WELL-GROUNDED VS. FLOATING AND DROWNING

The famous Jerusalem tzaddik Rabbi Arye Levin once said (I'm quoting from memory, so this just the idea that caught my attention and not his exact words), "When good and righteous people dream, their visions can reach Heavens but they are still firmly planted on the ground, like the ladder seen by Yaakov Avinu. Yet when evil people dream, their dreams are neither above nor below, neither reaching high nor rooted in reality; when Pharaoh had his dream, he saw himself standing at the edge of a river - neither here nor there."

When I started writing for the Nanach blog, one of the conditions was that I wasn't allowed to mention any "contemporary Rabbis", which obviously included my teachers in Breslov. At first it was fun, "Hey, I have so many ideas of my own that I can write tons of posts without ever mentioning anybody else!" I saw it as an interesting challenge, and I wanted to prove that I could do this.

Yet, after a while, I started to get a nagging feeling that I was becoming a bit like Pharaoh: teetering on the edge and constantly in danger of falling. I also realized that, if I wasn't firmly grounded, it automatically meant that I couldn't continue growing. The way I see it now, it's a person's teachers that give them so much of what they need to really develop spiritually: not only the stability and clarity that come with being rooted in tradition, but also the power to reach high and dream big.

I might yet return to Nanach (the blog I mean; I've never even tried to go Nanach in my real life). But right now I see it as a choice between feeling well-grounded vs. floating and drowning, and I'd rather pick the first option every single time.