Tefillah - 087 Leaving The Confusion

Exile – Being Dependent On The Nations

In the blessing of תקע בשופר, we ask Hashem ושא נס לקבץ גלויתינו. The word נס means to “uplift”; we are asking Hashem that we be taken out of exile, to be “uplifted” from the nations we are surrounded by.

When we are in exile, we are like a fetus in its mother’s womb, dependent on the nations for our survival. Exile is not just in the other countries; it is in Eretz Yisrael as well. As long as the Jewish people depend on other nations for survival, that is exile. In Eretz Yisrael, the Erev Rav rules. When people get supported by the Erev Rav, their Torah learning is being nourished by Erev Rav, and this is part of the exile.

Thus, we ask Hashem to raise us out of this situation – ושא נס לקבץ גלויתונו.

The Inner Aspect of the Exile: Confusion

But the deeper meaning is that even in our own souls, we are exiled to the nations. How do we see this?

The Torah is vast, and its details are endless. It is wider than the sea and longer than the earth. But a person can get drowned in all the details! He sees so many details, and wonders where the root is. He loses sight of what priority is.

The first aspect of our exile is clear: we are among the nations, and thus we depend on them for survival. We depend on them physically, like a fetus in its mother. For this reason, all the non-Jewish influences have entered even the world of those who keep Torah and mitzvos. Everything – our food and clothing, etc. – all comes from them. And their ways of thinking have entered us too. That’s one part of our exile.

But there is a second, deeper aspect to the exile going on: there is a great lack of clarity going on today.

If a person lives with Hashem in his life, then all his Torah and mitzvos are connected and unified into one direction. Such a person sees how all the details connect.

But when a person loses his central goal in life, which is to live with Hashem in his life – then even if he does many mitzvos, he can lose his sense of priorities in life.

For example, a person learns Agadta (homiletic teachings of Chazal) and get very confused: What is the most important thing to do in life? In one place, it seems like Chazal are saying that giving tzedakah is the most important thing. In another Gemara, you can find a Chazal that guarding our speech is the most important thing a Jew should do. Another Gemara seems to imply that doing chessed is the greatest priority in life. Different statements of Chazal seem to emphasize one particular mitzvah over another, and it gets so confusing.

The depth of our exile is that we can be involved with many details of the Torah and mitzvos, but lost in all of them, with nothing connecting all the details together.

Even in Eretz Yisrael, we are mixed with other nations and susceptible to their influences. The root of this is because even within our own ranks, we are confused, because we are missing the one link that connects all our details together [the fact that life is about becoming close to Hashem through doing the mitzvos].

With your physical eyes, you can see clearly that we are mixed with the other nations of the world. But if you use your inner sight, you can see that the confusion and mixing up is really taking place in each of us.  People are constantly getting influenced by the world, on a constant basis, and lose their yishuv hadaas to think about their priorities.

Regain Your Central Priority In Life

To counter all the inner confusion of our priorities in life, a person has to always think about Hashem. When he says Modeh Ani and when he says Baruch Attah Hashem, he has to think for a moment about Hashem. Thinking like this will get a person to connect all the actions he does throughout the day and keep him aware of his main priority in life.

When a person is confused inside himself, he suffers from pizur hanefesh (scattering of the soul), a term described in Chovos HaLevovos. Most people nowadays are living with pizur hanefesh. People lack inner unity to their souls, and this is the root behind all the confusion going on. A person has to reveal a point of “oneness” in his life that will bind all of what he does together into one unit, and then he will leave all the confusion. By reminding ourselves of the goal that binds all that we do in life – the primary goal in our life, which is to come to recognize Hashem – we will then have the point that connects all details together.

In order to merit the redemption, where we will be gathered in from all the exiles, we need to clear up our own inner confusion that we have inside ourselves. A person might do all the mitzvos very religiously, yet he never even realizes that life is about recognizing Hashem, Who is the One who commanded us with all these mitzvos!

So when we ask Hashem to gather us in from all the exiles – ושא נס לקבץ גלויתינו -  we are not just asking that Hashem redeem the Jewish people in the general sense and bring us all back together again.  We are asking Hashem that He merit each of us to have our own personal redemption, that each of us should leave our own personal inner confusion. A person has to realize that he needs to uplift himself and go beyond all the confusion. We can then merit to be nourished not from the “Erev Rav” that heads this exile, but to be nourished directly by the sustenance of Hashem.

We must make the recognition of Hashem into the central priority in our life, and then we will be uplifted from all our negative surroundings.