Would say who knows much a Gadol went through before he got to his greatness. True growth is step by step, which then enables one to get up after he fails. The failures bring difficulty but one can deal with them and heal from them after he knows how to grow properly step by step.
Working With Your Current Level And Capabilities
In order to live like this, one needs to know where he is right now. Many times people do not even know where they are now, what their abilities are right now. Otherwise they join a place or setting which is set way beyond what they can do, then they think they become broken from this and they can fall very low afterwards.
How many hours a day should a person learn Torah every day? One fulfills the mitzvah of learning Torah with saying Shema twice a day, but beyond that, how much should a person learn? The clear answer to this is that every person is obligated in learning Torah as long as he’s available to learn Torah and he doesn’t have to take care of anything else. He has to learn according to his capabilities. How capable is a person? No sefer tells you the answer. Can a person learn every day for the same amount?
How much should a person eat, how much does he need to eat? Reb Chatzkel would wonder how much he needed to eat, before starting to eat. When he ate the set amount he stopped eating. The average person though eats and eats as long as he’s hungry. How much time does a person need for sleeping? Between 6-8 hours, some need less and some need more, a baby sleeps a lot and as he gets older he doesn’t need to sleep as much.
Every person has to feel inwardly what his capabilities are, he has to know himself this much: What am I capable of and what am I not capable of? You can’t know it clearly and exactly but generally. A Gadol can learn much more, but most people who try to do this don’t succeed, they aren’t acting according to their capabilities. Thus, we need to have passion (fire) in our progress (wind) as we build ourselves step by step (earth) in order to have joyous growth. How do we know how to grow step by step? By knowing what our current capabilities are. We have to be very attentive, for our entire life, of where we stand currently and what the next step for us is that we would like to reach.
We have to know the purpose and greater goal but we also have to know the very next step we can take. These are two parts of life – knowing our greater purpose of where we want to end up, and knowing the current level of growth we are striving for right now.
One of my children saw a group of people who were sitting together and talking endlessly. He said to me, “I don’t want to be like these.” We don’t know what we want to look like at the end of our lives but we can know for certain that we don’t want to be like certain people. The more truthful we are and the more we think, we can know, to where do we need to be heading now and what is the eventual purpose that we need to end up by?
There are some mitzvos which are equal to the entire Torah, such as the mitzvos of learning Torah, donning tzitzis, keeping Shabbos, and teshuvah. Why does teshuvah equal the entire Torah? “Return Yisrael until Hashem your G-d.” To where does one return when he does teshuvah? To Hashem. The person was once by Hashem and now he is returning to Him, He is the source of all our souls. Every mitzvah that He gave us is so that we will return to Him through it. Torah is to recognize Him, to cling to His wisdom and will. It is all to return to Him. How do we return? Through keeping His mitzvos, doing His will, and clinging to His will. Thus all the mitzvos are about returning to Hashem.
The goal which we should want to end up by is to become attached with Him totally. Those who are zocheh (worthy) die with “kiss of Hashem”, they clung so much to Hashem. At the beginning of one’s way, one learns that the purpose is to be close to Hashem and he may attempt right now to reach it all but he has to realize that’s the goal and he can’t reach it all right now. He has to know where is going to, where he wants to end up, but he also has to know what his current goal should be.
Some people are always wanting to grow but they just want to be a little better, they aren’t heading for the purpose of life. The Mesillas Yesharim talks about such people and explains why they are making a mistake. They are moving their whole life, like wind, but they have no fire, they aren’t going up. But it has to be with earth, growing step after step, one after another. Then a person can be happy.
Why are people sad? Either when they are not using their potential, like when they want things that aren’t suitable for them, or the opposite, when they are overdoing their idealism and aspirations by acting above their current level and capabilities, when they take on extreme levels of growth and then they fall afterwards. In contrast to all this, a person can be happy throughout all of his growth, [making sure to maintain his drive but also making sure to work at one step at a time] and he doesn’t have to wait for Succos or any festival to be happy, because he can be happy right now. One example of this is learning Torah, which gladdens the heart.
We have mentioned here briefly how a person can be happy every day, to be “happy with his share”, being happy with his current level of growth, making sure to grow step after step, which is by working with his current level and capabilities, heading towards the general purpose of life (closeness to Hashem) yet also making sure that he has the next level of growth that he’s striving for, going from one level to the next without trying to get to the higher levels all at once. That is how a person can live a life of constant growth - and true happiness.
