What the Rav said:
A person needs to think only on the good. Thank G-d, I got up this morning, I’m alive, I’m breathing.
This way, a person can reach all the levels of holiness.
The opposite of holiness is when a person just thinks of the bad all the time.
I heard once from Rav Velvel Cheshin, a very strong thing. He said that the mekubalim say that a place where a lot of crows gather is a place of tumah (impurity) and, the opposite is true, in a place where a lot of doves gather there is holiness. There, the Shechinah dwells.
The nation of Israel is compared to a dove.
That’s why a crow ‘crows’ and calls out ‘rak rah, rak rah’ all the time [rak rah in Hebrew means ‘only bad’].
It’s possible to say that this is an allusion to those people who are the opposite of holiness, who only see bad in themselves and in the world all the time.
They’re not happy with another person’s good fortune, and only see bad in others, G-d forbid.
My thoughts:
A person creates his own reality.
He sees good, then it is good.
He sees bad, then, well, it is bad.
But Hashem is only good. So, when a person sees ‘bad’ he’s not seeing Hashem. In fact, he’s seeing falsehood. Because, in truth, there is no bad.
Like the famous parable of someone who appears to be being tied down, and being knifed by another person, when in fact he’s a patient on an operating table and the doctor is saving his life. Or, the other famous parable of entering a movie half-way, and not staying to see how it all turns out for the good.
We don’t have the whole picture.
We have no place to decide that something is ‘bad’. Rather, our job is to trust in our emunah and our belief in Hashem’s goodness, and to think only that whatever it is – it is surely good.