Layers of Will
As the year comes to a close and Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, approaches, it is a time to reflect on the past year and to look ahead toward the upcoming year.
Before we can hope to grow and advance, before we can decide on specific resolutions to help us reach our goals, perhaps the most important question to ask ourselves is what to aspire for? What life do we want for ourselves and with what do we want to fill our minutes, hours and days during the upcoming year?
The power of will is the strongest of all the souls powers. Yet, it is also the most complex and is comprised of multiple layers. As the Kabbalists put it, there is “external will” and “inner will”. “External will” is a will that serves a deeper will, while “inner will” is a will that does not serve a goal but rather it is the goal itself.
[To illustrate: Say a person wakes up in the morning and wants to catch the train. She wants to get to the office. She wants to earn money. She wants to spend the money on the purchase of a house. She wants to make the house into a home, a place where she and her family can live a deep and meaningful life. The desires listed earlier are external, as she doesn't necessarily want them for their own sake (if she can get to work without riding the train, she would not object, nor would she object if she earned the money without the work), the “inner will”, in this illustration, is the will to create a home for family, it is the “inner will” because it is the will for its own sake].
Both our “external will” and “inner will” crave to express themselves free of any outside coercion. Yet the free will we crave is different for the “external will” and for the “internal will”. Our “external will” wants the freedom to choose between options. Yet our “inner will” seeks, not the luxury to decide between two possibilities that are outside of ourselves but rather it seeks to express the core of who we really are.
More often than not, we function at the level of “external will”, expressing our free will by identifying the good and the bad, the positive and negative, the productive and the destructive, the selfish and the selfless. Indeed, this Shabbat, the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, we read the words Moses spoke to the Jewish people on the final day of his life. He tells them: Behold, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil. (Deuteronomy 30:15). On the level of our “external will”, there is indeed a great choice to be made. Both paths are appealing and exercising the right choice, requires discipline and effort.
Just a few verses later Moses says: “You shall choose life”. The statement seems self contradictory, the commandment implies that we have no choice, so how can there be a commandment to choose? The answer is that “You shall choose life” refers to the “inner will”. Moses is telling us that if we dig deep enough within ourselves, if we excavate deep within our soul, we will discover our “inner will” we will discover that indeed the negativity has no appeal at all. That our deeper self yearns only good. A parent in touch with her “inner will”, does not need to choose to be devoted to her child, for connection to her child is part of her core and, for the “inner will”, no other option exists. The same is true for the connection between our “inner will” and our Father in heaven.
On Rosh Hashanah we seek to peel away the layers and allow our inner will to express itself. Just before we sound the Shofar we recite the verse “He chooses our heritage for us, the glory of Jacob whom He loves eternally (Psalms 47:5)”. We ask G-d to choose us. We ask him to express His will toward us, to have a relationship with us and to bless us. To illicit G-d’s deepest will and blessing we must first reveal our inner will. We must discover the part of us which yearns to transcend. We listen to the part of our heart whose voice is often overshadowed by the voice of the “external will”. As we hear the Shofar’s cry, we express the longing and yearning of our inner soul. The part of our soul that desires all that is wholesome and good.
(Adapted from the teachings of the Rebbe, Lekutei Sichos Nitzavim vol. 19 sicha 3).