This was posted up as a comment on Rav Berland Reminisces, but deserves it’s own post.

It’s from R Hoshea Allen, of the Shoemaker Report, and it adds a whole level of understanding about what the word is really describing, when he talks about withstanding the ‘karpas’, or difficulties.

This is how Breslov Torah is, btw. Often, it seems too ‘strange’ to engage with, superficially, but if you make even the tiniest little effort to really think for yourself, and ponder what is really being said, some massive, life-changing ideas spring out.

Enjoy!

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A few thoughts about what the Rav is bringing out about the word karpas:

He’s mapping a precise inner sequence of how we are to experience and survive life’s challenges using karpas as its code. At the outset, a person is granted mochin de-gadlut – a brief expansion of awareness in which Hashem feels present and life carries coherence and meaning. This corresponds to the samech at the end of the word, corresponding to somech, relying and trusting H’, seeing things clearly, hence mochin d’gadlut.

But this is immediately followed by entry into a state of perech – normally understood as crushing labor, but here representing crushing labor of the mind, i.e. pressure, fragmentation, and painful kooshiot that the mind cannot resolve.

These aren’t just abstract questions either. They’re existential tensions that can strain a person to the point of collapse.

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So what is this teaching us?

The initial gadlut is given specifically so one can survive the stage of katnut, the perech. Without it, a person in mochin d’katnut would be crushed by the questions. That’s why later the Rav brings up the Shoah and Simchat Torah, as exmples. But if one has already tasted clarity, then even when that clarity recedes, its imprint remains, allowing a person to endure the confusion without losing direction.

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And it’s interesting that this whole sod is revealed when you read karpas backwards.

Within the experience, it feels as though we begin with perech – the questions, the confusion, the pressure. But in reality, that is not the beginning; it is the middle of the process. It really started with the samech – the hidden support of gadlut. It came first even it wasn’t considered at the time.

So as the Rav has been saying a lot lately, the real avodah is withstanding katnut. That’s this whole drasha — moving through perech while remaining rooted in that unseen samech, to endure the kooshiot without collapse by drawing on a clarity that was given earlier.

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Bigger picture?

Redemption begins not by resolving every question, but by learning to carry truth through a state where nothing much makes sense.

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We had some awesome miracles here in EY the last few weeks, despite the very real challenges, mostly coming from the fear of what will be.

This is an article from Ynet, in Hebrew, that breaks down the number of fatalities from this latest installment of  ‘WAR WITH IRAN’:

https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/s1ipmtm3wx

If you take out the military casualties from the figures to just leave civilians killed in rocket attacks – you get 29 deaths.

If you break that down by who was killed ‘directly’ in a rocket attack, and who died on the way to a shelter because they had a heart attack, got run over, fell and tripped etc, this is what you get:

From the 29 civilian deaths:

• Killed by direct rocket/missile impact (including building strikes): 19

• Not killed by direct impact: 10

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Or in other words, more than a third of these deaths were caused by trying to follow Home Guard instructions, about getting to a bomb shelter.

The really amazing thing here, is that in those awful strikes on Dimona and Arad – no-one died.

That’s simply mind-boggling.

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I am a million percent sure that this is only the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to starting to figure out how many open miracles God has been doing for us, the last few weeks.

If the Six Day War provides the blueprint, the establishment will do everything they can to distort the open miracles, and try to hide them.

But make no mistake, God still loves us, and still has our back.

Even though we’ve been through a tremendous amount of karpas here in Israel, the last few weeks.

But now, we’re back to ‘peace in the Middle East again’.

BH.