Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. We're continuing from yesterday, that people are brought up with a misconception that life is supposed to be smooth and easy, then when a bump in the road comes, they get thrown for a loop.
I heard an interesting thought from the famous Sarah Schenirer, at the beginning of the Bet Yaakov movement. She asked a question: In the Mizmor Beseter Elyon ( Tehilim 91) , it says, “
עַל־כַּפַּ֥יִם יִשָּׂא֑וּנְךָ פֶּן־תִּגֹּ֖ף בָּאֶ֣בֶן רַגְלֶֽךָ
He’ll pick you up on His palms Lest you stub your toe on a rock.”
The question is, Why do they have to pick you up? Why don't they just take away the rocks? And the answer is, you can't take away the rocks. Life has to have rocks. So how does one deal with those rocks?
Again, two or three of the rabbis that spoke at the Agudah convention made the same point. They said that when a person has an obstacle, they have to say, This is Hashem now telling me what I need to do.
That means that if somebody was learning in a Yeshiva or running his business, and then his wife needed to be on bedrest, because she's in her third month of pregnancy and the doctor says she needs to be in bed for two months, that's an obstacle. That's a challenge for your business, for your learning, or for whatever you're doing. But you know what God is telling you. You know what you need to do; you need to use this opportunity, obviously, to grow and to pick yourself up and overcome it.
It's what you need to do in life now. Obstacles are God's indicators of what needs to be done. You don't always know what needs to be done in life, but the obstacle is a call for action, whatever it may be, whatever that obstacle is. The challenges of today that we're going through in Israel are obstacles. People are using those obstacles to gain and grow and wonderful things are happening because of those obstacles, that might not have happened otherwise.
So again, this is an important reframe and proper way of looking at things. One of the rabbis said a very cute line. He said, we don't believe on people walking on water. You can't walk on water, you sink. But if there are large stones in the water, you walk on the stones and it's like you're walking on water. And that's what obstacles are. Obstacles are these large stones that you could walk on and go from place to place. So of course, we don't ask for them, and we don't want them. But when they come, and as we said yesterday, they will come, we have to be ready for them. We have to know these are opportunities for growth. It's when Hashem tells exactly what we need to do.
As the Ramban says, God knows our potential. Challenges and tests bring it out into action. There are people that we did not know how great they were until they were in a challenging situation!
And again, we don't ask for them, but we're not supposed to feel that we're bad, or that we've been abandoned, or have any of those thoughts that come to mind when a person's going through a challenging time. We'd love that everybody gets into the top school, gets married right away, has a child right away, their children all get into the right schools and so on and so forth.
But that's not life So much so that the Hovot Halevavot, in Shaar Bechina, talks about the different benefits in the world like the apple, the orange, the banana. But then he discusses to why there is such a thing as childhood diseases. I'm sure that it could be explained naturally- the easiest explanation is that their immune system is underdeveloped, and there's a high exposure to germs at school and childcare facilities and so on.
But that's just the external. The real reason, says the Hovot Halevavot, is that Hashem wants children to be raised with the fact that life has challenges. You're going to have the measles, you're going to have the mumps, etc. Life is not easy.
Now, Baruch Hashem, we don't have a lot of these things. I remember the mumps, I remember chickenpox.
I remember other things that we don't get anymore. The fact that you can take an aspirin and a Tylenol and avoid all those challenges, on one hand looks great, but we're training ourselves that everything is supposed to be smooth. We have air conditioning, we have conveniences. And we're not saying that they're going to go away and we're changing life. But understand that all of this makes life harder because life is not made to be easy.
By having it be so easy, when the challenges do come, they are so much more difficult. It's a training to train ourselves and those around us that it's not always so easy. Sometimes you have to do things on your own.