Nonetheless, Rebbe Nachman never points out our problems without giving us amazing advice on how to fix them. In this case, his advice is to surrender to Hashem. In particular, Rebbe Nachman mentions two types of surrender: embarrassment and broken heartedness.
We naturally don’t do things in front of other people that would cause us embarrassment. This is how we prevent ourselves from sinning and doing improper things in public. So too, we should feel embarrassed in front of Hashem. When we go through hard times and we fall, we should be full of humiliation over what we did. We should hear the rebuke of the Torah and the tzaddikim and receive it with love by being silent and accepting the truth. This embarrassment has incredible power to help us escape the klipos of heretical thoughts by nullifying our ego and attaching us deeply to Hashem.
Furthermore, we should break our hearts before Hashem in hisbodedus. We should recognize that our entire existence is completely in His hands, and we should surrender ourselves to Him completely by saying, “I don’t know anything. I have no seichel. I’m not worth anything – not in this world and or in the next world.” This is the main teshuvah that we must do to overcome all of our heretical thoughts and come to pure emunah: to be mevatel ourselves to Hashem.
Of course, we must be careful not to let our broken heart make us fall into sadness. Rebbe Nachman says later on in Sichos HaRan that there is a difference between a true broken heart and depression. In essence, the main difference is that when we break our hearts from a place of arrogance – that we feel upset because we thought that we deserved things to go our way and they didn’t – this type of a broken heart only causes us to get stuck in bitter darkness.
Thus, if we find that our suffering and negative thoughts bring us to the broken heart of arrogance, we must apply Rebbe Nachman’s other advice of feeling embarrassed before Hashem. This embarrassment transforms our brokenness into positive motivation to do teshuvah and serve Hashem. It inspires us to get up and do the right thing. In this way, the aspects of a broken heart and embarrassment go together.
