Moments of Triumph
Alice Jonsson draws on Rebbe Nachman’s teachings to show that positive thinking lifts us to new heights. Imagine your glorious dream moment of triumph – it’s within your reach!
God’s way is to focus on the good. Even if there are things which are not so good, He only looks for the good. How much more do we have to avoid focusing on the faults of our friends. We are obligated to seek only the good – always! (Rabbi Nachman, Likutey Moharan II, 17).
When I taught 9th grade English, one of my favorite books to teach was 1984, by George Orwell. Fourteen-year-olds are really primed for a tale wherein the hero fights ‘The Man’ who is constantly telling them what to do and who has amazing snooping abilities. I’m not sure why. It also gives them a whole new and sort of intellectual sounding way to yell at their parents. “What are you, the Thought Police?” Storm out of kitchen, slam door to room…
To introduce the idea of mind control, a prominent theme in the book, we did what I dubbed the ‘Positive Thought Experiment’, borrowed then modified from a self-help book. It goes like this: The goal is to think nothing but positive thoughts for twenty-four hours, by extension, you can not utter a negative word. If a negative thought enters your head, you have about six seconds to obliterate it. If you fail to obliterate it, you start your twenty-four hours over again. This is so challenging, I have never actually succeeded in doing it. Freshman have an especially rough time with this, as they must be around each other and their astronomically annoying siblings, parents, lab partners, teachers, and worst of all the kid with whom they must share a tiny bench on the school bus.
One year a student I’ll call Lauren returned to class and excitedly reported that in the midst of the thought-experiment she experienced a breakthrough. She was at dive practice, was attempting some kind of scary backwards dive, and was finally able to do it. She was standing back to the water at the end of the board, up on her tiptoes feeling quite nervous, obliterated the negative thoughts, and presto, she accomplished the dive!
This happened about seven years ago, but I can still picture her excited face and chin length blonde hair, clutching her notebook and telling me the story. The moments in life where we break through the negative chatter in our heads and do something that seemed un-doable, these are the life’s sweet moments of triumph. Lauren did the dive!
Somehow, way back in the 1700s when life was much harder and shorter, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov came up with some really great ideas about positive thinking. ‘Really great’ is probably an understatement given that he was a tzaddik and a genius. It’s extremely unlikely that many contemporary, secular self-help authors have read Rabbi Nachman’s works, or even those written by his followers, although clearly they should. Despite this, Breslov centered writings about positive thinking feel right out of our time. The Breslov approach to positive thinking is called Azamra, which means “I will sing.” [Editor: Also, see the video Azamra: Turning Self-Hate into Self-Love.] In this context it means I will sing about the good points of others and, apparently, we are also allowed to, even must, see our own good points as well. Although I’m not sure we should run around singing songs about ourselves. At least not out loud, which would be weird. But about others, I say go for it.
Here’s a story retold by Rabbi Kramer, author of Crossing the Narrow Bridge, that illustrates how vital it is that we look for the positives, even in situations where it seems futile:
Once, fire swept through a part of Breslov. Passing by the site, Reb Noson and his followers spotted one of the distraught homeowners. Although crying bitterly, he was sifting through the rubble of his destroyed house in the hope of finding something, anything that he might use to rebuild his home. Reb Noson said: Do you see what he is doing? Even though his house has been destroyed, he hasn’t given up hope. He’s collecting whatever might be useful for rebuilding his house. The same is true when it comes to spirituality…We have to pick up a few good points and collect them together from amidst the sins. This is the way to return to God. (Kokhavey Or p.78)
Sometimes life forces us to dig. As a former teacher, once again, I can relate, because teachers must learn how to do this in order to do our jobs. We must help students to move themselves forward, regardless of how much they know or who they are when they sit down at their desk. We must search for something, anything, to connect with in the student and sometimes this is really difficult to do because public school teachers are confronted with, and are privileged to meet, folks from every corner of the community. Sometimes, I felt like there was no way on earth I was going to bond with certain students. Some of them were even criminals. Literally. But they were there and I was and there, and we were going to see each other every school day for 50 minutes, so I just had to get over myself.
One student was accused of an awful crime against a girl, in fact many. Shocking. He was expelled for these incidents for a year, which was the most that could be done apparently. And there he was in my classroom. I assigned a personal narrative essay. He wrote all about the incidents that had precipitated the expulsion. It was a doosey. I was shocked and appalled and then back again. I held on to that thing for about a month. How was I to grade it? It was so disturbing and strange I didn’t know what to do. After reading the other essays, some of which were, get this, plagiarized, I figured out a way to see a positive point. (Bet you didn’t know someone could plagiarize a personal narrative, did you?) I gave him an ‘A’ and it was an honest ‘A’. When I handed him his graded paper, he was pretty ecstatic. I said something like, “It was powerful. And it was totally your work. Which is more than I can say for some of the other essays. Congratulations.” How’s that for picking through the rubble?
Because I have learned so much from Rabbi Kramer and from Rabbi Nachman, I can now look back at these teaching experiences and see them in a new light. I have learned when we find the positives in others, we actually elevate them spiritually. And it goes beyond them; we can actually bring the whole world to the side of positive merit by doing this. If we can teach others to see the positives in tough situations, the merits grow exponentially. That’s an enormous bang for the buck.
Allow me to take a moment to thank Rabbi Chaim Kramer for his book Crossing the Narrow Bridge. It is he who has pulled together the quotes from Rabbi Nachman and Reb Natan and crystallized and inspired so many of the ideas that are in this article and many in other articles I have written. His insights, wisdom, and knowledge of Rabbi Nachman and Torah are in another galaxy compared to my own. Rabbi Kramer’s ability to bring these lofty and complex Torah concepts from way out in the stratosphere down to earth where I live is a God send. Thank you, Rabbi Kramer! I could write a song about your good points. Reader, go buy his books. Your moment of triumph awaits you too.
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