The Ba'al Shem Tov on the Transformation of Suffering

A Yom Kippur Teaching 5766/2005

by Rabbi Burt Jacobson

               Throughout the High Holy Day period this year we have been examining the theme “Learning to Count our Days: Making Our Days Count.” Our focus has been on the issue of human mortality. 

            Mortality is a problem for us because we don’t want to grow old, we don’t want to become infirm, we don’t want to die. All three of these issues – aging, sickness and death – have to do with fear and suffering. And this is what I have chosen to speak about this afternoon, as Yom Kippur draws to a close.

            This theme has a profound personal meaning for me, for there have been times when I have had to face some pretty bleak situations in my life. There have been periods when I have been overwhelmed by confusion or I have disappeared into inner emptiness. I have undergone dark nights of the soul, times when I have been confronted by frightening phantoms from my past, ghosts which tried to catch me up in their curses and often succeeded. There have been days - even recently - when I found myself regressing into negative childhood patterns, and I lost my adult sense of control and responsibility.

            If you are at all familiar with Buddhism, you know that the issue of human suffering and the ending of suffering is central to the Buddhist path. In fact, from the Buddha’s point of view, suffering is the major catalyst for the journey that leads toward spiritual awakening. As many of you know, the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of 18^th century Polish Hasidism, has been my main spiritual teacher for several decades. The Ba’al Shem, like the Buddha, viewed suffering as an experience that could and should lead an individual toward self-transformation.

The Ba’al Shem Tov had to face his own dark nights of the soul. When he was just a small child, his father died and apparently his mother disappeared. The community attempted to care for him as he grew up, but he was a willful child and he would often absent himself from school, running away into the woods. When he was sixteen he married, but his young wife died a year later. The Ba’al Shem may have internalized these tragedies, believing that he was somehow at fault for what had happened, for he spent seven years in the Carpathian mountains fasting and practicing asceticism and self-mortification, like other Jewish mystics of his time. Somehow, however, the Ba’al Shem came to see this traditional response to suffering as illusory. He eventually learned and taught the transformative power of love, pleasure and joy, and spoke against the debilitating dominance of guilt, shame and morbid rumination over one’s sinfulness.

            One of the great teachings of the Ba’al Shem has to do with how an individual can move from suffering and sadness to joy and blessing. Before I discuss this teaching, I would like to acknowledge Rabbi Miles Krassen, the teacher I first learned this teaching from. The Ba’al Shem outlined a three step process for the transformation of suffering. I’d like to lay out the process briefly without explanation, and then go into more detail about each of the steps.

            First of all, the Ba’al Shem counsels the sufferer to enter into the heart of darkness, into her pain, accepting it fully. The second step has to do with searching in the darkness for the spark of light that is hidden there. Finally, by concentrating all of her attention on that spark, and by intensifying its light, she will eventually be able to dispel the darkness.

            Now, I will examine each of the steps in the process in greater detail. Our culture is designed to hide or deny the reality of suffering, so that when we meet it head-on we are often totally unprepared. Rabbi Jonathan Magonet has written, “If religion has a task in a secular world, it is to encourage us to accept the reality of suffering, and then to try to move beyond it.” So the first step, the Besht taught, is yielding to the reality of one’s pain and suffering.. When you are caught up in adversity, you must accept your suffering fully. This is called hachna’ah, yielding or surrender. I can tell you from first-hand experience how difficult this is. No one likes to suffer. But the problem is this: When we resist our suffering, we make it worse, because we add our resistance onto the pain itself. And then we have to fight our resistance as well as the pain.

            Let me offer you an example of this from my own life. In the late 1980s my seven year marriage began to come apart, but I was oblivious to the signs. When my wife informed me that she was going to file for divorce, I was stunned by her decision, and this opened out into fear and dread as my world  began to come apart. And then, only a few months later, my mother died. I’d had a difficult relation with Mom as a child, but in my adult life she and I had become close friends, sharing a mutual interest in spirituality, the visual arts, culture and politics. I was shaken by her loss, all the more so because it came on the heels of my marital breakup. I felt as if my life had fallen into a black hole, and I wasn’t sure whether or not I would survive. Somehow I needed to accept what was happening, but I didn’t know if this was at all possible.

            Years before, my spiritual director, Ted Pecot, had told me that I was too unyielding, and that I needed to learn to abandon myself to God. “I’m willing to abandon myself to God’s goodness,” I had told him, “but not to God’s evil. How can I surrender to the God who allowed the Holocaust to happen?” “No,” he replied, “when you give yourself to God, you abandon all of yourself to all of God.” I didn’t really grasp what he was saying and his proposition seemed impossible to me. If I gave my self to God, what then would be left?

            A few years later, Judith Binetter, a good friend of mine from Israel and a woman possessed of great insight into the human soul, told me that she experienced me as being overly controlling. "Let go!", she would shout at me in her German accent. "Why do you hold on to this image of yourself? Each moment is different. Each moment unique. Let go of the past and be in the present." But again I didn’t really understand what she meant.

            The day my wife informed me about the divorce I called Ted, who offered me his deepest consolation. Then I called Judith in Tel Aviv. She shouted at me over the phone, "Let it go! Let it go, Burt. Don’t hold on." I put the phone down. How could she be so callous, I thought, angered by her response. Much later I came to see that Ted had responded as one kind of spiritual director and Judith had reacted as another kind of director - or perhaps a Zen master - trying to shock me into accepting the present situation in its fullness, rather than wallowing in self pity. It took a great deal of time, but slowly the truth of what Judith and Ted had observed and shared with me over the years began to sink in.

            I realized that Ted and Judith had both been right: I had attempted to stake my life on a rigid idea of how my life needed to be. And I came to recognize that if I was to survive these two losses, I would have to learn to surrender, to yield my wounded ego to God. I was not thinking of the Ba’al Shem Tov at the time. I did not know that he had spoken about these sorts of issues. But this decision on my part was the first step of the Ba’al Shem’s three step approach to dealing with adversity: hachna’ah.

             The second step, the Ba’al Shem taught, is called Havdalah or Discernment. In the Havdalah ritual ending Shabbat, Jews declare that God “discerns (HaMaVDiL) that which is sacred from that which is profane (or ordinary), light from darkness, etc.” According to the Holy Ba’al Shem, havdalah is the ability to discern the Light -- the presence of the Divine in the midst of the darkness and chaos of our experience. 

            Discernment is the process of distinguishing the still, small Voice of the Spirit from the cacophony of noises and voices in your life, so that you can listen to it, hear its message and come to understand the spiritual purpose and meaning of your suffering. This Voice is always a call to freedom, meaning and joy. To enter the path of transformation, of course, requires a conscious choice. Moses tells the people: “I set before you today the blessing and the curse... Choose life that you and your children may live...”  Discernment is a choice for life that enables the suffering individual to understand what God or the Living Spirit requires of him or her.

            So I asked myself: Where was the light hidden in the darkness of my mother’s death and my divorce? These events, which had broken my heart, forced me to make a decision: I had to change, and in order to change I knew that I had to surrender to God. And this would require my taking on a spiritual discipline. I had not engaged in regular spiritual practice for twenty years, ever since I had left the bounds of traditional Judaism, but now I began to practice a daily form of meditation in which I simply gave my self over to God. B’yado afkid ruchi… “In Your hand I entrust my spirit…”

            The Ba’al Shem’s second step may seem to you a bit like whistling in the dark. But whistling in the dark may be just what is called for. Novelist Frederick Beuchner wrote that: “To whistle in the dark is more than just to try to convince yourself that dark is not all there is. It’s also to remind yourself that dark is not all there is, or the end of all there is, because even in the dark there is hope. Even in the dark you have the power to whistle. And sometimes that seems more than just your own power because it’s powerful enough to hold the dark back a little. The tunes you whistle in the dark are the images you make of that hope, that power . . .”

            In the summer of 1991 I returned to San Antonio for the unveiling of my mother’s gravestone. When I returned to Berkeley, the final divorce papers were waiting for me. And then, two weeks later a firestorm swept through the Oakland and Berkeley hills. Hundreds of homes were destroyed, including the house I lived in, and virtually all of my belongings went up in smoke. But this immense destruction did not affect me emotionally. The loss of the two women closest to me loomed so much larger than the loss of mere possessions. More important, I had already begun to surrender my life and destiny to the Divine. I came to see the fire as a kind of testing: How far had I come in learning to yield? The months after the fire were difficult, but I was not shattered. After all, I was alive and no one that I knew had been killed. I had lost only possessions. For me, the discovery that I needed to yield my life to the Spirit through meditation became the second step of the Ba’al Shem’s three step process.

            And so we come to the Besht’s third step, which he calls M’tikah or Sweetening. When we are living with tension and then that tension is released, we come into joy and delight. In like manner, for the Besht, havdalah. discernment, leads to m’tikah, the sweetening of our lives.  The energy we have heretofore placed into identification with our adversity and with our suffering can now be released and transformed into joy. This sweetening may not always effect the physical conditions of adversity which impinge upon our lives. We may still find ourselves in a painful situation. But our act of havdalah has brought about an inward change, and we are now able to cope with the external difficulties out of an inner sense of resolution, freedom and joy.  In like manner, Buddhists teach that the pain itself may not dissipate, but the suffering will.

            In my own case my practice of meditation has had important effects on my life over the past fifteen years. While meditating I often experience the divinity of all things. The practice has taught me humility. More and more I realize that I am just a small finite part of a vast universe, privileged to live on this planet for a short time; but at my core there is something infinite, which is my true identity. I have come to accept my gifts and my greatness as a human being as a single instance of divine grace. The practice has also given me a great deal more calm and acceptance, non-attachment and equanimity. Because of this I’m better able to witness myself screwing up without always getting caught up in the screw-ups.

            I have not reached any kind of summit of perfection. There are times in my life when I experience difficult crises, when I have to struggle with negative inner patterns. The old ghosts don’t give up easily. Over and over again I have had to re-learn the necessity of surrender. Almost every day I experience resistance as I engage in my meditative practice. Yet, I know that because of my practice I have grown, and so I persist.

             Before I conclude this talk, I’d like to offer you a simple short visualization which can help you to remember the Ba’al Shem Tov’s three-step process. Please close your eyes: Envision a vast darkness . . . Look in this darkness for a spark of light . . .  Begin to fan that little spark into a flame into a fire . . . Notice that the darkness seems gone . . . That’s because you have been concentrating your entire attention on the fire.