Healing with Joy - The Power of JOY - Reb Shlomo Carlebach Part 2/2

Healing with Joy - The Power of JOY - Reb Shlomo Carlebach Part 2/2 Sadness is a sickness, not an emotional problem. It is absolutely a sickness and you have to get rid of it. The Baal Shem Tov says if you want to know whether you are really serving G-d, it is simple. If my heart is filled with joy each time I put on tfillin, and each time I do something good my heart is filled with joy, I am serving G-d. If I am not on that level, then I am just doing mechanical things. That is very holy, I’ll be rewarded in Heaven for it, but it is heartbreaking. If I look sad when I walk in a room, what happens to the person sitting next to me? He feels a bit uncomfortable. If he loves me a lot he will overcome those uncomfortable feelings and say, “I got to stick it out, he’s my friend, so I have to stick around while he is crying.” This.is not good. If I am sitting here and laughing like the Ropshitzer Rebbe, laughing my head off, suddenly everyone will feel comfortable. It is very simple. You feel uncomfortable when someone laughs hysterically if it is stupid laughter, but not if it is holy laughter. If you could look into the abyss it would be very uncomfortable, frightening. The truth is, when you see someone sad, at that moment you are confronted with nothingness. You see that person is struggling between “being” and “non-being”. Imagine that I am standing on the roof with one foot on the roof, and the other hanging over the edge. You say, “Listen, do me a favour. You make me nervous, even if you are the greatest acrobat in the world. Put your foot back on the roof. I don’t have strength to watch that.” You have to realize it is the same way with G-d. When you walk around sad you make G-d uncomfortable. G-d says, “I love you. I’m your G-d. I signed a contract on Mt. Sinai and I will stick to it. I’ll be with you, but I reaIly don’t feel comfortable with you when you are sad.” When you smile filled with joy, and you look at somebody, they look back at you, When you cry they can’t really look back at you. You can smile eye to eye, but you can’t cry eye to eye. We know this world is a little mirror of Heaven, so although it can be beautiful when you cry, G-d still feels a little uncomfortable about it. You can cry with being, or you can cry with nothingness, with this dead kind of sadness. If someone says, “Really I love you so much, I want to be the greatest friend to you,” and he cries while he says it, that can open your heart in a thousand ways. But if someone cries, “I was in the beauty parlor, sniff sniff, and they cheated me, sniff sniff, and I paid five dollars” what do you feel then? Would you say it is a beautiful confrontation? You say okay, pat her on the back, and look away. There is a very deep difference between crying before somebody and crying about something. If I am crying before G-d it is the holiest thing. Maybe He is crying with me, If I am crying about something, am I telling it to G-d, it is not as good. Anyway, the most important thing you have to know is that if you are shining below here, G-d is shining. If you smile below here, then G-d smiles back at you from above. Something very holy is going on between you and G-d. Tears open the gates, but joy breaks down the walls! The word sadness is really a bad translation. The word atzvut actually means to shut yourself off. There are two kinds of sadness. There is marirut, which is bitterness, which is living sadness, and there is atzvut, which is dead sadness. Bitterness says, “I wish I could do better. I didn’t do it right. Gevalt! Why didn’t I do better?” Without regretting, I just know I didn’t do well enough. That is living sadness, because when I walk out of there, I want to do better. The Baal Shem Tov says you can tell the difference between marirut and atzvut very simply. If you see another person after you cry, do you love them or do you hate them? If you cry in the living kind of crying then every person looks beautiful to you afterward. “I’m not so good, but they are so beautiful.” If you have the dead kind of sadness, then everything looks ugly to you. Sometimes you cry and you look out the window and say, “Oh, those disgusting creatures walking down the street.” With this kind of sadness G-d can’t look at you either. If you want to know if you have the living kind of sadness or the dead kind of sadness, this is the test. In the dead kind of sadness, deep down you think, “I really think there is no G-d, the whole thing is a fake.” Even if this is only for one split second, at that moment you really reached the botom of dead sadness. Therefore Reb Nachman warns that you should keep as far away from it as you can. There is a deep kind of sadness coming from things that G-d caused. We are always accustomed to rattle off the prayers. The holy