Emunah and stick to it. But he has to realize, “This is the condition of the covenant he has with God.”
That means part of serving Him means knowing that there are going to be challenges. Service doesn't mean that life is always smooth. If there are no challenges, there is no service. Therefore, life has tests. Avraham Avinu had 10 tests and we, his children, also have tests. Knowing this is very important, because a person can live life with the wrong attitude, thinking that life is supposed to be good, that life is not supposed to have any challenge or any problems. This doesn't mean that our problems will last forever, and it doesn't mean we're not going to rely on Hashem to get us out of our problems. But there are problems.
If a person thinks that life is supposed to be, “Row, row, row, your boat, gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream,” he’s in or for a big surprise when it's not so merry and it's not so dreamy. Then, when something goes wrong, you start saying, “Why me? Why is God picking on me? Why is God rejecting me? What's wrong with me? What did I do wrong?Am I guilty,” not understanding that that is the nature of the beast. That is what this world is all about.
Mesilat Yesharim says man is here to do Mitzvot, serve Hashem and to withstand tests. That's one third of religion- withstanding tests. That's what life is all about. As an old Arabic saying goes, A head without a headache is a head in the grave.
The Sefer HaYashar says, “This is the way a Sadik lives his life.” He knows this world is the world of things happening that he doesn't always like. The world is an obstacle course. The problem is that we don't realize that. Or maybe we do, but our children definitely don't. This is one of the things that three different rabbis mentioned at the Agudah Convention. This year they had a mental health pre-conference, and they all spoke about the same point, which is why it is that people suffer so much today mentally.
They said it's not so much the problems, but the fact that people don't think they should be having a problem. They're not dealing well with the fact that they have a problem. The problem itself is not the necessarily the issue. It's they're just not used to having a problem.
That's the deeper issue.
Of course, this is not for everybody, and I'm not targeting anybody.
But three different rabbis asked separately, without conferring with each other, why do we have so many divorces, lo alenu, early in marriage, which was not so heard of in the old days? And they all said the same thing. That children's lives today are so smooth and so easy. We no longer have what they call helicopter parents, now we have what they call snowplow parents, who smooth the way in front of their children, so that there are no bumps in the road. Then, when they finally do hit a bump in the road, they're so thrown by it that they don't know how to deal with it.
That's today's important lesson, that life is an obstacle course.
And once you know that, when you get to an obstacle, you won’t say, “Oh no! Why an obstacle?” Because you are on an obstacle course, and that's what happens on obstacle courses.
Have a wonderful day.