20.6.07

discourse on spiritual healing

Yitro came to teach Mosheh something, and the whole story came to teach us something, so I'm going to give it a whirl:

As per the explanation of the Noam Elimelech, (פרשת יתרו) Mosheh used to anticipate the problems of those who came to him, with his divine foresight, (רוח הקודש) and would fix their problems (through prayer or yichudim presumably or through simple faith in HaShem) before they even arrived at their meeting with him.

Yitro suggested to Mosheh a slightly different tactic. Why not go to the source of the harsh decrees, the dinim, and fix them there, solving everyone's problems all at once instead of waiting for each person's problems to occur?

There's so much we can learn from this, but for me I think the most important thing is that when you want to fix the world, you need to start one person at a time. Once you have developed the compassion and the understanding from working with each person directly, then you can start to generalize the solutions and the fixings to the whole.

[This is perhaps why according to some opinions we should only be praying for the wellbeing of the Shechinah and according to other opinions we couldn't possibly relate to the suffering of the Shechinah and so we can't pray directly on the Shechinah's behalf. The opinions who say we can and should (pray for the Shechinah) perhaps take for granted that we've built to it by first praying on behalf of ourselves and others. The second opinion (that we cannot pray for the Shechinah) perhaps applies to the beginning/intermediate stages where we would be reaching beyond our capabilities and unsuccessful in our (futile) attempts without first experiencing proper tefillah on behalf of those closest to us.]

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