The Look That Builds Your World

“You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” A Question A student once asked his teacher: “Rabbi, the verse says, ‘You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.’ What is this ‘desire’? Every living thing wants something different!” The teacher answered: “That is exactly the point. Hashem opens His hand to everyone. But each person, by the way he looks at things, decides what reality that open hand will give him.” Solid Only in Appearance We think reality is fixed. The house we sit in is stone, wood and plaster. The circumstances that sweep us along are debts, stress and hardship. Everything seems solid, heavy and immovable. If so, what is the point of choice? What is the point of inner work? If reality is locked shut, a person is nothing more than its prisoner. But the scientists of our time have discovered something surprising. At its root, reality is not a “thing.” It is a “possibility.” They call it a “wave function”: a cloud of many possibilities. These possibilities exist as potential until one deciding moment, the moment someone observes. The instant the observer’s eye falls on it, all the possibilities “collapse” into just one. This is only a parable, a finger pointing at the moon. The moon itself was laid out clearly in our holy Torah hundreds of years earlier. “You Open Your Hand”: The Power of Potential Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, writes in the Tanya’s section called “The Gate of Unity and Faith” that Hashem brings every created thing into being at every single moment, just as He created it from nothing the very first time. Reality does not “stand on its own.” It comes into being anew at every moment from Hashem’s infinite power. So at every moment there are endless possibilities of what could appear, and what actually appears is only one of them. This is the deep meaning of “You open Your hand.” The hand is open. Everything is given as potential, everything is possible, and everything exists in Hashem’s thought as a cloud of possibilities. Then comes “and satisfy the desire of every living thing.” Only the “desire” of the living being, his inner intention, compels that endless potential to become real and to appear in one specific form. Your Look Decides If so, what is this “desire”? Do not make the mistake of thinking it is only a wish in the heart. The desire is shaped and formed by the “look”: the way a person sees the situation he is in. See how deep this goes. When Moses sent the spies, they all saw exactly the same land. But the spies saw “a land that devours those who live in it.” That became their reality. Caleb and Joshua saw something else: “We can surely go up!” A completely different reality opened up before them. The same land. Two ways of looking. Two realities. The outside situation did not change their destiny. The way they looked changed it. Our Sages taught an ancient principle: “All dreams follow the mouth.” This is not only about dreams at night. It is a principle. “The mouth” means the way your inner look comes out into words. That is what decides which way the possibility hidden in the dream of life will turn out. “Think Good and It Will Be Good”: A Practical Tool From here comes the teaching of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn of Lubavitch, a great Hasidic leader of the last century. His teaching has echoed through the generations: “Think good, and it will be good.” This is not an empty pep talk. It is a firm foundation. Your thought, your “look,” is the tool a person uses to “compel” what will appear. If you look at your situation as closed, you will find it closed. If you look at it as a “cloud of possibilities” waiting for your look, a possibility you never knew about will appear.