 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. 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 sites is in the book of the midbar numbers chapter 22 verse 20 where it says that God came to Billam 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 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 by Mordechai Rogau. 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 are 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 Rogau 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 Kutskerebi famous Hasidic master would quote Exodus chapter 22 verse 30 where the Torah says, people of holiness you shall be to me. And God didn't want the Kutskere 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 Rogau 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 activity 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 Tethan prophets at the night time 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 the fathers all of our activities should be for the sake of heaven everything that we do not just the 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 he'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 and Rabbi Tatz says that's not true because even before Abraham there were people who knew God who believed in God who worshiped God so that was not an innovation of Abraham and 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 a 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 right 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 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 kadoosh 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 breit the covenant and we know that the breit in Hebrew breit adds up to the number 612 and the breit the breit me la the circumcision is associated with the male genitive 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 dollars 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 reconnaissance mission which makes sense if you're going to to wage a war and try to conquer a land you want to spy out the land and see where they strong where they weak what are the 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 the doorsteps they had this miraculous manna from heaven there was a well called the bare 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 midrush 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 a 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 a 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 believe 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 spirit 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 going to 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 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 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 Zeda 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 Zeda 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 have to be in that you happen to be in right now well let me tell you the Shpola Zeda 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 Siddharim 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 Zraim 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 Ahad from Deuteronomy chapter six here oh 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 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 become 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 asked 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 mazaltov 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 asked 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 Gererebi the first Gererebi Ravitzok mayor by one of his students what's going on here he said to the Rebi 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 Rebi 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 want to take someone's spiritual temperature if you want to 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 region it's called the region of Rebi 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 let the heavens rejoice and let the earth exalt so here you have a verse at 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 result 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 you'd hey and vav and hey the capitalists explained that these two that these that this name really is composed of two names they explain that the first two words Yismehu Hashemayim is the name of God which has the letters you'd and hey and they say that this refers to the world of concealment and it's the world of spirituality because here the letter you'd 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 vav and the hey and this is referred to as the revealed physical world because here the vav is basically where the you'd gets extended down you'll see that the you'd is a dot and the vav 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 want to 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 a vision 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 you shall eat you'll become satiated 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 the achalta you will eat and then the savata uberachta 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 svasemes the second garerebi 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 at 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 going to be praying until another hour from now he says tati he says you know you got me so upset when you 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 want to 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 it's for example we have faith in god we have belief emunah but you don't want to leave emunah just in your head you don't want to leave it as something that's incoate you want to be able to take that faith which is very spiritual and you want to be able to live your life in the physical world as an expression of that faith not to leave things just spiritual you want to take the spiritual and you want to be able to manifest them in the physical what Rabbi Yisrael originally 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 akhila eating shatia drinking sheina sleeping bia sexual activity lina living all of these words that describe physical activities contain the letters yud and hey now yud and hey we saw were the letters of spirituality yud and hey 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 hey 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 hey the vav and the hey we saw were the letters of the physical realm so rabbi Yisrael of vision says we see from this verse of yismuchu ha shamaim the sagar haratz 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 revmosha haim lutsato 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 but 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 you think about it our body speaks to us in the first person oh 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 stuka 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 so you 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 chapter three verse six in every single one of your ways you should know God the Torah begins in the portion of Bechukotai in Leviticus chapter 26 verse 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 going to 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 that simplest explanation is that even though David may have had other ideas he was going to go shopping he was going to go sightseeing he was going 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 something 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 going to 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 to study he's not saying that somehow he was going to 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 a house to 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 kutskerebi would always say and complain why do people only speak about having kavana 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 kavana and the kutskerebi said no everything we do in life should be with kavana and the book of Leviticus chapter 6 verses 3 to 4 it describes a service in the temple that's unusual it's called the true mass adeshan the true mass adeshan 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 take off his vestments and put on other garments and he shall then take the ashes to a ritually pure place outside the camp mean yet these ashes were taken to a special place they weren't just discarded the word true mass adeshan means literally the raising up of the ashes Rebenachem Mendel of Rimenov was a great Hasidic leader in Poland during the 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 if Sotekah Cohen 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 come 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 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 of Yerucham Levavitz who was the spiritual mentor of the Mir Yashiva 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 and 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 the 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 Shaman Aver 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 is 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 at B'tselem the same exact word that's used for the human being that we are but B'tselem and the image of God that's what the bible the Torah calls us an idol at 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 and 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 Hanukh Hanukh was the person that lived eight generations after Adam that Hanukh 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 Salantar 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 Salantar 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 Traktay Taneet which the whole Traktay deals with fasting fast days so on page 22a Talmud says that Elijah the prophet once told Rabbi Broca 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 Broca couldn't understand this because he looked at these two fellows they didn't look very special he looked 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 so it's actually a fellow here from Toronto Joel Hecker who wrote his phd dissertation on the 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 to 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 Ravtsodaka coin of Lublin in his work Pre-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 I mean 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 Ravtsodaka 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 Mishinatora in the laws of Yasodehatora the laws of the foundations of the Torah chapter 2 Maimonides wants to know what is the path that we can attain love of God how can we achieve of 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 wondrous 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 sur olamim now sometimes it's translated as rock of ages sur olamim but the word sur in Hebrew is related to the word Sayar which means an artist and the expression sur 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 my monies 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 want to conclude with a wonderful passage from a book an amazing book called walking with rabbi miller rabbi Avigda 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 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 going to 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 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 Slavotka 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 in 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 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 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're 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