The Seat Is Never Empty

The Torah says: “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Opening Your phone wants your attention. Not once a year, and not once a month. It wants it every single moment. It runs a nonstop campaign that never gets tired. And it is not alone. Money runs a campaign. Success, measured by what other people think, runs a campaign. Public opinion runs a campaign. They all want the same thing. They all want the same job: to make your decisions for you. Ask yourself, my young married friend: How many times a day do you pick up your phone not because you wanted to, but because you couldn’t keep from picking it up? How many times have you made a business decision not after careful thought, but out of fear of losing out? How many times have you said “yes” because you couldn’t stand to let someone down? This is the puzzle of our lives. We think we are free. In reality, we are being run. Going Deeper: What Is Control? The sign that something has taken control of you does not show when you use it. It shows when you can’t say no to it. If you can’t put your phone down, it is not a tool in your hand. You are a tool in its hand. If you can’t handle a small financial loss, money is not your servant. You are its servant. If you can’t let a certain person down because you fear what he will say, his approval is not a prize you won. It is a chain you put on. The world defines freedom as “doing whatever pulls you.” But this definition is itself a trap. Because the thing that pulls you, who is it? Is it really you? Or is it the campaign that won last night? The Foundation: The Seat Is Never Empty Here is the foundation: the seat is never empty. Inside every person there is a seat of inner leadership. It is the place where the real decisions are made, the place that moves every single person. This seat can never stay empty, not even for one moment. If you do not deliberately choose who will sit on it, something else will choose for you. And most of the time, you won’t even notice that it happened. In the language of holiness: the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, teaches us that our mind cannot stay empty of thought. If it is not filled with holy thoughts, stray thoughts rush in to fill it. Two inner inclinations, two souls, the divine soul and the animal soul, are always competing for that same seat. There is no middle ground. There is no neutral “vacuum.” This is a deep and precise point. The question is not “Is there a king?” The only question is “Who is the king?” The Answer: Freedom Is Not Having No King And from here, everything turns upside down. True freedom is not a life with no one over you. True freedom is the right and the power to choose your master. This is the meaning of the famous teaching in Ethics of the Fathers: “No one is truly free except a person who is busy with Torah study.” At first this seems strange. Torah study is a duty. It means discipline. It means commitment. How can that be freedom? But the teaching reveals what real freedom is. Freedom is not being empty of any ruler. It is choosing the greatest and highest of all rulers. The person who is busy with Torah has chosen his master with his own hands. He did not let the campaigns of the phone, of money and of what people think make that choice for him. He crowns his king with awareness and clear thinking, instead of being dragged along. In Practice: Accepting Hashem as King The highest expression of this freedom is accepting Hashem as King over your life. It is not a forced surrender. It is an active choice, a crowning done with awareness and of your own free will. Every morning a person says the first line of the Jewish declaration of faith: “Hear, Israel: Hashem is our Lord, Hashem is One.” In that line he does a deeply free act. He chooses who will sit on the seat. He puts Hashem’s campaign ahead of every other campaign that will come during the day. And at any moment of the day, a person may stop and notice: “Who is pulling me right now? Is it me, because I chose? Or has the seat already been taken?” That moment of noticing is itself already an act of the divine soul. It is already a movement of freedom.