A Channel, Not a Pit

Opening: The Problem You sit down in front of the Talmud, or maybe in front of the prayer book, and nothing happens. No vitality. No excitement. Your head is blocked. Your heart is cold. So you say to yourself: “Not now. When I’m in a better place, when I have strength, when I feel more full, then I’ll study. Then I’ll pray. Then I’ll give.” And so the day goes by. Then another day. And another. This is the root mistake, and it is not a small one. The Foundation: A Channel, Not a Pit There is a basic difference between a pit and a channel. A pit gives from what it holds. When it is full, it gives. When it is empty, it has nothing to give. So before anything else, it needs to fill itself up. A channel gives nothing of its own. It only passes things along. That is why it can be completely empty, worn out, even cracked. The moment it is opened, the water flows through it. And then something happens: the channel itself gets wet. It is filled by the very thing it passed along. This is the foundation. You are not the source. You are the vessel. When a person sits there feeling, “I’m empty, I have nothing to give,” he is treating himself like a pit. But the truth is that he is a channel. A channel never has to ask, “How much is in me?” It has only one question: “Am I open?” Going Deeper: Open, Not Full In the language of Hasidic teaching, “fullness” is the sense of being a separate “something,” the feeling that I have to be full of my own before I can act. And this very sense of self is what blocks the flow of blessing. “Openness,” on the other hand, is setting the self aside. It means agreeing to act even out of emptiness, out of “nothing.” And it is exactly this setting aside of the self that opens the channel and connects it to the Source that never runs dry. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, writes about someone whose heart is empty and has no vitality in it. His advice is not to wait for vitality. Instead, he should busy himself with Torah and the commandments even without any vitality or feeling at all, because the deed itself has its effect. He also wrote there that giving, the act of charity, is what awakens Hashem’s infinite light here below. Fullness does not come before giving. Giving is itself where the light is revealed. And the holy Zohar, the classic work of Jewish mysticism, says: “An awakening from below brings an awakening from above.” When we stir ourselves down here, it brings down blessing from above. Your small action is what opens the gates. The Proof: The Miracle of Hanukkah The Talmud tells of the miracle. There was one small jar of oil, enough for no more than one day, and from it they lit the lamps for eight days. But notice the moment before the miracle. The Hasmoneans, the heroes of the story, knew the oil would not be enough. They did not wait to collect more oil. They did not say, “When we have enough, we’ll light.” They opened the channel. They lit. And at that very moment, Hashem sent the oil. The Bible itself has a story just like it. It tells of Elisha the prophet and the woman who said, “I have nothing in the house except a small jar of oil.” There too, there was almost no oil. But there were vessels. There was openness. As long as there were open vessels, the oil kept flowing. When the vessels ran out, the oil stopped. The oil did not run out. The vessels did. The New Insight: You Don’t Light Because You Have Oil And this is the new insight: You do not light because you have oil. Because you light, you discover the oil. The action itself is the revealing. Being ready is not a condition you must meet before you begin. It is a result. We do not act because we feel full. We become full because we act. That is why the Jewish people, when they received the Torah, said, “We will do and we will listen,” and not “We will listen and we will do.” First comes the action. After it comes the understanding, the vitality, the inner “oil.” And the author of the Sefer HaChinukh, a classic book on the commandments, wrote: “The heart follows the deeds.” The outer action is what shapes the inner self, and not the other way around.