Q&A
Sensible Growth & Teshuvah
Question 1: How can a person know if he’s ready to grow to another step?
Answer: When a person feels that his current level of growth isn’t stressing him and that he’s natural at it, he is ready for the next step. If one feels that his current goals are a pressure on him and he feels many times that he has no desire to grow at his current level, it means he hasn’t acquired his current level yet and he’s certainly not ready to start working on the next step. When he feels it’s easy to do it, now is the time to go to the next step.
Question 2: How can a person know what his current capabilities are?
Answer: A person can’t know this exactly, just as one cannot know exactly how much he needs to eat and sleep. But a person is able to have an idea of what’s too extreme for him to do right now.
Question 3: What should a person do if he can’t figure it out? A person who gravitates towards extremities is likely to be imagining what his actual capabilities really are.
Answer: That is a very good question. Some people have souls that are very emotional, stormy, and imaginative, so they can’t see things clearly and objectively, and they will need to find either an expert Rav or a wise friend whom they are close with, whom they can regularly seek advice with, because they aren’t able to get clarity by thinking on their own. They also should realize that they can’t act right away on every thought and feeling they have, and if they want to make any kind of change or resolution or commitment to something, they should push it off for another month and then re-assess to see if they still want to make that change, and usually a month later a person discovers that he was mistaken about something. If a person suddenly gets an idea when he wakes up in the morning and immediately he decides to act on it, it is very likely that he will err. He got the idea when he felt inspired from some factor, and though he can act on it for a day or two, soon after he falls. If he would think about it for a month beforehand, then gradually the emotional inspiration will fade and then at the end of the month he can see that he had been acting from a place of faulty logic. This is how a person gains clarity. A person can also write down all the different thoughts, feelings, and ideas he had over the course of a month, and he will see all the shifts in his thoughts that took place. That is how a person can see that he doesn’t know himself well, and this very awareness will give him more clarity about himself.
Question 4: How can someone know if he’s making the mistake of “jumping” to a higher level that he’s not ready for yet?
Answer: The first thing one has to know is: “Where am I found?” [or, “What is my current level?”] The second thing to know is, “What is the next level of growth that I’m capable of right now?” He can try visualizing that a friend is coming to him and asking him this very question. He can now think more objectively. If he can do the above, the next step is to try for a few days or a week to go about acquiring his next stage of growth. Not to take on resolutions, but to simply experiment and try it out (just like a person first tries out a new job for a few days to see if it’s for him). After a week he should re-asses. If he feels that he has acted too extreme, it means he was making an error. But if it didn’t feel extreme to him then he can keep trying at it again for another period of time, this time a bit longer. If, after trying it out 3 times he feels relaxed and calm about the new changes, then the chance of him being mistaken are very low. Usually though people decide to take on changes for the year before they have even tried it out a little. How many people can keep to the changes they accepted on Rosh HaShanah? Not a lot, because they aren’t being realistic. But if a person would first try out the change a bit before taking it on, though he may make mistakes, they will be a lot less. He is going at it sensibly. Along with davening to Hashem to guide him, he will succeed, and even if he makes mistakes, the mistakes won’t be major and he is in a lot less danger of falling, after following the above.
Question 5: By doing mitzvos it’s easier to take on change and go at it slowly, but when it comes to not doing aveiros it’s much harder not to do. How can a person grow slowly at not doing aveiros?
Answer: This is a sensitive issue. In the final generation where there are so many baalei teshuvah who have recently discovered Yiddishkeit, this question is often asked, and the Gedolim answered many of these kinds of questions, of how to guide baalei teshuvah, of how much to push them forward and how much can be ignored so that they don’t fall back. There are certain rules though which don’t change. Something which is clearly forbidden will always be forbidden and it can’t be compromised in any situation. One has to do the will of the Creator right now, regardless if he feels he can make the change or not – if it’s clearly the will of the Creator then he must do it. The only issue of taking on growth slowly is only when it’s something that’s not clearly forbidden (for example, in the area of sanctifying permissible pleasures, which require gradual pulling back and which cannot be done rapidly). In the last generation the Gedolim decided what to tell baalei teshuvah who fall back into doing their old aveiros. These are matters which need an expert, reliable Rav to guide a person in, and one can’t know the answers to this on his own.
Question 7: So if a person got used to do something forbidden, he won’t be able to rapidly “jump” out of it?
Answer: When a person is doing something that’s clearly forbidden, this is the only time where he in fact he must jump out of it. It is just that most people can’t even do this. If a person earnestly says that he is able to handle the change then we cannot tell him not to change. He’s doing something forbidden, so we can’t tell him to do otherwise. Here we are discussing a different problem, when people say they can’t separate from all their forbidden behavior all at once. It is a delicate issue because this involves sins of the Torah, not merely levels of growth. But if to begin with we merely tell him to try at it, there are things he can handle for a short period of time but which he won’t be able to do for a long period. For example if a person tries to get only 3 hours of sleep, for how many days can he do this? A person can’t try extreme changes for too long. But if tell him to begin trying something out, he can keep to it and slowly he will understand that yes, it’s difficult, but then he can better accept that he can’t do more. Instead of feeling like a failure, he can realize from the start that he was merely trying out a new change for a short period of time. That is the healthy and proper way to do it – on one hand not to slacken off from being idealistic, but at the same time, knowing from the start that he doesn’t have to end up in “failure” later.
Question 8: But if a baal teshuvah is told that his growth is limited, then we are stifling his great fiery enthusiasm.
Answer: That’s very true, but practically speaking we have to give him a step by step plan to work with. We can tell him “Try for a week learning for these hours of the day.” Don’t tell him that he needs to learn a certain amount, just tell him to try this for a week. Like this, even if he couldn’t keep to it, he won’t feel that he failed. Instead he will feel that he tried something and saw that it wasn’t compatible with him. If we would have told him “Learn for these hours of the day” and he fails with the task, he feels like a failure. That is why we need to instead tell him to try it out as an experiment.
Question 9: How can it be that one day a person has yiras shomayim and the next day he doesn’t? What changed?
Answer: There isn’t one answer to this - there are several possible reasons for it. Everything always goes through changes, nothing stays the same. Everything in creation comes from the spiritual, it is always changing. Only Hashem doesn’t change. Every person changes, either a person is going up or down. But extreme changes have to be avoided.
