Sadness – Your Enemy
Most people are sad and depressed because they feel they're failures and they lack hope. This is the product of negative thoughts about themselves...
Most people are sad and depressed because they feel they’re failures and they lack hope. This is the product of negative thoughts about themselves, the result of self-persecution.
Whenever we meet the challenge of a problem with emuna and optimism – knowing that everything is from Hashem and everything is for the best – we easily overcome the sadness, depression, and worry that only make matters worse.
Take for example a husband and wife: A husband is commanded to make his wife happy. If he sees that she’s down in the dumps, and because of that he becomes gloomy too, then their problem becomes all the more acute. As soon as the husband becomes melancholy, the Divine Presence departs from him and he therefore forfeits Hashem’s help. The household then becomes as disaster area.
But, when a husband looks at a delicate situation as a test of faith from Hashem to stimulate and enhance teshuva and emuna, he won’t allow himself to fall into the trap of despair. He’ll destroy sadness – his enemy – by asking for Hashem’s help, strengthening his emuna, and smiling at his wife in optimism. His smile is not only encouraging, it’s contagious.
Grievances or Emuna
Rebbe Nachman of Breslev describes sadness as the statement of complaint when a person is angry with Hashem for not giving him what he wants.
Anger expresses a lack of emuna, when a person fails to acknowledge that Hashem’s Divine Providence is for the very best. An individual with emuna has no complaints and harbors no grievances against Hashem, Heaven forbid, for he or she is positive that everything Hashem does is for their ultimate benefit.
When a person forgets about Hashem, he or she falls into a fear of natural forces – whether human or otherwise – which they perceive as obstacles or barriers to what they want. The more a person forgets about Hashem, the more he or she fears those forces and succumbs to anger, anxiety, and impatience. Even worse, when people attribute their problems to themselves, they fall into depression and despair. When they don’t accept their lot in life with happiness – in other words, when they lack emuna – they’re expressing their grievances with Hashem!
Big Gains vs. Tiny Losses
One of the Yetzer Hara’s prime ploys is to magnify a person’s faults while concealing their good points. In this way, the Yetzer robs many of their joy in life. There’s not a person on earth that isn’t full of good points; if a person were to realize his or her good points, they’d be happy all day long.
Imagine that a person, who is an investment broker, on a given day, has made a net profit of one hundred million dollars on the commodities market. Yet, on one small transaction, he incurred a loss of five thousand dollars. Along comes someone and yells, “You loser! Don’t you know anything about investments? Your future is finished! When the whole world finds out about the five grand you lost, you won’t have a single client. You’re down the drain!” That someone is the Yetzer Hara – the epitome of all evil, destroying a person from within.
If the broker has emuna, he’ll throw the Yetzer right out of the 24th story window; if he lacks emuna, he’ll be running to his psychiatrist.
To be happy, it’s important to focus on your good points – your million-dollar gains. Don’t let the minor losses bring you down.
Self-Persecution
Self-persecution is a prime cause of sadness and depression. Self-persecution is another expression of deficient emuna, when a person blames himself for his failures.
One may ask, “How can I be happy when I fail?” The answer is simple: With emuna, a person addresses a setback by saying that this is what Hashem wants and it’s all for the best!
Let’s take an example: A women is married for eight years already and she hasn’t yet been blessed with children. Without emuna, she starts persecuting herself in all sorts of ways, such as: “I’m not normal; I’m not deserving of children; Hashem doesn’t want anything to do with me; I was born with bad fortune…,” and so on. These thoughts are the sole result of insufficient emuna, for she thinks that childbearing is dependent on her, when in actuality, she has little say in the matter. Children, like everything else in life, come from Hashem.
So what should the childless woman do? She’d best be advised to pray to Hashem, as follows: “Hashem, You can help me. Show me why I don’t have children and what’s lacking in me. If I lack emuna, give me emuna! If I haven’t prayed enough, help me pray more! Teach me how to ask for what I need; I know that everything You do is for the best and that You want our prayers just like You wanted the prayers of our forefathers. Ultimately, I believe that You’ll make me a mother too.”
Here’s an important rule: Most people are sad and depressed because they feel they’re failures and they lack hope. This is the product of negative thoughts about themselves, the result of self-persecution. Self-persecution results from a lack of emuna.
Emuna says, “Hashem can help me this very minute; and, even if Hashem decides not to help me, it’s still for the best.” Emuna and sadness are mutually exclusive.
So, to break the cycle of sadness, one must stop persecuting oneself. In order to put an end to self-persecution, one needs emuna. In order to obtain emuna, one must talk to Hashem in extensive personal prayer, and ask for emuna. As such, talking to Hashem in personal prayer can literally uplift a person from the depths of sadness and depression.
Self-persecution begins as soon as a person says, “I didn’t succeed.” This is a faulty way to think. The right way is to say, “Hashem doesn’t want me to succeed right now, and this is surely for the best, because He wants me to learn something or to strengthen something. He probably wants me to strengthen my emuna; I’ll do just that and ask Him to help me!”
By focusing on Hashem rather than on oneself, a person breaks the cycle of self-persecution. Knowing that every occurrence in life is from Hashem, and that everything is for the ultimate good, is the basis of emuna that keeps a person in the happy mode, no matter what.
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