Our Tests

Chanukah took over for much of the last two weeks, and no sooner did the last candle of the fully lit menorah splutter out than I found myself plunged back into the darkness the festival is meant to help us rise beyond. Ritual can be very powerful and meaningful as a roadsign for us to follow but it isn’t magic and sometimes it takes hard work to replicate the symbolism in real life.

I’m referring to recent difficult events in The Mussar Institute. We don’t need to dwell on the details to learn the lessons. In this post, I’ll explore one lesson that came into high relief for me, and in the next post, another.

The Mussar masters of the past emphasized that it is part of the blueprint of life that we get tested. They referred to these tests as nisyonos [nisyonot] and the paradigmatic example is Abraham, who confronted and passed ten tests in his life.

All of us face tests throughout our lives that are uniquely configured to our unique personal spiritual curriculum. What might be a test for me will be just commonplace behaviour for you. What makes the test a trial is not how difficult it is but it strikes at an inner quality where that person has unrealized potential to grow.

Looking at Abraham, he is well-known as the patriarch who exemplified chesed [lovingkindness]. It follows, then, that the tests he faced were focused at the other end of the middah spectrum, which is in regard to gevurah [strength]. Going out to do battle with kings, sending away Hagar and Ishmael, and ultimately being willing to sacrifice his beloved son all demanded enormous strength from a person whose inherent nature was soft-hearted and generous.

For the tests to be real, there needs to be actual potential to fail. You pass the test when you make a decision or take an action that pulls your behaviour closer to the ideal. If you abandon the ideal and indulge a desire or act egotistically or do harm to others for no just reason, you have failed the test.

This is consistent with the Ramban (Genesis 22:1), who says that the purpose of test is to reveal a person’s dormant abilities. How often people say, “I didn’t think I could do it.” But they did, and in that way the test gave them an opportunity to grow.

When a person is confronted by a situation that is open to a variety of responses and that person stays true to the ideal and does not give in to the temptation to “get away with it” and does not listen to the inner voice that is telling them, “Everybody does it” or “What’s the big deal? or whatever inducement or rationalization that individual might be prone to, then the test has been passed. Now you know what you are capable of doing and the same situation encountered the next time will be not nearly the test it was the first time, until it is just second nature for you.

And the opposite is true as well. The Talmud (Kiddushin 40a) tells us that when a person transgresses and then goes and repeats that transgression a second time, it becomes as if that negative action were actually permitted. And I heard somewhere that after doing it a third time, the person comes to consider it praiseworthy!

We see people – including some in high office – who brag shamelessly about their immoral behaviour. Their moral descent has become praiseworthy in their own eyes.

This is the path of ascent in this life. Each test is a rung of the ladder; pass and ascend, fail and descend.

Understanding the role of nisyonot in life does not just give us a tool to analyze other people’s behaviour but, more importantly, our own. It is easy to point a finger at someone else who failed a test, and, in parallel, to minimize the strength and other resources someone else had to muster to pass one, but what about you? What tests have come your way recently?

Is there a certain phone number that calls to you to be dialed even though you know that no good will come of it.

Does a certain retailer or product call you to indulge in something you do not need, or that might be harmful to you, or your family, or this planet?

Is there someone whose advice almost certainly leads to strife at home?

And then there are smartphones. Since the publication of The Shabbat Effect, I have been in conversation with people about turning off their phones one day a week and I have a clear idea what an enormous test this is for some people.

Do you have a clear vision that every test is nothing other than a rung on the ladder of your spiritual life? Grasping that notion deeply and with conviction is an essential foundation for meeting the tests and trials you inevitably fact in your life. And emerging more whole and more holy.

The thoughts expressed here are mine alone and do not represent the views any organization I may be affiliated with.