Your Strength Was Given to You on Purpose

My dear friends, let us speak tonight about the bull. Not the bulls that roam in the field, but the quiet, stubborn, powerful bull that lives inside each and every one of us. Hashem in His infinite wisdom made Shor, the Bull, the mazal of Iyar, and when the Ribbono Shel Olam places a symbol at the head of a month, we know there is a holy secret waiting there for us to discover.

The Shor is pure koach, raw strength, the kind of energy that can tear down a fence or plow an entire field depending on who is holding the reins. In our seforim the bull is a symbol of the nefesh habahamis, the animal soul, which carries inside of it the drives of stubbornness, impulsiveness, and that insistent voice that says "me first, me loudest, me right now." Please hear me clearly, chevra, this energy is not a curse, chas v'shalom, nothing Hashem created is anything less than good. It is simply a powerful engine that has been placed in our care, waiting for us to learn how to steer it.

The Navi Yeshayahu says something breathtaking in the opening of his sefer, "Yada shor konehu," the bull knows its master. Think about what that is teaching us. A bull with no master will trample everything in its path, but a bull that knows to whom it belongs becomes the most productive creature in the field. Your strong will, your passion, your stubborn streak, all of it is waiting to be claimed by its true Master, by the Ribbono Shel Olam Himself, and the whole avodah of Iyar is to quietly place those reins into His hands.

Spiritually the Bull represents the stage of individuation, the wild and untamed years of childhood and adolescence when a neshama begins to assert "I am me, I will decide, I will be heard." This is a holy stage, and Hashem built it into every one of His children for a reason. The danger is only when that self-assurance is left unchecked, when it hardens into arrogance or sharpens into aggression, when the bull forgets it has a master and starts trampling the people it was meant to love.

This is exactly where the talmidim of Rebbi Akiva fell short, and the Gemara records their story so that we in our generation would learn from it with trembling hearts. They were not wicked, chalilah, they were giants of Torah who loved each other deeply. The sources tell us they were simply too aggressive with their own convictions, too bull-headed about their own chiddushim, and in that insistence they failed to give Kavod, real weight, to the nekudah of the person sitting across from them. Iyar arrives every year to heal exactly this tendency, and the first step is to see the bull inside ourselves honestly and without shame.

The bull sits on what the mekubalim call the left side, the side of Gevurah, which is the attribute of strength and restriction and outward expression. Gevurah is beautiful when it is balanced, because without it a person has no spine, no ability to stand for anything, no power to say no when no needs to be said. But Gevurah untempered becomes the insistent need to impose, to push our perspective onto others whether they are ready to receive it or not. The holy work of Iyar is to take this same Gevurah and turn its strength inward, using our stubbornness not to conquer others but to conquer our own unconscious patterns.

So how does a Yid actually yoke this bull for good? The first move is to pivot from insistent expression to insistent respect. Take that same stubborn energy that wants to be heard and redirect it toward really hearing someone else, be bull-headed about giving weight to another person's words, be immovable in your commitment to honor every detail of their perspective. The same fire that used to demand attention can become the fire that pays attention, and Hashem is delighted when we make that switch.

The second move is to yoke the bull to Ahavas Chinam, selfless and unconditional love. Assertiveness is a neutral tool, and when you feel that bullish impulse rising inside you, channel it into proactive kindness instead of reactive emotion. Use your stubbornness to stay committed to a difficult act of chesed, to persist in helping a person who may even be resistant to receiving your help, to refuse to give up on someone that the world has written off.

The third move is what I want to call linear kindness, because the sense of Iyar is Hirhur, inner hearing, which is a slow and steady thing, one unit at a time. Nisan was the month of sudden bursts of light, but Iyar asks us for endurance, and a bull has endurance in abundance. Use that bull-headedness to never miss a day of showing up, count the Omer with consistency, check in on the same person every week even when it feels small, build a strong bond through steady persistence rather than through grand gestures that flare up and fade.

My dear friend, the bull inside you is not your enemy. The Ribbono Shel Olam gave it to you on purpose, because He knew you would need that engine to carry you all the way home to Him. Iyar is the month Hashem hands us the reins and gently says, "Now let Me show you what your strength is really for." May we all be zoche to yoke our bulls to holiness, to turn our stubbornness into loyalty and our fire into warmth, and may the chodesh bring each of you closer to the Master Who knows your name, amen.