The Hints From Above Bringing You Back to Your Path

The Hints From Above Bringing You Back to Your Path

Kitzur Likutey Moharan - Lesson 31 - 23 Tevet

"God sends to each individual the thoughts, words and deeds appropriate for the day, the person and the place. Within them are hints intended to draw the person closer to God's service." -Likutey Moharan I, 54

Credit: Pixabay - Blickpixel

One of the oldest slanders about Breslovers and anyone who follows Rebbe Nachman's path is that they will eventually go crazy.

Even though this is obviously ridiculous, it has--everything else in this world--a small kernel of truth mixed in among the enormous lies. 

Because like with any other important discovery in about the Big Truths, Rebbe Nachman's teachings can hit you really deep in your head and your heart. They can make you shift your entire perspective on the world to the point where what you've discovered can be almost dazzling. And after that, if let yourself go too far afield with your own "logical implications" of Rebbe Nachman's ideas (which are really just the same old Torah ideas of Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov), your thinking could, potentially, become a bit jumbled.

Of course, the True Tzaddik knew this could happen, which is why he was very explicit about what you can, and what you can't, do with the lessons he gave over.

The paradigm case of all this is Rebbe Nachman's ideas about the almost constant "hints" being sent by G-d to each and every person, you included, tailor made just for you in order to guide you back on the path leading back to your Creator.

This is important because for Rebbe Nachman, there's no metaphor being made here about Nature, or some complex magical/mystical phenomena. 

Rebbe Nachman takes G-d seriously. When G-d tells us in the Torah that we are His children and that He waits, at every moment, for us to come back to Him, simply because He loves us and we are His children, Rebbe Nachman knows that G-d means exactly what He says.

G-d watches us stumble around on this Earth, on our unsteady legs, constantly distracted by all the beautiful--and not so beautiful--things He put here in this physical world, and He knows that we need his help.

The incredible thing about this is that even though we can't really put it into words, we can comprehend, on a deep level inside ourselves, exactly how this works, through similar situations in our own lives. 

My youngest daughter is the most pleasant child I have ever experienced. She barely ever cries, and when she does it's only because she really needs something, like a diaper change or to be fed. But even then, her cries aren't all that sad. If you have kids, or younger siblings, or an important four-legged friend, you know what I mean about the difference between the "sad" cries and the "hey guys, look over here, I'm kind of hungry, can I get some food please" cries.

But every once in a while, usually if something startles her awake in the middle of the night, or if her view of my wife and I is blocked and she can't find us--in these moments, her cries are so sad in their searching and longing for mommy and daddy to just be with her, that even writing about it now makes my heart feel like its dropping out of my chest.

If you know that feeling that you just can't quite describe to anyone else, even though you know exactly how it feels inside yourself, then you know exactly why G-d uses everyday, regular occurrences, to send us hints--messages from the One Who Loves Us Infinitely--so that we will realize that every moment of searching and longing for meaning and happiness in life has always been a pale substitution for our true desire for our Creator to just be with us.

This is all directly related to this entire essay, because it wouldn't have existed were it not for G-d's very obvious hints to me.

I had originally planned on writing one post per-day, for each daily portion of the Kitzur Likutey Moharan (according to the schedule lovingly provided by the Breslov Research Institute in their amazing English translation of the same). 

Well, I started writing this on 23 Tevet. I last published here on 19 Tevet. 

Fail.

And not just any kind of fail. I failed in my plans after one day!

Epic Fail.

I was feeling incredibly down about this. I recognize that for many of you, this is a very strange thing to feel down about. But it just was one more thing in the long list of things that I've determined to do in my daily, flailing attempts to even take one tiny step closer to Hashem.

So I was going to just abandon this blog and put it down as yet another entry on my seemingly endless list of bad ideas.

"But you should still read the daily lesson Rav Noson wrote in the Kitzur."

It was just the briefest of thoughts that popped into my head as I was reading about a new variation of that meatless meat stuff, of all things.

Should I really have been so surprised that the day's lesson was directly related to what I was feeling? 

Rav Noson writes:

"The general principle is that yearnings and longings for a holy thing are extremely precious."

Here I was, wanting so bad to make this new project work, but feeling like a complete failure because as much as I knew the real truth of my desire to make this smallest service to the Creator in order to take just one tiny step closer to Him, it seemed like I wasn't going to be able to accomplish it.

And yet, obviously, Hashem saw what was happening in the deepest parts of my heart, so He sent me this hint. Not in some kind of conspiratorial "I hear voices" madness, but just a gentle guiding hand, putting what I needed to hear in front of me exactly when I needed to hear it. The longing and yearning I have to write about Rebbe Nachman's path here shouldn't be bringing me down. It should be bringing me higher than high, because those feelings are, per Rav Noson, "extremely precious."

The same should go for all of you. Anytime you set out on a path to do something to get you closer to the Infinite One, but for whatever reason, you feel like you've failed miserably, don't let that get you feeling like a failure. It should be the complete opposite. The very fact that your longing and yearning to get closer to Hashem is strong enough to make you feel so bad when it doesn't go as planned, is a message and a sign from Hashem Himself that your longing is precious to Him and should encourage you to keep going, no matter what happens. 

As Rebbe Nachman stressed over and over again, the descent is always for the purpose of the ascent. If you never fall, you may not even realize that there was more space to raise yourself up, even closer, in your connection to Hakadosh Baruch Hu.

Just as long as you keep desiring to get closer to Him, you never have any room to doubt how cherished that very desire is to the One Above.