Troublemakers

There’s an idea that you’re meant to serve G-d with everything you have, and I mean everything: with your heart, with your soul, with your body, with your money, with everything you own.
 
Like many ideas, it sounds great in theory, but when you start to put it into practice, a whole bunch of ‘issues’ can come up. We can all get how you can donate your time and / or money to a charitable cause; how you can use your heart to empathize with another person’s pain; how you can use your mouth to speak words of encouragement and emuna, and light and ‘uplift’.
 
But what about all the bad stuff that’s in me? What about my angry streak? Or my mean streak? Or my incredibly strong urge to ‘make trouble’ wherever I go? How am I meant to serve G-d with that stuff?
 
I was thinking about that for a while, when I heard a class that started to give me the answer. Our very own Zev Ballen was talking about how strong negative emotions like fear, anger, or even worry, can make the best ‘motivators’ in the world.
 
A person can sit on their couch for years, stuffing in Twinkies, and brownies and blondies non-stop, and feel quite happy and content about it all. One minor heart-attack later, one blood test that comes back with ‘Borderline Type II Diabetes’, one super-high cholesterol problem – and all of a sudden, that happy, content, obese person has the motivation they need to really start changing their life around.
 
Out goes the cakes; out goes the 24-ounce cokes; out goes the pizzas and fries and burgers, and in comes some lettuce and a pair of new sneakers.
 
Changes that everyone thought were ‘impossible’ just a few short weeks’ ago can literally happen overnight. And what set it all off? The terrible fear that the person felt in their heart, when they heard the doctors’ gloomy prognosis that if ‘something’ didn’t change radically, they’d be pushing up some turf within a year.
 
What about anger? How can a person use their terrible built-in propensity to get angry to serve G-d? If you think about it, it’s really not so hard to work it out.
 
Sweet, calm, gentle, unruffled people simply don’t have the same passion or fire in them as enraged lunatics. Just as they don’t turn into the Incredible Hulk when someone gives them the wrong change in the supermarket, or get into ridiculous show downs when someone cuts in front of them on the road, those people also find it much harder to shake the heavens with their prayers.
 
Compare: “Um, G-d, it’s all up to You and I’m really quite happy whatever You do to me, but I’d quite like to have a new car this year / meet my future spouse / have another kid – but no stress! No rush! Take Your time, G-d! I’ve got a lot of patience, and I really don’t want to put You out…” With:
 
“G-d!!!! I can’t take it any more! I know everything comes from You etc, but PLEASE, get all the selfish, self-centered lowlifes in the world to turn over a new leaf already!!!! If I have to deal with one more self-righteous, lying, duplicitous, horrible person, I’m seriously going to get sick to my stomach!!!!”
 
OK, maybe it’s not a ‘perfect’ prayer. But you can feel the passion in it, you can feel the emotion in it and the sincerity, and in this increasingly fake, superficial world, those prayers are worth their weight in gold.
 
When I was growing up, one of the many labels that was pasted on to me was ‘troublemaker’. You see, ‘troublemakers’ go around paying attention to things that everyone else is trying to avoid looking at; they put two and two together, and come up with answers that are often correct, but not to everyone’s liking. They don’t ‘put up and shut up’; they don’t avoid ‘rocking the boat’; they don’t live a lie, just because that’s what most convenient for everyone else.
 
‘Deep Throat‘ was a troublemaker; the little boy who pointed out that the Emperor didn’t have any clothes on was a troublemaker; Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi were terrible trouble-makers, each in their own way.
 
True, not all trouble makers are so noble. Stalin and Al Capone also made a lot of trouble. But I guess we’re back to the point, that whatever our G-d given abilities, the good, the bad, and the ugly, we can find a way to use all of them to serve G-d.
 
In today’s politically-correct world, options are quite limited for a person who has no tact, is as blunt as a fish hook, and who loves shaking things up. They’d make a great third-world dictator, but last time I checked, most of those positions were filled. So they’ll have to go for option ‘B’, and stick to writing some interesting stuff for Breslev.com instead.
 
 
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Check out Rivka Levy’s new book The Happy Workshop based on the teachings of Rabbi Shalom Arush.