Rebi Yehudah HaNasi said, “I learned much Torah from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and most of all from my students” (Makkos 10a). It is not always true, but it is true a lot of the time, and not necessarily because of what they say, but because of how they make you say something. I can’t tell you how many times in the middle of trying to better explain something to an audience that I have ended explaining something better to myself!
And it happened again recently. I was learning about the topic of bitachon—trust in God. Invariably, that leads to a discussion about “Gum zu l’tovah—this is also for the good.” The expression was coined by someone in the Talmud who was famous for saying it, so he was nicknamed Nachum Ish Gumzu. His student was the great Rebi Akiva, and he continued the tradition by always saying, “All that God does He does for the good” (Brochos 60b).
Many understand the mitzvah of trusting in God to be this, to always believe as Nachum Ish Gumzu and Rebi Akiva that whatever happens to a person is always for the good. It’s not that trusting in God means that you’ll always end up riding off into the sunset, because you won’t. No one has such a perfect life. Rather, it means that when things go south you know and believe in your mind and in your heart that not only is God responsible, but He did it for your good.
No one ever asks why they win the lottery. If they believe in God and Divine Providence, they are only too happy to assume that God made them win, and because they deserve it. It is most certainly and absolutely for their good.
No, they only ask why they DIDN’T win the lottery. They know God could have made them win it if He wanted to, but He didn’t. It doesn’t matter that the odds of winning a large lottery are much greater than getting struck by lightning. God can beat any odds, and obviously did for the “lucky” winner, which wasn’t them. “What’s up?” they ask God, as if they were denied something that was rightfully theirs, especially if they REALLLLLY need the money. Gum ZU l’tovah…
But it would really be more accurate to say “Gum zu l’tikun,” this too is for rectification. That’s the good the statement really refers to, because that is the only real good that can happen to a person. Sure it’s nice to get free money and buy anything you want. But ultimately, what will you have gained from it if it did not help you rectify yourself, or worse, it spiritually damaged you?
It’s the only thing we’re supposed to be thinking about from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment when we go back to sleep for the night. Every conscious moment is supposed to be devoted to personal tikun, which contributes to the larger goal of world tikun. We only reincarnate to finish off our personal tikunim, and we’ll keep doing it until we succeed, or worse, time runs out on history. That will only necessitate time in Gehinom, the Torah version of Purgatory. We don’t want to end there at all!
Here’s the thing. We may be oblivious to the need for tikun, but God is not. We may avoid doing that which helps us achieve it, but God does not. In some extreme cases He may just ignore a person and wait until after they die to “fix” them in the seven furnaces of Gehinom. But for the average do-gooder, God’s on their tikun even if they are not, giving them the kind of Divine Providence that will help them grow closer to spiritual perfection.
It’s complicated, tikun. There are so many important seforim and how-to books on the topic from over thousands of years of Torah tradition. One of the best I found was Sha’ar HaGilgulim (Gate of Reincarnations), the Arizal’s work on reincarnation which is really a work on personal tikun. That’s where you can see just how complicated personal tikun can be, but also how to go about it, step-by-glorious-step. An English translation exists with annotations and can be acquired through my other site (www.thirtysix.org).
It’s kind of like health. Our main focus is on what we like to eat, when we like to eat, and where we like to eat. We have a little bit of nutrition consciousness thanks to the efforts of some nutritious conscious people. But it is very secondary to the eating experience itself as to be almost non-existent when the average person orders from a menu, or goes to the fridge to make a snack.
It should be the other way around, something we tend to realize much too late when we’re older and slowly breaking down. All that carefree eating eventually results in the need for painstakingly careful eating, and some medications to boot. If only we had known that when we were much younger…
Likewise, life is, well, just life. We get up in the morning like we normally do and start our daily routine, day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month, life-after-life. We try to add some spice here-and-there and avoid disruption whenever possible, or at least minimize the setbacks when it was not. Only when we approach that point-of-no-return, at least in our current lifetime, that we realize, if even then, that we might have overlooked some very important clues about the purpose of our current incarnation. How many things did we do over decades of life that were NOT for tikun?
There’s no better time than the present to fix the situation. There are billions of people involved in billions of things which makes for a very distracting world, especially when some of them are connected to us. That’s why it is important to focus at least once to twice a day, at the beginning of the day and at its end, and perhaps every Shabbos as well, on the idea of personal tikun, and what yours might be.
You will be surprised by the results. You will be shocked by the growth. But you’ll be especially happy in the World-to-Come when you realize how much of post-death rectification it saved you.