Everyone knows you're supposed to be b'simcha. Almost nobody is told what to do with the sadness that's still standing there.
Rebbe Nachman opens Torah 23 Tinyana with a mashal: a circle of Yidden dancing, and one person standing outside, and the ones inside grab him and drag him in against his will until he's dancing with them. And then he tells us the circle is inside you. When you feel simcha, the marah shechora steps aside on its own — it can't coexist with joy. But that's the small thing. The Rebbe wants more: chase it. Run after the sadness, snatch it, force it into the simcha — until the marah shechora itself turns into simcha and becomes part of your inventory of joy.
This is the second shiur on the Torah, and it's mostly questions. That's deliberate — the point isn't to collect answers, it's to live in the kasha until the Rebbe answers you himself.
What we go through:
• Why the Rebbe opens b'inyan hasimcha — a phrase he uses nowhere else — and then says not one word about simcha before handing us a mashal
• Al pi mashal, not l'mashal — and the strangeness of a mashal for simcha that is itself simcha
• The chart: sasson, simcha, hasimcha, sameach, chedva, kedusha on one side — yagon va'anacha, atzvus, marah shechora, yisurim, daagos, sitra achra on the other
• Sasson is external, simcha is internal; yagon is the ache, anacha is the krechtz
• One thought at a time — but many feelings at once, and which feelings cannot coexist
• Sasson v'simcha yasigu — a new pshat: not that you attain the simcha, but that the simcha reaches your yagon
• The yagon va'anacha of the sitra achra that refuses to be a merkava — and why it has to be forced
• Chotfin · machnisin · umachrichin — three stages of b'al korcho, and what state the person is in at each one
• Imahem gam kein — the diyuk that carries the whole Torah: I was outside the circle too. I have the same pulls. I just found something, and it isn't my light, it's ours
• The white dots and the black dots
• how do you actually do this? — and the answer: hisbodedus, and not hatzileini hoshieini
• Mesaper lefanav kol libo — not what you did, what you're feeling. Our relationships are transactional; ego talks to ego. "What are you feeling right now?" opens the door for the real you
• V'ha'arev na, k'ish echad b'lev echad, and why v'ahavta l'reiacha kamocha is literal
• Why Ponevezh was the day I stopped learning
Women's shiur. Part of an ongoing series on Torah 23 Tinyana — there are 125 questions on this Torah, and we're not going to answer all of them.
#Breslov #RebNachman #LikuteiMoharan #Simcha #Chassidus #Hisbodedus #Emunah #TorahShiur #JewishWomen
