Ask Yourself
When Reb Yitzchak of Vorki was a new husband, his wife complained about him
every chance she got. Reb Yitzchak chose to endure her insults in silence. When he saw that she treated the servants in the same manner, he went to his rebbe, Reb David of Lelov, for advice.
The rebbe listened and said, “Why are you asking me? Ask yourself!”
Reb Yitzchak was confused by his teacher’s response. He knew his teacher was trying to teach him something, but he was unsure as to what it was. Then he recalled a teaching of the Baal Shem Tov:
“If you suffer from the anguish of servants, it is due to your own error in action. If your spouse curses you, it is because you have failed to master your tongue. If your children trouble you, it is due to your obsession with errant thoughts. If you align these three with godliness –— if your thought, word, and deed are holy and hallowing –— then all this distress turns to joy.”
Suddenly Reb Yitzchak understood what his teacher was saying. If he wanted to improve the situation of others he must begin with himself.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Hasidic Tales, SkyLight Illuminations, 2004
Questions:
- In what ways does this translation of the story clarify the issues for you?
- What are your remaining questions?
- What do you notice about how Reb Yitzchak reacts/responds to Reb David’s advice? Describe his process.
- What is your interpretation of “begin with yourself?”
COMMENTARY
Deeds, words, and thoughts are called the Three Garments of the Soul, the three primary ways in which consciousness manifests in the world of human beings. The soul is pure and at one with God, but the Garments are stained by selfishness. Cleanse the Garments, and unity of all with All is apparent.
...The Baal Shem Tov provides us with the principle governing knowledge in the psychological dimension: Everything we encounter is colored by the quality of our thoughts. God provides us with the third principle: “Be still and know” (Psalm 46:10). When you stop investigating, when you stop reacting, when you stop doing, then there is a knowing that surpasses all self-centered understanding. This knowing comes not from you but through you from God.
Reb David knew that before Reb Yitzchak could engage his wife constructively, he would have to let go of his own view of the situation. He would have to realize that he did not know the whole story and that his sense of justice was colored by his lack of knowledge. Acting and reacting from partiality makes it impossible to be an impartial mediator.
The same is true of you. To engage the world constructively, you have to cleanse your thoughts of partiality; you have to stop acting and reacting from your own limited knowledge; you have to be still and allow what is to be present without bias. Don’t investigate, don’t think, just receive, and then you will know how best to respond.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Hasidic Tales, SkyLight Illuminations, 2004
Discuss:
- The three garments of a soul: thoughts, words, deeds. How are these "garments?"
- Discuss acting and re-acting. What does Rabbi Shapiro add to the conversation about the practices we can engage in to help us be more conscious?
“The decisive recognition that conflict resolution must begin in my own soul is an unsettling idea, and it runs counter to the commonly accepted view of how the world operates. It is natural for any of us to circumvent that idea by arguing (with our challenger or with our soul, if it is our soul that has challenged us) that every conflict involves two parties.” Martin Buber, The Way of Man, location 387 (46%)
“She started it….”
“You apologize first…”
What else??
The Importance of Beginning
The basic principle that stands behind most of the attention given practices done upon awakening is the importance of the beginning. The very beginning of the day is a time of potential spirituality because before one has gone out into the world, before the mind is scattered in a multiple of directions toward worldly concerns, it is still relatively unified and separated from material attractions and can be erectly wholly to God.
All the disciples the Baal Shem Tov have written that we should be careful when we wake up and get out of bed, that our first thought, our first words, and our first action be devoted to God, in Torah and mitzvot. For then, all our subsequent thoughts, speech and deeds throughout the rest of the day will follow in the train of these first (Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov, Agra Dd’Pirka, quotes in Zochron l’Rishonim, p. 59
“The first thing of all is the mind and thought, and speech is a derivative of that, and action is a derivative of speech. Therefore, when a person gets up in the morning he is like a newly created being…If the first speech he engages in is concerned with personal maters (not to mention lies and other such), then even if he will pray and occupy himself with Torah study afterwards, everything will spin out from and follow the first speech he began the day with, because just as speech is a derivative of thought and secondary to it, so is the second use of speech a derivative of the first."
(I, Din Hashkamat ha-Boker)
Yitzhak Buxbaum, Jewish Spiritual Practices, Jason Aronson Publishing, 1990. pages 89-91
Because Even the Word Obstacle Is An Obstacle
Try to love everything that gets in your way:
the Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute thirty-six furious laps,
one for every item on your to-do list.
The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water
like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side,
whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.
Teachers all. Learn to be small
and swim through obstacles like a minnow
without grudges or memory. Dart
toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking Obstacle
is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl
idly lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:
Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,
in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.
Be glad she’ll have that to look at all her life,
and keep going, keep going. Swim by an uncle
in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew
how to hold his breath underwater,
even though kids aren’t allowed at this hour. Someday,
years from now, this boy
who is kicking and flailing in the exact place
you want to touch and turn
will be a young man, at a wedding on a boat
raising his champagne glass in a toast
when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.
He’ll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,
but he’ll come up like a cork,
alive. So your moment
of impatience must bow in service to a larger story,
because if something is in your way it is
going your way, the way
of all beings; towards darkness, towards light.
Alison Luterman
http://www.alisonluterman.net/