Nishmas Am Yisrael - Taking Cover? Hashem help us dissolve what we need to from our hearts to reveal You as is Your Will

How do tyrants gain power? The world unfortunately has many examples of brutality, of killings, of actual control over the lives of others, of those who adversely affect the lives of others in order to dominate and to require submission of the others to the will of their tyranny. When it comes to the physical existence of people, it is not hard to understand why people fear for their lives and conform. That is a natural human response.

One reason to love Hashem is that He is all loving. He gives us a Torah and multiple times a day, He tolerates our insults to His Stated will, we say the wrong bracha, we omit an after bracha, we have a negative charge against a family member and more. Hashem knows every emotion, every ounce of electrical impulse, within our makeup because at every moment it is He Alone Who is providing the Source for its existence by uttering it into existence. Hashem weaves the circumstances of our lives together so seamlessly though that we lose sight of His Constant Presence, His Omniscience, and His Omnificence.

The hiddenness of Hashem is in order to give us free will. Yet it also gives tyrants a tool to dominate, and that is through the illusion that they are in charge of our lives, our survival, in what esteem the world community will hold us. For those who do not have Torah to help see Hashem’s hiddenness, it is easy to understand how emotions can be swayed with political means.

There is a place in every person that needs love and value. It is oxygen for our existence. As people, being well thought of, cared for, appreciated, and having a productive existence is imperative to having a healthy life. There is no question about it. It is obvious that a tyrant can take that away. What is not obvious is that it is only with Hashem's permission.  And what is really hidden is that the success of the tyrant does not mean that Hashem favors the tyrant.  In human terms, in terms of human justice, it seems that way, that Hashem "rewards" the tyrant by subjugating the Jewish people to their actions.  In Torah terms, in terms of the function of Nishmas Am Yisrael, there is a more elevated effort towards creating positive influence for which Hashem desires to give us real eternal reward.

In the Holocaust, the Nazis took away productivity, took away the jobs and positions of the Jewish People. They forced us to wear garments labeling us as Jews. In this way, they used their power over the physical realm and their speech to create labels intended to strip away the divine dignity of the Jewish people.   It hurt the part of us that is physical. It was crushing. And then because they convinced themselves and others that the Jews were not really human, they went through with their plan to eradicate us, annihilating six million people.

Over the years we have become very sensitive to that place where our sense of feeling loved and valued based on emunah and bitachon in Hashem has been ridiculed, tortured, lowered, and murdered in order for tyrants to appear victorious over His People. That connection between the Jewish People and Hashem is our Bais HaMikdosh. It is a special flow. When our physical existence or ability to survive in healthy environment is threatened, unless we are so very strong in emunah and bitachon that we FEEL our love and value coming from Hashem, chances are that our happiness and pleasure will become trapped in goals seeking responses from external sources. No one is immune from this.

The Torah response is to understand at all times that EVERYTHING is Sourced in Hashem and He is the one to turn to. We lift our eyes and cry out regarding the bitterness, in prayer, Hashem this is bitter! We are turning to You! Hashem Echad!  Even if we don't understand.
Hashem wants to give us the relief we want. He wants to fill us with the pleasure of feeling love and valued by Him. He is in a constant state of desiring to do this, for this is the purpose for which He creates the world. Yet if He sends this chesed to us and we do not have a vessel to receive it, what will happen? We will not be able to contain the pleasure. It will just fall away and we will still be seeking the happiness and pleasure from external sources, believing that is reality. In other words, Hashem’s chesed to us would not be good for us! Why? Because even if intellectually we want it, our hearts are biased towards lower pleasures, an inevitable consequence of having had our existence challenged, traumatized and exterminated and threatened throughout history.

That is the area we need to restore. Each one of us can, in personal prayer, identify where we experience a discrepancy between the way things appear to be and the reality that everything Hashem does is good and just. Even if we can’t articulate all the ways our complaints and charges interfere, we can say two words with intention and sincerity. Hashem Echad.

Hashem is One. He is the Source. There is No Other Power.

Whatever it is that I seek through whatever means outside of Hashem that I seek it, that hishtadlus is not the hishtadlus that will prepare me to receive the real pleasure Hashem wants to give to us. We can argue with that a long time with many proofs. But Hashem wants our hearts and He knows when He has our hearts.

We know when we have given Him our hearts when we experience the pleasure of revealing His Glory over our natural urges otherwise.

Hashem wants a relationship with us. He wants us to spend time dissolving, bitteling, our sense of having any glory whatsoever that is not His Glory. He wants our egos to surrender to animating His Glory and His Torah and emulating His Attributes of mercy. He wants our imagination to happily connect to the role of Nishmas Am Yisrael and He wants to give us the pleasure He intends for us, the pleasure of being that vessel which reveals His Attributes of Mercy.  The Jewish people are intended to be as the moon reflecting the sun, with no light of our own.

All day long Hashem tolerates our insults awaiting us to remember Hashem Echad.  May His Love for us give us strength to reconnect our yearning for love and value, for happiness and pleasure, for our survival, to our hishtadlus to learn Torah, emulate His Attributes of Mercy and to live with emunah and bitachon revealing more and more His Glory and less and less the false belief that we have light of our own. Whatever doubts come up upon reading this, that is the work on our hearts we must do in order to become a vessel that can receive the pleasure He desires to give us. Individually, it is our tikun. And once we bring ourselves glued more closely to Him, and take our next step revealing His Glory, that is our yeud, our unique role.

No matter where we find ourselves, in government, politics, professions, positions of power and leadership, these principles apply to every Jew and it is a worthy pursuit, to remove what blocks His Glory from flowing through our hearts. Effort to do so creates the spiritual beings that can then help us in our positions to serve Hashem and make kiddush Hashem.

May we be zocheh to redemption b’ahava.
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