Don’t Jump

Everybody has one emotional state that feels like home. It’s where you spend most of your time and unfortunately for many it’s in the vicinity of anxiety, anger or guilt. No matter where else you go, that’s the place you’ll park your car with its trunk full of doubt.

When I was in college it was trendy to be jaded and moody. It meant you were a deep thinker, affected by world events and artistically sensitive.

For some reason being happy got a bad rap. It wasn’t stylish and it proved you were naive and shallow. Only nerds were happy, only a doofus (stupid person, ignoramus) would be optimistic about life.

Years later I concluded that those “worldly” kids were just a bunch of losers and I was sorry I ever admired them. But now, even more years later, I understand that it wasn’t all an act.

The first time I went to Australia to visit my son, we drove across a huge bridge that went on for miles across the water.

There were tall wire fences on each side of the bridge and every half mile or so there was a sign with a hot-line number for suicidal people thinking about leaping out of their misery. Because even a tall wire fence might not be enough to stop a hopeless person determined to die. And because maybe that broken-hearted soul could be talked out of it.

It was disturbing to see the tall wire fence and the signs. It was very sad and needless to say it spoiled the view. (Black humor).

I told my son Menachem how ironic it was that people would use such a beautiful place to end their lives and my son said something that surprised me. He said, “If I didn’t believe in God I would also jump. Because a life without emuna is worthless.”

I had to agree with him. All the physical pleasures in the world cannot fulfill a soul.

To live without emuna is a surefire way to become an emotional victim. There are so many ways to be miserable if you don’t have faith in God, if you don’t believe that everything is from Him, for your best and with a reason.

Otherwise we can spend our lives playing the blame game. Who by nature and who by nurture? Who by boss and who by bullies? Who by sabotage and who by self?

Life can become a reality show of suffering, complete with nasty neighbors, evil relatives, random medical emergencies and natural disasters.

I’d rather be a survivor. I’d rather be a superhero with God given powers of strength, hope and emuna. I’d rather pray for my tormentors and face up to my tests rather than find myself at the edge of that bridge, defeated and filled with despair.

What a mess we can make, what complicated narratives and hard feelings we can forge if we refuse to utilize the truth of emuna!

If we look anywhere but at God for what happens to us we will have a never ending cast of characters to blame and resent. Including ourselves.

If we focus on Hashem and the message He is trying to send, we can be so much stronger and we can move from a home of negativity to a place with a better emotional climate.

Believing that nothing and no one can cause us pain without Hashem’s permission is both calming and empowering. It means you can step out of an insecure “why me?”  …Into a confident “what now?”

Because the answer to “why me?” always begins with a, “So that I can…”

That is the third level of emuna. Rav Shalom Arush writes on page 67 of The Universal Garden of Emuna that a person with upper level emuna tries to understand the message within whatever God does.

Hashem has confidence in us. He believes that we are smart enough to take a good look in the mirror when we’re in trouble. Even if another person was truly unkind to me, there is a lesson there for my own benefit. I can grow spiritually from anything, from everything. I just have to give up my role as the victim.

Decide to learn something useful from your pain. Join the community where happy people live, move into a house with three levels of emuna where every room has a reason.

Leave the old neighborhood of negativity behind. If you ever feel like jumping, than make it a leap of faith.