Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. Today we will discuss the concept of resilience. Resilience means that even though you fall and you fail, you pick yourself up and you continue. And of course, like all psychological concepts, we find it in our Torah first. We have the story in Baha’alotcha, of the men who were contaminated. They tried to do a good deed, but it coincided with the time of the Korban Pesach, so they were not fit for the Korban Pesach (It was the only Korban Pesach in 40 years) and they were going to miss it. So they went to Moshe Rabbenu and said, “We're contaminated. Lama Nigara? Why should we lose out?”
Moshe said, Imdu/let's stand, which Rav Sadok HaKohen says means, “Let's pray.” And what happened ? Hashem brought down a new concept called Pesach Sheni, a “rain-date” to make up for the first Korban Pesach, which they missed. And they brought it down.
Our rabbis say that we see from here that man can never give up. Even though, seemingly, there was no hope for them, God created a new approach. So we have to think, “There is a way out for me; as many times as I go down, I'll come up again.”
This concept is illustrated in Shulchan Aruch Orach Chaim (siman (תכו where it says that when we make Birkat Halevana/the blessing on the new moon, we say, “David Melech Yisrael, Chai. V’Kayam/David Hamelech is alive and well,” because his kingdom is compared to the moon that waxes and wanes. And so too, the Jewish people get bigger and smaller, but eventually they will reconnect to Hashem.
Rav Chaim Shmulevitz once recounted that he asked a survivor how was able to bear five years in a forced labor camp and remain a believer. How could he have emerged with undiminished love for Hashem? The man said, “They didn't allow us to keep any mitzvah in the camp. They deprived us of Shabbat, Torah, etc, from early morning to late in the evening, they guarded us closely. But there was one thing thing they could not take away from us- the moon. There were inmates among us who calculated when Rosh Hodesh was, and the first time we could make the blessing on the new Moon. On that night, as we'd walk back to our barracks, with soldiers on both sides, someone would whisper, “It’s time to recite the beracha on the moon.” We'd hold hands and recite the beracha, where we say, “To the moon, He said that it would should renew itself as a crown of splendor, for who are destined to renew themselves like it, the Jewish people will renew themselves like the moon.”
And that is this concept, that we have to believe, fail and fail, but pick yourself up again. And actually more than that, as the Gemara in Masechet Hagiga 14A says, אין בני אדם עומדין עליהן אלא אם כן נכשל בהן
A person can't understand something unless he stumbled on it.
Stumbling is an opportunity for growth. You can't really get something unless you fall first. Falling is a way to grow. If you never fall, you never grow.
There's a famous author named Angela Duckworth, who wrote a book on grit and she says that the research supports that what is going to predict a child's success is resilience, not IQ. Grit, that ability to persevere, work hard and overcome adversity develops from allowing young people to struggle with the process of learning, encouraging them to be curious, enabling them to discover effective ways of managing their stress and fears.
If we just coddle our children and never give them the ability to fall, they will never grow.
אין בני אדם עומדין עליהן אלא אם כן נכשל בהן
You can only properly understand something if you stumble and realize it's not really stumbling.
There’s a famous story about the great inventor Thomas Edison who tried, they say 2000 times, before he finally got his light bulb to work.
When a reporter asked him how it felt to fail so many times, one version of the story says his answer was, “I never failed. I learned a thousand ways not to make the light bulb.” Others say he said, “ I invented the light bulb with a 2000 step process.”
However he said it, the point is, after two thousand experiments, he realized that every failure along the way wasn't a failure. It was an opportunity to learn from that failure.
But we don't need to go to outside sources for this. We can stick to our own literature. Who was greater than Rabbi Akiva, a shepherd boy that went on to learn, sacrificing. He came back with his 24,000 students and, as the Gemara in Yevamot 62B tells us, they all died at one time and the world was desolate. Rabbi Akiva should have said he was throwing in the towel.. But instead, he searched out five great rabbis from the south, and all of the Oral Law that we have comes from those rabbis.
Rabbi Akiva is the example of resilience. He picked himself up, and he learned from his previous experience. His previous students died because they didn't properly respect each other, so he instituted
VeAhavta L’Re’echa Kamocha in group number two.
Have a wonderful day.