[Avodah] honest emotions

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2017 at 12:53:45PM -0500, Micha Berger wrote:
: So much of spirituality is emotional, that to this branch of Litvisher
: thought, emotions are the qodesh haqadashim of the soul...

Thinking about it more... If there is a seed of truth in the depiction
of a chassidic court in Potok's The Chosen, I want to amend that answer
to being a stream of thought in a number of East European mehalakhim.

To quote one of Reuven Saunders' lines from that book, he says about
his father, the rebbe:
    My father himself never talked to me, except when we studied
    together. He taught me with silence. He taught me to look into myself,
    to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with
    my soul.... One learns of the pain of others by suffering one's own
    pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one's own
    soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said. It destroys our
    self-pride, our arrogance, our indifference toward others. It makes
    us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend
    upon the Master of the Universe....

And on the next page, R Saunders explains:
    Reuven, I did not want my Daniel to become like my brother, may he
    rest in peace. Better I should have had no son at all than to have a
    brilliant son who had no soul.... And I had to make certain his soul
    would be the soul of a tzaddik no matter what he did with his life.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Our greatest fear is not that we're inadequate,
micha at aishdas.org        Our greatest fear is that we're powerful
http://www.aishdas.org   beyond measure
Fax: (270) 514-1507                        - Anonymous