In the meantime, what I am about to prescribe will not be easy, especially for people like me. I have a hard time shutting things out, and Hate (with a capital H) injustice. I Hate evil. I Loathe stupidity (with a capital L), especially my own. I am most relaxed when by myself and cut off from the world, which is very hard to be at times like this. That’s why I want to work on this.
When the snake came and tempted Chava to eat from the forbidden fruit of the Aitz HaDa’as Tov v’Ra, it was not really the snake talking. Kabbalah explains that the Sitra Achra had taken over the snake and spoke through it. It looked like a woman talking to a snake, when in reality it was a woman talking to a bad angel.
But he is good at what he does, very good. He is a master of disguises and impersonations, especially since he works through real people. He makes an even bigger enemy out of our enemies, and we are easily duped into seeing only the human, not the Heavenly being working through them. People can be bad all on their own, but the Sitra Achra helps them to go to the next level.
The goal is not to physically hurt us. That is the means. The goal is to spiritually hurt us. To take us down, spiritually. The Sitra Achra wants us to stop producing weapons against him that can weaken and, potentially, destroy him. He wants to kidnap holy sparks to increase his power and extend his reign. When we learn Torah and perform mitzvos, we redeem those sparks and keep them from him. That makes the S.A. furious.
So if he can’t outright stop a Jew from learning Torah or performing mitzvos, he tries instead to limit the time and energy spent on both. And he is very clever about it, somehow knowing what riles us and gets our blood boiling, or simply catches our attention long enough to make us miss an important spiritual opportunity. And boy oh boy, he has had an enviable track record to date. Gihenom is a very crowded place thanks to the Sitra Achra.
So you want to ghost him. Ghosting is when someone who used to be friendly with you suddenly cuts off all communication without explanation. And though we’re never friendly with the Sitra Achra, we usually give such credence to everything he does to us that it is like we have an intimate relationship with him. We want to end that and just leave him hanging.
Now, the truth is, we’re supposed to be trying to do that all of our lives, war or no war. Evidently it is very hard to do unless a person puts everything they are into being a tzaddik. But everyone at some time or another has been able to ghost the Sitra Achra, even if only for a moment. Inspired, the person rose to the occasion and did not let any negativity get in their way of doing the right thing. The going got tough and, despite the S.A.’s efforts, they became tough and got going.
What does it mean to ghost the S.A. here? It means to realize that we are being terrorized by the S.A., vis-a-vis cowardly Arab murderers. He is doing it in a way that screams evil overcoming good, the triumph of injustice, in a way that makes us feel abandoned, lost, hopeless, frustrated. And it is so well disguised that we are only seeing humans perpetrate it, just as Chava thought she was talking only with the snake.
We have to decide between which thoughts and emotions we can afford to feel right now that will allow us to deal with the situation in a spiritually mature manner. We have to recognize our negative feelings and realize that they do not help the situation but hinder it.
We’re at war, but first and foremost with the Sitra Achra, a war that doesn’t involve bullets and missiles. It is a war over holy sparks that run this world and either strengthen holiness or evil. Six million Jews were murdered by a madman who, like the original snake, was the perfect vehicle for the Angel of Death.
You don’t need emunah for when things make sense. You don’t need it for when you feel calm and in control. Emunah almost seems superfluous when we’re confident that the outcome will be in our favor. Emunah is how we deal with the opposite, when things don’t make sense, when we do not feel calm and in control, and we’re not confident about the outcome.
When you can have it, truly feeling it at times like these, you ghost the Sitra Achra. When you don’t let him interfere with your learning of Torah and your performance of mitzvos, especially when they seem so hard to do and particularly with intention, you grab precious sparks away from the side of evil and weaken it spiritually and, in the end, physically.
May Hashem Yisborach, the All-Merciful One Who has saved us and sustained us countless times until now, do so once again, revealing Himself to the world and ending the reign of evil forever. May we merit to see this day, when Moshiach Tzidkeinu will usher in the great Messianic Era and the fulfillment of the words of the prophet:
God will be King over the entire land. On that day, God will be One and His Name, One. (Zechariah 14:9)
Quite honestly, after years of saying it was coming, it actually feels, for the first time since being here, that it is.