Much to learn

There is much that philosophy could learn from the Bible. To the philosopher the idea of the good is the most exulted idea. But to the Bible the idea of the good is penultimate; it cannot exist without the holy. The good is the base, the holy is the summit. Things created in six days He considered good, the seventh day He made holy.

To Jewish piety the ultimate human dichotomy is not that of mind and matter but that of sacred and profane. We have known profanity too long and have become accustomed to think that the soul is an automation. The law of the Sabbath tries to direct the body and the mind to the dimension of the holy. It tries to teach us that man stands not only in a relation to nature but in a relation also to the creator of nature.

What is the Sabbath? Spirit in the form of time. With our bodies we belong to space; our spirit, our souls, soar to eternity, aspire to the holy. The Sabbath is an ascent to the summit. It gives us the opportunity to sanctify time, to raise the good to the level of the holy, to behold the holy by abstaining from profanity.

Abraham J. Heschel, The Sabbath, p.97

holy seperate

In Judaism kadosh, holy, means separation. To sanctify is to separate. Why? Because when we separate, we create order. We defeat chaos. We give everything and everyone their space. I am I and not you. You are you and not I. Once we respect our difference and distance, then we can join without doing damage to one another...The most beautiful symbol of the problem and its resolution is the ceremony of havdalah at the end of Shabbat and especially the havdalah candle. The wicks are separate but the flame they make is joined. So it is between husband and wife. So it is between parent and child. And so it is, or should be, between brothers.

Rabbi J. Sacks

A fly also lives

I was reading The Chosen on Shabbat afternoon and came across this passage which has always resonated with me, so I plucked it out of the text to share here.

“Reuven, listen to me, do you know what the Rabbis tell us God said to Moses when he was about to die? God said: “You have toiled and labored, and now you are worthy of rest. Human beings do not live forever... We live less the then time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more then the blink of an eye…I learned along time ago, that the blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. The span of life is nothing, but the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant…a man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill ones life with meaning, a life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. Merely to live, to exist – what sense is there in that? A fly also lives.”

I also like these two quotations: from Rabbi N. Weinberg: “When you know what you're willing to die for, then you know what to live for.” and from Martin Luther King Jr. “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.”

Parsha Va’etchanan

This week’s Parsha contains perhaps the most famous and important idea in all of Torah. The Shema has many important ideas in it, but none more important than the imperative to teach our children the ways of our people. In this sentence we learns that although a person might think that the mitzvah of learning Torah takes precedence over that of teaching others, the opposite is in fact true. We learn from the emphasis on teaching children the proper approach we should have when we begin to learn Torah.

When Jews do mitzvah’s we create a change in the physical world, we elevate physical objects and seemingly mundane tasks and make them holy buy using those objects in the performance of mitzvoth and in our service to gd. The practical performance of the mitzvah is therefore more important than the intentions of the person doing the deed. The action itself brings spiritual illumination into the world.

In contrast to this Torah learning’s purpose is to refine and elevate the individual. When a person engages in the act of studying Torah their intellect becomes united with the gdly wisdom contained within and that wisdom affects the individual. Aiding and helping us to be more gdly people whose thoughts and actions are holy. Therefore learning Torah is in essence a process of humbling oneself and nullifying oneself with the goal of approaching gd with an open heart and mind.

Before we learn Torah we must subjugate our own ego and ask ourselves what does the Torah want from me? Our Sages say that without this prerequisite, Torah learning can be like a poisonous drug. Without asking this question we can actually damage ourselves.

I’d like to thank, Chabad.org and the Lubavitcher Rebbe zt”l for this insight, Shabbat Shalom.