From the Rebbe,s Private Counsel
Releasing the load is the first, more passive, step of bitachon. But there is a second, active step often found in the Rebbe’s counseling.
Cognitive Power
“Think good and it will be good,” the Tzemach Tzedek (the third Lubavitcher Rebbe, 1789–1866) counseled a worried disciple.
Drawing on this teaching, the Rebbe would often encourage people experiencing anxiety over the future to proactively cultivate a stance of positivity. Instead of indulging thoughts of doom and gloom (“This date is going to fail for sure!” “I know this job interview is hopeless!” “This illness will only get worse!”), you should consciously think that things will turn out well.
Nosson Leiman, a successful Canadian business owner, was facing the possibility of financial ruin.
Born in Ukraine in 1903, he had escaped to Canada at age twenty to evade the Soviet draft. In Montreal, the young immigrant built up a clothing business and eventually came to enjoy a modest sense of financial stability.
However, in the early 1960s, this hard-earned security was shaken to its core. His son explains:
“My father owned an old building—his store was on the ground floor, and he rented out the upper floors to small manufacturers. One of these manufacturers found it more lucrative to start fires and collect insurance than to sell merchandise. So he did that a few times in my father’s building until the insurance people got tired of paying out. They came to my father and said, ‘You have a choice: Either you install a sprinkler system, or you tear down this old building and put up a new one. Until you do one of those things, your insurance is canceled.’”
Leimann was terrified of losing his insurance—his entire inventory was highly flammable menswear. Between the two options, it was more sensible to tear down the old building than to install an expensive sprinkler system through its fragile structure.
Leiman hired an architect to draw up plans for a new building, but funds ran out before he could complete the project. Now he had no cash and no insurance for his merchandise—a frightening situation for the conscientious business owner.
Feeling at a loss, Leiman became deeply depressed. In his desperation, he decided to travel to New York and go see the Rebbe, bringing along his two sons.
“When we came into the Rebbe’s office,” his son relates, “my father was quite despondent. He was totally bent over. He walked up to the Rebbe’s desk and laid his hands flat on the desk surface, as if to support himself. He just embodied the picture of depression.
“The Rebbe looked at my father and said in a commanding voice, ‘Reb Nosson, stand up straight!’ My father took his hands off the desk and stood up straight.
“He then asked my father for the architectural plans and reviewed them in detail. (‘Why make the basement ceiling so low?’ ‘Why create a foundation that forever limits the building to three floors?’)
“When he finished, he smiled at my father and said, ‘You have to be b’simcha [joyous]. Be like a soldier going into battle. The soldier doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but he has firm faith that he will win. This is how you have to go back to Montreal, this is how you have to go back to your bank manager and mortgage company—with full confidence that G‑d is on your side and everything will turn out right.’
“My father walked out of there a different person. In those few minutes, the Rebbe transformed his anxiety into confidence.
“Upon returning to Montreal, my father was back to himself. With newfound optimism, he was able to proceed confidently and request things that he had been previously reluctant to ask for. He managed to secure a mortgage of six percent interest when the going rate was twelve percent. The new building went up, and thereafter his business prospered.”3
Optimism isn’t simply a way to fend off needless anxiety. The saying “think good and it will be good” indicates that positive thought has the power to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It can itself influence the future for the better.
This can be understood on both psychological and spiritual levels.
From a psychological perspective, when you replace angst with optimism, you tend to make better choices, resulting in better real-world outcomes.
“You should have every confidence that you will succeed,” reads one letter.
Such confidence, as is generally recognized, is a strong psychological factor in seeing things in their proper perspective and finding the best ways and means to obtain the objectives.4
Another letter, addressing a father who wrote about his discontent and worry over his children’s behavior, reads as follows:
The expression of our Rebbes, “Think good and it will be good,” applies to your children’s behavior as well. This can also be understood logically, for when you view their behavior with a good eye, your behavior toward them will naturally shift accordingly—especially your speech. And it is self-understood that words of affection have a much greater effect than the opposite approach.5
“The [dejected] spirit of your letter is very puzzling,” begins a letter to a veteran educator who wrote of the challenging dilemmas he was facing at the educational institution he directed,
especially coming from an educator who for tens of years has observed how children turn into adults, and how those without comprehension transform into understanding people, without them even putting in effort….
The very fact that G‑d created the world in such a way that even without effort, when a person turns twelve or thirteen [the age of maturity and some liability in Jewish tradition], they are given [the gift of] understanding from Above—an understanding strong enough to differentiate between good and evil—clearly indicates that essentially good prevails in the world. Though a person, seeing only a small part [of the world] and being biased by various factors, isn’t always able to see the situation as it is but instead evaluates it through their emotions….
It is almost certain that after reading these lines the question will arise [in your mind] that in all of the above there isn’t a solution for even one of the problems you have written about.
The relevance of all the above to [the problems in] your letter is because the approach to resolving a dilemma depends on the general outlook of the person who needs to resolve it. If their outlook is that they are sure to eventually find a good resolution to the dilemma, then they will search with increased vitality, knowing with certainty that the treasure exists and [that finding it] only depends on their efforts. This is not the case, however, when they are in doubt whether there is even a solution to be found.6
Positive thinking has a real-world impact from a spiritual perspective as well.
Chasidic philosophy explains that the universe has a spiritual dimension which is mirrored in the material realm.7 When you conjure up certain thoughts and images in your mind, you are, in effect, introducing and creating that scenario on a spiritual level. Thus, the way you envision the future influences how it actually turns out. When you imagine positive scenarios, you bring them closer to materializing, and the same is true with visions of doom.
“Clearly,” reads a letter to a man who wrote of his gloomy predictions for his financial endeavors,
I have not yet been successful at inspiring within you a spirit of optimism, despite having told you on numerous occasions that according to Jewish teachings, one should refrain from introducing negative and melancholy ideas into the world, which is one way of averting their actualization.
This applies not only to speech…. Thought, too, has the power to materialize, as we see from the teaching of our Rebbes, “Think good and it will be good.”8
Let’s conclude with a short story.
Josh (Yehoshua) Gordon was the energetic Chabad rabbi of California’s San Fernando Valley for decades.
“On one occasion,” he related, “my wife and I faced a very serious challenge in our lives. The particulars are not important for the story I want to tell, but suffice it to say, it was a debilitating time for us.
“I suggested that my wife write to the Rebbe about it, and she did—she sat down and wrote a ten-page letter detailing everything. The day her letter arrived in New York, I got a call from the Rebbe’s secretary with his handwritten response:
Time and again in your holy work, you have imagined that the situation you found yourselves in was the end of the world, but then you saw how the situation flipped over and became one of visible and revealed good…. You must follow the command of the Tzemach Tzedek to think optimistically, and things will turn out well.
“What an answer! I have this answer hanging on the wall of my office, and I have it on my dresser at home. This answer is a teaching I try to remember every day—that as bad as things may look, they looked bad last time, too, but everything turned out fine.
“With that encouragement, we decided to move forward and do what we had to do. And a couple of days later, the problem was solved.”9
This story appears to illustrate a deeper meaning in “think good and it will be good.” It’s not a flowery, out-of-touch approach that predicts no hardships at all. It is, in fact, a profoundly resilient approach to life and its momentary setbacks. It teaches a person to stare down their current complications, resist despair and worry, and defy them with active faith that all will be good. Then it will.
Liberate yourself from the grip of anxiety by shifting your perspective:
Think about G‑d’s infinite care for all His creations. Recognize that He certainly wants what’s best for you. And reflect on His benevolent providence over everything that happens to you.
In the end it’s all up to G‑d, and He can be trusted. So why be anxious? Let it go.
Furthermore, when you cultivate an optimistic outlook and have faith that things will go well, not only will you feel better, but the result will actually be better.
In the following chapter, we will turn to another struggle endemic to the human experience: bad moods.