Turn Around!

I had a funny occurrence this week. I read and speak Hebrew quite well actually, but the weird cursive fonts used on some packaging can still be very confusing. A particular brand name had me confused forever – it just didn’t make sense and I knew I had it wrong, but didn’t know how to pronounce it. As I was doing hitbodedut earlier in the week, I suddenly saw the package and realized that I didn’t know what it said because I had been reading it with a peh and really it was a shin (in cursive, they are basically the same shape, just the direction is reversed – one faces right, and the other faces left). Once I realized that I had the opposite letter, it read easily and it made sense!

So there I was, thinking – “OK Hashem, why this now, in my hitbodedut, while I'm trying to do chesbon hanefesh (spiritual accounting of my actions)?” The answer was apparently obvious once I asked it – clearly there are things in my life, and everyone’s life, that we cannot understand. They just don’t make sense. We try to wrap our minds around it, and we just end up more confused. What’s the problem? We are looking at the problem from the exact opposite angle of the truth – just like from one direction it is a peh, but see it from the other direction (ie flip it around) and you get a shin. I am looking po (here, seeing myself, the “I” or the ego) and the truth is understandable once you look shama (there, seeing Hashem).

And this is where we make our mistakes, and this is why the essential and most important aspect of doing teshuva is turning around. If G-d forbid we’re facing away from Hashem, then everything we see will be backwards. And unfortunately sometimes it does sorta look like it makes sense, even backwards, but we’re not seeing the truth at all. We have to first turn and face Hashem, and be willing to honestly look at our lives and where we are holding, and where it is leading us. Here are some simple examples, generalizations from my own life, Hashem has helped me see recently:

-I am so frustrated with my husband not filling his responsibilities, and he really isn’t! But I can't see that the pushing is making everything worse, just like the rubber band that bounces back the tighter you pull it…and as I am learning Women’s Wisdom (enter the importance of the good advice of the tzaddik in your life!!!) and working on appreciating him per the advice in his book. Everything is turning around so quickly, because instead of looking at my husband, I'm focusing on myself AND working on appreciating him, and now I see that he has been doing so much all this time, even if it wasn’t everything I expected…and big surprise, admitting that I am not fulfilling all of my responsibilities 100% either. All I had to do was turn around to see that the situation was the exact opposite of what I thought it was.

-I used to think that people holding this or that chumra were insane. Now that I'm sitting and learning pashut Halacha, I see that many things I thought were chumrot are not at all. In actuality, I was holding by many, many heterim, albeit that everyone around me also holds – but they aren’t the simple halachah. They are incredible leniencies that I can clearly see result in many halachic problems because people inevitably use (and I know they are using) the gaping holes created by them in ways the heter does not expect, and in some things, people aren’t even holding by the heter – the heter is being used in conditions that are clearly against the original conditions in the original teshuva that people are supposedly holding by! I am changing my life in big ways just to hold by the Shulchan Aruch plain and simple (as Rabbi Arush says – halevai, if only every person could just follow the Shulchan Aruch simply, forget one single chumra! And Rabbi Nachman requires everyone to learn Halacha every day, if only 2 halachot a day, for this reason as well – how can you hope to fulfill the Torah if you are not learning what you need to fulfill?). I thought the truth was one thing, but I see that it is the exact opposite.