Sha’arei Teshuva 2:1 Shivisi Hashem

Gut voch, gut voch, I hope everyone is well. I think we saw on Thursday Rabbeinu Yonah writes that he’s about to list for us the six sets of circumstances or stages of life which should stir a person to do teshuvah, but the emes is that really a person shouldn’t look to or be dependent upon external cues and prompts, but rather a person on a daily basis should think of Hakadosh Baruch Hu, should remember Hakadosh Baruch Hu and that will serve as the catalyst for teshuvah. So we saw that in a certain sense there’s a dialectic here that remembering Hakadosh Baruch Hu is both the cause and source on the one hand as well as the goal and ultimate destination of teshuvah and we tried to explain a little bit how that is. When you sort of juxtapose a Rambam with the Rama's quotation of the Rambam, there’s a very fascinating parallel to this. The Rambam discusses how שויתי ה' לנגדי תמיד is at the end of the Moreh, how it’s the ultimate goal that after a person has attained yedias Hashem, which is the t'nai kodem l'maiseh, the sine qua non for ahavas Hashem, so then too that a person's always thinking about Hakadosh Baruch Hu is the ultimate goal and one’s life is devoted toward pursuing and coming close to that goal. Me'idach gisa, if you look in Shulchan Aruch, so the Rama quotes this passage from the Rambam in the Moreh in siman aleph of Shulchan Aruch and it’s clear what the Rama's telling us is that simultaneously on one level it’s the goal, it’s the ultimate goal of everything, but yet on another level it’s the basis and foundation for everything. Again the same idea that obviously Shiviti both in terms of the constancy, how close one comes to the tamid as well as in terms of the profundity of the Shiviti, it lends itself to very different levels, to a whole different spectrum, and in that sense it’s both the basis and foundation on the one hand as well as the goal on the other hand. V'haya lecha, says Rabbeinu Yonah, zichro, remembering Hakadosh Baruch Hu, l'lehishiv nafesh, it will restore your soul מדרכי תולדות גוף עפר. It will restore your soul from otherwise maybe sort of being overwhelmed or overridden by what ensues from the body, right? The body is just a clump of dirt, afar min ha'adama. U'l'chein עריה תעור קשת מדעך, you have to expose the strength of your knowledge l'yasher hadurei teva'acha, to straighten your teva. This is a fundamental idea that we come across in many, the chachmei hamussar present that a person has to, we're comprised of, we have emotions, we have feelings, we have instincts, we have reactions and The goal is that all of these a person needs reflectively to assess and evaluate and channel. And it's through the strength, right, the keshes, the bow, the strength of mada, of your understanding, that needs to mold and shape one's teva. ומורא השם ואהבתו ובושת לפניו toseif ma'alah tamid. ותשקוד על נקיון כפיך. Right? We use the idiom the person is shokeid al dalsei hatorah. It implies a persistence, a consistency. On one level, if we wanted to single out the single most important middah that we need to cultivate in life, in avodas hashem, it's consistency. And I don't know, when you think about it, most, if not all of our sort of setbacks, self-imposed setbacks, our stumblings, our failing to live up to our own goals and standards, is from a lack of consistency. ותשקוד על נקיון כפיך. A person has to look again, to be with a sense of, as much as possible, a sense of consistency and constancy. Uchvos, well, maybe we'll leave the next phrase for tomorrow, bli neder, im yirtzeh hashem. We'll stop here now for the rabeinu yonah.