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| Mystical Musical Meditations in Jerusalem |
What I want to communicate to you now is a summary of a very special lecture that I heard a few years ago. It was literally the middle of the night and it was given by a very special righteous man, a tzaddik, Rabbi Tsvi Meir Zilberberg.
I asked for his blessing afterwards so that I could communicate his ideas, so I feel very inspired to share this now. Rabbi Zilberberg’s style is to take one main point and drill it into your heart. He spoke for an hour and a half when I heard him recently, and now I will tell you what he talked about and how he expressed his ideas.
The principle is that G-d loves us, and that G-d gets incredible happiness and joy from the smallest things we do in our lives. It may take us a lifetime to see past the blinders and see through the fog of the inner resistance to actually feel that love.
One reason for this is because we are having such a hard time; so many people are experiencing brokenness in their lives and homes, as I know from the people I am connected with personally. People who are very broken often feel that G-d is very far from their lives. That perspective is a result of their brokenness.
But the truth is this – because we are so broken, any small effort on our part to overcome that brokenness gives G-d the greatest pleasure, as if we are his only child (overcoming the hardest struggle). We are, collectively, millions and millions of “only children” giving pleasure to our father in Heaven. And the more we feel G-d’s love for us, the more we will be filled with love, and it will take us out of our shells and light up our potentials and powers in our lives.
There are a lot of verses discussing this phenomenon. In the silent Amidah, the Standing Prayer we say three times a day, “For the sake of G-d’s name, with love…” And G-d says to us, before the Shema prayer, “The one who chooses his people Israel with love…” But there are constant challenges in our process of belief, meaning whether we believe or do not believe in G-d’s presence in our lives. This process is described by the Kabbalists as the 50th Gate of Teuma, the 50th gate of uncleanliness that we must overcome in order to see G-d now, at these very end of times.
Once the Messiah, once Moshiach comes, all that is hidden now, in this world called “olam” which literally means “hidden,” will be revealed. All that is deceptive will be uncovered. We will be able to see how much G-d really loves us and how much pleasure we bring him with every little tiny thing we do, and what an incredible impact it has.
One story told by Rabbi Zilberberg was about a group of people in Yeshiva who were traveling by air from Cleveland with the head of their Yeshiva, Rabbi Gifter. They were traveling from Cleveland to New York and ran into heavy weather, so they were re-directed to Washington DC where thousands of flights were detained due to the weather conditions. When they landed in Washington DC they ran into a simple, unlearned janitor who ran up to the Rabbi saying, “I had a dream last night about my father whom I haven’t seen for 50 years. But my father came to me in my dream and said to me, ‘I want you to say the Mourner’s Kaddish, the special prayer said on the death anniversary of those who are departed.’ The present date was the death anniversary of this man’s father, and he had no idea how he was going to say Kaddish when there are no Jews where I live or where I work.
Sure enough, Rabbi Gifter and the other 8 people with him, along with the janitor, made a minyan. The janitor, in broken language, was able to say the Mourner’s Kaddish in a group of 10, which his father had arranged for him. We have to understand that G-d wants so much for this janitor to be able to say a prayer of holiness for the sake of his father that thousands of flights were delayed and redirected due to the weather, all for the sake of this man, allowing him to pray in a minyan for his father.
That’s one example of the pleasure G-d receives from hearing and seeing the tiniest move on our part. Every little good thing you do counts. Soon we will be able to see how big our souls are and how small this world is. When we travel in an airplane and look out the window, seeing how small the globe is from that perspective from “upstairs,” we can begin to grasp that the globe is really, really small. Even though we feel that the global world is big, our souls are huge, and every little move on our part makes a huge impact a well.
The thing is, our generation is the one to finish up the work of perfection of the human condition now, before the time of Moshiach. As lowly and far from perfection as the human condition may seem, we are like dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants who have taken care of all the other work already. We just have to finish up the last bits and pieces now.
That is why we are here as “only children,” as the beloved children of G-d who is rooting for us every step of the way. The biggest difficulty and heart pain that a parent experiences is when his child does not know this. Children go through stages and often do not realize how much their parents really do love them. They go through stages and phases and think the opposite about their parents. Love is about recognizing that the other person loves you, which elicits your own love for them.
It’s like seeing your own reflection in water when you see their love for you and your love for them. The fire of love burns forever.
There was another story of an earlier generation, a story of a simple man who was looking for a husband for his daughter. He was looking for a son-in-law and found one who was even simpler than this father, so the father began teaching him the very basics of belief in G-d. He taught him the main verse, probably the most important verse in Jewish tradition, Hear Oh Israel, The Lord Our G-d, The Lord Is One. And he taught him, in his own language, that there is no other power that can get in the way of G-d doing what G-d needs to do when G-d needs to do it.
There is a verse, Ayn od milvado, there is nothing else but G-d that is able to do anything. And when you say the Shema and contemplate it over and over again, there is nothing that can stand in your way. You can make incredible miracles happen. In the last nights of Hanukkah and afterwards and anytime, in the midst of darkness when incredible miracles can be accessed, this is the verse taught by the book, Nefesh Ha Chaim, and it can make miracles happen. The man taught his son-in-law this whole thing.
And the son-in-law was thinking to himself, and he finally said, “ I don’t understand it. Here’s this great, incredible G-d, creating heavens and earth and overseeing everything… What does he care about a small person like me? And look at how difficult life is for me, for all of us. It doesn’t seem like G-d is right there for us when we need him.”
So he went to ask a big rebbe, tzaddik, a halachic authority, well known at that time, the Slonim Rebbe, and they asked him, “Who is right? Is my father-in-law right or am I right?” And the Rebbe said, “Of course your father-in-law is right. G-d is really, really close to us, despite our troubles and despite how great he is, and despite how simple we are.” The son-in-law heard that and said, “Well, if someone that great has so much pleasure from somebody like me then that is something worthy of love.”
The Rebbe looked at him and said, “That is what love is all about, when you understand that distance and that overcoming, that G-d loves us from his vantage point, such a great point. To feel that love is what this whole principle is all about.”
Another story is from the Chofiz Chaim, back in Europe, just before WWII. There was a rich donor contributing to the Yeshiva, and he came to the Chofetz Chaim to say that he had contributed 50 hospital beds for injured people, making that point that he was an important person and revealing that he was somewhat arrogant.
The Chofiz Chaim listened to him go on to say, “All of your Yeshiva students together cannot even contribute for one hospital bed.” To that the Chofiz Chaim replied, “Listen… These Yeshiva students are learning Torah and in doing so they are preventing 50 people or many more than 50 from going to the hospital. With your arrogance, you are actually creating a situation in the world with your energy, and you may send 50 or more people to the hospital as a result.”
“You are contributing the beds but they are preventing the beds from being needed at all.”
So it’s all in perspective. The point is that we need to see things from the perspective that G-d is loving us and we have to overcome the laziness of thinking and contemplating and analyzing and understanding how much G-d loves us.
Making this shift takes us a long way, especially as we understand that these are not easy times we are living in now. Rebbe said that just in the Land of Israel alone in this past year so many people got the horrible disease starting with the letter “C,” the disease that is so bad we don’t mention its name, another person was diagnosed every few hours. That’s how bad it is. We have to see it as the last minute clean-up job before Moshiach comes, getting rid of what needs to be gotten rid of, before the revelation and reality of perfection happens on earth.
So, every little bit we do, as we learn from the teachings of the Arizal and many other teachings, each little tiny step forward gives great pleasure to G-d, to what’s happening with G-d. We really have no idea…
One last story was about a doctor who was not aware, who was not observant, and who did not know too much about Judaism. But this doctor went to a class given by a rebbe in New York City who was teaching this principle, “there is nothing but G-d, and if you really believe that there is nothing that can harm you at all,” and the doctor was impressed. But he was busy and he had a job to do in the hospital where he worked, which was in a neighborhood in the Bronx, a very difficult neighborhood at the time.
He went to work and he had to park his car a few blocks away, taking his chances because it was known as a big gangster area and cars left in the area often disappear. When you come back there may be no car there at all. But he took his chances to get to his job.
He kept saying over and over to himself, like a mantra, “There is nothing but G-d, Ayn nod milvado.”
He kept saying it and he really believed it, so much that he repeated it over and over all the way to the hospital, and also all the way back to his car after work that day.
He saw evidence of the neighborhood filled with crime and theft and cars that were destroyed and violence, but when he returned to his car he saw a group of gangsters standing on the corner, contemplating whether or not to do something to his own car. He heard the head of the gang say, “If G-d doesn’t want this to happen, it’s not going to happen.” The doctor heard with his own ears the incredible results of his belief at that moment.
We all have incredible potential if we believe it, too, if we internalize it and bring it into our hearts, especially in these days. We just have to say, as King David said, “Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil because G-d is with me.”
There is nothing but G-d with us if we feel G-d’s presence and feel G-d’s love, nothing in the world can harm us, no matter what the situation is.
More or less, this is what Rabbi Tsvi Meir Zilberberg said to us that night.
One last story was about a doctor who was not aware, who was not observant, and who did not know too much about Judaism. But this doctor went to a class given by a rebbe in New York City who was teaching this principle, “there is nothing but G-d, and if you really believe that there is nothing that can harm you at all,” and the doctor was impressed. But he was busy and he had a job to do in the hospital where he worked, which was in a neighborhood in the Bronx, a very difficult neighborhood at the time.
He went to work and he had to park his car a few blocks away, taking his chances because it was known as a big gangster area and cars left in the area often disappear. When you come back there may be no car there at all. But he took his chances to get to his job.
He kept saying over and over to himself, like a mantra, “There is nothing but G-d, Ayn nod milvado.”
He kept saying it and he really believed it, so much that he repeated it over and over all the way to the hospital, and also all the way back to his car after work that day.
He saw evidence of the neighborhood filled with crime and theft and cars that were destroyed and violence, but when he returned to his car he saw a group of gangsters standing on the corner, contemplating whether or not to do something to his own car. He heard the head of the gang say, “If G-d doesn’t want this to happen, it’s not going to happen.” The doctor heard with his own ears the incredible results of his belief at that moment.
We all have incredible potential if we believe it, too, if we internalize it and bring it into our hearts, especially in these days. We just have to say, as King David said, “Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil because G-d is with me.”
There is nothing but G-d with us if we feel G-d’s presence and feel G-d’s love, nothing in the world can harm us, no matter what the situation is.
More or less, this is what Rabbi Tsvi Meir Zilberberg said to us that night.
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