Actualizing Our Faith - 007 Where To Run To When Afraid

Living in the Innermost Part of your Soul

If a person understands life to mean that he is living on this physical world, in the simple sense, naturally, he will feel that this world is a very frightening place.  This world is indeed a very scary place – that is, for someone who lives superficially.

Only those who feel like they really live on this world have fears. By contrast, those who live in their soul do not have fears from this world.

The Solution To Fears

When a person feels that he is in danger, where does he run to?

The simple reaction, which is superficial, would be to run away to a new place, where there’s no danger. That can work if a person is in danger from the country he’s living in, so he can just run to a different country where it’s safer there.

But what if the danger is always here, and there is nowhere to run to? What then is the solution? On this world, there is always what to be afraid of. Where should a person run to, then? That is why we need to use the inner solution.

The inner solution for fears is not to run away from where you are. It is really to stay where you are, and to deal with it. The way a person does this is by building for himself an inner place in his soul, where he can run to whenever he feels scared. The only safe place a person can run to is a place in his own soul.

Of course, no one should retreat into this place all day, as this is not what Hashem wants from us. What we mean is that sometimes, when a person feels afraid, he should run into an inner place in his soul. A person needs to develop an internal world inside himself, where he can run to sometimes.

There are rooms in a person’s heart – “chadrei halev.” Our Gedolim developed their souls, and they would retreat there whenever they felt a time of danger. The Chazon Ish zt”l said that there is a deep, inner place in one’s soul where there is no danger and only peace. That is where we need to go when we feel danger.

This is not the imagination. If a person wants to live in his soul based on imagining so, he will become delusional and mentally ill. Only one who lives in his soul through his internal reality that he has developed within himself can go there.

Just like Gan Eden is a place where we can sit there and feel no danger, so is there a place in our soul where there is no danger.

The Innermost Point Is Above Even Your Power of Emunah

We are referring to the innermost point of one’s soul. What is the innermost point? Even emunah, which is a very deep part of one’s soul, is not yet the innermost point. We are referring to the “chadrei halev”, the innermost chambers of one’s heart.

One who lives there will have no fears; one who lives an internal kind of life is able to access this place in his soul.

How does a person develop an internal kind of life, which will enable him to access his innermost point of the soul and retreat to there? To give a general description, this is when a person sees that life is all a set, organized path. Such an attitude will help a person live life more internally. We will explain this more about this soon.

Accepting Changes

There are two basic kinds of unhealthy fears – fears of impending danger, and fears of the unknown. How can a person overcome these fears?

We said before in the last chapter that all fears are rooted in a fear of change. Based upon this, we can know the solution to our fears: a person needs to get used to and accepting changes. Since all our fears are essentially a fear of a change to our situation, we can mitigate the fear by accepting change.

To work on this, we can think about what it means to go through a change, even a small change. This will take away the fear.

How does it work? Fear is only possible because it is unexpected. People are afraid of any changes, because changes are unexpected. A person naturally thinks: “This event is not supposed to be here…why is this happening…?”

The source of all fears is that people fear changes, and this is because all changes are unexpected. Everyone is scared of changes for this reason, and this is also behind why people fear the unknown.

Life: A Certain Journey

But if a person thinks about life and what every normal person goes through in life, he will see that everything is supposed to happen, come what may; doing this reflection will get a person to see that nothing is “unexpected”, because really, everything that happens in life is supposed to happen.

A person starts out life; he is born into this world, and then he grows up as a child and a teenager. He gets married, he has children, he becomes older, and then - he dies.

This is the setup of life. When a person realizes that this is the setup, and that this is the way things are supposed to be, he will be able to accept any changes that come his way, small or big. He won’t look at life as just a bunch of circumstantial events, but instead he will come to look at everything in life as a certain path that he has to go on.

In Hebrew, this is called the “tahalich” (journey). Our life – from beginning until end, as well as the end itself – is all a tahalich.

With this acceptance, a person will then be able to expect anything, and then the person will also find that there is no place for fear in one’s life.

Most people view life’s events as circumstance, that everything just “happens”, with no intentional order of events, that everything in life is random. But the inner way to live life is to see life as a very specific, clear setup; everything is supposed to happen.

Of course, there is a higher way to overcome our fears, and that is if a person has total Emunah. But we are not speaking of such a high level; we are addressing even a person who isn’t even on that level; it is something that even the animalistic part of the soul can understand. Our method can be used to calm down the simple emotion of fear that comes from one’s animalistic part of the soul. It is a simple solution that speaks to even the lowest part of our soul; no one has to be learned in Torah at all to use this solution for fear. It is simply a change in one’s attitude.

By realizing that everything in life has its place, that everything that happens is part of the path of life, then there is no more fear. This gives stability to a person, and doesn’t allow fear to set in.

Examples of Seeing All of Life As A “Tahalich”

For example, if a person wants to develop his soul, he cannot look at the various forces in his soul as various abilities that “happen” to be there. He must look at everything that there is always a certain system to it, and that there is a reason for everything he sees. Everything has its place.

A person who truly works on himself will see that all of life is a certain system, and that everything is supposed to happen in this system.

As an example, a person can understand this from learning a sugya of Gemara. Every part in the sugya has its place; nothing “happens” to be there in the sugya. All of the information is part of the plan.

When a person doesn’t view life this way, and instead everything just “happens” – then he goes his whole life with a superficial attitude: If one is worthy, he goes to Gan Eden, and if not, he goes to Gehinnom….he will go his whole life not knowing what life even is. He won’t see life as a system.

When people worry about how many daughters they have to marry off, how many simchos they have to make, and how they will manage financially, it is all because they don’t see how all of these things are supposed to happen, and then they live their whole life in fear and anxiety. Really, it’s all part of the system of life.

Why People Fear Death

This helps us understand why people are so afraid of death. People think that death just “happens”, and that really it shouldn’t happen. Of all changes, death is the biggest change there is, so we are all afraid of it; in addition, it always comes so unexpectedly. What we get from this is the most unexpected change possible, something that we think shouldn’t happen.

But if a person knows that life has a system to it, and that death is a step in the system of life just like any other step – that yes, death is supposed to happen to us - then he will find that he won’t fear death. Death is a step in life – it is the final step, but it is part of life, and we are to expect it. It is supposed to happen!

This does not mean that we should not pity widows and orphans, who have lost their loved ones. We absolutely must feel their sorrow, as the Torah commands us to.

But death shouldn’t make us afraid. Death is a part of life that we all have to go through. People fear death only because they don’t see how death is a part of life. Most people, in fact, aren’t experiencing life the way they should, because they spend their entire lives agonizing over what will happen to them when they die. When people do this, they spend their whole lives experiencing death, not life!  

Life is only experienced when we realize how everything that happens in life is part of a system.

We will go a step further: besides for dealing with our fear of death, how can we deal with all our fears and worries that we have?

The Deeper Solution to Dealing With Fears

There is a superficial solution that people have for their fears: “hesech hadaas” – to simply take their mind off their worries.

Some people will either call a friend, and some will simply get busy with something else, in order to take their mind off their worries. It can definitely work, but what is the problem here? It is that when people have a hesech hadaas, many of them lose their “daas” (mind) in the process, because they end up “removing” all of their daas altogether…

Others look for excitement and stimulation to take their mind off of their troubles. They also lose their daas in the process; when a person becomes too excited with emotions, it ruins his daas.

But there is an inner kind of solution we can do. It also involves a factor of hesech hadaas, but it is deeper than regular hesech hadaas.  A person can have a hesech hadaas, but instead of not thinking about his worries as a way to disconnect from his mind, he can instead steer his mind to something else: he can return to his daas.

We will explain how to do this.

Learning Torah in order to get back your Daas

It is written in Tehillim, “If not for Your Torah, my delight, I would lose myself in my suffering.” The best solution to overcome our anxieties is to learn Torah.

As we explained in the last chapter, this does not mean that one should run away from his painful reality by simply by running to the beis midrash to learn Torah. It’s possible that one is only learning Torah as a form of disconnecting from reality! This is not what Hashem wants from us. It’s better than running away to other places, but it is not yet the inner solution to our fear and anxieties.

The inner solution for fear is to return our da’as to an inner place; we will explain this. All fears really come from our sins. This is the deep source for all our fears. Fear gets created from sin.

Where in our soul ds our fears located? They come from our daas, which is found in our heart. Fear is not just an emotion; it is a higher kind of feeling, stemming from our daas in our heart. The outer layer of our fears is felt through our emotions, but the inner layer of our fears is in our heart (Although there are also fears that come from our simple emotions, the main fears come from our daas.)

It is written, “When a man has worry in his heart, he should speak it over to others.” When a person is afraid and worried, the fears are located in his heart. Are they located in our heart’s emotions, or they are coming from a deeper place in our heart?

They are not coming from the heart’s emotions; they are coming from a deeper place in our heart, our daas of the heart. Fears are rooted in our daas, and they result in the emotional fears that we experience. But the fear itself is located in our daas.

In the sefarim hekadoshim, fears are known as “daas ra” – the evil kind of daas, which came as a result from Adam’s sin when he ate from the eitz hadaas, which had in daas tov and daas ra. All fears thus come from the evil kind of daas. When we have fear, it means that our daas has become daas ra.  We need to gain daas tov, the good kind of daas; we need to have the real “hesech hadaas.” The unhealthy fear we experience is only a garment of the evil daas, but the root of the fear is evil daas itself.

Now we know the solution to fear: to use our daas tov, the good kind of daas. So what we need to do is learn how to steer our daas to a better place than where it is now, whenever we have fears. Let us explain how we can do this.

If a person wants to take his mind off his troubles by going to the Beis Midrash to learn Torah, it can only take away his fears is he learns with the intention that this is the only thing that can return his good kind of daas, that he needs to get back his daas.

This is the true “hesech hadaas”: take your mind off your troubles, by learning Torah – because you know that by taking your mind off of the fear in this way, you are enabling yourself through the Torah to gain back your real daas.

The Root Solution To Fears is Daas

We have discussed the different causes for fears, and we have given the root solution: daas. We have said that to solve all our fears, a person needs to get back his daas.

There are three basic kinds of fears, and each has its own method how to solve them. There are fears that come from our feelings, which can be calmed through our feelings. There are fears that come from our daas, which is daas ra; such fears are calmed through the daas tov, the good kind of daas. There are also fears that come from both the feelings and the daas together, and if this is the case, a person needs to figure out where exactly his fears are coming from – if they are coming from his feelings, or from his daas.