a new focus

כדי לבטל את רצונות היצר אפשר לעקוב אותו במחשבה פשוטה. שילוב חיי אם אני, להקדים את מקור חייך להאני הישות שלך מביא ביטול מוחלט מאני לאין: חאיניי - עיטוף האני בחיי נפשך מגלה עצם ביטולו

One of the most basic ways to work on ego is to remind yourself that you are nothing next to your soul which is literally a piece of Godliness. (חלק אלוקה ממעל ממש) The Tanya discusses this in the context of awakening divine mercy for your poor soul that has been distanced from her home (the source from which she was hewn) in heaven.

A simple idea to focus on is this: the ego, the I, is אני in hebrew. The goal is to turn the ego, the אני, into אין, into the hebrew word for nothing. This seems simple as אין and אני have the same hebrew letters, aleph yud nun. So, we should be able to just rearrange our awareness and that's it, presto! no more ego. 

Unfortunately it's not so simple. But, when we start to think of our soul, of the source of our life-force, we can represent it with the word חיי. This is the life-force we pray for when we ask HaShem for בני חיי ומזוני - offspring, life, and sustenance. The life component encompasses many things, including really the other two. So, when we focus on our soul as the root of our life-force,  חיי, we can unite it with our ego, אני, and accomplish fascinating results.

When we connect two ideas in our thoughts, we generally interweave the letters of their composition, called in hebrew a שילוב - shiluv. In the case of אני and חיי when we want the חיי to be the dominant force influencing the אני, we start with the ח from חיי and then take the א from אני and so on, alternately taking one letter from each word. When we combine the whole thing we get:

חאיניי 

In this word we see that while the חיי remains intact surrounding what's in the middle, the middle has changed from אני, from ego to אין, to nothing.

In this way we can see that by focusing on the source of our life-force, on our soul, and its importance, we can overcome our ego in a very natural almost roundabout way.

When we remember our soul, and recognize how our actions either respect our soul, dignifying her, or dishonor her, embarrasing her, we can lose sight of whether our actions are bringing us honor or power or attention or all the other things our ego likes us to focus on.

the fire within the letters

Those in the know will tell you that the physical world is simply the clothing through which HaShem hides Himself from us. This is hinted at by the word for world, עולם which comes from the root meaning to disappear or to hide. It is through the world that appears before our eyes that HaShem hides from view.

This isn't merely a game of hide and seek, but a means to refine our spiritual essence so that we can withstand the actual experience of HaShem without veils in the world to come.

Just as HaShem clothes Himself in the world, we clothe ourselves in the mitzwoth and in the Torah.

The Noam Elimelech teaches (parashath Hukath) that through focused Torah learning with great mesirut nefesh, self-sacrifice, the Tzaddikim can clothe their desires in the words of the Torah and in this way convince (figuratively) HaShem to fulfill their will.

There is nothing in this world that is not or cannot be clothed in Torah, he goes on to explain, and it is only through clothing something in the Torah through great self-sacrifice that HaShem will grant the will of the Tzaddikim.

Rav Morgenstern in Dei Hochmah l'Nafshech on Bshalach explains how mesirut nefesh (raising up mayin nukvin) is a necesary part of bringing down the divine influx of blessing to us. He goes into how tzaddikim can awaken people to mesirut nefesh.

It occurred to me this morning that when we don't do our part and awaken ourselves to HaShem through self-sacrifice, when we go to the Tzaddikim, we place an additional burden on them, that they must perform the self-sacrifice rather than us.. Which made me realize how much I need to sacrifice myself to the service of HaShem, bear my own weight.

Even if we aren't Tzaddikim, it appears to me that if we clothe our desires in Torah, Tefillah, Tzeddakah and Teshuvah we too can attain HaShem's will, at least when our wants coincide with His. So we should certainly be using Torah as the clothing for all of our Holy desires in all of our prayers.

the very last day

We have a mesorah, brought down in many different contexts, including the Talmud, the Kabbalah, Hassiduth, and I imagine also Mussar (though I don't have enough mussar experience to know for sure) but I personally saw it first, I think, in the Pahad David (Moadim:Shabbath HaGadol) of Rav David Pinto of Lyonne: One of the most potent weapons we have against the Yetzer Hara, the evil inclination, is to remind ourselves of the day we will die.

Often times we take this idea to mean that all of the pleasures of the physical world will be left behind. This is meant to recallibrate our relative valuation of particular actions and remind us that what we are about to do, although it will probably be enjoyable for the next few minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, is ultimately something finite, and the price is much steeper than we are willing to admit.

That is basically the pshat, the simple understanding of the metaphor: scare yourself out of the craziness you are about to involve yourself in.

I have what I think is a new and slightly different understanding of the metaphor: Even when you know you want something good, to serve HaShem through life and eventually death, what is your death ultimately going to look like?

For me the answer is that I want my death to be as meaningful as possible, please God may it be at the end of 120 years. The only way my death can be that meaningful is if i've already made my life meaningful going into it.

Right now the way I see it is, if I gave my life today, how big would the kiddush HaShem be? Only HaShem can really know that, but would it be bigger if I did just one more mitzwah? Certainly.

So, when I look at the day of my death, it isn't a sad abrupt wake-up call to remind me of how fleeting all these worldly pleasures are, it's an alarm clock reminding me I have a date with destiny and I want to have time to properly present myself.

In the end, when and how I go is up to the sole discretion of He who created me, as R' Haninah ben Teradyon said, "It is better that he who gave me life should take it from me." Yet, whether I face that end a recalcitrant child who doesn't want to go home, or a refined Tzaddik with no wish but to serve HaShem however He wills, that is (at least partly) up to me.

shabbath garments

Last Shabbath I was thinking about the three garments of our Neshamah, thought, speech, and action and how these garments relate to our observance of Shabbath.

Basically, to my simple understanding it breaks down like this:

1. שמור את יום השבת - Guard the day of Shabbath. This represents thought, as it says about Yaakov avinu, ואביו שמר את הדבר - [Yosef]'s father guarded the incident.
   
2. זכור את יום השבת - Remember the day of Shabbath. This represents speech, as it says בכל מקום אשר אזכיר את שמי - everywhere that I invoke My Name.
   
3. ששת ימים תעשה כל מלכתך - Six days you will perform all your labor. This represents action.

What is nice to see from this is that while we guard and remember the Shabbath through our thought and speech on Shabbath itself, the major involvement of our action for the sake of Shabbath is felt during the other six days of the week. In other words, if we didn't take action and do everything we need to do during the week, our Shabbath will be without the third and most corporeal garment, the clothing of action.

In this way, to the best of my understanding, we see that our Shabbath depends on our week.s

unintended consequences

[re: A Simple Jew's post "With their intentions"]

In Rav Yitzchak Ginsburg's Introduction to the Kabbalah of the Ariz"l, (pp. 169-171) he brings down the idea (a favorite of the Baal HaTanya's) that the willingness to sacrifice one's life for the sake of HaShem's name is something that resides at the root of our souls, in a part called the Yechidah. This highest part of the soul is never actually clothed within us, rather it surrounds us from above. It is well beyond our mental faculties, above even our decision-making process.

In light of this, there isn't really a question as to what happens if someone dies in HaShem's name without being given the choice. In essence, we don't really ever have a choice in the matter. Every death for the sake of HaShem's name is holy because it is a revelation of the deepest essence of a Jew.

To me, on some level this would seem to be troubling. A case of no free will, how can we see something as honorable or laudable if there was no choice involved? One obvious answer is that HaShem never really lets any of us choose how and when we die---even if we think it is within our own power. The Mishnah tells us in Pirkei Avoth:
על כרחך אתה חי. ועל כרחך אתה מת. ועל כרחך אתה עתיד ליתן דין וחשבון - against your will you live, and against your will you die, and against your will you will stand trial.

So what is important? What you did all the time between life and death. That's what you are going to stand trial for. That's the more technical answer.

The more spiritual answer is as follows: What's the goal of being a Jew? To bear witness to HaShem as Creator, Master, and King of the world. Choosing right over wrong is only a means to this end. When we choose right over wrong we are bearing witness to the fact that HaShem created us and gave us the commandments to perform along with free will to not perform them.

[In a way an even higher level of this revelation is when we actually break the commandments, proving that we don't have to keep them, and then we do teshuvah and keep those very same commandments. Then we've removed all doubt that HaShem gave us free will, and yet we serve Him because His ways are Emet, truth.]

Through our actions we are revealing our pedigree, that in fact, we are of divine origin. HaShem did create the world and us in it.

When we see the actions of a Jew as the revellation of the underlying Jewish Neshamah, then we can see too how a Jewish death in and of itself is special because it reveals the essence of the Jewish soul that just left this world. The Baal HaTanya even says that a person who dies a Jew, was always a Jew, and a person who dies a non-Jew was never a Jew. (This is a tremendous chidush, because without this definition we always understood than anyone born a Jew is always a Jew. Not so according to the Baal HaTanya, the person's end reveals his true beginning, his true essence. נעוץ תחילתן בסופן)

So, no matter whether a Jew had the choice to die as a Jew or not, the fact that they died for the sake of HaShem's name reveals their spiritual essence, that they are and always were a Jew, that HaShem is the Creator, Master, and King of the world.

[There are many opinions of what is the point of being a Jew. Each of them has their own subtle points and differences, I take my cue from Avraham Avinu. What did he do differently from Noah? He actively engaged the world to glorify HaShem's name.]