Don’t Despair
Once a person appreciates how much Hashem helps us during these exalted days, he becomes filled with joy—and therefore, we must be extremely joyful in these days, and this bring us to another crucial point: despair from teshuvah.
The strongest despair in the world is the despair from teshuvah, when people despair of their spiritual future, thinking that they can no longer return.
The neshamah wants more than anything to return—because the neshamah hails from a place of Heavenly pleasure, and it cannot attain pleasure from the crooked ways onto which a person may have stumbled, and the only thing that can help the neshamah is teshuvah. Even if a person is entirely distant from Torah and mitzvos, his nefesh intuits that this the only effective method, that the way of teshuvah is the only way that he can attain pleasure and success in This World and in the Next World. Why, then, doesn’t he do teshuvah? Because he doesn’t believe that he will be successful in doing teshuvah! He has tried many times, and he didn’t succeed, and this threw him into deep despair, and he no longer believes that he can be successful in doing teshuvah.
And this is the worst kelipah: when a person despairs of changing his ways. And the mistake stems from the fact that teshuvah is indeed a herculean task—but the good news is that we don’t need to do it on our own! If we were required to do all the heavy lifting of the entire journey on our own, we would be justified to fall into despair. But we don’t! The daunting feeling is correct—for teshuvah is indeed difficult business. But teshuvah is not something that is done on one’s own. If we understood that teshuvah is formulated in a way that we take one step in the right direction, and then Hashem assists us on our journey forward, then we’d understand teshuvah as we never did before. In the past, you tried to do it on your own. You thought that it’s all on your shoulders to bring results, and this is why you haven’t succeeded.
