Transcript
Automatic transcript; may contain mistakes, especially in Hebrew.
This week's question is how do you interpret your struggles in life? What do you think they mean? So I'm not a hundred percent sure here exactly what the questioner is asking, but I believe that the questioner is asking things follows Let's say a person is going through something in life, and they're having certain yisurim, certain pain How do we interpret that pain? How do we decide so to speak how to process it? So a lot of times when speaking to people about these things they say, I feel like God is sending me a message. And I agree. Everything that happens in our life is God sending us a message. But the question is, can we know exactly what God's message is? And the answer to that is no. We're not prophets. All we have is wisdom. And so we have to be careful not to say, I feel like so many things in my life are I feel like it's a sign from God.
We don't have signs from God in the sense that we can't say for sure what God wants from us. So for example, a person who's not ready to start dating, but somebody keeps coming over to them and saying, I've got the perfect girl for you, I've got the perfect girl for you, or I've got the perfect guy for you. So at some point you have to ask yourself, okay, what does wisdom dictate? It's true that there's something going on here, but it could be that the exact opposite approach is necessary. Despite the fact that somebody keeps coming into you and saying, I have the perfect girl for you or I have the perfect guy for you, if it's not the right timing, then it's not the right timing. So the first thing is we have to be careful when interpreting the Word of God not to say, I know what God is telling me because these things keep coming up. We have to use our seichal to understand what we're supposed to do and to do the right thing.
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Having said that Chazal do say that when something is going on in our life, we have We have to look within and examine our deeds. What exactly does this mean? We're not saying that there is cause and effect. Meaning we're not saying I'm struggling with this issue because of this Avera that I've done or because of this Mido that I haven't been working on. We don't know why anything in Shammaim happens. But what we are doing is taking every single thing that happens to us and using it as An opportunity for a growth oriented experience If this is an area I can work on
Before the shiva house, we came in and saw that he was quite disturbed, and it was a couple of days into shiva, of course he was very sad that he lost his mother, but we saw that something had just happened. He told us, I have to share with you what just happened. Some makubl had just walked into his house, and said to him do you want me to tell you why your mother died? And he looked at this makubl and he said to him, if you can tell me why this blade of grass is growing, you can tell me why my mother died. We don't know why any blade of grass grows. We don't know why anything in this world happens. All we can do is say, my job is to use the events that occur in my life as opportunities to get close to our kalashbarachu.
There's three dimensions of getting close to our kalashbarachu in this world. One is through the mitzvos that we do. Secondly is by looking at the avayras we do and doing teshuva. And lastly is finding god within the pain. Finding god within the pain means a, yefashvesh bemaisov, looking within, and b, recognizing gamsu litovah, Hakadosh Baruch Hu, lives within our pain. It's our responsibility to be mivatil ourselves to Him and even in our deepest pain to recognize that God is present. In this way we're not overwhelmed by the pain, but we have the opportunity to actually hold and experience the pain in a healthy and growth-oriented fashion.
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