Rabbi Shalom Arush tells us in the name of Rebbe Nachman that character traits are nothing but thoughts, with the prevailing thoughts delineating the essence of one’s mindset at any given time.
Here’s a baal gaiva. He struts around like he’s the somebody that he imagines himself to be. He looks down on those that he perceives to be beneath him in intelligence, learning, financial status, physical appearance, social status or anything else that he holds to be important. His arrogance is manifested in his haughty demeanor, speech, tone, clothes, and all the rest of the expressions and trappings of his lifestyle.
For all of his pretense he is nothing more than an actor and a lousy one at that because nothing he does even remotely resembles extemporaneous action. He is rigidly reading his lines; the lines that he has written for himself; the ones etched into his thoughts. He thinks he’s better than yenem so he acts accordingly. If his thoughts were saturated with humility it would be physically IMPOSSIBLE for him to conduct himself in an arrogant manner. And so it is for every other midda, be it positive or negative.
You are what you think.
Our thoughts also parallel our inclinations, with our good thoughts courtesy of the Yetzer Tov while the bad thoughts come to us by virtue of the other guy. But it’s deeper than that because the two yetzers aren’t in the business of running a shuttle service for our thoughts. The two inclinations are our thoughts, with one being our good thoughts, and the other the bad.
This all leads to the rather sobering conclusion that at such a time when a person is harboring bad thoughts the Yetzer Hora has taken over his mind and is now in charge. And as Rav Miller z”l, relates in the context of the Hakdama to the Chovos Halavovos, it’s an aveira to hold in our mind bad thoughts such as jealousy and resentment because we are being observed by Hashem at all times. As soon as we have such thoughts we are commanded to remove them from our mind.
Chazal has described this sparring between the Yetzer Tov and Yetzer Hara as the War of the Inclinations. It’s an ongoing struggle resembling a tug of war in which the good thoughts are striving to overcome the bad.
The somewhat less than good news is that the acquiring of good thoughts is not the product of a life spent on a hammock. It’s work. And not a day’s work either. You’re in it for the duration because it is a situation of constant war in which you must perpetually marshal your good thoughts so as to overcome the thoughts that are south of desirable.
Rabbi Arush says that the upside of this lifetime struggle is that we don’t have to sit back in a defensive posture and let the evil thoughts that are from the dark side overwhelm us. We have it on good authority from Chazal that one cannot hold onto two disparate thoughts at the same time, so all we have to do is to decide to put good thoughts into our heads, thereby pre-empting the dark side competition.
Very nice to be sure, but how exactly does one go about pushing the envelope on good thoughts, he asks? And he answers:
New data!
Think of your mind as a computer (l’havdil) that works on the classic GIGO principle of garbage in garbage out. Common sense dictates that you can’t get out any better than you put in.
And that brings us to a typical baal Teshuva who comes to Torah Judaism with a shmutz kop because he has spent his formative years and, depending on age, some or many of his adult years immersed in negative unwholesome thoughts of all kinds. If in a burst of new found religious fervor he would attempt a frontal assault on the evil thoughts that predominate in his mind he wouldn’t make a dent, his noble intentions notwithstanding.
The road from shmutz kop to a mind permeated with positive attitudes anchored in Torah hashkafa is paved with new data. Tzubisilach, word by word, concept by concept, thoughts of Torah and emunah Pesach clean the mind from the remnants of the Street that have burrowed themselves within.
And by the rest of us it’s different?
To the extent that the thought driven output of what we are pleased to call our minds does not merit to be noted on our resume for Olam Haba, we have to input fresh data sufficient to dictate a positive entry because as we said above, we are what we think. And what we think about is what has been given to us to think about because it all depends on what inhabits the precincts of our mind.
If what we think is good then so are we, because our character traits are nothing but our thoughts.
