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Against Your Will You Live; Against Your Will You Die

By Rabbi Heschel GreenbergJanuary 15, 20182 min read

AGAINST YOUR WILL YOU LIVE;

AGAINST YOUR WILL YOU DIE

All of the above has been sated succinctly by our Talmudic sages: “Against your will you must live.” Taken at face value this refers to the lack of choice we have in our own births. Nobody asks us who our parents will be and if and when they will decide to have a child.

But, considering that this quote is in Ethics of the Fathers, a treatise, the Talmud states, that is devoted to teaching us how to become a Chasid, a self-transcendent individual, there must be a deeper message than that contained in the obvious lack of choice in our births, that the simple explanation suggests..

According to the mystical tradition, this quote echoes the concept discussed earlier that the soul does not want to leave its “comfortable” existence in the world of souls and spirituality. It literally has to be compelled to descend into this world.

Equipped with this bit of information we can appreciate our lives very differently. We know that the soul is dissatisfied because it is lacking the spiritual freedom it had in the past. It exhorts us to look for ways of filling in the void that our souls experience here.

This, however, is not the end of the statement in Ethics of the Fathers. The rabbis continue: “And against your will you die.” Here too, it is unlikely that the rabbis were merely trying to inform us of the obvious, that nobody asks us as to whether we want to leave this world or that in most situations we do not want to die.

Rather, our sages revealed to us that, to the same extent that the soul did not want to enter into this world, it does not want to leave it. Precisely because of the dangers that lurk here, the hardships it endures, and the adversity it encounters, the same soul refuses to leave. Indeed, it is with the same intensity that it did not want to come here in the first place, that it does not want to leave in the end.

Once the soul “tastes” the taste of meeting the challenge of struggling with evil and surmounting all the obstacles and thereby experiencing a a quantum rate of growth, it does not want to leave this world. Nothing, not even the greatest state of bliss in the next world can compare to the level of infinity that the soul realizes in this material world. The soul discovers a part of its personality it did not even know existed before it descended here. So both emotions – of not wanting to come into this world and of not wanting to leave it – are genuine. The soul, once it learns about the challenge of this world and the newly acquired energy, it is a different soul. This “new” soul truly does not want to leave.

The lesson we derive from this knowledge is that we should cherish the struggles we have in our lives and that we achieve the highest heights through our soul’s engagement with this physical world. With the observance of Torah and Mitzvot within the framework of a resistant world, the soul acquires the most potent divine energy and is enabled to climb to unprecedented heights.

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From the book Safe Kabbalah, Part Three: Journeys of the Soul by Rabbi Heschel Greenberg, published by the Jewish Discovery Center.

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Rabbi Heschel Greenberg Teacher, scholar and author of Tefillin — Judaism’s Crown. About the Rabbi

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