Ask The Rabbi

Ask The Rabbi

category:  Chassidut

Keeping the peace under difficult circumstances

The Rav Name: Rabbi Yitzchak Arad

Hi Rabbi,

I wanted to ask your advice about how to live with certain people in my life. It is a husband and wife and their 4 (young adult) children. The husband and wife are much older than me and the kids are all about my age.

I’m sorry to say they act dishonestly, selfishly, and sneakily, but they are part of my family circle.

Most of the time if it effects me, it’s just annoying, not terrible. Sometimes it could be more– that they are sick and know it (which I have proof for), but they tell me it’s just allergies, and then I end up bringing home their germs to someone I live with who it could be dangerous for if they get sick. And most recently it was something a little bigger…

I’m feeling hurt that I could be lied to and deceived, even to my detriment, by people who claim they care about me, and I’m also really angry that because of them I could have been the messenger for a lot of hurt unknowingly to other people I care about.

Needless to say, I can’t look at them right now. I can’t not have them in my life because they are important to people who are very important to me and we cross paths weekly if not daily.

If I smile at them when I see them today, is that being “one way with my mouth and another way with my heart”, which is a sin? If I say anything I don’t think it would accomplish anything except cause strife, as I highly doubt they will change. It is also a sin to cause a loss of peace, which would certainly come from that (as well as awkwardness) if I confront them. I am struggling internally not to hate them.

I know everyone has good in them, and everyone has their weaknesses, and that I have to reduce the size of my ego, and that everyone is a messenger from Gd, etc. I told myself that every day this summer when they aggravated me about things, so it lost its effectiveness for right now. And it’s one thing to tell myself “increase in faith” if I look upon this all as a memory, but I have to stare at them every week, if not every day, and constantly wonder if they are lying to me as they smile to my face and just knowing they are so selfish even to hurt me, is just not a comfortable feeling. I try to usually Forget it and act normal, because it’d be so awkward and tense otherwise, so I let my guard down until it gets really squashed again, and I feel hurt all over again. But this time, I’m just so revolted and so upset, more than the other times.

I normally go to my mother to vent and get advice but I don’t want her to have more reasons to be filled with the same feelings about them that I have.

How do I live among them and not be filled with hurt, anger, hate?

Thank you for your time.

Shalom and thank you for such a beautiful question! It is an excellent question. How does HaShem put a ‘piece of Himself’ in each of us and still have Himself?

This would be a problem if HaShem was only something physical, something like a pizza. If you divide a pizza into eight pieces and Joey gets two, Sarah and Moishy get only one each because they are much smaller, and the twins Berl and Menucha get two each because they really love to eat pizza, then the pizza is finished and you have to order another one for Mom and Dad and for Yanky when he comes home from Yeshiva. One tray of pizza is enough for only a few people.


When Mommy lights Shabbat candles, she may light a special large match, or small candle, and with that she lights many candles, one for ‘shamor’ – to keep the Shabbat holy, and one for ‘zachor’ to remember the Shabbat, and then one for Yanky, another for Berl, and for Menucha, for Joey, for Sarah and for Moishy. The candles are all lit and glowing. All of a sudden, there’s a knock on the door. Tante Malka has come for Shabbat and there’s still time to light, so now Tante Malka picks up a match and lights it from the candles that are already lit. Two more Shabbat guests arrive also in time to light, Sally and Eliana. The one flame that Mommy lit was enough to light those other candles, and you know what? You could keep taking candles and lighting them from the other candles. That first flame is still burning in a candle. It didn’t lose anything by lighting other candles. That is the nature of fire, that is the way HaShem made fire. You can light a flame,  then another flame from the first, and another flame from the second, and so on and so on! That first flame doesnt lose anything from itself!


This is a little bit like HaShem. HaShem breathed life into Adam – the first person. That means that HaShem made Adam’s body and then breathed a soul into it so that it would live. When you breathe out you are taking air from inside of yourself to the outside. So HaShem breathed a soul out of Himself into Adam and then he made Chava and breathed a soul into her. All the people in the world came from Adam and Chava, just like the candles that all came from the first one that was lit.

King Solomon wrote in Proverbs “נר השם נשמת אדם’. ‘A candle of G-d is the soul of man…’ Just like the candle that Mommy lights, from which you can keep lighting more and more candles and it doesn’t lose anything of itself, so G-d breathed a soul into us and it doesn’t take anything away from Him.


In the book of Tanya, (in Chapter 37 in the section for 18 Adar 2,) which is a very important book written by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, it explains that there are six hundred thousand Jewish souls. All the souls of all the Jewish people in the world come from these six hundred thousand souls. There are millions of Jewish people and each one has a soul that is a spark of one of the six hundred thousand that received the Torah from HaShem at Mount Sinai, just like candles that are lit from other candles.


Why did HaShem create these souls? HaShem creates souls so that they should help make the world a very good and nice place to live. HaShem wants the world to be a place where people learn Torah and keep Mitzvot,  like Shabbat and keeping kosher, and giving Tzedaka and teaching Torah and helping people. This way the world will become better and better until everybody will be doing good things and nobody will be doing bad things.


There are six hundred and thirteen Mitzvot in the Torah. Each mitzvah that we do makes us close to HaShem. Unfortunately we can’t keep all the Mitzvot properly until we have the third Beit HaMikdash, the house of HaShem. When the Moshiach comes we can all visit the Beit haMikdash and do Mitzvot that we couldn’t do before. Our souls want to keep Mitzvot and make the world a better place so that Moshiach can come and we will have the Beit haMikdash in Yerushalayim and the world will be completely fixed up!


So what Mitzvah are you going to do today so that your soul will shine and make this world a better place?



Sources