Under The Hood

One person is told that if his car battery dies, he needs to connect it to another car battery for a minute. Another person is told that he needs to plug the car in for a half hour. Yet, a third is told to plug his car in overnight. 

One person is told that when his car only has a short distance till empty, he needs to pull off at the next gas station and refuel. While another person is told not to bother pulling off at the next exit, because the gas station coming up doesn’t have what he needs.

At first glance, to someone who is unfamiliar with cars, what I wrote would be confusing. In fact, such a person may very well not believe what I wrote. They might even accuse me of lying or making up stories. 

Yet I stand firmly and proclaim that such a story can happen, and indeed, such a story happens daily throughout the world. There are often three seemingly identical cars, which all seem to have the same exact issue, and yet, each one requires a different solution. How can this be??

As complicated as this riddle may seem to someone who is unfamiliar with how cars work, for people who have “seen under the hood” there is no confusion at all. 

They can easily surmise that we are dealing with different types of vehicles. On the outside they may all look identical, but in reality they are not. You see, they don’t all run on the same fuel source. 

The first car is a gas engine, and when the battery is dead it only requires jumper cables; whereas the second and third cars are electric, and therefore require a complete recharging of their batteries. 

Why don’t they require the same charging time?

It is possible that they have different size batteries, but it is more likely that the time difference is due to differences in the charging stations. 

At a quick charge station the car would only take about half an hour to completely charge, whereas when charging at home, it typically takes closer to eight hours.

We often look around at the world and see similar looking people facing identical looking problems, and assume that we are all the same.

We think that we understand others and their predicaments. We claim to know who people are, what they’re going through, and how they should handle situations.

However, Kabbalah teaches us that there are entire worlds “under the hood”. 

There are different souls which come from different roots — different energy sources.

Although on the outside we might look the same, and our predicaments might seem identical, we never know what a person is going through and how to assist them unless we are expert mechanics (True Tzaddikim). 

For anyone who wants to get some insight as to the possibilities of what’s going on “under the hood”, we have the stories and teachings of Rebbe Shimon bar Yochai in the Zohar. He began to openly unravel the complex spiritual mechanics for everyone to learn, and the great Tzaddikim have been further explaining and elaborating his teachings ever since.

At this point, you might be wondering why I mentioned the second scenario, in which one person is told to pull off at the next gas station and the other is told not to bother. 

Stop for a second, and see if you can think of the answer. 

I may have written that we never know what a person is going through and how to assist them, but surely at this point, you have enough information to know what the second person needs. 

The person driving the first car is told to pull off at the gas station coming up because his car runs on gasoline. 

So where would you tell the second person to go?

Perhaps to the closest charging station??

Well, if that’s what you told him, thanks to you he’s now stranded in the middle of nowhere. 

Like I said, we never know what a person is going through and how to assist them. 

He isn’t driving an electric car.

He’s driving a diesel engine. 

Shabbat Shalom!!!