Serve Hashem with joy. When is a person truly happy? There are many happy occasions we have, but which are not genuine happiness, just temporary and fleeting experiences of joy.
There are three festivals in which we have a mitzvah to be happy on, and the Torah says specifically of Succos that it’s the “time of our happiness”. The Torah calls Succos as Chag Ha’Asif, the season of harvesting. It is the time of the year in which the wheat gets harvested from the fields. What are we so happy about on Succos – that the wheat has been harvested? What does this have to do with us and why should we be so happy about this? It is because when the grains are harvested from an entire year’s worth of planting and growing and watching it grow, we are reminded of all the times when we “plant with tears and reap with joy”, we are seeing the fruits and efforts of our hard work.
We take one tiny little seed, plant it in the ground, and look how much comes from it - so many fruit and trees coming from one little seed. How could so much come from one little seed? It is because the seed itself really contains all of the trees and fruit that will come from it, in its potential. In fact, an endless amount of trees are potentially contained in that one little seed. Thus the time of our joy, Succos, the time to harvest from the ground, where the earth has produced so much from the potential that we put in.
Earth takes a potential and actualizes it. We plant a seed in the earth, it gets buried in the earth, where the earth nurtures the seed and then enables an entire tree to grow from it. In the soul, the element of earth is when we actualize our potential, thus the element of earth is the joy-giving element [as explained in the previous chapters].
When is a person happy? When he utilizes his abilities. Usually a person is happy when he buys something, but he hasn’t produced anything from himself so this cannot be true joy. “If someone has a hundred he wants two hundred”, whatever we get from the outside will just leave us disappointed and wanting more. But when we activate our own potential, that brings us joy.
ENJOYING THE PROCESS (WIND)
Getting even more precise, we plant with hard work and we are happy not only when we harvest the produce but we are happy throughout the whole process of the growth. We see it growing bit by bit and we are happy throughout the whole process. A child becomes Bar Mitzvah and later gets married, are the parents only happy at these big occasions? They are happy with the child even before it, they are happy with the whole process. This is the element of “wind”, the movement or process that’s involved. The parents don’t just see the results, they see the potential slowly being actualized.
PASSION (FIRE)
But a person may not be happy with the process itself. He needs passion in it. This is the element of “fire”. People can be growing and progressing but if they feel like there’s no meaning in their life they’re only getting closer to death and despair, they can feel like they’re just getting closer to the end of their lives or that they’re getting closer to a place of despair.
True growth is when a person is regularly rising higher and feeling passion in his growth as he’s in the midst of the process of growing, he’s just not moving forward and making process but he’s becoming excited and passionate throughout the whole process as he gets closer to his goals.
FIRE-OF-WIND-OF-EARTH
Thus joy comes from harvesting, actualizing our potential – earth. It has come not only at the end but throughout the whole process – that’s wind. And throughout the process there has to be excitement and feeling uplifted, that’s fire. [This is how joy can come from our soul’s power of fire-of-wind-of-earth].
STEP BY STEP GROWTH (EARTH) VS. RAPID, EXTREME GROWTH (FIRE)
There are two ways of how people grow. One way to go higher is to go step by step, to climb, and another way is to jump higher. What is the right way to go higher? Step by step is better than jumping, because jumping means that a person needs to do something extreme in order to get higher, he is not being stable. When he does get higher, he remains with the extreme movements. Either he will make another extreme move to go higher or he will make an extreme move to get back down, since he has accustomed himself to extreme movement. Even if he can jump very fast to a very high place, he can quickly fall back down.
For example, if one learns halachah where does he want to go, to learn quickly and get to the end already? But if one learns in depth he can get it slowly until he gets to the end. How to get higher – to go step after step. If one wants to quickly rise higher he won’t succeed.
An example of fire-based growth (when there is no earth) is when a festival is coming up so a person wants to really gain from the holiness of the festival, he opens up sefarim and starts learning all about the concepts of the festival. For example when Chanukah is coming up, he learns a sefer about how great and lofty Chanukah is and all the great levels he can get from Chanukah. After learning all about Chanukah, now he is wondering how he can reach all of it at once. The first day of Chanukah comes and he feels like he’s already there (it’s like he is going with the view of Beis Shamai which is that one has to start with 8 lights on the first day and decrease 1 light each day), and as each day of Chanukah passes he feels his inspiration waning, he is falling down from the plateau that he was on, until all of his excitement for Chanukah is completely depleted and he has to wait until Purim to feel excited and inspired again.
He started with fantasy, with trying to quickly attain the highest levels. What is the right way? All the exalted matters written about Chanukah are describing where we have to get to at the end, not where we have to start from.
We can’t rise too quickly, and even if we do then we will learn how to do extreme things and we can’t really grow like that. This is not only extreme (“kitzoni”) but external (“chitzoni”). People who become newly observant of Torah will often go too far with their idealism and they want to jump to the highest levels already, and a few months later they might fall back into their old ways.
Everything needs a ground to be based on. Fire pushes a person upward and wind moves a person around, we can’t base our growth on wind or fire, we need to base ourselves on earth and go step by step. We can’t either build a house on a river or body of water even if it’s frozen because the ice can crack, and when they fall in to the water they can die not from drowning in deep water but because there’s no way to get out of the water with a frozen surface. Without stable ground we can’t build anything on it.
The proper way is to build step after step. We need fire to go up, but only if can we rise step after step. This is a way to live happily. Otherwise we can grow quickly but then fall quickly, and this leads to sadness. People want to grow very much, they go higher, and then they fall quickly and fall into a rut. Though people can also fall even after they grow step by step, most of the falls that people have are after they have grown very quickly.
Any obstacle in one’s way defined as a pit, which damages or kills depending on how deep the pit is. A person who grows slowly goes up a bit. If he falls from there, the fall isn’t so bad. But if he grows quickly, he goes up very fast and then if he falls from there, either he can get very hurt or he may die from the fall (not always but commonplace). Moshe didn’t go past 10 tefachim (handbreadths) above the ground, he didn’t jump too high. There is no one who doesn’t fall - even tzaddikim fall. But depending on how high he goes that’s how much the fall will be.
[ אש דרוח דעפר עבדו את השם בשמחה013הכרת כוחות ושימוש השמחה ]
