The Battle of the Soul

For You tested us, Oh God; You refined us as though refining silver.

Tehillim/Psalms 66:10

For the past several years, I’ve observed that the most difficult struggle in life is the one we talk least about.

We all speak readily to one another about our surface-level challenges – finances, family, health – and yet, the greatest battles are not external. The greatest battles are within.

There is the battle of truly conquering oneself. The battle of refinement. The struggle through daily tests and challenges.

And there is the battle of darkness. The dark night of the soul.

That darkness can be a muteness, a silence of the soul. Or a profound, extended suffering. It can be numbness, a kind of death in itself. It is a spiritual paralysis, a complete detachment from the true nature and calling of the soul. 

These are the wars we often too weary to engage in. And being too weary, giving up inch by inch, is exactly how most lose this war.

I believe we are all born hearing the voice of our soul - the still, small voice – and that, with time, tests, failures, and compromises, that voice can be buried and eventually strangled.

I have watched many – religious and secular alike – succumb to their baser instincts when tested. This internal war is subtle. It’s slow. It’s the tiny compromises of daily life. The constant justifications of one’s behavior to oneself. The erosion of values. The small betrayals. One little transgression leads to another… and another… until you don’t recognize the face that peers back at you in the mirror.

"If you do not improve, sin crouches at the entrance…to you is its longing. But you can conquer it…" Bereisheet 4:7

This is the battle of the soul. 

It is a daily battle. It occurs dozens of times a day, every single day. The act of conquering is not, as the movies and shows portray, a single heroic moment. It is an act that must be taken many times each day, endlessly, for the rest of your life. It is a repeated, often exhausting choice.

This daily battle is relentless. Grueling. It has all the drudgery, misery, and bloodshed of any other war. But it is a war that must be fought. We are all at war - constant war - on all fronts.

And this battlefield of the soul isn’t just individual.

It mirrors something much larger. It mirrors the war our people now face.

The daily battle we all experience within —the spiritual muteness, the gradual descent, the struggle to rise up for the seventh and the seventieth time—is not just an individual’s story. It is a reflection of the greater battle: the battle we, as Jews, are struggling with on the national scale.

A deafening spiritual silence has fallen across the Jewish people. Yes, an external war is being waged on us, but more importantly, an internal war has been raging for thousands of years—in each of our individual souls, and in the collective soul of our nation.

We are a people at war with ourselves. And like all spiritual wars, this one is easy to ignore. There are no headlines for this war, no explosions. 

The battle manifests in our moral confusion, our fractured identity, our craving for comfort over conviction.

We don’t even realize we’re losing.

There may not be explosions or missiles from this war – but there are casualties.

For two thousand years, we were a people in exile. A people of silence, a people who bowed its head to the nations. We prostrated to the whims and the bloodthirst of nations who, acting as tools of God’s wrath, exacted His punishment on us.

The King had banished us from His kingdom, from the home we shared with Him. We wandered the earth in our torn and ragged bridal gown.

"Truly, as a woman betrays her beloved, so have you betrayed Me, O house of Israel, says the Lord." Yermiyahu 3:20

We lost our identity. We lost ourselves. We lost our minds.

And then something happened. Something strange, wonderful, and terrifying.

"...you have played the harlot [with] many lovers, yet return to Me, says the Lord." Yermiyahu 3:1

The King opened the kingdom’s gates again and beckoned us in. 

We ran in for shelter, fleeing from those nations who flogged us… and slammed the door in the King’s face.

We invited the nations of the world in and cavorted with them, those very nations who had flogged us. We mocked the King in our hearts and bowed down once again to the idols of our own making. 

We played the harlot.

And yet the King knocked…

Again.

And again.

And again.

"I have taken off my tunic; how can I put it on? I have bathed my feet; how can I soil them?" Shir HaShirim 5:3

We rejected Him. 

Some rejected Him with rage and hatred, attempting to destroy our marriage contract, our sacred, storied history and covenant.

Some rejected Him with indifference, the dismissal of a people who is completely detached from its identity and mission.

And some didn’t even return to the kingdom at all, choosing instead to languish with their foreign, abusive lovers, the ones who reject and shun us. 

“All your lovers have forgotten you, they do not seek you, for I have smitten you with the wound of an enemy, cruel chastisement, for the greatness of your iniquity; your sins are many.” Yermiyahu 30:14

We rejected the King out of a subconscious, crazed notion that we can live without Him.

But the truth is… we need Him. Desperately. 

My beloved stretched forth his hand from the hole, and my insides stirred because of him… I opened for my beloved, but my beloved had hidden and was gone; my soul went out when he spoke; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he did not answer me.

Shir HaShirim 5:4-6

We were once again given a choice. It was the choice given to us at Har Sinai. It was the choice given to us repeatedly throughout our odyssey in the desert. The choice God has been presenting to us over and over again throughout history.  The blessing or the curse. God… or destruction.

Behold, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil…

Devarim 30:15

Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse. The blessing, that you will heed the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today; and the curse, if you will not heed the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn away from the way I command you this day, to follow other gods, which you did not know…

Devarim/Deuteronomy 11:26-28

And yet it is this very choice, this ancient and holy covenant, that we have most pointedly avoided.

Because this choice – the one that has been presented to us over and over again – means we must engage in the weary battle of the soul.

It means we must conquer ourselves.

And it means we must extricate the disharmonious, contradictory parts of ourselves that developed through generations of punishment and exile. The parts that developed not from a place of true identity, but from a need to survive.

It means we must wage war against those who seek to annihilate us, those who profane the name of God, declaring war on us and therefore on Him.

Choosing God means we are picking up our swords to fight, all while maintaining the faith that God will fight for us.

“The Lord, your God, Who goes before you, He will fight for you, just as He did for you in Egypt before your very eyes.” Devarim 1:30

It means we are daily engaging in a fierce battle, day in, day out…

A battle against our ego.

Against our false identity.

Against our weaknesses.

Against our collective history and trauma.

Against our enemies.

And ultimately, against our very selves.

Knowing there is a God and following the laws on a surface level – keeping kosher, keeping Shabbat – is not enough.

God demands that we know Him in all our ways, and warns us that we should not be wise in our own sight (Mishlei 3:6-7).

In everything we do, everywhere we go, every moment of every single day – “when you sit in your house, and when you walk on the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up” (Devarim 6:7) – we must invite Him into our lives.

Our relationship with God must be a constant and consistent invitation.

Our objective is to invite Him into every facet of our lives, even the ones that are our darkest and most painful. We must invite Him in to heal us. To lift us up. To scrub off the coarseness and the lies that have left a thick layer of dust over our souls.

Our goal is to clean house, prepare for His company, and graciously host Him, not merely as a guest, but as a permanent member of each of our households. 

We cannot take His guidebook and unceremoniously throw Him out. We must invite His presence down into this earth using His instructions as our guide. We must build His palace, His house, so He may dwell among us. “And they shall make Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in them.” Shemot 25:8

That is the very purpose of the Torah; to invite His presence down to earth by building Him a dwelling place; to invite Him into our lives so He may dwell among us.

A husband and a wife do not live separately; if they do, the marriage is unhealthy.

So, too, our relationship with God: if God’s presence does not dwell among us, we know we are not in a healthy state.

And yet we are distracting ourselves from our mission, running to and fro, frantically chasing after wealth, power, innovations, technology, and materialism. We are keeping the banished King out of His kingdom, the One who so graciously let us back in.

Is it a time for you to dwell in your paneled houses, while this House is lying in ruins? And now, so said the Lord of Hosts: Consider your ways. You have sown much and you bring in little. You eat without being satiated. You drink without getting your fill. You dress, and it has no warmth. And he who profits, profits into a bundle with holes. So said the Lord of Hosts: Consider your ways. Ascend the mountain, bring wood, and build the house – and I will accept it, and I will be honored, said the Lord.

Haggai 1:4-8

We have set to work renovating His kingdom, turning it upside down in our quest for modernity, trying to make this kingdom look like all other kingdoms - but we refuse to build His palace, His private rooms.

The King who allowed us back into the kingdom is watching us from the outside while we frenetically pull apart any vestiges of our relationship with Him and try to copy the other kingdoms in look and in spirit.

We are busying ourselves trying to find a cheat code, trying to hack into blessings and success, vainly putting all of our efforts into automating our absolution.

Our claims of ingenuity in technology, medicine, and agriculture are vanity of vanities - reflections of an undercurrent of faithlessness and Godlessness.

Why do we need pharmaceuticals, digital innovations, and artificial weather manipulation to induce rain when the true remedy, the real panacea, is to follow God? 

You shall serve your God Hashem, who will bless your bread and your water. And I will remove sickness from your midst. No woman in your land shall miscarry or be barren. I will let you enjoy the full count of your days. I will send forth My terror before you, and I will throw into panic all the people among whom you come, and I will make all your enemies turn their backs to you.

Shemot 23:25-27

Why do we need foreign superpowers and their weapons of war, when they blackmail us and demand compliance with their terms, when the Almighty Himself, the God of vengeance, vowed to stand with us in battle – if only we would stand with Him?

“One man of you pursued a thousand, for it is the Lord your God Who wages war for you, as He has spoken to you.” Yehoshua 23:10

There is no hack, no cheat code, no artificial innovation or technology that can bypass the need to follow God wholeheartedly and completely. We cannot play competitor to God; we must partner with Him. We must learn to know Him and invite Him into all of our efforts.

We cannot evade the King, the Creator, the Master, our Husband. We never could – though humanity, for thousands of years, has been fooling itself that it can.

Humanity has become, once again, those doomed builders of the Tower of Bavel, eager to make a name for ourselves as we wage war against our Master. Like the builders of the Tower of Bavel, we have convinced ourselves that our next innovation will save us.

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered upon the face of the entire earth.” Bereisheet 11:4 

We have manipulated and brainwashed everyone around us to believe the same, perpetuating the system of lies, more lies, and half-truths.

And like the Tower of Bavel, we will be toppled. Like Sodom and Amorrah, we are watching fire consume our land. Buildings collapse around us, houses are being ripped from their foundations, and the clamor and distress of humanity has grown to a deafening level.

​We are compromising all of our values, betraying one another, bowing down to the nations, and serving the idols of narcissism and greed. 

We proudly call ourselves the “startup nation,” the hi-tech center of the Middle East. We have become the powerhouse of artificial innovations. Meanwhile, we are becoming strangled by these cages – these cages that we built ourselves. We are drowning in the lies we’ve told ourselves and everyone around us. 

We have allowed these lies to drive us. And these lies have taken over our lives. We lust, rage, violate, and disrespect – all in the name of greed, innovation, identity, following our heart, being “happy.” And, in some cases, while pretending to follow God. While keeping Shabbat. While keeping kashrut. While praying three times a day and appearing pious and holy.

“Because that people has approached [Me] with its mouth, and honored Me with its lips, but has kept its heart far from Me. And its worship of Me has been a social obligation, learned by rote…” Yeshayahu 29:13

Because our identity, our ego, our hearts – if we don’t completely submit all of ourselves to God – are deceitful and misleading. And when we don’t completely submit all of ourselves to God, we ultimately fight against Him. There is no other way.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and when it is sick, who will recognize it? I, the Lord, probe the heart, search the mind, to give everyone according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” Yermiyahu 17:9-10

If you have been wondering why people have lost their minds – if you have been wondering why there is so much destruction, violence, an utter lack of humanity – 

Then you should look no further than the mirror.

The insanity we are witnessing in the world is a reflection of an insanity within ourselves. A disconnect. A rottenness. 

The world is lost because we are lost. 

The world is foundering because we are foundering – in our role as a lighthouse. A lighthouse to the nations, to show them which way they should go. 

We have drowned, strangled, and suffocated our truest mission, our highest calling. 

We have buried our souls.

We, as a people, have been buried for centuries. But we weren’t buried to die; we were planted to live.

We were a seed, and we were planted deep into the earth so we would have the opportunity to grow fiercely into the light, more powerfully than ever before. 

It is our choice whether we grow into the light… or wallow in the darkness forever, to decay into nothingness.

“And your people, all of them righteous, shall possess the land for all time; they are the shoot that I planted, My handiwork in which I glory.” Yeshayahu 60:21

Following God completely and wholeheartedly is not simple by any stretch of the imagination – but it is straightforward. After all, God Himself gave us the rules, the wisdom, and the stories we need to follow Him in all our ways.

“For the matter is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.” Devarim 30:14

God promised us, the Jewish people, that we would have everything we needed… if we only kept our end of the bargain.

We have forgotten to seek our God. We have forgotten to say that He, the God of our fathers, the God who took us out of Egypt, is the only source of strength, the only reason we are a people, the only source of blessings, might, and honor.

We have been asleep for far too long.

“I sleep, but my heart is awake. The voice of my beloved is knocking: 'Open for me, my sister, my love...'” Shir HaShirim 5:2

We have chased power. Ingenuity. Influence. Wealth. None of these will save us.

Only God can.

We were meant to be a light unto nations. A holy nation. A nation of priests. 

But we are a nation with amnesia. A nation that has forgotten its role in the world. We were meant to be a light unto nations. But we are not, no matter how much our Hasbara tries to convince the world otherwise.

Our collective soul has been silent for too long, and the silence must cease.

We must awaken, and we must return. “Renew our days as of old…” Eicha 5:21

We must open our mouths and cry out—not to the world, but to the One who has been waiting for our cry all along.

I opened for my beloved, but my beloved had hidden and was gone; my soul went out when he spoke; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he did not answer me. The watchmen who patrol the city found me; they smote me and wounded me; the watchmen of the walls took my jewelry off me.

Shir HaShirim 5:6-7

We are not Jews, we are not a holy nation, without God. We are not a people without God. 

We are His bride, His beloved. And we cannot forget our Husband.

“I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine…” Shir HaShirim 6:3

Technology will not save us. Diplomacy will not save us.

Nothing will save us… 

Except God.

“Let me sing for my beloved

A song of my lover about his vineyard.

My beloved had a vineyard

On a fruitful hill.

He broke the ground, cleared it of stones,

And planted it with choice vines.

He built a watchtower inside it,

He even hewed a wine press in it;

For he hoped it would yield grapes.

Instead, it yielded wild grapes.

‘Now, then,

Dwellers of Jerusalem

And citizenry of Judah,

You be the judges

Between Me and My vineyard:

What more could have been done for My vineyard

That I failed to do in it?

Why, when I hoped it would yield grapes,

Did it yield wild grapes?

Now I am going to tell you

What I will do to My vineyard:

I will remove its hedge,

That it may be ravaged;

I will break down its wall,

That it may be trampled.

And I will make it a desolation; 

It shall not be pruned or hoed,

And it shall be overgrown with briers and thistles.

And I will command the clouds

To drop no rain on it.’

For the vineyard of GOD of Hosts

Is the House of Israel,

And the seedlings he lovingly tended

Is the citizenry of Judah.

And [God] hoped for justice,

But behold, injustice;

For equity,

But behold, iniquity!

Woe to those who add house to house

And join field to field,

Till there is room for none but you

To dwell in the land!

…

Assuredly,

My people will suffer exile

For not giving heed,

Its multitude victims of hunger

And its masses parched with thirst.

Woe to those who call evil good

And good evil;

Who present darkness as light

And light as darkness;

Who present bitter as sweet

And sweet as bitter!

Woe to those who are so wise—

In their own opinion;

So clever—

In their own judgment!

…

Assuredly,

As straw is consumed by a tongue of fire

And hay shrivels as it burns, 

Their stock shall become like rot,

And their buds shall blow away like dust.

For they have rejected the instruction of GOD of Hosts,

Spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel.

That is why

GOD’s anger was roused

Against this covenanted people,

Why God’s arm was stretched out against it

And struck it,

So that the mountains quaked, 

And its corpses lay

Like refuse in the streets.

Yet God’s anger has not turned back,

And a divine arm is outstretched still.”

Excerpts from Yeshayahu/Isaiah, Chapter 5

Now featured on Jewish Home News and Arutz Sheva.