EW 207 The Everlasting Imprint
Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
Rav Wolbe, in his Sefer Alei Shor (vol 2) talks about the concept of yi’ush/despair when it comes to a self-improvement. A person might be working on himself (through mussar and learning about these topics) for a while but feel like he’s not getting any better in his character traits or in the way he acts in daily interactions with people. If anything, he feels like he's getting worse, and he's about to give up hope that nothing is helping. Rav Wolbe says that Rav Yisrael Salantar, in letter 10, says that a person's heart shouldn’t fall when he learns mussar and he doesn't feel anything, and nothing seems to change.
He says even though to your physical eyes, you won't see a change, something is happening. And those subconscious imprints will slowly change the person. He says that there's a blessing that's not felt. Just like when a seed is planted, you don't see it happen right away, and just like the drip, drip on the rock makes a hole eventually, so too with the impact of learning mussar.
This is an important point. Although Rav Yisrael is talking about the subconscious and the subconscious impacts that aren't felt, this is not just a psychological concept. Everything we’ve said until now is true in psychology as well. A person could be in psychotherapy for a while and not feel anything happening because he’s changing things in the subconscious. He adds that this is also relevant for a person who starts working on himself. The change is happening in the subconscious, but the self-awareness is happening in the conscious. So he's aware of his lacking and he thinks he's worse, because he's becoming more and more aware of his lackings (that he didn't realize that he had until now).
He says that's the paradox of learning mussar, or for that matter, any subconscious exploration. There's a deep subconscious impact that's happening under the covers. At the same time, on the surface, we are revealing lackings.
His takeaway is that there is no place for despair. You can learn, and it can feel dry, like you're not feeling anything, but something is happening.
I want to add that there's a big difference between taking a psychological approach to change versus a mussar approach to change.
Rav Wolbe, in sefer Aleh Shor (volume two, page 168, again quoting from Rav Yisrael Salanter), says that even after you learn something and it seems to be long gone and long forgotten, it still has its impact.
He explains that, “In a place where there was once holiness, even when the holiness leaves, the imprint, the impression of the holiness lasts forever. It won't be erased.”
Just like the Bet Hamikdash, although it's destroyed, still has a remnant of holiness, so too in a person's heart. Our heart is compared to the Bet Hamikdash. And even in a time when the Bet Hamikdash is destroyed, there's still Kedusha. So if you learned something and it made an impact on you, it's going to stay with you. How far does this go? One of the great rabbis said that if somebody went to a good elementary school and had a teacher who was God-fearing, even if years later he goes off the Derech and he's not religious, there's still an imprint of that and it's going to make a difference.
And a great rabbi, I don't remember who, applied this to Ben-Gurion, who was not a totally religious man; he did not do everything a hundred percent, but he was definitely more religious and more respectful of religion than any of his contemporaries at that time. He was different in that he went to a regular, good yeshiva for elementary school. He had a good teacher. Eventually, he got caught up in secular Zionism of the times. But he had something in his youth. Everyone can attest to that, wherever they are in religion. I often see people, years later who say, “Oh, Rabbi So-and-so, he had an impact on me!”
They may be very far from Rabbi So-and-so, but that impact lasts. That’s very different than reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Since that’s not an impact of kedusha, whatever you did, you did. But when it comes to learning mussar and learning things from our Torah sources, there's a holiness there, and that impact lasts.
So it’s important never to despair, because even if you don't feel it now, something is making an impact.