What Gives Us Courage in Difficult Circumstances

It has now been two months that we have been in quarantine here in New York City.  As it looks more and more likely that this situation will continue for much longer than I had originally anticipated, I find I am thinking more about courage.

I came across a fabulous teaching by R. Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev (18th century Hasidic master) in his comments on the Torah portion Yitro.  He says that a key to courage in difficult circumstances is knowing what your motivation is in serving God.  If your motivation is to be rewarded (“God, please give me X and I will be good.”), then great fear can fall upon you when bad things happen.  He calls that mochin dekatnut, smallness of mind.  But if you are serving God for the pure pleasure of serving, then “your heart is sure and confident” and you don’t have any reason to fear.  That, he says, is mochin degadlut, expansiveness of mind.  He gives the example of King David, who always served God with an expansive mind and was never afraid – except for when he fell from his elevated spiritual level and served in hopes getting a reward.  Then he was indeed afraid.  But when he remembered, then he was sure and confident again.

Let’s unpack this a bit.  I think Levi Yitzchak is teaching us two things.  The first is about the nature of courage.  When you feel fundamentally safe, fear does not have to arise.  Courage is not about overcoming or pushing down fear.  It’s about cultivating an orientation towards life in which you can generally feel “sure and confident.”  Levi Yitzchak called that “serving God.”  There is a joy in trying to live with a heart that is open to the goodness and sacredness that pervades the world, the kind of goodness and sacredness that does not depend on anything, that simply is.  Tuning into it and then acting from that sense of connection gives a sense of safety that can contain whatever may happen, good or bad.

But the second teaching is filled with the loving compassion Levi Yitzchak is known for.  He holds up King David as a role model for always serving God with the noblest of intentions – until he was unable to do so.  Levi Yitzchak realizes how impossible it is to have pure motivation.  He knows that God is not Santa Claus in the sky, handing out good fortune and suffering based on our behavior.  He knows that we might intuit that the “reward” for a deep spiritual life doesn’t always correspond to a care-free life.  But when we suffer, we often “fall” into a sense of our injured ego:  Why me?  Wasn’t I a good person?  And then we face the world with fear because we don’t want to suffer.

It’s okay, says Levi Yitzchak.  Even King David was sometimes afraid.  But he (and you) can reclaim that sense of safety by remembering that the point is really to live in alignment, come what may, with the goodness and sacredness in our world.

I hope you find this as inspiring and encouraging a teaching as I did.