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Short Summary
Main recommendation: Practice divine-style tolerance and patience toward people who misuse your goodness, mirroring God's attribute of "Mi El Kamocha" (who is a God like You), rather than cutting them off at the first sign of wrongdoing. The video, a class on the Ramak's Tomer Devorah, explains that God keeps sustaining people even while they sin against Him, because He ultimately wants a relationship and for the person to return on their own.
Key Points
- The first of the thirteen attributes of compassion in the Tomer Devorah is "Mi El Kamocha," from Micah 7:18, and it describes God as an "insulted King" who tolerates offense.
- The Ramak argues that the very energy a person uses to sin is Divine energy sustained moment to moment, which makes sinning a paradox of using God's power to deny God.
- The speaker illustrates divine restraint with the story of Yarav'am, whose hand was paralyzed when he tried to seize a prophet who warned him, and who was healed only after he asked the prophet to pray for him.
- God's restraint is described as a form of tolerance called savlanut, or patience, which the Ramak says has no words adequately describing it.
- Human emulation means not withholding goodness from a recipient who misuses it, since the aim is the person's eventual self-discovery and return.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: The speaker gives no step-by-step method, checklist, or measurable practice. The actionable guidance is to respond to someone who misuses your goodness with patience and continued care rather than immediately stopping, with the goal of their self-realization.
- The speaker distinguishes this from enabling: if continuing to give is actually harming the person, the giver should recognize that and not simply keep giving, and the person must discern when help is helping.
- The class draws on Micah 7:18, a Kabbalistic work referred to as Pirkei, and the Yarav'am narrative in Melachim (following the split of Shlomo's kingdom), with the Ramak cited as the author of the introduction.
- The Tomer Devorah is described as authored by a 16th-century Safed mystic and scholar, born 1522 and died 1570.
- The speaker notes the word "Kel" carries both meanings of giving life and of power to retrieve it, which he uses to explain why God's tolerance is not weakness.
Bottom Line
Divine tolerance here is not passive acceptance of wrongdoing but a deliberate, patient continuation of goodness aimed at a person's eventual return, and the speaker frames it as the first attribute to emulate in human relationships.
