JEWISH SPIRITUALITY – Rabbi Michael Skobac – Jews for Judaism

I wanted to begin by sharing with you a midrash. A midrash is a rabbinic teaching, homiletic, philosophical, spiritual teaching, usually found either in a collection of such teachings called a midrash or even sometimes in the Talmud. And so in this midrash, we're told that God reveals himself to heathen prophets, to the non-Jewish prophets. God reveals himself at night when people separate from each other. And the midrash gives several examples. In Genesis chapter 20, verse 3, it says that God came to Avimelech in a dream at night. Or another example the midrash cites is in the book of Bamidbar Numbers, chapter 22, verse 20, where it says that God came to Bilaam at night. So the midrash states that this is a principle that God reveals himself to the heathen prophets in the evening, but he reveals himself to his Jewish prophets in the daytime. And the source that's cited is Genesis chapter 18, verse 1, where it says God appeared to Abraham in the plains of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance of his tent in the hottest part of the day, not just in the daytime, but in the middle of the day. Now the question you always have to ask when you study a midrash is what is the point? What is the lesson? And midrashim are generally not there to teach us history or teach us what happened. It's never really there for that purpose. It's always there to teach a lesson. There are many, many interpretations of this midrash. I want to share one that I saw from a great European sage who came and taught the last years of his life in Chicago in the middle of the 20th century, Rabbi Mordechai Rogow. And he said that basically most religions, he asserts, from the beginning of recorded history felt that there was an unbridgeable gap between the physical and the spiritual realms. They felt that these were two realms that were totally antithetical, mutually exclusive, and they believed that in order for a person to reach lofty spiritual levels, we have to detach ourselves from the mundane physical world. And Rabbi Rogow says that the approach of the Torah is the exact opposite. The Torah says that we are able to reach the highest spiritual levels through our involvement and engagement with the physical world, not by escaping from it. The Kutzker Rebbe, the famous Hasidic master, would quote Exodus chapter 22, verse 30, where the Torah says, Anshei kodesh ti yuli, people of holiness, you shall be to me. And God didn't want, the Kutzker says, us to be angels, to be people that were not human beings. God wanted us to serve him as human beings, as our physical, earthly human beings that we are, and that we should strive for holiness as physical human beings. So Rabbi Rogow understands this midrash to be saying the following, that the path of escape, the path of basically capitulating to the tension between the body and the soul, the path that says that we're not able to really engage in the physical to become spiritual. We have to really remove ourselves from the physical realm. So that path is most comfortable at night. Why at night? Because at night, we are transitioning from our daytime activities. We're inactive at night, unless you can't sleep, but we're basically passive. We're sleeping at night. We're not involved with other people. We're not involved with physical activities, such as eating or working. The Talmud actually says that sleep is like a 60th of death, because you're basically not active. You're in a different realm, and the rabbis teach that when you sleep, your soul leaves the body, and it travels into the spiritual realms, and that's what dreams are all about. But that's the path of the philosophy, which says the only way to be spiritual is to disengage from the physical and disengage from the world. And you've got to do it in a more spiritual realm. And that's why the Midrash says that God reveals himself to these prophets, the heathen prophets, at the nighttime, because for them, the encounter with God, for these people, the encounter with God is only seen as possible when you're not involved with the day-to-day physical world. But the spiritual path of Judaism is associated with the daytime, and that's why the Midrash says that God speaks to his prophets, the Jewish prophets, in the daytime, when we're active and we're engaged in the very physical activities of this world, and it's precisely in this realm of the physical that we're able to achieve spiritual heights. We don't limit spirituality to praying and to meditating. That's not the only place where the spiritual activity takes place. People often think that. Spirituality is limited to the synagogue, but we're taught in Pirkei Avot, Ethics of All of our activities should be for the sake of heaven. Everything that we do, not just the stereotypical spiritual things like prayer and studying the Torah and meditating, but every single action of our lives can be for the sake of a higher purpose. Rabbi Akiva Tatz once conducted an ongoing correspondence with a fellow named David Gottlieb, who's actually a friend of mine, and they exchanged emails for a number of years. David was a Jewish person involved with Buddhism, with Buddhist practice, and after a number of years, they published these exchanges, this series of emails, in the wonderful book that's called Letters to a Buddhist Jew. I highly recommend it. And Rabbi Tatz, in this book, suggests that Abraham's great contribution to the world was not what most people think his great contribution was. Most people say that Abraham was the father of monotheism. Rabbi Tatz says that's not true, because even before Abraham, there were people who knew God, who believed in God, who worshipped God. So that was not an innovation of Abraham. Rabbi Tatz says that his innovation was his unique vision that it's possible for our bodies to be vehicles for spirituality and holiness. That was the thing that Abraham basically brought to the world. Because prior to Abraham, again, there was this assumption that if you want to really get close to God, you've got to escape the physical world. Other paths see a conflict between the body and the soul, and therefore, other spiritual paths lean towards asceticism. They lean towards a path where their holiest exponents, the holiest people in these other spiritual paths, live lives of celibacy, take vows of poverty, live in isolation, in meditation, and the body is renounced for a life of the soul. It's interesting that Abraham, in Hebrew, Avraham, if you add up the numerical value of the letters, so Avraham is equal to 248, because we say in Jewish tradition that the human body has 248 limbs and sinews, meaning that what makes up the totality of our physical essence is associated with 248, which is the number of Abraham's name. It's interesting that the Hebrew word for holiness, kedushah, has application in a number of things that we do as Jews. For example, every Sabbath and every holiday, and even at weddings, we begin with a glass of wine, a cup of wine, and when we say the blessings over wine, it's called kedush. This is something that we see as holy, taking a cup of wine and using it as a vehicle for holiness. But the truth is that if you wanted to find the one thing possibly on the planet that's most prone to being debased when it's used mainly as a physical indulgence, it's alcohol. So here we take something that is very, very prone to being essentially used purely for physical purposes, and we raise it up to use in our holiest ceremonies, for the Sabbath, for the holidays, for a wedding. We call a wedding in Hebrew kedushin. The wedding itself is called kedushin, again, from the word kedushah, kadosh, holiness. And again, if you wanted to think of what arena of human activity is often possibly an arena for the most animalistic of human activities, it's the sexual realm. It's one of the areas in which human beings can become the most easily debased. And yet in Judaism, we refer to this area of life as holiness. So that's the vision of Abraham. Abraham says 248, our entire body, we're able to put into the service of holiness. It's never separated from anything in terms of who we are. All of the body, Abraham taught, was potentially a vehicle for the highest spiritual experiences. It's interesting that Abraham was the father of the brit, the covenant. And we know that the brit, in Hebrew, brit adds up to the number 612. And the brit, the brit milah, the circumcision, is associated with the male generative organ, the organ of sexuality. It's significant that the circumcision symbolizes the essence of the path of Abraham, the path of dedicating all of our physical resources to the service of God. The covenant, really, that Abraham generated was the covenant of cooperation between the body and the soul, between the physical and the spiritual. Now this direction that I've spoken about is not easy to grasp. This idea that we can marry the physical and the spiritual. And we see that even in the history of Judaism, there were some who balked at the idea of this integration. We know, for example, that after the exodus from Egypt, our people ended up not going directly to the land of Israel after the first year. It should have taken them a number of weeks or months to get to the land of Israel, but we know that's not what happened. They didn't pass Go, they didn't collect $200, they ended up having to wander in the desert for 40 years. Most people assume, incorrectly, that the reason that they were punished with having to wander for 40 years was because of the sin of the golden calf. That's not true. We know that the actual cause of having to wander for 40 years in the desert was the incident of the spies. The Jewish people, before they came in to conquer the land of Israel, requested that they be able to send in spies on a reconnaissance mission, which makes sense. If you're going to wage a war and try to conquer a land, you want to spy out the land and see where are they strong, where are they weak, what are their people like. And so 12 spies were appointed, actually very great men, and when they returned from their mission, 10 of these 12 spies gave a very discouraging report, essentially saying it would be nearly impossible to conquer the land. It would be nearly impossible to conquer the land, they said. And the people despaired and they cried. And God decreed that they weren't worthy of going into the land of Israel, so they would wander the desert for 40 years as a boot camp. The desert would be a spiritual boot camp to learn the proper lessons they would need to be able to then later enter the land of Israel. But the Hasidic masters, when they looked at this story, they understood that the reluctance to go into the land was that they felt it would be a spiritual downgrade. The people in the desert that had just come out of Egypt, they were living in a spiritual cocoon in the desert. They lived a totally supernatural experience. They didn't have to go shopping for food, they didn't have to go working for food. Their food was provided directly by God every day, essentially at their doorsteps. They had this miraculous manna from heaven. There was a well called the Bear Miriam, the Well of Miriam that provided their water. It followed them around. The clouds of glory protected them from the sun and from the heat. We're told that it even was an air conditioning system that was provided for the Jewish people. Their clothing never wore out, the Midrash teaches us. And their experience of eating was so sublime and spiritual, they never had to use a restroom. There was no waste product from the food they ate. Life was so idyllic when they were in the desert that they can devote all of their time to studying, to praying, to meditating. They just received the Torah. They wanted to occupy themselves with the Torah. They wanted a purely spiritual existence. And they despaired of having now to conquer the land, not simply waging war against people, but conquering the physicality. They would have to go in and now live a physical life. They would have to farm and plow and harvest. And this is what upset them. They believed that going to the land of Israel and having to live a normal, physical, mundane existence would sabotage their spiritual lives. They didn't appreciate the fact that light only becomes visible when it strikes an object. Light is very spiritual. Light is very ethereal. But you can only see light when it comes in contact with something physical. And they didn't realize that true spirituality and true spiritual expression requires its place in the physical realm. This was actually the debate between the angels and Moses when God was going to give the Torah. The angels were complaining and saying, God, you're gonna give the Torah to these people? They're so fallible. They're so small. They're so physical. The Torah is much grander than they are. The Torah is your very creation, God. You're gonna give it to simple human beings? Who are they to have your Torah? And Moses counter-argued and said to the angels, do you people work during the week that you rest on the Shabbat? Do you have parents that you need to honor your parents? Do you get jealous of other people that you have to be told, don't covet and don't envy? And Moses said, basically, the Torah is not something which belongs up in heaven. The Torah belongs down here on earth. There was a famous story about the Shpola Zeida. It was the grandfather from Shpola. And one of his Hasidim had to make his living working in a tavern. I had a grandmother that worked in a tavern in Europe. And he came to the Rebbe for guidance. He didn't feel this was really a great place to be spending his time. He said to the Rebbe, every day I have to see drunk people in low lives behaving like animals and talking about the most disgusting things using the most horrible language. I'm really worried that this will affect my mindset and will lower me to be more like them. What can I do? And the Shpola Zeida answered him, it sounds to me like you think that if you had enough money to live on without having to work and you had a beautiful clothing, plenty to eat and a beautiful clean house of study full of books to learn, then you could really serve God properly. That's what you probably think. But that you really can't be holy, a servant of God in the environment you happen to be in right now. Well, let me tell you the Shpola Zeida said to him, Hashem already has tens upon tens of thousands of angels serving him up in heaven. They're there already. If he needed one more of those, you would have been created an angel. But God put you in that place of impurity right now so that you would long to be close to God and look forward the entire day to those few holy words you could utter before your creator in the evening. That longing and that desire and purity and holiness of the mind that you can have in the midst of that tavern of yours is more precious to God than all of the service of all those angels up in heaven. Our Talmud, our vast body of rabbinic literature, is referred to as Shas. Shas is an acronym for Shisha Siddarim, the six orders. And the entire contents, the basic contents of the Oral Torah are contained in the many tractates that are included in these six general categories, these six general orders. One of these orders deals with the laws of holidays. One deals with civil law. One deals with the temple service. But the first of these six orders is called the Seder of Zerahim, seeds. And it deals with the agricultural laws that are applicable primarily in the land of Israel. There are many tractates in this order. But the first of the tractates, the first of the books is called the Brachot, blessings. And it deals primarily with prayers and blessings. The very, very first teaching in this tractate, which is the very first statement in the entire Talmud, deals with the topic of reciting the Shema, the Jewish declaration of faith. Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad from Deuteronomy chapter six. Here, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. And we know that we're required to say this declaration twice every day. The Bible says you say it when you're going to bed and when you're rising up in the morning. You say it in the evening, you say it in the morning. So the very first question, the very first question the Talmud asks is, what is the time that the obligation to say the Shema in the evening begins? Meaning, what is the proper time in the evening for saying the Shema? That's the first question the Talmud wants to know. When does the obligation begin in the evening? And the answer the Talmud gives is a bit circuitous. The Talmud says, do you want to know when you begin saying the Shema in the evening? From the very same time that priests who might have been ritually impure, there are times when people become ritually impure, when a priest becomes ritually impure, they cannot eat the special food that's donated to priests. There was a tithing system in ancient Israel where people would contribute a certain portion of their crops to the priest, it was called truma. And it was very holy, it was special food. And you were not able to eat it if you were a priest if you had come in contact with something that was ritually impure, like a dead animal, for example. When a priest became ritually impure, there was a process of purification which required they wait a requisite number of days depending upon what their source of impurity was. At the end of that period of time, they would immerse themselves in a mikvah, in a body of water. And then we're told that after they went to the mikvah, as soon as the evening began, they could then begin eating from their truma. So the Talmud asks the question, from what time can you say the Shema in the evening? The answer is, from the same time the priests come in to eat their truma after they've had to purify themselves. Mazal tov, but when can they do that? So the answer is, they can do that at nightfall. And when is nightfall? So it's not defined by sunset, it's defined by the stars coming out. So the Talmud asks the very simple question. So why didn't you just say that? Meaning, if the answer to the question of when you could say the Shema in the evening is from the time the stars come out, that just should have been the simple answer. Why go into this whole circuitous discussion of you could say the Shema from the same time the priests come in to eat their truma? So this was a question that was once asked to the Gera Rebbe, the first Gera Rebbe, Rav Yitzhak Meir, by one of his students. What's going on here? He said to the Rebbe, and isn't it incredible, isn't it strange that the Talmud links something so spiritual, the requirement to declare our faith in God, that what becomes the barometer for when you can say that? Something so physical, sitting down to eat a meal. And the student was perplexed. Why does the Talmud link the most spiritual activities to the most physical thing, sitting down to eating a meal? And the Rebbe responded by saying, indeed, that's the case. That our entire spiritual lives depend upon how we conduct ourselves in the material, physical realm. And he said, if you wanna take someone's spiritual temperature, if you wanna understand how someone is doing spiritually, you have to observe how they're living in the physical, mundane world. Now this idea that I've been sharing with you was illustrated in a very profound teaching of Rabbi Yisrael of Rijon, it's called the Rijon Rebbe. He was a great Hasidic master who died in the year 1850. There's a verse in the book of Psalms, chapter 96, verse 11, which begins, yesmechu ha'shamayim, let the heavens rejoice, v'sagel ha'aretz, and let the earth exult. So here you have a verse, it's not the whole verse, it's the first four words of the verse. It says, let the heavens be happy and let the earth be joyous. The heavens have to rejoice and be happy and the earth has to exult and be joyous. Now one of the things, if you're looking carefully at this verse, that you'll notice is that the first letter of each of these words spells out the Tetragrammaton, the special holy name of God that we don't pronounce. The four letters, Yud, He, and Vov, and He. The Kabbalists explained that these two, that this name really is composed of two names. They explain that the first two words, yesmechu ha'shamayim, is the name of God which has the letters Yud and He. And they say that this refers to the world of concealment and it's the world of spirituality. Because here the letter Yud, the first letter, is the smallest and least substantive letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It's the letter which is almost invisible. So this name of God alludes to the world of concealment which is not very overt, it's more covert, it's more concealed. And then you have another name of God which is formed by the last two letters, the Vov and the He. And this is referred to as the revealed physical world because here the Vov is basically where the Yud gets extended down. You'll see that the Yud is a dot and the Vov is a straight vertical line. And so what happens in the revealed physical world is that that core of spirituality which is really concealed from us, it's really a spiritual realm beyond this world, it congeals and it descends into this world where it becomes more manifest and more physical and more revealed. So basically if you wanna think of this four letter name of God that we don't pronounce, it was only pronounced in the holy temple on Yom Kippur by the high priest, we don't normally pronounce it, we usually say Hashem, the name. But think of it as really composed of two names of God, one which alludes to the spiritual realm and one alludes to the physical realm. What Yisrael of Rishon said is that our lives are supposed to be dedicated to two things. Number one, working to elevate the physical realm towards spiritual goals. Part of our life, we're involved with physical things. And the goal is to take these physical things and make them more spiritual. So interesting, by the way, that the Bible teaches that when we eat food, we eat a meal and we're satisfied, we have to thank God. The Torah says, v'achalta, you shall eat, v'savata, you'll become satiated, u'beirachta, and you'll bless God for the food that you ate. But one of the Hasidic masters said, read it differently. Don't read it that you'll eat and you'll be satisfied from the food and then you'll bless God. He said, read it like this, v'achalta, you will eat, and then v'savata u'beirachta, you will be satiated from your blessings. Meaning what will really satisfy you is not the food so much, it's your ability to use the eating of the food to connect with God. So one thing that we try to do is take this physical world and raise it up to a spiritual level. They tell a wonderful story that the Sfasemes, the second Gerarebi, he was a child. And one day, for some reason, his father had to yell at him. And he began crying, he was very, very upset. And 15 minutes later, his father sees he's in a corner and he's praying the afternoon prayer service. So his father says to him, what are you doing? We're not gonna be praying until another hour from now. He says, Tati, he says, you know, you got me so upset when you yelled at me and I found myself so torn and so broken inside and so emotional, this little boy said I wanted to take all those strong feelings and all those strong emotions and I wanted to use them when I prayed to God. It's an example of a little genius who was able to take something in this mundane world and raise it up to a higher level. So one thing that we're engaged in doing is taking the physical and elevating it. But another thing that we're doing according to our masters, our teachers, is we wanna take spiritual things, things that could be very easily left in a spiritual realm and we want to implant them, embed them in our physical world. It goes in both directions. For example, we have faith in God, we have belief, emunah, but you don't wanna leave emunah just in your head. You don't wanna leave it as something that's inchoate. You wanna be able to take that faith, which is very spiritual, and you wanna be able to live your life in the physical world as an expression of that faith, not to leave things just spiritual. You wanna take the spiritual and you want to be able to manifest them in the physical. What Rabbi Yisrael Rijen points out is something quite amazing. He said, if you look at these two different realms, again, the first realm on the right-hand side is the realm of spirituality that's concealed. The left-hand side is the physical realm. Look at the words that we use in Hebrew for physical things, like achila, eating, shetia, drinking, sheina, sleeping, bia, sexual activity, lina, living. All of these words that describe physical activities contain the letters yud and he. Now, yud and he, we saw, were the letters of spirituality. Yud and he were the letters of the spiritual realm, and yet all of our physical activities in this world are composed of those two letters, the yud and the he letters. But if you look at all the words that we use for spiritual things, like Torah, avodah, mitzvah, emunah, these words all have the vav and the he. The vav and the he, we saw, were the letters of the physical realm. So Rabbi Yisrael Rijen says, we see from this verse of yismechu ha'shamayim ve'sagal ha'aretz, that we have both of these very, very important activities in our life that have to take place. We need to take the spiritual and to implant it in the physical. We need to take the physical and make it more spiritual. And we see it very beautifully in these Hebrew words. Now, Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, we discussed him in the past, the Ramchal, great 17th century mystic, 18th century, I'm sorry. He lived in the 1700s. He writes that our lives are a struggle. Our lives are characterized by tremendous struggle. And we're pulled in opposite directions by the physical and the spiritual sides of who we are. That's the nature of who we are. We're both a body and a soul. And these are in conflict. They're not necessarily getting along so easily together. But we know that in Torah, the Torah of path is that we're not here to escape or to deny the physical, but to elevate it. Our rabbis teach us that each of us is a horse and a rider. Those are the symbols that the rabbis use to describe the nature of the human being, a horse and a rider. The horse is our body. The rider is our soul. And in Judaism, our goal is not to kill the horse. We're not interested in killing the body, which many, many spiritual paths want to do. What we want to do is not kill the horse. We want to co-opt the horse. We want to engage it in our ultimate goals. The body has a tremendous advantage in this struggle between itself and the soul. When you think about it, our body speaks to us in the first person. I am, I hungry. I am so tired. I am thirsty, right? That's how our body speaks to us in the first person. It's immediate. It's powerful. We feel it very strongly. But think of the way your soul speaks to you, not in the first person. The soul speaks to you in the second person. You know, you should pray. You should go and study Torah. You should maybe work on taking control of your anger. You should maybe give stucco. I mean that when our soul is making demands upon us, it's never in the first person. We don't feel it so strongly. The horse is much stronger than the rider. The goal is to get the horse to work for you, to harness the energy of the horse to drive you towards spiritual pursuits, to get to the point where you don't feel, oh, I've got to pray, but to feel, oh, I get to pray. That's the kind of goal that we should be seeking. Now, we know that Judaism seeks to embed godliness into every nook and cranny of our daily lives. It says in the book of Proverbs 3.6, Bechol drochecha do'ehu. In every single one of your ways, you should know God. The Torah begins in the portion of Bechukotai. In Leviticus 26.3, the Torah says, if you will go or walk, if you will go or walk by my decrees, it says there in the Torah. And on this, the Midrash quotes David, King David from the book of Psalms, chapter 119, verse 59. David says, I calculated my ways. I calculated my ways. And I returned my legs to your testimonies. So the Midrash says that what David said was this. David said, master of the universe, each and every day, I would make plans, I would calculate. And I would say, I'm gonna go to such and such a place and such and such a residence. But even though I had all these plans, my legs would always bring me back to the synagogue and the halls of study. Now, the simplest explanation of this Midrash, the simplest explanation is, that even though David may have had other ideas, he was gonna go shopping, he was gonna go sightseeing, he was gonna go to a movie, whatever his plans were, his legs would always take him to better places. But I think on a deeper level, the Midrash is saying something else. David is saying that I might plan my everyday activities, my mundane routines. I can think about all the things I'm gonna do during the day. But David is saying, but since my consciousness is to ultimately elevate all of these things to a higher purpose, David is saying then all the things I would be doing anyway become elevated as if I was going to a synagogue, as if I was going to a house of study. He's not saying that somehow he was gonna go shopping and somehow he was just taken against his will to a synagogue. I don't think that's what the Midrash is saying. I think the Midrash is saying that David would go through his daily activities. He would get up in the morning, he'd set his agenda, I have to do this today, I have to do that today, I make all my plans. And what he's saying is that whatever I did, it was as if I was going to a synagogue or house of study, meaning that everything he did became spiritual. Because when he went to business, and when anyone goes to business, they could be there not just to make money, but they could be there to make money to use for holy means and holy ends. They could be there to sanctify God's name in the workplace. It's possible to take going to work and making it a holy activity. The Katsgarebbe would always say and complain, why do people only speak about having Kavanah, which is focused awareness or mindfulness? Why do people speak about this only in the context of prayer? People would always say, are you praying with Kavanah? And the Katsgarebbe said, no, everything we do in life should be with Kavanah. In the book of Leviticus chapter six, verses three to four, it describes a service in the temple that's unusual. It's called the Trumas Hadeshen, the Trumas Hadeshen. There were some sacrifices that remained overnight burning on the altar. The Bible says as follows, the priest shall then put on his linen vestments. He shall remove the ashes of the burnt offerings consumed by the fire that are on the altar and place them near the altar. Then he shall take off his vestments and put on other garments. And he shall then take the ashes to a ritually pure place outside the camp. Meaning that these ashes were taken to a special place. They weren't just discarded. The word Trumas Hadeshen means literally the raising up of the ashes. Rav Menachem Mendel of Riminov was a great Hasidic leader in Poland. He died in the year 1815. He said that what you see from this is that even seemingly mundane deeds, even taking out the garbage, could be done with reverence and raised up to become a spiritual service. It could become a holy spiritual activity. Now, who was the greatest woman in the Torah? Probably could have a lot of debate on this. But I would say that one of the candidates could easily be seen as Miriam, the sister of Moses. She would definitely be a candidate for the greatest woman in the Torah. Think about it. Miriam's parents separated because they didn't want to bring children into a world where Pharaoh was threatening to kill every baby boy that would be born. And they said, why should we produce children if they're going to be killed anyway? And Miriam said, look, Pharaoh decreed only against the boys. You're definitely destroying the potential even having girls born. And Miriam was able as a child to convince her parents to remarry, to get back together and to have children again. And from that union, Moses was produced, the great leader of the Jewish people. And she watched out after him when he had to go floating down the Nile River to save him. His sister watched very carefully. Miriam later then led all the women at the Red Sea in singing the great song of salvation. There's a beautiful, beautiful song where the Jewish people sang to thank God for the salvation at the sea. We're told that the women sang separately and Miriam led them. We're told that in the desert, there was a well that we had just because of her merit. However, Tzedek HaKohen of Lublin says, if you want to understand the essence of anything, go to the first place it's mentioned in the Torah. So where is the first place that Miriam appears in the Torah? According to our sages, she was the midwife named Pua, who delivered the Jewish babies under the nose of Pharaoh. And saved all these Jewish babies. Why was she named Pua? So we're told her name reflected how she would calm the little babies by singing lullabies to them, pooing them and cooing them. And so her name was Pua. And the question is, this is her essence. I mean, in the first place she appears, that's what we find out about her. Not that she did great, great, great things, but that she sung lullabies to little babies. So Rav Yerucham Levavitz, who was the spiritual mentor of the Mir Yeshiva at the beginning of the 20th century, he teaches that sometimes even people who are ordinary can rise to great heights in extraordinary situations, especially when the spotlight is focused on them. Even simple, ordinary people can actually rise to the occasion in extraordinary situations. But he says that great people, great people that are truly great, do everything with greatness. They put every ounce of themselves into every single thing they do. Miriam's lullaby that she sang to these children was sung with the same passion and enthusiasm with which she led the women at the Red Sea after they crossed the sea. This was true greatness in the little things that she did. Genesis chapter 28, we learn that Jacob, in his flight from his brother Asav, after years of wandering, finally goes to sleep. We're told he has a dream of an incredible ladder with angels ascending and descending. He wakes up in the morning after having this incredible prophetic experience, and Jacob says, behold, God was in this place and I did not know. Now, one unusual explanation of this statement, there are many explanations, there's a whole book, by the way, written on this one sentence. But one unusual explanation of this enigmatic statement was that for 14 years prior to this experience, according to the Midrash, Jacob did not sleep. He was studying Torah at the yeshiva of Shem and Eber, and he felt that sleep would be a waste of time. He felt that he needed to spend all his time studying, sleep would be a waste of time, so he never slept. And this was the first time in 14 years he had slept. He wakes up in the morning and he says, behold, God was in this place, meaning he recognizes, he sees, you know what? There's a potential to have a godly experience, even sleeping. And he said, I didn't know. I never realized, he said, that sleep can have a potentially spiritual side to it. We can do that if when we go to sleep, we have the consciousness and the awareness that I'm going to sleep for the purpose of becoming stronger and to be able the next day to have the strength and the clarity of mind to serve God properly. Then the sleep itself becomes a spiritual experience. Yitzchak Buxbaum, who's a contemporary Magid, a Jewish storyteller, teaches a very powerful idea about how we're able to raise up everyday activities to a very high spiritual level. He says, look at the creation story of man. How is the human being created? So he says, what did God do? God takes earth and he takes this earth and he shapes it into a human being, the form of a human being. And then God takes that form and he breathes the breath of life into this form, which is the soul, and you have a being that the Bible says is B'Tselem Elohim, in the image of God. Buxbaum says, think about this, that if you think about what this looks like, God taking earth and forming it into a human shape, and it's called B'Tselem Elohim, he says that there is a very similar thing that takes place when someone makes an idol. When someone makes a statue, what are they doing? They take earth, they take clay, they shape it into a form, and they worship this. And what is the statue called in Hebrew? B'Tselem. The same exact word that's used for the human being that we are B'Tselem in the image of God. That's what the Bible, the Torah calls an idol, a B'Tselem. And these are very parallel stories. God is making a little idol. And that's what we do. We make idols also, but we create idols. And he says that the take-home message here is very powerful. The Torah prohibits idolatry. It's seen as the ultimate spiritual transgression. And the message from God is the following. If you want to serve me, God is saying, if you want to serve me, don't serve what you make in my image. That's what we're doing, we're making an idol. We're making something that we are creating in the image of God. God says to us, no, when you want to serve me, don't serve what you make in my image, serve what I made in my image. God made something in his image, the human being. And God is saying here that if you really want to get close to me, serve other people. Put yourself out for other people. Help other people. Live a life of service to others. There was a famous rabbi who once said that you might have been put on this earth just for the purpose of doing a favor for someone. That might be your whole reason for being here. The Midrash teaches that Chanukh, Chanukh was the person that lived eight generations after Adam. Chanukh was a shoemaker, a cobbler, that was his profession. And the Midrash teaches that with each stitch that he made, he was able to achieve the highest mystical unifications. That somehow he was able to reach the very, very highest spiritual levels with each stitch that he made in these shoes. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter said, don't think that he was able to do this by praying to himself and meditating while he was making the shoes. You might think that. You might think, how did he reach these high levels? So he was stitching and he was praying at the same time. And Rabbi Yisrael Salanter said, actually that would not be even appropriate because when he's being paid to fix shoes, he's got to be fixing shoes and not doing two things at the same time. So that would not even have been proper to be using that time for prayer. So how did he reach the highest mystical levels in making shoes? He did it by putting everything into each stitch. His consciousness, his intention was that he wanted to make the very, very best shoes for his customers. He wanted to have the most comfortable shoes, the most durable shoes. He wanted every stitch to be of the highest quality. And the Midrash is basically saying that because his intentions were so pure and his intentions were to help others and to serve others, that itself became the highest way of reaching the highest spiritual realms. Because when you're working like that, you're becoming yourself very godly. You're caring, you're giving, you're generous. And by being like God, we become very close to God. The Talmud in Tractate Ta'anit, which the whole Tractate deals with fasting, fast days. So on page 22a, Talmud says that Elijah the prophet once told Rabbi Brocha that there were two fellows in the marketplace. And Elijah the prophet said that these two gentlemen in the marketplace, they are assured of a place in the world to come. Said if you want to see anyone in the marketplace here that you know is a ben olam haba, has a place in the world to come, it's these two fellows there. So Rabbi Brocha couldn't understand this because he looked at these two fellows, they didn't look very special, they didn't look very spiritual, they didn't look very holy. So he went over to them and he said, what do you guys do? So they said, you know, some of the merchants when they're here in the marketplace, they get very upset if they lose any money. So what do we do? We tell them some jokes to lighten their spirits. So by going beyond themselves and caring about others and seeking to give to others, they are reaching the highest spiritual levels. We could actually go through tonight, time permitting, every single activity that we engage in as people. We won't have time for that. One of the things that our rabbis teach, the mystics especially, is that one of the holiest activities potentially that we can engage in is the activity of eating. The Jewish mystics would look at eating as the ultimate spiritual experience. There's actually a fellow here from Toronto, Joel Hecker, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the mysticism of eating. There's a wonderful book that I recommend by Susie Schneider, lives in Israel. She runs a wonderful organization called The Still Small Voice. And she published a very small little booklet called Eating as Tikkun. Eating as a spiritual activity, basically. And she points out something very interesting. She says that in the Garden of Eden, according to Jewish mystical teachings, the sin of Adam and Eve was not eating the wrong fruit. It's not what they ate. It was how they ate. This is actually a teaching of Tzadik HaKoin of Lublin in his work, Preet Tzadik. And he writes that the real error, the real mistake in the Garden of Eden was that for Adam and Eve, eating was an end into itself. Meaning that it was eating with no real consciousness, that they were doing something that was potentially holy. They were eating just as an activity, just a routine thing that is done mindlessly. And when human beings eat like that, it's essentially equivalent to a cat or a dog eating. We're just meeting an urge. We're hungry. We want to satisfy the urge. And Tzadik says that really, the mistake in the Garden of Eden was emblematic of the major spiritual mistake that people always make, which is they separate their consciousness from the potential for every activity to be spiritual. And so they could have been eating with a proper consciousness and awareness that the eating could be a way of connecting to God. And they didn't do that. So the act of eating became degraded. I want to conclude tonight with one last area when we talk about our day-to-day lives. And this is a teaching of Maimonides in his Mission of Torah and the Laws of Yesodeh HaTorah, the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, chapter two. Maimonides wants to know what is the path that we can attain love of God? How can we achieve a love of God? And he suggests that it can be achieved by contemplating the wonders of the creation. He basically says that when we look at this world and we contemplate the incredible wisdom that went into the creation of the world, that appreciation of the wisdom and magnificence of this incredibly beautiful and complex world will lead us to love God. I want to recommend three wonderful books, quite amazing, that just focus on understanding how incredibly magnificent our world is. One is called Designer World, one is called Our Wonderous World, and one is called Our Amazing World. Three volumes, and they just look at the world of nature and how exquisite everything is and how brilliant it is. You know, in Hebrew, one of the expressions for God is tzur olamim. Now, sometimes it's translated as rock of ages, tzur olamim. But the word tzur in Hebrew is related to the word sayar, which means an artist. And the expression tzur olamim can also be translated the artist of the world, that we live in a world which is a masterpiece. It's delicious, it's gorgeous. So if Maimonides is saying that if we really look at the world through proper eyes, we can come to an incredible appreciation of the beautiful, magnificent artistry behind this world and fall in love with the artist. I want to conclude with a wonderful passage from an amazing book called Walking with Rabbi Miller. Rabbi Avigdor Miller was a famous American rabbi who passed away maybe a dozen years ago. And one of his areas of just brilliance was he was naturally tuned into the world that we're living in. He would carry in his pocket apple seeds and he would contemplate them and realize that he's holding in his hands a magnificent factory that from these little seeds is gonna grow a huge tree. And he would marvel in the beauties and the intricacies of every element of this world. He wrote quite a bit about this. So there was a fellow named Rabbi Mordechai Dolinsky who would go on walks with Rabbi Miller. Rabbi Miller's doctor said that it'd be good for his health to take walks. And so this rabbi, Rabbi Dolinsky, had the privilege and the pleasure of accompanying Rabbi Miller on these walks. And he wrote a book called Walking with Rabbi Miller and he shares a number of their discussions. So in one of the chapters, he shares the following. When Rabbi Miller was studying in the Slabotka Yeshiva in Europe, during the summer break, he occasionally hiked in the Lithuanian hills and fields, indulging in the joy of coming close to God's creation and its natural state. On one of these excursions, he sat and stared at a flower, analyzing its components, appreciating its beauty and basking in the brilliant warmth of Hashem's infinite wisdom. The rabbi explained to me that he sat, preoccupied this way for an hour. It's quite amazing for a teenage boy to sit captured by this flower for an hour. When he was finished, he had an awesome feeling of closeness with God and saw the divine hand in creation with an outstanding clarity. He then added that this was to such an extent that it actually came close to being a prophetic experience. This contemplation, the rabbi said, produced the greatest spiritual experience he had ever had in his life and it led him to supreme heights. The menu for each of us is infinite. The ability for us to live in our mundane, routine, day-to-day physical worlds where we are interacting with other people, interacting with our physical activities like eating or sleeping, interacting with the world of nature. We are living in an environment where every ounce of our existence is potentially able to connect us to God. And this, as we learn tonight, is the path of Judaism. Judaism says that this is the arena in which we are able to have spiritual growth, not by escaping this world, but by encountering the world, by engaging the world, and by recognizing that this is really the ultimate path towards spirituality.