Hashem Is My Light

“Of David. Hashem is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? Hashem is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” “Hashem is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” My dear young friend, please listen. There is a moment you know from your own life. It is the moment you feel the shadow inside you. You feel the animal soul, the evil inclination (the inner voice that pulls us toward wrong), the flaw. And something in you says: Enough. If this is the battle, if this is my real face, it is better not to see it. So you pull away. You pull away out of shame and tiredness, out of what Hasidic teaching calls heavy sadness and despair. You step back from your daily routine of serving Hashem, from prayer, from Torah study. You may never say the thought out loud, but it goes like this: If there is no light, there will be no shadow. There will be no gap. There will be no shame. The question is simple and sharp. Does running away from the light really make the shadow go away? Let us look at how simple this is. A shadow does not exist on its own. It has no life of its own. A shadow comes straight from light. Wherever the light reaches, a shadow appears. And when there is no light? Then there is no shadow. But there is also no seeing, no life, nothing at all. There is only total darkness, and total darkness is simply the shadow in its complete form. It works the same way in the spiritual world. The divine soul inside a person is the light. When it shines, you feel the animal soul. You feel the forces of darkness. You feel the battle. If you feel the evil inclination, if you sense the shadow inside you, that itself is a sign that the light is on. As the Talmud teaches: “Whoever is greater than his friend, his evil inclination is greater than his friend’s.” The size of the battle measures the size of the light. It does not measure failure. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi writes in the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought: “When the animal soul is winning... a person should worry and grieve over how far he is from Hashem’s light.” He does not say to worry and grieve so much that you put out the light. The worry itself is proof that the light is there. And here is the common mistake, the painful one. A person thinks: If I keep away from holiness, I will stop feeling the gap. I will not be a hypocrite. I will not have to bear the shame of a battle I keep losing. So he turns off the light so he will not have to see the shadow. But what happens? He does not get rid of the shadow. He is swallowed up by one great darkness. King Solomon wrote: “As light has the advantage over darkness.” That advantage exists only when there is light. In total darkness there is no advantage, no telling one thing from another, no life. The holy Zohar, the classic book of Jewish mysticism, says: “There is no light except the light that comes out of the darkness.” But coming out of the darkness is possible only when there is light, a light to come back to. The Tanya speaks of the “in-between person,” someone who is neither fully righteous nor wicked. He is not someone who has defeated the shadow. He is someone who lives with the shadow under the light of the divine soul, without falling apart and without running away. This is the inner work of sorting good from bad. You do not put out the light. You stand your ground. Now let us go back to the verse: “Hashem is my light and my salvation.” There are two things here, and we should read them carefully. “Hashem is my light”: Hashem is the light. It is the same light that creates the shadow. It is the light that defines the battle, that shines on the animal soul and reveals it in all its strength. And right after that comes “and my salvation.” That very same light is what saves you. It saves you not in spite of creating the shadow, but precisely because it does. The light that reveals the shadow is the same light that rescues you from total darkness. This paradox is the heart of the inner work. There is no salvation in putting out the light. Salvation means standing inside the light, with the shadow, with the battle, with the shame. And it means knowing that this very place is where Hashem is.