The Fear of Peace

Like a dog that returns to its vomit, a fool repeats his foolishness. A Question King Solomon wrote: “Like a dog that returns to its vomit, a fool repeats his foolishness.” This verse raises a huge question. We can understand a person making a mistake once. The challenge was new. The strength wasn’t there. It was a weak moment. But what about the fool who “repeats,” the one who goes back? He has already tasted the bitterness. He already knows it was foolish. He has already burned his hands. So why does he go back? Young married man, who among us doesn’t know this up close? Your work finally finds its place, and suddenly it crumbles from the inside. Peace in the home was built with great effort, and suddenly someone lights a match. A spiritual climb has just begun to breathe, and suddenly it breaks. You feel cursed. You feel weak in character. But maybe neither one is true. Not a Love of Pain, but a Fear of Peace Many people make the same mistake. They think that a person who keeps going back to his foolishness must love pain. That is not so. He does not go back because he wants to suffer. He goes back because the struggle is his home. Chaos is the only language his inner self knows. The Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, explains that the animal soul is drawn to “its birthplace and its root.” That root is the world of chaos, the forces of darkness that hide holiness. By its nature, the animal soul looks for what is familiar to it. It looks for the surroundings where it feels in control and has a firm hold. When quiet arrives, when Hashem’s goodness arrives, the animal soul becomes alarmed. It cries out from within: “Something is wrong here!” To the animal soul, peace is a stranger. So a person breaks the blessing before the blessing can “break” him. That means: before the blessing changes him so much that the animal soul loses the control it is used to. This is “the fear of peace.” It is a deep fear, rooted in the inner self. It is not a fear of pain. It is a fear of rest. “What I Feared Has Come Upon Me” Job said this about himself: “For the thing I feared has overtaken me, and what I dreaded has come upon me.” Look closely. Fear ruled Job’s heart precisely in his calm days, when he sat on his throne and his world was in order. That fear did more than express his worry. The fear itself became a vessel, a magnet, that pulled the hard reality into his life. Peace became the source of his worry, and that worry broke the vessel. This teaches us something. It is not “bad luck,” and it is not some hidden decree. A person’s inner state creates his reality. When the inner self does not feel worthy of good, it finds its own way to break that good. A Habit, Not a Curse There is no curse here. There is a habit. The Tanya explains that the animal soul does not need to be killed. It needs to surrender. The inner battle is not about destroying the forces built into it. It is about bringing them under the rule of “the mind over the heart.” And what is “the mind”? It is the decision. It is the thought. It is the conscious will that a person turns toward himself when he says: I am worthy of good. But some people grow up speaking the language of struggle. It may come from what happened in their lives, from the people around them, or from the patterns of their inner self. Such a person does not know who he is without the war. His identity was built around the pain. So the moment the pain goes away, he feels empty, nameless, without shape. The Hasidic classic Likkutei Torah explains the idea of “making a vessel.” To receive Hashem’s blessing, a person must prepare a vessel inside himself. Self-destruction is nothing but breaking the vessel. A person who does not feel worthy of peace has no vessel to hold the blessing. He breaks it before it even comes down. The Moment You Decide My brother, as the Torah says, this thing is very close to you. You are not cursed. You are not weak in character. You are used to something. And a habit has a cure: a decision. A person may decide, truly and with his whole heart, “I am worthy of peace,” and agree to receive the good that Hashem wants to give him. The moment he does, he builds the vessel anew. It takes no miracle, no heroic effort, no outer change. It takes one inner decision. Every Jewish soul has been given the power of free choice. That power is not needed to win great wars. It is needed to open one door: “I am ready to receive the blessing.” The war does not end when circumstances change. It ends when the inner self agrees.