Thesis: Hashem Yisborach is supervising our every movement, personally, with total love, every moment of our lives. There is not a moment or place in all that we know of existence where He is not intimately involved in directing us towards our ultimate good. He never has and never will abandon us or weaken His resolve to draw us near to Him. He will succeed with each one of us: we will ultimately reach our true destiny, fulfill with perfection our true purpose. We will all return to Him and be completely subsumed and united with His unique oneness.
Our choice can be seen as a matter of choosing the most direct and pleasant path to our goal, or not.
To facilitate our choosing the best path we should understand that our decisions should center upon grasping His ratzon for us. He knows the light-strewn path for us and is constantly urging us to follow it. This is His ratzon for us; that we seek to understand His ratzon for us. By seeking to understand His will for us we have taken a step towards Him, and He responds by likewise stepping towards us; He reveals to us more of His will.
As said, His love is unceasing and unwavering for us, and He only seeks to draw us close. Even though there are many statements in the Torah and in the Talmud, etc. where we understand that He can have anger towards us, turn His face from us, not hear our tefillot, etc., and of course these are the complete truth; nevertheless we must understand that these forms of Providence, which fall under the category of “Hester Panim” are matters of Providence which are evident to us in this world; yet in the higher worlds, He has never severed any connection with us, we are bound to Him in eternal love.
His desire, though, is to be revealed in this world; that we walk the path which will cause Him to reveal His Providence openly here, for this is His glory, that it be seen in this world that there is nothing besides Him. And for His glory all was created.
His desire is that we see His Providence over us, for in doing so we have drawn ourselves closer to Him; for which, in turn, He will reveal more of His Providence. His will is to be revealed in this world, yet he made us the agents by which He reveals Himself; if we behave with alacrity, zeal and excitement, we speed our redemption. If we seek to see how He already is revealed within our lives, He responds in kind and reveals more of His Hashgacha.
HaKadosh Baruch Hu blesses us with many needs and lacks; our needs and lacks are a blessing because where we still need salvation, where we lack blessing, success, fulfillment, that is where we seek out solutions, that is where we pray and implore for Hashem’s face to shine upon us. Thus, essentially the purpose of all that we are still lacking is that our desire to fulfill ourselves will draw us to seek Him, will draw us nearer to Him, which is our purpose. We are all lacking much tikkun, and Hashem leads us down the proper paths by which we will fix ourselves; this is achieved through that which we are lacking; this is where we seek Him.
I want to suggest a small suggestion which can help us see more openly Hashem’s Hashgacha with us and thus open the opportunity that He will visit upon us the salvations that we desperately need, and that He, even more than us, want us to have.
The suggestion is simple: that we lower ourselves to look into the so-called smaller places in our lives, and in the darker places in our lives, and find that indeed, HaKadosh Baruch Hu is with us there. He is with us in every tight passage of our world yet we generally only see Him in the broad vistas. By asking our hearts to gaze and see His presence, His love, compassion, His faithfulness in the places and times where we are accustomed to fret and worry; this avodah will lead us to ur redemption.
An example: a person has tens of thousands of dollars of debts and desperately needs salvation and is looking and praying to Hashem constantly, yet still the debts remain…
The man is walking down the street and suddenly he sees a colorful paper on the ground, a 20 shekel bill. Very nice, he is happy, it is nice to find 20 shekels. But does he think: ahh, Hashem is saving me, see He is beginning my salvation, I will soon be able to pay all my debts!? Likely not. Why not? Because he thinks: Hashem can perform for me a hundred miracles like this and I will still be far from paying my debts.
It is this kind of “logical” thinking that keeps us from seeing Hashem’s Providence. For His thoughts are not like our thoughts, and as long as we insist on seeing things our way, we will not see them His way. Each breath of ours is Hashem’s salvation. Every moment of life we are surrounded and filled with constant unfathomable miracles. We simply must teach our hearts to awaken to see them. By nature we are drawn after this physical world which is a world where there is always lack, and thus we feel our lacks always, and we are full of worry—when will I have? But if we attach ourselves to HaKadosh Baruch Hu, we attach ourselves to a reality where there is only completion and perfection, and our hearts become trained to see that there is already blessing, salvation, Hashgacha in our lives.
By looking into the shallow places and the dark places in our life and seeing that Hashem’s Providence is already with us there, we come to understand that Hashem’s Providence is already with us entirely. We simply don’t see His Hashgacha, not because it is not there, rather because it is hidden from our sight. It is hidden from our sight because He desires us to seek Him there. When we search for Him we will always find Him for He is always there, waiting for us.
painting:
נפשי חמדה
(משיר הכבוד)
My Soul Yearns
(from The Song of Glory)
Oil on canvas ציור שמן
תשע”א
100 x 80 cm.