What keeps me from finding the answers already inside me?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau teaches from King Solomon's words, “Mayim amukim eitzah b'lev ish, v'ish tevunah yidlenah,” the counsel in a person's heart is like deep water, and a person of understanding draws it out. The answer is there, but it is deep.
What covers it? “Deep down, he already knows what he needs to do, but it's covered, hidden under fear, confusion, shame, and noise.” Those layers are why “you might not be able to find it yourself. You might not be able to light it yourself.” Yet he insists, “it's all there.”
That is why a person of understanding matters: not to hand you someone else's directions, but to help draw up what is already in you. Every person, he says, has “his own soul, his own God-given fire, and his own inner answers.”
Related concepts: Selfawareness · Advice is not control
In A Soul at Peace: Deep Waters: The Answer Already in Your Heart
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
The counsel in a person's heart is like deep water: present, but deep.
Fear, vulnerability, or tension
Fear, confusion, shame, and noise cover what a person already knows.
What may be behind it
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau notes that the verse says “the advice in a person's heart,” not advice brought home from the marketplace. It is already there, under the noise of the world and the noise inside us.
Deepest human truth
Every person has his own God-given fire and his own answers; a person of understanding only draws them out.
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Wisdom, Perception, and the Inner Life · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz