Where do anxiety, loneliness, and the need to control everything come from?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau teaches that these are not really many problems. “We think we suffer from a thousand different problems. We have one, concealment, expressed in a thousand different ways.”
He explains it through Yirmiyahu HaNavi's words, “Sakosah ve'anan lach,” You have covered Yourself with a cloud. When a person lives inside that cloud and no longer feels Hashem's presence, “every problem feels like your problem.” From there come fear, anxiety, loneliness, and the need to control everything.
That is why someone can know that Hashem is in control and still feel that everything depends on him. The cloud doesn't mean Hashem's light is gone; it means we can no longer experience it. Remove the cloud, and the thousand problems lose their single root.
Related concepts: Anxiety · Spirituality
In A Soul at Peace: The Cloud That Covers the Heart
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
Our many struggles are one problem, concealment, in a thousand forms.
What may be behind it
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes of one cloud, not a thousand problems, drawing on Jeremiah's lament of a cloud that prayer cannot pass through.
Deepest human truth
Hashem's light remains behind the cloud. When we cannot feel Him, every burden feels like ours alone.
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Wisdom, Perception, and the Inner Life · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz