Our generation is blessed with unprecedented gifts and opportunities. Our generation also seems to struggle with internal challenges, more than any before it. Our minds, emotions, and relationships can bring us great light but also sometimes seem to carry more darkness than we’d like.
Many explanations are offered as to why our world has developed these internal struggles: social media, technology, exposure, pressure, affluence, processed food, the pace of modern life, over-indulgence in therapy, backlash from the emotional shutdown of the previous generation. These are some of the theories. Each holds some truth, but they are not the answer from the perspective of a believing Jew.
The answer is that our generation struggles with its internal world because Hashem has tasked us with bringing tikkun — healing, rectification, and sanctification — to our internal world. All the theories above are true as descriptions of the keilim, the vessels, that Hashem uses to bring about our opportunity to engage our inner worlds, but they are not the causes; they are the vehicles He uses. The cause is that Hashem created our generation for exactly this holy task.
This means that struggles that may have once seemed b’di’eved, a deviation from the ideal, become l’chatchilah. They are the very purpose of our generation’s avodah. The challenges of our inner world are not getting in the way. They are the way.
The Gemara speaks of the three mishmaros halaylah, watches of the night, and says that the final watch — the last moment before dawn — is defined as ishah mesaperes im ba’alah, a wife speaking with her husband. The night the Gemara speaks of is our journey through the darkness of exile. And at the end of this very, very, long night, moments before dawn, when the light of redemption begins to rise, there is one last avodah: the husband listening to his wife. The man listening to the woman. The masculine listening to the feminine. This describes an inner relationship: the meeting of our own inner masculine and feminine voices, the encounter between our masculine part and our feminine part — the part of us that acts and the part that feels, the part of strength and the part of vulnerability.
This is the mitzvah of the Seder night. To listen to the questions, thoughts, and ideas of our children. Not only our biological children, but our inner children as well. The parts of us that are more tender and sensitive.
By turning to our inner worlds, we are not fixing an unfortunate situation; we are answering a calling. This is the Torah of the mishmar acharon, the last watch before dawn, when the voice of the heart becomes the language of avodah. And if we listen — if we let that voice speak — we will very soon find ourselves whispering the first words of morning, of Geulah: “Modeh Ani.” The night is ending. The heart is speaking. The day is about to break.
This time period from Adar to Nissan is a time of geulah. We joyously celebrate and revel in the miracles Hashem performed to redeem us from Haman and Pharoah. And we, like the Jews in those times, emerge from those miracles with a deeper connection and commitment to Hashem. But both of those redemptions were incomplete, and the full force of the process they started so many years ago has not yet reached its peak. We, here now, with all the gifts of our lives and also with all the difficulties of our upside-down, inside-out world, are being called to bring the light of Geulah that shone bright on Purim and Pesach to the deepest, most inner crevices of Hashem’s creation.
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 73.
