Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
We've been talking about taking responsibility for one's actions and not blaming others. This is an important point. Rav Wolbe writes in his sefer Aleh Shor, in more than one place, in the name of Rav Hutner, that the final heresy before the times of Mashiach will be the denial of freedom of choice.
Every generation has its challenge in hashkafa, whether it's idol worship in the era of the first Bet Hamikdash, philosophy in the era of the second Bet Hamikdash or communism, socialism and Marxism. Currently, Rav Hutner said, it's the denial of freedom of choice. This is promulgated in part by a concept in modern psychology that says a person is a victim, so obviously, it's not his fault.
There are people that don't have freedom of choice. That is true. Someone who's suffering with an eating disorder cannot just say, I'm going to eat now. But like everything, we always need to have a balance as the pendulum goes from one extreme to the other. Rav Chaim Volozhin writes in his sefer Nefesh HaChaim that in life, we go to extremes. At one time we might have been very harsh. Then we become a little too soft. These are the two poles of Avraham Avinu’s Hessed and Yitzhak Avinu’s Middat HaDin, and we always have to find the harmony of Yaakov Avinu, who is able to handle both, together.
We're in an era where there's no responsibility, it's nobody's fault. That is overused. I'll use the current situation where all Palestinians are not held accountable, because it's not their fault. In 1948, they were thrown out. This is true for different ethnic groups, who still say, to this day, “It's not our fault. We have an excuse because 200 years ago…,” and therefore we forever are on the receiving end. We never have to take responsibility for anything. The world owes us for all of the horrors that happened to us 200 years ago. And we're forever just waiting for others to take care of us and fix us.
That is a horror, because eventually, you have to take responsibility. You can't blame everyone around you forever. That mentality is counterproductive because if you don’t take responsibility, there's nothing for you to do. You're just forever crippled, waiting on welfare lines and unemployment lines, because the world owes you, because they wronged you, however long ago.
That's what's going on today with the whole movement of the woke and whatever it may be, to rewrite history and not to take any responsibility for anything.
The Jewish people should have the greatest victim card of all. We were expelled from so many countries. We suffered pogroms and inquisitions and who knows what? What's our secret?
Of course, it’s God’s Hashgacha that's taking over and taking care of us. But it's also up to us. One of the things that we do right, is that we were trained to always introspect, like we said yesterday from Rav Wolbe.
The Gemara in Masechet Avodah Zara says, because God loves the Jewish people most, He punishes them the most. If you did something wrong, you're going to get punished and you're going to fix it. You're not going to play the victim card. You're going to look at it and say, “There's something for me to fix here. There's something for me to correct.”
We're constantly looking into ourselves, making self introspection, fixing things, and becoming better people. That's one of the secrets of the Jewish people-taking responsibility. Rav Hutner writes that it’s why the Rambam writes about the fundamental of freedom of choice, which means I'm not a victim of my circumstance and situation, in the laws of teshuva. Because you can't repent, and you can't change, until you take responsibility. That's our secret. Our secret is to go through Eicha and say, ‘We sinned. We sinned; we did wrong. We take responsibility.’ People don't like to hear, ‘When someone sees suffering coming to him, he should look into his deeds,’ but that's the Jewish way. We're not claiming to be prophets and know why everything happens, but we do know these rules. These rules don't change. When things go wrong, look into yourself. That's always been the Jewish way and that's why we grow from situations, and don't have that victim mentality. We're resilient and successful.
We have to think about this and not be swayed by the world's belief in taking no responsibility and blaming everybody for any misfortune.