Although we have had occasion to touch upon the concept of gam zu l’tova in the past, it was never spoken out as such.
In EmunahSpeak: It’s Okay with Me we said that there are any number of ways to explain Bitochon, but at its core it simply means that Hashem has a Master Plan, and that every facet of that Master Plan is subjectively good, as applied to you and every other you walking the Earth at any given time.
And similarly, in EmunahSpeak: PLAN B we averred that Plan A is always the best plan for a person because everything Hashem does is for the best and moreover, Hashem wants what is good for you more than you want what’s good for you. And that’s reflected in the fact that we consistently come up with Plan B…. It’s all about seeing life’s curve balls as the real Plan A rather the ruination of what we thought was Plan A.
It’s all quite a madreiga to be sure, but for most of us it is the madreiga of grinning and bearing it, which means that if we’ve got our heads screwed on right, really tight, we won’t have a meltdown when a pipe bursts in our house putting most of what we own three feet under water. We’re not happy about it, to be sure, and as much as we may try, we also seem to be incapable of discerning the good that will eventually put in an appearance. And nonetheless, we’ll say gam zu l’tova, accepting b’lev shaleim that it’s all Hashem’s will.
As we said above, this is already a madreiga. Maybe not high enough for a nose bleed, but it’s still something to talk about.
In EmunahSpeak: Preview "Winning the Battle" we gave over the Tanya’s admonishment to separate from anything that has even a shmeck of worry or sadness and that as a first step in that direction we should begin seeing the good in what is presumed to be bad.
It’s basically an inyan of gam zu l’tova, is it not?
Yes, but with a twist. In the Tanya’s world we don’t sit back waiting for the good inherent in any presumed mishap to come dancing across our screen because the words, we should begin seeing the good in what is presumed to be bad, mean exactly that. We are adjured to actively seek it out.
But the reality is that, in most cases, at the end of the day we’re not actually seeing the so-called good through the eyes of the Tanya either. So what therefore is the practical difference between the Tanya’s more active approach and the passivity that defines the outlook of the rest of us?
It’s all in the mindset. The Tanya calls on us to conduct ourselves as if we did see it.
The Tanya’s attitude can be succinctly summed as follows: If you really hold of gam zu l’tova, then why aren’t you smiling?
Rabbi Yisroel Brog, tracking the view of the Tanya, reminds us that the goal is not to allow the slightest worry to penetrate our heart. The aitza, he says, is that in the same way you make a brocha over good you should make a brocha over evil, meaning that just like you accept the good with simcha you should mekabel the evil with simcha also.
It’s not enough to simply accept an unpleasant situation. A person has to try to motivate himself to see it as an occasion for simcha.
It’s all in how you relate to it.
Your car broke down? Boruch Hashem. It’s all gam zu l’tovah, our blindness to the tov notwithstanding.
And on the subject of that blindness, Rabbi Brog shares with us an amazing insight. He tells us, in the name of the Tanya, that the yissurim that we endure in the course of our sojourn in this physical world come from a world that is totally tov, and we are incapable of seeing the tov in much the same way that we are incapable of seeing ethereal beings such as angels.
And because these yissurim do in fact come from a world that is totally good, they have to come to us as such because this world cannot handle anything emanating from that world that’s not dressed up in a levush of yissurim.
Those who are samayach with their yissurim disregard the package (the yissurim) and look inside (the tov). They are samayach because they realize that they are zoche to a good that is so special that it has to be packaged in yissurim.
