By: Yehuda Berg
February 8 — 14
How can we alleviate the guilt after we’ve hurt someone?
The first step is to realize that, despite the pain you caused, what took place had to happen. This doesn’t mean you can shirk responsibility and say, “he had it coming to him” or “everything happens for a reason, so obviously she deserved it.” We understand the laws of cause and effect not so we can deny responsibility, but so we can take responsibility.
Once you’ve accepted that things happen for a reason, the second step is to take a cold hard look at what you’ve done and acknowledge the bad. This is something Rav Ashlag writes about often, with regards to dismantling the ego. Unless you recognize where you went wrong, you don’t stand a chance of eliminating that pattern of behavior from your life.
The key is recognizing you aren’t bad. The behavior is bad.
Step three is the reparations process, and for this potentially painful step, I want to share with you a little bit of insight from this week’s portion of The Zohar.
If you are using The Zohar, you may have noticed that this week’s portion – Yitro – is one of the only segments named after a human being. (Yitro was Moses’ father-in-law.) The fact that this section is named after him indicates that we have something important to learn from him.
Yitro was the high priest of the Midianites (an enemy of the Israelites) and one of the most powerful sorcerers of his time. However, when he heard of the Splitting of the Red Sea, he realized the power of the Light and he soon saw the error of his ways. He immediately dropped everything - his home, his ministry - and began to follow the ways of Moses and Kabbalah.
As The Zohar tells us, Yitro had created a lot of negativity up until that point, but rather than moan about his errors in judgment, he dropped everything and asked the most important question one can ask when standing on the precipice of regret:
“What can I do to reveal Light, now?”
Yitro took it to the next level and actually became an advisor to Moses. He lived with the Israelites for a year and then went back to Midian (his home) and spent the rest of his life revealing Light by teaching the Midianites about the power of the Light.
You are going to fail from time to time – that’s the system you asked for before your soul came down. In a sense, failing in itself is not really failure. Real failure is getting stuck in self-loathing, missing the lessons you were meant to learn.
Not only was Yitro able to recover from the mistakes he made, but he used his failure to help others see the error of their ways. It’s like a person who overcomes drug addiction and then goes onto be a mentor to others struggling with addiction.
Therefore, the key to step three is turning your hardest learned lessons into a mission to save others from making the same mistakes.
I am sure you have moments in your life that you wish you could redo - or even erase altogether. I know I do. Use the energy this week to bring your regrets out of hiding and find a way to use them for good. Take some time to identify something you’ve done in the past from which you have yet to see the Light (something pretty bad against yourself or others). Go through the steps above to help you get to a place where you can do something about it, even if it is not directly with the person you have wronged.
Consider it early spring cleaning.
All the best,
Yehuda
72 Name of the Week
I recall negative deeds from my past. I reflect on some of my more unpleasant traits. I feel the pain that I have caused others. I ask the Light to eradicate all my negative attributes. The force called repentance spiritually repairs my past sins and diminishes the dark side of my nature.
