Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
I'd like to share a beautiful thought that is relevant to Bitachon and emotional wellness. I actually heard it from Dr. Shlomi Zimmerman at a graduation of our Rabbi cohort at SIMHA. He shared a Netivot Shalom, also known as the Slominer Rebbe.
He writes that the concept of Galut/exile was hinted at in our Torah from the very beginning. From the early pesukim of Bereshit, even before anybody sinned, the four exiles that Jewish people would go through are mentioned. That's odd.
Secondly, the seventy souls that went down to Mitzrayim and were exiled didn't do anything wrong. They were holy people.
Furthermore, Avraham Avinu was told about Galut, again, before anyone did anything wrong.
What’s going on?
His answer is that the purpose of exile is not necessarily to punish us. Exile is there for us to grow from. There's a purification process that exile and suffering bring that he says you can't get to in any other way. And that's why we had to go down to Mitzrayim. And that's why the Jewish people throughout the generations are going through this.
It’s there for an ultimate purpose. And what is the perfection? What do we get out of it? One of the main things we get out of it is Emunah/ faith. It gives us the ability to work on our faith. Therefore, adds Dr. Zimmerman, a lot of the suffering that people endure, whether with a health challenge in general, or specifically a mental health challenge- anxiety, depression, mood disorder, eating disorder, or any of the multiple disorders) beside the disorder itself, part of the suffering is the, ‘Why me? What did I do wrong? Why am I so bad that I deserve all this?’
And the answer is, You're not. This is not happening because of any terrible thing that you did. This is part of God's larger plan. Many great people suffer, even though they didn't do anything wrong. The purpose is to be able to tolerate and hold that difficulty.
He says, “Even in the individual exile, there are certain people that in this world to tolerate suffering.” We don't know why, and we don't know what they're fixing, but he says, “He’s going to reach the highest levels possible.”
I heard this on Sunday night, before Rav Matityahu Salomon passed away. And then, this Thursday, somebody from the Torah center, shared with me a quote from Rav Salomon that says almost the exact same thing.
It's a quote from one of his books with Artscroll, and it goes like this:
“From time to time, during the various exiles of the Jewish people, there have been periods of deep darkness, of exceedingly terrible suffering. And if we look back, we see that these usually took place right before periods of redemption. And why is that? When God wants to redeem us, but finds insufficient merit to justify redemption, he intensifies the darkness. The times in which we live certainly qualified as a period of intense darkness.
He wrote this 10 or 20 years ago, but it applies today equally as well.
The Jewish nation as a whole finds itself in a precarious position, under attack from all sides, persecuted, abused, maligned. Blood flows on the holy soil, and there is no end in sight. In Jewish homes in all parts of the globe, there is also an unusual amount of suffering. All around us we see heartbreak and heartbreak and more heartbreak.
I do not believe that all of this misery is being visited upon us only in order to exact punishment for transgressions.
This is the point. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a sinner.
I believe that it is rather to bring us to reach up to God with higher levels of prayer and to reach out to our fellow Jews with higher levels of compassion.
He says prayer, I’ll say Emunah, but it’s one in the same.
Our generation has apparently not accumulated enough merit to earn redemption. But we are nonetheless in the final days of our long and bitter exile.
So how does He make it happen?
He has darkened our world, sending down so much suffering that we cannot help but see it everywhere we turn. But suffering is not always a punishment. It can also signal the opening of the Shaare Rachamim/the gates of mercy, and it is important that those of us who suffer accept their lot with trust and faith.
Here, he says clearly it’s Emunah. As for the rest of us, this is our opportunity to respond to our suffering brothers.... This is our opportunity to rise above our safe and comfortable little corners and truly feel for our brothers and sisters who live with…pain, anxiety and sorrow.
This is unbelievable. As I said, it's a bitachon hizuk and it's an emotional wellness hizuk.
B’Ezrat Hashem, we’ll take the lesson.