Question:
When a Jew faces a difficult situation in life, the first existence to most importantly look up for guidance is – G-d. G-d, can’t speak to us (individually through a voice format).Nevertheless, G-d sends out messages (differently) through a form of our daily actions. It’s our mission to puzzle up – upon G-d’s signals. But, what if G-d sends messages that people translate like a “message or messages” from G-d – When in reality… it’s their own version of a message. For instance, a person is lacking in the category of: Treating people the way you would want others to treat you. So, you publicly embarrassed a person – until they turned red at a supermarket. In a short period of time, G-d sends a warning message to you. One day, you walk outside a find a wallet lying on the ground. You pick it up… out of curiosity of how it landed right there. And a man comes shouting at you (that your a theft) and that you “stole it from his side pocket”. You get publicly humiliated – until you turned red. This person (who was humiliated), could translate this example story into two verses. 1) G-d, made me feel what it’s like to get publicly embarrassed so that I stop causing others pain. 2) “Translating: G-d’s message into your own personal use as if it’s a message from G-d”. In other words, your prospective is that G-d – wants me to show people, that I could stand up for myself and embarrass this person with all my might back as well.
How can a person not make a mishap between a message from G-d and their version “as if” it’s G-d’s talking to us in that direction. Even, if G-d would send a ton of messages to prove us wrong, people create a ton of times translations of their own verse, rather than G-d’s official messages. How to comprehend upon the difference?
Thanks!
Answer:
You are asking a good question. Unfortunately we don’t have prophets nowadays and we can not know exactly what messages H-shem wants to tell us, and our yetzer hora tries to get us to want to do things that are incorrect by telling us that it is indeed correct. So what do we do? To put the question in different words, often we are subjective and that confuses us. There are a number of things that we can do about this. The first one is to have a Rebbe or a mentor, that we can talk to openly and honestly, who is not subjected to our situation and can see things with a clearer perspective then we can. As a side point I once heard a nice idea regarding Yosef, when Potifara wanted to seduce him, and he almost failed until he saw the image of Yackov, which helped him overcome the nisayon. The question is asked, that the gemora says that when a persons yetzer hora tries to get him to sin, that he should read kriyas shema, go to a bais midrash and if that doesn’t work, he should remember the day of death. The question is why didn’t these three remedies work over here? One of the answers given is because the wife of Potifar said that she saw in the stars that the two of them were destined to have children together (which was misinterpreted, because It was from the child of Potifar that Yosef had children). This being the case, for him to say shema and think about fear of heaven, or the time that he will have to give a reconing in heaven, or learning torah will not help. This is because part of the difficulty there was that she was convinced that what she was doing was correct, therefore thinking about answering to the bais din shel maaleh will not help, because he thinks he is now doing a mitzva! What will work in this situation is for his rebbe to tell him, “cut it out! What you are thinking that it is a mitzva is a mistake, and what you are doing is really an aveiro”. That is why only the image of Yackov was able to save him at that time.
If you don’t have a rebbe or a mentor that you can speak to, try to get a different person that will be able to answer you honestly. Another possibility would be to try and take your subjectiveness out of the picture. try thinking, “what would I answer someone else, that would present me with this question”? This might help you to be able to think and see the situation in a more objective way.
Best Wishes
There are times when H-shem means to give us a message and times when it isn’t a message, but a test, to help us develop ourselves. Sometimes it may simply be a punishment. We don’t know. Our job is to do the best that we can, but H-shem gave us the torah, and it contains direction for all situations. It would seem to me that it is not H-shem will to show everyone that you know how to stand up for yourself, and that you have the capability to embarrass the other person with all your might. This will not help your middos, and it will not perfect your neshoma in any way. The question is how will we know when we are
and try to understand things to the best of our ability. the gemorah says that H-shem does not expect us to more than what we are capable of doing. Therefore we do the best we can, and then we leave the rest up to H-shem. On the other hand,
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