48 Ways - 017 A Settled Mind

Yishuv Hadaas

We are soon approaching the time in which we received the Torah; we must prepare ourselves for this. One of the ways we prepare for the Torah is through “yishuv” – otherwise known as yishuv hadaas, a “settled mind”. It means to have a life of tranquility.

 This doesn’t mean to sit at home and do nothing, of course, but to have a real and inner kind of tranquility. A tranquil kind of life – yishuv hadaas – can totally change a person’s life. How can a person reach yishuv hadaas?  

Getting Back Our Minds

People are doing all sorts of actions a whole day. How much are we connected in our minds to the many actions that we do? Upon some reflection, we will find that most of our actions throughout the day have nothing to do with our mind. We simply do and do all sorts of things, but our mind isn’t necessarily connected to what we do.

In order to live a life with “yishuv hadaas” – a calm and tranquil life - we need to have “daas” (a mature mind) in the first place. A life without daas is a life in which people live in a superficial manner, never thinking about what they do. What is the concept of yishuv hadaas? There are two explanations to this. One meaning of it is to act calmly. Another explanation of yishuv hadaas [which is what we will focus on here] is when a person’s mind is presentas he acts.

We will try to think here what a life of yishuv hadaas is (and we will go with the second approach, that yishuv hadaas is to a life with a mind). Here is a question: Every person has a mind. Do we use our mind just as a tool in order to get to something, or is our mind considered to be an actual part of our life?  In other words: do we only consider this world to be a life of action and “getting things done”, or is there more to life than just getting things done? Do we ever consider the fact that life contains an inner kind of knowledge, an inner dimension, that needs to explored?

A Life of Knowledge

There are really two ‘worlds’ in front of us. There is a world of physical action that we see with our eyes, and there is also a world of daas (‘knowledge’) in front of us, which we cannot see with our physical eyes. We must discover it and connect to it.

A life of daas (‘knowledge’) takes place within the person himself. A person could either look at this world through his physical senses, feeling superficially that “I’m happy,” or he can actually enter a world of happiness within himself. The first way is a superficial kind of life - and the second way is the deeper, truer kind of life.

Awareness

We will give an example of it. If a person travels to Israel, let’s say, is he aware that he has just moved from place to place? Yes, because he understands that he has undergone physical kind of movement. But let’s say a person has gone from sad to happy. Does he feel this change taking place?

The soul of a person has many rooms to it – and they are called “chadrei halev” (rooms in the heart). A person really moves from one place in his heart to another! When a person isn’t aware that he is able to leave one place inside himself and entering another place of himself, he is living is unaware of his internal world, and he lives a life of darkness.

We need to become aware of the internal layer of reality that is within us; we need to realize the many rooms that are inside our heart, our chadrei lev.

Mature Emotions

Do adults and children share the same happiness? If an adult still experiences a childish kind of happiness, can we call this a real happiness? A child doesn’t have daas; his happiness isn’t real. A child’s happiness is a mere emotion that is missing a certain kind of mature understanding. But when a person matures and develops, he has to realize that there is more understanding to our emotions. We have to realize as we mature that happiness, for example, has to be a deeper experience to us than when we were happy as a child.

This idea is very hard to express in words, because it is a feeling that must be experienced. But we are trying to describe a certain kind of picture: that the feelings we have must be entirely different than from what we felt as children.

Most people, when they become adults, only see how they changed physically. They don’t see how they changed emotionally, because most people are unaware of the internal world.

A Whole Different Kind of Life

I am trying to explain a totally different kind of a life than we know of, a total change in our perspective.

Many times people think that it is only their middos (character traits) which they have to change, but they don’t realize that they must change their entire understanding towards life altogether.

To explain this concept a bit more (chadrei halev), all of us have inside us a kind of ‘store’, with many compartments and items inside it. But we are used to looking at ourselves as if we’re standing outside the ‘store’, peering inside to see what’s in there on the front shelf, but remaining outside of it.

“Pnimiyus”: The Inner Dimension Inside Us

If we would only enter inside ourselves, we would realize a whole new world that we never knew existed.

People might have even seen others work hard at uncovering their pnimiyus (inner layer) in themselves, and they have therefore heard of this concept of “pnimiyus”, but they still have no idea what this really entails.

We must realize that there is an entirely different kind of world, inside of us, that we need to enter. First, we must believe in this reality. It’s not about coming to a shiur once a week; it’s about building a new world within ourselves. The question is if we are really willing to invest in it, or to just come once a month to “hear a shiur”….

It is hard to express the concept we are describing. Some people have indeed begun to enter the inner world, but even those who haven’t at least have heard this now, and they now will have the key to open it.

Restarting Our Lives To Live A Life of Inner Truth

We must start over our life!

Is the world today – in Eretz Yisrael, and certainly in America – is this the kind of world that Hashem wants us to live in?? Or does Hashem want something else from us? Is there a much deeper world than this world?

Besides for Gan Eden and Olam HaBa, which are spiritual realities, this current world as well, can be a more inner place for us to live in - if we choose to enter inward.

The life we are used to and see on this world is not a life that can bring us to yishuv hadaas. Something very troubling in America is that there are Jews – members of a holy nation - who are davening on the trains on the way to work. Can this be called a true kind of life, a life of yishuv hadaas?? Anyone who wants to live a life of truth can see that the life going on today here that we see is not the kind of life Hashem wants us to live.

In Conclusion

The words here are to awaken us to think about life, and to decide if we want to continue this life or start a new kind of life.

 There are already people who are living in the inner dimension of this world, and they are truly connected to themselves and to Hashem.  Each of us can do this as well.

I hope that you accept these words, not because I asked you to, but for the sake of yourselves. I hope that each of you reaches the proper decision and realizes, that there are changes that must be made in our life – but that they will be changes which will help us live in the proper way.

May we all merit to receive Torah in the exact way we received it at Har Sinai.