⚠ מחשבות זרות · Raising strange thoughts

The early Hasidic teaching that an intrusive thought during prayer — lust, anger, pride — is not to be pushed away. It contains a fallen spark of the attribute it distorts: the flare of desire is a fallen love, the flare of anger a fallen severity. You are to trace it to its root and lift it.

⭐⭐⭐ The boldest thing the movement ever taught, and the movement itself got frightened of it. It follows exactly from avodah be-gashmiut — if the sparks are in everything then they are in that too — and it hands a person a technique for treating their worst material as raw material. ⚠⚠ And it was quietly withdrawn: later Hasidism, Chabad included, restricts it to the exceptional few or drops it, on the grounds that a person who cannot tell lifting from indulging will not be saved by the distinction. The retreat is as informative as the teaching.