Since Levi Shmotkin released his book Letters for Life: Guidance for Emotional Wellness from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, he has been asked numerous times whether he feels that he now has no struggles in life. Does he have all the answers?
The scholar and now author is humble in his response.
“Of course, the answer is no. But what I do think has changed entirely is that I feel there is a more ideal place to aspire to, and I have the tools to come back to that, to create the safety net, so that I don’t fall down a bottomless pit,” he told The AJN. “There are tools and directions, drawing from our age-old traditions about how to pave the path to that desired state that we always want to be in. We may never reach it, but the aspiration itself is what creates the emotional wealth that we need.”
Shmotkin is talking about all the letters that he read when he needed to pull himself out of what he referred to as “emotional turbulence.”
He described himself as an ordinary guy going through the traditional yeshiva system with good parents, good friends and good teachers. But a niggling ‘feeling down’ confused him, because there was no catalyst like the loss of a loved one or a broken relationship. He was simply feeling these negative feelings.
“When it’s the process of living in this world itself that is the source of the turmoil, I think it’s more confusing in trying to understand what is happening,” he said. “But I also think it forces us, or at least it did for me, to face and to address the core issues and the core thoughts and feelings of life, and being human itself.”
Shmotkin found himself gravitating to “an immense body of literature”, namely the thousands of letters that the Rebbe used to counsel those who came to him for help. And rather than reading them as philosophy, he began to view the letters as practical, relevant advice.
“Letter after letter, I watched the Rebbe take 3000 years of Jewish wisdom, and bring it down through the minds and hearts of people from all walks of life,” Shmotkin recalled. “A teenager struggling with friends, a young father having their first child, someone who’s addicted to substances and just ordinary people with the insecurities and fears and existential questions that we all have. And as I’m reading one letter, another letter, another letter, I’m seeing patterns. I started detecting patterns, recurring ideas that the Rebbe clearly sees as principles for building emotional health in our world, and I started putting down these patterns and recurring themes into a notebook of my own.”
That notebook became Letters for Life: Guidance for Emotional Wellness from the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
Slowly, Shmotkin started implementing these lessons into his own life. Some are cognitive, tools or exercises on how to deal and respond to negative thoughts, and some are behavioural. A lot of them are actually actionable ideas.
Shmotkin recalls feeling “a different energy that was lifting me from a darker place” and he felt compelled to share these ideas with others who could also hopefully gain from the lessons he was learning.
“You’re much stronger and bigger than you may imagine, and you have an inner health that you can rely on that will push you forward”
Shmotkin described the writing process as an intellectual feast.
“The first thing I did when I decided to move ahead with the book project was to double down on the research to really come back to the volumes and make sure that I mastered the material, the English letters, the Hebrew letters, the Yiddish letters, the handwritten notes, and the 1700 interviews with individuals who had private audiences with the Rebbe,” Shmotkin said. “It was intellectually fascinating to see the Rebbe take the age-old Jewish wisdom and bring it down to the emotional struggles that we have through archival letters that are historical, to face modern struggles that are rooted in the Talmud and the Chumash and Jewish mystics.”
But the writing process, he said, was grueling. Shmotkin described it as a learning curve on how to ensure readers got maximum value for their time, and to trust the reader to understand the subtle ideas that were being presented. Shmotkin also said he had to learn how to remove his own emotional biases when writing, understanding that not everyone felt the exact same way that he did.
To do this, Shmotkin has separated the book into chapters that focus on specific emotional challenges such as anxiety, doubt or identity, providing practical tools to help readers. His aim to is to “make sure every paragraph and sentence gives the reader maximum value for every word they read without repetition.”
“Letter after letter, I watched the Rebbe take 3000 years of Jewish wisdom, and bring it down through the minds and hearts of people from all walks of life”
Shmotkin said one of the most important lessons he learnt from the Rebbe and one that he hopes speaks clearly through the book, is the importance of looking outward and connecting to others.
“The Rebbe says the mother of illness is isolation. Popular culture builds a very isolated generation because at the end of the day, at the centre of our feelings becomes ‘what are our emotions? Am I happy? Am I sad? And how does everything treat me?,” Shmotkin explained. “In the end, that’s very fragmented because at the beginning and end of our thoughts is our own little emotional world, and that creates entanglement and continuous vicious cycles of negative emotions.”
The Rebbe’s position, Shmotkin explained, is to take that emotional world that we have and connect it to others – connect with community, to tradition, to identity. This, the Rebbe says, creates a healthy and vibrant world.
“I hope readers walk away with one of the central themes in the Rebbe’s counselling is not to become entangled and battle the negativity, the regrets, the worries, the fears, the past, failure, self-criticism, but instead to pivot to somewhere entirely different in your life, and to invest in that,” Shmotkin explained. “To expand from shrinking into the black hole of our minds and our frustrations and our disappointments and our unhappiness, and to move to an entirely different part of our life, mentally, emotionally and behaviorally.
“You’re much stronger and bigger than you may imagine, and you have an inner health that you can rely on that will push you forward in that process of pivoting,” Shmotkin said. “[It] will bring you to a much better, healthier place, without the fight and the entanglement into the weeds of your life, and instead to spend time with the other parts of the garden of our mind.”
Letters for Life: Guidance for Emotional Wellness from the Lubavitcher Rebbe is available on Amazon.
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